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June is Pride Month. The 2016 attack on the Pulse nightclub, which occurred three years ago today, killed 49 people at an event held for gay Latino men. Yet Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — or someone in his administration — decided it was necessary this year to scrub mentions of the LGBTQ community from the state's yearly Pulse Memorial Day proclamation. In 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott's memo noted the state continues to "mourn the tragic loss of life and recognize the lasting impact it has on our state and communities, including Florida's LGBTQ community." But DeSantis' proclamation, his first as governor, oddly scrubbed the mention of the "LGBTQ community" and replaced it with the "Orlando and Central Florida community." Hours after being browbeaten online for the statement, DeSantis seemingly backpedaled this morning and tweeted that the attack "targeted the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities, and Florida as a whole." His office later released a statement claiming the edits were a “staff error.” His spokesperson, former Trump employee Helen Aguirre Ferre, said DeSantis would issue a “corrected” memo that does actually mention the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities. Today we mourn the loss of life of 49 innocent victims of an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando that targeted the LGBTQ and Hispanic community, and Florida as a whole. In honor of their memory, I am ordering flags to be lowered to half-staff.— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 12, 2019 State Rep. Anna Eskamani first flagged the difference on Twitter last night. She called the statement "completely straight-washed" and went on to lambaste DeSantis for failing to mention the Latin community or any communities of color. "Imagine if the Mayor of Pittsburgh didn’t talk about the Jewish community in a proclamation about the synagogue shooting," she wrote, referencing the anti-Semitic massacre carried out by a white supremacist at the Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018. "That would NEVER happen. But I guess denying the existence of #LGBTQ people is ok in Florida." @GovRonDeSantis has stripped any mention of the #LGBTQ community in remembering #Pulse. This is completely straight-washed and an insult to #HD47.— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani (@AnnaForFlorida) June 12, 2019 Based on these side-by-side Pulse proclamations, Governor Rick Scott was a better friend to LGBTQ Floridians than DeSantis. pic.twitter.com/2nvUE343XG PS: Governor Rick Scott is a low bar to not meet. Absolutely shameful.— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani (@AnnaForFlorida) June 12, 2019 Also no mention of #Latinx community members or communities of color— 49 mostly queer black & brown people were murdered in Orlando and our Governor recognizes them by erasing them.— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani (@AnnaForFlorida) June 12, 2019 She added that "Governor Rick Scott is a low bar to not meet. Absolutely shameful." So far, it's unclear why DeSantis' office edited the language, but it's not the first time he's thrown the LGBTQ community under the bus. This past January, LGBTQ-rights groups were furious when DeSantis signed a workplace anti-discrimination order that excluded protections for LGBTQ people. If you like this story, consider signing up for our email newsletters. SHOW ME HOW You have successfully signed up for your selected newsletter(s) - please keep an eye on your mailbox, we're movin' in! This is also far from the first time Republican politicians have conveniently forgotten the LGBTQ community when discussing the Pulse shooting. Scott himself was no hero here either: He infamously waited days to bother mentioning the LGBTQ community after the shooting and didn't wear a rainbow remembrance ribbon until 2018, two years after the attack. (State Rep. Carlos G. Smith, who is himself Hispanic and openly gay, wrote in the Orlando Weekly in 2018 that Scott "turned his back on Orlando after Pulse.") Pulse's Hispanic and LGBTQ communities have said they sometimes felt forgotten in the three years since the tragedy: Smith, for example, has consistently hit Scott for expending far more resources and effort in the wake of the Parkland shootings than he did after 49 mostly Hispanic, LGBTQ victims were killed at Pulse. Orlando’s LGBTQ community will never be erased. #ForThe49— Rep. Carlos G Smith (@CarlosGSmith) June 12, 2019 Last night, just before DeSantis issued his, ahem, updated tweet, Smith also took a veiled whack at DeSantis. "Orlando's LGBTQ community will never be erased," he tweeted.

1Byly dva dny před Hodem beránka a svátky nekvašených chlebů. Velekněží a učitelé Zákona hledali, jak by se ho lstí zmocnili, aby ho zabili. 2Říkali totiž: „Ne ve svátek, aby snad nebylo pobouření lidu.“ 3Když byl v Betanii v domě Šimona Malomocného a byl u stolu, vešla žena, která měla alabastrovou nádobku pravého, velmi drahého nardového oleje; rozbila tu nádobku a olej vylila na jeho hlavu. 4Někteří se mezi sebou rozhořčovali: „K čemu je ta ztráta oleje? 5Vždyť se ten olej mohl prodat za víc než tři sta denárů a ty dát chudým!“ A hněvali se na ni. 6Ježíš řekl: „Nechte ji. Proč jí působíte těžkosti? Vykonala na mně dobrý skutek. 7Vždyť chudé máte stále s sebou, a kdykoli chcete, můžete jim učinit dobře; mne však nemáte stále. 8Učinila, co mohla; předem pomazala mé tělo olejem k pohřbu. 9Amen, pravím vám, kdekoli po celém světě bude hlásáno toto evangelium, bude se na její památku mluvit také o tom, co ona učinila.“ 10A Juda Iškariotský, jeden z Dvanácti, odešel k velekněžím, aby jim ho vydal. 11Když to uslyšeli, zaradovali se a slíbili mu dát peníze. I hledal vhodnou příležitost, jak by jim ho vydal. 12Prvního dne nekvašených chlebů, když obětovali velikonočního beránka, mu řekli jeho učedníci: „Kam chceš, abychom odešli a připravili ti k jídlu velikonočního beránka? “ 13I poslal dva ze svých učedníků a řekl jim: „Jděte do města a potká vás člověk, který ponese džbán vody. Jděte za ním 14a tam, kam vejde, řekněte hospodáři: ‚Učitel říká: Kde je moje místnost, kde bych se svými učedníky pojedl velikonočního beránka? ‘ 15A on vám ukáže velkou horní místnost, již prostřenou a připravenou, a tam nám připravte jídlo.“ 16Učedníci vyšli, přišli do města a nalezli vše, jak jim řekl, i připravili velikonočního beránka. 17Když nastal večer, přišel s Dvanácti. 18A když byli u stolu a jedli, Ježíš řekl: „Amen, pravím vám, že jeden z vás mne zradí, ten, který jí se mnou.“ 19Začali se rmoutit a jeden po druhém mu říkali: „Snad ne já?“ 20On jim řekl: „Jeden z Dvanácti, který se mnou namáčí v míse. 21Syn člověka opravdu odchází, jak je o něm napsáno, běda však onomu člověku, skrze kterého je Syn člověka zrazován. Pro toho by bylo lépe, kdyby se byl nenarodil.“ 22A když jedli, vzal Ježíš chléb, požehnal a rozlomil, dal jim a řekl: „Vezměte, toto je mé tělo.“ 23Pak vzal kalich, vzdal díky a dal jim; a napili se z něj všichni. 24A řekl jim: „Toto je má krev nové smlouvy, která se vylévá za mnohé. 25Amen, pravím vám, že se již více nenapiji z plodu vinné révy až do onoho dne, kdy jej budu pít nový v Božím království.“ 26A zazpívali chvalozpěv a vyšli na Olivovou horu. 27A Ježíš jim řekl: „Všichni ode mne této noci odpadnete, neboť je napsáno: ‚Budu bít pastýře a ovce stáda se rozptýlí.‘ 28Ale po svém vzkříšení vás předejdu do Galileje.“ 29Petr mu říkal: „I kdyby všichni odpadli, já však ne!“ 30A Ježíš mu řekl: „Amen, pravím tobě, že dnes, této noci, dříve než kohout dvakrát zakokrhá, právě ty mne třikrát zapřeš.“ 31On však tím více říkal: „I kdybych s tebou musel zemřít, určitě tě nezapřu.“ Stejně mluvili i ostatní. 32I přicházejí k místu jménem Getsemane. Říká svým učedníkům: „Posaďte se zde, než se pomodlím.“ 33A vzal s sebou Petra, Jakuba a Jana a začal se děsit a znepokojovat. 34Říká jim: „Má duše je smutná až k smrti. Zůstaňte zde a bděte!“ 35Trochu poodešel, padal na zem a modlil se, aby ho, je-li to možné, tato hodina minula. 36Říkal: „Abba, Otče, tobě je všechno možné, přenes tento kalich ode mne, ale ne, co chci já, ale co ty.“ 37A přišel a nalezl je spící. Říká Petrovi: „Šimone, spíš? Nemohl jsi jedinou hodinu bdít? 38Bděte a modlete se, abyste nevešli do pokušení. Duch je sice ochotný, ale tělo slabé.“ 39A opět odešel a pomodlil se, říkaje stejnou prosbu. 40A opět, když přišel, nalezl je spící; měli velmi těžká víčka a nevěděli, co by mu odpověděli. 41A přichází po třetí a říká jim: „Ještě spíte a odpočíváte? To stačí. Přišla ta hodina, hle, Syn člověka je vydáván do rukou hříšníků. 42Vstávejte, pojďme! Hle, přiblížil se ten, který mne zrazuje. “ 43A hned, když ještě mluvil, přichází Juda, jeden z Dvanácti, a s ním zástup od velekněží, učitelů Zákona a starších, s meči a holemi. 44Ten, který ho zrazoval, měl s nimi domluvené znamení: „Koho políbím, ten to je. Zmocněte se ho a bezpečně odveďte!“ 45Když přišel, hned k němu přistoupil a řekl: „Rabbi!“ A vroucně ho políbil. 46Oni pak na něho vztáhli ruce a zmocnili se ho. 47Jeden z okolostojících tasil meč, udeřil veleknězova otroka a uťal mu ucho. 48Ježíš jim na to řekl: „Vyšli jste s meči a holemi jako na lupiče, abyste mne zatkli. 49Den co den jsem vyučoval u vás v chrámě, a nezmocnili jste se mne. Ale musí se naplnit Písma. “ 50A všichni ho opustili a utekli. 51Šel s ním nějaký mladík, který měl přes nahé tělo přehozený lněný šat, i zmocnili se ho. 52On tam však zanechal lněný šat a utekl od nich nahý. 53Ježíše odvedli k veleknězi a shromáždili se k němu všichni velekněží, starší a učitelé Zákona. 54Petr došel zpovzdálí za ním až dovnitř do veleknězova dvora, seděl pak se služebníky a ohříval se u ohně. 55Velekněží a celá velerada hledali proti Ježíšovi svědectví, aby ho odsoudili k smrti, ale nenalézali. 56Neboť mnozí proti němu křivě svědčili, ale jejich svědectví nebyla stejná. 57Někteří povstali a křivě proti němu svědčili: 58„My jsme ho uslyšeli, jak říká: Já zbořím tuto svatyni udělanou rukama a ve třech dnech vybuduji jinou, ne rukama udělanou.“ 59A ani tak jejich svědectví nebylo shodné. 60I povstal uprostřed velekněz a zeptal se Ježíše: „Nic neodpovídáš? Co tito lidé proti tobě svědčí?“ 61On však mlčel a nic neodpovídal. Znovu se ho velekněz otázal a řekl mu: „Jsi ty Mesiáš, Syn Požehnaného?“ 62Ježíš řekl: „Já jsem. A spatříte Syna člověka sedícího po pravici Moci a přicházejícího s nebeskými oblaky. “ 63Velekněz roztrhl svá roucha a říká: „Nač ještě potřebujeme svědky? 64Slyšeli jste rouhání. Jak se vám to jeví?“ Všichni ho odsoudili, že je hoden smrti. 65A někteří na něho začali plivat, zahalovat mu tvář, bít ho pěstmi a říkat mu: „Zaprorokuj!“ A biřici ho zasypali ranami. 66A zatímco byl Petr dole v nádvoří, přišla jedna z veleknězových služek. 67Když uviděla Petra, jak se ohřívá, pohlédla na něj a řekla: „I ty jsi byl s Nazaretským, tím Ježíšem.“ 68On však zapřel: „Nevím ani nerozumím, co říkáš.“ A vyšel ven do předního dvora a kohout zakokrhal. 69A když ho ta služka uviděla, začala opět říkat těm, kteří stáli poblíž: „Tento je z nich.“ 70On však opět zapíral. A za malou chvíli znovu ti, co stáli poblíž, říkali Petrovi: „Skutečně jsi jeden z nich, vždyť jsi také Galilejec.“ 71On se pak začal zaklínat a zapřísahat: „Neznám toho člověka, o kterém mluvíte.“ 72A hned kohout podruhé zakokrhal. Tu si Petr rozpomněl na výrok, jak mu Ježíš řekl: „Než kohout dvakrát zakokrhá, třikrát mne zapřeš,“ a začal plakat. Jamieson Fausset Brown Bible Commentary 1 THE CONSPIRACY OF THE JEWISH AUTHORITIES TO PUT JESUS TO DEATH--THE SUPPER AND THE--ANOINTING AT BETHANY--JUDAS AGREES WITH THE CHIEF PRIESTS TO BETRAY HIS LORD. ( = Mat. 26:1-16; Lc 22:1 ; Jn 12:1 ). (Mc 14:1 After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread--The meaning is, that two days after what is about to be mentioned the passover would arrive; in other words, what follows occurred two days before the feast. and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death--From Matthew's fuller account (Mat. 26:1-75) we learn that our Lord announced this to the Twelve as follows, being the first announcement to them of the precise time: "And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings" (Mt 26:1 ) --referring to the contents of Mat. 24:1-25:46, which He delivered to His disciples; His public ministry being now closed: from His prophetical He is now passing into His priestly office, although all along He Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses--"He said unto His disciples, Ye know that after two days is [the feast of] the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified." The first and the last steps of His final sufferings are brought together in this brief announcement of all that was to take place. The passover was the first and the chief of the three great annual festivals, commemorative of the redemption of God's people from Egypt, through the sprinkling of the blood of a lamb divinely appointed to be slain for that end; the destroying angel, "when he saw the blood, passing over" the Israelitish houses, on which that blood was seen, when he came to destroy all the first-born in the land of Egypt (Ex 12:12 ) --bright typical foreshadowing of the great Sacrifice, and the Redemption effected thereby. Accordingly, "by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working," it was so ordered that precisely at the passover season, "Christ our Passover should be sacrificed for us." On the day following the passover commenced "the feast of unleavened bread," so called because for seven days only unleavened bread was to be eaten (Ex 12:18 ). See on 1Co 5:6 -8. We are further told by Matthew (Mt 26:3 ) that the consultation was held in the palace of Caiaphas the high priest, between the chief priests, [the scribes], and the elders of the people, how "they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill Him." 2 But they said, Not on the feast day--rather, not during the feast; not until the seven days of unleavened bread should be over. lest there be an uproar of the people--In consequence of the vast influx of strangers, embracing all the male population of the land who had reached a certain age, there were within the walls of Jerusalem at this festival some two million people; and in their excited state, the danger of tumult and bloodshed among "the people," who for the most part took Jesus for a prophet, was extreme. See JOSEPHUS [Antiquities, 20.5.3]. What plan, if any, these ecclesiastics fixed upon for seizing our Lord, does not appear. But the proposal of Judas being at once and eagerly gone into, it is probable they were till then at some loss for a plan sufficiently quiet and yet effectual. So, just at the feast time shall it be done; the unexpected offer of Judas relieving them of their fears. Thus, as BENGEL remarks, did the divine counsel take effect. The Supper and the Anointing at Bethany Six Days before the Passover (Mc 14:3 The time of this part of the narrative is four days before what has just been related. Had it been part of the regular train of events which our Evangelist designed to record, he would probably have inserted it in its proper place, before the conspiracy of the Jewish authorities. But having come to the treason of Judas, he seems to have gone back upon this scene as what probably gave immediate occasion to the awful deed. 3 And being in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman--It was "Mary," as we learn from Jn 12:3 having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard--pure nard, a celebrated aromatic--(See Ct 1:12 very precious--"very costly" (Jn 12:3 and she brake the box, and poured it on his head--"and anointed," adds John (Jn 12:3 ), "the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment." The only use of this was to refresh and exhilarate--a grateful compliment in the East, amid the closeness of a heated atmosphere, with many guests at a feast. Such was the form in which Mary's love to Christ, at so much cost to herself, poured itself out. 4 And there were some that had indignation within themselves and said--Matthew says (Mt 26:8 ), "But when His disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying," &c. The spokesman, however, was none of the true-hearted Eleven--as we learn from John (Jn 12:4 ): "Then saith one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray Him." Doubtless the thought stirred first in his breast, and issued from his base lips; and some of the rest, ignorant of his true character and feelings, and carried away by his plausible speech, might for the moment feel some chagrin at the apparent waste. Why was this waste of the ointment made? 5 For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence--between nine and ten pounds sterling. and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her--"This he said," remarks John (Jn 12:6 ), and the remark is of exceeding importance, "not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and had the bag"--the scrip or treasure chest--"and bare what was put therein"--not "bare it off" by theft, as some understand it. It is true that he did this; but the expression means simply that he had charge of it and its contents, or was treasurer to Jesus and the Twelve. What a remarkable arrangement was this, by which an avaricious and dishonest person was not only taken into the number of the Twelve, but entrusted with the custody of their little property! The purposes which this served are obvious enough; but it is further noticeable, that the remotest hint was never given to the Eleven of his true character, nor did the disciples most favored with the intimacy of Jesus ever suspect him, till a few minutes before he voluntarily separated himself from their company--for ever! 6 And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me--It was good in itself, and so was acceptable to Christ; it was eminently seasonable, and so more acceptable still; and it was "what she could," and so most acceptable of all. 7 For ye have the poor with you always--referring to Dt 15:11 and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always--a gentle hint of His approaching departure, by One who knew the worth of His own presence. 8 She hath done what she could--a noble testimony, embodying a principle of immense importance. she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying--or, as in John (Jn 12:7 ), "Against the day of my burying hath she kept this." Not that she, dear heart, thought of His burial, much less reserved any of her nard to anoint her dead Lord. But as the time was so near at hand when that office would have to be performed, and she was not to have that privilege even after the spices were brought for the purpose (Mc 16:1 ), He lovingly regards it as done now. "In the act of love done to Him," says OLSHAUSEN beautifully, "she has erected to herself an eternal monument, as lasting as the Gospel, the eternal Word of God. From generation to generation this remarkable prophecy of the Lord has been fulfilled; and even we, in explaining this saying of the Redeemer, of necessity contribute to its accomplishment." "Who but Himself," asks STIER, "had the power to ensure to any work of man, even if resounding in His own time through the whole earth, an imperishable remembrance in the stream of history? Behold once more here the majesty of His royal judicial supremacy in the government of the world, in this, 'Verily I say unto you.'" 10 And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went unto the chief priests, to betray him unto them--that is, to make his proposals, and to bargain with them, as appears from. Matthew's fuller statement (Mt 26:14 ) which says, he "went unto the chief priests, and said, What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver." The thirty pieces of silver were thirty shekels, the fine paid for man- or maid-servant accidentally killed (Ex 21:32 ), and equal to between four and five pounds sterling--"a goodly price that I was prized at of them!" (Zc 11:13 And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money--Matthew alone records the precise sum, because a remarkable and complicated prophecy, which he was afterwards to refer to, was fulfilled by it. And he sought how he might conveniently betray him--or, as more fully given in Luke (Lc 22:6 ), "And he promised, and sought opportunity to betray Him unto them in the absence of the multitude." That he should avoid an "uproar" or "riot" among the people, which probably was made an essential condition by the Jewish authorities, was thus assented to by the traitor; into whom, says Luke (Lc 22:3 ), "Satan entered," to put him upon this hellish deed. 53 JESUS ARRAIGNED BEFORE THE SANHEDRIM CONDEMNED TO DIE, AND SHAMEFULLY ENTREATED--THE FALL OF PETER. ( = Mat. 26:57-75; Luke 22:54-71; Jn 18:13 , Jn 18:24 ). (Mark 14:53-72) And they led Jesus away to the high priest: and with him were assembled--or rather, "there gathered together unto him." all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes--it was then a full and formal meeting of the Sanhedrim. Now, as the first three Evangelists place all Peter's denials of his Lord after this, we should naturally conclude that they took place while our Lord stood before the Sanhedrim. But besides that the natural impression is that the scene around the fire took place overnight, the second crowing of the cock, if we are to credit ancient writers, would occur about the beginning of the fourth watch, or between three and four in the morning. By that time, however, the Council had probably convened, being warned, perhaps, that they were to prepare for being called at any hour of the morning, should the Prisoner be successfully secured. If this be correct, it is fairly certain that only the last of Peter's three denials would take place while our Lord was under trial before the Sanhedrim. One thing more may require explanation. If our Lord had to be transferred from the residence of Annas to that of Caiaphas, one is apt to wonder that there is no mention of His being marched from the one to the other. But the building, in all likelihood, was one and the same; in which case He would merely have to be taken perhaps across the court, from one chamber to another. 54 And Peter followed him afar off, even into--or "from afar, even to the interior of." the palace of the high priest--"An oriental house," says ROBINSON, "is usually built around a quadrangular interior court; into which there is a passage (sometimes arched) through the front part of the house, closed next the street by a heavy folding gate, with a smaller wicket for single persons, kept by a porter. The interior court, often paved or flagged, and open to the sky, is the hall, which our translators have rendered 'palace,' where the attendants made a fire; and the passage beneath the front of the house, from the street to this court, is the porch." The place where Jesus stood before the high priest may have been an open room, or place of audience on the ground floor, in the rear or on one side of the court; such rooms, open in front, being customary. It was close upon the court, for Jesus heard all that was going on around the fire, and turned and looked upon Peter (Lc 22:61 and he sat with the servants, and warmed himself at the fire--The graphic details, here omitted, are supplied in the other Gospels. Jn 18:18 And the servants and officers stood there--that is, in the hall, within the quadrangle, open to the sky. who had made a fire of coals--or charcoal (in a brazier probably). for it was cold--John alone of all the Evangelists mentions the material, and the coldness of the night, as WEBSTER and WILKINSON remark. The elevated situation of Jerusalem, observes THOLUCK, renders it so cold about Easter as to make a watch fire at night indispensable. And Peter stood with them and warmed himself--"He went in," says Matthew (Mt 26:58 ), "and sat with the servants to see the end." These two minute statements throw an interesting light on each other. His wishing to "see the end," or issue of these proceedings, was what led him into the palace, for he evidently feared the worst. But once in, the serpent coil is drawn closer; it is a cold night, and why should not he take advantage of the fire as well as others? Besides, in the talk of the crowd about the all-engrossing topic he may pick up something which he would like to hear. Poor Peter! But now, let us leave him warming himself at the fire, and listening to the hum of talk about this strange case by which the subordinate officials, passing to and fro and crowding around the fire in this open court, would while away the time; and, following what appears the order of the Evangelical Narrative, let us turn to Peter's Lord. Jesus Is Interrogated by Annas--His Dignified Reply--Is Treated with Indignity by One of the Officials--His Meek Rebuke (Jn 18:19 We have seen that it is only the Fourth Evangelist who tells us that our Lord was sent to Annas first, overnight, until the Sanhedrim could be got together at earliest dawn. We have now, in the same Gospel, the deeply instructive scene that passed during this non-official interview.Jn 18:19 The high priest--Annas. then asked Jesus of His disciples and of His doctrine--probably to entrap Him into some statements which might be used against Him at the trial. From our Lord's answer it would seem that "His disciples" were understood to be some secret party.Jn 18:20 Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world--compare Mc 7:4 . He speaks of His public teaching as now a past thing--as now all over. I ever taught in the synagogue and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort--courting publicity, though with sublime noiselessness. and in secret have I said nothing--rather, "spake I nothing"; that is, nothing different from what He taught in public: all His private communications with the Twelve being but explanations and developments of His public teaching. (Compare Es 45:19 ; Es 48:16 Why askest thou Me? ask them which heard Me what I have said to them--rather, "what I said unto them." behold, they know what I said--From this mode of replying, it is evident that our Lord saw the attempt to draw Him into self-crimination, and resented it by falling back upon the right of every accused party to have some charge laid against Him by competent witnesses.Jn 18:22 And when He had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest Thou the high priest so?--(see Es 50:6 ). It would seem from Act 23:2 that this summary and undignified way of punishment what was deemed insolence in the accused had the sanction even of the high priests themselves.Jn 18:23 Jesus answered him, If I have spoken evil--rather, "If I spoke evil," in reply to the high priest. bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou Me?--He does not say "if not evil," as if His reply had been merely unobjectionable; but "if well," which seems to challenge something altogether fitting in the remonstrance. He had addressed to the high priest. From our Lord's procedure here, by the way, it is evident enough that His own precept in the Sermon on the Mount--that when smitten on the one cheek we are to turn to the smiter the other also (Mt 5:39 ) --is not to be taken to the letter. Annas Sends Jesus to Caiaphas (Jn 18:24 ). Jn 18:24 Now Annas had sent Him bound unto Caiaphas the high priest--On the meaning of this verse there is much diversity of opinion; and according as we understand it will be the conclusion we come to, whether there was but one hearing of our Lord before Annas and Caiaphas together, or whether, according to the view we have given above, there were two hearings--a preliminary and informal one before Annas, and a formal and official one before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrim. If our translators have given the right sense of the verse, there was but one hearing before Caiaphas; and then Jn 18:24 is to be read as a parenthesis, merely supplementing what was said in Mc 14:13 . This is the view of CALVIN, BEZA, GROTIUS, BENGEL, DE WETTE, MEYER, LUCKE, THOLUCK. But there are decided objections to this view. First: We cannot but think that the natural sense of the whole passage, embracing Mc 14:13 , Mc 14:19 , is that of a preliminary non-official hearing before "Annas first," the particulars of which are accordingly recorded; and then of a transference of our Lord from Annas to Caiaphas. Second: On the other view, it is not easy to see why the Evangelist should not have inserted Mc 14:24 immediately after Mc 14:13 ; or rather, how he could well have done otherwise, As it stands, it is not only quite out of its proper place, but comes in most perplexingly. Whereas, if we take it as a simple statement of fact, that after Annas had finished his interview with Jesus, as recorded in Mc 14:19 , he transferred Him to Caiaphas to be formally tried, all is clear and natural. Third: The pluperfect sense "had sent" is in the translation only; the sense of the original word being simply "sent." And though there are cases where the aorist here used has the sense of an English pluperfect, this sense is not to be put upon it unless it be obvious and indisputable. Here that is so far from being the case, that the pluperfect "had sent" is rather an unwarrantable interpretation than a simple translation of the word: informing the reader that, according to the view of our translators, our Lord "had been" sent to Caiaphas before the interview just recorded by the Evangelist; whereas, if we translate the verse literally--"Annas sent Him bound unto Caiaphas the high priest"--we get just the information we expect, that Annas, having merely "precognosced" the prisoner, hoping to draw something out of Him, "sent Him to Caiaphas" to be formally tried before the proper tribunal. This is the view of CHRYSOSTOM and AUGUSTINE among the Fathers; and of the moderns, of OLSHAUSEN, SCHLEIERMACHER, NEANDER, EBRARD, WIESELER, LANGE, LUTHARDT. This brings us back to the text of our second Gospel, and in it to The Judicial Trial and Condemnation of the Lord Jesus by the Sanhedrim-- (Mc 14:55 But let the reader observe, that though this is introduced by the Evangelist before any of the denials of Peter are recorded, we have given reasons for concluding that probably the first two denials took place while our Lord was with Annas, and the last only during the trial before the Sanhedrim. 55 And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death--Matthew (Mt 26:59 ) says they "sought false witness." They knew they could find nothing valid; but having their Prisoner to bring before Pilate, they behooved to make a case. and found none--none that would suit their purpose, or make a decent ground of charge before Pilate. 56 For many bare false witness against him--From their debasing themselves to "seek" them, we are led to infer that they were bribed to bear false witness; though there are never wanting sycophants enough, ready to sell themselves for naught, if they may but get a smile from those above them: see a similar scene in Act 6:11 . How is one reminded here of that complaint, "False witnesses did rise up: they laid to my charge things that I knew not" (Ps 31:11 but their witness agreed not together--If even two of them had been agreed, it would have been greedily enough laid hold of, as all that the law insisted upon even in capital cases (Dt 17:6 ). But even in this they failed. One cannot but admire the providence which secured this result; since, on the one hand, it seems astonishing that those unscrupulous prosecutors and their ready tools should so bungle a business in which they felt their whole interests bound up; and, on the other hand, if they had succeeded in making even a plausible case, the effect on the progress of the Gospel might for a time have been injurious. But at the very time when His enemies were saying, "God hath forsaken Him; persecute and take Him; for there is none to deliver Him" (Ps 71:11 ). He whose Witness He was and whose work He was doing was keeping Him as the apple of His eye, and while He was making the wrath of man to praise Him, was restraining the remainder of that wrath (Ps 76:10 And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him--Matthew (Mt 26:60 ) is more precise here: "At the last came two false witnesses." As no two had before agreed in anything, they felt it necessary to secure a duplicate testimony to something, but they were long of succeeding. And what was it, when at length it was brought forward? saying--as follows: 58 We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands--On this charge, observe, first, that eager as His enemies were to find criminal matter against our Lord, they had to go back to the outset of His ministry, His first visit to Jerusalem, more than three years before this. In all that He said and did after that, though ever increasing in boldness, they could find nothing. Next, that even then, they fix only on one speech, of two or three words, which they dared to adduce against Him. Further, they most manifestly pervert the speech of our Lord. We say not this because in Mark's form of it, it differs from the report of the words given by the Fourth Evangelist (Jn 2:18 ) --the only one of the Evangelists who reports it all, or mentions even any visit paid by our Lord to Jerusalem before His last--but because the one report bears truth, and the other falsehood, on its face. When our Lord said on that occasion, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up," they might, for a moment, have understood Him to refer to the temple out of whose courts He had swept the buyers and sellers. But after they had expressed their astonishment at His words, in that sense of them, and reasoned upon the time it had taken to rear the temple as it then stood, since no answer to this appears to have been given by our Lord, it is hardly conceivable that they should continue in the persuasion that this was really His meaning. But finally, even if the more ignorant among them had done so, it is next to certain that the ecclesiastics, who were the prosecutors in this case, did not believe that this was His meaning. For in less than three days after this they went to Pilate, saying, "Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, after three days I will rise again" (Mt 27:63 ). Now what utterance of Christ known to His enemies, could this refer to, if not to this very saying about destroying and rearing up the temple? And if so, it puts it beyond a doubt that by this time, at least, they were perfectly aware that our Lord's words referred to His death by their hands and His resurrection by His own. But this is confirmed by Mc 14:59 But neither so did their witness agree together--that is, not even as to so brief a speech, consisting of but a few words, was there such a concurrence in their mode of reporting it as to make out a decent case. In such a charge everything depended on the very terms alleged to have been used. For every one must see that a very slight turn, either way, given to such words, would make them either something like indictable matter, or else a ridiculous ground for a criminal charge--would either give them a colorable pretext for the charge of impiety which they were bent on making out, or else make the whole saying appear, on the worst view that could be taken of it, as merely some mystical or empty boast. 60 Answerest thou nothing? what is it which these witness against thee?--Clearly, they felt that their case had failed, and by this artful question the high priest hoped to get from His own mouth what they had in vain tried to obtain from their false and contradictory witnesses. But in this, too, they failed. 61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing--This must have nonplussed them. But they were not to be easily baulked of their object. Again the high priest--arose (Mt 26:62 ), matters having now come to a crisis. asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?--Why our Lord should have answered this question, when He was silent as to the former, we might not have quite seen, but for Matthew, who says (Mt 26:63 ) that the high priest put Him upon solemn oath, saying, "I adjure Thee by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God." Such an adjuration was understood to render an answer legally necessary (Lv 5:1 ). (Also see on Jn 18:28 And Jesus said, I am--or, as in Matthew (Mt 26:64 ), "Thou hast said [it]." In Luke, however (Lc 22:70 ), the answer, "Ye say that I am," should be rendered--as DE WETTE, MEYER, ELLICOTT, and the best critics agree that the preposition requires--"Ye say [it], for I am [so]." Some words, however, were spoken by our Lord before giving His answer to this solemn question. These are recorded by Luke alone (Lc 22:67 ): "Art Thou the Christ [they asked]? tell us. And He said unto them, If I tell you, ye will not believe: and if I also ask [interrogate] "you, ye will not answer Me, nor let Me go." This seems to have been uttered before giving His direct answer, as a calm remonstrance and dignified protest against the prejudgment of His case and the unfairness of their mode of procedure. But now let us hear the rest of the answer, in which the conscious majesty of Jesus breaks forth from behind the dark cloud which overhung Him as He stood before the Council. (Also see on Jn 18:28 and--in that character. ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven--In Matthew (Mt 26:64 ) a slightly different but interesting turn is given to it by one word: "Thou hast said [it]: nevertheless"--We prefer this sense of the word to "besides," which some recent critics decide for--"I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sit on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." The word rendered "hereafter" means, not "at some future time" (as to-day "hereafter commonly does), but what the English word originally signified, "after here," "after now," or "from this time." Accordingly, in Lc 22:69 , the words used mean "from now." So that though the reference we have given it to the day of His glorious Second Appearing is too obvious to admit of doubt, He would, by using the expression, "From this time," convey the important thought which He had before expressed, immediately after the traitor left the supper table to do his dark work, "Now is the Son of man glorified" (Jn 13:31 ). At this moment, and by this speech, did He "witness the good confession" emphatically and properly, as the apostle says in 1Tm 6:13 . Our translators render the words there, "Who before Pontius Pilate witnessed"; referring it to the admission of His being a King, in the presence of Cćsar's own chief representative. But it should be rendered, as LUTHER renders it, and as the best interpreters now understand it, "Who under Pontius Pilate witnessed," &c. In this view of it, the apostle is referring not to what our Lord confessed before Pilate--which, though noble, was not of such primary importance--but to that sublime confession which, under Pilate's administration, He witnessed before the only competent tribunal on such occasions, the Supreme Ecclesiastical Council of God's chosen nation, that He was THE MESSIAH, and THE SON OF THE BLESSED ONE; in the former word owning His Supreme Official, in the latter His Supreme Personal, Dignity. 63 Then the high priest rent his clothes--On this expression of horror of blasphemy, see 2Ro 18:37 and saith, What need we any further witnesses? (Also see on Jn 18:28 Ye have heard the blasphemy--(See Jn 10:33 ). In Luke (Lc 22:71 ), "For we ourselves have heard of His own mouth"--an affectation of religious horror. (Also see on Jn 18:28 what think ye?--"Say what the verdict is to be." they all condemned him to be guilty of death--or of a capital crime, which blasphemy against God was according to the Jewish law (Lv 24:16 ). Yet not absolutely all; for Joseph of Arimathea, "a good man and a just," was one of that Council, and "he was not a consenting party to the counsel and deed of them," for that is the strict sense of the words of Lc 23:50 . Probably he absented himself, and Nicodemus also, from this meeting of the Council, the temper of which they would know too well to expect their voice to be listened to; and in that case, the words of our Evangelist are to be taken strictly, that, without one dissentient voice, "all [present] condemned him to be guilty of death." The Blessed One Is Now Shamefully Entreated (Mc 14:65 Every word here must be carefully observed, and the several accounts put together, that we may lose none of the awful indignities about to be described. 65 some began to spit on him--or, as in Mt 26:67 , "to spit in [into] His face." Luke (Lc 22:63 ) says in addition, "And the men that held Jesus mocked him"--or cast their jeers at Him. (Also see on Jn 18:28 to cover his face--or "to blindfold him" (as in Lc 22:64 to buffet him--Luke's word, which is rendered "smote Him" (Lc 22:63 ), is a stronger one, conveying an idea for which we have an exact equivalent in English, but one too colloquial to be inserted here. began to say unto him, Prophesy--In Matthew (Mt 26:68 ) this is given more fully: "Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote Thee?" The sarcastic fling at Him as "the Christ," and the demand of Him in this character to name the unseen perpetrator of the blows inflicted on Him, was in them as infamous as to Him it must have been, and was intended to be, stinging. and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands--or "struck Him on the face" (Lc 22:64 ). Ah! Well did He say prophetically, in that Messianic prediction which we have often referred to, "I gave My back to the smiters, and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not My face from shame and spitting!" (Es 50:6 ). "And many other things blasphemously spake they against Him" (Lc 22:65 ). This general statement is important, as showing that virulent and varied as were the recorded affronts put upon Him, they are but a small specimen of what He endured on that dark occasion. Peter's FIRST DENIAL of His Lord (Mc 14:66 And as Peter was beneath in the palace--This little word "beneath"--one of our Evangelist's graphic touches--is most important for the right understanding of what we may call the topography of the scene. We must take it in connection with Matthew's word (Mt 26:69 ): "Now Peter sat without in the palace"--or quadrangular court, in the center of which the fire would be burning; and crowding around and buzzing about it would be the menials and others who had been admitted within the court. At the upper end of this court, probably, would be the memorable chamber in which the trial was held--open to the court, likely, and not far from the fire (as we gather from Lc 22:61 ), but on a higher level; for (as our verse says) the court, with Peter in it, was "beneath" it. The ascent to the Council chamber was perhaps by a short flight of steps. If the reader will bear this explanation in mind, he will find the intensely interesting details which follow more intelligible. there cometh one of the maids of the high priest--"the damsel that kept the door" (Jn 18:17 ). The Jews seem to have employed women as porters of their doors (Act 12:13 And when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked upon him--Luke (Lc 22:56 ) is here more graphic; "But a certain maid beheld him as he sat by the fire"--literally, "by the light," which, shining full upon him, revealed him to the girl--"and earnestly looked upon him"--or, "fixed her gaze upon him." His demeanor and timidity, which must have attracted notice, as so generally happens, leading," says OLSHAUSEN, "to the recognition of him." and said, And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth--"with Jesus the Nazarene," or, "with Jesus of Galilee" (Mt 26:69 ). The sense of this is given in John's report of it (Jn 18:17 ), "Art not thou also one of this man's disciples?" that is, thou as well as "that other disciple," whom she knew to be one, but did not challenge, perceiving that he was a privileged person. In Luke (Lc 22:56 ) it is given as a remark made by the maid to one of the by-standers--this man was also with Him." If so expressed in Peter's hearing--drawing upon him the eyes of every one that heard it (as we know it did, Mt 26:70 ), and compelling him to answer to it--that would explain the different forms of the report naturally enough. But in such a case this is of no real importance. 68 But he denied--"before all" (Mt 26:70 saying, I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest--in Luke (Lc 22:57 ), "I know Him not." And he went out into the porch--the vestibule leading to the street--no doubt finding the fire-place too hot for him; possibly also with the hope of escaping--but that was not to be, and perhaps he dreaded that, too. Doubtless by this time his mind would be getting into a sea of commotion, and would fluctuate every moment in its resolves. AND THE COCK CREW--(See on Lc 22:34 ). This, then, was the First Denial. Peter's SECOND DENIAL of His Lord (Mc 14:69 There is here a verbal difference among the Evangelists, which without some information which has been withheld, cannot be quite extricated. 69 And a maid saw him again--or, "a girl." It might be rendered "the girl"; but this would not necessarily mean the same one as before, but might, and probably does, mean just the female who had charge of the door or gate near which Peter now was. Accordingly, in Mt 26:71 , she is expressly called "another [maid]." But in Luke (Lc 22:58 ) it is a male servant: "And after a little while [from the time of the first denial] another"--that is, as the word signifies, "another male" servant. But there is no real difficulty, as the challenge, probably, after being made by one was reiterated by another. Accordingly, in John (Jn 18:25 ), it is, "They said therefore unto him, &c.--"as if more than one challenged him at once. and began to say to them that stood by, This is one of them--or, as in Mt 26:71 --"This [fellow] was also with Jesus the Nazarene." 70 And he denied it again--In Luke (Lc 22:58 ), "Man, I am not." But worst of all in Matthew--"And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man" (Mt 26:72 ). This was the Second Denial, more vehement, alas! than the first. Peter's THIRD DENIAL of His Lord (Mc 14:70 And a little after--"about the space of one hour after" (Lc 22:59 they that stood by said again to Peter, Surely thou art one of them: for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto--"bewrayeth [or 'discovereth'] thee" (Mt 26:73 ). In Luke (Lc 22:59 ) it is, "Another confidently affirmed, saying, Of a truth this [fellow] also was with him: for he is a Galilean." The Galilean dialect had a more Syrian cast than that of Judea. If Peter had held his peace, this peculiarity had not been observed; but hoping, probably, to put them off the scent by joining in the fireside talk, he was thus discovered. The Fourth Gospel is particularly interesting here: "One of the servants of the high priest, being his kinsman [or kinsman to him] whose ear Peter cut off, saith, Did not I see thee in the garden with Him?" (Jn 18:26 ). No doubt his relationship to Malchus drew his attention to the man who had smitten him, and this enabled him to identify Peter. "Sad reprisals!" exclaims BENGEL. Poor Peter! Thou art caught in thine own toils; but like a wild bull in a net, thou wilt toss and rage, filling up the measure of thy terrible declension by one more denial of thy Lord, and that the foulest of all. 71 But he began to curse--"anathematize," or wish himself accursed if what he was now to say was not true. and to swear--or to take a solemn oath. saying, I know not this man of whom ye speak. 72 And the second time the cock crew--The other three Evangelists, who mention but one crowing of the cock--and that not the first, but the second and last one of Mark--all say the cock crew "immediately," but Luke (Lc 22:60 ) says, "Immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew." Alas!--But now comes the wonderful sequel. The Redeemer's Look upon Peter, and Peter's Bitter Tears (Mc 14:72 ; Lc 22:61 It has been observed that while the beloved disciple is the only one of the four Evangelists who does not record the repentance of Peter, he is the only one of the four who records the affecting and most beautiful scene of his complete restoration (Jn 21:15 ). Lc 22:61 And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter--How? it will be asked. We answer, From the chamber in which the trial was going on, in the direction of the court where Peter then stood--in the way already explained. See on Mc 14:66 . Our Second Evangelist makes no mention of this look, but dwells on the warning of his Lord about the double crowing of the cock, which would announce his triple fall, as what rushed stingingly to his recollection and made him dissolve in tears. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept--To the same effect is the statement of the First Evangelist (Mt 26:75 ), save that like "the beloved physician," he notices the "bitterness" of the weeping (Lc 22:62 ). The most precious link, however, in the whole chain of circumstances in this scene is beyond doubt that "look" of deepest, tenderest import reported by Luke alone (Lc 22:61 ). Who can tell what lightning flashes of wounded love and piercing reproach shot from that "look" through the eye of Peter into his heart! And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny Me thrice. Lc 22:62 And Peter went out and wept bitterly--How different from the sequel of Judas' act! Doubtless the hearts of the two men towards the Saviour were perfectly different from the first; and the treason of Judas was but the consummation of the wretched man's resistance of the blaze of light in the midst of which he had lived for three years, while Peter's denial was but a momentary obscuration of the heavenly light and love to his Master which ruled his life. But the immediate cause of the blessed revulsion which made Peter "weep bitterly" (Mt 26:75 ) was, beyond all doubt, this heart-piercing "look" which his Lord gave him. And remembering the Saviour's own words at the table, "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not" (Lc 22:31 ), may we not say that this prayer fetched down all that there was in that look to pierce and break the heart of Peter, to keep it from despair, to work in it "repentance unto salvation not to be repented of," and at length, under other healing touches, to "restore his soul?" (See on Mc 16:7

This article is from The Algemeiner. To read the full article, click here. Alumni and faculty members of New York University’s School of Medicine called on President Andrew Hamilton to combat a “climate of anti-Semitism at NYU that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students, prevents honest discourse and limits academic freedom on our campus.” The letter, which attracted more than 140 signatories as of Wednesday afternoon, warned that “anti-Semitism has been normalized on our campus” in recent months. “Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an organization that has become a symbol for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred, was awarded the highest honor of any organization at NYU, the President’s Service Award,” the letter read. SJP has faced criticism for spearheading the passage of a student government resolution in December endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has been denounced by top Jewish groups in the US and globally, and leading an earlier boycott of Zionist student clubs, all Israeli goods and universities, and the Anti-Defamation League. Last year, while participating in a protest that saw two of its members arrested and accused of physical assault, SJP’s president said the group sought “to make being Zionist uncomfortable on the NYU campus.” Hamilton, who has repeatedly criticized efforts to implement the BDS campaign at NYU, did not select the group to receive the honor, did not attend the awards ceremony, and later wrote that he would not have picked SJP as an honoree. Nonetheless, “SJP has been given a megaphone to spread bigotry at our institution and has been rewarded for doing so,” the letter’s signatories argued. “Jewish students filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over NYU’s failure to curb ‘extreme anti-Semitism’ on its campus,” the signatories added. They also pointed to a recent vote by NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA) to not cooperate with the university’s own Tel Aviv campus, “alienating students and faculty who are part of the program.” The vote was condemned by NYU’s administration, the school’s Jewish chaplain, hundreds of faculty members, and former NYU-Tel Aviv students after it was announced by the SCA on May 2nd — the same day as Yom HaShoah, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance day. While applauding Hamilton’s “strong condemnation” of the SCA boycott, the letter called on the president to “pair your words with actions.” “Rescind SJP’s award,” the signatories urged. “Reprimand the SCA Department. Reaffirm your commitment to protecting and uplifting all students, including Jewish and Zionist students.” The group Alums for Campus Fairness — which aims to fight antisemitism and counts 500 members at NYU — said it helped launch the letter and bring together the signatories. Earlier this month, a separate note signed by leaders of the academic and clinical departments of NYU’s School of Medicine and the NYU Langone Health medical center also protested the SCA vote. “We want to make clear that NYU Langone Health welcomes and provides healthcare to all persons without discrimination in the communities we serve, and collaborates globally in the countries with which we have affiliations, including Israel, and will continue to do so consistent with our academic values,” the message read. In a statement to The Algemeiner on Wednesday, NYU Spokesman John Beckman confirmed that the administration replied to the earlier letter from leaders of NYU Langone Health and “will be replying directly to the second letter.” “In the meantime, we are a little puzzled by them, partly because NYU president’s record on these issues is quite clear,” he added, pointing to an institutional statement rejecting the SCA pledge and a private letter sent by Hamilton and board chair William Berkley to SCA faculty, urging them “to reconsider this regrettable vote.” Hamilton had made clear that he thought awarding SJP was “an error,” had “personally, publicly, and face-to-face criticized” SJP efforts to ostracize pro-Israel student groups, “publicly denounced anti-Semitism” and BDS, and “unequivocally rejected” calls to close NYU-Tel Aviv, Beckman said. The incidents that have drawn criticism “do not reflect the center of gravity of opinion on our campus, and it is puzzling that the letter’s authors believe these incidents to be more of an indicator of campus sentiment than their unequivocal rejection by campus leadership and so many other members of the NYU community,” Beckman added. “It is also puzzling why the letter’s authors chose to ignore the vibrancy of Jewish life on this campus,” he continued, pointing to a recent major Shabbat event, “or the University’s commitment and support for academic efforts such as our renowned Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and our campus in Tel Aviv.” SJP and representatives for SCA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As you begin reading Paul’s letter to the house churches in Rome you clearly see Paul’s heart for the church and for the Kingdom of God now in place in this most cosmopolitan of cities: “This letter comes to all in Rome who love God, all who are called to be his holy people. Grace and peace to you from God our father, and King Jesus, the Lord.” Paul’s letter is tactful, spirited, full of information and pastoral. He is excited and “not ashamed about the gospel” even though many outside the church are not eager to receive Good News of the Kingdom of God. Paul knew that Rome was the dominion of the “rulers of this age.” Paul clearly understood that by calling Jesus “King Jesus, the Lord,” that he was promoting another ruler above the Emperor. This was seditious and dangerous for Paul. But Paul knew the power of the Gospel. Paul knew what God’s Good News had done in his own life and in the lives of others. He knew the cost of God’s mercy. Prior to Paul’s letter, Rome had gone through sweeping changes. Pagan Rome didn’t much care for Jews and their purifying religious rituals. They also didn’t very much care for the new “religion” in town, Christianity, which some of the Jews embraced. Emperor Claudius had the Jews expelled from Rome. The Jewish Christians left behind Gentile house churches. Some believe that these churches in Rome began with Gentile believers who were converted during Pentecost, while they were in Jerusalem. After Claudius died in AD 54 Nero became Emperor. Under a new Emperor the Jews and with them the Jewish believers returned to Rome. It is then that Paul writes his letter, circa AD 58, describing the sweeping changes brought about by the Kingdom of God on earth. He writes about God’s justification of all those who believe that God would keep His Covenant promise. That promise was completely fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul was deeply concerned for Christ’s church at Rome. His “masterpiece” letter hopes to resolve conflicts between Gentile believers and Jews now returning to Rome. And, more importantly, he writes to give the church an overarching vision of God’s Covenant plan to save the world from itself. As you read Romans you sense that the church and the world system at that time are not so different from that of our world and our own times. At the beginning of the letter Paul writes that he was under obligation to barbarians as well as to Greeks, that he was obliged to the uncultured and the cultured. He was obliged to speak the Gospel to the wise and to the foolish. These kinds of people are with us today, are they not? Paul begins God’s creation salvation story with the problem: man’s brokenness and man’s unwillingness to turn from his sin. To make the point, within the first paragraphs of his letter the phrase “So God gave them up” occurs three times: “So God gave them up to uncleaness in the desires of their hearts, with the result that they dishonored their bodies among themselves. They swapped God’s truth for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed for ever, Amen. So God gave them up to shameful desires. Even the women, you see swapped natural sexual practice for unnatural; and men, too, abandoned natural sexual relations with women, and were inflamed with their lust for one another. Men performed shameless acts with men, and received in themselves the appropriate repayment for their mistaken ways. Moreover, just as they did not see fit to hold on to knowledge of God, God gave them up to an unfit mind, so that they would behave inappropriately.” Keep in mind that Paul knew the Jewish canon. He knew about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – God’s righteous anger poured out on the sexual perversion within those cities. Those cities had been warned. Paul was again warning the new Christians in pagan Rome about God’s Righteousness and Justice and man’s hardheartedness. Is not homosexuality worshipping the creature rather than the Creator? But Paul was revealing a way out – a path made straight by the One Jew who fulfilled all of God’s desires for His rebellious people – Jesus. And lest we read Paul’s words and become smug and judge others keep in mind Paul’s words in his letter to the Corinthians: “Some of you were once like that.” “Don’t you realize that those who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people–none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” (I Cor 6:9-11) I don’t have to tell you that in our time the main stream media pours out filth and degeneration into our homes. Our lives are constantly bombarded with TV programs, movies and advertisements that use sex or by political party advocates who call homosexuality a “right.” Yet, a “right” does confer righteousness to the owner, only license and worse, in the case of homosexuality, licentiousness. The perversion and antinomianism now seems even more pervasive in our age than in Paul’s because of the ever-present media. What can Christians do to heed Paul’s words today in our pagan world? It begins with worship. So God will give them up – the people of this age – who follow in the footsteps of the pagan Romans but for us who believe we can give up to God what Paul writes later in Romans: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God–this is your true and proper worship.”

Attorney and Hasidic community activist (and Orthodox Jewish All Star!) Rachel Freier won a contested primary for a civil court judgeship in Brooklyn’s 5th Judicial District and took her seat on the bench this week as a civil court judge. Freier, the first Hasidic Jewish woman to hold elected office in the United States spoke to Gothamist about her career, the role of women in traditional Jewish life, and the historic nature of her judgeship. The team behind popular Lower East Side kosher shop The Pickle Guys is getting into the restaurant business for the first time with a new fried pickle shop. The kosher pickle shop recently moved to a new location at 357 Grand St., where the retail store will soon be accompanied by a small, counter-service restaurant. Jason Dov Greenblatt of Teaneck, who began 2016 as the Trump Organization’s chief legal adviser and became one of two special advisers on the U.S./Israel relationship for his longtime boss, Donald J. Trump, this spring, will enter the new year ready for a new title. He soon will become the new Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations with focuses on Israel-Palestinian peace process, the American relationship with Cuba, and trade agreements. Floor Hockey in Orthodox Jewish private schools has grown enormously popular in recent years. The championship match can fill an arena with as many as 1,000 fans, with more people watching live online. Players in elementary grades at Jewish schools now set their sights on yeshivas with the most powerful hockey programs. The teams play in the Metropolitan Yeshiva High School Hockey League, which includes 18 varsity and 15 junior varsity teams for boys. There are also 12 girls’ teams, which play in the spring season. On Israel’s “The Voice,” the judges were astounded to turn their chairs and discover it was a frum Jew who was belting Bob Marley with such talent. But the truly impressive part of the performance came when a judge asked Ganz “Why did you choose God?” Ganz responded, “I didn’t. God chose me.” Estee Ackerman was raised around a basement pingpong table, a traditional gathering spot for Sabbath-observant kids on long Saturday afternoons. After taking an avid interest in the game, Ackerman joined professional clubs and earlier this month, the Long Islander won five medals including two golds at the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships in Las Vegas. Sometime in November, right after the end of daylight saving time, as we turn the clocks back an hour, the shorter days become a challenge for keeping Shabbos. For this Op-Ed author, Fridays inevitably become a complex operations problem, figuring out how to cram in a full day of work, errands, Sabbath preparation and child care in half as much time…but it’s worth it for the taste of heaven it creates.

Article by Josh Leitner The Yeshiva of Volozhin In 1890 a 17-year old orphan, by the name of Chaim Zhitomirer applied to join the Volohzin Yeshiva, after reading a gushing and effusive account of the institution from Hebrew writer Micha Josef Berdyczewski (1865-1921). The article was written by Berdyczewski near the end of his studies at the Volozhin Yeshiva, and his admiration for the Yeshiva and its rabbis is evident in it. Soon after he reached Volozhin he was introduced to the ageing revered dean, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (known with the acronym the Netziv), who instructed him to prepare a full tractate of Talmud for his entrance examination. As it transpired, Zhitomirer was quite disappointed by what he found in the Yeshiva. He thought Volozhin was a place where he could study the ‘seven disciplines (the seven wonders of the world) and the seventy languages’, but ultimately all he found was hundreds of boys studying Talmud in the study hall day and night. Still, he decided to knuckle down and studied assiduously and diligently for three months until he had mastered an entire tractate and was now ready for his admission test. Chaim was no fool, and he passed his test with ‘flying colours’. In fact the Netziv commented that he had rarely come across someone who was able to attain so much knowledge in so short a period of time. Chaim began to devote himself to intense study, and as he later said, “I had every intention of becoming a life-long student”. But something wasn’t right in Volozhin. Over the coming months Chaim discovered that the Yeshiva was in a state of turmoil, with two secret groups of Maskilim (Jewish enlightenment – the Haskalah ) operating within the Yeshiva. Chaim now understood what Berdyczewski had meant. It was not the Yeshiva that was teaching the seven disciplines. The boys were learning that themselves. Meanwhile, the Yeshiva was in disarray and the Netziv was collapsing from internal strife and external pressures. Just a short while later Chaim Zhitomirer, or better known as Chaim Nachman Bialik left Volozhin Yeshiva and went to Odessa, the seat of secular Jewish education where he abandoned his religious observance and became a champion of the Haskalah movement as well as a renowned Zionist icon. Bialik wrote several famous poems about his time in Volozhin, the most famous of all, HaMasmid, a wistful description of the devoted Talmud student, dedicating himself to the endless sea of Talmud in the hope that he would become the next greatest scholar. In the poem he bitterly condemns the Yeshiva movement which he sees as stifling promising youngsters preventing them from achieving their true potential. He declares proudly, that ‘I have deliberately pitched my tent far from that existence, an existence that I despise with a passion’. The poem became so famous that it later had a street named after it in Israel. But what was Volozhin Yeshiva and what had driven Bialik to wish to join in the first place? Let’s briefly go back in time…Belarus. White Russia. Birthplace of the Lithuanian Torah world. Where Hassidic Rabbi’s and deans of Yeshivot (Jewish Torah Schools) held court. The halls of the great Yeshivot once brimming with life are now of course silent, but the concrete walls that absorbed so much are still standing. Jewish schools have existed for millennia; famous Yeshivot flourished in Israel, Babylonia, across the Middle East and in Europe. In Belarus, the towns of Brest (also known in Yiddish as Brisk), Grodno, Minsk and others contained many well-regarded Yeshivot. But, amongst all the Yeshivot of Eastern Europe, it was the Volozhin Yeshiva that was revolutionary in providing an antidote to both, the crisis of assimilation and the growth of Hassidism which were undermining the tradition of Torah and Talmud study. On the one hand, the Russian government and the Haskalah movement joined forces in pressuring Yeshivot into teaching secular subjects – science, humanities, and languages; on the other Hassidism’s focus on devaikut or clinging to G-d with joyous prayers and chanting was gaining more followers, straying them away from a stricter Torah and Talmud education. Yeshiva Volozhin, , located in the town of the same name in Lithuania, Russia —today Belarus— was founded by Rabbi Haim ben Yitzhak – known as Haim of Volozhin – a scholar of repute who created a short-lived movement, the Mitnagdim, to oppose Hassidism and ban its followers from entering traditional Jewish communities to entice yeshiva students away from Torah and Talmud. In turn, Rabbi Haim sought to fight Hassidism by establishing the Yeshiva Volozhin with a sole focus on Torah and Talmud education rather than Kabbalah, mystical visions, and cheerful chanting as was the Hassidim custom; or secular studies, the Russian government’s and the maskilim’s goal. Yeshiva Volozhin is often romanticised as the womb that bore and nurtured the greatest dynasties of gifted scholars, intellectuals as Rabbis Abraham Kook, , (1865-1935) the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik (1820-1892), and the Chofetz Chaim (1838-1933), who among others, started religious movements that changed the Jewish world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eastern Europe. Known as the “mother of all Yeshivot,” Volozhin opened in 1806 and closed in 1892 amidst an epic struggle between traditional and modernisation forces. The closing of Yeshiva Volozhin had tremendous repercussions in the yeshiva world of that time as it stopped producing dynasties of religious intellectuals and it is still a source of debate in American yeshivas today Rabbi Haim was one of the main disciples of Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, in nearby Lithuania, who was known simply as the “Vilna Gaon” (the Vilna Genius). Together they revolutionised the way Talmud is studied and emphasised moral character and development. In 1802 Rabbi Haim issued a public letter calling on all Jews in the region to support his new Yeshiva. One of Volozhin’s innovations was its source of funding which came from emissaries who traveled throughout Eastern and Western Europe rather than relying on local support. Within the Volozhin Yeshiva, students studied in shifts – there were always students in the Study Hall, 24 hours a day. The Jewish learning never ceased. Its curriculum, based only on Torah and Talmud, was meant to avoid bittul Torah or wasting time on superfluous subjects. The study of Torah and Talmud took place all day from dawn to late evening, all year, with no terms or vacation time. Advanced knowledge of Talmud was required for admissions and students could work independently or with study-partners. Basically, study for its own sake was the yeshiva’s goal. Rabbi Haim of Volozhin grew the number of students from 10 to 200 within ten years as the yeshiva’s reputation spread beyond Lithuania’s borders. After Rabbi Haim’s death in 1821, the leadership of the institution was taken over by his son, Rabbi Yitzhak Berlin (1780-1849). For the next decade, the yeshiva remained a family business. Rabbi Yitzhak’s death caused his son-in-law, R. Eliezer Yitzhak (1809-1853) to become dean of the yeshiva and when he died, the mantle of leadership passed to his younger son in-law, Naftali Zevi Yehuda Berlin, who governed it for four decades. It was during his tenure that the institution experienced its greatest success. The Yeshiva became celebrated not only as the most prestigious institution of Torah and Talmud learning in the world in the nineteenth century, but also, as the paragon of opposition to the pull of Hassidism and the assimilationist movements of the Russian government and the Haskalah. In their wake, the future of the Yeshiva was never stable as the Russian establishment tried to curb the intensity of Jewish learning by insisting on the inclusion of secular studies into the curriculum with the help of the enlightened Jews who aggressively supported a new educational system that combined Judaism with secular studies and professional training. By 1848, maskilim, encouraged by grants from the government to push for mixed education, created an infrastructure of enlightenment institutions, media outlets in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish, and even founded a Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia (1863) in St. Petersburg to support young students seeking Russian acculturation. They planned to attract Yeshiva students after they had achieved their goal of abolishing Volozhin. The Yeshiva remained stubborn and resilient against those that wished to dilute the Yeshiva curriculum but during the latter half of the 19th century cracks began to appear from within. Many students were quietly reading academic papers in between Torah sessions, and indeed some were leaving to join the city’s universities. The turning point came on December 22, 1891, when the government ordered the yeshiva to adopt new rules for the yeshiva’s curriculum, student body, teaching staff, and administration. Four rules stand out: (1) Secular studies were to take place daily between 9am and 3pm; (2) no more than ten hours a day could be spent studying; (3) no Jewish studies at all at night; and (4) teachers and administrators had to speak Russian and hold a diploma of secular studies. The government’s total intrusion into the yeshiva’s autonomy weighed down the rabbinic leadership. The moment to make a decision had finally arrived. Should they bow to the pressure of the Russians and adopt a modern type of education or close shop altogether? History is not clear as to the full depth of the Netziv’s attitude to the addition of secular classes running alongside Torah studies. Some argue that he was severely opposed to any reduction of Torah learning to the degree that he would rather see the institution closed than to yield even an inch. Others say that the Netziv had made the decision to include some secular studies, albeit against his will. The Yeshiva existed for almost a full century. However on Wednesday, the February 3rd 1892, a high government official accompanied by soldiers entered the great hall carrying an order from the Minister of Education to close the yeshiva. The Netziv’s fight was a long and arduous one. It was the Netziv’s against the world; traditional Judaism versus secularising forces; and the Russian government against G-d. The Netziv resisted as much as he could, torn as he was between following the Higher Authority or submitting to the Russian one. Bialik may have left Volozhin and will want to be remembered as one of its ‘star students’. Yet in his poem he does call the Yeshiva the academy “the place where the soul of the Jewish nation was molded.” The Volozhin Yeshiva will endure in the annals of history as one of the important Torah institutions of recent times. Today the building that was the Volozhin Yeshiva stands empty and abandoned. As part of The Together Plan’s work to build a Jewish Cultural Heritage Trail – this site of enormously important Jewish provenance will be included on the route and highlighted so that more people around the world will learn about it and about the story it tells.

Monday, April 30, 2012 Sunday, April 15, 2012 If any man be devout and loveth God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast. If any man bee a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord. If any have labored long in fasting, let him ow receive his recompense. If any have wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any have come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings: because he shall in no way be deprived therefore. If any have delayed unto the ninth hour, let him draw near fearing nothing. If any have tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also be not alarmed at his tardiness; for the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first; He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour. And He showeth mercy upon the last, and careth for the first; and to the one He giveth, and up the other He bestoweth gifts. And He both accepteth the deeds and welcometh the intention; and honoreth the acts and praises the offering. Wherefore, enter ye all into the joy of your Lord; and receiveth your reward, both the first, and likewise the second. You rich an poor together, hold high festival. You sober and you heedless, honor the day. Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast. The table is full laden; feast ye all sumptiously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away. Enjoy ye all the feast of faith. Receive ye all the riches of loving kindness. Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shown forth from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free. He that was held prisoner of it has annilhillated it. By descending into Hell, He made hell captive. He embittered it when it tasted His flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this did cry: Hell, said he, was embittered, when it encountered Thee in the lower regions. It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked. It was embittered for it was slain. It was embittered for it was overthrown. It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains. It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen. Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh hell, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and thou art overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen and life reigns. From “The Sermon of St. John Chrysostom”. P.S. And there are those that think that the feast, life, is all about them and only for them. And if it isn't, and if they can't have it all, they intend to destroy it all with a Sampson option. They will remain in the hell of their presumption, separated from the feast. Their Sampson option will only close the doors of their hell on themselves, and remain separated from the feast. They won't be missed. Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Tuesday, April 3, 2012 Interview With Joe Cortina - Ex Green Beret by Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2012 JOE CORTINA IS AN EX GREEN BERET, a former airborne special operations officer and US Army Training Center commander. Joe Cortina’s subsequent experiences as an intelligence investigator and anti-terrorist adviser brought him to such hotbeds of turmoil as the State of Israel, adjacent Middle East nations, and Central America. Joe Cortina’s Web Site, “My Name Is Joe Cortina,” is a showcase of crimes committed against humanity by the Judaic global elite. Here. Br Nathanael: Joe, what is Depleted Uranium? Joe Cortina: Depleted Uranium, also known as DU, is a by-product of enriched uranium used in nuclear reactors and weapons. Thus, it is called “depleted” uranium. Basically, it’s a waste product of the nuclear industry. When Depleted Uranium is vaporized into the air it is DEADLY TO ALL LIFE on earth INCLUDING our own soldiers. Br Nathanael: So why is it used by the US military? Joe Cortina: Due to its high density it has greater penetration potential against armor and other hard targets. It can be used for armor or in kinetic energy projectiles to defeat armor – as it’s about twice as dense as lead, and unlike tungsten, will ignite at temperatures over 600F. Br Nathanael: How is it dissipated into the environment under war scenarios? Joe Cortina: Used in cannons, rockets and bombs, Depleted Uranium vaporizes after the heat-of-impact and then produces profuse DU dust particles as small as 5 microns and can travel long distances when airborne. Br Nathanael: How is it introduced into the human body? Joe Cortina: Three ways – absorption through the skin, or through open wounds, or by inhalation into the lungs…which is the most common AND most hazardous. Br Nathanael: Are there ‘safe’ dosages?” Joe Cortina: ONLY – if you believe the biggest liars on earth – the US Government. Our Government, now under the control of Jews, has lied to the public for years about all aspects of radioactive isotopes – more recently regarding DU. There is no ’safe’ dosage rate below which dangers disappear. “No threshold-dose,” says John Gofman, a former Associate Director of Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb and co-discoverer of uranium-233. Gofman concludes, “Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not ‘hypothetical,’ or ‘just theoretical,’ or ‘imaginary.’ They are real.” View Entire Story Here & Here. Br Nathanael: The US government has been lying to us about depleted uranium? When was this dangerous technology first employed? Joe Cortina: Our government has been lying about the risks since day-one of the Gulf Wars beginning in 1991. During the first period, Desert Storm, approximately 350 tons were spread in Iraq. During the subsequent wars – the 2003 invasion of Iraq - nearly 2000 Tons turned that nation into a radioactive wasteland. Our soldiers who have returned home, suffering from Depleted Uranium’s poison, are calling their deadly ailments, “The Gulf Syndrome.” Br Nathanael: Is it used in Afghanistan as well? Joe Cortina: Absolutely! There has been even MORE tons of this deadly poison spread over Afghanistan by an irresponsible Government gone mad! These deadly micro-particles are often carried up into the atmosphere and released with rain hundreds of miles away. The Jews themselves have poured over 75 tons of this radioactive death on the tiny 138 Square Mile Prison we know as Gaza. That’s enough to kill 50 million people. Gaza has 1.5 million people. Br Nathanael: What a horrible nightmare. I have heard that these demonic weapons are called “dirty bombs.” Is there any validation of this in technical terms? Joe Cortina: Let me tell you just how accurate that fear is considered to be by the experts. When Dr Marion Falk, a retired Chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore Lab, was asked if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb, he stated, “That’s exactly what they are. They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.” Br Nathanael: So – America has become the major destroyer of the world community environment? Joe Cortina: Absolutely, once again! We are as evil a polluter as any nation on earth. Br Nathanael: But is there any evidence to show that our Government was aware of these war crimes against humanity? Joe Cortina: Once again – PROOF POSITIVE. While the Pentagon officially denies the dangers of DU weapons, ever since at least 1943 the military has been aware of the extreme toxicity of uranium dispersed as a gas, or as dust particles. A declassified memo written by James B Conant while working on the US nuclear project during the Second World War and sent to Brigadier General LB Abrams on October 30 1943 provides the evidence. In the memo, Conant states that dust particles carrying Depleted Uranium are equally inhaled by US military personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small…that only one millionth of a gram in a person’s body would be fatal. He goes on to say that there are no known methods of treatment. Point is – ALL of our military, and their masters—our now all pervasive war-mongering Jewish civilian leadership—know EXACTLY what happens when polluting the earth with Depleted Uranium. Br Nathanael: Joe, as a former Green Beret how do you access what is happening with our militaristic nation? Joe Cortina: We are now a nation under the thumb of what I call the Military/Judaic Complex. Under this entity, we have become the monsters of the universe – whose greed, lust for power, and bloodshed for the Jews, has exalted all manner of evil and wickedness to obfuscate rationality, goodness and wisdom. The recent massacre of 17 Afghan villagers by Sergeant Robert Bales—who DID NOT ACT ALONE—but was assisted by at least 20 other US soldiers is a fitting metaphor of a Jewish-controlled America gone mad. And by the way, the Jew-owned press is maintaining the lie that Bales was a “lone, drunk, shell-shocked soldier.” More lies, more cover-ups by our Military/Judaic nation. Br Nathanael: What have we done? Have any effects of the poisons of Depleted Uranium shown up in our own US soldiers since these endless serial wars started? Joe Cortina: The evidence is legion. “Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose and it is not going to decrease very much over time,” stated Dr Leonard Dietz, a nuclear physicist with 33 years’ experience, as he told the New York Daily News. “In the long run,” Dietz said, “veterans exposed to DU’s ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem.” Dietz, by the way, has written many scientific reports on the deadly hazards uranium depleted weapons have on our US soldiers which have been ignored by the Pentagon and its enablers at the Jew-run, war-mongering, Main Stream Media. In concert with Dietz’s analysis, Dr Falk, whom I mentioned above, and other authorities state that inhaled particles of depleted uranium dust will either lodge in the lungs or be carried through the body’s cell walls and “affect the master code” – the expression of the DNA. View Entire Story Here, Here & Here. Then we have Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs who said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 Gulf Wars through the War in Iraq, 179,310 are receiving disability compensation and another 24,763 cases are pending. Br Nathanael: I have seen photographs of infants born in Iraq and Afghanistan during this period and they are truly heart-breaking. I have also seen photos of young children maimed for life. Joe Cortina: Let me put it this way, and remember, I speak as a former Green Beret who has served my country faithfully and honorably. Now that these horrors have been exposed – including the FACT that our ‘Government’ has LONG SINCE known about the deadly nature of these lethal threats to all living organisms – rational people can only conclude that those with whom we have entrusted our very lives are lying, sociopathic, mass-murdering criminals – from our top-ranking Military leaders all the way to the President – and MUST be charged, tried and convicted of committing mass murder. To NOT do so is to doom humanity to eventual extinction and relegate the goodness of human beings to that of mindless, barbaric criminals. We MUST regain our sanity and do what needs to be done. And that is to rein in the greatest institutionalized terrorist apparatus on earth – the greedy, Godless, murderous, maniacal Military-Judaic Complex that was once America. Br Nathanael: So, what is the fate of the six-hundred-thousand-plus and the growing daily number of returned Vets who have been exposed to breathing in DU dust particles? Joe Cortina: Simple – they will all die of depleted uranium contamination – some sooner – some later. Some already have and will father babies that will be horribly deformed and suffer the very same grief they have caused countless innocent Afghan and Iraqi parents by saturating their environment with radioactive death. Thousands of US soldiers returning home from our Jew-inspired wars have suffered memory loss, physical maladies, even deaths, and are unknowingly spreading the poison of Depleted Uranium to their wives and newborn babies. But that’s OK with many Americans because the endless wars which Jewry has forced upon us with its powerful Lobbies and Media Control has made the world, as Jew neocon Robert Kagan tells us in his latest piece of Jewish propaganda, ‘a safer place.’ OH – I almost forgot – safer for Jews only. So now just ignore these truths – grab a cold Bud – take a purple pill – turn on the TalmudVision to your favorite Jew-created violence, sexual reverie and depravity, or NFL Goyim Games, and repeat this little mantra over and over till it makes things right again: “Our government would never lie to us – our government would never lie to us – our government would never lie to us.” Or, if you feel really ‘patriotic’ – you can see your recruiter and redeploy to murder more “rag heads” or “dune coons” or “sand nigger’s” children – as the Jew-run media so eloquently belittles them. There now – don’t you feel a whole lot better about being a brave, free, democracy-loving American? P.S. Our government would never lie to us, our government would never lie to us... we are the good guys, we are the good guys. Sunday, April 1, 2012 GOSH! Talk about your ‘timely’ events… Israel—right smack dab up to her bushy eyebrows in bad press following YET ANOTHER massacre of gentiles in Gaza, and the next thing you know—like the hand of God coming out of the clouds and giving the various characters in this drama a little ‘nudge’— …a mini-bloodbath takes place at a Jewish school in France, blamed upon (of course) ‘Islamic terrorism…’ And the ‘GOSH’ just gets ‘GOSHIER’ as details emerge…Seems the perp—one Mohamed Merah—had all sorts of ‘radical affiliations’, but yet somehow managed to make it into Israel—TWICE. This by itself definitely qualifies as ‘GOSHY,’ but what’s more is that he was also under the microscope of both French AND American law enforcement/intelligence services, so much so that his name was added to the infamous ‘verboten fur flugen’ list maintained by DHS, the same agency originally under the kommissariat of one Michael Chertoff, the dual-citizen singularly responsible for helping bust out of jail the infamous ‘5 dancing Israelis’ arrested on the morn’ of 9/11. And yet, despite all this, a VERY dark-skinned, Middle Eastern-looking Muslim of Algerian descent named Mohammed, known to dabble with (what we are told are) the more ‘radical’ aspects of Islam, nevertheless manages to get his hands on a gun (in Europe, not Texas) and then goes on a killing spree that ends with several Jewish children and a rabbi biting the bullet, no pun or disrespect intended. Like we said before—how ‘timely’… As far as cameo appearances go, this latest impromptu walk-on by the ever-recurring villain of Islamic terrorism couldn’t have come at a better time. Nor with better packaging, for that matter. Consider the surrounding scenery for a moment…Here we have a young Muslim man, angry over the manner by which his co-religionists are being slaughtered in places such as Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan…Those responsible for causing this slaughter to take place–the various policy planners, pundits, politicians, preachers, screechers, etc–all of whom lead very public (and unprotected) lives… AND YET, rather than go after one (or more) of them, instead our lone gunman shoots a bunch of Jewish kids and their pure-as-the-wind-driven snow shaman. Honestly, as far as screenplays go, the only one coming close to topping this was the one making a very conspicuous appearance shortly before 9/11 entitled Independence Day, showcasing a nice, unpretentious, nerdy, environmentally-conscious Jewish boy named David who manages singlehandedly to save the entire human race from a bunch of extraterrestrial jihadists. So, with regards to this latest tragédie Francaise, an awestruck world is forced to ask–How DO they do it??? I mean, it NEVER fails. As soon as she–the Jewish state–finds herself in one of those ‘UH, OH’ moments, a game-changer ‘pops up’ like an unexpected attack of hiccups, resulting in a COMPLETE change-a-roo of scenery, characters and dialogue. Like switching from one channel to another, what was a righteously-outraged world a moment before whilst watching some Judaic version of the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ then finds itself diverted to some heart-wrenching scene in ‘Schindler’s List’… Well, what can be concluded, other than the fact that they are God’s chosen people after all…When all’s said and done, what we in the befuddled world are forced to accept is that if He—the almighty Yahweh–was ready, willing & able to pull off a ‘Moses’ (meaning plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, pillars of fire by night and a whole lotta other fancy-shmancy mumbo-jumbo designed to razzle-dazzle a captive audience) then we can suppose with equal ease He’d be ready, willing & able to pull off a ‘Mohammed’ from time to time whenever ‘His people’ find themselves staring into the jaws of death… The fact is however that (outside of an out-in-the-open admission by the Jewish state) we’ll never really know. We can suspect, of course… In fact, we can even assume, based upon Israel’s historically-documented penchant for creating believable scenes of politically-propitious terrorism in the same way Spielberg makes a lot of nonsense on the silver screen look like reality, but the truth is, we’ll never really know… And as crazy as it sounds, the truth is that in this case we don’t really need to know the details of who Mohammed Merah was meeting with before the mini-massacre and what they were talking about. What we DO know beyond the shadow of any doubt is that ‘Islamic terrorism’ is not some naturally-occuring, stand-alone item. It is merely a by-product of Judaic terrorism and it’s twin sister, Jewish ritual murder, and therefore were there no massacres in places such as Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, etc, there would be no occasions of Islamic blowback in places such as Toulouse. But even this is secondary to the REAL story, because as dramatic as the events in Toulouse were (and by that we mean ‘Jramatic’) the most important sub-plot of the entire spectacle was what happened—as most climaxes do—towards the end. In the immediate aftermath of the events in France, as people are searching for the right things to say that hopefully sound profound and meaningful, EU minister Catherine Ashton uttered the unutterable as far as Jewish interests were (are) concerned. Commenting on the deaths in Toulouse but then underscoring the fact that what just happened is anything but an aberration in today’s violence-soaked world, she lamented the plight of—not just the Jewish children who lost their lives, but as well–children all over the world killed ‘in all sorts of terrible circumstances…’ She specifically mentioned those murdered last year in Norway by the pro-Israel Islamophobe Anders Breivik and then ended by mentioning the children killed in Gaza by the IDF on a regular basis. Now, were this ANY OTHER situation involving ANY OTHER group of kids besides those with dual French/Israeli citizenship, something like this—Ashton’s comments–would be perfectly apropos… But, the fact that there WERE Jewish kids involved puts the whole game in a completely different ballpark and with completely different rules, something that the world learned tout suite in the well-organized screeching campaign that followed. As with most things involving them when they know mic is on and the cameras are rolling, the Jewish reaction to Ashton’s comments was perfectly apocalyptic in its apoplexy. Employing all the same theatricism their cousins in Hollywood utilize whenever they want to get a certain point across, it was replete with all the typical shrieking, screeching, wailing, face-clawing, gnashing of teeth and rending of robes that accompanies any protest on the part of organized Jewish interests. First on stage was Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (poster child for mental health awareness month) and who (incredibly) wound up the saner of the various characters on-stage. Speaking officially on behalf of the Jewish state, there was very little airborne saliva or bile on his part, (again, very atypical) as Lieberman limited his comments to a brief condemnation of Ashton’s remarks, but adding that there could be ‘no comparison’ between the massacre of 3 Jewish kids in Toulouse and the massacre of thousands of non-Jewish kids in Gaza. He did slip briefly back into his usual type-cast role however by reminding the world that ‘Israel is the most moral country in the world’ and does everything in her power to avoid killing ‘innocent’ civilians. Others were not as non-salivic as Liebermann in their comments. Oliver Worth, British chairman of the World Union of Jewish Students was a tad more theatric in his theatricism, characterizing Ashton’s comments as ‘outrageous and revolting’ and then reverted to the typically-Jewish shtick (seen all too often whenever someone speaks his or her mind dans une manière désagréable with Jewish sensibilities) by calling for her to be added to the roster of those looking for new employment, since as an EU minister she had ‘lost all credibility’. Other commentary from le monde Juif concerning Ashton’s remarks were as follows— “Baroness Ashton’s remarks were crass and inappropriate” so says John Mann, chair of the All-party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism. “The loss of young, innocent lives anywhere is of course appalling, but the attempt to draw parallels between Toulouse and Gaza was deeply, offensive and unworthy of a person in her position… Stefan Kerner, director of public affairs for the Zionist Federation pontificated (rabbinated?) that there is absolutely ‘no equivalence between the situation in Gaza and the cold and callous murder of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and the three children, and for a person in Ashton’s position to even consider her comments appropriate is disgraceful. She should withdraw her statement immediately and apologize unreservedly for the offence that she has caused.’ And then, there was Livni, a (only in some respects) ‘Lieberman-lite’ and a bona fide, genuine, died-in-the-wool war criminal who described Ashton’s comments as “reprehensible, infuriating, and wrong” in drawing ‘any link between the murder of children in Toulouse and the situation in Gaza’. Now, as already established with the crushing weight of thousands of years’ history, when it comes to the Jewish state and her supporters, theatricism and all its trappings are always the rule and never the exception and for the simple rule that—just as her spy/disinformation service Mossad preaches–when making war, doest thou by deception… Therefore those of us living in the Hotel Reality and who have gotten wise to the ways of our non-Gentile counterparts will (with good reason) assume that the aforelisted commentary coming out of Mundus Judaicus is but more of the typical carnival barking the world has come to expect with the self-appointed chosenites. And clearly, there is good reason to assume this. However, that is not to say all this drama does not spring forth from some deep reservoir of genuine feelings on their part. The best performances come from actors with some real emotional connection to the theme at hand, and this latest protest over the manner by which Jewish children are forced to share the limelight with those killed in Gaza, we KNOW that there is a particular electrical current these various screechers have tapped into for the energy of their protests. After all, are we to assume that the various aforementioned characters DON’T believe that what took place in Toulouse was a hundred times worse than its counterpart in Gaza? Or a thousand times? Or ten thousand times? Or even a MILLION times, for that matter? OF COURSE they do…In fact, the proper mathematic equation in computing and measuring the inequality of life-value between the Jew and the non-Jew has already been discovered, tested and revealed by one of the Jewish state’s greatest spiritual mathematicians, Rabbi Yaakov Perrin, who stated without blushing that– ‘One million Arabs is not worth one Jewish fingernail…’ For those gear-heads more accustomed to number equations than words, we’ll make it more pleasing to the eye— 1,000,000 Arabs < 1 Jewish fingernail, 1 Jewish fingernail > 1,000,000 Arabs Nota bene—‘Arabs’ is just word-play here, as what Perrin REALLY means is ‘Gentiles’ of any racial variety. Note as well that Perrin’s mathematical statement is not ‘an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ as the original Jewish book of hate—meaning the Torah–teaches. No, this is 2012 and we are waaaay past the child’s play of the ‘older, kinder, and gentler’ Judaism preached-n-practiced by Moses, Joshua, Solomon, David, et al… Rather, this is the NEW Jewish math, where the original anti-Gentile number-play spawned in books such as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers et al—over the course of thousands of years and through the mad genius of rabbinical logic—has been distilled, purified, enriched and made into a spiritual/political cocktail as deadly and as radioactive as a lump of uranium 235. And lest some think that Professor Perrin was just some lone theorist, keep in mind he is joined by an entire faculty of others who agree wholeheartedly with him. Teaching in the biology department down the hall is the infamous Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg who once quipped ‘Jewish blood and a goy’s (gentile’s) blood are not the same, since the blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord and is therefore redder and their life more preferable.’ Upstairs, we find the classroom of Rabbi Ovadiah Yusuf and his recent zoological comparison of Gentiles to donkeys whose only purpose in life was to ‘serve the Jews’. Downstairs in the entomology department we have various other ‘learned elders of Zion’ who refer to non-Jews as ‘cockroaches’ and ‘grasshoppers’. But make no mistake about it—no matter what the discipline, the math is always the same— …1 Jewish fingernail… And of course the best proof that these various theorems are indeed embraced as gospel truth (not only by the greater part of the faculty but as well the Judaic student body) lies in considering the manner by which these theorems are applied on a DAILY basis in the various math tests and exercises carried out by the IDF, a VERY short list of which includes –Sabra & Shatila, –the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon, –the murderous assault on the Mavi Marmara, –Operation Cast Lead, where thousands of Gentiles—not worth a Jewish fingernail—were erased as if mere number scribblings on paper. So the notion that the recent ‘Jrama’ resulting from Catherine Ashton’s ‘all children are created equal’ remarks is a case of ‘all show and no go’ is belied by using the simple Judaic math given to us by Israel’s most impeccable source—meaning the various doctors, professors and scribes themselves. Realize this as well—the mini-series of screeching and kvetching broadcast in the immediate aftermath of Ashton’s comments was but a tiny, mirrored-reflection of the greater problems the world faces now on a daily basis. Indeed, the ENTIRE conundrum in which the world finds itself (global war on behalf of Jewish interests) and which is responsible for Toulouse and the accompanying aftermath of Jewish theatricism can be rightly traced back to the same perverse system of thousands-of-years-old math that began with one lone soul wandering in the desert hearing voices in his head saying ‘I will bless those who bless thee and curse those who curse thee…’ Like an inferno that began as a mere spark, this primal, Neanderthal-level narcissism has been THE starting point that has brought civilization to the brink of extinction, and absent that, a hell of a lot of misery for those finding themselves on the wrong side of the number line. In the meantime, as long as this backwards, regressive system of spiritual computation–developed and espoused by the various professors holding tenure in the Judaic Studies department–remains the dominating force driving politics, finance, media, religion, culture and military adventurism, the West might as well get used to events such as Toulouse. As long as Gentiles—Arab or whoever—continue to allow their lives to be reduced to a +/- equation favoring Jewish interests and to be victimized by a mathematized system of racial supremacism where Jewish life is infinitely more valuable than that of non-Jews and with its accompanying actions, those who do not embrace this type of math—the Mohammed Merahs and all their accompanying organizations and groups will strike out against those who do. Perhaps the solution to this problem then actually lies in embracing this ‘wisdom’ of these learned elders of Zion and the math formulae they have constructed. Perhaps, as they allege, millions of Gentile lives are indeed not of equal value to ‘one Jewish fingernail,’ but rather, the other way around… Therefore, let the 6 billion non-Jews on earth making up what we might call the Moral Majority see themselves and their lives as being of infinitely more worth than a few claws on the hands of some Zionist vampire. Let them forcibly remove these claws from their collective neck and in the process consign these backwards Transylvanian mathematicians and their followers to a dark, secluded place where they have no decision-making power over who lives and who dies. To do any less is to perpetuate the world as it exists now—millions of Gentile lives destroyed while at the same time, those responsible for all this death and destruction are found luxuriating in the various salons and beauty parlors around the world… …getting their nails done. P.S. And the reply from the jewish audience... and fellow traveling jewish sycophants... is: Mark, do you not know history? Do you not know of the capital 'H' Holocaust? P.P.S. Mark, you really need to get together with the truth jihadist Kevin Barret to help you lighten up. Otherwise I'm afraid you're going to fall into his category of "real anti-semites". Get together with him. He'll help you find a healthier, happier perspective. He'll help you appreciate some of the positive things about the jewish culture, like its humor and chutzpah (and lies for reality and great movies). Suggest you get together with the truth jihadist again. But so it's not just two gentiles talking, suggest you also invite Barret's buddy, jewish good-guy Gordon Duff, the one with all the intelligence connections around the world and is somehow able come and go out of Israel visiting his family and friends. These two will help you find a healthier, happy perspective regarding our ruling jewish culture. We just gotta deal the psychopaths. P.P.P.S. And Mark, I still think, and I'll always say, that you lost an opportunity in educating people on why Egypt and the Arab countries have dictators and must always have them (which is the same reason we can't have real democracy here) when the uprising in Egypt was getting center-stage media attention. Instead, for you it was all about whether you were correct in being so clever in seeing the zionist influence in steering it, not about the cause of the people. That was a distant secondary matter. You're so clever, Mark. God's really lucky to have you on His side.

Below is a list of area art exhibitions and events for the week of Jan. 8-14. Anyone with information to be included may contact Ann Nichols at Chattanooga Times Free Press, 400 E. 11th St., Chattanooga, TN 37403 or email [email protected]. 1800 Main: 1800 E. Main St. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, Saturday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday. Free. 718-2543. Tom Farnam and Judith Mogul through Feb. 23. Association for Visual Arts: 30 Frazier Ave. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Free. 265-4282. Members juried exhibit through Feb. 11. Bessie Smith Cultural Center: 200 E. M.L. King Blvd. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday. Admission: $7 adults, $5 seniors/students, $3 children 6-12. 266-8658. Isaac Duncan through Feb. 29. Creative Arts Guild Gallery: 520 W. Waugh St., Dalton, Ga. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. Free. 706-278-0168. "The Art of War" through Feb. 29. Cress Gallery, UTC Fine Arts Center: Corner of Vine and Palmetto streets. Hours: 9:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and 1-4 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Free. 304-9789. 2012 Juried student exhibition Tuesday-Jan. 29. Reception 5:30-7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Hunter Museum of American Art: 10 Bluff View. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Wednesday, Sunday; and 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday. Admission: $9.95 adults and $4.95 ages 3-17. 267-0968. "Dorothea Lange's America" through April 22. In-Town Gallery: 26 Frazier Ave. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. 267-9214. Works by 36 member artists on view. "Leap Into Art" during January. Jewish Cultural Center: 5461 North Terrace. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday and by appointment. Free. 493-0270. "Torah Covers: Sacred Textiles" through Friday. River Gallery: 400 E. Second St. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday and by appointment. Free. 265-5033. "Past and Present" through January. Sculpture garden open daily. Shuptrine's Gold Leaf Designs: 2646 Broad St. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursday and by appointment. Free. 266-4453. "The Face of Robert Rittenhouse: This Is Who I Am" through January. Tanner Hill Gallery: 3069 S. Broad St., Suite 3. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday and by appointment. Free. 280-7182. Robert Marchessault through Jan. 27. The Arts Calendar lists temporary exhibitions for facilities that focus primarily on visual arts.

Sign up now! First off Im not Jewish.I was unaware that this was a strictly jewish site but here goes.Im 29 and I enjoy all that life has to offer.I... RebelTyger29 is a 33yr-old single man in Tulsa, Oklahoma Copyright © 2010 Spark Networks® USA, LLC. All rights reserved. Spark Networks USA, LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spark Networks, Inc., a NYSE Amex Company (LOV). Spark Networks USA, LLC DOES NOT CONDUCT BACKGROUND CHECKS ON THE MEMBERS OR SUBSCRIBERS OF THIS WEBSITE.

Square One Theatre Takes DRIVING MISS DAISY to Stratford High School Playwright Alfred Uhry's play deals with the relationship between an elderly Jewish woman (Daisy) and her African-American chauffeur (Hoke). The thematic importance of Driving Miss Daisy lies in the impact on the characters of historical events during the years from 1948 to 1973, which include some of the most important developments in the civil rights movement. Director Tom Holehan adapted the play to fit the length of the student class periods. Based on the real-life relationship between Uhry's grandmother and her chauffeur, the play was made into a movie in 1989. Uhry wrote the screenplay, which won the Oscar for best adaptation from another medium. This is the twelfth year Square One Theater has taken a stage production into the Stratford Schools. Earlier this year, Square One Theatre presented Irena's Vow. For each production, Square One provides study guides for the teachers to use in the classrooms and invites the students and faculty to participate in post-performance discussions with the actors and the director. These educational programs are subsidized by People's United Bank. In 2005, Square One Theatre received "The Friend of Education" Award from the Stratford Board of Education for its work with the schools.

|Jean-Hyppolite Flandrin - "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem"| The need to rewrite Holy Scripture It was this image of a child on top of a tank that reminded me of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a donkey […]. And most of the crowd spread their garments in the road; and others cut branches from the trees, and spread them in the road. And the crowds that went before him, and that followed, cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.’” (Mt 21:5-11) Doesn’t the image of a child used as a ‘human shield’ on top of tank force us to rewrite Holy Scripture, as if Christ is again entering the city where his crucifixion will take place? Only this time that Holy City is not Jerusalem but the Syrian city of Hama. And the road is not strewn with garments and palm leaves but with enemy fire, with bullets singing: “Hosanna to the son or daughter of whomever!” And if we are thus rewriting Holy Scripture, we might as well rewrite the passage about the murder of the children under Herod, such that it is now not in Rama but in Hama where “a voice [was] heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not!” (Mt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15) |Giotto - "The Massacre of the Innocents"| This is what a father says about his son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) – turned into a film by John Hillcoat. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where due to some global disaster – whether natural, man-made or divinely ordained remains unclear – all civilization has crumbled and nature is dying. Those who are still alive are reduced to a sub-human existence of daily struggle for food and the realistic fear of cannibalism. In this world, where all hope and value is lost, this father has made it his sacred mission to protect his son: “the child was his warrant,” McCarthy writes. “What if I said that he's a god?” the father says about his boy to an old man who is amazed to see a child still being alive in the disaster zone the world has become: “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died […]. I never thought to see a child again.” In this godforsaken world, where all faith has died, where God himself is “dead”, this father finds a superhuman faith through his son, who has for him become a divine being, indeed, Christ himself, the Incarnate Word of God. The grimness of McCarthy’s dystopian vision, however, is such that besides the father no one believes anymore. Not even the old man puts any faith in the divinity of the child: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.” Even the living, walking and talking Word of God carries no weight anymore: the world of The Road is too far gone, too godforsaken for that. The father’s task to protect his child against rape, murder and cannibalism is indeed a superhuman task, a more or less impossible mission. In comparison the film Children of Men (2006) – based on the novel by P.D. James – offers an almost optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Here too the story revolves around the divinity of childhood in a seemingly godforsaken world. The premise is that due to some unknown cause – a virus or divine intervention? – mankind has become infertile and faces extinction in several decades. When the youngest person on the planet – celebrity Baby Diego, aged 18 – is killed by a disappointed fan over a refused autograph, people lose their last ounce of hope and give in to despair and nihilism, epitomized by the government-issued suicide drug Quietus. For why take care of the planet, indeed why take care of oneself if there is no future? The future after all is what a child is: the future beyond oneself. Then, miraculously, one black girl becomes pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby amidst the brutal civil war into which the world is falling apart. Bullets are flying, bombs are exploding, people are dying on the spot, but when the mother and her newborn infant appear all falls silent, the fighting stops abruptly, people stand in awe, soldiers fall on their knees before this epiphany which can only be described as religious – underscored by correspondingly dramatic music. It’s a beautiful scene and arguably the high point of the film, far surpassing its dramatic ending when mother and baby are finally aboard the Tomorrow, the ship that will bring them to the utopian community of the Human Project. |Children of Men| So where do we stand now, what is the status of our own world when children are used as ‘human shields’ on top of tanks? Are we closer to the ‘optimistic dystopia’ of Children of Men? Or are we in the truly hellish world of The Road where faith in the divinity of childhood has all but disappeared? Apparently we are right in between, since the sanctity of childhood is both recognized – for otherwise children would be worthless as ‘shields’ – and violated, since they are used as shields. As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is defenseless.” The supreme value and defenselessness of the child is apparently also the supreme armor, not impenetrable for bullets, no not quite, but almost impenetrable for considerations that rationalize the killing of another human being. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the “Face of the Other” as that ultimate instance of vulnerability which calls the spontaneity of our violence into question. But what has become clear now is that this Face is first and foremost the face of a child. It is the ideal mask to hide behind. What has also become clear is that post-apocalyptic dystopia is not just a Hollywood genre, some entertaining vision of horrors predicated on the hypothetical question: “What if…?” No, dystopia is here and now: it is this-topia so to speak. The apocalypse is taking place again and again, each time an innocent child is brutally murdered, abused, raped. How can we believe in a God who lets such things happen? But then again, how can we stop believing in God if this means giving up the divinity of the child? We must have faith, then, simply for the sake of the children. This is the great strength of McCarthy’s line “If he is not the word of God God never spoke”. And therefore I say: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…” "After Auschwitz" – On regurgitating clichés Obviously this ‘Christological’ reading of the Syrian ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ is meant to be abysmally cynical rather than as an expression of faith in the redeeming power of (forced) imitatio Christi. Confronted with such horrors, faith crumbles in despair. To repeat: How can one believe in a God who lets such things happen? This, of course, is an age old question, a powerless cliché nowadays, incapable of causing serious religious doubt. Why? Because we have already stopped believing in the goodness of God a long time ago. Auschwitz cured us of that, to use another cliché. This is the way the world is, we sigh, and then we look away and think about something else, lest we would have bad dreams at night. And we can’t have that, can we? No, we must be rested and fresh in the morning for another productive day. But still… Doesn’t a feeling of sacrilege encroach on us when we hear the invocation of Auschwitz being reduced to a mere cliché? Who dares to say such a thing? True, some people – especially in academia – use it as a cliché when they unthinkingly repeat claims like “After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry” (Adorno) in order to please their professors and further a nice academic career. Such claims have become clichés all right, but they are all the more painful in light of the horrors of Auschwitz. And for Auschwitz we might as well substitute any of the other disasters that constitute the history of the modern world (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). I won’t go into particulars – that is to say: I don’t want to ‘regurgitate more clichés’ – but just think about that child on top of a Syrian tank, that instance of supreme (in)vulnerability. Don’t we encounter here, despite all clichés, something sacred and divine? Something that suggests the image of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey and perhaps even requires the rewriting of Holy Scripture in the indicated way? Christianity and transcendental violence Levinas spoke of a metaphysical and even religious dimension coming to paradoxical presence in the anti-phenomenon of the Face of the Other, who questions us from beyond the sphere of being and makes us responsible to the Platonic “Good beyond being”. Levinas, of course, was a Jewish thinker, who took his lead from the dialogical nature of the Judaic relation to God, who speaks to the individual through the personality (the “Face”) of the other human being – hence Levinas’ fondness of the Jewish proverb “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs”. Yet one wonders if the metaphysical dimension he discovered – the supreme ethical authority of supreme vulnerability – isn’t more amenable to a Christian interpretation rather than a Jewish one, given the apparent necessity of sacrifice in order to bring this dimension to manifestation. Isn’t this the gist of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” where he criticizes Levinas for ignoring the fact that the otherness of the Other – and hence his ethical authority – can only become manifest through the violence perpetrated against her? Thus Derrida spoke of a transcendental and pre-ethical violence as the condition of possibility of the ethical relation to the Other: “For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other.” (Derrida 2002: 160) Hence the intimate relation – which is more than etymological – between sacrality and sacrifice: only through the violence of the latter is the former truly revealed. But this transcendental violence as the precondition for the sacred authority of the Other – isn’t this first and foremost the crucifixion, as the violence that reveals the divinity of Christ? Derrida himself does not investigate this suggestion, despite the fact that “Violence and Metaphysics” shows a strong Christian undercurrent in the reciprocity envisaged by Derrida between (the transcendental violence of) Greek logocentrism and (the ethical authority of) Jewish heteronomy. For isn’t it clear that Christianity is this reciprocity as a historical ‘synthesis’ of Hellenism and Hebraism? Derrida suggests as much when he writes: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek […].” (Idem: 191) For this, of course, is not just an allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses (“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”), but ultimately refers to St. Paul’s statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek […], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). |The divine emptiness of God's grave| Paul’s meaning, of course, is that such parochial distinctions are no longer relevant in light of the universality of the Christian revelation, which addresses humanity as such (see Badiou 1997). Yet we might also interpret his statement more creatively as pointing to the special nature of Christianity as being between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: it is “neither Greek nor Jew” since it is both, as the impossible excluded middle between these contradictories. Christ as the incarnation of God is both ‘Greek’ insofar as He is the veracious presence of the divine logos, yet He is also ‘Jewish’ in that this presence manifests a constitutive absence of the divine, of God as “wholly Other” who as such cannot be made present – and the attempt to do so can only kill him. Hence the Incarnation of God is only truly fulfilled in the Crucifixion: the moment when God dies – that is the moment when He is truly present/absent, when his absolute authority is truly manifested in his absolute (in)vulnerability. As I said, Derrida doesn’t investigate these suggestions, although they are clearly implicit in “Violence and Metaphysics”. One wonders why he remained silent… Be that as it may, the suggestion with which I want to end is that the Syrian child – put as a ‘human shield’ on top of a tank – manifests this Christological dimension of sacrifice. Doesn’t this child force us to rethink our (post-)modern disbelief vis-à-vis the divine? “God is dead,” we say following Nietzsche, and we say so especially “after Auschwitz”. But doesn’t God die again in that Syrian child? And how can He die again if He was already dead? Shouldn’t we say then that God is not (yet) dead but rather dying, continually dying in all the innocent victims of human violence? To paraphrase Zappa’s famous statement on the status of rock music: God isn’t dead, He just smells funny… And it would indeed almost be funny if it wouldn’t be so horrific. -Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris. -Jacques Derrida (2002 ), “Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp.97-192.

khatami harvard 298.88. (photo credit: AP) Last Friday, Harvard University's student newspaper The Crimson had a noteworthy front page. The top headline read, "Students plan to protest Khatami's visit." The second headline read, "Cheney visits Harvard Club through backdoor." The first story referred to plans by student groups to protest Harvard's Kennedy School of Government's decision to invite former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak at the school on Sept. 10. The second story reported how Vice President Richard Cheney was forced to enter the Harvard Club in Boston through the back door to evade some 200 protesters. On the surface, these stories seem to perfectly balance one another. Some people are protesting against Cheney, some against Khatami… Now how are the Red Sox doing? Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood defended the decision to provide his school's most prestigious platform to Khatami by asking rhetorically, "Do we listen to those that we disagree with, and vigorously challenge them, or do we close our ears completely?" This sounds reasonable, but is it? It is surely important to know what people like Khatami have to say. But why did Harvard need to honor him with an invitation to speak? And why was he allowed to speak alone? Why did Harvard not suggest that he debate Iranian students or journalists whose friends and colleagues were imprisoned, tortured and in some cases killed by Khatami for calling for democracy and freedom of the press during his tenure? Why did Harvard not offer to have Khatami debate former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu regarding the ballistic missiles capable carrying nuclear warheads that Iran developed during his tenure; the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran transferred to Palestinian terror groups and to Hizbullah during his presidency; and the advances in Iran's nuclear weapons program that were made when Khatami was in office? Why did Harvard not suggest Khatami debate Vice President Richard Cheney regarding the evidence that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists passed through Iran on their way to the US; several senior Al Qaida leaders including Osama Bin Laden's son Sa'ad have been operating in Iran since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001; and that most of the terrorists in Iraq are directed by Iran? Of course, Khatami would have refused to participate in such a debate. But had a debate between him and Cheney been organized, it would have been interesting to see which side the protesters outside of the Harvard Club in Boston would have supported. Expressing the view of his 200 fellow demonstrators, Nick Giannone told the Crimson that having Cheney speak at the Harvard Club was, "the equivalent of Hitler coming back to life and coming to Boston." Giannone continued, "This guy's a straight-up fascist. I also find it pretty appalling that someone would pay… to sit in a room with a war criminal." It would also be interesting to know what side Ellwood and his Kennedy School colleagues would have taken. Just a few months ago, then Academic Dean Prof. Steven Walt co-authored an anti-Semitic diatribe titled The Israel Lobby where he effectively accused Israel and the America Jewish community of subverting US national security interests by coercing the US to fight the war against the global jihad and view Israel as a US ally. THE TWIN headlines in the Crimson were complemented by twin news stories in Israel's papers on Sunday. Sunday morning Jerusalem Magistrates Court Judge David Mintz dismissed criminal charges against right-wing activist Nadia Matar. Last summer Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz indicted Matar for "insulting a public servant" in reaction to a letter Matar faxed to Yonatan Bassi, the head of the Disengagement Authority where she compared Bassi to the Judenrat who collaborated with the Nazis in deporting fellow Jews to concentration camps. In his decision to expunge the charges against Matar, Mintz wrote, "Anytime we are dealing with freedom of speech, criminal law does not present the correct and effective tool." Using the same logic in the past, Attorney-General Mazuz has refused to indict MK Azmi Bishara, now visiting in Damascus with two of is fellow MKS Jamal Zahalka and Wasal Taha, for incitement to violence or treason for statements he has made expressing support for Palestinian terrorism, Hizbullah and Syria. At the urging of Interior Minister Roni Bar-On, Sunday, Mazuz ordered a criminal investigation against Bishara, Taha and Zahalka for visiting Syria in violation of the law barring officials from visiting enemy states without explicit government permission. The law was passed in response to Bishara's last visit to Damascus in 2001. The Knesset passed the law because six years ago the Attorney-General claimed he lacked the legal means to indict Bishara. Bishara claims that he has a right to say anything that he likes. And he is right. He has the right to praise Hizbullah. He may tell Israeli Arabs that they should reject Israel's right to exist. His colleague Taha had the legal right in July to tell an online audience that he and his colleagues had repeatedly advised the Palestinians to kidnap IDF soldiers. Taha had the right to commend them for abducting Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Bishara had the right last week to praise Syria for its operations to free "occupied Arab lands," and warn his Ba'athist hosts to be on the lookout for Israeli aggression. It is legal to make these statements. What is illegal is the treasonous actions they describe. Yet, rather than contending with the fact that Bishara, Taha and Zahalka are guilty of treason, Mazuz now investigates the technical fact of their visit, just as in the past he ignored their treasonous actions arguing that they have a right to their opinions - as if providing aid and comfort to Israel's enemies is a matter of opinion. IT BEARS pointing out that Bishara - who like Hizbullah, Iran, Fatah and Hamas believes that Israel has no right to exist - is a favorite son of the Israeli Left. Haaretz's op-ed pages are open to him. Last Tuesday he wrote there that protests against the government and IDF's mishandling of the war are the result of the inherent racism of Israeli society which immorally assumes "that Israel… must threaten its Arab neighbors and not be threatened, deter and not be deterred; and that the Arabs are incapable of developing human and material infrastructures that make resistance possible." Bishara, who blamed the war in Lebanon on the US which he said put Israel up to it, is the former director of research at Hebrew University's Van Leer Institute and a frequent speaker at the institute's events. In 1997, the New Israel Fund invited him to participate in a conference at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington discussing Israel at 50. When considered in isolation, Harvard's decision to invite Khatami to speak; the leftist protesters' desire to humiliate Cheney; Mazuz's decision to indict Matar for "insulting a public servant; and Mazuz's decision to ignore Bishara, Taha and Zahalka's apparent treason, all seem to be reasonable good faith judgments. They can all be defended in the interests of liberty, democracy, free speech and public order. But when placed in the overall context, it becomes clear that the opposite is true. By inviting Khatami to speak unopposed at Harvard, the Kennedy School effectively advanced his anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal agenda. In calling Cheney a Nazi, a fascist and a war criminal, the leftist protesters in Boston silenced debate about the nature of fascism, genocide and war crimes by claiming that those who fight these scourges of humanity are morally equal to those who commit them. By indicting Matar for expressing herself because he didn't like her views on the one hand, and refusing to even investigate apparent acts of treason by Bishara and his colleagues because those actions are considered acceptable by his social circle on the other hand, Mazuz makes a mockery of Israel's laws. He transforms his position from one of chief law enforcement officer to one of chief thought enforcement officer. To advance a radical, anti-Zionist and anti-American political agenda, he is willing to outlaw debate and ignore treason. Many argue that the only way to stop the Left's subversion and so win the war of ideas, is to attempt to co-opt its agenda from the inside. By this logic, champions of free speech, democracy and liberty should eagerly seek opportunities to speak at Harvard, or be the token "fascists" on panel discussions at Hebrew University. Unfortunately, this view is wrong. Accepting the legitimacy of leftist institutions prolongs their power, expands their undeserved legitimacy and erodes the power of the message of those who defend liberty, free speech and democracy. Rather than supporting the Left, those concerned about the protection of liberal values should work to expose the corruption of these institutions and build alternative institutions that can replace them. Five years after Sept 11, the greatest asset the jihadists who seek our physical and spiritual destruction have are those individuals, institutions and groups within our own societies that prevent us from seeing the dangers and defending ourselves. Our greatest challenge as individuals is to expose these dangers and those who hide them to our fellow citizens.

All Nations go through 5 progressive cycles Freedom and Birth The cycle repeats. Now lets look a little closer at these cycles and our country. Freedom and Birth. It is no mystery that the birth of our country was heralded with promise. The revisionists may tell a different story, but many Christians saw this as the opportunity to form a nation with godly principles and values. A nation has never emerged that grew like ours. We were great and we were good. In 1892 the United States Supreme Court made an exhaustive study of the supposed connection between Christianity and the government of the United States. After reviewing hundreds of historical documents, the Court asserted, “These references…add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a religious people… a Christian nation.” Likewise in 1931 Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland reviewed the 1892 decision in reference to another case and reiterated that Americans are a “Christian people.” (reference available, just ask.) So the world saw something that had never been seen before – an emergent country shaped by many people who sought to honor God. We flourished. Over time, every nation and organization ages. Even Jesus mentioned this – to paraphrase what he said, “Don’t try to accommodate new growth with old organizations. You need new organizations for new growth.” (reference available, just ask) So, the complacency we have experienced as Americans is what all nations experience. In complacency, things run down hill. There is not strong leadership moving us in a positive direction. We become inwardly focused, obsessed with ourselves, obsessed with feeling good and living for the moment. In all nations, this occurs as the nation ages. And, people choose the path of least resistance. This obsession with ‘feeling good’ allows leaders to emerge that speak not to a ‘higher calling’ but speak to giving us what we want. Giving people what they want without an equal exchange of value is not a good foundation. It is a cracked foundation that will not work in the long term. The type of leadership that advocates taking care of the masses without an equal contribution establishes a weak and ineffective government. This type of government speeds the down hill decline. This type of leadership generates something else. Those who understood the original purpose of the nation see that the nation has moved off center and begin to exert their leadership influence. But, because their mission is in conflict with the official leadership, this further fragments the nation. Again, the down hill slide moves into higher gear. A nation divided against itself cannot stand. The fruit of the government that caters to providing for the masses without an equal exchange of value begins to emerge. An economy based on government spending is economic disaster. Economic activity sags, decays and slows down. There are fewer and fewer buyers for services and goods. Reduction of workers accelerates. Average earning decreases. Fear reigns and even more people emerge saying, “Wrong turn! Go this way!” The conflict between the power holders and the rest widen. The power holders take a tighter grip to control things, they invent ways to gain more power and to stay in power. Tyranny reigns. Tyranny spurs rebellion which spurs more tyranny. So, is there a solution for this decay? I’d say a solid maybe. I think the solution has to do with 2 things… First… do you know what people group is the richest people group in the United States? The Amish. Why, because they trade with each other FIRST before they trade outside of their community. Their money ‘turns’ ten times inside of their community before it goes ‘outside.’ One of the next richest people groups are the Jewish people. They tend to turn their money 7 times in their communities before it goes outside. Second.. regarding what Jesus said… We need new and better ways to organize. I think this is the time for Christians to form deliberate communities. What I am saying is this. We need to… Recognize each other and link together. Trade with each other. Prefer each other. Support each other. And begin to learn how to effectively meet the needs of those inside our Christian communities and those outside of our Christian communities. Somehow this thought that “Christian” and “Government” are two worlds that should spin in separate universes has emerged. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are supposed to be wise enough (and organized enough) to settle our own disputes. We are supposed to hold people accountable for wrong behavior. We’re supposed to help those who are working and to not help those who are lazy and refuse to do honest work. We’re supposed to take care of those in need and to share what we have, not by compulsion or force but by with mission, purpose and love. These are self-government principles that we need to rethink. We need a new definition and organization of Christian community. These are tough days for many, but also days that could see the birth of something new, a more visible expression of the Kingdom of God.

Juneteenth Kabbalat Shabbat Friday, Jun 18, 2021 Friday, June 18 at 5:00pm ET See “Ways to Watch” below We are honored to help present this Kabbalat Shabbat organized by our friends at Be’chol Lashon in celebration of the most recognized African-American holiday observance in the United States. The program will be feature appearances by Rabbi Sandra Lawson, Cantor Sabrina Sojourner, Isaiah Rothstein, Rebecca S’Manga Frank, and Robin Washington. June 19, 1865 is considered the date when the last slaves in America were freed. Although the rumors of freedom were widespread prior to this, actual emancipation did not come until General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas with the news that the Civil War had ended and that 250,000 enslaved people were now free. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them almost two and a half years earlier (January 1, 1863), Texas was the most remote of the slave states with few Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow. Juneteenth continues to expand as Black Americans seek to make sure that the events of 1865 are not lost to history. Juneteenth is increasing in popularity in the US and activists are pushing Congress to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. On January 1, 1980, “Emancipation Day in Texas” became an official state holiday and California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington, D.C followed. Today, only four states (Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana) do not recognize Juneteenth. In 2018, Apple added Juneteenth to its calendars in iOS under official US holidays. Juneteenth celebrations often focuses on education and prayers with guest speakers and elders who recount the events of the past. Certain foods have became popular with Juneteenth celebrations such as strawberry soda, barbecue, watermelon and red velvet cake are several red foods, symbolizing the blood and resilience of former slaves. For others, it means indulging in traditional black Southern cuisine like fried chicken, collard greens and cornbread. As Martin Luther King said in his “I have a dream” speech, “Until All are Free, None are Free,” an oft repeated maxim that highlights the significance of the end of the era of slavery in the United States. Ways to Watch Youtube: All who register will receive a reminder email containing the link to the event one week before the event and one hour before the event starts. Click here to register. NMAJH website: A little before the program start time, the livestream will also be available at the top of this page. You will be prompted to enter your email address. Please note that you may need to refresh your screen and press “play” on the video—the static image will be replaced with the live feed before the program starts. This program is organized by Be’chol Lashon in partnership with The National Museum of American Jewish History, OneTable, 18Doors, JCC Manhattan, the Union for Reform Judaism and the PJ Library.

Touching Short Story Bread of Sacrifice Samira 'Azzam (1925-1967) When Ibrahim handed him the tobacco-filled pipe, he wished he could break down and cry like a child. He felt tears welling in his eyes and turned his head aside to wipe them away on his sleeve. In an attempt to hide his sorrow, he raised his head to peer over the barricade, but when he turned back to face Iris companions their grief-stricken silence brought the tears back into his eyes. The night, presided over by a distant, cloudy moon, seemed to grieve with them; everything in tile universe seemed to know his story. He longed to be able to give himself up to the luxury of sorrow, but could not. He longed to shake his friends, to throw away the armor of toughness and cry--cry without shame. He raised his sleeve to wipe his eyes, and felt the woolen shirt irritating them, reminding him of that talisman of hers he was wearing, that would protect him--as she once said--from every treacherous bullet. Yes, he could remember that night. It had been a night of stinging cold like this one, with a thin crescent moon. He had been ordered to guard the small hospital the Arab Legion had set up in a town house that consisted of four stone rooms and a small garden. The eight hospital beds were occupied by eight wounded men brought in following a battle between the Jewish Nahariya settlement and the Arab villages around Acre. Yes, it had been cold that night, and neither his kaffiyyeh nor his heavy overcoat were enough to shield him from the biting chill, so lie had taken to walking about in order to keep the blood from freezing in his veins. When he tired of this, he returned to lean against the hospital wall, near the door, gazing at the distant houses of the city which slept uneasily, fearful of sudden attack. He did not know what time it was exactly. The only remaining lights were the streetlamps on the main thoroughfares, and the night was silent save for the sound of a distant jackal. Yes, he did not know exactly what time it was when he sensed her standing near him in her white nurse's uniform, asking him whether lie wanted a cup of tea. He had not given thought to tea, nor to anything else; nevertheless, he felt it would be nice to have a warm object to hold against his chilled fingers, and accepted her offer gratefully. When she returned with the tea, he finished it off in four gulps so as not to oblige her to wait long, and gave her back the empty cup, murmuring some word of thanks. And after she left, he thought it would have been polite if he had talked to her a little more. He turned Iris head, searching for her shadow behind the window. He saw no one. He decided to thank her in the morning‑but who could she be? There were two female nurses, and he had seen nothing of her except her white uniform. The second night he was determined to be less rigid when she brought him tea. He waited a long time, but she did not come. He told himself that she must be too busy with those who really needed her care to see to his tea. Why shouldn't he, therefore, knock on the door and ask for his own tea? He hesitated, not wanting to be a nuisance. The lights went out, the city slept, leaving him and his comrades the responsibility of keeping vigil. It was about this time last night that he drank her tea. He flexed his fingers, frozen by the gun‑barrel, and wished for something to bring them warmth. No sooner had he lifted his hand to his mouth to blow on his fingers than her white uniform suddenly appeared p at Iris side and he heard her saying, "I've brought you your tea without asking; you won't refuse it, will you?" He raised his eyes, looked at her, and extended his cold hand to take the cup. He decided it would be nice to speak to her before drinking. "Don't you find the work here hard?" With a gravity he had not expected, she replied, "Do you think I'm not good enough for duties like this?" "I . . . No, not at all . . ." At a loss for words, lie raised the cup to Iris lips and drank quickly, scalding his throat. He returned the cup to her without a thank you, and when she had moved a few steps away, he called out, "Miss" why shouldn't he ask her name? There was no harm iii that. She stopped, and he approached her. "Excuse me, I wonder if I might know your name?" She laughed before replying: "And why not? We are all comrades I( here. My name is Wad. "I am Ramiz. My buddies call me Sarge. Should we shake hands?" She laughed and gave him her hand, then slipped away as lightly as she had come. Su'ad. How strange--another Su'ad. He seemed to have luck with this name. Some days ago the Acre Women's Committee had presented a gift of hand-knitted woolen shirts and blankets to the Arab Legion. In the pocket of each was a card bearing the name of the young woman who had knitted it, along with a word of encouragement. He still kept his. He felt for it in his pocket, pulled it out, and lit a match by which he read the words "Su'ad Wahbi," and below the name "May this shirt be worn by a hero." The match went out and the words vanished. He put the card back in his pocket. Could it be her? If it were, wouldn't that be a pleasant coincidence? He turned to the door, and found it locked. The third night he arranged to begin his shift of guard duty earlier in order to have an opportunity to enter the hospital and ask after the wounded. The door was open, and he went in. He saw her carrying a dinner tray to one of the soldiers. He greeted her and asked if he might visit them. She replied, "Why not? I'd like you to meet Hassan so he can tell you the details of the battle. I've heard it myself dozens of times, but it won't hurt to hear it once more." He followed her. He stood next to her in front of Hassan's bandaged head, and they both laughed to hear the wounded man say; "Su'ad is a strict nurse who wants me stretched out like a corpse. She won't even let me sneak a cigarette." As she laughed, Ramiz noticed that her teeth were very white, and her eyes shone with an indomitable will. The mood in the room en couraged him to ask; "Still, you'd agree with me that she's a good one?" "Good? She's the best of them all. She's better than my old mother. She's always around, giving this one something to drink, that one something to cat, answering the bells that ring in all the rooms. If ever she finds a moment to rest, you'll find her sitting by the door with her knitting." He remembered the shirt. His hand moved, finding the thick buttons of the overcoat that covered it. Opening the coat to show his shirt, he turned to her and said, "Do you recognize this shirt?" "Yes. So you were the one who got it." "Don't I deserve it? I still have the card. This way I will always remember my duty to perform as a hero." A persistent bell summoned her ail(] she left him with Hassan, who asked him for a cigarette which he promised not to smoke until Su'ad gave him her approval. Two weeks went by, and the wounded began to recover and leave the hospital, all except one who was transferred to another hospital. Ramiz's guard duty there was over, and he returned to his job training recruits. He would meet new recruits and release others until darkness fell, then he would take his rifle and go for his nightly guard duty. Only when dawn lit the sky did he go home and throw himself on the iron cot in his one room house. There he found time to think about her. An entire week went by, during which he did not see her. Where could she be? Why did he feel driven to think about her, and to treasure the shirt she had knitted? Yesterday morning he had discovered something as he got dressed. She had knitted and knitted without knowing who would wear the shirt. Maybe she had a picture in her mind's eye of what the man who wore it ought to look like. Obviously she wished him to be tall, with broad shoulders--a man she hoped would be a hero. He turned to look at himself in the mirror oil the wall and felt his muscular arms. He laughed at his own foolishness as he gazed at himself. But what harm would it do if he acted a little silly, burying his face in the shirt, for example, or kissing it? On the eighth day he chanced upon her in the street. She was not in her nurse's uniform. I He stopped her, saying, "I almost didn't recognize you out of uniform." She shook his hand and said; "'file hospital has moved and I couldn't think of anything; to do today. What are you up to?" "Training recruits during the day, and guard duty at night‑nothing much' And no teal" Her silvery laugh rang out. She caught him gazing at her and blushed. She started to walk away, and he rushed to speak to her before shyness overcame him. "I hope you don't think I'm being out of line. Couldn't I meet you somewhere?" "Our town is too small for that." "But we're comrades in arms. I train recruits, both men and women. Come to the Port Club. We can talk a little bit after I'm finished with drilling." They agreed to meet there at three. He was in the middle of demonstrating to a women's squadron how to stand firm holding a heavy rifle without faltering, when he caught sight of her. He continued with his job, and did not talk to her until the exercise was completed. Then he dismissed his class and turned to greet her, offering her a chair. "Aren't you exhausted?" she asked. "Who Isn't? But once I realized what sort of mobilization and preparations arc going on in the Jewish settlements, I wished there were sixty hours in a day. We have a tough job ahead of us." "Aren’t you afraid?" "Wary. It won't be easy. I think the Jews have stockpiled a great many weapons in their settlements. We've found out many things." "Have you gone there yourself?" "Yes, I used to go a lot before relations became strained. Now I can't go. I'm on their blacklist." He saw her observing him. Presently, her lips parted and tile determined look flashed in her eyes. "You know, I'm starting to believe that you are something of a hero." "A hero? No way, though your card has given me the inspiration to be one." "Do you still have it?" "Here it is." He handed it to her, gild as he took it back, lie pressed her hand briefly then released it. Then, to give her a chance to conceal her embarrassment he looked out over the blue sea in front of' him. It was spring. Springtime iii this part of Palestine is a sparkling sea, traversed by white sails during the day .lied lit by the twinkling Limps of fishing boats at night. The fragrance of the orange groves tills the air. That spring, Ramiz learned about two things--love and war--and the first gave meaning to the second. War was not simply an enemy to kill voraciously. Rather, it was the assertion of the life of the land he loved and the woman he loved. Palestine was clot only a sea with fishing boats, and oranges shining like gold, and not just olives and olive oil filling the big oil jars. It was Su'ad's black eyes as well. III Su'ad's eyes he saw all of Palestine's goodness. I, too, saw the image of a happy home for him, and a wife who would bear him young heroes and make her love the meaning of his existence. Each new day her image accompanied the news of battles in the morning papers. The battle of Qastal.1 The Palestinian counterattack from the Triangle of terror2 on enemy settlements. His and his comrades' raids on the infiltrating Jewish armored vehicles rolling down the road from Haifa to Acre to Nahariya. The heroism of his people in Salama, in every town and village. Then came the fall of Haifa.' He would never forget that evening. He was busy training the recruits. When he turned toward the sea, he saw dozens and dozens of boats filled with refugees. The people of Acre gathered at the city walls to learn about the new situation. They had been aware of the battles that were being fought in Haifa, and they knew that the British authorities had secretly helped the Zionists with fortified positions. Although the British had publicly declared that they would not leave Haifa until a few months after the end of the Mandate Period, they now suddenly announced that they had to leave the city. The terror poured down Mount Car Carmel onto tile Arabs who lived on the slopes. Tile British authorities spread terrifying rumors that caused panic. At the same time, they opened the port, and made their ships available to carry off anyone who wished to flee. So people crammed into them while gunfire spit out at them from the mountain. The boats dumped them on the shore of Acre, a human mass, some stunned by their wounds, others by hunger, still others by terror. The homes, the mosques, the monasteries, the plazas of his city were jammed with them. They brought Ills small city the burden of providing food and shelter for so many. That night he saw Su'ad with dozens of women volunteers, receiving the wounded at the port and assigning them to hospitals and homes. At the same time, the war of rumors began to play on everyone's nerves. He awoke the following day to a loud knocking at the door. He opened it and was astonished to see her there. She was crying. She said that her brother had got hold of a truck, loaded it with everything that would fit, then crammed his wife, his children, and himself onto it and drove to Lebanon. Twenty families in tier neighborhood had already done the same thing. Her brother had tried to make her come with them, but she had refused. She had argued with him and he had slapped her oil the face. All she could do then was run away. She would be the last to leave. He was startled and remained silent, not knowing what to say to her. When she tapped against Ills chest with her fist lie asked; "Have you done this because of tile?" She blurted out; "No, not because of you. Yes, I love you, It's true. Still, you're not everything!" And she left. He opened the door and went out into the city. Dozens of cars, both large and small, full and empty, were speeding off, like the wind. Baffled, lie did not know whether to weep or shout or start pelting them with stones. After a week the city was empty, except for the fighters, a handful of woman nurses scattered among the small hospitals, and refugees from Haiti or the surrounding villages. There was no more time for meetings with Su'ad. 1o the north and south, the enemy was lying in wait for a chance to attack. By day lie slipped Into the villages to gather rifles and ammunition; his tights were spent with five others crouched behind barricades set up of the roof of a disused cigarette factory. The city had to hold fast until the Mandate ended and the Arab armies could come in to fight the battle. These were his duties as assigned by the National Committee of Acre. When he had time to rest, he thought of Su'ad wondering how she was living and under what circumstances. One day lie was startled to see her suddenly; he stopped in Iris tracks. She was wrapped in a coat and was carrying a large basket. He did not know how to greet her, but she solved the problem by opening the basket and directing her words to all his comrades. "The National Committee was afraid you might run out of, food, so they sent me with these things." There was bread, cigarettes, and candy in the basket. Her eyes were filled with love. He wished he could embrace her in front of all his comrades. He felt lie alone had the right to walk a little way with her on her way back, and to take her fingertips in his trembling hand. Then he raised her hand to Iris lips, begging her not to do such a crazy thing again. She went off; and he stood watching her until a bend in the road swallowed her. She visited them repeatedly. She always stayed just a few minutes, but they were enough to arouse Iris emotions in a way that made him both tired and happy. Until the beginning of the week. The fighting grew more intense, with shelling going on for an entire day and two nights, and for part of a second day. The enemy's armored cars were advancing along the main road to Nahariya The fighters had to ambush them with artillery placed on the roofs of houses near the road. The battle did not subside until three the next afternoon. Some of the men lay on the barricades to rest, and others lay on the ground. He went down to wash at the garden faucet before heading to the city to find out what plans the Arab Legion had for hauling the wrecked cars into town. His face was covered with soap, when he heard the sound of a bullet, then another. As he quickly wiped the soap from his eyes, the sound of her voice rang in his cars. Turning toward the garden door, he saw that she had darted in. Her basket was in one hand and she held the other against her chest. At the beginning, he did not see anything wrong as she was standing, but then she fell into Iris arms and blood began to flow from her chest. He stopped her wound with his hand and called out to his comrades, who quickly threw their shirts to him to absorb the blood that came pouring out. She opened her mouth to speak, but a rattle in her throat choked her words‑then, with a single groan, it was all over. It happened so fast he could not believe it. A single horrible instant put an end to everything. How could time not have stood still, how could it have marched on, allowing her to die? Why did she not revive under his kisses and his anguished cries, and how could those eyelids not tremble with life as lie whispered Iris love to her? She was dead. How, when the fragrance of her hair still lingered in the air, the warmth of her hand could still be felt on Ills palm, and lie could still taste her lips against his own? Her eyes had never spoken of death, only of love and the promise of life. Rubbing Iris eyes to banish the nightmare, he gripped tile pipe Ibrahim had handed him, so that Iris fingernails would not bore into Iris palm. He stared at Iris comrades. "Yes, she is dead," their eyes seemed to say. We must take her from you and bury her on the hill over there. We'll mark her grave with a flag and proclaim tier a heroine. She loved you and became a symbol for all of us, Ibrahim and Wadee` and Salih, Ahmad and `Abdullah. A thin yellow moon and a few stars. Nothing but the darkness and the glowing ends of cigarettes. Behind the barricade they had neither food nor drink, and they had not slept. The rest of the night passed peacefully except for a skirmish or two at dawn. Then things grew quiet, and tile tired heads surrendered themselves to a sleep broken by hunger and fear. At dawn `Abdullah rubbed tits eyes and looking over to the piles of wooden boxes nearby asked; "Isn't there anything to eat?" Wadee` replied, "Sure, there's our hunger." He fell silent. There were Su'ad's loaves, stained with her blood. What a wretched dip for their bread! Their hunger became unbearable, and they were soon unable even to stand up. Ramiz felt that the situation was turning into a humiliating ordeal, and that he alone of his comrades could dare to consider eating the loaves. He covered Iris eyes with his hands. Could anything be worse than his being forced to feed her blood to Iris friends? He looked over at Iris comrades. `Abdullah lay on a blanket, as did Salih. Ahmad sat on a sandbag, pressing his hands against Iris stomach. They were ready to cat a dog's corpse, but no one reached fur the loaves baptized with blood. He would have to set things in motion. What would he say to his comrades? Tike it, for Su'ad has given us the bread and the dip? He bowed Iris head for a moment, then dragged himself to Iris feet. If the idea was too awful for him, he must go to the city and get them something to cat. He tried to stand tip, but lie was too weak. His comrades realized what his going to the city would entail. Any bullet would catch him like a little bird‑the open countryside between their post and the city center was wide and exposed. Armored cars protecting themselves by spraying out bullets in all directions could be expected to pass 'at any moment. So Salih took him by the shoulders and made him sit down. He sat down, and once again the battle between the blood soaked bread and their hunger began. There it was, still piled in the corner, in the basket, just the way Su'ad had brought it. It would hurt, but it would save five lives. What price would he pay? Could he bear to see the hands tearing off a piece and the teeth chewing the bread she had stained with her blood? His eyes clouded over‑no, it would never happen, even if they all had to die. They weren't any better than she had been, so what if they, too, died? She had died carrying bread to them, but they would die because they would not touch her bread. Her death would not save their lives. They would be rejecting the bread of sacrifice, offered to them to test their humanity, or his own humanity at least. What had they done that they should starve? But what if they did starve? They could just forget the bread was there. In any case, they were not considering it. They had abstained, willing themselves to wait for another source of nourishment, or to die, and with them would die the chance to avenge her death. Revenge? Yes, how could he have forgotten that? How could he choose to die of hunger like a dog, and to let five others die with him? So many encounters with death had insured 11111 to the thought of it. But if he could choose the death he wished, lie would not choose to die of hunger. Su'ad herself would never allow that of a hero. He shuddered in pain. He realized that throughout this last night he had thought more about his hunger than about Su'ad. Hunger had suspended all other sensibilities. What a horrible experience! He called to his comrades, and they were barely able to open their eyes. He would call them one by one: Ibrahim and Wadee` and Salih and Alimad and `Abdullah. They would form a circle around him. Then he would rise and bring the loaves of bread. As he put his hand out to open the basket he would tell them an ancient story known to this land and its people, tile story of the redemption of life by flesh and blood. Then he would bring the loaves and, with all the solemnity of an Eastern Orthodox priest offering the bread of Jesus he would tell them: "Eat, for this is my body; drink, for this is my blood." He would also cat some himself, and something of Su'ad would remain in him. How did this thought escape Iris attention before? Something was now nudging him, shouting and demanding, reminding him that lie had to do something for that body now buried in the corner of the garden. He pulled himself tip and walked to the other corner, his movements followed by five pairs of eyes. He could feel their gaze fastened on Iris legs. With a trembling hand, lie took the basket, opened it, and brought the bread to his lips. Then he approached Iris comrades, fell to his knees, and handed tile loaves out, saying; "Eat . . . Su'ad would not have wanted its to die of hunger." Then the world grew distant, and lie fell senseless to the ground. (Anthology of MODERN PALESTINIAN LITERATURE, Edited and introduced by Sara Khadra Jayyusi, translated by Kathie Piselli and Dick Davies)

Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the anti-fascist Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the most known exponents of the so called Exilliteratur. Mann was born Paul Thomas Mann in Lübeck, Germany and was the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant), and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns (a Brazilian with partially German ancestry who emigrated to Germany when seven years old). His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent time at the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich and Technical University of Munich where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story, "Little Herr Friedemann" (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann), was published in 1898. In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children:

Less than 1% of the Japanese population is Christian however that hasn’t stopped the retail establishments from recognizing a shopping opportunity that would make Santa hurl coal at department store door fronts. If the Jewish culture had a mascot around which to rally, I would expect to see the Festival of Lights fully represented as well. Curmudgeon me shoved aside joyful holiday shoppers to snap this shot: Then I unhitched my trusty dog Max from the Grinch sled and asked “Andretti-san,” one of the fastest drivers in Japan and culture consultant for all Ouisar questions, the viewpoint of Christmas by the average Japan inhabitant. Andretti-san– “Christmas is for lovers.” Language barrier perhaps? Ouiser- “You mean Valetine’s Day?” Andretti-san– “No- you know- people who love each other. And children. And there is Santa. Apparently American exports aren’t in as bad of shape as previously reported, we’ve shipped materialism to Japan. Signs of Christmas are everywhere although in an altered form. Some of the Christmas decorations remind me of the “Whisper Down the Lane” game- Someone starts the game by telling a secret, it is whispered to next person and so on until the end. The last person compares what was told to them vs what the originator whispered in the beginning of the game. A metamorphosis of the secret is the result. As Big Patti (my mother) says- “That’s how damn lies get started.” Following are a few of the more memorable decorations I’ve seen. Santa arrived, but he’s wearing blue. Apparently either he or the Japanese prefer him in this hue since he is often seen in Japan wearing it. What would the holiday season be without a tree? Even my Jewish friends have one- which is removed when the in-laws arrive. Rockefeller center, the White House all boast trees with a pristine Americana pedigree. Lately these have come under fire for not being “green”. The US public must watch the lighting of countless giant trees and endure cities competing for greenest tree in the greenest city of all…. I think I found their Japanese counterpart. This is a really large specimen of the fir genus and species with Christmas decorations and a message that proclaims “Christian” sentiments of Christmas to a predominately Buddhist and Shinto population. It looks to me like it was a recycled version. I can hear the rationale now- ” We’ve got to cut this tree down for a building- I know, let’s use it for one of those big American type Christmas trees- it sort of has the right shape.” I wonder the reaction if I wore this to a party? One of the Shibuya decorations has been getting quite a lot of attention. It is beautiful in a decorative way, although I haven’t found its connection to Christmas. One important thing I’ve learned about the Japanese. As a culture, she will embrace a concept and develop or improve it in ways that leave one wondering why it hadn’t been done before. Once engaged on an idea, no people in the world is better at producing a quality product, with gadgetry no one realized was needed until it became a “Must have” post installment, all components working absolutely right, with little nuances added to make it “just a little better.” So I was not surprised upon my escape from the crowded shopping streets to see tasteful decorations in the lesser known areas of Tokyo. Holiday decorations that reflected the style, simplicity, and attitude of the Japanese combined with the sentiments of the season. Christmas cards aren’t exchanged in Japan. As required in a new country, flexibility in adjusting to the new traditions is a must. The Clampett Holiday card has gone through a metamorphosis of its own in order to incorporate our family members all over the globe. Please enjoy the attached photo montage in lieu of the traditional pic. Have a wonderful Holiday,

As one begins a perusal of the New Testament, he encounters an unusual phenomenon known as “demon possession.” The first Gospel writer recorded these words: “And the report of him [Jesus] went forth into all Syria: and they brought unto him all that were sick, holden with divers diseases and torments, possessed with demons, and epileptic, and palsied; and he healed them” (Matthew 4:24, ASV). From this point on, there are numerous references to “demons” or “demon possession” in the New Testament. [NOTE: “Devils,” as found in the KJV, is an incorrect rendition. The Greek word for devil is diabolos. Other terms, diamon (found once) and dimonion (63 times), are transliterated as “demon(s)” in the ASV. There is only one devil, but there are many demons.] Critics of the Bible, of course, allege that this is an example of the sort of gross superstition that characterizes the ancient volume. The following quote represents a typical atheistic approach to this matter: Mark 5:1-13 relates an incredible story wherein Jesus casts out the “devils” from an unfortunate man. He then causes the devils to enter, instead, a herd of swine, and the swine, thus bedeviled, race over a cliff, fall into the sea and drown. Fundamentalists would have us believe that this is a true story. That tells us a lot about fundamentalists. Belief in demons and fairies and goblins and dragons ended, for most people, ages ago, and is remembered only in some Fairy Tales. Such primeval superstitions should be left behind, in our colorful past, where they belong (Hayes, 1996, pp. 129-130). Even religious modernists are prone to dismiss the biblical accounts of demon possession. William Barclay wrote: We need not argue whether demons were realities or not. One thing certain is that in the time of Jesus people believed in them with terrified intensity. If a man believes he is ill, he will be ill. If a man believed that he was demon-possessed, then, illusion or no, he was definitely ill in mind and body (1976, p. 26). The Scottish scholar went on to concede that Jesus may have believed in demons, but that “He did not come into this world to give men medical knowledge, and there is no reason to think that his medical knowledge would be any more advanced than that of the people of his day” (p. 27). To suggest that such a comment is a reflection upon the deity of Christ is an understatement. The New Testament does not represent Jesus merely as believing in demons, but depicts Him actually speaking to these beings, and being spoken to by them. He even commanded demons to do certain things. Either these evil spirits were a reality, or else the biblical record is entirely wrong. There is no other way to view the matter. This sort of a priori dismissal of the historical record is typical of unbelief. The skeptic, and even those religionists who have been influenced by the rationalistic mode of thought, repudiate anything that is not consistent with current human experience. But such an ideology simply is not an intelligent basis upon which to establish conclusions. There is validity in the credibility of historical testimony. The reality of demon activity, therefore, is not to be determined upon the basis of twentieth-century experiences; rather, it is grounded in whether or not the New Testament documents are credible. While I do not have the space to explore this matter in depth, I would like to make this observation. In 1846, Simon Greenleaf, Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, produced a work titled The Testimony of the Evangelists Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice. Greenleaf was the greatest authority in the history of legal procedure on what constitutes evidence. His massive three-volume set, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence (1842-53), is, to this very day, a standard on the topic of evidence. Greenleaf argued in The Testimony—with dramatic authority—that the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John passed the strictest tests of authenticity, and thus may be regarded as dependable (1903, pp. 1-54). And without controversy is the fact that these writers described cases of demonic activity during the ministry of Jesus. THE ORIGIN OF DEMONS The etymology of the term “demon” is rather obscure, but some have suggested that it comes from a Greek root meaning “to know,” hence probably means “a knowing one” (Vine, 1991, p. 203). Vincent noted that Plato derived the term from daemon, signifying “knowing” or “wise” (1972, p. 92). Ancient Greek writers suggested that the genesis of the term is to be found in the fact that these entities were considered to be “intelligent beings” (McClintock and Strong, 1968, 2:639). I will not concern myself with a detailed discussion of how demons were perceived in the ancient world, except to say that they were seen as evil spirits “somewhere between the human and the divine” (Arndt and Gingrich, 1967, p. 168). Unlike the speculative literature of antiquity, the New Testament makes no attempt to explain the origin of demons or to describe any materialized features (cf. Reese, 1992, 2:141). This appears to be significant; the restraint, I believe, is a subtle evidence of the divine inspiration of the narratives (see Jackson, 1996). Scholars, however, have speculated as to the origin of demons. I will consider briefly some of the prevalent ideas. (1) Some claim that demons were the disembodied spirits of a pre-Adamic race of men who lived upon the Earth in a “gap period” that allegedly fits between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. There are two things wrong with that notion: (a) There is absolutely no evidence that there ever was a historical “gap” between the first two verses of Genesis (see Fields, 1976). (b) There were no people before Adam. He came directly from God (Luke 3:38), and was the “first” man (1 Corinthians 15:45). (2) Others trace the origin of demons to a supposed cohabitation between angels and certain women of the pre-Flood world (Genesis 6:1-6). This theory is negated by the fact that Christ taught that angels are sexless beings, incapable of such unions (Matthew 22:30; see also Kaiser, 1992, pp. 33-38). (3) It has been argued that first-century demons may be identified with the fallen angels mentioned in 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6, some of whom, consistent with the divine plan, were permitted to leave temporarily that sphere of confinement for the purpose of inhabiting certain people. Charles Hodge argued this theory (1960, p. 643), which probably is the most popular idea regarding this matter. (4) Another view is that demons were the spirits of wicked dead men who were allowed by God to leave the Hadean realm to accommodate the implementation of the divine plan of redemption. Josephus claimed that demons were the “spirits of the wicked, that enter into men that are alive and kill them, unless they can obtain some help against them” (Wars 7.6.3). Alexander Campbell delivered a lecture in Nashville, Tennessee on March 10, 1841, in which he, in rather persuasive fashion, argued the case that the “demons” of the ancient world were the spirits of the dead. The printed form of that presentation is well worth studying (Campbell, n.d., pp. 379-402). In the final analysis, no dogmatic conclusion can be drawn with reference to the origin of demons. That they existed admits of no doubt to anyone who takes the Bible seriously; as to their origin, the Scriptures are silent. THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF DEMONS The nature of demons is spelled out explicitly in the New Testament. They were “spirit” beings. This, of course, creates a problem for the skeptic, who denies that there is anything beyond the material. But consider the testimony of Matthew. “And when evening was come, they brought unto him [Christ] many possessed with demons: and he cast out the spirits with a word” (8:16). Note that the terms “demons” and “spirits” are used interchangeably. Since it is known also that “a spirit does not have flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39), one must conclude that demons were not physical beings. As spirit entities, demons could exercise both volition (“I will return...”) and locomotion (“Then goeth he...”) (Matthew 12:44-45). Moreover, they could assimilate factual information. A demon once spoke to Christ and said: “I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God” (Luke 4:34; cf. Mark 1:24). Too, they possessed a religious sensitivity. “Thou believest that God is one; thou doest well, the demons also believe and shudder” (James 2:19). “Shudder” suggests to “be struck with extreme fear, to be horrified” (Thayer, 1958, p. 658). The fact is, they tremble in prospect of their ultimate doom (see Matthew 8:29). As to their character, demons are depicted as “unclean” and “evil.” In describing the vile nature of the Jewish nation of His day, the Lord gave an illustration regarding a man who was possessed of an “unclean” spirit (Matthew 12:43); the spirit left the man, but eventually re-entered the gentleman, taking with him other spirits “more evil” than himself (vs. 45). This passage reveals the “unclean” (Greek akathartos—“not pure”) or “evil” (kakos—that which not only is morally malignant, but injurious as well; cf. Vine, 1991, p. 272) disposition of demons. From this text it is observed also that there were degrees of vileness (“more evil”) in demons. THE EFFECTS OF DEMON POSSESSION The physical and/or mental effects occurring in certain individuals as a consequence of being possessed by a demon or demons (more than one could indwell a person; Mary Magdalene had once been inhabited by seven demons—Luke 8:2) were varied. Some demoniacs were afflicted with blindness and/or the inability to speak (Matthew 9:32; 12:22). Some thus possessed might be prone to violent convulsions. A case recorded by all three synoptic writers tells of a young man who was “epileptic.” He suffered grievously, frequently falling into the fire or into water (Matthew 17:15). He was dashed to the ground and bruised badly (Mark 9:18; Luke 9:39); he foamed at the mouth, ground his teeth, and “pineth away” (Mark 9:18). This final descriptive may suggest that the boy’s body became rigid so that he was incapable of motion (Arndt and Gingrich, 1967, p. 550). A demon-possessed man who lived among the tombs on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee had excessive strength. He often had been bound with chains and fetters, but he had broken these restraints into pieces, and no one had the power to tame him (cf. also Acts 19:16). Further, he was characterized by both emotional illness and antisocial behavior (e.g., he wore no clothes—Luke 8:27), but when Christ purged the demon from the poor fellow he was observed “clothed, and in his right mind” (Mark 5:15). It is important to distinguish between cause and effect in these cases. The cause was that of demon possession; the effects were physical and/or emotional maladies. The Scriptures never confuse the two. In other words, “demon possession” was not just an ancient, unenlightened attempt to explain physical and/or mental problems. Rather, a clear distinction is made between being inhabited by an unclean spirit and being sick. Demon possession could produce illness, but not all illness was attributed to the indwelling of evil spirits. Note the distinction that is drawn in the following passage. “And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him [Jesus] all that were sick, and them that were possessed with demons” (Mark 1:32). The double use of the definite article (tous), together with the conjunction, reveals that two distinct classes are under consideration—those who were merely sick, and those who were demon possessed and may or may not have had attending problems. Lenski has commented: “Two classes are markedly distinguished; those suffering from ordinary diseases and those possessed with demons. The distinction shows that the latter cannot be classed with the former in spite of modern attempts in that direction” (1964, p. 84). THE DIVINE PURPOSE IN ALLOWING DEMON POSSESSION The New Testament clearly indicates that demons were under the control of divine authority. Jesus, for example, could command them to leave a person (Matthew 8:16), or even to keep quiet (Mark 1:34). The demons that tormented the man in the country of the Gerasenes could not enter the nearby swine herd except by the Lord’s concession (Mark 5:13-14). Since it is the case that demons could do nothing except by divine permission, the intriguing question is: Why did God allow these malevolent beings to enter into people? The truth of the matter is, the Bible does not give a specific answer to this question—as much as our curiosity wants to be fed. I believe, though, that a reasonable case can be built to help shed some light on the subject. If the mission of Jesus Christ, as the divine Son of God, was to be effective, the Lord’s absolute authority had to be established. No stone could be left unturned. Accordingly, we see the Savior demonstrating His authority in a variety of ways. (1) Christ exhibited power over diseases and physical ailments (Matthew 9:20-22; John 4:46-54; 9:1-41). (2) The Lord exerted His authority over material objects (Matthew 14:15-21; 17:24-27; John 2:1-11; 21:1-14). (3) Jesus showed that He could control the elements of nature (Matthew 8:23-27). (4) The Master even suspended the force of gravity with reference to His own body when He walked upon the waters of the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 14:22-23). (5) The Lord released certain ones who had been captured by death (Matthew 9:18-26; John 11:1-45). (6) Finally, it is not unreasonable to assume that, just as the Savior had displayed His marvelous power in all these realms, it likewise was appropriate that He be able to demonstrate His authority in the spirit sphere as well. Satan is not in full control! In fact, note this interesting passage. When the seventy disciples returned from an evangelistic trip (Luke 10:1), they joyfully proclaimed to Christ: “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in thy name.” Jesus responded: “I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:17-18). The significance of that statement is this: the disciples’ power over demons, under the aegis of Christ’s name (authority), was but a preview of the ultimate and complete fall of the devil. One scholar has expressed the matter in the following way. Jesus viewed the triumph of these [disciples] as being symptomatic of ever so many other victories over Satan throughout the course of the new dispensation, triumphs accomplished through the work of thousands of other missionaries. He was looking far into the future (cf. Matt. 24:14). He saw the ultimate discomfiture of the ugly dragon and all his minions (Hendriksen, 1978, p. 581). Consider another reference. Christ said: “But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come upon you. Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?, and then he will spoil his house” (Matthew 12:28-29; Luke 11:20-22). The Savior’s argument is: I have cast out demons, the servants of Satan. I could not have done so if I were not stronger than he is. My power thus is superior to his. These passages, I believe, help us to understand the purpose of demon possession in the first century. It established the comprehensive and supreme authority of the Son of God. Why demons entered particular individuals is not explained in the Scriptures. Unger speculated that “in the great majority of cases possession is doubtless traced to yielding voluntarily to temptation and to sin...” (1952, p. 95). However, in the instance of the epileptic boy, the lad had been tormented “from childhood” (Mark 9:21), which suggests, at the very least, that personal sin was not necessarily a causative factor in demon possession. CASES IN THE GOSPEL RECORDS OF JESUS’ EXPELLING DEMONS The demoniac in the synagogue (Mark 1:23; The Gerasene demoniac (Matthew 8:8:28-34; Mark 5:1-20; Luke 8:26-39). The Syrophoenician girl (Matthew 15:21-28; The epileptic boy (Matthew 17:14-21; Mark 9:14-29; Luke 9:37-43). The mute demoniac (Matthew 9:32-34). The blind/mute demoniac (Matthew 12:22ff.; A CONTRAST WITH PAGANISM It is worthwhile to make this brief observation. The ancient world abounded with superstition relative to demons (where the genuine exists, the counterfeit will be as well). But there is a vast chasm between the accounts of demons in the New Testament and that of the pagan world and, in fact, even among some of the Hebrew nation. For instance, as mentioned earlier, there are no accounts in the New Testament of any visual descriptions of demons. Such characterizations, however, were common in the heathen world. A bronze statue from ancient Babylon contains the image of the demon Pazuzu. The figure has the wings and feet of an eagle, a human body with claws for hands, and a misshapen head (Aune, 1979, 1:920). Josephus tells of a demon expulsion whereby the exorcist “put a ring which had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils...” (Antiquities 8.2.5). The New Testament contains no such absurd concoctions. DEMON POSSESSION TODAY? Do evil spirits enter into human bodies and afflict people today? I confidently affirm they do not. Unfortunately, though, some modern writers have argued that demon activity is still a part of Earth’s environment. Charles Ryrie contended that certain “fallen angels” are “still free to roam the earth as demons carrying out Satan’s designs” (1959, p. 296). Merrill Unger, a respected scholar, subtitled his book, Biblical Demonology, “A Study of the Spiritual Forces Behind the Present World Unrest.” Several years ago a book titled UFOs, Satan and Evolution enjoyed a limited circulation in the evangelical community. Therein the author claimed that hundreds of UFO visits to Earth represented an invasion of demons. He cited one “example” where a demon raped a woman (an interesting feat for a spirit!). The fact that a prominent creationist wrote the Foreword for this literary fiasco remains an inexplicable mystery. The position that demon possession does not exist today can be argued from a twofold base. First, a thoughtful study of the details associated with the so-called modern examples of demon habitation reveals that these cases bear no resemblance to the genuine examples of spirit possession described in the New Testament. The contrast is dramatic. Second, a consideration of certain data set forth in the New Testament leads only to the conclusion that demon possession was a first-century experience; it was allowed for a very specific reason, and the divine concession was suspended near the end of the apostolic era. THE MODERN EXORCISM MANIA When the movie, The Exorcist (based upon William Blatty’s novel of the same name), made its appearance in December 1973, a wave of mystical excitement that has been dubbed “the exorcism frenzy,” swept the nation. (By the time the movie had been out for 5 weeks, Blatty’s book had sold 9 million copies.) Scores of people began to surmise that they were possessed of evil spirits—or that they knew someone else who was! Numerous articles regarding these alleged experiences appeared in mainline newspapers and magazines. A careful consideration of the details involved in these alleged episodes highlights some startling contrasts to the New Testament (cf. Woodward, 1974). Reflect upon the following differences. (1) The “exorcisms” of today are performed almost invariably in dark, secluded environments, only to be publicized later. When Jesus cast out demons, the episodes were public, and therefore subject to critical examination (cf. Luke 4:31-37). (2) The Lord could expel evil spirits with but a word, and the effect was immediate (Luke 4:36; Matthew 17:18). The Jesuit Priest who supposedly “exorcised” a demon from the youngster who served as the subject of Blatty’s book, The Exorcist, confessed that it took him two months of preparation (fasting on bread and water), and twenty ritual ceremonies to purge the child. (3) The demoniacs of the New Testament era were afflicted, either physically or mentally, by a malfunction of what were otherwise normal human traits. Those cases involved no grotesque details. However, according to Roman Catholic priest Luigi Novagese (the official exorcist for the papal diocese in Rome), “A man’s skin turned white like paper, his teeth became transparent, his eyes bulged with balls of flame and fire issued from his mouth.” One priest claimed that a demon took a bite out of his sandwich. The February 11, 1974 issue of Newsweek magazine carried a photo of the burglarized delicacy, displaying perfect, human-like teeth prints! (I wonder—do demons get cavities?) (4) Modern demoniacs frequently are described as uttering “fierce curses” and “bursts of blasphemy.” In the New Testament record, demons always were very respectful of deity (Mark 1:24; 3:11). There is not a solitary case of a demon blaspheming either God or Christ in the biblical narratives. (5) Two cases of demon possession in the New Testament reveal that the unclean spirits could empower their hosts with supernatural strength (Mark 5:1-20; cf. Acts 19:13-16). The demoniac described in Mark 5 could not be bound even with a “chain.” A respected university professor posed this interesting query: “If we have demon-possessed people today, why in my travels in over forty countries of the world have I never seen a person who is so strong that you can’t bind him with chains (cf. Mk. 5:3)?” (Edwards, 1996, p. 135). (6) The ability to cast out demons in the first century was given in order to confirm the truth of the Gospel message (Mark 16:17-20). Modern “exorcists” preach everything but the Gospel. A REASONABLE ARGUMENT A powerful case can be made for the proposition that demon possession was not allowed to continue beyond the apostolic age—i.e., the era of miracles. I first must mention that when the prophet Zechariah foretold the coming of the Messianic dispensation, and the blessings that would accompany the spread of the Gospel, he suggested that the Lord would “cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land” (13:1-2). Some feel that the expression “unclean spirit” may hint of, or at least include, the cessation of demonic activity. Hailey sees this as a prediction of the eventual termination of prophetic activity (on the part of God’s people) and the curtailing of the power of unclean spirits. Likewise, unclean spirits, the antithesis of the prophets, would cease. In the conquest of Christ over Satan and his forces, unclean spirits have ceased to control men as they did in the time of the ministry of Christ and the apostles... (1972, p. 392). While this is not a common view of Zechariah’s prophecy, and certainly not one upon which an entire case could be built, it is not without possibility. A firmer proposition can be argued as follows. With the close of the first century, the age of the supernatural came to a close. God is not empowering men to operate in a miraculous fashion today. This is evinced in the following way: (1) Nothing duplicating the miracles of the first century is apparent today. No one can walk upon water, raise the dead, calm a raging storm, turn water into wine, instantly heal an amputated ear, extract tax money from a fish’s mouth, etc. Miracles are self-authenticating phenomena that cannot be denied, even by hostile critics (cf. John 11:47; Acts 4:14-16); clearly, they are not occurring today. (2) The purpose of supernatural gifts was to confirm the authenticity of divine revelation being received from heaven (Mark 16:9-20; Hebrews 2:1-4). Since the revelatory process was completed when the last New Testament book was written, miracles no longer are needed, hence, have ceased. They were like the scaffolding that is removed once the building is finished. (3) The New Testament explicitly argues that the day was on the horizon when miracles would cease. Paul defended that position both in Ephesians 4:8-16 and in 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. During the early days of the apostolic era, divine revelation had been “in part,” i.e., piece-by-piece. The apostle said, however, that when “the perfect” or “the complete” arrived, the partial revelation, which came by means of the various “gifts” (e.g., supernatural knowledge and prophecy), would cease (1 Corinthians 13:8ff.). Prominent Greek scholar, W.E. Vine, summarized the matter well. With the completion of Apostolic testimony and the completion of the Scriptures of truth (“the faith once for all delivered to the saints”, Jude, 3, R.V.), “that which is perfect” had come, and the temporary gifts were done away. For the Scriptures provided by the Spirit of God were “perfect”. Nothing was to be added to them, nothing taken from them. This interpretation is in keeping with the context (1951, p. 184). Elsewhere this writer has discussed the theme of miracles and their duration in much greater detail (Jackson, 1990, pp. 114-124). Here is a crucial point. If it is the case that miraculous powers have been removed from the church’s possession, including the ability to cast out demons (Mark 16:17-20), does it stand to reason that God would allow demons to supernaturally assault people today, thus granting Satan an undue advantage over the human family? How would this square with the promise that “greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4)? In other words, if the gift of expelling demons no longer is extant, is it not a reasonable conclusion that demon possession is obsolete as well? Certainly Satan exerts great influence today. However, as God does not work miraculously in this age, but influences through his Word and through the events of providence, so also, the devil wields his power indirectly, and non-miraculously, through various media. Current cases that are being associated with demon possession doubtless are the results of psychosomatic problems, hysteria, self-induced hypnosis, deception, delusion, and the like. They have natural, though perhaps not always well understood, causes. Arndt, William F. and F. Wilbur Gingrich (1967), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago). Aune, D.E. (1979), “Demonology,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia ed. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), revised edition. Barclay, William (1976), And He Had Compassion—The Healing Miracles of Jesus (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press). Campbell, Alexander (no date.), Popular Lectures and Addresses (Nashville, TN: Harbinger Book Club). Edwards, Earl (1996), “Powers of Darkness—Demon Possession,” Settled in Heaven, ed. David Lipe (Henderson, TN: Freed-Hardeman University). Fields, Weston W. (1976), Unformed and Unfilled (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed). Greenleaf, Simon (1903 edition), The Testimony of the Evangelists Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice (Newark, NJ: Soney & Sage). Hailey, Homer (1972), A Commentary on the Minor Prophets (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker). Hayes, Judith (1996), In God We Trust: But Which One? (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation). Hendriksen, William (1978), An Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker). Hodge, Charles (1960 edition), Systematic Theology (London: James Clarke). Jackson, Wayne (1990), “Miracles,” Giving a Reason for Our Hope, ed. Winford Claiborne, (Henderson, TN: Freed-Hardeman College). Jackson, Wayne (1996), “The Silence of the Scriptures: An Argument for Inspiration,” Reason & Revelation, 16:17-22, March. Kaiser, Walter C., Jr. (1992), More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press). Lenski, R.C.H. (1964), The Interpretation of Mark’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg). McClintock, John and James Strong, eds. (1968 reprint), Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker). Reese, David G. (1992), “Demons,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman, (New York: Doubleday). Ryrie, Charles C. (1959), Biblical Theology of the New Testament (Chicago, IL: Moody). Thayer, J.H. (1958 edition), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark). Unger, Merrill F. (1952), Biblical Demonology (Wheaton, IL: Scripture Press). Vincent, Marvin (1972 edition), Word Studies in the New Testament (Wilmington, DE: Associated Publishers and Authors). Vine, W.E. (1951), First Corinthians—Local Church Problems (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan). Vine, W.E. (1991), Amplified Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words (Iowa Falls, IA: World Bible Publishers). Woodward, Kenneth L. (1974), “The Exorcism Frenzy,” Newsweek, 83:60-66.

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Hedwig Lachmann (1865–1918) was a German poet and translator, best known for her translation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé. Lachmann was born in Stolp, Pomerania. Her father was a Jewish cantor and teacher of religion. She studied languages in Augsburg, passing her teaching examinations at the prodigiously early age of 15. She later worked as a governess in England and in Dresden and Budapest, and in 1889 settled in Berlin. There she became a close friend of the poet Richard Dehmel (whose works inspired some of Richard Strauss’s greatest songs), though she rejected his offer to join him and his wife in a ménage à trois. In 1899 she fell in love with Gustav Landauer, an anarchist, pacifist and writer who she married in 1903. In the same year, Lachmann published her translation of Wilde’s Salomé. It was performed soon after in Berlin at the Schall and Rauch Theatre, in a production by the great impresario Max Reinhardt. Richard Strauss was stunned by the work and – with some cuts – used Lachmann’s translation as his libretto for Salome. Lachmann later wrote a monograph on Wilde (1905) and translated The Picture of Dorian Gray (1909). Lachmann’s other work included translations of Edgar Allan Poe, Rabindranath Tagore and various Hungarian poets, and of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions. She died in February 1918, an early victim of the international flu epidemic. Her Collected Poems were published in 1919.

Girls’ Labor and Leisure in the Progressive Era The central story in many textbooks is one of tireless reformers committed to protecting the poor and helping vulnerable children by eliminating child labor and expanding education. Working on all levels, reformers expanded educational opportunities and increased literacy rates by reforming education from kindergarten through high school. Florence Kelley, a pioneering social reformer featured in many textbooks, formed the National Child Labor Committee and employed photographer Lewis Hine to document the experiences of children. Hine’s photographs led in part to the era’s notable campaigns and legislation against child labor. His images of children working in mines, factories, and sweatshops illustrate all textbook chapters on the Progressive era. Yet textbooks minimize parts of the past that alter the collective portrait of reformers as unfaltering. Textbooks underplay the influence of Southern entrepreneurs and government officials who either fought or ignored child labor laws. Not only were reformers less successful than portrayed, but they were not wholly responsible for all the gains for which they took credit and for which they are credited. Child labor, for example, was on the decline when reformers marshaled efforts against it. Also missing is discussion of reformers’ motivation. Feelings about immigrants, migrants, and their potential impact on American society and culture ranged from compassion to apprehension. Similarly, their confidence in the superiority of middle-class values—especially childhood ideals—guided many of their efforts. Reformers’ principles about girlhood found expression in institutions providing domestic training and maternal protection. Reformers’ racial attitudes led them to establish segregated facilities. Their beliefs in the benefits of country life blinded them to the problems faced by young rural workers, especially African Americans and Hispanics, who labored on family farms and in commercial agriculture in the South and Southwest. While the Progressive era is one of the few periods in which girls appear in the national narrative, a few photographs and a sprinkling of quotes in textbooks do not establish significant historical visibility. Girls are largely subsumed within the broader category of (adult) “women,” even though the term “working girls” used by contemporaries better describes the youthful composition of the feminized labor force at the turn of the century. When categorized as children, girls’ historical prominence is overshadowed by examples, illustrations, quotations, and questions about boys. Moreover, the relationship of gender differences within racial and ethnic categories is rarely recognized. It was, however, critical in determining young people’s opportunities and obstacles, responsibilities and rights. Textbook descriptions that feminize, sentimentalize, and minimize girls’ labor are based on assumptions about girls as dutiful daughters. Yet those girls that assumed family responsibilities, called “Little Mothers,” by reformers, complained about being saddled with babies while brothers played in city streets. Along with European immigrant girls, Chinese mui tsai indentured servants—not mentioned in textbooks—also complained about having to carry and care for the children of Chinese merchant families in California (see Primary Source “Mui Tsai” ). Images of girls ornament chapters, but they do not effectively illustrate the diversity of their lives or illuminate girls’ value to families, economies, and cultures. Going beyond the textbook emphasis on girls as family helpers provides insight into the everyday lives and expectations of girls, and reframes the narrative to include a variety of girlhoods that competed for dominance during the Progressive period. While immigrants transported a variety of Old World notions of girlhood deeply rooted in gendered beliefs, national traditions, and ethnic customs, their Americanizing daughters shed Old World attitudes along with their homemade European costumes. Girls’ agency took place within immigrant families where daughters taught their parents English and American customs and arbitrated with landlords and shopkeepers. Jewish girls in the Northeast, Chinese girls on the West Coast, and those in small towns also ran errands for their families generating economic, social, and cultural capital. Picturesque depictions of girls on commercialized trade cards document the reality of girl couriers and consumers working in the private and the public sphere, as well as informal and household economies (see Primary Source “Going Momma’s Errands” ). Girls also expanded the customary notion of “work” to include activism, which further reshaped the dominant framework. At age 16, for example, Pauline Newman and her girl friends organized 10,000 families to protest rent hikes in New York City (see Annotated Bibliography, Bartoletti, ch. 3). Similarly, and much to the consternation of parents, freedom-seeking daughters purchased consumer goods and challenged courting traditions. Some parents turned to the police, courts, and reformers for help with their “reckless” daughters whose vibrant mixed-sex (“heterosocial”) youth culture redefined social values and sexual mores in modernizing America. This adolescent reinvention of modern girlhood increased clashes with reformers whose middle-class upbringing informed the gender ideals they fostered. Progressives feared that tawdry commercial culture imperiled girls’ morals and manners. The alleged “girl problem” stirred reformers to raise the age of consent, expand status offenses, and incarcerate the “incorrigible.” Seeking to provide more wholesome and feminine forms of entertainment and education, reformers offered classes on cooking and childcare in settlement houses and established scouting organizations. In schools, the word problems in revised elementary arithmetic books similarly conveyed educational reformers’ conventional goals for girls (see Primary Source “Essentials of Arithmetic Primary Book” ). The expansion of middle-class ideals about girlhood found expression in Hine’s photographs of child laborers as well. Images of destitute girls typically pathologize working-class beliefs that obligated children to contribute to the family economy. Images of laboring girls stand in contrast to photographs that model the lifestyle and ideals of girlhood among the rising middle class, images that reflect the shifting social value of children from economically useful to “emotionally priceless.” The middle-class girls playing with a doll instead of making one in one Hine photo portrayed the ideal of modern American girlhood (see Primary Source Lewis Hine Photographs ). In representations like these, girls did “cultural work” reinforcing and reifying middle-class ideals. Textbooks often marginalize girls’ role in shaping the past. In contrast, historians have worked, especially in recent decades, to: - investigate girls’ everyday lives; - use intersecting categories of analysis; - examine girlhood as a social construction; - deconstruct discourses (e.g., female adolescent sexuality), and - interrogate girl-centered sources for evidence of consensus and conflict, continuity and change.

(Greek psyche; Latin anima; French ame; German Seele). The question of the reality of the soul and its distinction from the body is among the most important problems of philosophy, for with it is bound up the doctrine of a future life. Various theories as to the nature of the soul have claimed to be reconcilable with the tenet of immortality, but it is a sure instinct that leads us to suspect every attack on the substantiality or spirituality of the soul as an assault on the belief in existence after death. The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality. If there be a life after death, clearly the agent or subject of our vital activities must be capable of an existence separate from the body. The belief in an animating principle in some sense distinct from the body is an almost inevitable inference from the observed facts of life. Even uncivilized peoples arrive at the concept of the soul almost without reflection, certainly without any severe mental effort. The mysteries of birth and death, the lapse of conscious life during sleep and in swooning, even the commonest operations of imagination and memory, which abstract a man from his bodily presence even while awake—all such facts invincibly suggest the existence of something besides the visible organism, internal to it, but to a large extent independent of it, and leading a life of its own. In the rude psychology of the primitive nations, the soul is often represented as actually migrating to and fro during dreams and trances, and after death haunting the neighbourhood of its body. Nearly always it is figured as something extremely volatile, a perfume or a breath. Often, as among the Fijians, it is represented as a miniature replica of the body, so small as to be invisible. The Samoans have a name for the soul which means "that which comes and goes". Many peoples, such as the Dyaks and Sumatrans, bind various parts of the body with cords during sickness to prevent the escape of the soul. In short, all the evidence goes to show that Dualism, however uncritical and inconsistent, is the instinctive creed of "primitive man" (see ANIMISM). Early literature bears the same stamp of Dualism. In the "Rig-Veda" and other liturgical books of India, we find frequent references to the coming and going of manas (mind or soul). Indian philosophy, whether Brahminic or Buddhistic, with its various systems of metempsychosis, accentuated the distinction of soul and body, making the bodily life a mere transitory episode in the existence of the soul. They all taught the doctrine of limited immortality, ending either with the periodic world-destruction (Brahminism) or with attainment of Nirvana (Buddhism). The doctrine of a world-soul in a highly abstract form is met with as early as the eighth century before Christ, when we find it described as "the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower, the Eternal in which space is woven and which is woven in it." In Greece, on the other hand, the first essays of philosophy took a positive and somewhat materialistic direction, inherited from the pre-philosophic age, from Homer and the early Greek religion. In Homer, while the distinction of soul and body is recognized, the soul is hardly conceived as possessing a substantial existence of its own. Severed from the body, it is a mere shadow, incapable of energetic life. The philosophers did something to correct such views. The earliest school was that of the Hylozoists; these conceived the soul as a kind of cosmic force, and attributed animation to the whole of nature. Any natural force might be designated psyche: thus Thales uses this term for the attractive force of the magnet, and similar language is quoted even from Anaxagoras and Democritus. With this we may compare the "mind-stuff" theory and Pan-psychism of certain modern scientists. Other philosophers again described the soul's nature in terms of substance. Anaximander gives it an aeriform constitution, Heraclitus describes it as a fire. The fundamental thought is the same. The cosmic ether or fire is the subtlest of the elements, the nourishing flame which imparts heat, life, sense, and intelligence to all things in their several degrees and kinds. The Pythagoreans taught that the soul is a harmony, its essence consisting in those perfect mathematical ratios which are the law of the universe and the music of the heavenly spheres. With this doctrine was combined, according to Cicero, the belief in a universal world-spirit, from which all particular souls are derived. All these early theories were cosmological rather than psychological in character. Theology, physics, and mental science were not as yet distinguished. It is only with the rise of dialectic and the growing recognition of the problem of knowledge that a genuinely psychological theory became possible. In Plato the two standpoints, the cosmological and the epistemological, are found combined. Thus in the "Timaeus" (p. 30) we find an account derived from Pythagorean sources of the origin of the soul. First the world-soul is created according to the laws of mathematical symmetry and musical concord. It is composed of two elements, one an element of "sameness" (tauton), corresponding to the universal and intelligible order of truth, and the other an element of distinction or "otherness" (thateron), corresponding to the world of sensible and particular existences. The individual human soul is constructed on the same plan. Sometimes, as in the "Phaedrus", Plato teaches the doctrine of plurality of souls (cf. the well-known allegory of the charioteer and the two steeds in that dialogue). The rational soul was located in the head, the passionate or spirited soul in the breast, the appetitive soul in the abdomen. In the "Republic", instead of the triple soul, we find the doctrine of three elements within the complex unity of the single soul. The question of immortality was a principal subject of Plato's speculations. His account of the origin of the soul in the "Timaeus" leads him to deny the intrinsic immortality even of the world-soul, and to admit only an immortality conditional on the good pleasure of God. In the "Phaedo" the chief argument for the immortality of the soul is based on the nature of intellectual knowledge interpreted on the theory of reminiscence; this of course implies the pre-existence of the soul, and perhaps in strict logic its eternal pre-existence. There is also an argument from the soul's necessary participation in the idea of life, which, it is argued, makes the idea of its extinction impossible. These various lines of argument are nowhere harmonized in Plato (see IMMORTALITY). The Platonic doctrine tended to an extreme Transcendentalism. Soul and body are distinct orders of reality, and bodily existence involves a kind of violence to the higher part of our composite nature. The body is the "prison", the "tomb", or even, as some later Platonists expressed it, the "hell" of the soul. In Aristotle this error is avoided. His definition of the soul as "the first entelechy of a physical organized body potentially possessing life" emphasizes the closeness of the union of soul and body. The difficulty in his theory is to determine what degree of distinctness or separateness from the matter of the body is to be conceded to the human soul. He fully recognizes the spiritual element in thought and describes the "active intellect" (nous poetikos) as "separate and impassible", but the precise relation of this active intellect to the individual mind is a hopelessly obscure question in Aristotle's psychology. (See INTELLECT; MIND.) The Stoics taught that all existence is material, and described the soul as a breath pervading the body. They also called it Divine, a particle of God (apospasma tou theu) it was composed of the most refined and ethereal matter. Eight distinct parts of the soul were recognized by them: Epicureanism accepted the Atomist theory of Leucippus and Democritus. Soul consists of the finest grained atoms in the universe, finer even than those of wind and heat which they resemble: hence the exquisite fluency of the soul's movements in thought and sensation. The soul-atoms themselves, however, could not exercise their functions if they were not kept together by the body. It is this which gives shape and consistency to the group. If this is destroyed, the atoms escape and life is dissolved; if it is injured, part of the soul is lost, but enough may be left to maintain life. The Lucretian version of Epicureanism distinguishes between animus and anima: the latter only is soul in the biological sense, the former is the higher, directing principle (to hegemonikon) in the Stoic terminology, whose seat is the heart, the centre of the cognitive and emotional life. Graeco-Roman philosophy made no further progress in the doctrine of the soul in the age immediately preceding the Christian era. None of the existing theories had found general acceptance, and in the literature of the period an eclectic spirit nearly akin to Scepticism predominated. Of the strife and fusion of systems at this time the works of Cicero are the best example. On the question of the soul he is by turns Platonic and Pythagorean, while he confesses that the Stoic and Epicurean systems have each an attraction for him. Such was the state of the question in the West at the dawn of Christianity. In Jewish circles a like uncertainty prevailed. The Sadducees were Materialists, denying immortality and all spiritual existence. The Pharisees maintained these doctrines, adding belief in pre-existence and transmigration. The psychology of the Rabbins is founded on the Sacred Books, particularly the account of the creation of man in Genesis. Three terms are used for the soul: nephesh, nuah, and neshamah; the first was taken to refer to the animal and vegetative nature, the second to the ethical principle, the third to the purely spiritual intelligence. At all events, it is evident that the Old Testament throughout either asserts or implies the distinct reality of the soul. An important contribution to later Jewish thought was the infusion of Platonism into it by Philo of Alexandria. He taught the immediately Divine origin of the soul, its pre-existence and transmigration; he contrasts the pneuma, or spiritual essence, with the soul proper, the source of vital phenomena, whose seat is the blood; finally he revived the old Platonic Dualism, attributing the origin of sin and evil to the union of spirit with matter. It was Christianity that, after many centuries of struggle, applied the final criticisms to the various psychologies of antiquity, and brought their scattered elements of truth to full focus. The tendency of Christ's teaching was to centre all interest in the spiritual side of man's nature; the salvation or loss of the soul is the great issue of existence. The Gospel language is popular, not technical. Psyche and pneuma are used indifferently either for the principle of natural life or for spirit in the strict sense. Body and soul are recognized as a dualism and their values contrasted: "Fear ye not them that kill the body . . . but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell." In St. Paul we find a more technical phraseology employed with great consistency. Psyche is now appropriated to the purely natural life; pneuma to the life of supernatural religion, the principle of which is the Holy Spirit, dwelling and operating in the heart. The opposition of flesh and spirit is accentuated afresh (Romans 1:18, etc.). This Pauline system, presented to a world already prepossessed in favour of a quasi-Platonic Dualism, occasioned one of the earliest widespread forms of error among Christian writers the doctrine of the Trichotomy. According to this, man, perfect man (teleios) consists of three parts: body, soul, spirit (soma, psyche, pneuma). Body and soul come by natural generation; spirit is given to the regenerate Christian alone. Thus, the "newness of life", of which St. Paul speaks, was conceived by some as a superadded entity, a kind of oversoul sublimating the "natural man" into a higher species. This doctrine was variously distorted in the different Gnostic systems. The Gnostics divided man into three classes: Two features claim attention in this the earliest essay towards a complete anthropology within the Christian Church: The dubious language of these writers can only be understood in relation to the system they were opposing. By assigning a literal divinity to a certain small aristocracy of souls, Gnosticism set aside the doctrine of Creation and the whole Christian idea of God's relation to man. On the other side, by its extreme dualism of matter and spirit, and its denial to matter (i.e. the flesh) of all capacity for spiritual influences, it involved the rejection of cardinal doctrines like the Resurrection of the Body and even of the Incarnation itself in any proper sense. The orthodox teacher had to emphasize: Tertullian's treatise "De Anima" has been called the first Christian classic on psychology proper. The author aims to show the failure of all philosophies to elucidate the nature of the soul, and argues eloquently that Christ alone can teach mankind the truth on such subjects. His own doctrine, however, is simply the refined Materialism of the Stoics, supported by arguments from medicine and physiology and by ingenious interpretations of Scripture, in which the unavoidable materialism of language is made to establish a metaphysical Materialism. Tertullian is the founder of the theory of Traducianism, which derives the rational soul ex traduce, i.e. by procreation from the soul of the parent. For Tertullian this was a necessary consequence of Materialism. Later writers found in the doctrine a convenient explanation of the transmission of original sin. St. Jerome says that in his day it was the common theory in the West. Theologians have long abandoned it, however, in favour of Creationism, as it seems to compromise the spirituality of the soul. Origen taught the pre-existence of the soul. Terrestrial life is a punishment and a remedy for prenatal sin. "Soul" is properly degraded spirit: flesh is a condition of alienation and bondage (cf. Comment. ad Romans 1:18). Spirit, however, finite spirit, can exist only in a body, albeit of a glorious and ethereal nature. Neo-Platonism, which through St. Augustine contributed so much to spiritual philosophy, belongs to this period. Like Gnosticism, it uses emanations. The primeval and eternal One begets by emanation nous (intelligence); and from nous in turn springs psyche (soul), which is the image of nous, but distinct from it. Matter is a still later emanation. Soul has relations to both ends of the scale of reality, and its perfection lies in turning towards the Divine Unity from which it came. In everything, the neo-Platonist recognized the absolute primacy of the soul with respect to the body. Thus, the mind is always active, even in sense perception it is only the body that is passively affected by external stimuli. Similarly Plotinus prefers to say that the body is in the soul rather than vice versa: and he seems to have been the first to conceive the peculiar manner of the soul's location as an undivided and universal presence pervading the organism (tota in toto et tota in singulis partibus). It is impossible to give more than a very brief notice of the psychology of St. Augustine. His contributions to every branch of the science were immense; the senses, the emotions, imagination, memory, the will, and the intellect he explored them all, and there is scarcely any subsequent development of importance that he did not forestall. He is the founder of the introspective method. Noverim Te, noverim me was an intellectual no less than a devotional aspiration with him. The following are perhaps the chief points for our present purpose: Medieval psychology prior to the Aristotelean revival was affected by neo-Platonism, Augustinianism, and mystical influences derived from the works of pseudo-Dionysius. This fusion produced sometimes, notably in Scotus Eriugena, a pantheistic theory of the soul. All individual existence is but the development of the Divine life, in which all things are destined to be resumed. The Arabian commentators, Averroes and Avicenna, had interpreted Aristotle's psychology in a pantheistic sense. St. Thomas, with the rest of the Schoolmen, amends this portion of the Aristotelean tradition, accepting the rest with no important modifications. St. Thomas's doctrine is briefly as follows: Modern speculations respecting the soul have taken two main directions, Idealism and Materialism. Agnosticism need not be reckoned as a third and distinct answer to the problem, since, as a matter of fact, all actual agnosticisms have an easily recognized bias towards one or other of the two solutions aforesaid. Both Idealism and Materialism in present-day philosophy merge into Monism, which is probably the most influential system outside the Catholic Church. Descartes conceived the soul as essentially thinking (i.e. conscious) substance, and body as essentially extended substance. The two are thus simply disparate realities, with no vital connection between them. This is significantly marked by his theory of the soul's location in the body. Unlike the Scholastics he confines it to a single point the pineal gland from which it is supposed to control the various organs and muscles through the medium of the "animal spirits", a kind of fluid circulating through the body. Thus, to say the least, the soul's biological functions are made very remote and indirect, and were in fact later on reduced almost to a nullity: the lower life was violently severed from the higher, and regarded as a simple mechanism. In the Cartesian theory animals are mere automata. It is only by the Divine assistance that action between soul and body is possible. The Occasionalists went further, denying all interaction whatever, and making the correspondence of the two sets of facts a pure result of the action of God. The Leibnizian theory of Pre-established Harmony similarly refuses to admit any inter-causal relation. The superior monad (soul) and the aggregate of inferior monads which go to make up the body are like two clocks constructed with perfect art so as always to agree. They register alike, but independently: they are still two clocks, not one. This awkward Dualism was entirely got rid of by Spinoza. For him there is but one, infinite substance, of which thought and extension are only attributes. Thought comprehends extension, and by that very fact shows that it is at root one with that which it comprehends. The alleged irreducible distinction is transcended: soul and body are neither of them substances, but each is a property of the one substance. Each in its sphere is the counterpart of the other. This is the meaning of the definition, "Soul is the Idea of Body". Soul is the counterpart within the sphere of the attribute of thought of that particular mode of the attribute of extension which we call the body. Such was the fate of Cartesianism. English Idealism had a different course. Berkeley had begun by denying the existence of material substance, which he reduced merely to a series of impressions in the sentient mind. Mind is the only substance. Hume finished the argument by dissolving mind itself into its phenomena, a loose collection of "impressions and ideas". The Sensist school (Condillac etc.) and the Associationists (Hartley, the Mills, and Bain) continued in similar fashion to regard the mind as constituted by its phenomena or "states", and the growth of modern positive psychology has tended to encourage this attitude. But to rest in Phenomenalism as a theory is impossible, as its ablest advocates themselves have seen. Thus J.S. Mill, while describing the mind as merely "a series [i.e. of conscious phenomena] aware of itself as a series", is forced to admit that such a conception involves an unresolved paradox. Again, W. James's assertion that "the passing thought is itself the Thinker", which "appropriates" all past thoughts in the "stream of consciousness", simply blinks the question. For surely there is something which in its turn "appropriates" the passing thought itself and the entire stream of past and future thoughts as well, viz. the self-conscious, self-asserting "I" the substantial ultimate of our mental life. To be in this sense "monarch of all it surveys" in introspective observation and reflective self-consciousness, to appropriate without itself being appropriated by anything else, to be the genuine owner of a certain limited section of reality (the stream of consciousness), this is to be a free and sovereign (though finite) personality, a self-conscious, spiritual substance in the language of Catholic metaphysics. The foregoing discussion partly anticipates our criticism of Materialism. The father of modern Materialism is Hobbes, who accepted the theory of Epicurus, and reduced all spirits either to phantoms of the imagination or to matter in a highly rarefied state. This theory need not detain us here. Later Materialism has three main sources: As regards monistic systems generally, it belongs rather to cosmology to discuss them. We take our stand on the consciousness of individual personality, which consciousness is a distinct deliverance of our very highest faculties, growing more and more explicit with the strengthening of our moral and intellectual being. This consciousness is emphatic, as against the figments of a fallaciously abstract reason, in asserting the self-subsistence (and at the same time the finitude) of our being, i.e. it declares that we are independent inasmuch as we are truly persons or selves, not mere attributes or adjectives, while at the same time, by exhibiting our manifold limitations, it directs us to a higher Cause on which our being depends. Such is the Catholic doctrine on the nature, unity, substantiality, spirituality, and origin of the soul. It is the only system consistent with Christian faith, and, we may add, morals, for both Materialism and Monism logically cut away the foundations of these. The foregoing historical sketch will have served also to show another advantage it possesses namely, that it is by far the most comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating, synthesis of whatever is best in rival systems. It recognizes the physical conditions of the soul's activity with the Materialist, and its spiritual aspect with the Idealist, while with the Monist it insists on the vital unity of human life. It enshrines the principles of ancient speculation, and is ready to receive and assimilate the fruits of modern research. APA citation. (1912). Soul. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14153a.htm MLA citation. "Soul." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14153a.htm>. Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Tomas Hancil and Joseph P. Thomas. Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York. Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is feedback732 at newadvent.org. (To help fight spam, this address might change occasionally.) Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads.

For nearly half a century, “The Passenger,” a gripping opera set in Auschwitz, lay dormant. Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in the former Soviet Union, it was supposed to receive its premiere in 1968, but that never happened. “Soviet authorities didn’t think a piece about Jews would further the interests of the communist state,” said David Pountney, the acclaimed British director who rediscovered the work. “‘The Passenger’ was, for all practical purposes, banned there.” Now, on January 18, at Texas’s Houston Grand Opera, the opera, considered to be the masterwork of composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, will finally receive its American premiere. “The Passenger” takes place in the 1950s on a cruise ship, where one woman — a former SS guard at Auschwitz who has hidden her past from her new husband — is certain that she recognizes a prisoner she thought had perished at the camp. The story alternates between the present-day drama of conscience and flashbacks to the guard and prisoner’s complex relationship at Auschwitz. A two-level set (ship on top, camp on bottom) emphasizes the interconnectedness of these two otherwise disparate settings. “These women were both 19, and they should’ve met in a university canteen and had a row about a boyfriend,” Pountney said. “The difference is that this university was Auschwitz. It is an extraordinary relationship that the opera explores in an intelligent, sensitive way.” The opera — which was not performed until 2010 — has a story that seems almost as compelling as any theatrical plot. Weinberg “was himself a passenger of the 20th century,” said Pountney, who directed the opera’s 2010 premiere in Austria and is bringing it to Houston. This summer, the week of July 10, it will have three performances as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Weinberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1919. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Weinberg, then a 19-year-old music student, fled Poland for the Soviet Union on foot. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, Weinberg landed briefly in Minsk and then, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, was evacuated, along with other artists, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In Tashkent, Weinberg met and married the daughter of Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Soviet Jewish actor and the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. His close friend Marc Chagall painted murals for the theater’s interior. With the help of Mikhoels’s and Weinberg’s new booster, Dmitri Shostakovich, Weinberg and his wife moved to Moscow in 1943. But when his father in-law was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1948, Weinberg’s position in the Soviet Union became more tenuous. He was imprisoned briefly in 1953, and though he continued writing music, he received no support from the state. Weinberg hoped to live long enough to see “The Passenger” performed, but he died in 1996, almost 15 years before the world premiere at Austria’s Bregenz Festival. Pountney had been investigating Weinberg’s work for years by this point. “Since the ’70s, I’d been asking: Who came after Shostakovich and Prokofiev? But of course it was very difficult to get information out of the Soviet Union.” Bit by bit he started hearing about Weinberg, and eventually he got a hold of several recordings of “The Passenger.” “As I began to listen to it,” he said, “I realized that Weinberg was a really serious composer.” Weinberg adapted the story from a Polish radio play and novel by Zofia Posmysz, who spent three years as a prisoner in Auschwitz. More than a decade after surviving the camps, Posmysz — who is now 90 — was strolling through the Place de la Concorde when she thought she overheard the German voice of a former camp guard. It was this experience that inspired “The Passenger,” which is told from the guard’s point of view instead of the prisoner’s. Pountney acknowledges the inherent difficulty of pulling off an opera on such a subject. “I’m a little equivocal about all these novels and plays coming out now about Auschwitz that really crank up the emotional temperature,” he said. But despite the lush, heavily orchestrated music, Weinberg and his librettist, Alexander Medvedev, avoided the usual pitfalls. “It’s a very, very good opera, even if you’re not particularly moved by the subject of Auschwitz,” Pountney said. “Of course, one can’t ignore that Auschwitz carries a unique weight and emotional impact. Weinberg could still have gotten it wrong if there had been any sense of overemotional operatic grandstanding. The subtlety and restraint with which he handles the subject is just extraordinary.” After its premiere in Bregenz, “The Passenger” was produced in Warsaw and London. The Houston performances run through February 2. Since opera schedules are “between five and 10 years in the planning,” according to HGO’s managing director, Perryn Leech, HGO has had ample opportunity to organize local cultural and educational events surrounding the premiere. Through partnerships with the Holocaust Museum Houston and the Jewish Community Center of Houston, it has been presenting numerous “Passenger”-related events, such as lectures, salons and a screening of the unfinished 1963 Polish movie based on the same story. “We want to educate the next generation of people whilst we still have Holocaust survivors among us,” Leech said, “and this great piece of art tells the story wonderfully. There aren’t many operas that allow you to open up conversations and have educational events.” Laura Moser may be reached at [email protected]

On a picture perfect fall afternoon David and Carol Adelman exchanged vows in front of both of their loving families. The beautiful couple were married on November 10, 2012. Both David and Carol come from families with memorable traditions and were able to melded both their family traditions into a unique and beautiful wedding. The Rabi preformed the Jewish ceremony and incorporated Carol’s Philippine custom of the wrapping of the veil and cord of 8. We were so touched by the love and admiration of this handsome couple and their families. Best Wishes to The Adelman’s Carmine & Cheryl

From Ha’aretz. Be under NO illusion. There are many in Melbourne’s Adass Community who support this group completely. Others are even more right-wing. Why would you say anything, even if you disagreed. They are the right-wing version of J-Street. They live separate lives to the rest of us. They should not come to my door whether brought by master driver Osher Ehrlichster and others, all whom make a nice commission from these collectors. I will give them a dollar if they sing HaTikvah even with modified words (like I do). If you expect a rebuttsl or disagreement with Rabbi Beck, forget it, If it wasn’t for the fact that Yankel Unfanger was such a Tzadik, I’d have nothing to do with their products. He’s normal. Many of the rest are not. They are extreme zealots who should live on Gibraltar. They have a monopoly on Chalav Yisrael. That’s life. Some 3,000 followers of the Satmar Rebbe in Williamsburg took it to the streets of Manhattan Tuesday evening to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his speech to Congress and his claim that he’s an emissary on behalf of world Jewry to warn of a nuclear Iran. The protest, held outside the Israeli Consulate on 2nd avenue and 42nd street in Midtown Manhattan, was organized by the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada and attended by the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum. Signs at the protest included statements such as “Bibi – don’t drag American Jewry into your provocative politics”, “”Bibi Netanyahu does not speak for us”, and “we are ably represented, we don’t need a Bibi-sitter.” “When Netanyahu professes to speak on our behalf, we have to speak out and say this is not the case,” Rabbi David Neiderman told the thousands assembled. “Benjamin Netanyahu, stop speaking on our behalf and directing us what to do.” “We in America and Jews all over the world are loyal citizens in the respective countries we reside in, and no other foreign government can claim to represent us or speak on our behalf,” he proclaimed. Rabbi Neiderman went on to thank President Obama – whose name mentioning drew thunderous cheers – together with the Republican congressional leadership. “We are well represented and don’t need Netanyahu and his government’s representation,” he stated. The speakers preceding Rabbi Neiderman were harsher in their attacks against the Israeli leader. They called him “Haman” and Amalek” and accused him of igniting antisemitism by his ‘reckless’ actions. One Rabbi went a step further to claim that he’s sacrificing the well-being of world Jewry for his political survival. The Satmar Shita against Zionism and the formation of a state in the land of Israel was only mentioned as a secondary reason to protest. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, a spokesperson for ‘Natruna’ and the “True Torah Jews” website, told JP that the protest was only aimed to contradict what Netanyahu said that he’s speaking in the name of all Jewish people. “Besides this being a lie, it’s a very dangerous thing for him to say,” Rabbi Shapiro asserted. “He wants to get into some brouhaha with the president, he’s a foreign minister, he can do whatever he wants. But why bring in the Jewish people into this? So, we are here contradicting what he said about us, and if somebody has a problem with what Netanyahu said he shouldn’t blame the Jewish people.” “We are here to disassociate ourselves from the dangerous statements he’s making – statement that puts Jews in danger,” he added. Rabbi Shapiro also lambasted those who compare Satmar – who is against Zionism – to Neturei Karta, who associate themselves with Iran and the Palestinians. “We don’t believe that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. And when a leader of a foreign country comes to America to trash the president and says he’s our representative, the question is not why us but where is everybody else?” he explained.

Born in 1976 in Warsaw. Director and screenwriter. Worked as second director in films by Maciej Pieprzyca, Krzysztof Lang and Jan Kidawa-Blonski. Laureate of First Prize at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival (2004) for his short film OUR STREET (Nasza ulica) based on a short story by Jan Himilsbach. His feature film debut PRESERVE (Rezerwat) has already received many awards, including Debut Film Festival in Koszalin: Special Award of Jury, Audience Award, Young Audience Award, Journalists Award and Best Actress Award for Sonia Bohosiewicz; at the 34th Insko Film Summer: Golden Fish for the Best Polish Film; at the Film and Art Festival “ Dwa Brzegi” in Kazimierz Dolny-Janowiec: Audience Award. The film was also awarded Special Prize – Silver Statue of Leliwit and Young Jury Award in Tarnow. |2017||BREAKING THE LIMITS (Najlepszy)| |2014||GODS - Golden Lions at 2014 Gdynia Film Festival| |2011||FEMALE - MALE WAR|

Please visit our calendar regularly to view and RSVP to the many wonderful programs from the JCRCView Calendar Fall, 2019 Israel Engagement Fellowship Calling all Northern Virginia Explore the trends on college campus and how Israel fits into broader conversations. Participate in hands on activities, learn the importance of building allies and coalitions to impact change, and gain dialogue skills while practicing active listening. Graduate with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to engage with and advocate for Israel in a meaningful way on college campus and beyond. Created in partnership with The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. The program is funded by a generous contribution from The Margo and Yoram Cohen Family, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. Photographs will be taken at this event, and your picture may appear on our website or in other publications. If you do not want your image to appear, please contact us at 301-770-0881so that we may honor your request. About the Israel Engagement Fellowship IEF Graduation Ceremony at Israeli Embassy. The goal of the Israel Engagement Fellowship is to ensure that Greater Washington area high school students are connecting with Israel in an authentic way, receiving Israel education, and learning how to engage with and advocate for Israel in a way that makes sense for them as they move on to college campuses. Participants in the fellowship benefit from a space to ask tough questions, role play complex scenarios they may face on campus, and learn relational advocacy concepts and resources from dynamic speakers. Participants meet for eight sessions participating in hands on activities learning how to design and execute a campaign, the importance of building allies and coalitions to impact change, and will gain dialogue skills while practicing active listening. The final session is a celebration honoring the students' achievement which takes place at the Embassy of Israel. At the conclusion of the course will graduate with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to engage with and advocate for Israel in a meaningful way on college campus and beyond. IEF participants designing a social media campaign focused on Israel. As of 2019, more than 200 college bound students have graduated from the IEF program through 8 co-horts. Their diverse backgrounds represent every stream of Judaism - Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist - and more than 44 different area high schools. Each of the fellows has walked away from the course with a deeper appreciation for the unique relationship that American Jews have with a place as special and significant to our people as Israel. Learn more about the impact the IEF has had on the graduates by reading a speech given by IEF alumna Sarah Sachar: Advocating for Israel in the Next Generation. This program is free and funded by a generous contribution from the Margo and Yoram Cohen Family, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington and The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. For more information about the program or to inquire about applying, please contact the Israel Action Center.

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (DVD) Directed by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein Also Available On:HD Edition from Ricky Jay Website HD Edition from Ricky Jay Website HD Edition from Ricky Jay Website HD Edition from Ricky Jay Website HD Edition from Ricky Jay Website Booking Inquiry Sensei Fred Neumann Narrator Dick Cavett Directed by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein Ricky Jay is a world-renowned magician, author, historian and actor (often a mischievous presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson) -- and a performer who regularly provokes astonishment from even the most jaded audiences. DECEPTIVE PRACTICE traces Jay's achievements and influences, from his apprenticeship at age 4 with his grandfather, to such now-forgotten legends as Al Flosso, Slydini, Cardini and his primary mentors, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Featuring rare footage from his 1970s TV appearances (doing 3-card Monte with Steve Martin on The Dinah Shore Show) and told in Jay's inimitable voice, this is a remarkable journey inside the secretive world of magic and the small circle of eccentrics who are its perpetual devotees. DVD Extras Include: Jay's Colleagues on Camera: Paul Thomas Anderson, Steve Martin, David Mamet, etc. Mentors and Magic: Ricky Jay and Michael Weber Bob Dylan Video featuring Ricky Jay Never-Before-Seen Performance Footage, Crazy Anecdotes and Animation The New Yorker Festival with Mark Singer The New Yorker Profile of Ricky Jay by Mark Singer (DVD-ROM) "Wonderfully engaging!" - New York Magazine "Full of happy surprises. Card tricks that leave his audience speechless." - David Edelstein, New York Magazine "He puts on a smashing show, whether on or off the stage... Mr. Jay proves a hugely entertaining guide..." - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times "(A) great enchanter! A reminder that deception, in the best of cases, is a pathway to transcendence." - Keith Uhlich, Time Out NY "A riveting look at Mr. Jay's arduous, arcane pursuits through the prism of those who taught and inspired him to be one of the world's great magicians. Some of his illusions are so stunning that they leave spectators teary-eyed - out of amazement, or perhaps fear." - Robert P. Walzer, Wall Street Journal "Grade: A- Intriguing. A true master magician. Shows practical magic can be just as thrilling as anything you see on Game of Thrones." - Drew Taylor, Indiewire.com "There is a great deal of sheer fun of watching him grow up from little Ricky Potash, a 7-year-old performer of surprising poise... to a shoulder-length-haired hippie in a three-piece suit working the daytime talk shows with gusto, to the wry elder statesman of today. Jay's memories are... warm, charming and instructive." - George Robinson, Jewish Week "This introduction to Jay's world and his most secretive fraternity...dazzle(s) you with its clips of Jay pulling astonishments minor and major with the decks of cards he is forever just unwrapping from their plastic... We see mad and gorgeous excerpts from his library of magic guides. Here's a movie with magic." - Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice "So entertaining... Just watching this magician's hands at work with a deck of cards is positively mesmerizing." - Lou Lumenick, New York Post "You will be wowed." - Scott A. Rosenberg, AM New York "Grade: A. You'll feel like you're witnessing miracles." - Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly "Well structured and dynamically edited..." - Ronnie Scheib, Variety "One of the most compelling characters in magic gets his due..." - John Defore, Hollywood Reporter "This thoroughly engrossing, highly entertaining docu should delight fans and newcomers alike..." - Ronnie Scheib, Variety "Wonderfully engaging..." - David Edelstein, New York Magazine "...An entertaining introduction to the nimble-fingered card specialist." "...Offers an intriguing peek into an exclusive but collegial world..." - Joe Bendel, Epoch Times "...Visual magic experience..." 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I must be brief. Thanks for your patience waiting for a new posting at HogueProphecy.com. Since end of November, all my mental, emotional and psychic resources are trained upon one goal, the completion of Predictions for 2012. This will be the largest annual almanac I have yet written. It could be as much as 65,000 words when it is finally completed, hopefully soon. The deadline for donators getting their special edition, electronically autographed, advanced copy will possibly be pushed forward towards the winter solstice. One thing I can assure my readers who have already sent your advance for the book and those readers who will yet send, that this new e-book will be downloaded to you before the worldwide release to the world at large. You should have it as my gift for Christmas at the latest. Click on this link 2012 to learn how you can get your advanced copy. In the meantime, before I plunge back into the “bliss”-krieg process of bringing the new e-book rapidly into the world, I will post for you today this unique interview I gave online to Scarletwhore.com back around 8 March 2011. Inserted in the interview are some updates added in August 2011. I want to thank the people at Scarletwhore for inviting me to say something and I invite you all to check out their great site on prophecy and current events. (11 December 2011) John Hogue interview by Scarletwhore.com Scarletwhore Editor’s introduction: John Hogue does not need an introduction, most of you know him as the Nostradamus expert. He’s got a list of T.V. and radio appearances that few in the fringe world of prophecy, predictions, and apocalypse can dream of. He is the author of more than a dozen books, with over 1,500,000 in print in 19 languages. His website should be on the shortlist of top ten alternative information portals on the web. John Hogue is the quintessential ‘rogue scholar’, he is not dogmatic and set in a narrow paradigm of interpretation… he calls it as he sees it and rarely is he off the mark. The $12.50 I spent on his Predictions for 2011 is the best download I paid for this year. John Hogue is extremely insightful and sticks to his guns, he’s not afraid to admit when he’s wrong and more to point he understands the ebb and flow of a quasi deterministic future that exist in the realm of free will participants. Everything is foretold, but we still have free will. John Hogue gets it. When I read his 2011 predictions I felt like he was putting in words everything I felt intuitively about our world. After reading Predictions for 2011, I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask him. We received the following note from John Hogue: “Most of my answers to your questions are dated from no later than 8 March of 2011. I have inserted updates in red, composed nearly five months afterwards, on 6 August 2011.” Here we go: John, we might be thousands of miles apart but we are all the same rock and what happens in one part of this planet is going to affect us all. Has the natural balance been lost? Will the Earth deliver a wake-up call to humanity this year? Conditioning plays a subtle and mostly unnoticed influence on how we interpret or anticipate the future. We are programmed to expect the future to apocalyptically explode upon us like a Roland Emmerish movie. We look for Hollywood effects of his movie 2012 sliding California into the ocean. We look for climate change to superstorm in overnight like in his Day after Tomorrow. The fact we overlook for decades now is that the balance of nature is already lost and we are already listing from a tipping point in climate change that is too gradual for our Holly-wooden headed mindsets to pick up. We seek apocalyptic times grilled up hot and fast with an order of globally warmed fries — fast food style in less than a American-impatient minute. Nevertheless, global warming and climate change is coming at us a little slower, like an afternoon-long seven course French lunch that is equally going to be French-fried. History is quickening but not yet at a pace of wake-up calls most people want to recognize. In my almanac of prophecies (see 2011 predictions), I said this would be the year when the mainstream starts hearing the first clangs of alarm bells of the unsustainable. I pinpointed two wake-up calls: food sustainability and a redoubling of violent weather, seismic events and other natural disasters that are made unnaturally destructive by humanity’s wholesale abuse of the planet and its climate. Another bell ringing alarm though less noticed by people is the birth of the 7 billionth child set for 2011. Also it would seem that my oft documented warning of a second global economic crisis in the first half of 2011 is on track for fulfillment, and the source will be a rise in oil prices beyond $100 a barrel that continue to climb. It is important to note here that though Arab revolutions play a powerful factor in the oil price rise, the real cause is something far more systemic to our habit of growing demands that cannot be sustained by how we have worked things in the past. Oil and food prices are going up because emergent middle classes around the world are demanding food and energy the global supersystems of oil, energy production and agriculture cannot sustain. So, more shocks, more wake up calls are coming and will redouble this year of 2011, and again in 2012, and 2013, 2014, and so on until we reach the decade wherein waits the greatest threat to civilization, the decade I have been writing about for over 20 years and counting that I call “The Roaring 2020s.” If the wake-up calls are not being heeded now, they will be in 2020, at a time when it will be far more difficult to turn destiny around without much of the world plunging into a new wave of Fascism. Today’s conditioned reflex to anticipate fast food, Roland Emmerich-like, Teutonically Wagnerian, Hollywood style wake up calls will lead to emergency rule in the 2020s that looks a whole lot like Germanic Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s. I do not want that future. That is why I am scaring the be-jeesus out of readers now. Pull your head off the big mac, boys and girls. The tipping point is lurching since 1998. Wake up now, while you can still enjoy the freedom to wake up at all. The great Jewish Philosopher Rambam said in effect that Everything is foretold, but we still have free will. How do wrap our heads around this concept? Is it all predestined as written in the Book of Revelation or the writings of Nostradamus? Let me first answer with a metaphor upon which we all can meditate: There are many destinies for sale in the wholesale store of Time. All the potential futures are lining the shelves of Cosmic “Costco”. Coming through the sliding doors from the present is a purchaser of a future. An individual “buys” a future by his or her actions. He or she possess it, identifies with it, thus it changes a person’s life. We become what destiny we consume. The potential future procured either gives the customer positive or negative future stimuli. A million Cosmic Costco purchasers collectively buying and moving “units” of destiny is a mass of actions causing future reactions and by consequence, creating trends. These trends are our future history. Rambam is on the right track. Though, from my experiences of glimpsing this state of awareness, I would propose that all things are happening at once, forever. How we track them says more about the level of our awareness and the limits of the particular corner of the “multi-verse” in which we live embodied or dis-embodied. Everything has happened. Everything will happen. Everything is happening. All at once in a million years that pass with the snap of one’s fingers. Not all the “products” of potential futures are taken down from the shelves of Akashic Costco, as it were. So, not all the futures for sale happen, even though they exist. That is why sometimes the sensitive among us can see an alternative future we have not yet or never will “purchase.” Nostradamus has a different way of saying the same thing Rambam may be implying. What I gather about Nostradamus’ take is his tortured and dyslexic attempt to describe what a prophet can sometimes tap into by the grace of the divine: a continuum of events that are on the periphery of witnessing consciousness. The prophet momentarily glimpses this and if he or she is a skillful and unattached medium, he or she can describe for us the potential inclinations of our future trends days, weeks or hundreds of years hence. The future is not “this” divine witnessing. Nor is the past. Yet, the present is the doorway through which a remembrance of and union with this witness can be understood. You use this term ‘Super System’. You say ‘All of these supersystems are super-overstressed.’ Are we at the breaking point of these super-systems? And what are the signs when they begin to collapse? In the year 2011, we begin hearing the ringing alarms of large artificial and natural systems that sustain a global civilization and an ecological balance of nature. For instance, the natural world has the supersystem of ocean currents, jet streams, monsoons, the supersystem of rainforests that refresh the atmosphere and so on. These sustain the climate and weather balance of nature. Starting in 1998 and accelerated further since 2008, the natural climacteric supersystems have begun to go awry in a way that at last has become noticeable even to the mainstream mass semi-conscious minded humanity. They may be generally still in denial to the cause of climate disruption but as we experienced wilder weather every year, especially a quickening of such last year in 2010, most people on earth will agree there is global weirding of the weather even if a majority do not believe in global warming as the cause. The year 2011 will be remembered as the time humanity’s artificial supersystems began showing the first signs of their potential collapse later on in the 2020s. I described artificial, human manufactured supersystems in Predictions for 2011 in the following way: “Supersystems are those interconnected mechanisms of a modern global civilization keeping it functioning, such as the global transport system, the worldwide web feeding us information, keeping us connected. The agricultural system sustains nourishment for our exploding population. We have supersystems entrusted with budgetary responsibility to run public services. We have a banking supersystem that invests. The world currently is powered by a fossil fuel supersystem that fuels ALL economies.” In my forecasts for 2011 written in October through early December of last year, I forecast the first alarm bell of an approaching failure of supersystems would begin ringing this year, such as in the supersystem of food production. This is now happening as foreseen because the natural supersystem of the climate is coming unhinged and redoubling the weather and earthquake violence of 2010 in 2011. Russian grain exports halted because of droughts and fires in 2010, grain belts of Australia submerged in catastrophic floods from a more potent monsoon laced with enhanced cyclonic storms (hurricanes). China’s wheat exports are way down because of wheat crop failures from central continental droughts besetting all continents, another sign of a climate supersystem beginning to collapse. These have lead to skyrocketing food prices. Food prices triggered revolutions in early 2011 across North Africa and the Middle East. Food has often been the match of revolutions in the past, and I predict that more will spread beyond the Middle East and North Africa because of this first “tilt” warning, flashing in the supersystem of food sustainability. The next alarm bell is the birth of the 7 billionth child in 2011. You see the signs of his supersystem collapse in the rise of commodity prices as we now begin to add another American-sized middle class population to the planet every five years. Three hundred million new consumers begin demanding that our overstressed supersystems of food, oil, construction materials and other commodity supersystems supply its exploding demand. It is not possible. Not the way we think and unconsciously live today. A more enlightened society could sustain a healthy, spacious planet with 50 billion people living well off upon it. Our childish civilization cannot do that. Little children left to their own devices cannot clothe, shelter and feed themselves. We live in that society. The signs of the beginning of the collapse of childhood’s civilized end are the rising prices in everything. They rise because too many children are selfishly grasping for the resources. Their demand is too large to sustain. Thus you will have a lot of cranky babies out there, revolutions and civil disruptions. The process will be terrible and painful. It will take decades before a newer more mature civilization could emerge out of the chaos of the 2020s. Perhaps it arrives by the 2050s. It could arrive right now, if people heed these warnings and change destiny’s course. What is the tie that binds? Is it God, the Universe, the universal consciousness? What is the source? And how do we tap into it? Or maybe we are already tapped in… but we went in search of many schemes. I would say it is more the “or”, the last part of your question. Many years ago I wrote a poem that perhaps answers the last part of your question best, at least from my own experience of this question: Do you remember the game we played long ago, The game of Gods-Awake who chose to sleep, We chose to play the Game of Forgetting That we were gods playing a game? Dear enlightened one, play-acting enlightened-once, There still is a trace of the awaken-time left In the dark and secret corners of your being. Do you feel it stirring against the burial mound of mind-knowledge Suppressing your conscious flight? It is the Ever-“Yes” awakening in thee. It is calling you back with pure and voiceless silence, To remember godliness again. Sing now a song of yearning for the New Humanity So that it echoes sweet fulfillment back from the halls of the future. © John Hogue 1987 What are a few things that you predicted that came true? For starters, I seem to have the ability to pick the victor by popular vote of every presidential election since 1968. That is an 11 and 0 record so far. Next to that, I have a good track record for predicting the weather for each new year. For instance in Predictions for 2009 I said the Gulf States region would have a quiet Hurricane season except for a modest tropical storm hitting Florida and the Carolinas. These turned out to be the only paces having tropical storm events that year. In Predictions for 2010 I said the US Gulf States would once again enjoy a very quiet Hurricane season at a time when most weather forecasters were predicting a very violent hurricane season spreading the Deep Horizon oil spill. Though there were many hurricanes that season, they boiled and roiled off in the Atlantic Ocean. No hurricanes hit the northern waters of the Gulf or visited the Gulf States except a rainmaker hitting the southern tip of Texas but mostly going into Mexico. Cannot predict a quiet season for 2011, unfortunately. I documented one of my more notable hurricane predictions in the book 1000 for 2000 Startling Predictions (1998). I later repeated that prediction on Fox News for the Hannity and Colmes show on 31 December 1999. I reiterated that either New Orleans or Miami would be devastated in the first five hurricane seasons of the new century by a super-hurricane. As we know, Hurricane Season number five saw New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I presaged in 2008 that an African American would become Chairman of the Republican Party in 2009. Then came African American Michael Steel to the post. At the end of 2007, I predicted the Great Recession for later on in 2008. I also said this on the record on Coast to Coast AM in January of 2008. I also said Obama would be a two term president on that show in early 2009. Got a lot of angry mail for that. A lot of anti-Obama people thought I was nuts. Well…look at the current Republican bullpen of potential candidates for 2012. So far, it does not look too promising that there will be an upset. But we will see. [Hogue update, 06 August 2011. A few months ago I predicted Governor Rick Perry would enter the race making the 2012 campaign far more interesting. At the time of this update, he is about to enter the fray. I still content that Barack Obama will have a second term in office though efforts by certain corporate forces are openly contriving to collapse the economy into a Second Recession, which I dated in Predictions for 2011 coming no later than mid-year. Well, here we are, it seems. Forces are out there. The same forces which in Predictions for 2011 I called “Politicorp” – a new corporate aristocracy/plutocracy – are unleashing since 2012 a creeping coup d’état on the American democracy, often in the name of constitutional reform. But that noble idea is not their intent. Nor is it the scaling down of government spending. Their intent is to hobble the constitution and the democratic government of America, push back protections on food, water and environment by 50 years, to make unlimited and unrestrained profits. They will try to pin this next recession on Obama. If the president can be perceived in the presidential campaign of 2012 to be the only “adult” in the running – not to say that this is true, mind you – this perception at least will see him win in a very close and disputed election. He may face a divided Congress, divided between the Tea Party and Republican Parties, with Democrats a distant third in both houses. The man who “could” beat Obama will not run in 2012 because he has the wrong name, Jeb “Bush”, the former governor of Florida. Now we return to what I wrote back in February-March 2011:] For me some of the more unsettling fulfilled predictions revolve around things that just drop into my awareness out of the blue and go against my own mind, such as predicting the rise of lone wolf terrorists in 2009, followed by lone wolf domestic terrorist attacks in 2010. Getting the unemployment numbers right for the Great Recession was chilling to me. One of the most inexplicable and detailed prophetic hits happened in 2009. That was months before the strategy meetings happened between Obama and the Pentagon over Afghanistan. The oracle grasped exactly what transpired in the future; namely, that Obama would give the Pentagon a troop surge of 40,000 soldiers (10,000 of which were NATO allies) but hold them to an 18-month deadline to turn the tide or he would begin combat troop withdrawals by the summer of 2011. How serious is the potential collapse of Bee populations? The Bee Plague was a bee’s version of the pandemic of the Black Death of the high Middle Ages. In the bees’ case it was caused by crowding of industrial hives to produce more honey. Right now the Bee plague is going dormant, but like the bubonic plague on humans, it will return and subside return and subside. After the Black Death in the 1300s more localized and regional Black Death appeared and retreated throughout Europe and the rest of the world up to the 1700s. One might hope that the bee plague will do no worse, but I would add that the honeybee has become the new canary in the mind shaft, as it were of climate stress on animals and humans. The times of great pandemics are coming again. If not in this decade (watch for 2013-2014 as one important window) then definitely in the 2020s and 2030s. What do you think we could be blind sided with this year? Beyond a Korean War, Attack on Iran or dollar crash. A North Korean collapse is more likely rather than a war. No attack on Iran, even though so many people expect it. The economic crisis stemming form oil prices shooting up beyond $100 was what I said back in 2009 for predictions for 2010, would be the trigger of the next economic crisis. The window for danger opened in October 2010. I said in 2010 that March and April of 2011 would be the most dangerous months of this. Now we have oil rising over $100 and perhaps set to match its all time high of $148 or more because of food and fuel price upheavals and panics in the market around March and April. But the danger is not over if we pass into May through July, because the impact of grain lost to the global markets by Russia’s lingering lack of exports, Australia’s grain mostly good only for livestock because of cyclones. There is also America’s winter wheat crop suffering a lower yield than promised in exports because of a series of violent blizzards early in the year. These will rapidly, as predicted, shift suddenly into violent tornado infested storms of spring across the grain belts of America. Also, there is the 2011 hurricane season which will be at least if not more devastatingly violent than the 2005 season best known for Hurricane Katrina. Oil price climbs may also be threatened if Houston refineries are in the storm line of a great hurricane this year. [Hogue update, 06 August 2011. The peak rise of oil eventually reached the $120s level and even though it stabilized, many accurate market forecasters of Recessions, such as Bert Dohman, President of the Dohman Capital Research Institute, point to the beginning of the Second Recession in May. July ended with worldwide alarm at US leadership with the travesty of their debt ceiling debate. August began with the worst Dow Jones Industrial drop of points since the 2008 recession. S&P just lowered US credit rates by a star and may lower it further. At the time of this writing, Monday (8 August 2011) approaches. Stock markets will continue their recessionary fall for the oncoming week. Some of the worst sectors hit have been in the food and agriculture industries thanks to crop failures from the spring and summer floods. Blizzards did shift quickly to lingering triple-digit heat waves throughout the spring and summer causing widespread livestock and crop die offs in Texas and the central plain states. When I wrote the above, the tornado season was unusually quiet. It later exploded in April, May and June with historic devastation in St. Louis International Airport, super cell tornado outbreaks across the US south, flattening cities and towns of Alabama in particular. Even Massachusetts was hard hit by tornadoes, then Joplin Missouri – flattened. So far, the Gulf of Mexico regions and the Atlantic seaboard states have been spared a repeat of the Katrina-2005 hurricane season. The most active part of the season is ahead of us. Hopefully I will be wrong about it being violent storms for Houston and the Gulf, but Haiti is in the hurricane season’s cross-hairs, sorry to say. Now back to what I wrote in early March:] Prophecy likes to date events but free will does speed up or delay events. It is possible that these surprises can be delayed into 2012 or 2013 but at this time of writing (8 March 2011), the trends appear to be on course. There are also pleasant surprises that might blind-side us this year or next. I spent a whole chapter in Predictions for 2011 on a five year process Israel’s leadership might take that could see Iran isolated and the Palestinian State established. That future IS available for Israel if its leadership uses the rise of democratic desires across the Arab world to make peace with its Arab neighbors and thereby leave Iran as the sole remaining threat to the Arab world. An Israeli-Iranian war may happen as a result with the US allied in the fighting with Israel, but there is time for moderate voices in Iran to prevail. I foresee the war danger not coming until the present times enter the year 2015 and 2016. There are many more details about the economy, the future of the US military presence in the Middle East, where it is shifting next, the oncoming “Cold Depression” which is like a Cold War in economic terms, etc., that people can read more about by clicking on predictions. Read my Predictions for 2012:

Last week, we ran a post with advice for families bringing kids to visit Santa, written by a former mall Santa who got the job despite being skinny, thirtyish, and Jewish. He explained how to keep your children from melting down on Santa’s lap. One former elf, who we’ll call “Holly,” took offense at one of that particular Santa’s tips for saving money, and wrote in to explain how things worked at the mall where she served as “elf,” or manager of the Santa set. The main thing she wants our readers to know: if you don’t buy any photos and insist on only taking your own, you’re a Grinchy jerk who is figuratively yanking money out of every employee’s pockets. The photography companies contract with the mall, and we get the space allotted to and designed for us. Generally, all the staff, including Santa, work for the photography company. Both companies that I worked for hired only natural bearded Santas, so the skinny Jewish Santa in your story would not cut it. On to photography. The entire point of Santa being there in the mall is for the photography company to make money. They are paying Santa and the staff. The malls get a cut of that money. Many malls, including both I worked in, had a policy that prohibited photography on mall property. In one mall it was seasonal, in one it was all year. Taking that picture instead of buying one of our packages is literally taking bread out of the mouth of the manager, and sometimes Santa, of that site. Managers get a bonus, usually something equal to half their pay for the entire season, if they meet sales goals. With the companies I worked for, Santa got a bonus too. Managers at these sites are usually salaried, but it works out to about $10.00 per hour or less, especially if there is extensive administrative work like scheduling. Assistant managers usually make $8.50 – $9.00 per hour. The rest of the staff, excluding Santa? Minimum wage. We would do everything possible to block parents from taking their own pictures, up to and including calling mall security to have them removed. Why? We wanted to be able to afford to eat and to not lose our jobs. Telling people to take their own pictures in many cases violates both mall policy and the policy of the photography company, who leases the ‘set’ where Santa is and I have seen it go as far as getting someone permanently banned from the mall we were in because they got belligerent, I called security, and then the person got even uglier with security. Please advise your readers that it is NOT okay to take their own picture when their child is sitting with Santa. If they really feel the need to capture the memory, buy the least expensive package. Many companies have a policy that as long as the family is buying something, they’ll allow a quick extra couple of shots by the parent. One company I worked with allowed the family to videotape the entire visit with Santa as long as they were buying at least one picture package. But please remember that the people who are working are very poorly paid and very much need the bonus that they could earn from your business. As much as we would like to think a visit with Santa is a fun cultural event, it really is a business. Thanks, Holly! It’s really helpful to hear about this from the business side, even if Santa has already come and gone this year. When you stop to think about it, many money-saving, deal-hunting tactics that fans of this blog employ are also taking money from the pockets of low-paid employees. When you turn down a store credit card, decline a particular upsell, or use your local retailers as an Amazon showroom, you’re affecting sales figures or important metrics that in turn affect employees’ pay and the number of hours they’ll be scheduled. That’s not really the same as using a resource (Santa) without purchasing the item for sale (photos) but keep it in mind when planning your Santa visit next year.

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips Viking, 480 pages, $26.95 The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us by James Rudin Thunder’s Mouth, 300 pages, $26 Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg W.W. Norton, 224 pages, $23.95 Thy Kingdom Come: How The Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament by Randall Balmer Basic, 242 pages, $24.95 This is a paranoid moment in American politics. A host of conspiracies haunt our national imagination, and apparent incompetence is assumed to be the consequence of a dark design: President Bush knew about the attacks of September 11 in advance, or else the Israelis did; the Straussians took us to war in Iraq, unless the oil companies did; the federal government let the levees break in New Orleans, unless it dynamited them itself. Perhaps the strangest of these strange stories, though, is the notion that twenty-first-century America is slouching toward theocracy. This is an old paranoia: Back in 1952, the science-fiction libertarian Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 envisioned a religious tyranny toppled by a Freemason-led rebellion; in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale imagined America as a Christian-fascist Republic of Gilead, with its capital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its public executions staged in Harvard Yard. But the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era, reaching a fever pitch in the weeks after the 2004 election, when a host of commentators seized on polls suggesting that moral values had pushed the president over the top”and found in that data point a harbinger of Gilead. Later, more cool-headed polling analysis suggested that the values explanation was something of a stretch: The movement of religious voters into the GOP played a role in Bush’s victory, but the uptick in his support between 2000 and 2004 seems mainly to have reflected national-security concerns. Still, these pesky facts didn’t stop Garry Wills from announcing the end of the Enlightenment and the arrival of jihad in America, or Jane Smiley from bemoaning the ignorance and bloodlust of Bush voters in thrall to a fire-and-brimstone God, or left-wing bloggers from chattering about Jesusland and fundies and plotting their escape to Canada. The paranoia hasn’t yet burned down to embers. The term theocrat has become a commonplace, employed by bomb-throwing columnists, otherwise-sensible reporters, and centrist Republicans such as Connecticut’s Christopher Shays, who recently complained that the GOP was becoming the party of theocracy. And now the specter of a looming Khomeini’ism has migrated into the realm of pop sociology, producing a spate of books with titles like The Baptizing of America, Kingdom Coming, Thy Kingdom Come -and, inevitably, American Theocracy , the Kevin Phillips jeremiad that shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list this spring. Most of these books aspire to be anthropologies, guides for the perplexed that lead the innocent reader through what the subtitle of American Theocracy calls the perils and politics of radical religion. There isn’t perfect agreement on what to call the religious radicals in question: Everyone employs theocrat, but Kingdom Coming also proposes Christian nationalist, while The Baptizing of America favors the clunky Christocrat. Others have suggested Christianist, the better to link religious conservatives to Osama bin Laden”and of course there’s the ubiquitous theocon, suggesting a deadly mixture of Oliver Cromwell and Paul Wolfowitz. But the various authors are in agreement about the main point, which is that something has gone terribly wrong with the separation of church and state in this country, and that America is poised to fall into the hands of people only one step from the ayatollahs. Today’s battles aren’t just a matter of ordinary political factionalism, they insist. The hour is much later than that, and nothing less than the republic itself hangs in the balance. To understand what, precisely, the anti-theocrats think has gone so wrong, it’s necessary to understand what they mean by the term theocracy . This is no easy task. The word is often used to connote government by a specific institutional faith”Shia imams in Iran, say, or Wahhabi clerics in Afghanistan”with the clergy writing laws and a temple guard enforcing them. But the clout of institutional religion is at low ebb in American politics. No prelate wields the kind of authority that Catholic bishops once enjoyed over urban voters, no denomination can claim the kind of influence that once belonged to the old WASP mainline, and the evangelical Protestantism that figures so prominently in anti-theocracy tracts is distinguished precisely by its lack of any centralized ecclesiastical government. Occasionally, the anti-theocrats flirt with the possibility that one institutional church or another might pose a threat to the democratic order. In American Theocracy , for instance, Kevin Phillips waxes paranoid about the Southern Baptist Convention’s role as the state church of the South, and he tallies, darkly, the number of Baptists who have insinuated themselves into the highest levels of American government. But for the most part, the sum of all secular fears is slightly”but only slightly”more plausible than a Southern Baptist caesaropapism. The real danger, the anti-theocrats suggest, is an ecumenical theocracy that would install a right-wing Mere Christianity as its established religion, subject unbelievers to discrimination, and enshrine the Mosaic code as the law of the land. In The Baptizing of America , Rabbi James Rudin”the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser”offers a sketch of what America will look like if the theocrats get their way. All government employees”federal, state and local”would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions, as would employees of any company or institution receiving federal funds. There would be a national ID card, identifying everyone by their religious beliefs, or lack thereof”and such cards would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education. Non-Christian faiths would be tolerated, but younger members . . . would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity. Gay sex would be prosecuted, and known homosexuals and lesbians would have to successfully undergo government-sponsored reeducation sessions if they applied for any public-sector jobs. Political dissent would be squashed, religious censors would keep watch over the popular culture, and the mainstream press and the electronic media would be beaten into submission. Sadly, Rudin’s book is thin on examples of significant political actors who are proposing taking any of these steps, let alone all of them. What he has instead are the Christian Reconstructionists”the acolytes of the late R.J. Rushdoony”who are genuine theocrats, of a sort, and who also rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from figuring prominently in nearly all the anti-theocrat anthropologies, playing the same role that international communism played for right-wing paranoiacs in the 1950s: the puppet master working from the shadows and the hidden hand behind every secular setback. Like a diehard John Bircher poring over Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speeches in search of the Supreme Soviet’s marching orders, Rudin scans the utterances of evangelicals and their allies for Reconstructionist language. Did Billy Graham once advise evangelicals to run for public office and take control of the various branches for government? Then he must believe, with the Reconstructionists, that all adversaries must be completely eliminated from positions of authority and that to achieve a divine end by any means”including cruelty, deception, and brute force”is justified. Did Antonin Scalia suggest that government derives its moral authority from God? Well, he doubtless intended to issue a legal green light to theocrats seeking to destroy all existing political systems . . . and replace them with their own religion-soaked political regimes. Perhaps most religious conservatives, Rudin generously allows, are unaware of the potent ideology that calls for the dismantling of American democracy . . . and its replacement by an authoritarian Christian commonwealth. But then, of course, most Eisenhower voters were unaware, in the 1950s, that Ike’s administration was infiltrated and controlled by Communist agents”and more fool they. Similarly, Kevin Phillips announces that for all practical purposes, Pat Robertson is a Christian Reconstructionist”not because Robertson has ever identified himself as such but because his start-up university bears the sinister sobriquet Regent, an obvious reference to the Rushdoonian notion of Christians as God’s viceroys on Earth. Phillips doesn’t precisely accuse President Bush of being a Reconstructionist, but he notes that Bush’s GOP gets an awful lot of votes from the Mormons”who have created a de-facto establishment of religion in the inner mountain West”and that the Bush family has been close to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his cultish Unification Church. And then there’s Bush’s habit of encoding private scriptural invocations into his speeches. Not only did the president use the biblically loaded phrases hills to climb and seeing the valley below in his 2004 convention acceptance speech, but he also mentioned the resurrection of New York City. The resurrection. Clearly something sinister is afoot. Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming : The Rise of Christian Nationalism is marginally less ridiculous than this, perhaps because Goldberg, a reporter for Salon, actually spent some time among the believers and even found herself liking them. I was treated with remarkable openness and hospitality, she notes, and speaks with sympathy of the Christian nationalists’ eagerness to engage in passionate discussion about the meaning of life, and about how we understand morality and reality. But within a page, she’s quoting Hannah Arendt on the origins of totalitarianism and warning balefully that individual decency can dissolve when groups are mobilized against diabolized enemies. Goldberg’s approach, like that of all the anti-theocrat authors, is to assume that the most extreme manifestation of religious conservatism must, by definition, be its most authentic expression. So she analyzes contemporary evangelicalism without once mentioning Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, or any other prominent pop theologian, and her description of mega-churches”at once temples of religious nationalism and tightly organized right-wing political machines”suggests a fairly thin acquaintance with the variegated world of entrepreneurial Protestantism. The continuum of conservative Christian belief, in her telling, runs from Rushdoony on the Right to D. James Kennedy on the Left. And the taint of theocracy is everywhere, infecting everyone from Timothy McVeigh (a potential harbinger of theocratic authoritarianism, despite his distinct lack of Christian beliefs) to Marvin Olasky (who seems to be drawn to totalitarian ideologies). You can even be a totalitarian-theocrat-authoritarian without realizing it. Describing a speaker at a rally following the death of Terri Schiavo, Goldberg admits that the lawyer David Gibbs is a Baptist, not a Reconstructionist. But then comes the kicker: But whether he knew it or not, Reconstructionism shaped his thinking, just as it shaped the thinking of the Christian nationalist movement as a whole. These inanities are almost excusable, since Goldberg is such an obvious prisoner of her biases and preconceptions. Whereas Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament is less forgivable, because Balmer ought to have known better. He is an evangelical Christian, a professor of religious history at Columbia, and the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory , a largely sympathetic exploration of evangelical belief in America. Yet Thy Kingdom Come -a glorified pamphlet, despite its endless subtitle”is indistinguishable from the general run of secularist hysterics, save for a smug reference to Balmer’s spotless Sunday school attendance record and a patina of real Baptist outrage over how the Religious Right has supposedly hijacked his heritage. There’s certainly room, after thirty years of culture war, for an informed and evenhanded critique of Christian conservatism, and Balmer’s background would seem to make him an ideal writer for the job. But while he occasionally nods in the direction of intelligent criticism”noting the disparity between the Christian Right’s fixation on gay marriage, say, and its long-running silence on divorce; or zinging religious conservatives for writing the Bush administration a blank check in the war on terror”these arguments are quickly dropped in favor of the usual litany of anti-theocrat complaints, flavored with the usual apocalyptic rhetoric. What would America look like if the Religious Right had its way? Balmer wonders. The best answer is that Christian conservatism hankers for the kind of homogeneous theocracy that the Puritans tried to establish in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. A few attempts to insert Intelligent Design into public school curricula constitute an insidious plot to overturn the Enlightenment, while the campaign to allow voluntary prayer in public schools is an attempt to dismantle the First Amendment. In the debate over vouchers and homeschooling, Balmer (who opposes both) assures his readers that the future of American democracy hangs in the balance. Once again, all roads lead to Rushdoony. Reconstructionism, Thy Kingdom Come asserts, has driven evangelicalism’s radical tack to the right, influencing everyone from Pat Robertson to Richard Land to Jerry Falwell to Roy Moore. But unlike Rudin or Phillips, Balmer doesn’t bother to do close readings of conservative speeches, teasing out the Reconstructionist code words and theocratic allusions. He has all the evidence he needs: The Rushdoonian Chalcedon Foundation’s website, Balmer announces with the air of a lawyer delivering an airtight summation, once published a defense of Roy Moore, which was penned by an associate professor at Falwell’s Liberty University. So Rushdoony is Moore is Falwell: Case closed. When the evidence for Rushdoonian infiltration of the Religious Right grows thin for even the most diligent decoder, the subject is usually changed to the Rapture, another supposed pillar of the emerging theocratic edifice. Premillenarian dispensationalism’s emphasis on the imminent collapse of all institutions, foreign and domestic, would seem an odd fit with Reconstructionism’s idea of hastening Christ’s coming by building his (political) kingdom on Earth. But every 1950s conspiracist knew that when Communists seemed to differ”Tito and Stalin, Stalin and Mao”it only concealed a deeper concord. Similarly, everyone on the Christian Right is understood to be on the same side, no matter their superficial disagreements. And the Rapture thesis has too much explanatory power to be ignored. Why did George W. Bush go to war in Iraq? The answers are all in the Book of Revelation”or perhaps on the Christian fiction aisle of your local Barnes and Noble. It is eerie, writes Phillips, to see so many Bush administration foreign-policy qualities anticipated in the Left Behind novels. One step further into absurdity, Balmer informs his readers that the belief in dispensational premillennialism explains the lousy church architecture of the last fifty years: Why invest your resources in building or ornamentation when Jesus will return at any time? Or again, why are Christocrats fiddling while the Late Great Planet Earth burns? In a New York Review of Books essay on The Evangelist Menace, Bill Moyers explained the theocrats’ reasoning this way: Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? Never mind that conservative Catholics tend to be relatively supportive of environmental regulation, that evangelicals are divided on the issue (and perhaps trending leftward), and that the Bush administration’s refusal to take dramatic steps to combat global warming”like the Clinton administration’s refusal before it”probably has more to do with economics than eschatology. Never mind, too, that the main evidence for the pernicious influence of apocalypticism seems to be the success of a series of bestselling thrillers, which is rather like trying to divine a widespread gnostic political conspiracy by tabulating sales of The Da Vinci Code . Never mind, because the Rushdoony-and-Rapture theory’s implausibility is crucial to its appeal. Just as a plausible account of American politics in the 1950s would have left no room for the fantasies of the John Birch Society, a reasonable account of the Religious Right would have to accept the possibility that religious conservatives are fairly normal American political actors, seeking to further their agenda through normal political channels. Or as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru put it, in an essay written amid the values voter hysteria of 2004: It may be instructive to think about the wish list of Christian-conservative organizations involved in politics. They would generally prohibit abortion, and perhaps research that destroys human embryos. They would have the government refuse to accord legal standing to homosexual relationships. They would restrict pornography in various ways. They would have more prayer in the schools, and less evolution. They think that religious groups should be able to participate in federal programs without compromising their beliefs. They would replace sex education with abstinence education. They want the government to promote marital stability . . . . Nearly every one of these policies”and all of the most conservative ones”would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy. This reality poses no particular problem if you simply disagree with religious conservatives about abortion or gay marriage or prayer in public schools. But if you’re committed to the notion that religious conservatives represent an existential threat to democratic government, you need a broader definition of theocracy to convey your sense of impending doom. Which is why the anti-theocrats often suggest that it doesn’t take mullahs, an established church, or a Reconstructionist ban on adultery to make a theocracy. All you need are politicians who invoke religion and apply Christian principles to public policy. If that’s all it takes to make a theocracy, then these writers are correct: Contemporary America is run by theocrats. Of course, by that measure, so was the America of every previous era. The United States has always been at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious, and this tension has been working itself out in our politics for more than two hundred years. It’s often been a mixed blessing, giving us Prohibition as well as abolition, Jesse Jackson as well as Reinhold Niebuhr, the obsession with free silver as well as the zeal for civil rights. But there’s no way to give an account of American history without grappling with this tension”and with the role played, for good and ill and sometimes both, by religious reformers from Jonathan Edwards all the way down to Jerry Falwell. Yet this is a history that the anti-theocrats seem determined to reject. The Christian Right isn’t just bad for America because of its right-wing misapplication of religious faith, they suggest-it’s bad for America because any application of faith to politics is inevitably poisonous, intolerant, and illiberal. Religion in America has always functioned best from the margins, Randall Balmer explains, urging Christians to retreat into a countercultural role that he claims is closer to what both the gospel and the Founders had in mind. (In Balmer’s world, homeschooling your children doesn’t count as being countercultural, but voting Democratic does.) There is no such thing as a Christian politics, Garry Wills intoned recently in a New York Times op-ed, warning liberals against trying to turn religion to their advantage. If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. In a Time magazine essay defending his use of the Osama-inflected term Christianist to describe religious conservatives, Andrew Sullivan announced his opposition to any politicization of the gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. My kingdom is not of this world,’ Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand? In Kingdom Coming , Michelle Goldberg dismisses any talk of a Christian influence on the American founding as right-wing revisionism and then offers a bowdlerized history of her own, in which we were bequeathed a pristinely secular republic that the fundamentalists have been chipping away at ever since. Several times in our history, she notes, apparently innocuous references to God have been injected into public life during national crises, only to be used later to legitimate further erosions of church-state separation. These erosions include the In God We Trust added to the currency in 1863, the elimination of Sunday mail in 1912, and the 1954 insertion of under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Obviously, the theocrats play a long game. Whenever politicians invoke religion, Kevin Phillips suggests in a characteristic passage, the people perish: The newly Christian fourth-century Rome of the Emperor Constantine and his successors held up the cross as Rome faced military defeat and crumbling frontiers from Hadrian’s Wall to Assyria. So did seventeenth-century Spain, the proud but ill-omened command post of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Vestments of crusaderdom also cloaked imperial Britain’s overreach in World War I and its aftermath. In addition to casting religious conservatives as mullahs, proto-fascists, and agents of American decline, this strict-separationist interpretation of world history frees the anti-theocrats from the messy business of actually arguing with their opponents. From sex education and government support for religious charities to stem cells and abortion, it’s enough to call something faith-based and dismiss it. Indeed, reading through the anti-theocrat literature, one gets the sense that the surest way to judge if a political idea is wrong, dangerous, or antidemocratic is to tally up the number of religious people who support it. Except that nobody really believes this line. Just a few weeks before he announced that a Christian politics was a contradiction in terms, Garry Wills was in the New York Review of Books celebrating the role of the clergy in the civil rights movement and wiping a nostalgic tear from his eye as he declared that there was a time, not so long ago, when religion was a force for liberation in America. After years of blasting any religious encroachment on the political sphere as a threat to the Constitution, the New York Times editorial page awoke to find Cardinal Roger Mahony advocating civil disobedience by Catholics to protest an immigration bill”and immediately praised the cardinal for adding a moral dimension to what has largely been a debate about politics and economics. After spending two hundred pages describing all the evils that would pour through any breach in the wall between church and state, Michelle Goldberg suggests that liberals should hope that leaders on the Religious Left will find a way to channel some of America’s moral fervor into a new social gospel. And just a chapter before launching into a florid denunciation of the Christian Right’s lust for political power and cultural influence, Randall Balmer celebrates Victorian evangelicals for taking on the task of reforming society according to the standards of godliness, and seeking generally to make the world a better place. He praises William Jennings Bryan for being a political liberal by today’s standards and even defends the Great Commoner against a brutal character assassination at the hands of H.L. Mencken during the Scopes trial”this from an author who devotes thirty pages to attacking Intelligent Design as a battering ram for theocrats bent on the conquest of American society. Bryan, Balmer explains, had fewer qualms about Darwinism itself than he did about the social effects of evolutionary theory. A Christian is allowed to entertain such doubts, in other words, and allowed to mix religion and politics in support of sweeping social reforms” but only if those reforms are safely identified with the political Left, and with the interests of the Democratic party. There are ways to avoid this contradiction, but none of them are particularly persuasive. Sometimes it’s argued that what sets the contemporary Christian Right apart from previous iterations of politically active religion isn’t its Christianity per se but its unwillingness to couch argument in terms that nonbelievers can accept”to use public reason, in the Rawlsian phrase, to make a political case that doesn’t rely on Bible-thumping. As a prudential matter, the case for public reason makes a great deal of sense. But one searches American history in vain”from abolitionist polemics down to Martin Luther King’s Scripture-saturated speeches”for any evidence of this supposedly ironclad rule being rigorously applied, or applied at all. And besides, religious conservatives do, frequently and loudly, make arguments for their positions on non-theological grounds. Perhaps not as often as they should, to judge by the movement’s repeated political and cultural defeats (defeats that the anti-theocrats gloss over, since it would complicate their portrait of an all-powerful Christofascism on the march). But the evils of abortion, the value of heterosexual monogamy, the costs of promiscuity and pornography”all these issues are constantly being raised by social conservatives without appeals to the divine inspiration of the Bible. Tellingly, when a professor at Patrick Henry College explains to Goldberg how he teaches students to use terms and facts that the other side accepts as reasonable, she calls it a rhetorical two-step and casts it as yet another example of the devious Christianist project of political infiltration: Heads you’re a theocrat, tails you’re a theocrat. Again, perhaps today’s Christians are too comprehensive in their political aims; religious involvement in politics is acceptable, this argument runs, so long as it takes place on an issue-by-issue basis, but the more sweeping the goals, the stronger the whiff of theocracy. For Jeff Sharlet, for instance, writing a Rolling Stone profile of Sam Brownback, it’s the senator’s willingness to talk about a sweeping Christian renewal that makes him creepy. Brownback, echoing John Paul II, says he hopes for a cultural springtime in America, and Sharlet sums up this vision as a theocratic order that is pleasant and balmy. Except that it’s hard to imagine anything more sweeping than Martin Luther King’s dream for a Sermon on the Mount-style revolution in the South. King was a single-issue activist, in a sense, but his issue was the mystic renovation of an entire society. Similarly, the social gospel of Bryan’s era aimed at bringing an entire industrial society into line with biblical principles, making it easily as comprehensive as anything that Sam Brownback has ever dreamed up. So too with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, whose bishops have over the years taken positions”often ill-advisedly but never theocratically”on issues ranging from marriage law to nuclear war to immigration. If anything, the single-issue argument is often used against Catholic conservatives, who are accused of being too narrowly focused on questions of life and death rather than the larger seamless garment of Catholic social teaching. So maybe it’s not the issues, but the actors”the Christian Right’s narrow base of supporters, for instance, and its identification with a single political party, both of which contrast unfavorably with the supposed ecumenism and bipartisanship of the civil rights movement. This is the argument of Sullivan, among others; he admits that the civil-rights movement was indeed a fundamentally religious phenomenon, but . . . it was also multi-denominational and included Democrats and Republicans. Its core religious principle was non-violence, and it drew enormous inspiration from Gandhi. It included Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, atheists and agnostics. And it never, in King’s time, became a vehicle for one political party to win elections. There’s a great deal of confusion here”the Religious Right is nothing if not multidenominational, for one thing”but also a grain of truth. No religion-infused movement can afford to be used by a political party as a way to gain votes and nothing more. That’s how the Democrats have used the Al Sharpton / Jesse Jackson-era civil rights establishment and, sadly, how the GOP has often used the Religious Right. But this is less of a danger to the nation’s self-government than to the integrity of religious witness. When Tom DeLay cloaks himself in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ to brush off charges of corruption, it’s not the separation of church and state that’s in danger but DeLay’s own Christian faith. When preachers echo GOP talking points rather than shape them, they risk going down the same path trod by the liberal clerics of the 1960s, whose sermons became indistinguishable from the gospel according to the New York Times -until, as David Frum once put it, their parishioners began to wonder why they should spend a Sunday morning listening to the same editorial twice? But any idealistic movement has to risk such compromises if it intends to leave the mountaintop and make a difference in the valley below. It’s telling that the obvious alternative, the purer-than-thou Christian quietism suggested, at times, by writers like Balmer and Wills, was often urged on believers by segregationist clerics in the civil rights-era South. The realities of politics don’t necessarily make for the most Christlike displays: I’ve got all my votes, and I’ve got a suitcase, Martin Luther King Sr. remarked after John F. Kennedy helped get his son released from jail, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap. But every moral crusade in American history has ultimately become intertwined with one or both of the political parties”because political parties are how movements get things done. As for why the Religious Right has become so tightly bound to the GOP, rather than becoming as Democratic as the Populists once were, or as bipartisan as the civil rights movement was (albeit ever so briefly)”well, that’s a question that the anti-theocrats rarely address in any detail, beyond dark references to the nefarious activities of Karl Rove. Only Phillips has the honesty to analyze the political trends that have brought about this supposedly theocratic moment”and he does so with almost charming obliviousness, quoting experts such as John Green, Geoffrey Layman, and Louis Bolce, as if unaware that their arguments vitiate his thesis. What all these observers point out, and what the anti-theocrats ignore, is that the religious polarization of American politics runs in both directions. The Republican party has become more religious because the Democrats became self-consciously secular, and the turning point wasn’t the 1992 or the 2000 elections but the putsch of 1972, when secularist delegates”to quote Phillips, quoting Layman”suddenly constituted the largest religious’ bloc among Democratic delegates. Yet having noted this rather significant fact, Phillips sets it aside and returns blithely to his preferred narrative, which is the transformation of the GOP into America’s first religious party. But that’s not what happened at all”or rather, it’s the second half of the story, the Republican reaction against the Democrats’ decision to become the first major party in American history to pander to a sizable bloc of aggressively secular voters. This was very much a strategic electoral move on their part. As Mark Stricherz pointed out last year in a Commonweal essay titled Goodbye Catholics, Democrats in the McGovern era were faced with the crack-up of the old New Deal coalition and made a conscious decision to jettison blue-collar voters in favor of what a 1969 memo called a different political and social group with rising educational levels, affluence, and . . . greater cultural sophistication. At the time, pursuing a coalition of younger voters, minorities, and affluent suburbanites seemed a better bet than trying to hang on to socially conservative voters, especially given that all the energy in the party seemed to be coming from the Left. But it required the Democrats to identify with a segment of the population”self-identified secularists and nonbelievers”that has grown rapidly over the past three decades and grown more assertive along the way. Which in turn has alienated the devout plurality of Americans and left the Democratic party stuck just shy of majority status for the better part of a generation. So the rise of the Religious Right, and the growing religion gap that Phillips describes but fails to understand, aren’t new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing: to an old political party newly dependent on a bloc of voters who reject the role that religion has traditionally played in American political life. The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters’ prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark. The tragedy is that so many religious people have gone along with this revisionism”out of sympathy for the lifestyle liberalism of the secular Left, or out of disdain for the crudity and anti-intellectualism of some religious conservatives, or out of embarrassment in the face of a culture that sneers at anyone who takes their faith too seriously. In the process, they have become everything they claim to oppose: bigoted and hysterical, apocalyptic and self-righteous. What’s worse, they have corrupted themselves for the sake of a politics that cares nothing for their faith”that would tame it to suit the needs of secular society or do away with it entirely. Garry Wills is half-right: There is no single Christian politics, and no movement can claim to have arrived at the perfect marriage of religious faith and political action. Christianity is too otherworldly for that, and the world too fallen. But this doesn’t free believers from the obligation to strive in political affairs, as they strive in all things, to do what God would have them do. And the moments when God’s will is inscrutable, or glimpsed only through a glass, darkly, are the moments when good-faith arguments between believers ought to bear the greatest fruit. In today’s America, these arguments are constantly taking place”over issues ranging from abortion to foreign policy; over the potential, and potential limits, of interfaith cooperation; over the past and future of the Religious Right. But they are increasingly drowned out by cries of theocracy, theocracy, theocracy and by a zeal, among ostensibly religious intellectuals, to read their fellow believers out of public life and sell their birthright for the blessing of the New York Times . Ross Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.

“The self-monitored habits that sustain and improve the digital communities you enjoy or depend on.”from TeachThought.com SFS Parent Presentations: Parenting in the Digital Age (children 0-7) Sidwell Friends School 4th Grade - email and online communication workshop: Getting Started on the Right Foot Jewish Primary Day School Presentation - 5th-6th Graders: Your Life Online McLean School Parent Workshop: Navigating the Online World Park School Presentation - Parents and Students: Your Life Online: Becoming a Better Digital Citizen St Andrew's Episcopal School Presentation - High School Students: Your Life Online: Protecting and Building Your Digital Dossier Reflections on a Digital World - Jenni Swanson Voorhees' blog At home and school, guide your child through this reflection cycle: · Awareness: How the technology I use affects others and myself. · Understanding: Uses of technology that are appropriate and inappropriate. · Action: Making the best decision in a situation. · Deliberation: Did my behavior have a positive or negative influence? Would I do it again? Source: Ribble and Bailey: Teaching Digital Citizenship Reflection. A simple list to review frequently with your children: - The internet is public. Don’t post anything you don’t want the whole world to know. This includes revealing photos, offhand comments, etc. Keep the “Mom” rule in mind: “Would I want my Mom to see this?” or how about the college of your choice? - People aren’t necessarily who they say they are. Don’t talk to strangers. If you do, be aware that you don’t know who they really are. If you have an issue, talk to the person face-to-face – you should know them well enough to be able to contact them. - Avoid any forms of hate speech and inappropriate content. Report it. Don’t do it yourself. - Don't be a bystander - stand up and speak out when you observe bullying behavior. The bystander is the most powerful position in the situation IF you step up and do something. Stay informed: Review the news when it relates to behavior on the internet. Keep the family informed, discuss the issues and listen to your children’s perspective. What role are you (and the family) playing? Digital Footprints - who is leaving them besides the child? - Active - content the child posts online - Passive - data being gathered about the child, whether meta-data or history tracking the child (avoided if you prevent children from signing into sites requiring them to be 13 or older.) - Second-Hand - what friends, family, school, others post about the child - which the child has no control over. (Think of parental Facebook posts of family photos, etc.) Family Ground Rules Treat the Behavior, not the Tool: We are all dependent on our technology for work, and our children are no different. If they misbehave, don't be afraid to be the parent and treat the behavior, don’t blame the tool. Don't be Afraid to be the Parent Setting limits on our kids when they are passionate about wanting something is hard, but it's our job. Give them clear parameters for time online, and high expectations that they will be engaged in creative, challenging activities that causes them to reach frustration, get beyond it, and persevere. Help your child move through frustration and failure to build resilience. That's what it's all about. Engage with what they are engaged in - ask them to teach you about the games they are playing, the devices they are using, the apps they are fascinated by. Share their world in a positive way. Here is a list of suggested agreements you can make with your child about using tech tools at home. Written and signed, this document will help establish guidelines before habits get into place: - How much (non-homework)online/gaming is appropriate (time depending on the age of the child)? - Where should homework be done? - What is okay to do besides school work on the tech tool and for how long? - Will my parents have access to my browsing history? - What rules should there be about social media, instant messaging, and Skype? Who can I talk to? When? - What time should the tech tool be put away? - Where do phones/laptops go at night? (Consider setting up a family charging station for ALL of you in a central room of the house.) - Young children are not ready to navigate Google's options independently - Guide and monitor all searches - they can learn from you - Use safe search engines such as KidRex.org Tools for Families (Filtering advice) Kinder & Braver World Project (Anti-Bullying) A Parent's Guide to Google+ A Parent's Guide to Facebook

After months of legal wrangling, one of the 10 safe deposit boxes in which documents belonging to the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924 ) and his close friend Max Brod (1884-1968 ) were hidden for 40 years was opened Monday in Tel Aviv. A delegation of smartly dressed lawyers arrived at the entrance to the Kikar Hamedina branch of Discount Bank at 10 A.M., holding a court order stating the safe deposit box must be opened. The contents, however, cannot be publicly revealed as the owner of the deposit box, Eva Hoffe, petitioned the court for a ban on publication. Haaretz has requested that the court, through the law offices of Lieblich-Moser, lift the ban. A year ago the Tel Aviv Family Court, where the case is being heard, accepted the newspaper's petition that the hearings be opened to the public; until then, they had been held behind closed doors. The process of opening the safe deposit boxes will take a week. They are held in six different vaults in different banks in Tel Aviv, as well as four others vaults in a bank in the Swiss city of Zurich. Witnesses who had been inside the bank at Kikar Hamedina when the team of lawyers arrived said Eva Hoffe burst into the building in an attempt to prevent the safe from being opened, shouting "It's mine, it's mine!" The boxes are being opened in the presence of a battery of lawyers appointed by the court: the executors of the estates of Max Brod and his secretary and heir, Esther Hoffe; a representative of Hoffe's daughter, Eva; and a representative of the custodian general. The team of lawyers will draw up an inventory of the documents they find in the boxes and present it to the Tel Aviv court. Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman will then determine the documents' status - whether they are the private property of the Hoffe sisters, who can then do with them whatever they want, or whether they constitute a literary treasure that must be transferred to a public archive. Researchers and experts from Israel and Germany believe that some of the boxes may contain manuscripts by Kafka, widely considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, or documents that can shed additional light on the mysterious life of the artist who died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna at the age of 40 and who is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. An emotional battle "The contents of the vaults are the private business of [Eva] Hoffe and her sister, and at this stage no one else has permission to know of their contents," Hoffe's attorney, Uri Zfat, wrote to the court. In her deposition to the court, Hoffe articulated her fear that once the boxes were opened and their contents revealed, "they will be disseminated to the public and in this way, my property, assets, rights, privacy and human dignity will be compromised." Hoffe and her sister inherited the safety deposit boxes from their mother, Esther Hoffe - Max Brod's longtime secretary and friend. Esther Hoffe died about three years ago; since then an emotional legal battle ensued over the Jewish National and University Library's demand that Hoffe hand over the manuscripts. At the same time, the German Literature Archives in Marbach, Germany is also interested in obtaining the documents and has been negotiating with Hoffe to buy them. The opening of the vaults was facilitated by the executors of Esther Hoffe's estate, Shmuel Cassouto, Dan Novhari, Rami Hadar and Dan Zimmerman, who were responsible for handling the technical and bureaucratic difficulties involved in carrying out the court order. Dr. Aviad Stollman of the national library told Haaretz: "We are happy to hear that the process of revealing the contents of the vaults in which the manuscripts were hidden for decades has begun. We were sorry to learn that a request was submitted to prevent the contents of the vault from being revealed. It is a shame that Ms. Hoffe is not prepared to let the public be party to these important literary treasures, and that she is trying to thwart the clarification of the truth." Want to enjoy 'Zen' reading - with no ads and just the article? Subscribe todaySubscribe now

Friday, August 11, 2017 Tuesday, July 25, 2017 Wednesday, June 21, 2017 Friday, April 28, 2017 Tuesday, April 25, 2017 - More from Good Life Guide Baby Boomers, Fascinated by Tales of Their Famous and Infamous Ancestors, Have Made Genealogy One of America's Hottest Hobbies Posted: August 1, 1999 Published July/August 1999Family trees Baby Boomers, Fascinated by Tales of Their Famous and Infamous Ancestors, Have Made Genealogy One of America's Hottest Hobbies by Daren Fonda As a child, Susanne Lucretia Behling hated her name. Kids teased her endlessly about it, mispronouncing Behling (which rhymes with bailing). Lucretia sounded so ghastly, Susanne would pretend she did not have a middle name. And many people wanted to stick a "z" in Susanne or call her Sue, Susan or Susie. Traumatic as her name was, however, Behling wasn't prepared for what she discovered when she began tracing her family roots. It wasn't long before she realized her name was the least of her worries. She learned that her ninth great-uncle, Thomas Granger, was hanged for bestiality in 1642. Then she discovered there were ax murderers in the family. Benjamin Tuttle, her eighth great-uncle, killed his sister Sarah in 1676. A year earlier, his sister Mercy had murdered her 17-year-old son. Behling found out that her ninth great-grandmother, Sarah Lord Wilson, was accused of witchcraft and arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1692 (forced to confess, she spent at least half a year in prison). She also uncovered an unfortunate relative named Elizabeth Knapp, a Groton, Massachusetts, servant prone, in the language of her day, to "strange and unwonted" behavior. Knapp's story of demonic possession, Behling later discovered, was even recorded by Cotton Mather, the Puritan clergyman and writer of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, who wrote: "Her tongue being drawn out of her mouth to an extraordinary length, words were uttered from her throat, horrid railings against the godly minister of the town. She belched out most nefandous [sic] blasphemies against the God of Heaven." Surprisingly, Behling is not embarrassed by the black sheep in her family. Their infamous tales have provided her with a genealogical gold mine. "If it weren't for their dastardly deeds," she explains, "they wouldn't have left records. Even the bad stuff makes them more real." With more than 25,000 names in her family tree database, she's not surprised when she uncovers an unusual ancestor. "These people crack me up," says Behling. "I don't mind that it's all out in the open. I take joy in discovering them." Besides, Behling maintains, many of her ancestors weren't infamous at all. She's traced her lineage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Lady Godiva and the nineteenth-century American suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among other notable women. She's even nicknamed some, such as her tenth great-grandfather, Edward Wightman, a seventeenth-century religious "heretic" who made history for being the last man burned at the stake in England for his religious beliefs. Behling calls him her "twice-baked" ancestor because he was twice set afire for his heresies: the first time, he began screaming unintelligible words, which the townspeople interpreted as recantations. They doused him with water and threw him in prison. But he continued ranting and sadly, a few days later, was burned once more--this time to ashes. Behling became interested in her family's history 25 years ago, when her grandmother, Minnie Lucretia Williams, started telling her tales of ancestors who settled on the Continental Divide, along the Rocky Mountains. When her grandmother pulled out a dog-eared diary that had belonged to Behling's second great-grandfather, a rugged homesteader who fought in the Mexican War, she was hooked. "I wanted to know all the stories that nobody told me," Behling recalls. The more she uncovered, the more the names, places and figures of the past came alive. Eventually, she posted her ancestors' history online and started a Web site devoted to their tales. A few years ago, she quit her job as a legal secretary to pursue the hobby full time. "It's an obsession," she admits. For genealogists like Behling, family research--if not an obsession--is the hunt of a lifetime. Why did Uncle Bob trade two mules for a one-eyed calf when he settled in Indiana? And how was he related to Grandpa's great-aunt Clara whose third cousin Emo may or may not have fathered a child with a woman named Anna while fighting the Mexicans in Texas during the 1840s? For Americans, who have kept extraordinary records dating back to the Jamestown colony, genealogical research can yield much about the nation's social history. At its most basic level, it may involve the separation of fact from folktale, the creation of a linear narrative from fragments of the past. Its excitement comes from assembling the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose finished tableau tells stories as intricate as the vibrant hues of a meticulously painted fresco. Veteran genealogists say just about anyone can locate an extended family that stretches back centuries. Judging from the proliferation of Web sites, computer programs, books and videos devoted to the topic, it has become one of the hottest hobbies in America. An AT&T survey released in June 1998 found that nearly one-third of its 5,400 Worldnet Service subscribers used the Web to research their family history. Other surveys indicate that genealogy now ranks as one of the country's favorite pastimes. More than half the adults surveyed in a 1996 Roper poll reported writing family histories. And in the past few years, scores of lineage societies have increased membership, with some of the most prestigious, such as the Sons of the American Revolution, reporting soaring requests for membership. Why are so many Americans suddenly fascinated by legends and tales of their ancestors? Historians theorize that two events from the 1970s--the country's bicentennial and the Alex Haley TV miniseries Roots--contributed to the swelling of interest. "We're a nomadic people and have always been searching for our roots," says Timothy Field Beard, a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, which elects its members based on their published works. "Those events popularized the notion that personal history was something people could research. A lot of people started doing it simply because they realized they could." Demographics may also have a lot to do with it. With older baby boomers approaching retirement age, the roots quest has taken on fresh urgency for millions. "As we get older we get more interested in reflecting on our own life experiences and placing them in historical context," says Ralph Crandall, executive director of the 153-year-old New England Historic Genealogical Society. In the last decade, membership in the society, the world's largest and oldest, has risen 65 percent, to 17,500. Crandall speculates that restless boomers are seeking ways to form closer bonds with the past. "It's a way of resisting the rootlessness in our society," he says. "It's a struggle against anonymity. For many people, it's become important to establish their place in their family, and they want to pass down that knowledge." Thanks to the digital revolution, genealogical research is easier to do. New computer software has simplified the sometimes daunting task of keeping track of relatives separated by time and geography. Broderbund's Family Tree Maker, a best-selling program, enables users to organize kin on graphically intuitive trees; its deluxe edition includes a CD-ROM packed with genealogical databases. With more than 2 million copies sold, it's become one of the company's most popular items. The software's online component has won fans, too, allowing users to set up a home page and search the Web for other amateur genealogists who may be tracing the same surnames. The Internet has also become a genealogical mecca. With thousands of sites added daily, it offers family historians an array of valuable resources. Many researchers use it to find records and make contacts that would otherwise require lengthy letter writing campaigns or trips to remote archives. At one site (www.ancestry.com/ssdi/advanced/html), researchers can access the Social Security Death Index, an archive of more than 60 million death-benefit payment records from 1937 on. Privately operated sites offer even more help. Cyndi's List (www.cyndislist.com), one of the Web's largest genealogy portals, links more than 41,700 sites (and counting)--from societies of Huguenots to Mennonites and Native Americans. Beginners have been known to abandon their searches at the first sign of so-called brick walls: family branches that lead nowhere or relatives who apparently vanish without leaving behind a scrap of evidence. To avoid getting discouraged, experts recommend planning a strategy and sticking with it. They also issue a mantra for the chronically discombobulated: stay organized. Genealogical research can easily degenerate into a morass of hand-scrawled notes needing a cryptographer to decode. Even if you have only a few names or dates, plot them on a pedigree chart. Ideally, start by locating primary documents such as birth certificates, marriage licenses and death records. Make copies of the originals and keep them in separate folders for each relative. Then mark your progress on a master chart. Interview relatives; ask them when and where their ancestors were born, married and died; who may have owned land or a business. Look for scraps of memorabilia, anything from old family Bibles to baseball cards, diaries, monogrammed dishes, military citations and immigration papers. An online directory called Switchboard (www.switchboard.com) carries telephone numbers and addresses of more than 120 million U.S residents; if you're looking for an uncommon name, it's a good place to start. Another treasure trove is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. The library, whose records can be accessed at 3,200 centers around the world, contains a staggering 2 billion names, with millions more added each year by 75 research teams microfilming records from more than 100 countries. The church compiles records of previously conducted research and keeps copies of birth and death certificates, church registers, census schedules, military files and immigration lists. Some documents date back to the sixteenth century. To request a record, visit any family history center (listed on the church's Web site, www.lds.org) and fill out a form; within a few weeks, a microfiche or microform will be sent to that center, where you can examine it for free. Once you've focused on a particular branch to research, genealogists recommend working backwards in time. Searching for the last vital event in a person's life--his or her death--often reveals clues to earlier events. Even divorce records are sometimes classified as vital and may be tracked down in church archives, though more often you'll find them in courthouse records. On the Web, the USGenweb Project (www.usgenweb.org) a noncommercial, volunteer site, provides links to state and county archives and resources. It provides names, addresses and phone numbers of local societies, libraries and county registries that can help you avoid considerable legwork. The site also offers advice on how to locate vital records. Another good starting place is the Ancestry.com Web site (www.ancestry.com), which contains a large collection of free records, live chat rooms organized by state and country, message boards, and subscription-based access to more than 750 databases. Among the offerings are indexes of pre-1850 U.S. marriage records, immigration records that date to the early seventeenth century, and the Social Security Death Index. Working on the Internet does pose certain problems. Information exchanged online is often notoriously unreliable. A cyberspace name and date may be a poor replica of its paper-and-ink version. Facts can be distorted quite easily. Another drawback to Internet research is the lack of substantive content on the Web. Unless someone has traced your family's roots and placed a history online, you're unlikely to find much specific information about your ancestors. Some private companies archive information and post it on the Web, charging a fee for access. Unfortunately, most public institutions lack the funds to place their records online. That means a trip to the county clerk's office, library or local archive will still be necessary to examine and authenticate primary documents. Where should you go? If you live near Washington, D.C., or one of the 12 branches of the National Archives and Records Administration, you can look through broad categories of documents such as federal census records through 1920, military service records, passenger and immigration arrival lists, federal court records, and documents relating to Native Americans and African-Americans. Once you've narrowed a family branch to a particular state and county, contact the regional historical society, which probably has a collection of old county maps and a written local history where your ancestor might show up. Town courthouses maintain marriage, divorce and probate records. Some public libraries keep county and state censuses. A church or synagogue may archive notices of baptisms or bar mitzvahs, respectively. State libraries generally house old newspapers, vital records and county information. You may find yourself rummaging through documents in all these locations. Old-fashioned letter writing gets results, too. That's how Cyndi Howells became addicted to genealogy. Though she's now one of the nation's experts in online family research--she runs the Cyndi's List Web site and wrote Netting Your Ancestors: Genealogical Research on the Internet--it was a mailing campaign that helped her piece together the story of her third great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran named Xerxes Knox. Starting with just a few names and dates, she connected the strands of his tale by sending for his pension application, war records, company muster rolls and other military documents. The story she discovered amazed her. She found out that Knox was captured in Arkansas by the Confederate army, forced to march to Texas and incarcerated in a POW camp. He then made a daring escape, eluded bloodhounds, and survived a two-hundred-mile-plus journey before eventually returning to Union lines. What the Web is good for, explains Howells, is developing a network of contacts. Since going online, she's discovered 19 new cousins. "If you can trace your roots back to the War of 1812, you may find that someone else has already researched the line back to the Revolutionary War," she says. As for doing research on the Internet, says Howells, "checking primary documents is the only way to be absolutely certain you're not making errors." She recommends planning family vacations with a research goal in mind. Last year, while vacationing with her husband, she found herself on her hands and knees in a Mennonite cemetery in Rockingham County, Virginia, researching her grandmother's family. It was the best way to find new relatives, she says. Plus it was a good excuse to visit the state. "I spent over three hours there. I discovered that the cemetery was filled with my ancestors," she recalls. "It was very emotional. I knew some names, but to actually be there was quite moving." It's unlikely you'll make such an emotional connection online, says Howells. But the Internet can still get you started. As a key research tool for any genealogist, she recommends the Internet's newsgroups and mailing lists. Many are devoted to specific historical events or family lines. Mailing lists and newsgroups generally archive messages, enabling users to search them with keywords. The oldest and most popular list, ROOTS-L, allows subscribers to post queries for assistance and search archived messages for any text mentioned in any message. The lists can also help you learn about genealogical research methods and contact others who are researching your family line. Suffice it to say, all this work can wear down even the most dogged detective. If you find yourself stumped or decide you've had enough, a professional genealogist may be worth hiring. Professionals tend to specialize. Some research medical and family health histories. Others offer expertise in legal or military records, geographic areas, ethnic groups or time periods. They can help you evaluate evidence from different sources, analyze your lineage and plan research strategies. Roger Joslyn, a certified genealogist in New Windsor, New York, says clients hire him when they feel overwhelmed by the research. "A lot of clients have unusual requests," says Joslyn. "One client knew a revolver belonged to a great-uncle and he wanted me to find the story behind it. I had a name and an approximate time period around the 1700s and was able to trace the gun to the Isle of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast." Professionals can also help you gather materials for membership in one of the nation's more than 100 hereditary societies. Such groups range from the esoteric (like the Flagon and Trencher's, which admits only descendants of Colonial tavern keepers) to more accessible organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution. The American Society of Genealogists' Timothy Beard has helped hundreds gain entrance to some of the nation's strictest societies. As the so-called gatekeeper and president for the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States of America, a group that can trace back its members' lineage to the eighth-century Frankish emperor Charlemagne, he's authenticated several hundred family histories for aspiring members. "Many people have a name that wouldn't sound like royalty but really is," he says. "It may sound Italian or Jewish or French. Then you discover that through that person's grandmother he goes back to the Colonial period and then to kings or queens." Beard has traced his own lineage to Clovis, the fifth-century king of Cologne. He's become so adept at chronicling family trees (he's been doing it since he was four, he says) that a glance is sometimes all it takes for him to validate certain lines. "There are certain gateway ancestors when you get back into the seventeenth century," he explains. "I can look at these lines immediately and say, yes, that line goes back to Charlemagne or further." Even if you don't think there's noble peerage in your blood, you may be surprised. "Millions of Americans can trace their lineage to Charlemagne. You just have to prove it," notes Beard. "We're such a melting pot, but a lot of people who came over in the seventeenth century had ancestors that went back that far." Susanne Behling, for one, is now researching a woman named Anna Gould, her sixth great-grandmother. She suspects Gould was a nurse during the Revolutionary War's Battle of Bennington, in Vermont. She's trying to authenticate her story by searching archives, prowling graveyards and county records, surfing the Web and sending letters to strangers in search of clues. She's even become a member of one of the nation's fastest-growing genealogical groups: The Black Sheep Society, a loose confederation of some 200 people who share stories about their more infamous ancestors. "She [Gould] wasn't a black sheep," says Behling. "but it might turn up some leads." Behling hopes eventually to collect and recount her ancestors' tales in a book. But it seems unlikely she'll uncover any more shocking secrets. "A few years ago, I found out that my parents were distant cousins going back 10 generations," she says. "That's as strange as it gets." Daren Fonda is a freelance writer based in New York City. CHARTING YOUR SOURCE With online genealogy expanding faster than ever, there's a good chance that clues to your ancestors' lives exist somewhere in the digital world. Knowing where to look, however, may still take considerable detective work. You may need to join newsgroups, get on e-mail lists and sort through hundreds of Web pages before turning up a lead. Here are a few sites to help get you started: A first-rate gateway to online genealogy. Free databases include the Social Security Death Index, the Ancestry World Tree (a database of Ancestry subscribers who have posted their family histories online) and a rotating list with indexes such as civilian draft registrations from the First World War. Subscriptions cost $59.95 per year and enable you to access more than 700 databases. Membership also includes free online support and a subscription to Ancestry magazine. Beginners can access genealogy lessons at no charge. A noncommercial, privately run site, providing more than 40,000 links categorized and cross-referenced in more than 100 categories. Browsing is free and categories range from the familiar to the obscure: from cemeteries and funeral homes; to prisons, prisoners and outlaws; to Quaker families and Jewish genealogy. Links to all the major U.S. government sites, such as the National Archives and the Library of Congress, plus a helpful section on how to use the resources of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Family History Library. THE USGENWEB PROJECT Another noncommercial, volunteer-run site providing useful links to county and state archives and resources. Includes links to get you started and links to Web sites posting family reunion bulletin boards, state histories and maps charting county boundaries. Also has links to family reunion pages and state projects, such as records of Civil War regiments. BRODERBUND'S FAMILY TREE MAKER Broderbund's site for genealogy (the company also makes a best-selling CD-ROM package). This helpful Web page offers a grab bag of services, including tutorials, databases, links to other sites and a forum for exchanging stories with other members. Visitors to the site can view a listing of additional indexes, but only subscribers can access them. ASSOCIATION OF PROFESSIONAL GENEALOGISTS Provides listings of certified genealogists, including sections on what to look for in a professional. The site also lists regional chapters, with phone numbers of local pros. The first and largest genealogical mailing list, with more than 10,000 subscribers. For free membership, e-mail your request to [email protected] with the word subscribe in the message field. (Or go to the URL above for more information.) ROOTS-L databases include a list of more than 350,000 surnames and contact information for the 50,000 people researching them. Its library maintains hundreds of accessible text files, including a collection devoted to vital records, plus tips for beginners and book lists from the Library of Congress. There's also a searchable archive of messages posted since 1987.--DF You must be logged in to post a comment. Log in if you're already registered. 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David Friedman, US President elect Donald Trump’s choice to serve as the next US ambassador to Israel has his work cut out for him. Right after Trump announced his appointment, the nameless bureaucrats at the State Department mounted a rebellion. Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, the permanent members of the State Department’s Israel policy shop let it be known that Friedman is not to their liking. “These are the people,” the Post’s Washington reporter Michael Wilner wrote, “behind the carefully worded reactions to breaking news developments in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.” They operate on the basis of their shared catechism. Euphemistically stated, that writ of faith is that the US’s “influence… is only as strong as the legitimacy they maintain…as a fair and balanced arbiter.” In plain English that means that the permanent bureaucracy believes the US must be hostile to Israel. And now its members are worried. They “now fear that [their] influence may diminish under…Trump, after his announcement on Thursday night that…Friedman would be Washington’s ambassador to Israel.” The holy grail of the State Department on Israel is fairly straightforward. It doesn’t matter that the Palestinians siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars from their US-funded budget each year to pay terrorists and incite terrorism. It doesn’t matter that the US-funded Palestinian Authority indoctrinates the Palestinians in a Nazi-like, exterminationist view of Jews. The Palestinians’ actions and intentions are either completely irrelevant or justified in the State Department’s intellectual universe because like the Palestinians, the State Department’s permanent staff believes that the Jews are responsible for the absence of peace. Specifically, the State Department believes that there is no peace because of the Israeli Right and the Israeli government’s annoying habit of respecting Jewish civil and property rights in Judea and Samaria. And now, here comes Friedman, who sees no point in going along with this anti-Israel nonsense. Friedman not only doesn’t view Israel’s refusal to deny civil and property rights to its citizens in Judea and Samaria as a reason to oppose Israel. He supports these rights. He even supports Israel’s legal rights to govern Judea and Samaria. Friedman also sees no reason to continue the 68 year old US policy of refusing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Like Trump, Friedman supports respecting the federal law that requires the US government to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Given his stalwart rejection of the State Department’s organizational belief structure in relation to Israel, it makes sense for the permanent Israel-bashing policy establishment to oppose him. What makes less sense is for American Jewish organizations and lawmakers to oppose his appointment. According to years of survey data of US Jewry, the vast majority of American Jews support Israel. They support moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. They support respecting the legal rights of Israeli citizens. And they support Israeli democracy. But since Trump announced that Friedman is his choice to serve as US ambassador to Israel, opposition to his appointment has not been led by Muslim anti-Israel activists. It has been led by leftist Jewish activists. Part of the opposition is a function of thin skin. Friedman is an outspoken critic of the anti-Israel pressure group J Street. J Street clearly doesn’t like being called out for its consistent animosity towards Israel. Among other things, Friedman maintained that J Street is neither a Jewish organization nor a pro-Israel organization. This is an inconvenient truth that J Street would like to obscure. But it is the truth. In 2009 Lenny Ben David exposed that J Street’s political action committee was lavishly funded by Arab American and Iranian American lobbyists and activists. The head of J Street’s campus outfit, J Street U is a Muslim. J Street’s executive director Jeremy Ben Ami worked as senior vice president for Fenton Communications before he received seed money from George Soros to found J Street as a means to weaken Jewish American support for Israel. Fenton Communications was hired by a Qatari foundation to lead an 18-month long anti-Israel campaign in the US with a special focus on US campuses. J Street, of course doesn’t like being called out. So it has waged a no-holds barred campaign to demonize Friedman. Over the weekend, two Congressmen who are supported by J Street, Jerome Nadler and John Yarmuth voiced their opposition to Friedman’s appointment. The main problem J Street and its comrades at Americans for Peace Now and the New Israel Fund have with Friedman is not personal. It is existential. Once he is installed as ambassador, it will become much more difficult for them to mask their animosity towards Israel. The vast majority of Israelis do not ascribe to the State Department’s anti-Israel catechism. The vast majority of Americans also reject it. But so long as the official policy of the US government has been to view Israel as responsible for the absence of peace, and to support the Palestinians despite their opposition to peace and their support for terrorism, Israel’s antagonists on the Jewish American far Left have been able to maintain their conceit that they are pro-Israel. With an ambassador on the ground implementing a policy that rejects these absurdities, they will lose their patriotic cover. They won’t be able to say that the Israeli government is acting in opposition to the US government by defending Jewish civil rights. They won’t be able to claim that Israel will endanger its relationship with the US, and so undermine the American Jewish community if it rejects the irrational two-state policy that dictates the only acceptable Israeli policy is one that promotes the establishment of a terrorist run, anti-Semitic Arab state west of the Jordan River. J Street was Soros’s brainchild. In 2007, the far left financier wrote an article in the New York Review of Books calling for the establishment of a leftwing group that could undermine the Jewish community’s support for Israel by insisting that AIPAC did not speak for the American Left in its championing of a strong US-Israel alliance. Since its inception in 2007, J Street has been instrumental in breaking the American Jewish consensus on communal support for Israel. In so doing, J Street has played a major role in facilitating the far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party. With Rep. Keith Ellison’s sudden emergence as the frontrunner to win next month’s election to serve as the next Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the far left’s takeover of the Democratic Party is essentially complete. As a former member of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam, and a major supporter and beneficiary of the Muslim Brotherhood aligned leadership of the American Muslim community, Ellison’s rise means that the Democratic Party can no longer be viewed as a pro-Israel party. As a consequence, American Jews are now being required to choose between their support for the party and their support for Israel. Since the election, Jewish groups have taken steps that indicate their choices. The decision by the Jewish Federations of North America, Hadassah, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conservative and Reform movements and other more minor groups to boycott the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization’s Chanukah party last week was one major signal. The party, co-hosted by the Embassy of Azerbaijan, took place during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Azerbaijan. The groups’ chose to boycott the party because it was held at the Trump Hotel in Washington. Then there is Hillel International’s scandlous decision, announced at its annual conference earlier this month, to have Hillel organizations on campuses in the US champion Muslim rights on campuses. In other words, the premier Jewish organization on college campuses intends to champion the rights of the very students who stand at the forefront of the campus war against Jewish students. A week after the election, the American Jewish Committee announced that it has joined forces with the Islamic Society of North America to form a Jewish-Muslim Advisory Council to lobby the Trump administration. ISNA is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Its members have been indicted for funding Hamas terrorists. The Muslim Brotherhood is committed to the annihilation of Israel and the Jewish people. With his close, personal ties to Trump, Friedman will be uniquely positioned to implement the next administration’s policies towards Israel. Given the Republican majority in the Senate, it is clear that his nomination will sail through the approval process in the Senate. What is not at all clear is how the American Jewish community will fare in the coming years. If its members decide that they are okay with their organizational leadership’s decision to abandon Israel on behalf of the far Left, which has swallowed the Democratic Party, in all likelihood, they will not fare very well at all.

by Toya Richards Jackson LOUISVILLE (PNS) It is with a heavy heart that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) offers its condolences for the loss of life and suffering associated with the recent shootings at a Jewish community center and senior living community in a Kansas City, Mo., suburb. “We grieve for those whose lives were ruthlessly taken in this senseless act of violence,” said the Reverend Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “Simultaneously we offer our love and support to the families, friends, and community members who are intertwined with these precious souls.” Frazier Glenn Cross of Aurora, Mo., who reportedly has a history of anti-Semitism and racism, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing of three people on April 13, according to The New York Times. A man and his 14-year-old grandson were killed in the parking lot at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and a woman was killed in a parking lot at Village Shalom, a senior living community about a mile away. The General Assembly of the PC(USA) has a history of approving policies that denounce anti-Semitism and affirm a commitment to the Jewish people. The denomination affirms again, and particularly during this celebration of Passover, its position in the wake of this current tragedy. “We condemn anti-Semitism in the strongest terms. While affirming our close spiritual ties with the Jewish people, we wish to state unequivocally that authentic Christianity can have no complicity in anti-Semitic attitudes or actions of any kind,” the 202nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) stated in a resolution adopted in 1990. “We extend the power of our prayers and the weight of our influence to the Jewish community as it faces this threat.” Gracious and merciful God who sustains us all, We ask your hand of comfort on all those impacted by this horrific shooting. Where there are tears, please wipe them. Where there is heartache, please ease it. Where there is anger, please quell it. Wrap your loving arms of protection and care around all whose spirits are wounded, And bring healing and peace to this and all other situations that need your touch.

The Dingo Crusades Episode Blog #283 INDONESIA – VIETNAM – CHINA – SOUTH AFRICA – THE NETHERLANDS – CZECH REPUBLIC – POLAND – ISRAEL – SRI LANKA – SINGAPORE – AUSTRALIA Previously on TAR Australia: Teams raced from Poland to the Middle East. An odyssey through the desert left Dave & Kelly exhausted and didn’t even make it to the pit stop. Tonight, the finish line is in sight but the strain is starting to show as teams struggle through the Holy City. Will one crucial mistake be the end for surfers Tyler & Nathan? Just four teams remain; who will be eliminated next? THE BIG QUESTION: Will TAR Australia producers copy TAR US and have their final NEL before the Final Three, or will somebody go home tonight? I really hope Mike Bickerton from TAR Canada is following this season. Grant re-introduces us to the desert fortress of Masada. It looks like the surface of Mars. King Herod built this on a cliff top overlooking the Dead Sea. It was the site of a brutal siege during the Jewish-Roman war and became a symbol of the Jewish struggle for freedom. “Now watch me fall backwards and plummet hundreds of feet to the desert below. On the way down, several doves shall swoop down from the Heavens above and carry me to safety.” During the pit stop, teams record video messages for their loved ones. Mr. McKay loved forcing this task in TAR Asia 4 so much that he is making everybody do it again in Hopefully nobody cries worse than Richard Hardin did. “We’re the last women standing! We can quit now!” “We don’t have camcorders on our ranch.” How is Wilbur doing? Did we have to put him down yet? Ah, this is all an ad for Canon. Not the Sony Cybershot. Hopefully Matt isn’t recorded while he accidentally cuts his tongue on the adhesive. Wouldn’t production know which address to send it to? Teams have enough to do during their mandatory rest period as is. That cowboy charm. I shall transcribe these video messages for you. MATT: Hello Mum. As you can see, I am on The Amazing Race Australia. TOM: Over here, at the, uh, Dead Sea in Israel. JEFF: Just want to let you know Luke and I are having the most amazing time. “And just in case I am boring you, you can check your ticket for last week’s lotto numbers on the bottom of this video.” LUKE: I’ll be home really soon. “And I am going to buy a GPS right when I get home.” TYLER: Hopefully I come home with some cash in my pocket. “Although I would trade that in for some cash right now so I can stop whoring myself out to the local women just to survive the next leg. I haven’t eaten in three days.” NATHAN: I miss you so much. I love you so much. “But I miss having cash in my pocket even more.” SAM: We have been doing the most amazing things. Life-changing things and it made me realize how much I love you so much. “And my vocabulary is dwindling by a lot of much because we have been racing too much.” RENAE: I just want you to know I am thinking of you every second. I love you, okay? “I love you too, Renae.” Man, Renae misses Captain Caveman more than I do. I can’t wait for that family visit on Australian Survivor 5. JEFF: It’s really been amazing. Love you. “Turn it off, Luke. It’s game over, man. Game over.” Well, that was a gigantic waste of fucking time. Matt & Tom, who were the first to arrive at an unspecified time will depart first at 6:31am. They read they must search King Herod’s Winter Palace Ruins in Masada for their next clue. I can’t wait to see how much Matt & Tom won the last leg by. Teams must now ride a huge cable car to the very top of Masada Plateau and search for the ruins of King Herod’s Winter Palace where they will find their next clue. I am just glad to hear they aren’t leaving Israel after one leg for like France or something. Tom says they have a good shot at making the Final Three and continue to pretend that they are racing to avoid last place in this leg. You’ll be last very quickly if you observe the pottery. The random teenager in baggy pants shall lead the way. MATT: Take the bull by the horns and give it to her. I don’t think that could air on TAR Australia. They’ll air you saying shit, but not that, Matt. Matt & Tom enter the cable car. They say they will be walking down if the clue isn’t up there. That’s gonna be a long walk. A forty-four minute lead on Jeff & Luke? That’s it? They didn’t dominate the Know Your Partner task as much as the previous episode made it out to be. LUKE: King Herod’s Winter Palace? There’s nothing wintery about this place. King Herod would have frozen to death in Canada. Luke says the room for error is getting smaller and smaller now that they are in the “business end” of the race. Ugh. Didn’t Luke have a confessional just like this for the past couple episodes? Jeff says the $250, 000 grand prize would make a big difference in their lives. Matt & Tom comment on how old the castle is and the great views it provides. Where is Tom? That camera was really far away. Almost like an Earl Cole helicopter shot from Survivor: Fiji. Matt & Tom think the Winter Palace is down below. Tom leans over the railing like a child. I have a feeling a Winter Palace will stick out in the middle of the desert. Jeff once again tells us about his Bible knowledge and how cool it is to be amongst all of King Herod’s shit. Luke finds Bible study as intriguing as the rest of us. Matt & Tom run down several flights of stairs. The stairs lead into a chasm. Matt & Tom find the Winter Palace. It wasn’t as hidden as they thought it would be. Matt & Tom they must drive over one hundred kilometres north to Qumran–it is the site where the ancient Dead Sea scrolls were found only sixty years ago. This is where they’ll find their next clue. The area above the cave looks like a webbed foot. MATT: Stairs aren’t my forte. Thank god for the cable car back up to the top. Tyler & Nathan depart third at 7:56am. Only one hour and 25 minutes Matt & Tom despite wasting 45 minutes on the way to the pit stop. They talk about racing quite well. Jeff & Luke struggle with a sense of direction. Jeff wants them to leave their backpack at the top. Luke offers to carry it for him. JEFF: I am coming up with different logic for saving time. No kidding. It’s called “risk all of your possessions getting taken” but whatever. Something tells me the path to the Winter Palace was a lot more treacherous than this two thousand years ago. Jeff & Luke have the clue. Back up the steps you go, boys. It would be funny if now was the time when Jeff dumped his bag onto Luke. Matt & Tom read that there is a border crossing. TOM: Border crossing? Does that mean between two countries? What’s a border crossing? What’s West Bank? You don’t know? MATT: Do I look like I know? MATT: I’ve never been overseas before this race. I don’t know where we were. We’re in Israel. I don’t know how many countries we’ve been to. TOM: We come from a large country on a ranch in Australia. Ummmm. . . .I know EU countries don’t have a border crossing, but they definitely crossed over into other countries while on the trains in central Europe. “West Bank? Isn’t that the place near Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada on the other side of the bridge?” How little do Matt & Tom know about Israel? Well their unaired confessional is really awkward. “There are Jews here????? I thought it was just one of those religions they made up in Lord of the Rings or Schindler’s List.” Tyler & Nathan spot Jeff & Luke. TYLER: Do you have the clue? LUKE: We have a map! Do you want it? JEFF: The map helps. Well, Jeff & Luke have proven they are useless with maps so you may as well give it to a team that knows how to use one. The only alliance left in the race stays strong. JEFF: Nathan and Tyler are really top racers. LUKE: We are really happy to help out a little bit. Isn’t that a reason to make sure a team doesn’t make it to the Final Three and kick your ass? Tyler & Nathan have wanted to work with Jeff & Luke for a while despite knowing how bad they are with directions and understanding some of the tasks. I haven’t researched exit interviews yet, but my assumption is that part of Tyler & Nathan’s endgame strategy for the past two or three rounds has been to make sure Jeff & Luke are in the Final Three with them. Tyler & Nathan study the map and continue their way on the path. I know Tyler & Nathan say they aren’t religious, but I must add that those beanies are the closest in shape to a yarmulke that they’ll ever wear on their head. Matt & Tom are in the town of Kumquat–er, I mean Qumran. Qumran also happens to be Kevin & Ryan’s favourite “film”. Roadblock Hint: Who is not lost in translation? In this Roadblock, one team member must use a translation guide to decipher a Hebrew scroll. The message is written in the Hebrew style–right to left. Therefore they’ll have to transcribe it left to right in order to receive their next clue. GRANT: Teams who have a nact for codes will be able to decipher this next challenge. Well that pun was lazy. The contestants from Hamerotz LaMillion would kill this challenge. Good ol’ Jerusalen. Did you know the Hebrew alphabet is based upon taking strokes away from the Star of David? Future TAR applicants, you never know what might prove to be useful on the race! Good ol’ rainbow pockets. Matt has a theory about the Roadblock. TOM: I’d say so. MATT: You can have it. It’s all you, Tom. Tom doubts every team will remember to go from right to left. Sam & Renae depart last at 8:28am. Their ninety minute mistake and Sam misreading a question led to them being only one hour and fifty-seven minutes behind Matt & Tom. Working with Mo & Mos is more detrimental to your race than thinking Anne Marie & Tracy could lend you a helping hand. Sam & Renae talk about being the last all-female team standing blah blah blah. Nat & Kat and Kisha & Jen already beat you to what you’re trying to do. Tom says he enjoys Sudoku and crossword puzzles. He loves doing one on the race. I didn’t even know Sudoku made it to rural ranches in Australia. We put in the ‘k’ and. . .it says “Go Fuck Yourself”? That can’t be right. . . Wait a second. Does that one word say “raper”? It says e-raper! Like an online rapist! Man, so that’s what part of the word ‘prepare’ looks like backwards. Not good. Tyler & Nathan are third to find the Winter Palace clue. Tyler hasn’t heard of the Dead Sea scrolls. They get directions and off they go. Matt hates it when people are yelling at him when doing puzzles. So he decides to lend his mental support. MATT: I decided to have a bit of a kip. Or as well call it here, a nap. Matt’s mental support. He uses ESPN to communicate. Sam & Renae run into the crowd of tourists and want to catch “The Boys”. Considering there are six boys, Sam & Renae will need to be more specific. Sam is the one wearing pink in the crowd. Gates for Masada must open by nine. Tom reveals his puzzle to the judge. . . .Just kidding. Does he get penalized for adding in the smiley face? Tom receives the clue. They must travel by taxi to the MAIN post office in Jerusalem. Jerusalem–The Holy City. The Mother of All Meccas. Oh my word. The Dome of the Rock. Know Your Role and Shut Your Torah. Grant describes it as the city that was first settled over five thousand years ago and is the holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And CNN in the 90s. What are they going to do in Jerusalem first? They are going to mail their SD card at the post office where they will receive their next clue. A post office? What is this? TAR 2 in Namibia? Matt & Tom pound fists in cab in celebration of going to Jerusalem. Sam & Renae keep looking for the Winter Palace. Renae says they have been lost for a -long- time. The other side of the mountain? Not again! Commercial break. We resume. Sam & Renae find the stairs. Last to the clue box. No equalizer today, ladies. You’ve gotta hustle. Sam & Renae find a local who tells them the Dead Sea scrolls are in Qumran. Sam starts cheering and turns into an airplane. Jeff & Luke are second to the Roadblock. It is Jeff’s to even out their Roadblock count. LUKE: We’re racing in this one! JEFF: We are! Clearly Jeff thinks it is a NEL because he couldn’t give less of a shit. Now Jeff just has to touch his right ear three times, his forehead twice, and needs to find a Scientologist who can lightly scratch his back. Then he’s all good to go! Jeff is the Nomar Garciapara of TAR Australia. JEFF: Fifteen seconds to put my glasses on. “Fifteen? JUST fifteen?” LUKE: The little things Dad was doing was really really irritating. “Telling the girls it opens at six rather than eight was one thing, but taking fifteen seconds to put on your glasses is too much! LUKE: I’ll take your pack here. JEFF: No, that’s alright. LUKE: Just give me your pack, please. Luke won that game of Tug o’ War pretty quickly. Luke is somehow outwalking Jeff. JEFF: It was quite complex as I found out while deciphering the clue. I can help you out with the Roadblock, Jeff. Matt & Tom are on their way to Jerusalem in the taxi. By the way, that’s Jerusalem in case you have forgotten that is the next destination in the past two minutes. They are at the main post office according to their cab driver. Which is a small building next to a dumpster. MATT: We need to go to a big one. TOM: Is there more than one? DRIVER: This is a post. TOM: This is the main post office? Number one? DRIVER: I don’t know. “I wouldn’t be so stressed if that camera wasn’t staring me in the face.” Matt & Tom go inside. TOM: Do you speak English? Eighty percent of Israelis do. TOM: Is there a main post office in the city? Everything is Jaffa in Israel. The man and the driver speak in Hebrew. Ohhhh. The main -mail- office! They were just talking about the main -post- office or the number one one! “Thumbs up, mate!” TOM: So number one post office? TOM: The big one? Tyler & Nathan are third to the Roadblock. NATHAN: I’m going to struggle with it but I’ll do it. Tyler cheers on his Nate Dogg. Nathan is breezing through it. NATHAN: Jeff was still doing it. Once I sat down and got the first couple letters easily. I picked it up straight away faster than I thought. JEFF: It was quite complex. It’s very subtle as a language. One tiny brush stroke can mean the difference between a letter being an ‘e’ or a ‘y’. The biggest challenge for Nathan is swatting away the flies. JEFF: You wanna collaborate? NATHAN: He’s like “you wanna work together on cracking this code”? I was thinking ‘what code are you trying to crack? You’re just spelling out the words’. NATHAN: What letters you go– JEFF: Let’s have a look. Nathan doesn’t have a choice. Jeff is essentially the new Andre & Damon to Nathan’s Ken & Gerard. NATHAN: Dude, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got some letters wrong in there. NATHAN: I’m like ‘what is he doing’? Nathan explains the whole task to Jeff. JEFF: It was clear it was a message from right to left rather than left to right. Because Nate Dogg just explained it to you. Study Hebrew Every Day! JEFF: That’s. . .that’s ‘M’. NATHAN: No, that’s an ‘A’. JEFF: That doesn’t make sense. NATHAN: Once he sat there I couldn’t tell him to go away. Nathan has to explain each individual letter to Jeff. Hilarious. It’s like playing co-op fighting video games against your grandpa. You’re just going to have to do everything for him. Sam & Renae say there is no point stressing out and refuse to give up as they drive. JEFF: I’ve got a ‘Y’ in there. No, that’s a ‘W’. That doesn’t make sense. NATHAN: That’s a ‘P’. JEFF: It’s a ‘T’. NATHAN: First letter is a ‘F’. You’re getting your P’s and F’s wrong, dude. JEFF: Trust me on it. I’ve got a ‘F’. NATHAN: No, it’s not. That’s a ‘S’. Spell. JEFF: Whoa. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. JEFF: We work incredibly well with Nathan and Tyler so we decided to work together. NATHAN: It was like two heads clashing. He wasn’t checking it out enough. Like oh my god. Like you’re kidding. He was a bit all over the place. I think Jeff is -this- close to being smited right now. Or Nathan is ready to take on the role of Abraham and Jeff is his Isaac. Meanwhile, Matt & Tom notice a guy eating a bagel. Yeah, it’s just a bagel. What’s the big deal? Matt looks so serious. This is killing me. He is ready to kill for that bagel. I guess he just likes staring at round things with a hole in the middle. Matt couldn’t be more perplexed by this. What does it do? What does it do? What does a bagel do? It roundhouse kicks you in the face. It makes out with your Armenian cousins. It rigs the ending to the third season of The Amazing Race in the most iconic way possible. It tears down that wall. It’s a fucking bagel, Matt. MATT: . . . Matt still doesn’t get it. Even Smalls from The Sandlot understood what a s’more was after Porter explained it to him. Some more of what? Classic. Matt & Tom enter the main post office. There was a complimentary bagel on the way out. Nah, just kidding. Be funny if it wasn’t the main post office. The guy just took the letter and did his job properly. It’s a Detour. MATT: Pilgrim Trail or Holy Grail. Grant leaves out the bad puns this time. Which is for the best. In Pilgrim’s Trail, teams must make their way to the old city of Jerusalem. Then collect an eighty kilogram wooden cross and carry it along the Via Dolorosa. Christian pilgrims follow this path daily to retrace the final journey of Christ. The street passes the nine stations of the Cross to the Church of the Holy Sebokah on the site built where Jesus was crucified then buried. Forcing two people to carry a huge cross across a far distance? Kimo Leopoldo and Joe Son would have loved this task. Jesus passed through a Hard Rock Cafe on his way to his death? You’re telling me he stopped for nachos and looked at posters of James Dean before the Roman Emperor left him for dead? That’s tough to believe. The nine stations are marked with Roman numerals. Once they find the final resting spot, they will receive their next clue. The next clue is gonna be another Roadblock. ROADBLOCK: Who wants to be crucified? Note: Whoever performed the last Roadblock cannot perform this one. Easter came a little early this year! Meanwhile, locals gather to stare at a wall. In Holy Grail, teams must make their way to the Western Wall in the old city then walk through the coal tunnels to an active archaeology dig and unearth a clay pot. Take the clay pot to the nearby ruins of the City of David, wade through an ancient underground aqueduct, and deliver the pot to an archaeologist to receive their next clue. GRANT: Teams will need patience to tunnel through this task. Next time just leave it alone, sir. TAR Australia producers sure love underground locations over the past few rounds. Be funny if they unearth Jesus’ bones rather than a clay pot. Apparently ‘City of’ is ‘Tit’ in Hebrew. It doesn’t matter whether they’re reading it right to left or left to right. It’s still ‘Tit’. I know those are candles in the middle, but are those other things? They look like octopus arms. Or Zoidberg arms. The aqueduct is so cool. His hat is more Aussie than Jewish. Matt & Tom choose crucifixion. Nathan keeps correcting Jeff on the Roadblock. They are about to hand in their answer. JEFF: With Temple Mount. NATHAN: I don’t think so. JEFF: Trust me on it. JEFF: We burned through it quickly. How do I know Nathan knows it’s wrong? Because Nathan walks away even before the judge says anything. Jeff should change that smiley face to a frowny face and draw angry eyebrows on it. Jeff exhales deeply. Commercial break. We resume. We watch Jeff exhale. Jeff knows they are ninety-nine percent there. NATHAN: With ‘a’ temple mount. JEFF: Let’s put an ‘a’ in there. NATHAN (confessional): I had to just look over the thing and it was just an ‘a’ we were missing and he was like ‘oh yeah, alright, I see where you are going’. Jeff presents his guess. It’s correct then summons Nathan. “C’mon dude. I’ve got it. You’re slowing me down a bit, mate.” Nathan tells Tyler about how much of the work he did as they run to the taxi. He nearly says it within earshot. Both teams are in their cabs. JEFF: Working with Nathan and Tyler is like a dream. It’s like working with two more sons. NATHAN: He had the wrong letters all over the joint. JEFF: They’re just easy to work with. They collaborate. They’re intelligent. NATHAN: He wouldn’t have got that. There is no way. He was reading it the wrong way. JEFF: They’re got ethics. TYLER: Go around this guy in the car ahead. Just go. JEFF: We do it and we help each other. “It’s like we’re Batman and they’re Robin.” “Jeff’s a fucking moron who can eat my dung street.” “Nicest boys you’ll ever meet.” “My niece in pre-school could have finished that challenge before Jeff.” Renae is slightly ahead of Sam as they run to the clue box. The camera couldn’t capture Sam’s fall as it was happening, sadly. I hate the lotto. “We don’t roll around on the sand Sam, man.” Renae lifts Sam back up. Sam goes back to being an eagle again. She says she has some bruises on her leg, but everything is all good. RENAE: Shes got so many bruises she doesn’t care anymore. Sam wants to do the Roadblock because she is good with “looking things” cause it’s like a puzzle in her head. Renae agrees that this is an ideal task for Sam. Matt & Tom comment on what they are about to do. TOM: We’re following the road of Jesus Christ, mate. How about it? MATT: Pound it. “We’re following the route of a guy who got crucified two thousand years ago.” I wasn’t expecting that response. TOM: Surely they can’t do that to us. Nah, there’ll just be locusts. Matt & Tom bid farewell to their crappy taxi driver. I think she just finished watching TAR 24 for the first time. And now they’re retaliating on her behalf. “Excuse me, are these two hundred pound crosses for us?” It’s like carrying either Debra or Steve through Jerusalem for a task. Jeff & Luke are inside of the post office. Luke has to direct Jeff to the flags right in front of his face because his dad is so disoriented. They choose to do Pilgrim Trail. It’s surprising Jeff chose Pilgrim Trail because the clue says it requires commitment, and Luke may or may not disagree that Jeff has always possessed that trait. Jeff & Luke ask their driver to open the boot. Huh. Aussies talk like the British. Tyler & Nathan are fourth into the post office. Nathan leaps over a barrier and onto the road to catch a cab. The barrier is sponsoured by TAR considering it’s red and yellow. That bus certainly helped stall traffic enough for Nathan to catch the cab behind it. Sam is finding the Hebrew task easy. Where are the bruises? How is Renae lending her mental support? She’s your Venus, she’s your fire, your desire. That’s right. Renae has no choice but to shave her legs during a Roadblock because producers forced her to make an hour long video for her family at the pit stop while sleep-deprived. Maybe at the next Roadblock Jeff can hire somebody to shave his back and then at the final one Nathan will finally shave his head. Too bad Sam’s legs were partially shaved when she took that tumble a few minutes ago. Needless to say this task is easier when Jeff isn’t shouting out random letters to distract you. RENAE: She pretty much sat down for five minutes and said “I’ve got it!” “Well, that was after Anne Marie & Tracy secretly lent her a helping hand.” Sam receives the clue and asks if Renae really did shave her legs. She did and they have a nice giggle about it before getting into their cab. Sam & Renae ask their taxi driver to go as fast as possible because they are the only girls left in the race. Unfortunately for them Bono from U2 is their taxi driver. Matt & Tom casually walk by a group of tourists with a gigantic cross. TOM: The path we’re walking in is the same trail as the big man did with his cross back in the day. The big man? You mean Jesus? Now Shaq is a big man. You don’t see Jesus as the centre for the Bethlehem Lakers. “That’s another slam dunk for the big man! Hey-Zeus! Hey-Zeus! Hey-Zeus!” Matt & Tom keep walking through the stations. Matt doesn’t want to damage his good hat. Would JESUS casually put down his cross and take a breather guys? Weak sauce! Jeff & Luke and Tyler & Nathan get to the crosses at roughly the same time. Aren’t they T’s? LUKE: Fancy seeing you blokes here! Man, with that technique Nate is going to be wearing that cross for a crotch. Jeff says Luke took the front because Luke is a Hercules when it comes to that sort of stuff. “He can carry it from left to right.” JEFF: I’m only eighty-three kilos. I am carrying my own body weight. It was challenging, but I was up for it. You were probably up for the challenge because it was half of your body weight that you were carrying. Also, you weigh more than me. Matt & Tom have to pause for a second. Because a freakin’ tractor is going to block Jesus’ path. They have no choice but to hug the side of the tunnel. That can’t be comfortable. WE THE BEST SHOES! Matt & Tom set it down again. Matt thinks they may have to redo it because he didn’t see any of the stations. Especially when Matt’s head is tilted like Ralph Wiggum when he doesn’t know how to use an earring. “My ear hurts and I am being crucified. I have two owwies.” Tom approaches the two soldiers. Meanwhile, Matt starts humping Jesus’ cross. That’s a sentence I never thought I would say in this blog. I think it was the bagel’s round hole that did it for him. Matt & Tom are told to go straight and right. Matt thinks it is cool to walk the same path as Jesus in real life. Sam & Renae are last to the clue. They hire a cab. They decide to not do a task that is more than their combined body weight and go with Holy Grail. For some reason somebody is carrying a random scale through the market. Matt & Tom find the finishing point (not to be confused from the finishing point in the middle of TAR 4’s second India leg). Matt & Tom try to carefully put Jesus’ cross on its side. It would be hilarious if they screw it up and the cross falls flat while making a roaring thud sound that echoes throughout Old Jerusalem. Matt & Tom read that they must walk the Ramparts Wall to find their next clue. Ah. How cool. Nathan wants to switch to carrying it like a surfboard. After a few seconds Tyler disagrees. Probably because there are no waves to catch here, bro. Jeff is considering to collaborate with Tyler & Nathan on this task. “You’re doing a fine job, guys. . .Please don’t ask me to help.” Tyler admits they didn’t really bring their clue so they have no idea where they’re going. TYLER: Nathan and I have struggled the last two legs with directions. Because you’ve been hanging around Jeff & Luke too much. NATHAN: What’s VI? TYLER: Four. That’s four. Somebody needed to watch more Rocky movies. Tyler asks a local the way to the ninth station. He gestures them to the right. Follow the yellow Jesuses. Jeff & Luke continue to “collaborate”. Sam & Renae run past a bunch of rabbis. “Don’t you need a degree for this?” Yeah, c’mon guys. Don’t break a two thousand year old ancient artifact. Sam says there a lot of rocks in the digging site. It provided a lot of false hope because every time you hit a rock you think you hit the vase. This is very similar to the Detour task they chose last week. Just replace bottle caps with rocks for this round’s Detour. It’s also better than all of the used condoms they found on Jerusalem Beach last round too. Jeff frequently switches shoulders to use “the fleshy part of his shoulder and there’s not flesh up there”. JEFF: I felt the crush that Jesus must have felt by the cross that was significantly bigger and heavier on his own. I dunno. I’m pretty sure he had a buddy named Simon help him out on that one. If only Jesus had some followers telling him to “focus, believe, achieve” to move a bit faster through the streets. Tyler & Nathan grin and bare it while carrying the cross. Jeff & Luke lose their collaboration partners. Matt & Tom see the wall where locals and tourists write notes and shove them into the wall. Tom talks about Dung Gate. TOM: It’s near the Dung Gate. It’s in somewhere not out of somewhere. Sam & Renae find the long pot. Renae cleans it off. Tyler & Nathan get lost again with their cross. They are making this a lot harder for themselves than it needs to be. NATHAN: Do you want to read the clue again dude so we’re not walking around like chickens with our heads cut off? TYLER: I don’t have the clue. Commercial break. We resume. NATHAN: Do you want to read the clue again dude so we’re not walking around like chickens with our heads cut off? TYLER: I don’t have the clue. I only have the additional info. Well that was a misleading cliffhanger. Tyler insists there were no signs as they read the part about the nine stations. Nathan says there were. NATHAN: What do you mean year? TYLER: There were. NATHAN: Dude, we’ve got to follow that stuff. Tyler’s position flipped quickly. Maybe Tyler was accidentally reading the clue from left to right. Luke comments on the old stone in the withered streets. The woman reaches out to touch Jeff like he is a member of The Beatles in the 1960s. JEFF: We walked past people saying “I love you,” “bless you”. “I touched his wood!” A little overdramatic. JEFF: The little holes in the wall that were shops–at one point I could imagine smelling the spices and things that must have been present two thousand years ago. To put the cross down and know we were within metres of where Jesus was crucified was an amazing experience. All hail the Downes! I’d pay Jeff ten shekels to go up to the clue giver, sniff him, and exclaim “I can smell the spices on you! You smell like you are two thousand years old!” Luke shields the clue from the onlookers. Sam & Renae carry the pot. RENAE: I feel like I could qualify us for the Olympic Power Walkers Team. And should they fall any further behind, Renae can take out her frustration on the pot by using it to qualify herself for the Olympic Javelin Team. Sam & Renae get help to find the City of David. SAM: I wonder why we got so much help. Even more dudes. RENAE: There’s not a lot of blondes in this area. SAM: Now that I think about it, the only people who helped us were men. Sam has to explain what adjacent means to one of the locals helping her. It might not be the best help that they’re getting. Tyler & Nathan have to retrace some of their steps. Not Nathan’s most ideal position. NATHAN: What’s this phone, Tyler? What’s this phone? TYLER: Nothing. It’s a flag. Go. I think it’s just a phone. Screw sending a letter to your loved ones–just grab this phone and give ’em a shout right now! I hope the women in the Pikachu hats are cast for the next Hamerotz LaMillion. Tyler & Nathan arrive at the final station. The clue is theirs. There’s a lot of tourist groups hovering around in the area. Sam & Renae find the City of Tit. I mean David. Sam tells Renae to not drop the pot as if they are experimental high school students once they are inside. How was this a city? Unless it was like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Current Population: 2 Sam says the water was up to her knees. On Renae? Not so much. By the way, in some unaired footage there is somebody right behind Renae who is directly walking on top of the water. I don’t know who it is, but he seems to have a gift. SAM: The water is up to my knees. RENAE: It was only up to my ankles. Renae is awarded the most smug expression of the season. Renae admits to being claustrophobic. It’s The Blair Renae Project. RENAE: I’m good! I’m good! I’ll tell you when I’m not! Like right about now. “This is so fun, Renae! Renae?” Renae hits her head a couple of times. Too damn tall. In other news, Renae got a concussion. Alas, Renae is rescued and they complete their trek through the aqueduct. The ancient bong belongs to the archaeologist. Use it well, my friend. Use it well. Matt & Tom are completely lost and absolutely no one has heard of the Rampart Wall. TOM: We were bushed for quite a while. Ah, more Aussie-isms. Just keep going up, I guess. They nearly get run over by a bus. Matt & Tom really have no idea where to go. Jeff & Luke are near the Western Wall. JEFF: Take your time. On your left, that’s the Wailing Wall. Take your time. Just suck it in. Suck it in like a cultural Kirby. JEFF: We’re in the sharp end of the race now but we’ll still take time to experience the significance of historical places. JEFF: Alright. Let’s stop for a minute. LUKE: What are you– This picture is priceless. JEFF: I just want you to look at that. LUKE: I’m looking. That’s why I turned this way. Suck it in. Suck it in. Culture successfully sucked in. Let’s go. Luke says they always try to take in the environment while racing. The guy in the green is awesome. Jeff & Luke don’t even stop for a second. Clearly they are full on culture for the day. Every single team is looking for Dung Gate. Nathan gets directions from a local. Tyler doesn’t follow and asks the guy to repeat it in perfect English twice. After they start walking, Tyler is doubting if they even walked through that area as Nathan confirms they did. I love the guy rocking the Scatman John moustache. Matt & Tom finally find somebody who knows the Rampart Wall. “Up there, my friends.” Matt & Tom run to the clue box. They read to head to the Aish HaTorah World Centre on the Western Wall for their next pit stop. There sure are a lot of letters in that limestone. In 20 BCE in the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Western Wall was built by King Herod. It’s one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews. I’d advise against a pun on this one, Bowler. And that guy possesses one of the holiest beards I have ever seen. It is also known as the Wailing Wall and attracts thousands of worshipers every day who leave written prayers in the stonework. The Aish HaTorah World Centre overlooks the stone wall. Last team to check in may be eliminated. Matt & Tom scramble to find the pit stop. Jeff & Luke get directions to the clue box from a local. Jeff’s ascot returns. After receiving directions, Jeff wants a high five. Boooom! Brothers from another mother! I don’t know how this was advantageous to Jeff. Jeff & Luke are second to the clue box. Matt & Tom are asking for directions to the race flags that they see. I’m surprised nobody decided to go there rather than Rampart’s Walk. They spotted the race flags from quite a distance. There is a lot of running around throughout Old Jerusalem. Many steps. Who shall be first to the pit stop? Grant chillin’ with a rabbi. Just another day on the job. Matt & Tom are there first. Matt side-steps onto the mat. MATT: You like your stairs here. FIRST PLACE: MATT & TOM Another calm handshake. They have won ten thousand dollars courtesy of NAB. That asterisk is free and happy running around. What the hell happened to the asterisk? It’s on a cross! He crucified the asterisk! My god! TOM: We followed the path of Jesus and it ended up leading us to the right direction and getting us there first. Maybe he was looking down on us favourably today. MATT: He gave us that guiding touch. They’re the only Muslim team that had a chance to be racing around in Israel, and Mo & Mos really could have spoiled the Christian theme of this leg (and the last one) by winning one of these two rounds. Especially this one. It only would have been more hilarious if two raging atheists had won it. Missed opportunity for the folks at Active. “We’re the two very best friends!” SECOND PLACE: JEFF & LUKE They sure are sweaty. By the way, absolutely no mat chat for them again. We immediately cut to Tyler & Nathan running around to find Dung Gate. They’re told to backtrack. The locals are offering contradictory directions. Frustration is setting in. Sam & Renae are also running around. Sam & Renae appear to be close to the wall. They are stumped by a turnstile. It turns out to be an ‘Exit Only’ turnstile. It sure is fun to play with, though. It’s a long search for Dung Gate. Tyler & Nathan are getting increasingly frustrated. Nathan tries to calm Tyler down but it doesn’t go over well. TYLER: We’re trying to find a clue, dude. That’s where we’re going. What do you mean where we go? NATHAN: Chill out, mate. TYLER: I’m just saying, dude. NATHAN: You’re so stressed. TYLER: I’m not stressed. NATHAN: Yes you are. Chill out, mate. TYLER: I’m trying to find a clue, dude. NATHAN: Yeah, but look at how stressed you are! TYLER: Shut up, mate! I’m in a fucking race! NATHAN: Chill out. TYLER: You fucking idiot. NATHAN: Chill out mate. Don’t call me a fucking idiot. Yeah, don’t call him a fucking idiot. Not when he has the smallest manbun known to man. Commercial break. We resume. Tyler & Nathan’s fight is replayed. Nathan breaks out some sass. NATHAN: Let’s walk the wall where the wall is like the clue says. You wanna do that? TYLER: I don’t know. Tyler & Nathan find the clue. The Jewish cousin of Aisha Tyler. Sam & Renae are last to the clue box. Editors aren’t going to fool us. It isn’t that close. As Sam & Renae cross the street, Renae asks to hold her hand. “Hold my fin, baby girl.” It’s a race to Aish Hatorah. Wait. Canada? The Dan Family of Canada? I was not expecting Canada being mentioned on the Jerusalem leg of TAR Australia. And as somebody who has now been working in a pharmacy for nearly four years, I finally learned who was behind Novo and Teva brand pharmaceuticals. What a random connection to find in this episode for me. They have no choice but to wait. Sam & Renae have been running by tourists all day. THIRD PLACE: TYLER & NATHAN Not the happiest pair. GRANT: You look a bit frustrated. Tyler & Nathan answer that not reading clues properly and getting stressed out is why they are annoyed and stressed. “It’s more than what’s happening to Matt & Tom or Jeff & Luke at the moment.” Tyler says they should have finished in second place today, and that their struggle over the past couple rounds has been a major kick in the ass. Or a slap in the face. That’s a team who highly suspects a NEL. No tears yet. It’s tough to be angry around a happy rabbi. LAST PLACE: SAM & RENAE The breakdown is coming. GRANT: I have to tell you. . .this is a pre-determined non-elimination leg. Therefore you have not been eliminated from the race. If only they received this news via scratch card. SAM: We were pretty lucky to have dodged this bullet. TAR 1, TAR 2, TAR 4, TAR 5, TAR 6, TAR 7, TAR 8 (x2), TAR 9, TAR 10, TAR 11 (x2), TAR 12, TAR 13, TAR 14, TAR 15, TAR 16, TAR 17, TAR Asia 1, and TAR Asia 3 have all had a NEL at Final Four up to this point. If anything, it would be extremely unlucky if they didn’t hit the final NEL on this leg. Sam & Renae are Marked for Elimination. If they don’t arrive in first place on the next leg, they will incur a thirty minute penalty. SAM: We realize how far we’ve actually come in the competition, and to be the last two girls standing here we’ve won. To us we’ve won. Actually, you haven’t won. The only way you win is if you’re the first team to cross the finish line on the final leg of the race. Renae wants females in the top three, and girls can do it half their size, half their age, and half their strength. Aren’t they older than Tyler & Nathan? SAM: Hopefully we can do it. Sam & Renae didn’t exactly present the most compelling case that they would overcome this penalty in the next leg. Let’s see how it plays out. Next Time on TAR: The Final Four teams run a tight race in a sprint towards the finale, but in the battle for a quarter of a million dollars which team won’t make it into the final leg? Rank the Legs 1) Krakow, Poland -> Masada, Israel TAR goes to Israel. Well, other than Hamerotz LaMillion which is the Israeli version of The Amazing Race (you smartass), but the American version hasn’t even gone to Israel after 29 seasons. There is a sense of satisfaction to watch a version of TAR that visits a country that the US version has not dared to visit yet. TAR Australia and TAR Canada will later repeat this with Cuba. Cuba being dismissed by TAR US is obvious. But Israel? How did Australians go there but not the Americans or Canadians? Yes, Israel is still a very controversial country to this day, but their extremely close ties to the States makes you think that an Israel visit for TAR US would be very easy for them to do. Like, I know TAR Asia could never go there since some of its teams would not be allowed to visit, but TAR US? How come they can’t go? As somebody who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, news stations filled up endless material with things happening in Israel. The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, various attacks, etc. I know things aren’t kosher and hunky-dory with its surrounding countries there now, but it fills up a lot less of the daily news cycle than it did about ten years ago. It was really neat to see its debut as a casual TAR location. The Australian teams expressing genuine shock they were going there, and how Tel Aviv looked like any western metropolis, and then Jerusalem Beach looking like any other ordinary beach. It’s like “here is a regular ol’ country that just happens to be home to stuff you read in the Bible”. Oh, that thing over there? King Herod built it. And it gives me the chance to make a bunch of jokes that hover around the line of what is considered offensive. We all win. The storyline of Tyler & Nathan clawing their way to survival with minimal funds since the robbery continued. They ended up with a pile of phone numbers (and rubbers) by the end of this leg. Dave & Kelly became public enemy number one and were considered the worst thing since Hitl–er, Kevin & Ryan in TAR Canada 5 as everyone labeled them as the team that absolutely had to go home. I have no idea where that sentiment came from. A self-drive leg to the pit stop resulted in four out of five teams getting lost on the way to the pit stop. Hell, Dave & Kelly didn’t even get to the pit stop. The only team who didn’t get lost was also the team who were already in first after the Detour. Matt & Tom ran a flawless leg as they completed every single task in the fastest time this round. Even Grant commented that they did this leg in about two seconds. Hopefully we get departure times at the start of next round. Seeing two teams be absolutely certain they were being eliminated only to discover they were safe was fun to watch. That’s why I like self-drive legs. Matkot was alright for a task. Seeing the return of How Well You Know Your Partner task was refreshing. Particularly because Sam misread a question and nearly royally screwed Renae. Thank god Renae knew all of the other answers with certainty. Jeff acting like a maniac for half of the episode was also a surprise. Israel being a location automatically shot it high up in these standings regardless of the production design or editing this leg–everything else was just icing on the cake. 2) Masada, Israel -> Jerusalem, Israel All of my religious jokes in the blog aside, it is still really really cool that TAR Australia visited Jerusalem. I understand why they focused more on the biblical part of the city rather than the current political climate, but it was still awesome to see the city be added to the TAR catalog. I am very curious to see how TAR US or TAR Canada will treat Israel when they eventually visit the country. It was a bit anti-climatic as this was the shortest episode of the season in terms of airtime, and since NELs on the penultimate leg aren’t allowed anymore it had to be the final NEL of the season. It didn’t help that there were no equalizers and the tasks were easy enough for everyone to stay in the exact same position as they did in the last leg. The Holy Grail task was a bit too similar to what we saw in the metal detector search task from the previous round. However, instead of a beach we get an awesome trek through the mysterious city of David. Seeing teams go to the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls as Renae shaves her legs, Matt takes a nap, and Jeff couldn’t understand this task at all made it an entertaining Roadblock for everyone. Watching Tyler & Nathan deal with mounting pressure, stress, and attrition was interesting to watch play out. They have surprisingly unique ways of coping with this in the race. The letters to be sent home ultimately amounted to nothing. What was the point? There was no payoff with it. Sam falling was funny. Jeff being the Slow Grandpa was funny. The Kimo Leopoldo crosses were funny. Matt being seduced by a bagel was funny. There was a mixture of self-driving, taxis, and racing on-foot to make this an integrated round of play. It was a quick round, but we really needed two rounds in Israel and producers did a pretty good damn job with it. I approve. 3) Macau, China -> Port Elizabeth, South Africa It took four episodes, but we finally get some original material. After copying tasks from prior seasons of TAR Asia, nothing is repeated as the cast exits Asia for the rest of the season. What is even better is we visit a part of South Africa that has yet to be seen on The Amazing Race. In other words, not Cape Town. This round earns a lot of points for being an extreme self-drive leg. After flying for a full day, teams were forced to drive six hundred kilometres only to be equalized until the morning. Richard & Joey’s storyline was set up perfectly for this round. After pissing off everyone else this season, it did not come as a surprise that they would be the only team to be U-Turned. Add to this that they were stuck in the mud more than any other team, Richard wasting time wanting a better goat, and both of them going insane during the Detour was great entertainment. This round had the perfect balance of tasks. A couple of scenic locations, a difficult driving challenge through mud, a Detour where you pick between either coordination or skill, a record-breaking bungee jump task, and lastly a fun goat-herding challenge. This is when TAR is at its best. There was lots of fun moments this leg. Most of them came from Alana & Mel nearly dying as they learn how to drive a stick shift. Matt & Tom were pulled over by the friendliest police officer ever, and Mo & Mos barely surviving elimination yet again despite not even being able to stand up on a ferry just a day earlier. An episode like this is why I love The Amazing Race, and why it makes me sad when I watch a season like TAR 24 or the majority of TAR 28 where the soul of the series continues to fade away. Or the season premiere of TAR Asia 5. What the hell was that? 4) Cape Town, South Africa -> The ‘Dam, Netherlands -> Prague, Czech Republic I will award this round fifty points for traveling to two separate non-bordering countries properly in a single episode (as a reader pointed out, TAR Asia 1 and TAR Asia 2 had done this before). We saw teams fatigued before they were even at the second challenge. The twist of providing the leading teams with comfortable accommodations while providing the trailing teams with a punishment is something I don’t recall seeing before. Unless you’re Danny & Oswald and take it from your own pocket. Furthermore, the $50 Roadblock race bonus at the bow and arrow task was also a creative twist. None of the other versions had ever done that before either. However, this leg blatantly copied three of the TAR Asia 2 challenges that they also did in Prague. Back in 2011 I doubt too many people had watched the TAR Asia seasons prior to TAR Australia, but I can’t help but penalize production for a lack of creativity for the majority of the episode. Dave & Kelly accidentally making fun of a blind man, Tyler & Nathan describing themselves as underdogs, Matt as Robocop, Jeff & Luke unintentionally misdirecting Sam & Renae, the princesses being called fat, and Mel’s twinging elbow strain all contributed to an entertaining round of play. And just think of Jeff & Luke did not give away their arrows, Matt & Tom would have been eliminated! So close, guys. So close. 5) Port Elizabeth, South Africa – > Cape Town, South Africa This round is hilarious. I thought this season would suffer after Richard & Joey’s exit, but that is not the case. I have two complaints with this round. One of them is that the Intersection is as weak as the American version. Why doesn’t any of the franchises want to do something more with the Intersection? Just one lousy task and that’s it? Although it was funny to see Intersected teams lose each other while driving on the road to the same place. The other complaint is that they copied a luck-based task from TAR Asia 2 in the exact same location. I love how Anastasia thought it was necessary to one-up Collin’s accident. The air she got was ridiculous. Speaking of Anastasia, the reason why this episode ranks so high is because of how volatile Chris & Anastasia were from start to finish. The wine Detour blowup is memorable for any hardcore TAR fan. They were even fighting in confessionals from start to finish this episode. Not to mention they lost their keys in the desert, needed Renae to release their key, and Anastasia nearly died. I imagine more absurd fights are on the horizon. Mo & Mos’ adventure this leg started out with a series of bathroom breaks prior to jumping out of a plane. Or their pointless search of a random beach that didn’t have their next clue. I can picture their friends and family cringing at home as they make their jihad jokes when firing at clay targets on the shooting range. The Detour featured a classic pun–Guns or Rose. I guess that is a thing. Neither Detour seemed difficult unless you are a couple preparing to break up. It wasn’t a terrible Detour, but not brilliant either. The skydiving task may be a tired formula in TAR by this point. Thankfully Alana, Dave, and Mo provided a bit of entertainment within it. Dave & Kelly donating an extra map to the orphanage led to one of the more amusing moments of the round. The Matt & Tom vs. Tyler & Nathan rivalry continues to build without it being too boring. Luckily all four racers are somewhat entertaining. Mo & Mos were -this- close to surviving the leg. It would have made a better ending as Chris & Anastasia being eliminated would have been the best way to cap their shitty day. Lastly, Luke overplays how old his dad is on screen. It never gets old. . .unlike his dad. 6) Melbourne, Australia -> Lombok, Indonesia A Starting Line task where nobody is penalized? Wonderful. A NEL that doesn’t involve a stupid Speed Bump? Wonderful. A round where the prize up for grabs is an Express Pass? Meh, but I’ll forgive this since the twist was still relatively new. This round loses points for being the closest thing to a copycat of another prior TAR leg that I have ever seen. When half of the tasks are identical, nearly every single location is identical, and the host’s own puns are plagiarized, I think that is a bit extreme. I know it is tempting because this Lombok leg was well-constructed in TAR Asia 4. It had the freakin’ Ethan & Khairie vs. The Richards fight to set the tone for a very competitive leg. But c’mon, replacing a tomb with bakso soup is not enough to make this its own leg. We still had a clue covered by a net in an outrigger, the rice cake massacre, diving into the water, counting money, and riding a cidomo to a pit stop. The only interesting part about seeing a group of people repeat a leg from a different season is if it plays out any differently. Knowing how exhausted teams were by the time they needed to count the money demonstrated that this was a true test for everyone involved. My initial assumption that Tyler & Nathan would stroll through this round easily was erased halfway through the episode. Sam & Renae obliterate eighteen seasons of TAR US’ history with young blonde all-female teams by slaughtering everyone on their way to the pit stop. They were also responsible for slaughtering that poor asterisk. It gave you ten thousand dollars and THAT is how you repay it? One of the weirdest trends was seeing Mo & Mos repeat fellow Muslim team Bilal & Sa’eed by having a horrendous opening leg. Luckily, they were saved by a NEL unlike their Cleveland counterparts. The lopsided rivalry of the intense Richard & Joey versus the goofy and giggly Anne-Marie & Tracy begins here. I hope this lasts for a while because it is a hilarious storyline. Anne-Marie & Tracy must be oblivious to the target on their backs. By the way, I love Anne-Marie & Tracy win round one of this war. After Alana & Mel were awful with self-driving in Melbourne, I cannot wait to see how they handle driving in foreign countries. Chris’s roided up reactions to everything during this leg amused me. So was Dave & Kelly’s commentary. Lastly, Liberty vomiting after kissing a dozen Lombok men. Did their cheeks nauseate you that much? Overall, this round was anything but its own original piece, however the cast and the fact this was a strong leg in TAR Asia 4 makes up for it. A seventy-minute episode did not drag whatsoever. 7) Zimni, Czech Republic -> Niedzica, Poland Despite it being a To Be Continued round, there wasn’t an equalizer that resulted in all six teams being forced together at the start of the day. Yes, the gap narrowed at the salt mine, but it wasn’t enough to make Dave & Kelly and Matt & Tom be on an equal playing field with the other teams. Tyler & Nathan being robbed on the train is one of the most shocking moments in TAR history. James & Abba will suffer a worse fate just over a year after this season airs, but James & Abba weren’t the extreme frontrunners like Tyler & Nathan had been all season long. It would be like if Colin & Christie lost their passports at the end of the tenth leg of TAR 5–the strongest team being taken out in the unluckiest way possible. Thanks to it being a self-drive leg and having many allies, Tyler & Nathan mounted a comeback and nearly won this round. If you had any doubts they were going to win this season, they were certainly removed after this round of play. Surprisingly, none of the tasks in Poland referenced World War II like they did during TAR 11: Real All Stars’ visit. It’s just castles, salt mines, and views of the lakes and mountains. The salt mine task was a bit too much of a needle in the haystack for me. The crypt was cool, though. And Nathan nearly damaging the equipment was amusing as well as Matt being forced to damage his own equipment thanks to the tight overalls. Dave & Kelly continuing to pile on fatigue and physical injury was amusing. Every time they beat Matt & Tom on navigation and how pissed Matt & Tom were also added a dash of hilarity to the episode. The Detour, where it was so lopsided that everyone chose the sheep anyway, was full of funny moments. Renae lifting up fat sheep, sheep escaping through every pole or hole possible, and the cute little way they all run away from the contestants had me laughing. It was also a fun task to watch. It was painful to see the Intersection be the last task before the pit stop. I know it wasn’t the shortest drive in the world, but nearly everyone checked into the pit stop in pairs. Now for the Intersection task itself–the TAR Asia 4 woodcutting challenge on steroids. The log was three times as high, and the tools used required A LOT of physical strength. Was it too unfair to the group that had three women and only one man? That’s up for debate. Can you imagine if Charla & Mirna had to do this task? There was hope for Chris, Anastasia, Sam, and Renae when Sam & Renae made it through their first cut, but Anastasia’s lack of strength made it clear that the lead they had since the previous round was going to be sacrificed. At least there was suspense if Kelly had enough in her to complete this challenge. The editors had me wondering because of what happened with Anne-Marie & Tracey and Mo & Mos at the zodiac challenge earlier in the season. But Anastasia was the only one who couldn’t do it. The four hour penalty was assessed, and Sam & Renae were caught in friendly fire as they had a two hour penalty dumped on them. I think Sam & Renae should not have received a penalty at all because they weren’t allowed the chance to prove they could make the second cut. Jeff & Luke finally nab their first victory of the season. It was well-earned as this was Jeff & Luke’s most entertaining episode to date. What time is it, old man? It would be interesting to see how social media would have reacted to Chris & Anastasia if social media platforms were as big in 2011 as they were now. Something tells me Chris would have had a much tougher time dealing with the public reaction. Overall, this was a solid round but too much TAR Asia copying, an oddly placed Intersection, a Detour where one option was extremely unappealing, and a luck-based challenge drops it in the rankings. 8) Prague, Czech Republic -> Zimni, Czech Republic If I recall correctly, this is by far the shortest episode out of the first seven episodes (while other episodes were up to seventy minutes of running time, this one is only 43 minutes). Matt & Tom set a new record by being stopped by police TWICE in the same round. Somehow they were not detained or fined by law enforcement in either situation. The ice hockey challenge proved to be difficult as we saw some extremely painful falls by our dear Aussies. Dave’s incidents were cringeworthy to watch. Production trolled teams by setting up a Detour task that they knew would be borderline impossible for everyone involved. Seeing three teams fall for this trap was funny. Sam & Renae receive bad advice from a fellow team for the second round in a row as Matt & Tom were unaware of how to properly succeed at the Russian spy challenge. The comrade was always good for a laugh as he repeatedly insulted Tyler. You could see this season being taken to the next level as the showdown at the beer stacking between the three trailing teams became more physical than what I was expecting. With five rounds left in the season, we could very well shift to it being a cutthroat battle. This round does have a lousy ending, though. No prize given to Chris & Anastasia for finishing first, and whoever finishes last on this leg will not be penalized despite it being a Non-Elimination Leg. Sigh. A mid-season NEL leg can be dull most of the time, but here it holds up reasonably well. A self-drive leg, a unique penalty for failing at a task, and a physical active route info all contributed to a decent round of play. Oh, and there was abseiling. I almost forgot about it since it was only shown for two minutes. 9) Lombok, Indonesia -> Hue, Vietnam Although this leg ends in Hue, we cannot glance over the fact that we were in Ho Chi Minh City for one task before equalizing all of the teams. For the second round in a row, we get an excessive amount of overlap with a TAR Asia leg. Well, two TAR Asia legs if you include the carabao task from TAR Asia 2. I like how teams were given even less instruction with the dynasty coins task compared to when it was run during TAR Asia 3 (it was also twenty degrees Celsius warmer back then to balance things out). The Detour was extremely physical. Either you relied on the carabao to drag you through the mud to find a clue, or you caught a bunch of chickens and had to carry the heavy weight over a long course. Considering multiple teams switched tasks, nobody had any energy left. However, forcing half of the players to run up and down stairs during what would normally be billed as a mental challenge led to them scrounging what little energy they could to finish off the leg. Perhaps my biggest beef with this leg is underediting the broken deal between Alana & Mel and Richard & Joey right before the pit stop. Both teams were minutes away from being eliminated, and Richard & Joey gave into temptation to guarantee they stayed alive. Since both teams entered the pit stop seconds apart, we should have seen Grant Bowler host a mat chat on the spot. In fact, Ryot & Liberty could have been told they were eliminated and start crying while Mel and Joey engage in a shouting match. That would have been great TV. Rich & Joey was not the only team to piss off everyone this episode. Chris did his part as he infamously berated Anastasia at the airport in Lombok. Furthermore, the name-calling continued until Anastasia was the first to complete the Roadblock over ten other teams. Then things changed. We saw alliances begin to form and enemies made. I don’t understand why we needed a double equalizer before the true round could start, but whatever. I do find it funny that this cast got to travel by plane rather than bus or train to Hue. Special treatment for Aussies! Mo & Mos and Anne-Marie & Tracy staying alive through the first elimination was the ideal start to the season. Ryot & Liberty were not the best choice for first boots, but it is not the worst option out there. Besides, we saw how physically fit Liberty was in the first episode–I am surprised she held up through this round without vomiting again. While wonderful storylines developed and amusing moments were present, the lack of originality and a missed opportunity for the editors drops this episode down a bit in the rankings. 10) Hue, Vietnam -> Macau, China Let’s get this out of the way: For the third leg in a row, many of the challenges and locations are unapologetically ripped off from TAR Asia. The fortune cookie search, placing Zodiac lanterns in the correct order, dancing in a lion costume, playing a simple card game in a casino to win points, and A-Ma Cultural Village being used as the pit stop were all apart of TAR Asia 3. This episode used too many luck-based challenges. That is always disappointing. The only Fast Forward of the season appears, and features the famous traditional head shaving challenge. Whether you are annoyed this task is unoriginal or like the nostalgic factor is completely up to you. Seeing Richard & Joey go from the team viewed as underperforming and pissing off everyone else in the race go to “lucky bastards” who jump to the front and take the Fast Forward and skip three-quarters of the leg sets up the team everyone wants to knock out of the race. This round contains one of the most frustrating moments in TAR history. The bottom two teams, beloved Mo & Mos and Anne-Marie & Tracy are at the final Roadblock. Mo & Mos decide to take a four hour penalty, thus setting up Anne-Marie & Tracy to beat them by default. However, Anne-Marie & Tracy quit -after- them despite knowing it would guarantee their elimination, and end up going home in what could have been a case of having all-time great characters. We had name-calling in the form of Chris referring to Dave as a fat oaf, a kung fu task where Renae accidentally punched concrete to make her hand bleed, and Anne-Marie & Tracy successfully performing an aerobic lion dance. Oh, and Mel being angry with Alana’s hesitation to step up for a Roadblock was funny. We’ll have to work on that, Alana. This round featured a TAR franchise first which has yet to be repeated: An Express Pass which saved a team who had a 50/50 shot at being eliminated. Sam & Renae used their Express Pass in an episode where editors buried them. This round in Singapore was absolutely brutal for them. P.S. How dapper were Matt & Tom? They were as dressed up as the Texan guy from The Simpsons.

Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in the Russian Far East, could at last be joined by land to the rest of the country if an agreement is reached with Chinese state investors to build a bridge over the Lena river. Although the project, and a degree of Chinese involvement in it, have existed for quite some time, the likelihood that it will actually be built is increasing as Chinese investors take a more central role and get more favourable conditions from the Russian side. The bridge project was talked about last week at the event formerly known as the Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair (哈洽会), which Li Keqiang and Medvedev agreed last year to rename the China-Russia Expo (中俄博览会). The name change, fitting to the climate of cooperation between China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East, implies a change of venue as well. Next year‘s edition will be held in Russia, and the city of Khabarovsk has already come up as a candidate to host it. Yakutsk was founded in the 17th century on what, from the point of view of today’s existing transport infrastructure, looks like the wrong side of the Lena river. The river can be crossed by ferry in summer, on ice in winter, and not at all the rest of the year. Once on the other bank, things aren’t necessarily easy, but they used to be worse. One option is to drive east through the world’s coldest inhabited area on the road (called the ‘Kolyma road‘ (Колымская трасса)) to Magadan 2000km away. The road in the other direction was once known as one of the world’s scariest, but it has recently been paved. The railway is also about to reach Yakutsk: a line that took nine years to construct now links Nizhny Bestyakh, just opposite Yakutsk across the Lena, to the national network. The missing link is thus the Lena bridge. It has been planned for years. Funds were earmarked for it, and a tender to build it was won by a Russian consortium (which I understand already included the Chinese contractor as a partner), but then the federal government’s priorities changed, allegedly as a result of Crimea’s accession to the Federation. (One of Crimea’s infrastructure needs is also a bridge, the one over the Kerch Керчь strait, that will link the peninsula to the rest of the country.) The fund reallocation meant the Yakutians would have to wait until 2020. Yakutian officials haven’t given up though. Yakutia has been quite active in the last couple of years looking for Chinese (as well and Korean and Japanese) investment to develop the region, something I’ve written about on a few occasions. In the Chinese case, most of the exchanges I know about have been facilitated by a few businesspeople with heavyweight SOE contacts (the most visible names can be found in my earlier post on the Yakutsk bridge), and the main state interlocutors have been the Heilongjiang provincial government and a few municipalities. Chinese interest seemed to have been successfully aroused last July, when representatives from China Railway 24th Bureau (中铁二十四局集团), a subsidiary of the state-owned CRCC (中铁), showed up in Yakutsk to go into the technical nitty-gritty of the project. Even more auspiciously, Russian media quoted Chinese (private) interlocutors as explicitly referring to the possibility of Chinese financing for the project. Although I haven’t read it in so many words in Yakutian sources, Chinese financing is what the promotion activities Yakutian officials have been so busy at recently regarding the bridge project (first at the East Russia Economic Forum (Восточный экономический форум) in Vladivostok, now at the Harbin Expo) are conceivably about, given that a contractor for the actual construction has already been found in the 24th Bureau. The 24th Bureau (ultimately owned by the central government) is likely going to be involved in the Yakutian project in partnership with the Heilongjiang provincial government, through a jointly owned company such as Zhongtie Longxing (中铁龙兴), that is already active in projects in Siberia. (More details on companies called Longxing, sometimes mistransliterated ‘Lunsin’ from its Palladius Cyrillisation Лунсин, in my previous post on the subject.) It was indeed with the Heilongjiang gov’t that Yakutian officials agreed to form a “work group” on the bridge project, and the same group of Heilongjiang companies is also getting ready to make other investments in Yakutia (notably the Tirekhtyakh Тирехтях lead mine in Ulst-Yansky Усть-Янский district, at around 69°N and just 200km from the Laptev sea). There’s also talk of favourable conditions being advertised to convince Chinese investors to come over and get the thing built. Aleksey Zagorenko Алексей Загоренко, director of Yakutia’s investment development agency, has said the concession agreement will guarantee the investors “an acceptable level of profitability”. What’s more, unlike in the previous attempt to build the bridge, the contractor will be chosen (or has been all but chosen already) under new fast-track rules that don’t require public tender procedure before awarding them the project. Certain details about the project remain unclear, such as how much it will cost, who will pay for it, and, crucially, whether it will be a road and railway bridge from the start, or first a road bridge to be later made railway-and-road somehow. If all goes well and everyone agrees on everything by next year, construction could start in 2017 and finish in 2022 on time to celebrate the centenary of the end of the Yakut Revolt and the establishment of the Yakutian ASSR. It wouldn’t be the first time Chinese intervention gets such a project done after Russian funding fails to materialise. The rail bridge that will link Tongjiang 同江 in Heilongjiang to Nizhneleninskoye Нижнеленинское in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast across the Amur river, could be finished by early 2017 now that the Chinese companies building the Chinese half (with which they say they’ll be done before the end of the year) have agreed to do the Russian half as well (the Russians hadn’t even started). Auspiciously for the Yakutians, some of the companies involved in the Yakutsk project also have interests in the Amur bridge. Perhaps a bit less auspiciously, the international bridge over the Amur is considerably more important for Chinese economic interests (including, serendipitously enough, for General Nice through IRC) than the Yakutsk bridge, well inside Russia. Nor would it be the first Chinese-built bridge in the (near-)Arctic. The steelwork for the Hålogaland bridge, near Narvik in northern Norway, is being built by Sichuan Road and Bridge Group (SRBG, 四川路桥). That deal was technically won through a tender, but SRBG’s bid was found to have been prepared in, shall we say, involuntary symbiosis with a better known German company. The case earned the engineer who led SRBG’s winning bid four years in a German jail, but the project went on anyway. (I wrote about the German court case last December. The story has recently reached (paywall) Norwegian local media.) There’s an old argument over whether Lenin chose his alias after the Lena river. From what I’ve read, he didn’t, since he was already signing ‘Lenin’ years before the Lena Massacre alleged to have motivated the choice of the moniker, and when his earlier Siberian exile was spent near the Yenisei, not the Lena. Whoever came up the modern Chinese name for the river (勒拿) seems to agree with that view: the modern name has nothing Leninist about it (instead it rhymes with the Chinese for ‘Saint Helena’). A more Leninny name (列拿) can be found here and there though. The earliest Chinese name for the river is the one that appears in (at least some) Qing documents, namely 里雅那江 Liyana jiang. That’s a word of some historical significance. The negotiations between the Qing and Russian empires that led to the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 started off with Qing official Langtan 郎坦 announcing his side wanted the border to be as far as the Lena. The Chinese name itself looks like a transcription from a Manchu intermediate form, and it indeed makes sense for the name of the Lena to have entered the Chinese language through a Manchu rendition of the Russian name. Nerchinsk negotiations were carried out in Latin through Jesuit interpreters, and documents were translated into Russian and Manchu. (Manchu was possibly the primary language of several of the Qing representatives, including Songgotu, the leader of the Qing delegation, and indeed Langtan.) The ‘Map of the Nine Rivers of Jilin’ (吉林九河图) used by the Qing side at Nerchinsk has place and river names in Manchu only (as reproduced here on the website of Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, unreadable at this resolution though; look for the Lena near the top left corner). Now you’re waiting for me to say that perhaps Langtan would rejoice at the sight of a Chinese-built bridge over the Liyana, three centuries after he angered the Russians by throwing that name in. But I won’t.

KH: Today is the 7th of October. INT: With Kathy Hagler. INT: OK, here we are in Inverness and you said you would talk about your life. So tell me about when and where you were born. I’m just going to let you talk and I’ll prompt you if it stops. Your name was Hagler, that’s from your family name? KH: That’s from my father, that’s all I know about him. KH: I know his name and I know his approximate age. KH: I think he was eight or nine years older than my mother. So I know that my mother was born in 1914. KH: That’s all. I don’t know when in 1914 or where in 1914; I don’t know anything. INT: So her name was, her maiden name was your grandmother’s name wasn’t it? INT: Right. And that was the name of the husband that had gone off, the gambler? KH: Yes. I mean as far as I know he may have been still alive when I was living with my granny. I have no idea. He may have been dead. KH: I don’t know, I was never told. INT: Do you know what your granny’s name was? KH: S-T-E-R-N. But listen, as I’ve said, my granny’s younger sister survived. Her grandson, my second cousin in Hungary with whom I have a very good relationship with even today, he never found out that he was Jewish until he was twenty years old! INT: Wow. From a religious grandmother as well. KH: But a totally non-religious mother. KH: He was twenty years old before he found out that he came from a Jewish family. KH: I mean…so my granny and my aunt were not the only ones who kept everything a secret. INT: Yeah. So presumably after the Holocaust it was just too dangerous to say anything to anybody … KH: I was about fourteen years old when I sort of decided all by myself that maybe it’s not a good idea to let people know that I’m Jewish. I don’t know how I reached that conclusion because there was never any doubt about it; I always knew that I was Jewish. KH: But somehow I reached the conclusion that letting people know that I’m Jewish is not a very good idea.

The Jewish progressive American advocacy group J Street concluded its 12th annual National Conference on Monday, April 19, virtually hosting nearly 5,000 attendees who listened to lawmakers, experts and activists discuss the current respective political moments in Israel and the United States, as well as the present state of the US-Israel relations. On Sunday, April 18, the chair of the Joint List MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash) told the conference that his alliance remains committed to replacing Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister and ending the Israel’s political crisis. Odeh told the conference that Israel, more than ever, finds itself at a crossroads between a future of occupation and war, and a future of peace, democracy and equality for all. He highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and progressive American politicians who have managed to push the nation towards being a more inclusive democracy. “We must be brave enough to look at the structures of supremacy that aims to increase inequality between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians; between occupiers and occupied; between those in power and all of us who are denied power because of our race, our gender, our religion or our nationality; and we must dismantle these structures,” Odeh said. On Monday, Joint List MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash) posted a tweet in which she urged the Yesh Atid chair, MK Yair Lapid, not to reach a rotation agreement for the premiership with far-right Yamina chairperson Naftali Bennett. Touma-Sliman wrote, “If Netanyahu is unable to form a coalition, Lapid should not cede the premiership to Bennett who has just seven seats. Lapid should demand that he be the sole leader of the government. This would be a government which is not right-wing. This kind of government would be one that the Joint List would be prepared to back.”

LENOX — This summer Tanglewood is pulling out all the stops for Leonard Bernstein’s centenary year. The festivities began in earnest on Saturday night with a superbly buoyant performance of his wartime musical “On the Town.” During his lifetime, Bernstein’s theatrical successes worked against his reputation as a composer of serious art music. But the array of works to be heard here this summer seems designed to prod these boundaries and ask whether we are, finally, ready to listen through Bernstein’s output as the product of a single masterfully assimilative mind, a composer who reimagined both concert music and stage music in each other’s image. But of course in December 1944, when “On the Town” premiered, all those tensions lay in the unknowable future. This show — with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green — seemed propelled by something more simple: the sheer blind confidence and audacity of talented youth. None of the core collaborators was over 30, and none had worked on Broadway before. Bernstein had met the choreographer Jerome Robbins only the previous year and the two had immediately connected. Both had been precocious children of immigrant Jewish families with business-minded fathers who kept skeptical tabs on their early artistic careers. By 1943, Robbins had already devised the scenario for the ballet “Fancy Free,” in which three young sailors spend 24 hours in New York City. Bernstein had already scribbled a bit of music on a napkin in the Russian Tea Room. The rest is theater history. “Fancy Free” was rapturously received at its April 1944 premiere and Bernstein and Robbins soon went to work growing its dramatic kernel into a full-scale musical, one that eschewed tired Broadway conventions and sought to depict the sailors, in Comden and Green’s words, as “real people . . . coming to the city for the first time,” embarking on a “frantic search for gaiety and love,” while working against “the terrific pressure of time that war brings.” These days “On the Town” is heard about more than it is heard, as if the entire musical were some sort of elaborate pretext for giving posterity the song “New York, New York.” But the work as a whole stands up, with its sharply drawn wit, its scenic velocity, and its brilliantly hybrid score infused with that youthful exuberance from first bar to last. All of that came through vividly in Saturday’s semi-staged performance — conducted by Keith Lockhart, directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, with musical direction from David Chase. If “New York, New York,” which appears early on, joyfully telegraphed the sailor’s giddy sense of adventure, “Some Other Time,” which is sung once their 24 hours have all but vanished, captured with glowing wistfulness just how many aspects of everyday life in wartime were deferred into an unknown future. Saturday’s excellent cast was full of Broadway veterans. The trio of sailors was played by Brandon Victor Dixon as Gabey, the misty-eyed romantic who pines for the beauty pageant winner he sees on a subway poster; Andy Karl as Ozzie, who aims lower yet is pleasantly surprised; and Christian Dante White as Chip, who meets a taxi driver more interested in her house than his. Indeed, especially notable for its time was not only the show’s mixed-race casting but also its strong female characters. The sailors’ dates are each bolder and more liberated than the last, including Claire De Loone (here, Laura Osnes) the mischievously studious anthropologist of men; Hildy Esterhazy (Megan Lawrence), the take-no-prisoners cabbie; and Ivy Smith (Georgina Pazcoguin), the beautiful yet elusive singer who longs for a life of art but makes her living as a cooch dancer on Coney Island. Andrea Martin played a number of hilarious smaller roles, including the tippling voice teacher Madame Maude P. Dilly. And Marc Kudisch was Claire’s fiance, Pitkin W. Bridgework, ever-indulgent of her dalliances until he isn’t. Lockhart has been leading the Boston Pops in plenty of Bernstein already this year, and he drew vibrant and assured playing from the orchestra, full of rhythmic elan. All told, it was a highly auspicious start to the Bernstein summer at Tanglewood. This was not, however, the start of the BSO’s Tanglewood summer. Technically that came the previous night as music director Andris Nelsons led the orchestra in Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the latter receiving a lean, focused, dramatically powerful performance. Between the two works came a visit from the superstar pianist Lang Lang, making a somewhat low key return to the soloist’s spotlight after a lengthy hiatus due to a left hand injury. Originally slated to perform Tchaikovsky’s mammoth Piano Concerto No. 1, Lang ultimately scaled back to the classical refinements of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, a work whose challenges, for the battle-tested virtuoso, are less athletic than musical. Happily, by way of a report on his recovery, the pianist appeared at ease and in full command of the technique required for this first outing. His playing trafficked — to an almost daredevil degree — in extremes of pianissimo. For this listener, the micro-inflections in phrasing and dynamics often worked against the music’s broader expressive arc, but the performance overall drew hearty approval from the Shed audience. I’ve never seen a performer sign an autograph while bowing from the Shed stage, but Lang did it on Friday night. Then he sat down for an encore — Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C sharp minor — floated once more in wisps and whispers. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA + BOSTON POPS Andris Nelsons and Keith Lockhart, conductors. At Tanglewood Friday and Saturday nights.

- Prayer and Worship - Beliefs and Teachings - Issues and Action - Catholic Giving - About USCCB List of Workers. 1* a Eliashib the high priest and his priestly kinsmen took up the task of rebuilding the Sheep Gate. They consecrated it and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars, then continued the rebuilding to the Tower of the Hundred, the Tower of Hananel. 2At their side the men of Jericho were rebuilding, and next to them was Zaccur, son of Imri. 3b The Fish Gate was rebuilt by the people of Hassenaah; they timbered it and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars. 4At their side Meremoth, son of Uriah, son of Hakkoz, carried out the work of repair; next to him was Meshullam, son of Berechiah, son of Meshezabel; and next to him was Zadok, son of Baana. 5Next to him the Tekoites carried out the work of repair; however, some of their most powerful men would not submit to the labor asked by their masters. 6The Mishneh Gate* was repaired by Joiada, son of Paseah; and Meshullam, son of Besodeiah; they timbered it and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars. 7At their side Melatiah the Gibeonite did the repairing, together with Jadon the Meronothite, and the men of Gibeon and of Mizpah, who were under the jurisdiction of the governor of West-of-Euphrates. 8Next to them the work of repair was carried out by Uzziel, son of Harhaiah, a member of the goldsmiths’ guild, and at his side was Hananiah, one of the perfumers’ guild. They restored Jerusalem as far as the Broad Wall.* 9Next to them the work of repair was carried out by Rephaiah, son of Hur, administrator of half the district of Jerusalem, 10and at his side was Jedaiah, son of Harumaph, who repaired opposite his own house. Next to him Hattush, son of Hashabneiah, carried out the work of repair. 11The adjoining sector, as far as the Oven Tower, was repaired by Malchijah, son of Harim, and Hasshub, son of Pahath-moab. 12At their side the work of repair was carried out by Shallum, son of Hallohesh, administrator of half the district of Jerusalem, together with his daughters. 13The Valley Gate was repaired by Hanun and the inhabitants of Zanoah; they rebuilt it and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars. They also repaired a thousand cubits of the wall up to the Dung Gate. 14The Dung Gate was repaired by Malchijah, son of Rechab, administrator of the district of Beth-haccherem; he rebuilt it and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars. 15The Fountain Gate was repaired by Shallum, son of Colhozeh, administrator of the district of Mizpah; he rebuilt it, roofed it, and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars. He also repaired the wall of the Aqueduct Pool near the King’s Garden as far as the steps that lead down from the City of David. 16After him, the work of repair was carried out by Nehemiah, son of Azbuk, administrator of half the district of Beth-zur, to a place opposite the tombs of David, as far as the Artificial Pool and the barracks. 17After him, these Levites carried out the work of repair: Rehum, son of Bani, and next to him, for his own district, was Hashabiah, administrator of half the district of Keilah. 18After him, their kinsmen carried out the work of repair: Binnui, son of Henadad, administrator of half the district of Keilah; 19next to him Ezer, son of Jeshua, administrator of Mizpah, who repaired the adjoining sector, the Corner, opposite the ascent to the arsenal. 20After him, Baruch, son of Zabbai, repaired the adjoining sector from the Corner to the entrance of the house of Eliashib, the high priest. 21After him, Meremoth, son of Uriah, son of Hakkoz, repaired the adjoining sector from the entrance of Eliashib’s house to its end. 22After him, the work of repair was carried out by the priests, men of the surrounding country. 23After them, Benjamin and Hasshub carried out the repair in front of their houses; after them, Azariah, son of Maaseiah, son of Ananiah, made the repairs alongside his house. 24After him, Binnui, son of Henadad, repaired the adjoining sector from the house of Azariah to the Corner (that is, to the Angle). 25After him, Palal, son of Uzai, carried out the work of repair opposite the Corner and the tower projecting from the Upper Palace at the quarters of the guard. After him, Pedaiah, son of Parosh, carried out the work of repair 26to a point opposite the Water Gate on the east, and the projecting tower. 27After him, the Tekoites repaired the adjoining sector opposite the great projecting tower, to the wall of Ophel. 28Above the Horse Gate the priests carried out the work of repair, each opposite his own house. 29c After them Zadok, son of Immer, carried out the repair opposite his house, and after him the repair was carried out by Shemaiah, son of Shecaniah, keeper of the East Gate. 30After him, Hananiah, son of Shelemiah, and Hanun, the sixth son of Zalaph, repaired the adjoining sector; after them, Meshullam, son of Berechiah, repaired the place opposite his own lodging. 31After him, Malchijah, a member of the goldsmiths’ guild, carried out the work of repair as far as the quarters of the temple servants and the merchants, in front of the Gate of Inspection and as far as the upper chamber of the Angle. 32Between the upper chamber of the Angle and the Sheep Gate, the goldsmiths and the merchants carried out the work of repair. Opposition from Judah’s Enemies. 33When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and very much incensed. He ridiculed the Jews, 34saying in the presence of his associates and the troops of Samaria: “What are these miserable Jews trying to do? Will they complete their restoration in a single day? Will they recover these stones, burnt as they are, from the heaps of dust?” 35Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said: “Whatever they are building—if a fox attacks it, it will breach their wall of stones!” 36Hear, our God, how we were mocked! Turn back their reproach upon their own heads and deliver them up as plunder in a land of captivity! 37d Do not hide their crime and do not let their sin be blotted out in your sight, for they insulted the builders to their faces! 38We, however, continued to build the wall, and soon it was completed up to half its height. The people worked enthusiastically. * [3:1–32] The construction work on the gates and walls of the city is described in counterclockwise direction, beginning and ending at the Sheep Gate (to the north of the Temple). The exact locations of many of the topographical points mentioned are uncertain. * [3:8] The Broad Wall: perhaps identical with the wall, seven meters thick, discovered in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. By accepting this message, you will be leaving the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This link is provided solely for the user's convenience. By providing this link, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops assumes no responsibility for, nor does it necessarily endorse, the website, its content, or

A nuclear capable Iran is unacceptable. The current state of the Iranian nuclear program is not only a serious threat to U.S. national security, but to the entire world. Iran must be prevented from obtaining a nuclear weapon; containment is not an option. Over the last several years, many diplomatic efforts have been attempted by the U.S. and other world powers to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability. The P5+1, which consists of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) plus Germany, has used diplomacy and sanctions as a tool to change Iran's behavior. The legitimacy of recent reports concerning an agreement on direct talks between the Obama administration and Iranian officials is in question. However, either way these talks would not ensue until after the presidential election. Iran is buying time. Unfortunately, the Iranian nuclear program continues. In Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to UN General Assembly on September 27, he explained Iran would have enough enriched uranium in its stockpile by the middle of next year. This statement is based on current production rates and reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and is supported by many nuclear experts. In response to Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech, as expected, Iran stated the goals of its nuclear program are "peaceful." This statement deserves at least a healthy dose of skepticism as November 2011 IAEA reports challenge Iran's claim to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The nuclear program marches on. A nuclear capable Iran is problematic for the U.S. and for its allies for many reasons. First, there will likely be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, other Arab countries (including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan) have already stated they will develop nuclear weapons of their own. The Middle East is already volatile; nuclear arms in the hands of unstable regimes are a deadly combination. Second, the world will see the cost of oil skyrocket. Because Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it has the power to pressure oil-exporting nations who use the Straits if they are not supportive of an Iranian nuclear regime. As a result, world oil prices will increase, and America's economy will be negatively impacted. Third, Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. A nuclear capable Iran will be able to provide Islamist terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah with nuclear materials. We must remember that Hezbollah was responsible for the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing, which killed 241 U.S. servicemen--the most Americans killed in one event preceding September 11. Islamist terrorists will be even more threatening if they are backed by a nuclear-capable Iran. Fourth, U.S. soldiers will face even more severe threats in the Middle East. If Iran become nuclear capable, it will become a regional power that will increase its support to terrorists who are already targeting U.S. troops. A nuclear capable Iran will weaken American influence. Middle Eastern countries will feel pressured to follow Iran's example. America's ability to work with Arab countries will be diminished if they feel threatened by Iran. Consequently, the U.S. will be seen as a weaker power because of the failure in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear capability. The threat of the Iranian nuclear program increases as centrifuges continue to spin. A nuclear-capable Iran poses an imminent threat to the U.S., Israel, and the entire world. It is critical to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. A failure to do so poses a dangerous threat to American national security interests. We should reject any policy that seeks containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat and we should support diplomatic, political, and economic efforts to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. Lilly Rapson is a senior at the University of Colorado majoring in political science with a minor in Jewish studies. She is the president of Students for Israel.

Re: Jewish Dominance in the Porn Industry Nope. But it seems to fit nicely into the theory that one of the goals is to denigrate Christianity and the so-called dominant pseudo-puritanism that is actually based on control through fear, guilt, and the repression of strong emotions. It may be that the rebellion is an unconscious attempt for some to break out of this kind of oppressive mind set. Ah, yes, the joy of lex. :-D As you said, it's a big money-maker and we know that most if not all big money industries have the criminal element trying to muscle in. If there is a "Jewish Mafia", then I'm not surprised to hear of their involvement.

Changes to Improve Relations between Jewish, Palestinian Communities August 9, 2002 SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The San Francisco State University Presidential Task Force charged with examining ways to improve relations within the Jewish and Palestinian communities issued its preliminary recommendations to University President Robert A. Corrigan. The report includes a wide spectrum of changes, including establishing a new Arab and Islamic studies program, developing policies that respond to free speech and conduct protected by the law but offensive to the community and sponsoring multicultural events with a focus on Middle East issues. The President's Task Force on Inter-group Relations: Initial Focus on the Effect of Middle East Issues on Campus Life was formed in June to advise the University on immediate and long-term strategies for improving the campus climate, particularly regarding concerns of the Jewish and Palestinian communities. The 42-member Task Force is comprised of University faculty, staff and students as well as community, civic and religious leaders. The preliminary recommendations are part of the short-term agenda and the Task Force will continue to meet during the fall semester on long-term strategies. President Corrigan commissioned the Task Force following heightened tension between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian supporters on campus that culminated with inappropriate language and behavior but no violence or arrests during a May 7 campus rally. The Task Force met as a whole four times during June and July. In addition, 29 of the Task Force members participated in 18 confidential "listening group sessions," where members from the campus and local community were invited to offer suggestions on how to improve the campus climate between Jewish and Palestinian communities. A total of 50 people spoke during the listening sessions that were held in private and included only one speaker at a time. Also, Task Force members participated in subcommittees that focused on: university curriculum, codes of conduct/freedom of speech, colloquia, special events and discussions, employment practices, faculty and student orientation programs and psychological services. Highlights of the Task Force's preliminary recommendations include: The Task Force recommends that the University establish an Arab and Islamic Studies program, similar to the Jewish Studies program that was created in 1991 with financial support from the local Jewish community. The courses should satisfy both general education requirements and specialization in an Arab and Islamic studies program. In addition, an Islamic Studies Endowment Advisory Council should be established to help raise private funding in cooperation with the University's Office of Development. Also, the Jewish Studies Program should be encouraged to reactivate its Board of Advisors, the Task Force recommended. The University has already made significant strides in this area with the hiring of two new Islamic scholars who will arrive on campus this fall. The two are the first of six new faculty members with expertise in Islamic studies expected in the next year. One scholar is a historian who created the University's course on Islamic history and the other is a scholar in Islamic culture who will join the Humanities Department. Four additional international searches are now underway. "As members of the Task Force know, last fall, shortly after the September 11 attacks, I proposed that the University begin to seek outstanding scholars who could help us build strength in the interdisciplinary and wide-ranging field of Islamic Studies. On June 27 I was able to announce the steps we had taken to expand dramatically the University's faculty resources in this area," President Corrigan wrote in a response letter to Task Force members. "I also described our interest in creating one of the country's first Islamic Studies Programs, an effort that will be shaped by the new Islamic Studies specialists arriving on campus this year and next." CODES OF CONDUCT/FREEDOM OF SPEECH The University should revise major policies regarding student organizations and conduct at rallies, such as distance between groups with opposing views, posting of flags and banners and the responsibilities of students, off-campus visitors and faculty advisors. In addition, the task force recommends that the University develop a process to respond to speech, conduct and activities that might be protected by law but are morally repugnant. COLLOQUIA, SPECIAL EVENTS AND DISCUSSIONS The University should encourage dialogue between different faith communities by establishing an interfaith student group that would partner with religious-based community organizations. The Task Force also recommends that the University sponsor a wide spectrum of events with a focus on Middle East issues, such as film festivals, multi-cultural arts groups featuring Arab and Jewish performers, food festivals that cover the history of the cuisine, campus debates with panelists of divergent views, campus-sponsored trips to various houses of worship and community service projects. Relevant University departments should review their curriculum for deficiencies in the study of the Arab and Islamic works and Jewish history and people. Departments are then encouraged to request new faculty to address the problems in order to develop understanding around Middle East issues. All faculty and staff should understand the University's diverse community with its variety of cultures, races and religions and be ready to meet the needs of the student population with the help of training seminars and literature. FACULTY AND STUDENT ORIENTATION PROGRAMS Student leaders should be informed about free speech, hate speech and the role of the campus community in creating a climate for civil discourse. In order to foster better dialogue between groups, students should also develop ways to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and those in disagreement over political issues, the task force recommends. Similar types of programs should be established for current employees. PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING SERVICES The University should fund the study of the psychological support for Arab, Jewish and Muslim students populations. The Task Force also recommends that faculty with expertise in addressing concerns of Arab, Jewish and Muslim students continue to be available. In addition, advisory boards that could help open conversations with the three groups should be established. For a copy of the complete report and President Corrigan's response to the Task Force recommendations, visit www.sfsu.edu/~news/sfsuresp.htm. 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132 (415) 338-1111

abram games RDI OBE 1914 - 1996 newly installed April 2019 - English Heritage blue plaque at Abram's Hampstead home the rare 1942 original poster on the far right above Your Talk May Kill Comrades is currently available for sale, p.o.a. Abram Games was one of the great poster designers of the 20th century. His contribution to the development of graphic communication was remarkable for having been made within the circumstances of propaganda communication during WW2. Images such as Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades or Don't Crow About What You Know About applied modern design sophistication to the primary messages of wartime in a witty and effective way. The war established Games as a master of poster design. He continued to work until the 1980s and produced a distinguished body of work for London Transport, BOAC, the GPO and other British organisations. At the same time Games worked tirelessly for Jewish causes and made some remarkable contributions to Hebrew typography through book design. Abram Games also designed an improved Cona coffee maker that managed to be both functional and attractive. Abram Games was the winner of a competition to design an emblem for the 1951 Festival Of Britain. His combination of Britannia's profile, compass points and bunting created an emblem that was symbolic of both magisterial decorum (history and tradition but not of royalty or militarism) and light- heartedness (social tolerance and humour). This was a perfect symbol for post-war transformation and of Britain making it. The images on this page are testimony to the enduring quality of Games' poster design and offers a chance to re-examine a body of work that gave visual expression to both the efforts and experience of the war and to the hopes and ideals it was fought for. "Abram Games was the last master of the drawn lithograph before photography replaced traditional techniques in poster design" Conran Directory of Design Horizon is available for sale p.o.a The copyright of all these images is owned by the Estate of Abram Games. The text on page was written by Paul Rennie and first published by Conde Nast. Paul did this short interview between friends Abram Games and Tom Eckersley at Abram's home, which was published by Affiche in 1994/5. (click on pages below to read) the first major study of Abram Games by Naomi Games, Catherine Moriarty and June Rose. to view books for sale - please click here 1946 paperback with cover by Abram Games. available at £10 WW2 original framed poster original poster for BEA to Israel,1956, signed print of Portugal, and pack of 16 cards showing posterwork spanning the designer's career £9 per pack Whilst best known for poster design Abram games also made a striking contribution to information design. Throughout WW2 he produced a series of information maps published by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. These double-sided sheets provided information about the war and, on the reverse, some aspect of service of civilian life during the conflict. These sheets were pubished fortnightly and were to form the basis of discussion about British war aims . The sheets were supported by detailed notes available to the officers. The problems associated with presenting a variety of different types of information in a clear and coherent way anticipate those faced by contemporary web designers. (thankyou to Lorna for photo) NEW EXHIBITION 2019: The Art of Persuasion - Wartime Posters by Abram Games AT NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM - APRIL - NOVEMBER 2019 **Paul will be giving a talk at the National Army Museum on 'The Power of the Poster: Abram Games & ABCA on 7th August at 6pm. see also our pages on F H K Henrion and see also:

A speech made in the Capuchin Church on 1975/2/19 and published in the book entitled “Islam, a deep-rooted doctrine” in 1979. We praise and thank you God, the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, the God of the weak and of all his creatures. Praise be to God who reassures the frightened, delivers the righteous, elevates the seemingly weak, humbles the arrogant, eradicate kings and appoints successors. Praise be to God who puts an end to the totalitarians, eradicate the unjust, keeps up with fugitives, and exclaims the cause of those who cry out to Him. We praise you God for giving us success through your guardianship, for gathering us via your guidance and for uniting our hearts with your love and mercy. Here we are gathered in your presence in a house amongst others, which is said that it belongs to you and at times of fasting set for you. Our hearts are fervent for you. Our minds derive their light and guidance from you. Considering that you have called us to be co-workers in the service of your people and to meet together on words of consideration for the happiness of your creation. Towards your door we proceeded, and at your altar we prayed. We met for the sake of man for whom religions were found. At that time, these religions were one and heralding each others’ messages and authenticating one another. Through religions, God walked out nations from darkness to light after He bailed them out of deep and tearing conflicts and taught them to take the path of peace. Religions were uniform and in the service of one objective, which is to preach God and to serve mankind and the objectives are two sides to one truth. Later on, when religions started serving their interests too, they fell into discord. Subsequently, this self-interest grew until they were about to forget their objective. Conflicts grew bigger and man’s crisis and pains got harder and larger. Religions were united and yearning towards one objective: Waging of war against the gods and tyrants of the world, and to stand by the weak and the oppressed. The former and the latter are two sides to the truth. When religions prevailed and with them the seemingly weak, they found out that the religious groups have changed their skin and ran ahead of them to reap the benefits, and that they have started to rule them in the name of religions while upholding their sword. As a result, the growing ordeal of the ill-treated occurred and the tribulations of religions and their discords amongst themselves emerged. For no discord exists except in the interests of the exploiters. Religions were one because the principle, God, is one; with the purpose that man is one; and the destiny that the world is one. When we forgot the aim and turned our back to serving man, God alienated and distanced himself from us and as such we became parties with numerous routines. Then our daringness took over and as such we disagreed, divided the one universe and served our personal interests. We worshipped many gods and not the only God. We crushed man and tore him apart. Now we are back to the right path. We are turned to the tortured man to escape God’s chastisement. We are joined to serve the seemingly weak, the crushed and the torn apart in order to meet up together in all things, and in order to congregate in God and as such religions will be one. For each we have appointed a divine law and a traced-out way. Had Allah willed He could have made you one community. But what He may try you by that which he hath given you. So vie one with another in good works. Unto Allah ye will all return. (The Table Spread: 48) according to the Holy Quran. At this hour, in the church, during days of fasting, in the middle of a religious sermon and upon the invitation of committed officials, I find myself at the middle of the road with you. I found myself preaching and being sermonized, addressing and listening. I talk with my tongue and listen with my heart. History is our witness, chronicles and times gone by listens to us and we listen to it. History attests that Lebanon is the country of convention, the realm of man, the homeland of the oppressed and the refuge of the frightened. In such milieus and esteemed horizon, we can hear the original divine calls because we are now nearer to the source. Here is the Master, peace be upon him, in his furious love exclaims: “No…! The love of God cannot meet with man’s hatred”. His voice resounds in the conscious of masses, as another voice is raised up, the voice of the Prophet of Mercy “He who locks his doors sated while his neighbor is hungry doesn’t believe in God and in the Last Day”. The two voices interact through the epochs and here we have the Pope echoing them namely on the occasion of fasting: “Both Christ and the poor are one person”. In his well- known message “evolution of people”, he is enraged in favor of man’s dignity. The Pope reiterates the words of Christ in the temple: “Tremendous was the temptation to resort to violence to keep away what disgraces man’s dignity”. And he says: “The lowest of humanity are the unjust regimes, which are a product of abuse of possession, authority and the sucking of laborers’ rights, and from the injustice of treaties.” Is this clear voice at variance with the Prophetic tradition, which is steadfast on the objective: “I, God, am with the broken- hearted, I was with the sick when I paid him a visit, I was with the poor when I extended to him a sure hand and with the needy when I sought to satisfy his need”. As for the method, He considered that any attempt to establish the truth and any effort to buttress the oppressed is a “Jihad” for God, a prayer on His Alter, as He guarantees victory. During these testimonies, we go back to our humanity to search for the forces that crush, the forces that divide. Man, a divine giving, the being that is created according to the image of his Creator and his attributes, God’s creation on earth, this man, who is the object of existence, the beginning of society and the engine for history. This man is equal and worth his collective energies and not what philosophy and physics in this age agreed on, which is the possibility of transformation of matter all matter into energy, but rather what religions confirm as well as scientific investigation “that man will obtain what he seeks to have” and that proceedings are eternal. Man, apart from his flaring energies in different horizons, has no value. Therefore, the more we protect man’s capacities and we develop it, the more we honor and eternize him. If faith, in its heavenly dimension, gives man infinite feelings and endless ambitions; If faith, in its divine dimension, maintains permanent hope for man, and when all the reasons drops, and anxiety is lifted off, and when man coordinates with his kind on one hand, and with all other creatures on the other hand; and if faith, in such a dimension, confer on man excellence and beauty, then, faith, in the other dimension, seeks to protect and maintain the human being and imposes this protection and asserts that there is no faith without the commitment of serving mankind. Man’s capacities as a whole and the faculties of each man should be preserved and developed. For this purpose that the principle of continuance was in progress since the first messages and all the way till this letter that says: “For it to be a genuine elevation, the growth should be complete that is to say each and all men should elevate themselves to perfection”. Therefore, as an example we find that theft was forbidden. However, nowadays it takes the form of investment and monopoly under the pretext of industrial progress or by way of artificial needs that are imposed on man through production means whenever he feels a false desire that drives him to consume more. In fact, the needs of today are not derived from man’s innate needs but have been artificially made by the mass media that serve the interests of production methods… As such, we witness a profound evolution in different forces that wards off the capacities of man, destroying or dividing it. These forces remain stable at its core despite the disparity and the profusion in development. For instance, religion fought against lying, hypocrisy, vanity and arrogance. When we come to realize the foundation, we understand the extent of the impact of those characteristics on the capabilities of the individuals and the group. Lying, for example, falsifies both the truth and the potentials that are set for tradeoffs between human beings. By switching over those capacities, man grows by the means of giving as he receives in return potential substitutes. These capabilities are falsified through lying, and as such they become unknown and distorted, and consequently exchanges are deformed and capacities are deactivated. As for vanity and pride, both immobilize man since the arrogant and the prideful person feels that he has reached the phase of contentment and as such he discontinues taking or receiving and therefore stops the integration and togetherness process. On the other side, people halts taking from him as well as the process of integration through him. So there is no more taking and no more giving; it is the death of capacities, man’s capacities. As well, the generic attributes to lying are the basis for arrogance. Freedom for example, is the appropriate environment for the development of man’s potentials and the emergence of his talents when opportunities are made available. This freedom has always been subjected to assault and violated by variety of alleged reasons. Consequently, battles were waged with bitter conflicts occurred for freedom. The absence of freedom has caused the individual to succumb to the measure of freedom that the usurper allows. The individual is dwarfed, thus dwarfing the group. When man refuses this downsizing he endeavors and us with him – according with our faith – to put a limit to this dividing and overwhelming force, for our innate human defends, as we do so too, the potentials and dignity, no matter the downsizing formula and its expression across time… Numerous are the forms for stealing freedom and destroying potentials: From tyranny to colonialism, from feudalism to intellectual terrorism, from tutorship claims over people to accusing them of deficiency in understanding, from neocolonialism to imposing standpoints on both individuals and people, from economic, cultural or intellectual pressure, and from planned neglect to keeping away opportunities and depriving people of them, some of the people and regions, dragging some to ignorance, and even denying good health and the opportunity for mobility and development. Money, this supreme idol, which Jesus Christ considers as an obstacle to entering the Kingdom of Heaven an obstruction larger than the size of a camel when attempting to get it to pass through the needle hole. This money is a source of sedition. When money grows at the expense of other individual and collective needs, it becomes an end and a repressing and dividing force, since it can impose its deep influences on people’s lives, where the sizeable devour the petite. As well as all humanitarian needs that are growing at the expense of others needs, which we label as lusts. In fact, each need is a motivator and a driving force; as a matter of fact it is fuel that activates man in life. But when this need grows at the expense of other needs, it turns out to be a disaster. That is why the greatest responsibility is to well manage possessions and money, prestige, power and other human capabilities. The truth is that the dimensions of faith that allows connectivity between God and man in an ever existing presence, though it is the basis of modern civilization, has been subject to imbalance. When we review the history of this civilization, we feel that man – between one period and the other – is growing in one focus at the expenses of other tendencies. Because politics, management, market and construction were not built on faith, they grew in disproportions and as such turned into colonialism, wars, and search for new markets and periods of militarized peace. And man’s whole life swayed between one cold war and another hot war, between one period of healing and one of armed peace. The love of self is man’s fuel in his quest for perfection and the achiever of his ambitions. But when self adornment in man grows, the problem starts. Rows, racial discrimination and disdain of others, and bitter conflict within societies’ cells, from family to the international community, all this conflict is uneven in spheres. And although the axis of sectors is one, the gap varies. This conflict that has been considered as an integral part of structure is a result of the shift from self love towards adoration of the self. The same is true when we look at egoism inside a group. The group has been formed to serve man, as man is the civil person who is collective in nature. He exists in two dimensions, the personal and the collective. Humanity, herein, is extended and the problem appears in different frames. From individual egoism to family self-centeredness that made man suffer from its vices, to the dominance of tribalism that had, at a certain time, an order of things that had marks as well as results, to the sect that turned, by means of her egoism, the sky into earth and emptied both religion and sect, and put an end to its rise, compassion and tolerance … This sectarianism that traded with spiritual values had taken from it disparate prices. And finally we reach the egoist patriotism. Patriotism, although the most noble of feelings, when transformed into national racism patriotism it almost makes the person feels that he worships his country and not God. Therefore, he allows himself to build the glory of his country on the ruins of other countries, to craft his civilization by tearing down other civilizations, and to raise the standard of his own people by means of impoverishing other nations, all the way to reach a Nazi patriotism that has burned the world numerous times before. These extended egoisms were constructive feelings that evolved and transformed into corrosiveness and destruction. The love of one’s self, obedience to the family, tribal love and country and national belonging are all beneficent tendencies in the life of a human being, on the condition that these remain within the right limits…And now we are ready to shed light on the chosen title of this lecture. The human being, with his needs and capacities in a society that welcomes him, should live in harmony with his society. Each time one of his needs grows at the expense of another, it becomes chronically problematic. Each time the person or the needs of the group grows at the expense of the greater congregation, they become unremittingly challenging. And each times the group or its needs grow at the expenses of other groups and needs, this becomes evil and turn into a misfortune. Lebanon our country, the country whose citizen is considered as his single asset; this man who wrote the glory of Lebanon by personal effort, emigration, mental faculties and personal initiative, this man is the one that should be safeguarded in this country. If this country has further wealth than its human resources, it will be nothing short of its humanitarian stance. Therefore, our efforts in Lebanon, in places of worship, in universities and institutions are moving towards safeguarding and maintaining our citizen, the whole of man in all of its regions. If we want to preserve Lebanon, and if we want to translate our national feeling into practice, and if we want to apply our religious intuition through the principles that were presented, we should preserve the man of Lebanon, the whole of Lebanon’s men and capacities and not be selective. In this Lebanon, when we look at deprivation we discover that this denial is the result of malpractice and all are liable. Violence, as we have heard, and for the sake of man, as much as it is needed, and on the condition that it does not deviate from its humanitarian rights, is allowed within the context of words. The regions where we live in and where our citizens lives in are as important as each person in Lebanon. These areas are an entrustment unto our care and the care of our officials. The South and other regions are entrustments that should be preserved by the command of God and the country. This is why we should assume responsibility at once and to exercise application in a free and correct manners. For wrong thinking tantamount to double treasons and wrong investment is equivalent to twofold treachery; the treason of direct corruption and the treason of missing the opportunity for others in the context of wasting public money and rights. Lebanon is the country of man and of humanity. Lebanon’s realities are made known by his people through comparative living with the enemy. We find that the social nature of this enemy is racial and military that employs suppressive and disperse measures in all of its expressions. Daringly, this enemy also falsifies history and stamps the Holy City with a Jewish stance and marring historical ruins. Thus, our country should be safeguarded, not only for God and for his man but also for all of humanity. And we should shed light on Lebanon’s true and unified picture we should contrast it with the other image. Here we are face to face with a lifetime opportunity. It is a new chapter that we have started and Lebanon has started tonight with this unprecedented phenomenon in history. Dear believers, as far as man is concerned, man as a whole, let us meet up, the man of Beirut, of the South, of Akar, the man in the suburbs of Beirut, at Karantina and Hey El Selum. This man can still seize the available opportunity. He is neither isolated nor classified. Let us preserve the man of Lebanon in order to preserve this country, an entrustment unto us of History and of God. God’s Peace, Mercy and Blessing rest on you.

Learning about Zionism the Goldstone Way By Tali Shapiro at Sep 23, 2009 I waited a bit to have a complete picture of Ha'aretz ("the elite left") coverage of the Goldstone lead UN report on Gaza. Israeli citizens could have learned something about the government and themselves through this report. Instead, I learn, yet again, how corrupted the media, the government and the people are, by the Zionist mythos. Keeping the Myth Alive The first Ha'aretz article (and all the subsequent articles that weren't written by Amira Hass or Gideon Levy) about the report plays on the myth that both sides of this "conflict" (a.k.a. "occupation") are on equal footing: "UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes" This title is, of course, misleading, as anyone who's taken the time to read just the table of contents of the report, can see a clear ratio that puts Israel to shame. But the sillies don't stop there; Not only is the title misleading, when reporting about the mission, it's misleading in characterization of the article it heads! The article mentions the main points (I've rephrased, in order to avoid linguistic bias, such as calling a massacre "war"): - Hospitals, food production facilities, drinking water installations and other such sites were attacked. - Blockade on the Gaza Strip. - Use of human shields. - Civilians were shot while carrying white flags. - Israel failed to protect its Arab citizens against the rocket fire in the same way that it protected its Jewish residents. - Palestinian political prisoners must be released. - Indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli civilian areas. - Internal violence during the operation, including extra-judicial executions and arbitrary arrests. - Gilad Shalit must be released. Most obviously, Israel has more violation categories. But it isn't just a question of quantity, it's also a question of context: - For one Gilad Shalit there are 11,000 Palestinian prisoners. - The rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups are primitive and tough to aim, while the precision of Israel's air-strikes is not only well documented, but boasted by Israeli officials. The implications of this horror is amplified by the body count on each side (13 Israelis to over 1300 Palestinians [p.p 106-109]). - As for internal violence- this is despicable and should reach international court, as well. Period. (It's a perfect opportunity, however, to ask, why Ha'aretz fails to mention the whole chapter [XXV] dedicated to "Repression Of Dissent In Israel, Right To Access To Information And Treatment Of Human Rights Defenders".) Other offenses by Israel (i.e. Attacking civilian infrastructure, blockading the attacked area) imply a grander context, beyond the "smaller" shooting civilians waving white flags and the use of human shields. It's a wonder the myth of two equal sides still exists at all. Sounds dramatic and conspiratorial, doesn't it? Well, the truth is that the Zionist government feels it is so right, it doesn't even bother covering up its tracks: "The Prime Minister's Office decided Wednesday that Peres would take the front lines in Israel's campaign against the report." Israel has officially launched a campaign against the Goldstone report. It's not just alluded to in the above statement. You can find it in this article of IsraelPolitik - The Political Blog of the State of Israel (as it's titled in the Prime Minister's Office official website), which links to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs' "Special website". Of course, the media is to blame for encouraging and even glorifying this behavior, with graphic statements that engage the militaristic imagination, such as "Israel began fighting the diplomatic battle..." Other choice quotes from this specific article: "On the diplomatic front, following the report's release, Netanyahu, Lieberman, President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will telephone many of their counterparts around the world. They will stress that the Goldstone report is one-sided, that it rewards terrorism and that it sets a precedent which will make it difficult for any country in the world to defend itself against terror." All of the above, consistent with Ministry of Foreign Affairs' "Special website". That said, consistency was never the Zionist's strong side; My favorite part is when the obviously Zionist authors of this article justify their abhorring of the report by siding with Hamas: "Hamas yesterday rejected the Goldstone report, which accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Hamas spokesmen said the report was not fair. A representative of the extremist organization, Ismail Radwan, told Haaretz last night that the report was unbalanced and completely misrepresented reality." A Word on Zionist Consistency The most moral army in the world has created one of the most morally inconsistent nations in the world. This can be seen in self-righteous editorials that are so deeply morally bankrupt, they don't see their own cynical disregard towards the sanctity of life, lapdogging, and biting the hand that feeds them [respectively]: "Absurd? Yes, it's absurd. No sane person in the world believes that the United States, Russia or China could be subjected to purist international law. The United States has killed thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the last few months encouraged Pakistan to make an extremely brutal military move in its Swat Valley. The United States was not required to account for it because everyone understands that this is the price of the terrible War on Terror. Russia committed blood-curdling war crimes in Chechnya, while China deprives its citizens of basic rights and is conducting a wicked occupation in Tibet. They are not asked to pay for this because everyone understands that you don't mess with superpowers." [cynical disregard towards the sanctity of life] "Unlike journalists, governments and field commanders deal with this dilemma every day." [lapdogging] "Will U.S. now let Goldstone into Afghanistan?" [biting the hand that feeds them] More "pragmatic" editorials, have a more "realistic" concern: "In wake of UN Gaza probe, how can Israel go to war again?... Last, and perhaps most important, the Goldstone report reinforces the most serious strategic threat Israel brought upon itself with the Gaza offensive, in that it saps international legitimacy for a similar operation in the future. A country considering attacking the nuclear reactor in Iran, and then endangering itself to rocket fire from Lebanon and Gaza in response, will have to take into account whether the world will give Israel another opportunity for a severe, crushing response." And there's always the resident wack-job in the elite-left paper, proving that when it comes to violence, war-mongering and self victimization, we're the most consistent nation in the world: "This playing field for the dehumanization of Israel, which had already been heated up prior to the Goldstone report by various non-governmental organizations, remains exposed and neglected. Now that the most senior echelons are in their sights, maybe we will finally understand that it is necessary to conduct a worldwide offensive, efficiently and with maximum dedication to its goals, against those who would seek to destroy us by attacking the legitimacy of our existence." Ironically enough, the words of Avigdor Lieberman, on this issue- slightly spun- ring true: They do give the facts a chance to confuse them. The Inevitable Smear Campaign Richard Goldstone, that headed the fact finding mission, a Jew, a Zionist and a self-proclaimed "lover of Israel", has been (as expected) subjected to the usual Zionist smear campaign. From "anti-semitism" and "Israel-hating": "As a result of the destructive, toxic report of the United Nation's Goldstone Commission, from now on all of the haters of Israel will be celebrating anti-Semites." To the seemingly more forgiving "hopeless naivety": "The answer to that question will determine whether Goldstone achieves his stated objective of expanding the UN's purview of human rights, as he did South Africa's, or whether, as his critics predict, he will be shown up as a naive idealist, one who enabled an implacably Israel-obsessed body to use the findings of a distinguished pro-Israel Jewish jurist to justify its actions." In one sense, Goldstone's Zionist detractors are correct: He's a Jew, a Zionist and a lover of Israel, and even he couldn't deny the atrocities it commits. Perhaps tough love, rather than blind love, is what the spoiled, privileged child of the Middle East really needs. * Another way the media sows confusion is by failing to differentiate the people (=Palestinians) from the government (=Hamas) from the armed groups.

Shepherd's honor society to host lecture on April 3 March 28, 2013 Shepherd University's chapter of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society will be hosting the lecture "Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion" by Dr.... No comments posted for this article. Post a Comment

TODAY SCHEDULE (all times ET) Morning Show Wrap Evening Newscasts Wrap Ten political questions to which you should want the answers: 1. What will the first post-Reagan ABC News/Washington Post numbers say tonight at 6:30 pm ET on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings? 2. Will the Bill Clinton and Michael Moore PR machines dovetail or clash? 3. Will any swing voters enter their polling places in November with the words "Halliburton," "Guantanamo," "Wilson," or "Dukakis" on their minds? 4. Will John Kerry choose from the Edwards/Gephardt/Vilsack list, or someone NOT from that list? 5. Which article more caught Karl Rove's eye: the USA Today story on how Clinton could impact the race for Arkansas electoral votes, or the Washington Post story about the mobilization of union foot soldiers in Pennsylvania? 6. Are the people in charge of compliance for the fundraising of Kerry campaign and the DNC re-looking at their procedures this Monday morning? 7. How much obsessing will NSC spokesguy (and People magazine "hot" bachelor) Jim Wilkinson do about the kicker quote in Al Kamen's column? ("'The guy is a PR genius. The fact that he could convince anyone that he is remotely hot is an impressive achievement,' said one Bush adviser.") 8. Just exactly when, FPPO, is that 9/11 report coming out, and, as Bill Safire points out, whatup with the commissioners acting like their staff is footloose and fancy free? 9. What does Jim Dyke think of the pure comedy of John Kerry going from Nantucket to Aspen? 10. Which gold medal-bound Olympic athletes are from swing states and who do they support for president? Today, President Bush travels to Cincinnati for a 4:00 pm ET conversation on compassion and marriage in poor communities and a 6:10 pm ET fundraiser. Sen. Kerry launches a week focusing on the economy and scientific research with a 5:00 pm ET Denver speech sandwiched between Aspen and Denver fundraisers. Earlier, Vice President Cheney speaks about the economy in Henderson, Nev., at noon ET and then travels to Springfield, Mo., for a 5:50 pm ET campaign rally. Ralph Nader announces his running mate at 1:00 pm ET at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. Along with Matthew Dowd and Susan Pinkus, we eagerly anticipate the release today of the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll on Iraq and politics. This afternoon the Senate debates the defense budget bill -- the final vote is expected tomorrow. We'll watch and wait to see if John Rowland is Connecticut's governor by day's end. LINK The rest of this week . . . On Tuesday former President Bill Clinton's book, "My Life," is released, and he appears on "Oprah" and signs books in New York. President Bush is at the White House and Sen. Kerry is in Albuquerque and San Francisco. Prison guard Lynndie England has an Article 32 hearing in Fort Bragg, N.C. for allegedly abusing Iraqi detainees. Teresa Heinz Kerry campaigns in Miami, and Laura Bush holds an online chat. On Wednesday President Bush speaks about compassion and AIDS in Philadelphia and awards the Medals of Freedom at the White House. Among the recipients: journalist Robert Bartley, actress Doris Day, church leader Gordon Hinckley, make-up magnate Estée Lauder, and golfer Arnold Palmer. Pope John Paul II also received his medal in a previous ceremony. Sen. Kerry addresses the SEUI convention and holds a fundraiser in San Francisco, and Teresa Heinz Kerry campaigns in Orlando and New Orleans. In Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and from New York, former President Clinton appears on "Good Morning America" and "Today Show." The Green Party's national convention begins in Milwaukee, Wis., and lasts until Monday, June 28. The Greens will nominate their presidential candidate on Saturday night. And in Washington on Wednesday, the liberal and press elite get a screening of "Fahrenheit 9/11." On Thursday President Bush is down, Sen. Kerry speaks at the AFSCME convention in Anaheim and attends a fundraiser in Los Angeles, and prison guard Sabrina Harman has her Article 32 hearing in Baghdad for allegedly abusing Iraqi detainees. On Friday President Bush travels to Ireland for the US-EU summit, Sen. Kerry is in Ohio and attends a fundraiser in New York, "Fahrenheit 9/11" opens nationally, and Sen. Edwards and Gov. Vilsack speak at the Iowa state convention Friday night and Saturday morning. The Washington Post's John Harris looks at the two-books-in-one approach of "My Life," and Notes that Clinton's almost obsessive look at the demons and triumphs of his personal life may not exactly be the stuff of history. LINK "The memoir and promotional campaign have revived an issue that Clinton and his aides often confronted while he was president: How much should Clinton give vent to his personal grievances and feed the insatiable public curiosity about his private life? As president, Clinton usually -- though not always -- decided that doing so was against his political interest. As author, he and his publisher have decided that their interests lie in revelations about adultery, marital crisis and coping with the adult consequences of childhood dysfunction." The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz Notes that Clinton "is in no danger of getting the Ronald Reagan treatment." LINK Particularly from book critics. On Sunday, Michiko Kakutani said of "My Life": "The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull -- the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history." LINK Time magazine's Joe Klein and Michael Duffy talk to former President Clinton about "My Life": the lessons he learned, the accomplishments of his presidency, his feelings about Ken Starr, plans for his funeral, his "60 Minutes" interview, and succeeding in politics. Clinton: "I think the great trick to a successful run in politics is to have both what you've called the wussy-mommy qualities and the macho-tough qualities. If you're only one or the other, you're going to get into trouble." LINK USA Today's Kathy Kiely looks at how the Clinton book blitz can help Sen. John Kerry's presidential run - in former Gov. Clinton's home state of Arkansas, a battleground state this year. "Many political observers here think the only way Kerry can beat Bush in Arkansas is to recruit Clinton as his surrogate-in-chief." LINK The New York Times' Kirkpatrick comes to no conclusions about the book's impact on campaign 2004, but explores how Clinton detractors are prepared to remind readers, listeners, and viewers what they didn't like about Bill Clinton. LINK This graf doesn't seem to have made it into the print edition but does appear in the online version of the story: "A spokesman for Mr. Clinton's publisher, Knopf, declined to comment. The spokesman, Paul Bogaards, has acknowledged in the past that he and Mr. Clinton's advisers convened for daily conference calls to plan the promotional campaign to defend against potential attacks by his enemies as well as to try to reach his fans. But Mr. Bogaards declined to discuss specifics." The Boston Globe's Stockman acknowledges that whatever anyone thinks about the former President's memoir, "the interviews and excerpts from the book also offer a psychological profile of a complicated man who has had years to reflect on the mistakes and successes of his presidency." LINK The Boston Herald ed board Notes that the Clinton publicity blitz is "just the antidote liberals need to the weeklong remembrances that honored conservative icon Ronald Reagan." LINK USA Today prints a mini cheat sheet to presidential memoirs: LINK The New York Daily News plays up Clinton's comments regarding Chelsea in its recap of the "60 Minutes" interview. LINK On Sunday, the Washington Post's John Harris previewed President Clinton's book and "60 Minutes" interview, focusing on Clinton's somewhat confusing views on the war in Iraq, siding with President Bush for confronting the dangers there while questioning his motivations and timing. LINK The New York Post's Clinton coverage today includes a look at Clinton's would-be career as a doorman at the Plaza Hotel, LINK his missing the signs of his brother's cocaine addiction, and a preview to an allegedly heated moment in an upcoming BBC interview LINK. Iowa politicos chime in on what they hope to read. LINK In more important Clinton news, plans for his Little Rock Presidential Park have been unveiled, including "statues of Harriet Tubman, a fisherman, and an eagle soaring from under a rock" according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. ABC News Vote 2004: Bush-Cheney re-elect: The Wall Street Journal's Greg Hitt notes the favorable job numbers in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Watch for economic gains to be a theme in Bush-Cheney '04 campaign ads in six battleground states where President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Sen. Kerry are traveling this week, reports The AP's Nedra Pickler. Howard Dean may be known for savvy use of the Internet, but the first family is not far behind: First Lady Laura Bush is popping up on more than 50 Web sites in a short video on education. LINK The USA Today op ed page -- determined to maintain its reputation for silliness -- runs a piece by James Gannon, who covered Dick Cheney for the Wall Street Journal when Cheney was President Ford's chief of staff, offers a letter to Vice President Cheney asking him to step down, writing, "You must ask yourself now if your continued presence by his side will offer strength or weakness to the Republican ticket in November, and what it will mean for GOP prospects in the future." LINK Elisabeth Bumiller's White House Letter in the New York Times will be equally derided by 41 and 43 as she attempts to put President Bush on the couch and explore his attachment to Saddam Hussein's pistol. LINK ABC News Vote 2004: Sen. John Kerry: The AP's Nedra Pickler previews Sen. Kerry's visit to Colorado today. "The Massachusetts senator also hopes to have special appeal because he was born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital near Denver and can relate with his military background to the many veterans who live there." LINK Pickler, with just a touch of irony, also writes about Kerry's vacation. The headline: "Campaigning for the poor paused to vacation with rich." LINK Jodi Wilgoren's weekend travelogue of Sen. Kerry's Nantucket (non)adventure almost makes you feel like you were there too. LINK Here are our favorite back-to-back sentences. "Several members of Mr. Kerry's traveling staff flew their wives or girlfriends in to join them at a downtown inn." "But with the wind coming from the north and then luffing, Mr. Kerry could not get airborne." The Los Angeles Times' Michael Finnegan gets a scooplet: a relaxing, vacationing Kerry got a flat on his bike . . . and fixed it himself. LINK The Washington Post's Evelyn Nieves wraps the AFL-CIO's mobilization effort to tout Sen. Kerry's message door to door. LINK Accused of accepting a questionable $2,000 check "from the recently arrested son of South Korea's disgraced former president," who apparently wanted to involve himself in American politics, Sen. Kerry's presidential campaign is reportedly returning the funds "after learning the donor was charged with tax evasion," according to The AP's Solomon and Theimer. LINK We wonder if the AP scribes were handed this one . . . and by whom. The Los Angeles Times' Matea Gold chews over Sen. Kerry's deliberational style, which very much favors chewing over ideas and lots of late-night phone calls to advisers (and thrice weekly chats with Sen. Kennedy). LINK "Those close to the senator say his decision-making is one of his greatest strengths, demonstrating thoughtfulness, intellectual prowess and an ability to broker dissent. But because of his thoroughness, Kerry can also come across as overly cautious, some acknowledge." Rush & Molloy report that only James Taylor and Bette Midler were unable to rearrange their schedules for the rescheduled Kerry/DNC fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall now set to take place on July 8. LINK ABC News Vote 2004: Bush v. Kerry: The Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein is wary of interlocuters who use Sept. 11 to justify permitting civil rights intrusions and harsh interrogations and wonders if Sen. Kerry's approach to homeland security will be seen by voters as a better alternative. LINK "What if, Kerry seems to be arguing, Bush's answers to the toughest 'what if' questions have actually made America less secure? It's too early to say how America will answer that question, but already a safe bet that nothing else will shape the result in November more." The AP's Sharon Theimer reports that "Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry outspent President Bush by about $10 million in May and started this month with less than half as much campaign cash left as his GOP rival." LINK On Saturday, Glen Justice of the New York Times wrote about the cutbacks in spending by the Bush campaign in May -- just $22 million, compared to the $50 million spent in March and the $31 million in April. LINK He also throws in a quote from Gina Glantz on Kerry's fundraising success story: "'The first burst had to be about people not liking Bush, because people didn't know Kerry,' said Gina Glantz, a Democratic strategist who managed Bill Bradley's presidential campaign in 2000. 'But for the sustained fund-raising, you have to give Kerry credit.'" ABC News Vote 2004: the battlegrounds: Stemming from the Media Fund's radio ad in Ohio today for the President's visit, the Associated Press reports, "Interest groups are taking a more precise approach to political advertising than in the past, as they count on local media outlets to help spread their message to voters already inundated by campaign commercials." LINK The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Rob Hotakainen reports, "With polls showing most Ohio voters opposed to same-sex unions, many Democrats fear a high-profile fight over gay marriage will do nothing but damage Kerry's chances in a hotly contested swing state." LINK Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Mark Naymik writes of special interest groups that come from a "relatively new but well-organized web of groups with deep pockets and, they say, 20 million members, mobilizing liberals and like-minded voters to -- they hope -- oust Bush." LINK The Denver Post's John Aloysius Farrell writes, "Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada have landed on the list of crucial battleground states for the 2004 election. If lumped together, their 29 electoral votes rival such traditional prizes as Ohio (20) and Florida (27)." LINK More from Farrell: "The West's rapid population growth, and the demographic changes brought on by migration from California and other states along with immigration from Mexico, has opened the region's booming southern flank to furious competition between the two major parties." David Ammons of the AP wonders whether Bush's trip to Olympia, Wash., will actually help his battle in the Democratic-leaning state, for his trip "didn't show him shopping for the elusive swing voter," but rather "Bush was preaching to the choir," speaking to Republican-heavy crowds. LINK The Des Moines Register's David Yepsen recounts how "hundreds of people" in Iowa may be disfranchised by the counting method, an issue in what could be a very close election. LINK On Sunday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's James Rosen offered what the paper called the "first story in an occasional series on key national issues from one of the swing states in the presidential election." This one focused on Michigan, of which Rosen wrote, "The displeasure that some Michigan Republicans are expressing over U.S. involvement in Iraq has GOP strategists in the state on edge. Michigan is a battleground state that hasn't gone for a Republican presidential candidate since it backed Bush's father in 1988." LINK The St. Paul Pioneer Press' Tom Webb reports that Minnesota's Sen. Norm Coleman "has embraced an unusual niche in this year's presidential race. It is focused, in part, on encouraging Jewish voters to switch tickets and vote for President Bush." LINK The Arizona Republic reports that "A massive voter registration drive is under way throughout the Valley and some strategic corners of Arizona aimed at reaching more than 200,000 Latinos and other minority groups before the Nov. 2 election. To accomplish that goal, two nonpartisan groups plan to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire workers to register new voters in Arizona." LINK On Sunday, the Arizona Republic's Jon Kamman wrote about the paper's new poll of 600 likely Arizona voters that showed, "Arizona voters, narrowly split between candidates, see President Bush as more capable of handling war and combating terrorism but Sen. John Kerry as the better choice for dealing with most domestic issues." LINK The AP's Peter Jackson compares the two presidential campaign managers for Pennsylvania, the Bush campaign's Guy Ciarrocchi and the Kerry campaign's Tony Podesta. LINK The Kansas City Star's Steve Kraske reports, "Sounding like he was still running for president, Howard Dean ripped President Bush on Sunday for the Iraq war and for damaging America's worldwide reputation" as made a stop in Kansas City on Sunday for a fundraiser for Missouri senate candidate Nancy Farmer. LINK The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Jo Mannies also writes up Dean's Missouri visit, Noting that he is "trying to rebuild the Democratic Party -- one local contest at a time." LINK The Reno Gazette-Journal reports that democrats in Washoe County had better make sure Kerry makes it out to Nevada if they are to beat President Bush, whom spoke to a crowd of almost 10,000 people in Reno Friday and was "garnering unfettered media attention and rallying supporters." LINK While Nevada Democrats criticized the President for refusing to address the Yucca Mountain issue during his Friday visit to Nevada, Republicans countered saying that the economy and the war on terrorism are more important to Nevada voters. LINK Soon after Bush and the Clintons surprised the country with their chumminess during the portrait unveiling, Bush has mended fences again, this time with once biter rival, John McCain whom he has started campaigning with. A Seattle Times editorial examines this relationship. LINK This summer, a university student and Bangor, Maine native will kick-off Bike the Vote, a bicycle trek across the state designed to raise awareness and recruit voters for the November elections. LINK ABC News Vote 2004: casting and counting: The Boston Globe's Brian Mooney takes an in-depth look at the huge debate about electronic voting. Does it work, or does it not? That is the question no one seems to agree on. LINK "There is no chance the issue will be resolved before the Nov. 2 election, and some states are sticking with punch cards until 2006, when new electronic-voting standards that include some form of paper record are supposed to be in place. That will result in continued use of punch cards in precincts that are home to about 19 percent of registered voters this fall, Election Data Services projects, down from about 31 percent four years ago." In Periscope, Newsweek's Howard Fineman goes out on a limb and packs a wallop in just a couple of paragraphs, reporting (a) that this week may bring "a round of private, close-to-final decision discussions with potential running mates" for Sen. Kerry, (b) that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has refused overtures to discuss it, (c) Sen. John Edwards has been told to keep his schedule open to be able to sit down with Kerry, and (d) the Independence Day holiday may not be all that relaxing, as a "strong faction is pushing for an early pick -- perhaps around July 4." LINK The Hartford Courant's David Lightman writes about how Sen. Lieberman is so less present on the stump for Sen. Kerry than most of his other former nomination rivals, and Lightman that it's Lieberman's position on the war in Iraq that is "freezing him out" of a larger role in the campaign, contention as a running mate, and even more influence on the vice presidential search. LINK The Des Moines Register's Thomas Beaumont says chemistry between candidates could lead to the eventual veep choice, and that "Kerry and Vilsack have an easy relationship." LINK ABC News Vote 2004: the Senate: Roll Call reports that majority leader Bill Frist has confirmed that he will still actively campaign against minority leader Tom Daschle, saying he would not desert Daschle's opponent Rep. John Thune. The politics of the 9/11 commission: The talk of possible Al Qaeda/Iraq ties got a lot of play on the Sunday morning circuit with many commissioners making the rounds. Here is the New York Times wrap-up: LINK William Safire takes on the 9/11 commission staff today and urges the commissioners to reclaim its "nonpartisan credibility." LINK The politics of Iraq: The New York Times report the Bush Administration has been putting revenues from Iraqi oil to work in rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure prior to the handover of sovereignty. LINK The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes a look at the frustrations of an American educator who goes to Iraq to help rebuild the country's educational system in the second of his three-part series on the reconstruction of Iraq. LINK Chandrasekaran on Sunday took the first must-read look at what was expected to happen with the handover of sovereignty in Iraq, versus the reality of what is happening -- and the miscalculations that ensued. "Viewed from Baghdad since April 2003, the occupation has evolved from an optimistic partnership between Americans and Iraqis into a relationship riven by frustration and resentment," he wrote. LINK The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl observes "though Bush's mismanagement of Iraq has put his democracy advocates on the defensive, there nevertheless now exists the beginning of a broad pro-reform coalition in and outside the region." LINK The Washington Post's Will Haygood takes a really interesting (not to mention largely glowing) look at the career of the U.S.' new ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte. LINK Bob Novak looks at Speaker Dennis Hastert's efforts to lobby on behalf of United Airlines. LINK The New York Times business section has a less breathless take on the same matter. LINK Rep. Chris Bell was barred from distributing two letters to colleagues concerning his ethics charges against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay or from discussing the charges at a weekly whip meeting, according to Roll Call's Damon Chappie. Big casino budget politics: "In the wake of a long-running series of scandals and controversies involving charities and nonprofits, Congress's tax-writing committees are launching an effort this week to crack down on fraudulent activities and tighten laws governing tax exemptions for those groups," reports the Washington Post's Albert Crenshaw. LINK From the outside: Michael Crowley sits down with Harold Ickes and Jim Jordan in a look at the "shadow Democratic Party" -- i.e., the Media Fund, et al, for New York magazine, and explains how, despite the lack of formal coordination, Kerry's campaign would be in a far different place without the influence of the 527 groups. LINK The Washington Post's Carl Leonnig reports an incident in the career of Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in Washington, that might prove a snag in his confirmation process: he has been practicing law in Utah for the past four years without a state law license. LINK "Most lawyers arriving in Utah are allowed to get reciprocal state licenses, but Griffith did not meet the Utah State Bar requirement that he be a lawyer in good standing in his previous state for three of the previous four years." The Bush Administration has the United Nations Population Fund in its sights for its perceived support of abortions in China and is looking to isolate it from working with other UN agencies, reports the New York Times' Marquis. LINK The politics of same-sex marriage: The Wall Street Journal's Avery Johnson writes that social conservatives hope the gay marriage will cause a rebirth of a moribund Christian Coalition and other evangelical political movements. "At the coalition's headquarters in Washington, national field director Bill Thomson says he wants to broaden the organization's traditional base beyond issues affecting the family to tax cuts and the defense budget. But conservative ire over gay marriage is lending fresh energy. Some 30 new directors have been appointed to coalition chapters. The group is devoting attention to electoral battlegrounds with large numbers of evangelicals such as Missouri, Florida, Oregon, Iowa and Ohio. In the Buckeye State, director Chris Long plans a briefing for pastors this month and a statewide "citizenship Sunday" on July 4 to register voters." Civil rights activists Saturday called for Democrats to take an explicit stand in their 2004 party platform against the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment and for "equal recognition of same-sex relationships." LINK Today, Ralph Nader announces his running mate at noon ET at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The Congressional Black Caucus will meet with Nader this Tuesday to tell him "in no uncertain terms" that they want him to withdraw his name from the presidential race, according to Roll Call's Erin Billings. Laura Kurtzan of the San Jose Mercury News Notes the polls that do -- and do not -- exist on Nader popularity. And that "Better Than Bush" is the battle cry leading Nader supporters to Sen. Kerry. LINK The Arizona Republic suggests Ralph Nader's popularity has dropped in the battleground state. LINK This Friday the Nader campaign aims to get all 1,000 signatures it needs to make the Oregon ballot in one magical night. The campaign attempted a similar event in April but fell short of the attendance goal possibly due to a NCAA championships game and a discouraging message from Howard Dean. Dean tells the AP "this is not the year for a third party." Both Nader and Dean enjoy strong supporting Oregon. LINK The Green Party holds its national convention in Milwaukee this week, where Nader may take the nomination though he is not directly politicking for it. His chief rival for Green backing is California attorney David Cobb who tells the Seattle Times if he wins he'll employ a safe-state strategy. "My primary goal is to grow and build the Green Party, but my secondary goal is to have George Bush out of the White House." LINK Cobb defends the Green Party's standing to the Houston Chronicle: "If anyone thinks we are spoilers, it is because of a system that forces voters to vote against what they hate instead of voting for what they want." LINK Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe tells the Boston Herald that all the hooplah about traffic problems, fundraising, and construction for the Boston convention will be resolved. LINK The AP looks at businesses in downtown Boston making "emergency" plans involving transportation and food for during the Democratic National Convention. LINK The AP Notes the presence bloggers will be at the national party conventions this summer -- guaranteed at the Democratic Convention, not at the Republican Convention. LINK The Boston Herald breaks the news that those heading to Boston for the convention will not be able to enjoy the Museum of Science, and will have to get to the New England Aquarium early. But art buffs rest-assured, the Museum of Fine Art will be operating business as usual. LINK New York magazine's Greg Sargent reports Boston is not the only city with possible labor problems come convention time. A dispute between CNN and NABET could prove troublesome for labor/convention relations. Sargent also reports on Kerry's involvement in the dispute. LINK "Labor leaders asked him to boycott CNN shows, sources say, but Kerry refused, instead penning a private, sharply worded letter to CNN president Jim Walton: 'I find the dismissal of long-term workers and the ouster of their union to be disturbing, and I urge you to do the right thing by reconsidering your actions.'" The New York Daily News picks up on Crain's report about beefed-up security at Manhattan hotels hosting conventioneers. LINK Morning show wrap: On Saturday, birthday boy Mike Allen of the Washington Post described the dynamic between President Bush and Sen. McCain at a campaign stop last week. LINK Maura Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times did as well, Noting, "At times, the two men appeared chummy. At others, there were signs of the distance between them rooted in their bitter fight for the GOP presidential nomination four years ago and political disagreements since then." LINK So did the New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller, who threw in this graf: "It was last week when Mr. McCain was spurning Senator John Kerry's repeated proposals to be his running mate, dashing hopes of Democrats who viewed a Kerry-McCain ticket as unstoppable. A CBS News poll recently found that a Kerry-McCain ticket had a 14 percentage point edge over Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent, compared with most head-to-head polls that show Mr. Kerry alone tied or slightly ahead of Mr. Bush." LINK On Sunday, Dana Milbank looked at the way the Bush White House is reacting to the preliminary findings of the 9/11 commission, and the potential affect the final report could have on this fall's presidential election. It might not harm Bush, Milbank reasons, but the onus is on Sen. John Kerry to cast doubt on the President's credibility and to separate the war on terror from the war in Iraq in voters' minds. LINK On Sunday, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg looked at how the 90-day offensive by the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, including massive spending on television ads, once Sen. Kerry locked up the Democratic presidential nomination has affected Kerry's standing with voters. Answer: not much, though Bush has succeeded in raising doubts about the Senator. But polls continue to show the race basically even. LINK "The state of play does not appear to be the result of any particular expertise by the Kerry campaign, or of mistakes by Mr. Bush. Rather, it reflects the extent to which both campaigns have been whipped by events beyond their control, and the challenges of trying to influence public opinion at a time of turmoil and voter polarization." The Washington Post's Jonathan Finer on Sunday looked at the competition between the Bush and Kerry campaigns for New Hampshire's four electoral votes. LINK Newsweek reports that former President Clinton advised Sen. Kerry not to delay accepting the Democratic nomination for president, and that Clinton "hopes to tune up the message of a senator who lacks Clinton's political perfect pitch." LINK Perry Bacon of Time magazine writes about the importance of being optimistic, and the challenge for Sen. Kerry to be both serious about the problems of the country and his solutions to them without appearing pessimistic about its future. LINK On Saturday, David Halbfinger of the New York Times tick-tocked the veepstakes process of the Gore campaign that so put Kerry off and informs the way he's conducting his own search. LINK On Sunday, The AP's Ron Fournier wrote that the Kerry campaign has been largely successful in keeping mum on search for a VP candidate, and that beyond the few Notable candidates "little is known for sure," and that even then the nomination tends to go to a candidate who isn't widely reported. The decision, writes Fournier, could be "last minute." LINK On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune's Jill Zuckman examined how the Republican base around Pittsburgh, scarred by a tough Senate primary fight and frustrated over Iraq and economic issues, could affect voter turnout -- and President Bush -- on election day. LINK On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times' Robin Abcarian compared the "classic portrait of American privilege" that describes the lives of both President Bush and Sen. Kerry. For anyone who wants/needs a refresher on the backgrounds of the President and the Senator, this is a must read -- particularly Abcarian's pointing out the difference between "real wealth" (Bush) and being "comfortable" (Kerry). LINK On Sunday, MoDo found the "Just because I could" attitude abundant in both former President Clinton, for whom that was the reason for an affair, and President Bush, who she said used it as a reason to go into Iraq. But Clinton's, she wrote, did not bring with it a body count. LINK On Sunday, Yvonne Abraham of the Boston Globe talked to the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, and examined the effect his legacy could have on the Kerry campaign as Democrats try to sort out their conundrum with respect to him. LINK The Boston Globe's Michael Levenson on Sunday wrote about the effort by Raymond Flynn, the former mayor of Boston and U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, to mobilize Catholic voters for the Democratic National Convention and the fall election. Flynn is working in conjunction with Boston Archbishop O'Malley, who has pledged church support as Flynn visits parishes statewide in the next few weeks. LINK On Sunday, the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman wrote that evangelical Christians are frustrated and puzzled that the popular uprising against gay marriage has not materialized. LINK ". . . a few skeptics on the Christian right, as well as many on the Christian left, are beginning to conclude that there is more fervor for a constitutional amendment in America's pulpits than in its pews. And politicians of both parties say the issue has had less grass-roots sizzle than they had expected." The Wall Street Journal reports that health care premiums have risen more slowly this year than in years past, largely due to political pressure from states. Fred Dicker of the New York Post looks at Rudy Giuliani's eyeing Albany's top job or a run for the White House and how this year's presidential election will impact that decision. LINK TODAY'S SCHEDULE (all times ET): —9:45 am: Off-camera press gaggle by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan —10:00 am: The American Enterprise Institute hosts a conference titled "Preventing Another Florida? Will the Changes Make Things Better?" on the 2000 Florida elections, Washington, D.C. —10:00 am: The Supreme Court convenes to hand down decisions and release orders —11:00 am: Secretary of State Colin Powell holds a news conference with the Foreign Affairs Minister of Mauritania at the State Department, Washington, D.C. —11:30 am: Sen. John Kerry attends a fundraiser, Aspen, Colo. —12:00 pm: Vice President Cheney speaks about the economy at the Convention Center, Henderson, Nev. —12:30 pm: The House of Representatives meets for morning business —1:00 pm: The Senate resumes debate of the Defense Authorization Act —1:00 pm: Secretary Powell meets with International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed El Baradai at the State Department, Washington, D.C. —1:00 pm: Ralph Nader announces his running mate at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. —2:00 pm: The House meets for legislative business —4:00 pm: President Bush participates in a conversation on compassion and on his plan to promote marriages in poor communities at the ADAS Center, Cincinnati, Ohio —5:00 pm: Sen. John Kerry speaks about the economy and scientific research at the Greek Theater, Denver, Colo. —5:30 pm: The Senate is expected to vote on amendments to the defense budget bill —5:50 pm: Vice President Cheney speaks a campaign rally at the Exposition Center, Springfield, Mo. —6:10 pm: President Bush attends an RNC fundraiser dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio —8:30 pm: Sen. Kerry attends a fundraiser, Denver, Colo. —9:15 pm: President Bush returns to the White House —12:00 am: Former President Clinton's memoir, "My Life," hits bookshelves across the country —12:10 am: Sen. Kerry arrives at the airport, Albuquerque, N.M.

The Middle East Peace Process Can It Survive? Navy boards, takes control of Rachel Corrie off Gaza coast.None were harmed in the military operation as the international activists on the ship cooperated with the boarding party. The activists went as far as lowering a ladder to the soldiers patrol boat to allow them to board, army sources have revealed. Helen Thomas Tells Jews — Get the Hell Out of Palestine and Go Back to Germany and Poland,More.Helen Thomas issued the following statement today: I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.WHATEVER! BP chief Tony Hayward sold shares weeks before oil spill.Wow i wish i had his Cristal Ball! Imam unmosqued.Ground Zero booster tied to sea clash.I think it goes to show he is not the man he represents himself to be. We have two Imam Raufs," she said.We have the anti-Israel, anti-democratic imam, and we have the smiling, soft-spoken moderate Muslim who says Why can't we all get along? BP cap collects oil as undersea plumes mapped.According to government estimates, the BP well has leaked 189.3 million litres of oil in the last six weeks.To compare the Exon Valdez lost 41.6 milion liters! 189.3 million liters is also 5.588 of the largest road tankers together! Instant, online divorces receive clerical approval in Turkey.The religious course in Clarification/Correction Regarding Audio Transmission Between Israeli Navy and Flotilla on 31 May 2010.Shut up, go back to Auschwitz and we’re helping Arabs go against the US, don’t forget 9/11. Caught in the oil.The pictures BP doesn't like you to see! Pope urges support for Mideast Christians.Shortly after Benedict's arrival, the Cypriot archbishop launched a harsh attack against Turkey, accusing it of ethnic cleansing and of aiming to take over the entire island.Well they had enough practice during the Armenian holocaust. 1000th American serviceman killed in Afghanistan was born on the 4th of July.Marine Corporal Jacob C. Leicht was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Helmand Province.This is not a movie line this is real life! An Egyptian appeals court on Saturday upheld a ruling that orders the country's Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women.In 2005, former Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel issued a religious edict, or fatwa, saying Muslim Egyptians may not marry Israeli nationals, whether Arab, Muslim, or Christian.The possibility of a Jewish spouse was not mentioned.These guys have a fatwa for everything? Turkey's Muslim heart fights its pro-Israeli head.The IHH inspiration is unapologetically religious but the IHH insists its mission is purely humanitarian, despite Israeli claims that it supports the armed activities of Hamas.How about their soul? Turkish Charity Behind Gaza Flotilla Had Ties to Terrorism and Jihad.We know that IHH representatives have met with senior Hamas officials in Turkey, Syria, and Gaza over the past three years. That is obviously of great concern to us. International Donations Not Always Welcome in Gaza.Hamas Members Take and Distribute at Their Own Discretion. Israeli troops board new aid ship near Gaza after it ignores calls to change course.Everyone wants to avoid a repetition of this tragic incident Turkey Close To Severing Ties With Israel Over Raid. Report: Obama knew from the beginning that oil leak would likely last months.The White House appears resigned to living with the BP oil spill for some time to come.Why are all BP their efforts pointed at keeping that oil flowing and catching it so that they can sell it ?Not one solution actually tries to seal the leak completely?If i were the President i would tell BP no more plans to catch the leaking oil!Just seal the bloody thing NOW! What if the Oil Just Kept Flowing?What’s disturbing, of course, is that if you substituted gushed for burned up, you could play a similar thought experiment again. What BP Is Doing About the Gulf Gusher.The ultimate solution is to drill a relief well. In the meantime we believe we can substantially reduce the flow of oil.So that leaves 18.050 barrels a day leaking in the Gulf? Oil discovery in Falklands hailed as biggest of its kind since North Sea oil.Argentina, which invaded the British territory in 1982, has vowed to block British oil-drilling projects in the islands. Tony Blair our very special adviser by dictator Gaddafi's son.For us, he is a personal family friend. I first met him around four years ago at Number 10. Since then I've met him several times in Libya where he stays with my father. He has come to Libya many, many times.Hmmm Lockerby bomber released? Obama told Netanyahu: Go Home, Don't Explain From Here.It turns out that Obama told him to leave because he didn’t want Netanyahu to use the White House as a stage on which to present Israel’s side of the story. Liz Cheney attacks Obama for saying flotilla deaths were tragic.President Obama is contributing to the isolation of Israel, and sending a clear signal to the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis that their methods for ostracizing Israel will succeed, and will be met by no resistance from America. McCain says Obama helped create environment for flotilla controversy.This is another step in a chain of unfortunate events beginning with President Obama's insistence there be a freeze as a precondition for peace talks [with the Palestinians]; a freeze on settlements in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, not a settlement. All you need to know about the hurricane season.The US National Hurricane Center expects it to be a busy one. It forecasts a 70 per cent chance of eight to 14 storms reaching hurricane strength, and three to seven becoming dangerous "major" hurricanes of category 3 and above. Reaching the upper end of that range would make 2010 one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. South Carolina lawmaker on Thursday called a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent a raghead,saying we have one in the White House, we don't need one in the governor's mansion. Topless Transgender Women Told To Cover Up At Beach. Spared Arrest By Their Boy Parts. 2012: Israel’s Apocalypse.In 2012, Obama is narrowly reelected. He is angered by the defection of Jewish voters disenchanted with his Middle East policy. 16-Foot Pen Is Mightier Than a Sword -- and Heavier.According to The Wall Street Journal, the trio started working on the pen in early February and spent nearly 450 working hours and 250,000 rupees (about $5,555 U.S.) getting the pen just right. Quebec court mulls Palestinian villagers appeal.For allegedly violating international law by building condominiums for Israeli settlers in the area. Little People Grapple With M Word on Wrestling Show.No it ain't that word either! Oklahoma City woman's art featuring weapon-toting Virgin Mary gaining national spotlight.Our Lady of the Anti-Personnel Weapon And Her Stepford Friends” includes artwork featuring the religious icon holding a knife and a hand grenade. Another shows a nun holding a machine gun.

Who should pay whom or who should apologize to whom? In retrospect, I should have advocated more for reconciliation among people of African descent rather than restitution or reparations by whites, which I had previously advocated mainly because every other group; Jewish or Japanese-Americans, received monies from the US government for historical wrongdoings. This is still important but I believe less pressing than the healing that needs to happen between a people divided. The diaspora in the context of Africa evokes in my mind a people who were, by force or by choice, estranged from their homeland, while the homeland of Africa evokes in my mind a diverse land (54 countries) of milk and honey with limited skills to distribute the wealth. Like the story of two siblings, where one sold the other into slavery, Africa and its diaspora are sometimes deeply divided and each finding their way through the wilderness alone, forgetting that united we stand, divided we fall. There are around 200 million people identifying themselves as being of African descent who live in the Americas. Many millions more live in other parts of the world, outside of the African continent. Whether as descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade or as more recent migrants, we constitute some of the poorest and most marginalized groups. In many cases, people of African descent still experience discrimination in recognition of our achievements, access to justice, and face alarmingly high rates of police violence and racial profiling. Casual racism has become commonplace in the United States and many attribute this to the election of President Trump and his anti-foreigner stance during the election campaign. Furthermore, our degree of political participation is often low, both in voting and in occupying political positions. This racial discrimination lessens when inside Africa but problems of poverty, corruption and conflicts replaces it. The one thing we seem to have in common, that binds us regardless of where we find ourselves, inside or outside Africa, is the misery that's become synonymous with the black experience. The door of return So, when I learned that the United Nations had proclaimed 2015 -- 2024, the International Decade for People of African Descent, I saw an opportunity to reconnect the broken bridge between Africa and its diaspora, control the narrative about the black experience and help heal the pains and resentment between long lost siblings. While our ancestors left Africa bound and chained through the doomed 'doors of no return,' I firmly believe that reconciliation and prosperity can offer a 'door of return' for people of African descent back to Africa. This led me on journey to create the global civil society initiative: The Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD), born out of the desire to bring together a progressive group to support the United Nations' resolution declaring the years 2015 -- 2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent to combat racism, xenophobia and intolerance of Africa and its people worldwide. MIPAD is a unique global list that identifies 200 high achievers, under the age of 40, of African descent in public and private sectors worldwide. Hundred of them live inside Africa, and 100 outside Africa in the diaspora. The idea is to connect them with their counterparts across the world. There are well known African names such as Senegalese musician Akon, British actor David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyongo but there are also those whose ancestors are from Africa such as golfer Tiger Woods and Beyonce among many others. The truth is that not all people of African descent will move back to Africa, this is not the goal, instead it is to know that wherever we are, inside or outside Africa, our unifying and collective goal is the uplifting of Africa as a continent, knowing that making Africa great again is key to the dignity and respect we seek as a people.

Parable of the Good Samaritan: 13th Century Stained Glass, France “And who is my neighbor?” Just as in ancient times, we have our own set of social norms, classifications of the “most despised” and often we discriminate against those that look different from us. We are living in the age of the modern good Samaritan. To understand who plays the role of the modern Samaritan, we have to first understand who Jesus tasked to play the role in this parable. Jesus begins to tell a story of a gentleman robbed, beaten & left bloody along the roadside of travel. Several pass by the gentleman on their journey – from a priest to average Jewish civilians. I’m sure you’ve heard this tale – it’s a common Sunday School story that I heard a time or two. And, it’s a story out of many that you can miss the deeper meaning on what Jesus meant by “helping thy neighbor.” Jesus’ story is an answer to the question on how to inherit eternal life. “To love your neighbor,” but to whom is your neighbor… This is when Jesus tells a story in context to the cultural times he lived in – enter a Jewish gentleman robbed and left for dead. In this time period, Jews & Samaritans did not mix. They despised each other. The parable message here is that there isn’t one set class or person who is more deserving of your love than others. We must set aside ill will and move past what our surroundings tell us to do God’s work. Now, fast-forward to 2017 & using cultural context answer – “Who is your neighbor?” Hint: Refugees, blacks, latinos, lgbqt+ community – the minorities, who according to the context of our current culture are not to be “mixed” with the majority. Not deserving of grace, mercy, etc… I love the Bible for a multitude of reasons, but the first is this: It is just as applicable to our current culture as it was then, but context matters. Don’t just agree to the text at surface level – dig deep! I say all of this in response to a status I saw from a member of the queer community. He reminded me of what the Samaritan probably felt like traveling in a land where he knew he wasn’t wanted or that most did not have good will toward him. This must be how many of our black brothers & sisters feel when being pulled over by the police or how our queer community members react to having their right to adopt or love another in pure intentionality stripped. And, yet, at the end of the day – the Samaritan decided to leave his fears & embark on helping another as equal. Here is shortened version of this status: “In all honesty, when I’m alone… I constantly wonder and worry about the outside world. Why are people like me hated? Why is it that people like me and other minorities are so despised? Why am I afraid to be in public? Why am I afraid to be myself in everyday life?” Here is my response in full: Culture conditioning is a habit to break & not an easy one. I think many of us carry and harbor such emotions & thoughts. Many ignore them or don’t speak them out loud. So, commend yourself for acknowledging those truths. That’s powerful stuff. We are not hated by every person, but media and actions by those in particular settings do give us a ground to feed into that thought. Are we oppressed, marginalized, taking advantage of and not seen for our entire person? Yes, of course, but not by every being – and certainly that isn’t our only story line. That is the beginning thread of our story – every group – black, brown, so on, has an oppression – what you choose to do with that defines how you feel, move and create change in the world. It is true you can not change anyone but yourself – so start there and then have elevated discussions, be fearless in your pursuit of happiness and then fight injustice with loving truth. These elements help you begin to see and have safety in uncomfortable & comfortable spaces. The fact that I have to say this is in suggestion we need more modern day good Samaritans. We need more people, myself included, taking Jesus’ parable into the context of our cultural environments today. And, if the lesson is true as it was then – I think it is – the answer to who is our neighbor to love, show grace and mercy to is everyone. Before you raise a sharp tongue to the issues of which you do not understand, I encourage you to raise a calm hand to those who may represent these communities. Ask them what their deepest need is; what they wish to be understood for… I assure you that the response you get will be unified… love: We wish to be loved, affirmed and treated equal “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” I urge you to go outside of your comfort zone and become the modern day Samaritan.

Brief synopsis of the readings: We being 2018 with an old friend, the prophet Isaiah. He writes with imagery of light out of darkness. “[T]he glory of the Lord is rising on you, though night still covers the earth and darkness the peoples.” Those who have been scattered will now return. “At this sight you will grow radiant, your heart throbbing and full; since the riches of the sea will flow to you; the wealth of the nations come to you.” Matthew’s Gospel, however, paints a different picture. It begins with some wise men approaching King Herod asking about the infant king of the Jews. Disturbed, Herod spoke with the chief priests and scribes who told him that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. Herod then sent these seekers to Bethlehem and asked that once they find this infant they return and tell Herod where to find him so he could do homage. When the wise men found Jesus they presented him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But because of a dream they had they didn’t return to Herod but returned by another way. Today I’m going to do something I rarely do: I’m going to stray slightly from today’s readings. We celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, the encounter between the wise men and the holy family. To this day we celebrate this encounter by exchanging gifts on Christmas. It’s a profound commemoration because when we give a gift we emulate the wise men and when we receive a gift we recognize that another person sees Christ in us. I’ve spoken about this in previous homilies, but there is a darker hue to Matthew’s account. Jerusalem, then and now, commanded the center of Jewish life. When the wise men came from the east to seek this “infant king of the Jews” it made sense to come to Jerusalem. And any Jew who lived in Jerusalem would recognize that those seeking the “infant king of the Jews” should speak to Herod. Jews at the time of the birth of Jesus awaited a Messiah, one chosen from God to deliver them from all that was bad. Frankly, a great deal was bad. After being oppressed by the Greeks, they were (at this point) oppressed by Rome. The Roman Empire allowed them a measure of freedom to worship as they did, but also made it clear that any attempt asserting independence would be cruelly stopped. Herod found himself in the middle of this. He was a Jew but also someone appointed to his position by Rome. And to be frank, he depended on everything staying the same. The Roman authorities found him useful, a Jew who would keep the peace. Jews looked at him as a turncoat, someone who betrayed them to curry favor with Rome. So when the wise men showed up and asked for directions to an infant who will deliver the Jews, it wasn’t the best thing he could have heard, it was the worst. Like traitors throughout history he feigned support while planning something entirely different. Herod called the chief priests and scribes not to see if this child was the Messiah but to find a reason that he wasn’t. Finding something else, he asked the wise men to return and tell him the location of this infant so that he could pay homage. But instead he intended to kill this infant but was frustrated when the wise men were warned to return by another route. Here is where our story takes a tragic turn: Herod ordered the murder of all the children who might have been Jesus, boys in Bethlehem under 2 years of age. But once again Herod was frustrated: an angel appeared to warn Joseph and Mary about Herod and they took Jesus and fled to Egypt. That was good for Jesus but it wasn’t for other boys in the area. By as early as the fifth century they’ve been known as the Holy Innocents. We don’t know how many babies were murdered at this time, but the number doesn’t matter. It matters that Herod decided to commit mass murder. As a Jew he was supposed to look forward to the Messiah, but as a person of power he feared being pushed aside. He could have chosen hope, but instead he chose fear. We who lived in the 20th Century should recognize mass murder. We don’t have exact numbers but our best information tells us that Joseph Stalin ordered the death of 20 million Russians, Adolf Hitler ordered the death of 10 million (6 million of which were Jews), and Pol Pot ordered the death of 4 million Cambodians. We know that Herod didn’t kill nearly the numbers of Stalin, Hitler, or Pot but his intent was the same. We think of these men as evil, but perhaps if we dig deep we can find not evil, but fear. The murders of the 20th Century all claimed they were seeking racial purity and feared that outsiders (Slavs, Jews, Intellectuals) posed a grave threat to their own. Herod faced the same fear. He didn’t fear outsiders but instead feared insiders but in a way it was all the same. They all feared they would lose out and face a loss in their status and power. And that fear turned deadly. I’d like to point out that none of them were successful. The Soviet Union died in 1991, the Third Reich died in 1945, the Khmer Rouge was defeated in 1979, and Jesus escaped Herod’s rule and (let’s face it) redeem the world. I’m certain none of us will ever do anything remotely this evil but we all live with the fear of losing what we have. And sometimes we do foolish or bad things out of this fear. When I think of this I think about an agency where I once worked. It was an unusual situation where senior management was replaced by a group who had no experience in the field. Our general manager managed by fear. She had the choice of learning from her employees but her fear of appearing weak caused her to bully those who answered to her. Much like Herod, she allowed her fear to overcome her hope. Moral plummeted, customers fled, and the agency eventually failed. To be honest, she wasn’t the only reason for the failure, but if her faith was stronger than her fear, we would have had a different result. And if Herod could have overcome his fear of losing his status and welcomed this infant king of the Jews, the Holy Innocents could have grown up led fulfilling lives. In the end this didn’t work for Herod as he died when Jesus was still a child.

STORY OF A CONTACTEE Val has asked that I write my complete story, in my own words, in about two pages so people will know where I'm coming from when I write about him and for him. I agreed to try to do it in two parts, not pages. But I will try. I think my story really starts in early 1970's in Italy. We lived in a small costal town where other military families lived that were stationed at San Vito AFB. I'd often go down to the beach, slip off my sandalws and walk barefoot in the sand close to the waters' age. There seemed to be deja and I wondered where and when this had happened in my life or perhaps another lifetime on a far distant shore perhaps even another planet. I had always believed people, just like us, lived elsewhere in the stars. I remember, as a very loittle girl, telling my Grandfather that showed me the big and little dippers in the sky that peopkle lived up there on the stars just like us. He told me they did not but I never believed him though I didn't know why, I just knew they did. I'd lften hear songs from back in the late 1940's that Frank Sinatra sange. "I'll Be Seeing You" and "To Each His Own" were two of the songs that would come to me like someone humming them to me, I could almost hear a man's voice singing them off in the distance. T This was a morning like the others only I could almost feel a presence walking with me and the words, \"Toss a stone high in the air."" So I did, and it broke into small pieces. I thought, that must have been a hard piece of sand stuck together and then the thought came again, like words spoken from outside of me only as thoughts that came3 into my head not originated there. So I chose a very hard small rock and tossed it high in the air. It disintegrated into dust. I sat down on a large rock and said, "Are you going to disintegrate me like you did the rock?" I knew there was a spirit walking with me. I wasn't afraid, and I knew the answer would be "No". I felt I knew who it was yet I did not have any idea. I was not in the habit of communicating with spirits but I believed in it and had attended a very spiritual service at a spiritualist church one time and they had describe3d my mother, who they said was watching over me standing back of me. I never knew my mother as she died when I was born but they described how her picture looked. I had always believed in the Catholic Saints that they, too, were with us and helped us though I'm not Catholic at this time I have respect for all religions and I believe as we progress spiritward in ascension we will respect all people and their beliefws and as the wiccan rede states, "do as you will if it harm none"...though I'm not a witch I respect their right of belief. The only people that are hard to respect are those that believe they know it all and no one else is right or truthful unless they agtree. That is so childish. Suddenly I became very sleepy and tghe thought came to go lie down and he would take me somewhere and I would know who he was. I wasn't hypnotize4d but I felt in sort of a daze as I wanted to go to see who this person was, I felt such a pull to step out of this world into another world that seemed to be there with a door opening. I had never had that kind of feeling. I went the few blocks to my place and lie down on the bed. As soon as my head touched the pillow the room begn to spin around me slowly at first, then faster and faster. I was not dizzy. I was not spinning but the room was spinnijng around me faster and faster...then I was somewhere else totally. I was standing near water, I could hear the waves touch the shore and shortly ahead of me was a man, I knew him well, I knew at one time I was very much in love with this man, but I did not know who he was. He was surrounded by a ring of fire and he help out his left hand to me to come to him... I saw on his little finger a large stone ring. I thought, "That's my ring why is he wearing my ring?" I w3alked unhesitatingly to him through the ring of fire. It did not burn me. I took his hand and he said, "For your protection". To my right I saw a large round ball of pure golden light... it was about as big as half a football field. It was glowing like a ball of light, there were no lights on it, the whole thing was glowing gloden light. Then I saw stps come down the side of it. I counted them, therre were seven steps covered in red violet with gold trim on the sides. At the top of the steps was a panel that I could see golden light coming out from it as it slid open and a man's voice said, "Bring her up!". Then aother voice from a distance at first thqat got louder saying, "Mama, wake up and make me a peanut butter and blackberry jelly [email protected]!" My son was home from school..His bus got home around five in the afternoon. I had gone walking on the beach after he left for school that morning. It was after five in the afternoon. Where had I been all day? It had been several hours since I heard the mans' voice from the head of the steps saying, "Bring her up".... what happened during those hours? I fixed supper and after the family was asleep I took my portable typewriter to the kitchen and began to write of my experience of that day. I then wrote the question, "I wonder what happened to me today?" As soon as I had written the question the lighting in the kitchen seemed to change to a more tgolden color and I heard that same telepathic voice say plinly some words I wrote down. This is how I bgan to write for the man called, Val. I would like to write my whole story as I've never written it all in detail just as I lived it. I would hope to finish it and publish it perhaps with some of Val's writings. I gbegan to write with him and I wrote pages and pages as I asked him questions and he would ask me questions. Always the questions would begin to be personal as he would ask about my past, when I was very young and to tell him if I were ever in love in a special way with a special person. I would tell him, "No, I don't brelieve in that kind of special love at all." And I would tell him if he continued to question me I would stop writing with him so for awhille he would stop. Then he would start atgain asking me about my early love life and wasn't there someone very special I was once very much in love with and perhaps planned to marry one day? And I would again tell hyim if he did not stop trying to ask about my past I would stop writing with himk so he would again stop asking me questions and let me ask him about space and the ships and other civilizations in our universe. Then one night soon he asked if I wanted to see his ship? I said yes. He told me to lie down and close my eyes and not be afraid. I could feel an energy radiating from his hand over my heaart center then the energy and light wsurrounded me, I opened my eyes and it seemed a beam or searchlight came down through the ceiling or from the window that in Itay was high in the wall and it was open. I'm not wure if this was the transporter technology or tractor beam but suddenly I felt I was swooped up in the light beam and then I was standing on a ship and in front of me was a man in uniform but not like our military uniforms. It was the man I'd seen at the lake in the earlier exprerience. He said, "I'm Commander Val, don't you know me?" I knew I had known him but I didn't remember where or when, and I new I had been deeply in love with him but I couldn't remember him from this lifetime at all. Back in 1952 I had a near death experience and they told my family if I came out of a coma I would be a vegetable and could not have any memory at all as I'd bgeen out of oxygen way too long. However, when I came out of it, I told them my name, address and social security number. One of the doctors said it was the man upstairs, they did not do it but it was a miracle. However, there was much from my past I did not remember...the man called Val wass one of those memories. To be continued Note: At this time I do not see very well as I have4 lost my glasses but I felt I had to begin to write this story and if there are typos or I got my hands on the wrong keys please forgive me. I will try to edit it best I can but Val wants me to write the story and post it so I'm trying to do as he's asked me to do. So m,uch of myh story seems like a fairy tale or science fiction but perhaps by my telling it all as it happened I can encourage others to come out of the closet and tell theirs. I will be ninety my nezxt birthday and I have no reason to spin a tale that is not true just for the fun of it, as there is no fun in being a contactee of a real Alien presencce. There is much heartache, tears and sadness when people intentionally insult both the contactees and the abgeductees. I do believe in the abductee stories as all are not good on this Earth therefore we cannot experct all from other worlds to be good. I hope my story will help someone else to tell theirs. I know there are a lot of real contacts with those from other worlds that have been going on for a long, long time. God bless you and thank you for reading my story. I will continue it as soon as possible. - Patti Jean Spencer (Valana) Thank you Valana...I love your stories...I know them to be true...I just know...and I truly enjoy them...Thank you again for sharing them and Commander Val is right by asking you to write them...Many will enjoy them as I do...I wish you a very happy birthday whenever it comes...and as of now too...Blessings to you and Val and much Love always... DThank you dearest Amparo, for posting this. Blessings of Light and Love to you and all With all my love...Sometimes I do not come to the computer and other times I do not see blogs or discussions but when I do I take action especially when I like something...and you know I love your stories (real stories) ...Blessings dear friend...and keep on writing...You do very well...even without the glasses...Pray that you find them and you will...I always find things that I loose...I ask my Guardian Angel and sometimes even when I have just said His name boom right then and there I find the lost items...I send you my Love, Peace and Light...from my heart to your beautiful heart of LOVE... "A belief is a resonance and alignment to an energy. When you believe in love, safety, and health, no matter what evidence is shared with you to dissuade you, you align with and become love, safety, and health." FOR YOU VALANA: From Mary Magdalene: " Remember you are the Creators of your reality; you have the divine right to choose what you wish to experience; this has never been so important. If each person and soul on the Earth were to realize they have the power to choose what they wish to create all illness, fear, poverty, and any other harmful energy would be powerless and non-existent." Thank you for all the nice things you say...they give people strength and encouragement and are so important. I almost did not tell aboutg the ring of fire and back thenh I had never heard about any sort of thing other than the Bible scriprure, speaking of those that love God and try to live for God Zechariah said, "I'll be a wall of fire round about her and the glory in the midst of her"... Now literally that is speakikng of Jerusalem however there are four major ways the Rabbis (and the Bible was written by Israelites) translate the scripturfe...the Literal is only one way...there is the spiritual interpretation and two others...but one can take all the promises of the Jewish Bible ND APPLY THEM INDIVIDUALLY and their is a literal "wall of fire" round about those that have purified their souls and have unconditional love for mankind and every living creature... Val is on that spiritual level... When one is on the level they can see this level, they know instantly if a person is good or bad to be around..some are actually surrounded by black smoke on that Val wants to use my experiences to teach and if we ever do the book he is going to do a sort of like a footnote only long one and explain varius things like in this story where I was on the ship all day with the missing hours... this ring of fire is the psycfhic fire spoken of in the Bible around God's people for protection. He will also explain rthis as a form of time travel, taking me back in time to when the ship came down at White Rock Lake in 1950 and he deliberately blocked my memory from that time until I was playing piano for him my repertoire the next day for my protecdtion at the time....and bhecause we did not get back ktogether for him to unblock the memory, the lack of oxygen in 1952 NDE destroyed the key and he thinks I will never regain that memory of what we call "the missing hours"...and he did it for my protection as well as the protection of his technology he did not wish to share at the time with this planet he had shown me, however part of that memory has returned or he has shown me again what happened and I plan to write it if he ok's it and if not I won't... He also wants to teach about time travel, how it's done and that t's not that rthings are still going on that would be worse doctrine than hell fire as think if you were trapped in a burning building in another life and burned to death, if it were still going on you would still be screaming and that is not possible nor sensible.. But a master of the material realm and Val is one of the Masters....can take one back in time to the place where it occurred and reconstruct the wscene in a situation similar to the holodeck of the movies... this is how people tragvel in time but they nee3d to be careful trying to use technology on this planet as they are not progressed spiritually and the wsame rthing will happen that happened to the USS Eldriridge... Spirirtual advancement must go along with technological advancement or bad things occur... this is how Val wans to use the book and our experiences... this he definitely wants to teach...never attempt time travel to change anything... unless you rruly are working with the highest of the Light Powers and Authorities...U ciykd wrute nire in tgus byt best ti ket Val do it. Thank You for sharing your story Valana. I like the part where you were walking on the beach and you had this feeling of '' deja vu '' as if you lived somewhere else on another planet. That is a great story Valana and it's all true . Than tiy Hellen and I believe your story, also, as I understand how it occurs. Dr. Einstein said a railroad track could run through our homes and a train come through every hour and we would not know it. Your eyes were opened to a higher vibratory frequency for a fe3w moments and you saw the ships. I remember Betty Hill, the lady they call "Mother of Abductions", was asked by a reporter why she could see shi8ps so much and he had never seen one. She told him, "Because he didn't believe." yes, I once read an article on Betty Hill and her husband who was abducted in the early 1960s is what are you referring to? Yes, Hellen, Betty was called "Mother of Abductions" and she waned me to come visit her and I was goijng to do an article on her as I was then writing for the Fifth World Journal, a Ufology magazine that asked me to do a column for them back in late 90's...the publisher and his wife were on my mailing list and that's why I went to the Scottsdale ACCET meeting, was to do a write up on the meeting where they found my Implant with the magnietic counter or whatever it was... Betty and I corresponded by email and she said the psychologist that did their hypnotism regression caused them to speak with some fear as it was the unknown and that they were not hurt at all and they showed Betty a star our astronomers did not know aout that I believe they later found. Betty said they were not evil and the psychologist she felt caused them to say things that he made money off his book and it was not true, she was not afraid of the Aliens that had taken them and waved at the wships and would say, "come and get me"... She passed away years ago and I never went to visit as it didn't work out for me to go financially... Then Paola the Italian Journalist that intervewed the Cardinal of the Catholic church wanted me to visit her one summer and do an interview and write about my story and that did not work out because of something that happened I couldn't go... she told me she interviewed the man that was taken up out of the fishing boat and others saw him go up in a tractor beam, you remember that one? They made a movie of it and it was fearsome... he told Paola that if he did not know that movie was his story when he went to see it, he would not have known it was his story and he wished he had not sold it to Hollywood to do what they wanted with it as it was not like the movie at all and they painted the Alienw much worse than they were... fear is one of the big prohlems, fear of the unkno0wn. I am so thankful I've never had to face anything like that..there are bad Aliens and they do bad things, and it should be known, not all are the good guys... I have been lucky in that they know who IVal is and they won't bother me... But I do believe the abduction stories as the fact that a group has used Earthians for experimentation is true, those people are not making it up and it has not ended. The truth must be known. Love you so much for your sincere comments and your friendship through the years...God bless you and keep you safe and in peace....

George Hadjimichalis was born in Athens in 1954. His first solo show took place in Ashantour Bacharian’s Gallery ‘’Ora’’ in 1977, and he has been exhibiting regularly ever since. In 2001, the National Museum of Contemporary Art held a large exhibition, George Hadjimichalis, Works 1985-2000, and a show entitled George Hadjimichalis, ‘Seven Works’ (1990-2000) was organised in 2002 by MoMA/PSI in New York. In 2005, he represented Greece in the Venice Biennale. George Hadjimichalis has taken part in many important exhibitions, to name a few: DOCUMENTA 9, in 1992 in Kassel Centre Régional d ‘art Contemporain of Bretania ‘’ The Theoretical Object’’ 1993 Schirn Kunsthalle, G. Tsarouchis, S. Antonakos, G. Hadjimichalis, Frankfurt, 2001 The Factory, Conversation? Recent Acquisitions of the Van Abbemuseum, Athens, 2002 National Museum of Contemporary Art, Intercivilizations, Athens, 2004 European Art Projects, Ideal City-Invisible Cities, Zamosc, Poland, June-August 2006 and Postdam, Germany, 2006 Museum Serralves, ‘’The Decade of the 80’s, A Topology’’, Porto, Portugal, 2007 The work of George Hadjimichalis is versalite. His works are part of greater units. In creating a piece of work, he often employs a variety of different media, such as video, photography, text, painting, printmaking, etc. Several units that make up the artist’s body of work have never been exhibited. Born in 1954, Athens, Greece His first solo exhibition was in 1977 at the Ora gallery of Assadour Bacharian, since then he exhibits systematically Tom Sawyer, Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, Margarita Myrogianni – George Hadjimichalis, Athens, Greece Details of a city and a portrait, Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, Athens, Greece The Journey, OFFICINAE PICTORUM c. 1221-1445, The Byzantine and Christian Museum organized the exhibition of George Hadjimichalis, Athens, Greece The work 1922 was permanently installed at the Byzantine Museum of Didymoticho, Didymoticho, Greece 4 Works entitled as Notes, Batagianni Gallery, Athens, Greece Details and situations, 66 photos from the archive Faces, National bank of Greece cultural foundation, Athens, Greece A novel, The work The Painter A.K was exhibited at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece Correspondence 2007-2010, Kyrillos Sarris - George Hadjimichalis, Contemporary Greek Art Institute, Athens, Greece George Hadjimichalis: Three works, Mascs and tamata vow, Gestures, It, Batagianni Gallery, Athens, Greece The hunger in Athens in the winter of 1941-1942, a small container that traveled for eight weeks in different neighborhoods and places in Athens with its subject being the hunger of 1941-42. In collaboration with the National Museum of Contemporary Art The path of Andreas Embirikos, National bank of Greece cultural foundation, Athens, Greece Piet Mondrian, Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece Represented Greece at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy Landscape, with Kyrillos Sarris, Workshop of Drawing and Picture in Crisis, Athens, Greece F/B Apostolos P. The Beacons of the Aegean sea, installation on board while the ferry was sailing from the port of Piraeus to Aegina on Friday May 9th 2003 George Hadjimichalis: Three Works, Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece Seven Works (1990-2000), MOMA/PS1 organized the exhibition of George Hadjimichalis, New York, United Stated of America Works 1985-2000, the National Museum of Contemporary Art organised the retrospective exhibition, Athens, Greece From the archive of the Workshop of Drawings and Images in Crisis, Zoumboulaki Gallery, Athens, Greece Interpretation of opposite parts / 2, Epicenter, Patras, Greece He constructed the work Gathering Maronias at the exhibition hall of the 12th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities at the Tokos Mansion, Kavala, Greece Parallel Life, a work based on the homonymous novel of Apostolos Doxiadis, Gallery 3, Athens, Greece Painting, Gallery 3, Athens, Greece Ora Cultural Center, Athens, Greece Ora Cultural Center, Athens, Greece GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED) The Monument, 16 artists suggest, Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens, Greece Selective Knowledge, National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, Eynard Mansion, Athens, Greece The 80’s, a topology, Museum Sarralves, Porto, Portugal Ideal City – Invisible Cities, European Art Projects, Zamość, Poland and Potsdam, Germany Intercultures, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece Discussions, Recent Acquisitions of Van Abbermuseum, Athens School of Fine Arts (Factory), Athens, Greece Im Spiegel der Freiheit, Yannis Tsarouchis, Stephen Antonakos, George Hadjimichalis, Schirn Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany Synaxis, Domaine de Kerguehennec, Brittany, France Le milieu du monde, Centre Regional d’ Art Contemporain, Sète, France De la Main à la Tête, L’ Objet Théorique, Domaine de Kerguehennec, Brittany, France Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany In 2007 he curated the big retrospective exhibition of the sculptor Vasos Kapantais (1924-1990) and in 2015 the retrospective exhibition of Cosmas Xenakis (1925- 1984), both at the Benaki Museum at Pireos Street in Athens, Greece Agra publications published two books, in 1991 the book of C. Bakirtzes – G. Hadjimichalis, Gathering Maroneias, and in 1999 the book Crossroads including texts about painting (1979-1998). In 2005 Navado press publication of Trieste published his work, Konek konek, King of Isprovana, Ponders What Man Can Be. The Workshop of Drawings and Pictures in Crisis The Workshop of Drawings and Pictures in Crisis was founded in 1983 and had a different name (Officinae Pictorum) and took its current name in 1995. It has given its name at a central work of George Hadjimichalis and at the same time it is the name of the artist’s own workshop. The workshop has been in crisis since its foundation but has managed to survive despite the adverse circumstances. It published books – usually in collaboration with Agra publications and CD music out of commerce. But its main activity is the creation of a series of archive of faces, pictures, texts and ideas that he uses for the creation of his works.

Tomorrow I will get on my bike and ride to Quebec City to raise money for cancer care and research. I am riding with a few thousand others in the Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer. It is like so many big charity events that we see these days where we need to raise a minimum amount to participate and through corporate donations and individual sponsorship large amounts of money are raised. This event takes place in four provinces in Canada and raises millions. It is called charity. But I don’t want to write about charity, I want to write about generosity. Charity is being moved to give and generosity is being moved to change. This is not the first time I am doing this ride, I did this ride last year when I joined a team called, Hope & Gratitude. The team was started by a man named Rob Callard, a cancer survivor himself. I joined the team because I lost a very close friend to cancer and my friend had done a ride and somehow it seemed fitting to do this. Rob had made a post on FaceBook asking if anyone wanted to join and I remember reading the post and wanting to but not sure I could. I didn’t have a bike, I hadn’t really ridden a bike since I had a Peugeot 10 speed 30 years ago, and on top of that I had to raise $2500 to participate. What was making me hesitate though wasn’t any of that. In Being Generous, One Becomes Generous. What is it that makes most of us uncomfortable when we are presented with the opportunity to give, to being generous? As people, we are asked to give on a daily basis and in a charity situation we are being asked to make a difference in our communities, to overcome our fears and to make change. In this process we are forced to push ourselves beyond what we may think we are capable of doing. Yet true generosity is generative, it allows for change, for opportunity and it may go so far as being transformative. It goes far beyond charity. I grew up in a family where giving and charity were done quietly and without the need for recognition. After working for so many years in an industry where profit and recognition was the norm I was shown a different vision, where the idea of your name on a hospital wing or in the newspaper became the goal. There seemed to have to be a reward for any giving done and somehow that did not seem right to me. Yet I saw the benefits of what power and influence could do to raise money. In the end, it was always at the grass roots level that I saw true generosity. Generous acts, will allow for generous responses. This year to raise money there haven been spin-a-thons and bake sales, movie nights and workout events, and then just plain old asking for donations, in person, by e-mail and of course on Facebook. This year our team Hope & Gratitude has over 20 riders many of which I will only meet tomorrow. I enlisted one friend to ride with me last year and two more this year. What I have seen and heard from them and from the other riders in our training rides is always the same. They are amazed at the response from those they asked to sponsor them, they have been touched by the stories of those who were lost to cancer, and they were sometimes uncomfortable by the show of gratitude for what they are doing. They loved the hugs and thank-you’s that were bestowed on them and yet all that anyone has done is to be generous. People give what they can to charity; we are generous with what is important to us. There is one thing that I have learned in all my years of charity, we all want to give. I believe that it is innate in ourselves; we just need to be given the chance. That is what charity allows for, if we truly understand what it is to be generous. In the end, the Enbridge Ride we will do tomorrow will raise millions of dollars and it will make a difference and allow much needed funding for research and patient care, but what we all achieved through our generous acts has no measure. The friend that was allowed to tell her story of losing her sister and sharing her loss, the child that baked cookies to help her mother raise $20, the co-worker that helped plan a mini fundraising event, the gift of knowing that we allowed someone to give has no value. When we give because we want to make a difference we allow for the possibility to make change and our actions will have far greater consequences than any money donated to charity. It is not that money does not matter; it is to remember to put love into our giving. I say that generosity is not really optional and we must not do it now and then. It is when we do it on a daily basis that we will see it’s transformative power. I repeat: How will you be generous today? If you would like to support my ride to benefit the Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, click here.

Victor ebner switzerland anti aging Sociologie, Psihologie. Economie politică [Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology. Как трасса, на продолжение которой не хватило денег, улочка вдруг оборвалась. Перед ним была высокая стена, деревянная скамья и больше. Он посмотрел вверх, на крышу трехэтажного дома, развернулся и бросился назад, но почти тут же остановился. В некотором отдалении от него возникла фигура человека, приближавшегося медленно и неотвратимо. Political economy], în vol. The Jewish people only live in a few towns. The most important are, as we see, Sadagura and Cernăuţi, two neighbouring towns. Students, teachers of various disciplines, mathematicians, engineers, economists and researchers who do, at school, college or university, Mathematical Gazette problems or issues proposed and articles published in Mathematical Gazette, were animated by a passion for Mathematics for creative thinking, for demonstration and argument. This passion was encouraged by a stimulating and motivating framework of collaboration Mathematical Gazette. From the appearance, inand until now, the journal was an important landmark and a true Romanian mathematics school and has contributed to the formation of many generations of young fans of mathematics, from which many mathematicians have emerged Why do credit Romania worldwide. Mathematical Gazette is the most famous mathematical journal in Romania for youth to develop and strengthen math education. Sadagura has got a large Israelite community. The character, clothes and lifestyle of the Jews in this town is similar to Galicia and there is nothing else to be added; the only thing is Sadagura became more remarkable since reb Isrulke settled there after being banned from Russia. His particularly ostentatious style, more of a prince than a rabbi, his court and numerous servants blindly obeying his orders lead to the most unfortunate outcome which we will not mention here as it would it take too much time. We can only hope that things are going to change once he moves to the Austrian territory. As it happens, the choice of this town was actually a lucky one. The cattle traders most of them from neighbouring Bessarabia were to come and express their gratitude for the good deals they obtained at the markets. The town also gained a great deal, as the population passing by it grew and generated bigger input of food products and a larger amount of money being exchanged. Above all, alcohol sales grew as a symbol of the spiritual drink of the Chasidic crowds; it made life easier for the inn owners in Sadagura, grew the income of the land owners, of the alcohol producers and sellers in the area. The alcohol input closely connected to the tadic parties made local land owners do whatever they could to draw tadics to settle on their land, the same as they did to draw a garrison. More than that, they protected him and his Chasidics and promised to defend them on any occasion. This is how Chasidism succeeded in securing its existence. Half an hour away from Sadagura there stands Cernăuţi, capital city of Bukovina. Its romantic settlement at the foot of a mountain, on the banks of Prut River, its beautiful buildings, the city plan and the lack of a main street reminds us of its Turkish origin. Proceedings of ICVL 2010 Its inhabitants consist mostly of Moldavians, clerks and Jewish. Cernăuţi also has an important Israelite community. Однако одиночество не принесло ей успокоения. В голове у Сьюзан беспрестанно крутилась мысль о контактах Танкадо с Хейлом. «Кто будет охранять охранников?» - подумала . The real Cernăuţi inhabitants, of Bukovina origin, are not numerous; on the contrary, lots of them immigrated to Galicia a long time ago, and since a few years ago they have not been allowed to move back to Bukovina, with some exceptions. Until a few years ago the Jewish people of Cernăuţi and all Bukovina victor ebner switzerland anti aging exempt of the kosher meat tax as they are now of the candle tax. The economic status of the Jewish people in Bukovina is quite prosperous. There are lots of wealthy families that gained their fortune not only by commerce but also by doing different trades such as tailoring; many of them bought beautiful houses. Tailors are an important part of the Cernăuţi community. The clothing of the Cernăuţi Jewish has been inspired by that of Moldova and Muntenia. In the eastern part of Bukovina, many still wear Moldavian outfits. Yet, the way young people are dressed in Cernăuţi is much more pleasant than in Galicia. Instead of wearing the spodic every day and the streimel on Saturdays, people wear here a samur hat; the short trousers have been replaced with modern pants etc. Women do not wear the frontlet during workdays; instead, they save this precious yet civilizaţie [Contribution of the Jewish of Romania to culture and civilization], Bucharest, Hasefer Publishing House, second edition,p. Actually, the frontlet has a funnier look here than in Galicia where women wear it every day and spend all their money just to have one in their chest. During work days women wear a scarf around their heads in a very common way, the same as the Jewish in Moldavia. Many young women of the richest families in Cernăuţi wear a European bonnet, but there two categories here. The same goes for many young people who behave in a German: some wear on Saturdays the gheroc and the caftan hat and even the ştramel. On this category there are many craftsmen, including tailors. With some exceptions the educational degree is not very high in Cernăuţi. Deep Talmudists, Iliem, are rare. Besides their marketing abilities, the general knowledge of a Cernăuţi inhabitant does not c și un magazin suisse anti aging more than the usual prayers, the Hebrew writing and a German signature on a document. This ignorance can be explained by the fact that children are initiated in trading since early childhood. Once a 12 or 13 year-old boy has worked hard in a cheder for 6 or 7 years he can say goodbye to acquiring any further knowledge; his father is teaching him about his business, lets him work beside him for a while, then gets a small amount of money to speculate on his own. The boy then needs to earn some capital by himself until his wedding day when, his father doubles or triples what he had made on his own nadan. An interesting fact is that Bukovina Jewish people are acting with more responsibility in these matters. The Bukovinian bride groom may not be able to do a peştel but he can provide for his family the next day after the wedding unlike his Galician Baal-beessel who has no perspective and nowhere to go after retirement Kost. However this early adulthood of Jewish children will soon vanish and a more beautiful age is about to start, as the Cernăuţi people and their infinite spirit are going to overtake the wise men of Galicia. Due to their own initiative and the help of some kind men involved themselves in the intellectual Judaism movement they have recently founded an Israelite public school. We can well assume that an establishment of this sort leaves room for improvement both in its design and applicability but because it started as a good cause, we are sure of its right development in the future. In Cernăuţi there is now a noble Christian architect who took pity of some orphan Jewish children and is teaching them architecture with no charge. Some people I can trust have told me that these children are on the right track. This distinguished man, whose name has unfortunately slipped my mind deserves to be mentioned right here as a fortunate symbol of times to come. reeds rocket pecan cracker little rock arkansas I am certain that most of us will treasure his memory. There is more good news concerning the statistics this time. In Bukovina there are 55 Israelite families who whose income depends exclusively on agriculture. They are not grouped in one place but live in different villages, among other peasants. Iuliu Barasch ironically and excessively critic about his own people made the remark that the richest Jewish of Cernăuţi lived on the mountain side and had beautiful houses in the main street. Barasch also mentions the good deed of a Christian who taught six Jewish orphans lessons of architecture. Cernăuţi has rapidly become a specifically central- European city because of the cosmopolite population and architectural style similar to many cities across the Habsburg Empire The University was a multicultural one, having a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional profile and had students that came also from the outside of Bukovina; things changed after In Cernăuţi there were formed many associations, victor ebner switzerland anti aging, national and artistic, musical and sports societies. The Romanian student societies in Cernăuţi were the most appreciated and had a large influence on the other students and the other Romanians. The student societies had different formal wear, national colours; they each had their own anthem and obeyed a code. There were no serious conflicts among members of these societies and the University of Cernăuţi became a German Heidelberg in Great Romania after The elite of the Jewish in Bukovina, victor ebner switzerland anti aging in Galicia, formed and grown in Cernăuţi established its cultural model both in Yiddish and German, getting its education in public or private schools in Cernăuţi. Vienna was in those days — as Siegfried Jägendorf mentions — a genuine Jerusalem.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. – Declaration of Independence, 1776 We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. – Preamble, U.S. Constitution, 1787 The founders of the United States of America embarked on an audacious experiment. Could a diverse people given individual freedom and political sovereignty work together to build a unified nation that promotes freedom and advances equality, justice, and the common good? Aware of the fallibility of human nature, many of the founders had serious doubts. They knew that freedom and self-interest would always exist in tension with the ideals of justice and the common good. Nevertheless, they had the faith and courage to persist with the experiment. Their hopes for creating a free, self-governing society rested on the possibility of establishing an innovative constitution with checks and balances that recognizes certain inalienable human rights. They also believed that if the American experiment was to succeed, it would require a moral and spiritual foundation. Essential to the flourishing of a free society, they argued, are shared moral and political ideals leading to a way of life that involves a strong sense of national solidarity, social responsibility, and engaged citizenship. Even though the founders lived in a very different world from ours, their thinking in this regard is one key to rectifying the deficits in our democratic practice in the twenty-first century. In recent decades, the United States has become a deeply divided and fragmented nation unable to address pressing social, economic, environmental, political, and international challenges. There is an urgent need to reawaken a shared faith in unifying democratic ideals and values that can provide the nation’s people, in all of their cultural diversity, with an inspiring sense of a national identity and common destiny. From the beginning, what has defined the American people as Americans has been their shared moral and political ideals, which is not to deny the history of repeated attempts by some Americans to marginalize others on the basis of race, religion or ethnic origin. A revitalized democratic faith can help to focus the nation on the task of advancing social and economic justice and creating and implementing a compelling, inclusive vision of the common good. This essay explores the ideals and values that formed the early moral and spiritual foundations of the nation and offers reflections on pathways to a renewal of American democracy. Historians, sociologists, and philosophers have adopted different ways of describing America’s moral and spiritual foundations. They refer, for example, to the American creed, a creedal national identity, the American Covenant, American civil religion, Americanism, the democratic faith, moral democracy, spiritual democracy, and a public moral philosophy. Walt Whitman, John Dewey, and Jane Addams get to the heart of the matter when they conceive of democracy as first and foremost a great moral ideal. It is with this understanding that this essay identifies the nation’s deepest foundations with a faith in shared ideals and a personal way of life along the lines envisioned in Dewey’s A Common Faith.1 Faith in an integrated vision of ideals and values involves wholehearted commitment to a way of being and relating to the world. When the American democratic faith possesses a person’s mind and heart, it can become a relational spirituality that integrates spiritual life and everyday life. I. The Ideal and the Real In the midst of significant ethnic and religious diversity there emerged with the American Revolution of 1776 and the subsequent founding of the republic a set of shared moral and political ideals, which were set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution. Among the ideals affirmed in these documents by “We the people” are freedom, equality, individual rights, the pursuit of happiness, the sovereignty of the people, the rule of law, justice, the common good, peace, unity in the midst of diversity, and intergenerational responsibility. James Madison, credited with being the principal drafter of the Constitution, explained that “the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued.”2 The Constitution is a secular document that makes no reference to God, prohibits the establishment of religion by the government, and proclaims freedom of religion as a basic right. The Declaration of Independence, however, does affirm the widely held eighteenth century faith in God as the Creator who has endowed “all men” with equal dignity and inalienable rights. America’s founding ideals were set forth as self-evident truths and universal values that all can know and understand through rational reflection and an awakened conscience. For many they were sacred truths that promised liberation from the oppression, conflicts, and burdens of life in the Old World. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, his widely debated tract in support of revolution. America was the New World. Further, in the spirit of the eighteenth century Enlightenment movement, many of the founders adopted a cosmopolitan worldview and, like George Washington, saw no conflict between being a patriotic American and identifying as “a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large.”3 There have, however, always been contradictions between America’s aspirational founding vision and the reality that is American society. Moreover, there were complex problems with what the founders succeeded in accomplishing, revealing ways in which the colonists had not left behind the attitudes and practices of the Old World. Women were not understood to possess the rights of men. It would take 150 years of protest by women for the nation to adopt the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted them the right to vote. The 1787 Constitution does not recognize the rights of Native Americans for whom the European settlement of North America was a catastrophe. They were driven from their lands, forced onto reservations, and in the process suffered the destruction of their cultures and the denial of their livelihood with devastating long term consequences. It was not until 1924 that Native Americans were granted the right to vote. The Constitution allowed the continuation of slavery, and Congress was prohibited from outlawing the slave trade for twenty years. The first African slaves arrived on the shores of North America in 1619, and by the time the Constitution was ratified by the thirteen states in 1791 there were over 700,000 enslaved persons in the new nation. During the second half of the eighteenth century the debate over slavery became intense. Founders like Benjamin Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and many citizens of the new republic viewed slavery as an atrocity that should be abolished. The Constitution did permit the states to outlaw slavery, and it was outlawed in the New England states by 1791.4 Leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned plantations and were slaveholders, could not escape having to face the fact that slavery presented a terrible moral dilemma, and they feared that the nation would suffer grave consequences if it were not ended. Washington did grant his slaves their freedom in his will. However, he and Jefferson knew that if faced with abolition, some of the southern states, whose agricultural economies were built on slavery, would refuse to join the Union. The nation was created deeply divided over slavery, leading tragically within a relatively short time to the Civil War (1861-1865) that took the lives of over 600,000 men and left much of the country in ruins. Only then did Congress adopt the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution abolishing slavery, granting African-American citizens “the equal protection of the laws,” and granting African-American men the right to vote. It was in many ways a second founding of the nation. However, confronted during the Jim Crow era with brutal systems of racial segregation and discrimination, including denial of education, jobs, and the right to vote, the struggle of African-Americans for their freedom and rights was far from over. A hundred years after the Civil War, the civil rights movement would generate massive protests over long denied justice that would force major change, but in the twenty-first century the persistence of discrimination and the need for healing remain critical issues facing the nation. The general principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution remain among the most powerful, transformative social and political ideals ever articulated. However, given the prevalence of ignorance, the strength of narrow self-interest, and the corrupting influence of money and power, advancing freedom, equality, and justice is a never-ending task. Real progress has been and can be achieved, but intolerance and injustice inevitably reappear as human civilization evolves. America has always been a work in progress, and its founding ideals express the unfulfilled promise of American life and function as a force driving social change. Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, spoke for all marginalized groups in the nation when in 1935 he wrote: “Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be…The land it never has been yet – And yet must be…” Each generation faces the challenge of renewing the nation’s faith in its founding moral and political ideals and striving to give fresh expression to what that faith and commitment to the common good means. II. Freedom, Virtue, and the Common Good At the time of the founding of the nation, biblical religion, especially the prophetic call for compassion and social justice, was a major source of moral and spiritual inspiration. The Puritans, who settled New England in the seventeenth century, are sometimes called the first founders, and “Puritanism provided the moral and religious background for fully three quarters of the people who declared their independence in 1776.”5 The Puritans were Protestant Christian reformers bent on purifying the church and transforming society. In seeking to understand themselves and their mission, they drew heavily on biblical narratives and language. America was the new Promised Land. Their destiny was to create a New Israel in America founded on a new Covenant between God and his people. They were especially mindful that in the biblical narrative God’s liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt is followed by revelation of the law and establishment of the Mosaic Covenant at Mt. Sinai. In short, the Puritans like the ancient Hebrews believed that freedom must be harnessed and guided to become a force for the good. The Puritan’s spiritual and moral idealism has had an enduring influence. Most of us want to believe that America is a unique nation with a higher moral purpose. George Washington reflected this idealism when in his Farewell Address he stated: “It will be worthy of a free, enlightened… nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” In addition, from Jonathan Edwards’ call in 1630 to build “a city upon a hill” to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement speeches on the American dream, reformers and political leaders have used biblical ideals and themes to interpret the meaning of American history and to inspire change.6 Prior to the Revolution there was much discussion in the colonies about republicanism as a form of government and way of life that provided an alternative to British monarchical society with its rigid social hierarchy characterized by inequality, dependence, and subordination. A republic is a self-governing society without a king in which the supreme power resides with those recognized as citizens who enjoy a certain measure of freedom and equality and elect their own government leaders.7 Many of the founders were influenced by ancient models of republican government, especially Athens and Rome, as well as by more contemporary experiments with republicanism. It was republican ideals and values, which were embraced by the Enlightenment movement, that gradually undermined support for monarchical society in the colonies leading eventually to revolution.8 The goal of those involved in drafting the Constitution was to establish the United States as a modern republic sustained by both Christian and classical moral values. The founders believed that the republic they were creating would require independent, visionary leaders with exceptional intelligence and moral integrity and citizens with a high level of moral and social responsibility. In this regard, they emphasized the vital importance of virtue as the guide to individual fulfillment and social well-being. In accord with the Socratic tradition, they identified virtue with wisdom, knowledge of the good – the product of practical experience, rational inquiry, and deep experiential insight. In the republican tradition, the defining characteristic of civic virtue is devotion to the common good, and its highest expression is self-sacrifice for the general welfare. For the founders, who aspired to create a new, enlightened moral and social order, a love of virtue and wisdom and a liberal arts education were essential to sound political leadership. The federal and state constitutions manifest a qualified trust that the citizens of the new republic would have the intelligence and moral responsibility to elect good leaders. The founders did fear that self-interest could generate a divisive factionalism and anarchy, leading to new forms of tyranny. To guard against such a development they insisted that certain cultural conditions be established, including access to a basic education and information on public affairs. The state constitutions limited the vote to tax paying, male property holders. In addition, most of the founders agreed with George Washington when in his Farewell Address he asserted: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Washington understood that shared moral values underlie respect and support for the law, and he believed that religion and the love and fear of God are necessary to sustaining a commitment to “the national morality.” He considered “wisdom and virtue” to be “the great pillars of human happiness” and “the foundation of the fabric… of free government.”9 The founders were realists about human nature. They were well aware of the Christian doctrine of the universality of sin and of the warnings in classical philosophy regarding the corrupting power of the passions. For this reason they crafted a constitution that divided sovereignty between the federal government and the thirteen states, constructed a federal government with a separation of powers and checks and balances, and protected freedom of speech and the press. It was an innovative system of government carefully designed to prevent the centralization of power in the hands of any individual leader or group. Defending the Constitution, Washington declared: “A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.”10 The founders’ republican philosophy also emphasized the interrelation between the realization of freedom, the nurturing of virtue, and citizen engagement in the process of self-government. Republicanism regards humans as social and political beings who find themselves and thrive in and through their relationships and as members of self-governing communities. People may be born with an inalienable right to liberty, but they also need each other and are interdependent. In this tradition, autonomy is a prized value, but there is understood to be no inherent contradiction between freedom and respect for the law. For the revolutionaries, political independence meant living in a society governed by the rule of law as opposed to the arbitrary will of a tyrannical monarch. Further, personal freedom meant more than the absence of restraint. Someone in the grip of delusion and blind passion was not considered to be free. The defenders of republican values taught that becoming a truly free person requires self-knowledge, self-discipline, and the wisdom and will to pursue what is good and just. In addition, human beings naturally aspire to be part of something greater than their own self-interest, and the founders believed that people realize their full potential as free persons in and through engaged citizenship – working collaboratively with fellow citizens to protect their rights and to advance shared goals. They viewed active participation in self-government and other forms of public service in civil society as the primary way independent citizens acquire a sense of belonging to a community, are educated about public affairs, and develop the virtues and skills needed to deliberate productively and cooperate in advancing the common good.11 Here was a way of shared life that promised to nurture and strengthen a sustaining, spiritual sense of connection, meaning, and purpose. III. Equality and the Democratic Way of Life The result of the Revolution was a far-reaching reconstruction of American society that gave birth to the dream of a new democratic culture. It is the original American dream of what America could be. In this new democratic, moral, and spiritual ethos is found the only sure foundation for the flourishing of the nation’s political democracy. Again and again the nation has strayed from this understanding, and it finds itself anew by rediscovering its foundational moral and spiritual ideals, what Alexis de Toqueville described as those “habits of the heart” that create authentic community. The two most powerful American ideals driving revolutionary change are the principles of freedom and equality. Freedom has been America’s most cherished ideal, “the holy light,” celebrated in the nation’s statues of liberty and in song, sermons, protests, and political rhetoric. However, when reduced to a self-centered individualism, freedom undermines equality, the general welfare, and democracy itself. The ideal of equality is “the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution.”12 Freedom and equality together with the ideals of individual rights, the rule of law, justice, and the common good are the fundamental values at the heart of the spiritual and ethical vision that expresses the true spirit and deeper meaning of American democracy. One major influence shaping the spiritual and moral thinking that would over many centuries eventually lead to the American concept of equality is found in biblical religion. The Book of Genesis proclaims that human beings are created in the image of God, recognizing the immeasurable, intrinsic value and dignity of each and every person. The basic moral teaching of the ancient Hebrew prophets is the imperative to do what is right, good and just and to avoid evil. The most concise, general formulation of what this means is set forth in the Bible’s Golden Rule, which calls on us to treat others with a certain equal moral consideration. God commands the people of Israel: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18) Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount summarizes the principle as follows: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) This very general ethical principle invites us to identify with the other as a person who shares with us a common humanity and who like us seeks happiness and wants to avoid suffering. It encourages an attitude of empathy and sympathy. It is the imperative to treat all persons as an end and never as a means only. The clear implication of the principle is that one should strive to help others and avoid harming them. In the West, the Golden Rule was promoted by the Christian and Jewish traditions, but it is a universal ethical principle that finds expression in many different religions and cultures around the world. Further, it is a very general ethical principle that tells us what to think about when we are trying to decide what to do, but it does not tell us exactly what to do in any specific situation. The implications of the principle are interpreted differently by diverse cultures and generations. As the ethical consciousness of a people expands and becomes more tolerant and inclusive, their understanding of these implications can change dramatically as is happening with contemporary efforts to end discrimination of all kinds. In the new republic, equality meant rejection of the notion that one’s worth and social standing as a person are determined by birth and class. “Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else. That was equality as no other nation has ever quite had it,” asserts the American historian, Gordon Wood.13 The core notion in the American ideal of equality is the moral principle that all people in the midst of their diversity share a common humanity and are born equal in dignity and all, therefore, are worthy of respect and moral consideration. Right relationship begins with recognition of the inherent and equal dignity of other persons as human beings like oneself. In the eighteenth century, it was, of course, primarily men, and not all men, who were recognized as equal. However, if the American story has a moral meaning, to a large extent it is found in the ongoing, contentious process of working out the full implications of the idea that all human beings are “created equal.” Equality and liberty are interrelated ideals. The principle of equality meant to the revolutionaries that all white male citizens should be free in the sense of independent and autonomous, able to think and decide for themselves. Further, inherent in the ideals of equality and freedom is the belief that all should have the opportunity to develop their abilities and pursue their aspirations. Moreover, it was widely understood that with freedom and opportunity goes an obligation to strive to realize one’s potential and to contribute according to one’s talents to the life of the nation. Equality of opportunity meant that all careers, including leadership in government, should be open to any white man with the self-discipline, intelligence, and virtue required. The revolutionaries were not interested in leveling society and eliminating all economic inequality. However, they did believe that a large gap between the rich and the poor is a destabilizing force in a republic, and they strongly opposed the development of an aristocracy in America. It was their expectation that equality of opportunity would create more equitable economic conditions, but they did not foresee the dramatic way in which capitalism would increase economic inequality. Respect for the equal dignity of other persons includes respect for their basic rights. The concept of individual rights had a long history in England stretching from the thirteenth-century Magna Carta to John Locke’s liberal defense of the equality and natural rights of all men in the seventeenth century. Initially the concept of rights and liberties was developed as a way to secure protection for the people from the arbitrary power of monarchs and the abuse of power by governments. However, as the human rights tradition has developed, the vision of humanity’s civil, political, economic, and social rights has also become an essential part of the vision of what constitutes the common good. Human rights clarify the basic conditions necessary for the flourishing of freedom, equality of opportunity, self-government, and full human development. It was the hope of the revolutionaries that the spirit of freedom coupled with cultivation of mutual respect among the American people would open new pathways to authentic community and national unity. The goal was E Pluribus Unum, out of many one. The Enlightenment movement taught that when the inborn moral and spiritual capacities for empathy, sympathy, and love are supported and nurtured, people are naturally drawn to form friendships, cooperate, and build community. As they abandoned the old monarchical social order and looked for new ways to hold the American people together and build “a more perfect Union,” many of the revolutionaries envisioned the spirit of freedom and equality being infused with these natural feelings of sympathy, love, and benevolence, creating the new social ties and bonds needed.14 George Washington expressed this ideal in his “Farewell Address” when he envisioned a nation “bound together by fraternal affection.” Encouraged that the end of the Civil War was in sight and the Union would prevail, Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address endeavored to restore this spirit with his concluding words: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the newly created republic very rapidly underwent a major democratic transformation. In the midst of an enormous release of creative energy, the franchise was steadily expanded. Men from all walks of life with a host of different interests, not just the highly educated and public spirited, were elected to serve at all levels of government. In this regard, historians describe a transition from the republicanism envisioned by the founders to the kind of fractious democratic republic that has existed ever since. It is not, however, the purpose of this essay to explore this history. It remains to consider the contemporary relevance of the founders’ revolutionary ideals and dreams. IV. Radical Individualism and the Fraying Moral Fabric of Society We live in a highly complex industrial-technological society linked with a global civilization that the founders, who traveled on horseback and illuminated their homes with candlelight, could never have imagined. Nevertheless, we can still benefit from their republican social and political philosophy, especially their understanding of freedom and firm belief that a free society requires a foundation of shared moral and political ideals to hold the nation together at all levels. In recent decades, however, the influence of the founder’s republicanism has waned, and, as Michael Sandel, the political philosopher, explains, there is a widespread sense “that from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us.”15 In “A Report to the Nation,” the Council on Civil Society states that “the core challenge” facing America is “the moral renewal of our democratic project.” The Council Report asks: “What are those ways of life that self-government requires? What are those qualities the Constitution presupposes in the American people? They are precisely those qualities that are currently disappearing from our society.”16 As the bonds of community have frayed, the safety and wellbeing of children has declined, increasing numbers of people struggle with loneliness, depression, and drug addiction, suicide rates keep climbing, and the nation’s politics become ever more abrasive. There are many contributing factors to this moral and spiritual crisis, including economic inequality, the internet, and social media. However, the most fundamental underlying cause is the culture of radical individualism that became widespread in the wake of the 1960s.17 Radical individualism involves the notion that the self exists as a separate entity independent of other selves and society. It makes the autonomous self, not the community, the center of the individual’s world. Freedom is defined simply as the absence of restraint and the ability to do whatever one desires. Radical individualism values personal achievement over social relationships. It emphasizes being faithful to one’s own personal values, but it also involves the notion that a person is not bound by any moral obligations or civic duties that the individual has not chosen to embrace. This brand of individualism may lead to a personal spiritual quest, but it also has generated a culture of narcissism and consumerism and a secular moral relativism that considers moral judgments to be just subjective personal preferences. One implication of this outlook is liberal neutrality, the widespread idea that government should be neutral regarding any particular set of moral and spiritual values beyond respect for human rights, tolerance, and fair procedures for resolving conflicts. The weakening of the bonds of community and the social fragmentation created by radical individualism have been further complicated in recent decades by the rise of identity politics, which divides society into an ever-increasing number of minority groups who feel deep resentment over how they have been marginalized and oppressed. Many in these groups have grown disillusioned with having faith in traditional American ideals. On the one hand, identity politics has focused attention on real injustices suffered by women, Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, and LGBT people. On the other hand, identity politics is a force generating new forms of tribalism and fragmenting society. This has contributed to a form of multiculturalism that supports a vision of American society as divided into many competing groups with distinct identities and no common national identity. The most fundamental problem with America’s radical individualism is that it is based on a misguided concept of the self and freedom. It involves what Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk, has called “the illusion of separateness.” Everything that exists is both a unique individual and interconnected with the larger universe. People are born interconnected with families, local communities, spiritual traditions, nations, the larger human family, and the greater community of life on Earth. With these interconnections go ethical responsibilities without which human life and development are not possible. Moreover, the individual finds meaning and purpose and realizes true freedom through a sense of belonging, self-mastery, honesty, humility, trustworthiness, courage, caring, compassion, and service. It is love that makes us whole. Centuries ago Rabbi Hillel said it simply: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” V. Renewing and Reconstructing the Democratic Way of life The ideal of building a cohesive, pluralistic society guided by reason and experience and inspired by a love of freedom coupled with a compassionate spirit of respect for the equal dignity of all persons is the meaning of spiritual democracy.18 A commitment to human rights, justice, and the common good flows from respect for the freedom and equality of the other. In the world’s great spiritual traditions, spiritual development is centrally concerned with nurturing a sense of meaning and purpose and the spirit of understanding, compassion, and love. It is in this regard that one can talk about democracy as a spiritual practice. For many, spiritual democracy is a way of being and living together inspired by a religious faith but for others it springs from an open-hearted ethical humanism. Whatever its source, it is both a demanding and a rewarding spiritual and moral discipline that never forgets there is a tendency toward injustice as well as goodness in all of us. In these troubled times, those seeking the soul of America, the animating spirit of the nation, will find it here. Paula Winkler, who promoted the role of women in Judaism, in a letter to her soulmate and future husband, Martin Buber, sharpens the focus on the spiritual dimension of respect for the dignity of the other that is at the heart of the democratic faith and spiritual democracy. She writes: “Our attitude toward each other ought above all to be person to person – not ‘Frenchman to German,’ not ‘Jew to Christian,’ and perhaps less of ‘man to woman.’”19 Had Winkler been writing in America today, she might have added “black to white, Democrat to Republican, and established citizen to immigrant.” One ideally encounters the other first and foremost simply as a fellow human being. As Paula Winkler makes clear in her letter, embracing this attitude should not be confused with an attempt to deny the importance of difference and to blur the distinctions between cultures and religions. It is, however, a corrective to a one-sided emphasis on difference that generates separatism and fails to perceive what can bring people together in the midst of their diversity. It involves what Howard Thurman, the black spiritual leader and philosopher, describes as listening for “the sound of the genuine” in the other. It awakens compassion. It makes possible dialogue, forgiveness, and cooperation. The nation’s many social problems in the twenty-first century involving sexism, sexual abuse, racial discrimination, interreligious hatred, oppression of minorities, and economic inequality, as well as the contempt and hatred that pollute the nation’s politics, are rooted in a failure to respect the inherent dignity of the other. In concluding it is important to ask: from the perspective of the twenty-first century, what fundamental ideals and values are missing in our federal and state constitutions? The science of ecology has made clear that human beings are an interdependent part of the greater community of life on Earth and that the degradation of the planet’s environment by human activity threatens to undermine the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for present and future generations. The Preamble to the Constitution does recognize that the American people have a basic responsibility to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In this regard, it should be made explicit in the nation’s legal systems that future as well as present generations have a right to a clean and healthy environment. Were there to be a constitutional amendment on the environment, it should include a declaration affirming the interdependence of humanity and nature and the ethical imperative to respect and care for the greater community of life in all its diversity. The Earth Charter, a people’s treaty that is the product of a world wide, cross-cultural dialogue on shared values and the common good, provides a very good example of how democratic and ecological ideals can be integrated in a comprehensive ethical vision for building a better world.20 The moral and spiritual transformation necessary for the renewal of our democracy will have to come from the bottom up beginning with families, educational institutions, religious organizations, local communities, and voluntary civic associations. Only pressure from the people will force the national political parties to find ways to work together intelligently and responsibly for the public welfare. A transformation at the local level in how people interact, deliberate, and build community is what is needed. It is the direct experience of a better way of life that will change people’s thinking, attitudes, and behavior. Such change can help to promote a national dialogue about the spiritual and moral values essential to the flourishing of a free society in an age of economic globalization and the internet. Hopefully it might lead to what Michael Sandel calls “a new politics of the common good” that generates “moral and spiritual aspiration,” healing and reconciliation, and a compelling vision of America’s national purpose.21 John Dewey argued that the most effective way to promote social reconstruction is to start with a transformation of the schools, and one promising development is the growing support for PreK-12 school reform movements that promote education of the whole child. These initiatives include social and emotional learning, character education, education in compassion, training in mindfulness, and citizenship education. In addition, guided by new scientific research demonstrating the close correlation between the wellbeing of young people and their spiritual and moral development, a National Council on Spirituality in Education has been formed with strong support from educators.22 There are many schools that are already committed to education for the whole child and that promote the spiritual, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of development as well as social, emotional and academic learning. Some have a religious affiliation and some are secular. What is especially critical in this regard is the school culture. Renewing American democracy will require taking the spirit of holistic education and spiritual democracy into all the nation’s schools. How the founding of the nation and American history are taught is an especially critical issue if the American people are to recover a sense of shared national identity. Given the influence of identity politics, some want to tell the American story primarily from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, emphasizing the grave injustices that have occurred and the moral failures of the nation’s dominant white, male leadership. While the truth in this story needs to be honestly addressed, insofar as the objective of such a narrative is to condemn America and discredit her institutions, it contains no real answer to the problems that face oppressed groups, the nation, and the world. The alternative is to highlight what is truly enlightened, innovative, and good in the revolutionary founding of the nation and its history without denying the moral failures and injustice that are tragically very much a part of the story. If there is to be progressive change, hope is essential. The nation’s founding ideals and the struggle to realize those ideals by women and men of courage and good will from all races, ethnic groups, and religions should be viewed as one major source of hope that can inspire oncoming generations. In his inaugural address as president, John F. Kennedy invoked the spirit of the civic republicanism of the founders when he stated: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” One way to awaken a new sense of national identity, solidarity, and commitment to the common good among the American people is to require of all citizens, women and men, one or two years of national service after high school or college. The requirement could be fulfilled by serving in the military, teaching in the public schools, or through any number of other socially beneficial domestic or international projects. In conclusion, if the American people are to come together to address the great social, economic, and environmental challenges they face in the twenty-first century, it will require deepening our understanding of how to live meaningfully, responsibly, and joyfully with freedom. In this regard, the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Revolution presents a unique opportunity to rediscover the common sense in the founders’ republicanism and to commit ourselves to a fresh vision of the democratic faith infused with reverence for the mystery of being, a passion for what is right and just, and a new respect for Earth, our shared home in the universe. 1 Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 9 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 1-58. See also John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” in LW 14:224-230. 2 Federalist Paper 45. Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart; Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1985), 252-256. 3 As quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), 221. 4 Jill Lepore, These Truths; A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), 36-38, 123-128. 5 Sidney Alstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 124. 6 Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion From the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), viii-ix, 14-23, 37-44, 88-92, 116-131, 148-157. 7 James Madison, Federalist Paper 39. 8 Wood, Radicalism, 95-109. 9 George Washington Farewell Address. 10 Ibid.; James Madison, Federalist Paper 47. 11 Gorski, American Covenant, 23-26, 62,82, 223-225; Wood, Radicalism, 104. 12 Wood, Radicalism, 232 13 Ibid., 234. 14 Ibid., 229-240. 15 Democracy and its Discontents; America in Search of A Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3. 16 See “A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths” issued by the Council on Civil Society, a joint project of the Institute for American Values and the University of Chicago Divinity School. The Council’s report was issued in 1998, but the moral decline it describes has only worsened and its recommendations remain as relevant as when first released. 17 For an illuminating account of the origins and nature of radical individualism in America and the spiritual challenge it presents, see Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart. See also David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (New York: Random House, 2019), 3-11; Gorski, American Covenant, 28-30. 18 I was first introduced to the concept of “spiritual democracy” by Maurice Wohlgelernter’s Introduction to M. Wohlgelernter, ed., History, Religion, and Spiritual Democracy: Essays in Honor of Joseph L. Blau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), lxv-lxxiv. 19 Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber; A Life of Faith and Doubt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 13. 20 The Earth Charter has been endorsed by over 750 organizations in the United States and over seven thousand organizations worldwide. See www.earthcharter.org. 21 Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009), 261-269. 22 For information on the Collaborative for Spirituality in Education and the National Council, see www.spiritualityineducation.org. Originally printed on September 19, 2019. Republished with permission of the author.

While they’ll be showing me how to kick a ball, I’ll be teaching them on what is required to be a professional athlete. She also briefly hosted Animal Emergency for Channel Nine in 2008, and acted as the New South Wales Premier in the telemovie Scorched for Channel Nine in 2008. . '7. © 2017 Exclusive Insight All rights reserved, Gary Ablett reveals his AFL Pre-Game Routine, AFL stars pay tribute to Ablett ahead of 350. She is not the two-time Gold Logie award-winning actress, although she is asked frequently. All I wanted to do at that age was play just like my favourite footy player Shaun Rehn from the Adelaide Crows (the most random player I know!). The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Georgie Parker is an Australian olympian, who played field hockey player for the Hockeyroos. The image resurfaced this week following a similar incident involving the Richmond Tigers. It’s a huge challenge, and while I have so much to learn about my new environment, I’m also looking forward to playing a mentoring role inside the four walls at Collingwood. But I guess when it comes down to it, I didn’t really want to. Understandably, those in the rooms quickly assumed hockey would be the obvious answer. Jayden Short can be seen groping Mabior Chol's crotch (pictured) as the player's celebrate victory over the Western bulldogs last Wednesday. Especially since the young girl in me has always longed to be a footy player. Mark my words, this is not a publicity stunt or a novelty. By Alana Mazzoni For Daily Mail Australia, Published: 01:15 EDT, 12 August 2020 | Updated: 03:53 EDT, 12 August 2020. Parker has played over 100 international games for the Hockeyroos, including playing at the Commonwealth Games, Summer Olympics and World Cup. But it wouldn’t have been a hard decision at all – I just loved footy that much. Parker played club hockey in the Riverland as a junior and later in Adelaide for the Adelaide Hockey Club. It’s not just what you put out on the training track, it’s about all those one-percenters that define your success and longevity. 'Come touch my butt again plz Georgie Parker,' Slattery wrote on Instagram. I remember five years during an open media session with the Hockeyroos, being asked by a reporter what my favourite sport was as a kid. 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At age 28 now, it’s nice to now get that opportunity to live our my childhood dream with Collingwood in the AFLW League. Plus, in five years, it would have been a lot harder as the depth of talent will be greater because those teenage girls who are getting a footy in their hands now will be draft eligible, so it was now or never. '4. Georgie Parker (born 26 April 1994) is an Australian rules footballer and former field hockey player for the Hockeyroos. She was the only goalscorer in the grand final winning 1–0 against the NSW Arrows.. If it was a publicity stunt, I wouldn’t care as much, but I can’t wait to give the AFLW a red hot crack. An image can often looks 'worse' than an actual incident, worth keeping in mind. The 31-year-old shared a comment from Slattery, who said she consented to the cheeky gesture. Women's hockey-turned-AFL star Georgie Parker has defended squeezing her teammate Kathryn Slattery's bum after copping backlash over the joke. Footage of the first occasion of the Richmond incident shows the team standing in a circle singing their victory song after their win over the Brisbane Lions last Tuesday. We had players who hated being touched so would never do this to them – respect always,' she said. 9.2K likes. Following another big win against the Western bulldogs last Wednesday, an almost identical scene also played out. , Parker was a member of the Australia women's national field hockey team that were defeated by the Netherlands women's national field hockey team in the final of the 2014 Women's Hockey World Cup, a gold medal winner at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and member of the team that went to the 2016 Summer Olympics.. Georgie Parker recovering from her hip replacement surgery. You have to be able to give and take feedback, get over injuries and even be doing everything you can in regards to recovery and injury prevention. 3. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure I am playing well by the time the 2018 Season rolls around. Honestly.'. I was just obsessed with the Crows, and loved them so much. My entire life it has been my passion – I remember being a little girl and dragging my parents to the footy clinics at the school. Play it now. , On 4 June 2018, Parker was elevated to Collingwood's senior list ahead of the 2019 season. Georgie Parker (born 26 April 1994) is an Australian rules footballer and former field hockey player for the Hockeyroos.. Parker was a member of the Australia women's national field hockey team that were defeated by the Netherlands women's national field hockey team in the final of the 2014 Women's Hockey World Cup, a gold medal winner at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and member of the team … The former Hockeyroos and AFLW player was seen tapping the backside of Slattery during the national anthem before a game in 2017, Parker told the ABC the bum grab was nothing more than a harmless pre-game joke. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad hockey found me, as I have enjoyed tremendous success as a professional athlete, and will be forever grateful for what hockey has given to me. Parker told the ABC the bum grab was nothing more than a harmless pre-game joke. '5. Peter FitzSimons... Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. Chol appears increasingly angered by the actions of Vlastuin's and turns to face him. 2. I wanted a new challenge, and when the opportunity to join Collingwood arose, I didn’t want to let it slip by. Georgie Parker. She had no prior experience playing Australian football, but Collingwood viewed her as a potential midfield and forward line option. Parker also pointed out a number of differences to Tigers stars Nick Vlastuin and Jayden Short groping teammate Mabior Chol on his crotch and backside. AFLW || Olympian || Actress (some think so anyway) Twitter: @georgieparker Insta: @georgie_parker19 Enquires via DM or [email protected] Picture source: The Morning Show/Channel 7. Georgie Parker starred in the drama Emerald Falls, which aired on Network Ten. In May 2017, Parker signed with Collingwood as a rookie for the 2018 AFL Women's season, fielding an offer from Adelaide too. The video shows Tigers' defenders Nick Vlaustin and Jayden Short groping South Sudanese-born forward on two separate occasions. But this time Jayden Short is the one seen grabbing the African-born AFL star. Is this really what we are going to crack it over at the moment? In 2011, Parker was a member of the Australian Hockey League team the SA Suns (formerly Southern Suns) that won the national championship in Darwin. '6. '1. I also remember being the only little girl at the footy clinics. Parker lives in Perth, Western Australia, as part of the national training program, having grown up in South Australia. Barcelona Vs Real Madrid 2011/12, Thomas Doherty Height, Saker Falcon, Little Miss Books Collection, The Tales Of Beedle The Bard Stories, Big Green Egg Minimax, Neptune's Daughter Game, Jordan Rodrigues Height, Ukraine International Airlines Check-in, Learning Tree Publishing,

Drexel University received LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for the Constantine N. Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building, according to a Sept. 20 University press release. PISB is the first building on Drexel’s campus to achieve LEED certification, a prestigious environmental award. The 150,000-square-foot structure is located at 33rd and Chestnut streets and [...] Tag Archives | biowall - Crew team victorious at Dad Vail Regatta May 17, 2013 - Jewish Center will be first of its kind May 17, 2013 - Fry updates faculty on strategic plan May 17, 2013 - Drexel students co-op in Italy with Parma Panthers May 17, 2013 - Classic Steinbeck comes to life in Drexel Players’ ‘Grapes of Wrath’ May 17, 2013 - How to save the USPS February 1, 2013 - University responds to tuition dispute January 13, 2012 - QE3 on horizon for US economy August 17, 2012 - Law school delays plans for new building April 29, 2011 - Occupy Wall Street dying down April 6, 2012 - shy: very nicely written article - Stanley B ... - Jenny Burton: The black box theater is a very intimate space. ... - thechristianlawstudent: Excellent post. I also find it hard to have a &quo... - Lawyer In Atlanta: Chelsea played very well last year UEFA Championsh... - perth electrical: Thanks for helpful suggestion. My PS3 is one of my... advice album review basketball beer beer review CAA CAA Tournament concert Crew Dragon Doodles dragons Drexel Drexel University fashion featured features Field Hockey food fun Golf hip hop Lacrosse lax men's basketball Men's Lacrosse music Obama Philadelphia restaurant review Review soccer softball Squash Tennis top stories towson towson university University of Delaware Westphal What's Happening in Philly whip Women's Basketball Women's Lacrosse Women's Soccer Wrestling

As Al Jazeera's 24-hour station takes to the air in English and with other new Arab English-language media initiatives such as the Ramallah-based Palestine Times fresh off the press, Israel has begun effectively using a new weapon in its public diplomacy arsenal to fight the media war on the Web - a locally-developed computer software tool called the "Internet Megaphone." The Foreign Ministry itself is now pushing the idea, urging supporters of Israel everywhere to become cyberspace soldiers "in the new battleground for Israel's image." The Megaphone, which was first reported on in The Jerusalem Post when it made its debut in July during the Lebanon war, alerts activists about polls and articles about Israel on the Internet and enables them to express their support or opposition by e-mail. After just four months, it has been downloaded by more than 25,000 people from the Web site called GIYUS (Mobilization) which stands for Give Israel Your Support. Amir Gissin, who heads the Public Affairs Department at the Foreign Ministry, has been working behind the scenes to promote the idea. "During the war an initiative began, and we had the opportunity to do some very nice things with the Megaphone community," Gissin recently told the David Bar-Illan media conference in Ariel. "An Israeli company developed a type of software that functions like a beeper from one central place. They send alerts and anyone who downloads the software gets a pop-up with links to an activity. It can be to vote for Israel in a CNN survey or react to an especially nasty article. We still have a long way to go, but this is our future." Among the accomplishments of the Megaphone community during the war, Gissin said, was its role in obtaining an admission from the Reuters news agency that a photograph of damage done to Beirut in an Israeli air strike had been doctored by a Lebanese photographer. The extra smoke in the picture was first noticed by American blogger Charles Johnson who then alerted others, and later won an award for promoting Israel's case. Stewart Purvis, a journalism professor at London's City University who also attended the Bar-Illan conference, wrote in The Guardian last week that following Gissin's speech, he decided to check out the power of the Megaphone by logging onto the Giyus "It did not take long for an alert to come through," he said. "A Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, had issued a press statement condemning that day's Palestinian rocket attack which killed an elderly Israeli and wounded other civilians. GIYUS wanted site users to 'show your appreciation of the UK's response.'" One click took him to a prepared e-mail addressed to Howells and a slot to send a personal comment, Purvis said. He went ahead and did, later confirming with the Foreign Office in London that it had received the e-mails. "In the e-mails, there would be no indication of the involvement of GIYUS, although Howells may have been suspicious that so many people around the world had read the same Yahoo story about him and decided to e-mail him," Purvis concluded. He also noted that GIYUS supporters had claimed success in "balancing" an opinion poll on a pro-Arab Web Site by turning a vote condemning Israel's war in Lebanon into an endorsement. When GIYUS noticed a poll on albawaba asking whether the violence in Lebanon had been an Israeli provocation, it sent a message with a link to the poll to its members and soon the results jumped from an overwhelming yes to a resounding no. The Megaphone was introduced by the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) during this summer's war with the aim of getting the pro-Israel community to respond in real time to developments on the Web. To attract users from around the world, Giyus.org translates polls into English, French, Hebrew and Spanish. Yonit Farago in The Times reported that "Israel's government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. "The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track Web sites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages." WUJS's Jonny Cline said that Jewish students and youth were ideally placed to present Israel's side of the Middle East story. "We're saying to these people that if Israel is being bashed, don't ignore it, change it," Cline said. "A poll like CNN's takes just a few seconds to vote in, but if thousands take part the outcome will be changed. What's vital is that the international face of the conflict is balanced." Gissin has gone as far as sending a letter (posted on the Israel advocacy Web site, www.standwithus.com) that urges supporters of Israel to use the Megaphone. "Dear friends," he writes, "Many of us recognize the importance of the Internet as the new battleground for Israel's image. It's time to do it better, and coordinate our on-line efforts on behalf of Israel. "Please go to www.Giyus.org, download the Megaphone, and you will receive daily updates with instant links to important Internet polls, problematic articles that require a talkback, etc. "We need 100,000 Megaphone users to make a difference. So, please distribute this mail to all Israel's supporters. "Do it now. For Israel."

I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with every—or any—opinion in the posted article. Help your friends and relatives stay informed by passing the digest on. If you log on to the Old Jarhead blog and get this notice, please check back. From time to time, Google’s Spam Filter pulls my blog. They restore it when I appeal, but they don’t seem to have the technical ability to fix the problem. I hate to move to another platform with page views running to 10k a week and over 1,150 followers here. Free PDF Copy of The Coming Collapse of the . American Republic Must Read: Lethally Leisured by Mark Steyn Excerpt: In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, " Europe." The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent's elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West's last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it. " Europe" has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the Brazil defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn't enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks' vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality. Defense welfare does the same at a geopolitical level. In absolving the Continent of responsibility for its own defense, the U.S. United States not only enabled Europe to beat its swords into Ponzi shares but, in a subtle and profound way, helped enervate the survival instincts of some of the oldest nation-states on the planet Notorious Iranian militant has a connection to alleged assassination plot against Saudi envoy Excerpt: When nearly $100,000 landed in an undercover FBI bank account from a source linked to an Iranian paramilitary force, officials began taking seriously an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador that at first had seemed outlandish. And as the investigation unfolded over recent months, a name emerged that chilled some in the government. The Iranian cousin of the man accused of plotting the assassination was Abdul Reza Shahlai, a senior commander in U.S. Iran’s Quds Force, who had been linked to the killing of American troops in . (Apparently he wasn’t impressed with Obama’s outreach and use of “soft power.” ~Bob.) Iraq Rick Perry takes military-style tack to protect border from Mexican cartels Texas Excerpt: A little before dawn on a sticky summer night in June, one of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s Ranger Reconnaissance Teams was running a clandestine operation along the Rio Grande when its surveillance squad came across a Dodge Durango pickup truck loaded with bales of Mexican marijuana. The lawmen chased the truck along the river, with a Texas Department of Public Safety helicopter swooping overhead and Texas game wardens roaring down the in boats, state authorities said. In minutes, the traffickers had ditched the truck in the muddy water and were rafting the dope back to Mexico. Then the shooting started. Alone among his Republican rivals running for president, the Rio Grande governor has a small army at his disposal. Over the past three years, he has deployed it along his southern flank in a secretive, military-style campaign that his supporters deem absolutely necessary and successful and that his critics call an overzealous, expensive and mostly ineffective political stunt. Texas Fiscal Illusion and Fiscal Obfuscation: Tax Perception in Excerpt: Fiscal illusion is a term that is applied when the public largely misunderstands key tax and spending parameters, which distort their financial and governmental beliefs. Looking specifically to Sweden, Bjorn Wallace and Tino Sanandaji, Ph.D. students at the Stockholm School of Economics and the , respectively, examine fiscal illusion in that country. University of Chicago is an ideal country in which to conduct such a study because its government collects a greater share of national income in taxes than in any other country. Therefore, it seems logical that the Swedish government would be highly incentivized to encourage illusion, as this would help to muddle the actual amount of personal income that is paid to the government. When questioned about the portion of the average Swede's personal income that is paid in taxes, the average response was 40 percent and the median 35 percent -- far off from the correct rate of 63 percent. Though most respondents correctly identified the amount of the employer portion of the payroll tax, most misunderstood the burden of the tax, with only 24 percent stating correctly that it was on employees while 56 percent stated it was on employers. In 2003, taxes comprised 55 percent of Sweden 's national income. The strong concentration (roughly half the respondents) of responses pointing to a tax burden of around 30 to 39 percent suggests that many respondents were thinking only of the direct income taxes. This suggests that respondents failed to understand the true level of taxes because of the number of revenue sources and the fact that some are partially hidden. One of the hidden sources of revenue is the employer portion of the payroll tax. While most respondents knew the level of the tax, they failed to realize that empirically, the tax is paid by employees; though the company technically pays the bill, the employee receives less compensation and fewer people are able to work. Sweden Families Don't Depend on the Minimum Wage Excerpt: The minimum wage is likely to be a hot-button issue in the 2012 presidential campaign. Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, but it is as high as $8.67 in state, says the Wall Street Journal. Everyone favors the rising real wages and living standards that come with productivity advances and economic growth, but advocates of a higher minimum wage put the cart before the horse. A growing economy generates good jobs; higher wages don't grow the economy. And the overwhelming evidence is that higher minimum wages reduce the availability of jobs at the lowest end of the job market. A study from the Employment Policies Institute concluded that very few families depend on the earnings from a single minimum wage job for their economic support. The study also found that one out of four adults held a minimum wage job at least once during the years from 1998-2006. In addition, most adults who worked at the minimum wage did so for a relatively short time: Over 70 percent of them had no further minimum wage job after two years. The survey data reveal that in two-parent families, nine out of 10 married-with-children minimum-wage workers have a working spouse. Even more revealing is how much income that spouse earns: 40 percent of those spouses earn more than $40,000 a year. Another 27 percent report spousal earnings of $20,000 to $40,000. None of these households is in poverty. Nor is their economic wellbeing dependent on the minimum wage. In only 15 percent of these households are the earnings of both the minimum-wage worker and the spouse less than $10,000 apiece. The long-term survey data are clear: Family dependence on minimum wages is the exception rather than the rule. In most cases, minimum wage earnings of adult workers are a small fraction of family income. Hiking the minimum wage as a way to achieve "poverty-level" incomes is both misguided and inefficient. Washington D.C. Drove Up Your Student Debt Excerpt: One of the major complaints of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, many of whom have taken on significant student debt, is that the cost of college is too darn high. And they're right, but not because of greedy corporate fat cats. No, the real guilty party here is federal politicians, who for decades have been fueling high profits — and prices — at both for-profit and nonprofit schools. Wait. Big profits at nonprofit colleges? Yes, money has been piling up even at schools you thought had no interest in profit. And , is the biggest hand feeding the beast. Thanks to recent congressional hearings and battling over new regulations for for-profit schools, most people — including many college-aged, profit-disdaining Wall Street squatters — are probably at least vaguely aware that for-profit colleges are making good money. [T]he feds have been blasting helium into the college-cost bubble, enabling profits to balloon at the expense of students and taxpayers. But not just openly profit-seeking schools are making big bucks. If we define profit simply as revenue derived from providing a service exceeding costs, putatively nonprofit colleges actually have much higher margins than for-profit schools. How do we know that? It's tough, because nonprofit schools typically report all their profits as expenses. Basically, they take excess revenues coming from undergraduate education and distribute them throughout the college in subsidies for research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess compensation or featherbedding. In other words, rather than rewarding investors, colleges pay themselves. Washington, D.C. ’s Worst Wind-Energy Project: Wind-energy proponents admit they need lots of spin to overwhelm the truly informed. America Excerpt: The more people know about the wind-energy business, the less they like it. And when it comes to lousy wind deals, General Electric’s Shepherds Flat project in northern is a real stinker. I’ll come back to the GE project momentarily. Before getting to that, please ponder that first sentence. It sounds like a claim made by an anti-renewable-energy campaigner. It’s not. Instead, that rather astounding admission was made by a communications strategist during a March 23 webinar sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy called “Speaking Out on Renewable Energy: Communications Strategies for the Renewable Energy Industry.” During the webinar, Justin Rolfe-Redding, a doctoral student from the Center for Climate Change Communication at Oregon , discussed ways for wind-energy proponents to get their message out to the public. Rolfe-Redding said that polling data showed that “after reading arguments for and against wind, wind lost support.” He went on to say that concerns about wind energy’s cost and its effect on property values “crowded out climate change” among those surveyed. The most astounding thing to come out of Rolfe-Redding’s mouth — and yes, I heard him say it myself — was this: “The things people are educated about are a real deficit for us.” After the briefings on the pros and cons of wind, said Rolfe-Redding, “enthusiasm decreased for wind. That’s a troubling finding.” The solution to these problems, said Rolfe-Redding, was to “weaken counterarguments” against wind as much as possible. He suggested using “inoculation theory” by telling people that “wind is a clean source, it provides jobs” and adding that “it’s an investment in the future.” He also said that proponents should weaken objections by “saying prices are coming down every day.” It’s remarkable to see how similar the arguments being put forward by wind-energy proponents are to those that the Obama administration is using to justify its support of Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar company that got a $529 million loan guarantee from the federal government. But in some ways, the government support for the Shepherds Flat deal is worse than what happened with Solyndra. The majority of the funding for the $1.9 billion, 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat wind project in George Mason University is coming courtesy of federal taxpayers. And that largesse will provide a windfall for General Electric and its partners on the deal who include Google, Sumitomo, and Caithness Energy. Not only is the Energy Department giving GE and its partners a $1.06 billion loan guarantee, but as soon as GE’s 338 turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will send the project developers a cash grant of $490 million. The deal was so lucrative for the project developers that last October, some of Obama’s top advisers, including energy-policy czar Carol Browner and economic adviser Larry Summers, wrote a memo saying that the project’s backers had “little skin in the game” while the government would be providing “a significant subsidy (65+ percent).” Oregon Excerpt: There is an old British saying — I’ve never been able to find the source of it — “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The idea, of course, is that when a crisis arises, a leader will also arise to show the way out of it. By this faith too the ancient Hebrews lived in the period of the Judges when they followed God — and no one man — as their king. But those of us who feel the upcoming presidential election represents a crossroads of sorts are starting to find this faith in providential leadership somewhat shaken. We’re starting to think that if the man is cometh-ing he better hurry-eth up and geth here already. Because Mitt Romney ain’t the guy. While he may win the Republican presidential nomination by default — and while he may indeed win the presidency due to desperation — it is clear from every word he says that he understands neither the peril nor the needs of the present moment. Even his supporters seem to realize that he’s not really what is called for. Even his own political strategy — don’t mess up, cling to around 23 percent of the primary voters while other candidates rise above briefly and fall below permanently, force the earliest decision possible before someone better comes along and takes the prize away — indicates that Romney himself comprehends he is no one’s idea of the nation’s savior. The professionals and money guys in the Republican establishment don’t seem to mind that. As always, they feel that they are the old pros who take care of the all-important business of electability while we children in the base worry about such nonsense as principle and the preservation of the republic. It’s these establishment types who have traditionally delivered the truly electable choices like Bob Dole and John McCain while staunchly protecting us from extremists like Ronald Reagan. On Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report this weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s Dorothy Rabinowitz — a cultural commentator I esteem for both her fearlessness and her insight — seemed to give voice to that establishment opinion when she said that “reason is going to have to prevail” among conservatives and that they’ll ultimately have to abandon the likes of Herman Cain and “all of the alternatives that are warming their little hearts, that they’re playing with,” and learn to live with Romney as their guy. Who Knew Conservatives Loved the IRS? by C. Edmund Wright Excerpt: If there's one thing that the ongoing national debate over Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan has exposed, it's how much some conservatives love our current tax code and its enforcement arm. Who knew? Okay, that may be an exaggeration -- but it is not an overstatement to say that much of the criticism of Cain's plan coming from the right is based in a stunning comfort with and knee-jerk reliance on our current system. It's as if there is an undercurrent of belief that our IRS system is very, very good and can be replaced only by perfection. At the very least, much of the negative analysis is based on picking one aspect of the Cain plan and applying it to our current reality as if the 9-9-9 plan was ever designed to be applied piecemeal. This notion can come from only an intellectual vacuum where tax realities do not change human behavior. Whether the 9-9-9 plan is all that Cain (and Art Laffer, Paul Ryan, Steve Forbes, and The Club for Growth) say it is not the point here. The point is that it is hypocritical and shallow and misguided for any conservative to trash it. By our nature, conservatives want less government intrusion into our lives, and we want more liberty, and we believe in economic growth and opportunity and self-determination. We want, as Rick Perry says, for to be "inconsequential in our lives." Washington DC The 9-9-9 Plan: Is The Herman Cain Tax Plan A Good Idea? Excerpt: As he continues to heavily tout his "9-9-9 plan", Herman Cain has seen his popularity soar. But is the Herman Cain tax plan a good idea for ? Without a doubt, the "9-9-9 plan" is simple and it is easy to remember. To most Americans, it sounds like a low tax plan. But is that the truth? As you will see below, Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan will actually raise federal taxes on some middle income Americans to as high as 37 percent. If the other Republican candidates understood this, they would be jumping all over Cain. But instead the best that most of them seem to be able to do is to make jokes about it. For example, Jon Huntsman said that he thought that the 9-9-9 plan "was the price of a pizza when I first heard about it." That is a funny line, but the reality is that the future of our tax system is very serious business. Our economy is dying and our nation is drowning in debt. We need some very real solutions to our very real problems. So let's take a closer look at the 9-9-9 plan that Herman Cain is proposing.... The one great thing about the 9-9-9 plan is that it would completely eliminate the current tax code. That should be the starting point for any proposal for reforming our current system of taxation. Under Herman Cain's plan, all current federal taxes would be eliminated. Social Security taxes would be eliminated, estate taxes would be eliminated and capital gains taxes would be eliminated. All current tax deductions and loopholes would be eliminated as well. … First they would pay the 9 percent personal income tax. Secondly, they would pay 9 percent on all business income. There would not even be a deduction for wages paid out. This would hit some small businesses incredibly hard. In fact, small businesses that have a very tight profit margin could be totally wiped out by this. A lot of people have assumed that the 9 percent tax on businesses is only on corporations. But that simply is not the case. (There is a lot of criticism of Cain out there, and much is substantial, and substantiated. But it all pales next to the below-linked report. If this is true, then Cain is quite likely the WORST candidate of all and will harm small business in a way that Obama only could have dreamed of. --Don Hank) America 1,000 Days Under President Obama Excerpt: Today marks the 1,000th day of Barack Obama's presidency, and unfortunately for America, those days have been marked by deeper deficits, lost jobs, prolonged unemployment, and bigger government. Meanwhile, many of those charged with leading the federal government have all but abdicated their responsibilities. The national debt stands at $14.9 trillion--$4.2 trillion of which has been added since Obama took his oath of office. Fourteen million Americans are unemployed--that's 9.1 percent of the workforce. The unemployment rate has been above nine percent for 840 of the 1000 days, and the average unemployed worker has been without a job for more than 9 months. All told, 2.2 million jobs have been lost under Obama's watch, despite the White House's claims that the President's $787 billion stimulus would create 3.3 million net jobs by 2010. Unfortunately, instead of leading America toward fiscal sanity and a stronger economy, the President is taking the country in the opposite direction. Who’s a “Flip Flopper”? From Morning Jolt by Jim Geraghty Subscribe Here: http://www.nationalreview.com/newsletters/ Excerpt: Really? Governor Romney has to worry about being attacked for inconsistency by a president who attacked Hillary Clinton for supporting the individual mandate, who promised all of the health-care negotiations would be on C-SPAN, who said that anyone making less than $250,000 wouldn't see his taxes raised a dime, who now is a fan of recess appointments, who pledged to close Guantanamo Bay within one year, who pledged to renegotiate NAFTA, who pledged a net spending cut, who said he would press the Chinese on human rights, who said he wouldn't allow lobbyists to work in his White House, who pledged to avoid bringing "the same Washington players" into his administration, who promised to post every law on the White House website for five days before signing it, who pledged to end the income tax for seniors making less than $50,000, who pledged to end no-bid contracts above $25,000, who pledged to double federal funding for cancer research, and who pledged to double the size of the Peace Corps, to double funding for after-school programs, to increase the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour, to support a human mission to the moon by 2020, to establish a term limit for the director of national intelligence, to enact a windfall-profits tax, to create a cap-and-trade system, to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and to introduce a comprehensive immigration-reform plan in his first year. (One long list of expiration dates here, PolitiFact's list of Obama's broken promises can be found here.) To be fair, we know what the core principles of Barack Obama are: blaming corporate-jet owners and ATMS for job losses, shrugging his shoulders at scandals such as Solyndra and Fast and Furious, fundraisers, telling the American people they've gone soft, and golf. Occupy Wall Street's Crony Capitalism: Political extortion created Zuccotti Park, and it allows protesters to remain despite the noise, filth and stink. Excerpt: The Occupy Wall Street movement, now in its fourth week, has plenty to brag about. Its occasionally published newspaper, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, proclaims: "In the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army." How did protesters manage to take over Zuccotti Park, a half-acre plot a few blocks from Wall Street? It turns out that this land grab is not due to the power of social media. Instead, the main force letting protesters stay in the park is old-fashioned crony capitalism. The Occupy Wall Street organizers were clever in selecting their protest site. Zuccotti is not a city park, where sleeping overnight is prohibited. Instead, it is one of some 500 "privately owned public spaces" that New York City officials created as part of zoning deals with real estate developers. In the case of Zuccotti Park, the crony capitalism goes back to the 1970s, when U.S. Steel built the One Liberty Plaza office tower. In exchange for adding nine stories, city officials extracted an agreement that U.S. Steel would fund a 24-hour-a-day park across the street. These quasipublic spaces are notorious for leaving unclear who's responsible for what 17% See War with Iran As Very Likely Within Five Years excerpt: Most voters are aware that the United States has accused Iran of attempting to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia in this county and think there’s a good chance America will be at war with Iran in the near future. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the United States will end up in a war with Iran in the next five years or so. However, only 17% think it’s Very Likely. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 32% feel a war with Iran is unlikely in the next five or so years, but that includes only five percent (5%) who think it is Not At All Likely. 58% Think Repeal of Health Care Law Likely Excerpt: Most voters still want to see the national health care law repealed, and confidence that its days are numbered is at an all-time high. We’re paying the bill Excerpt: Regardless of whether the public buys into “the other 99 percent” argument or not, every single New Yorker is on the hook for the Zuccotti Park protests. At the end of the day, Occupy Wall Street may or may not revolutionize the country’s attitude about wealth. Two facts are certain, however: The mayor is not giving the protests a timeline; and the city’s taxpayers will be left holding the bill. Many of my fellow City Council members have taken steps to show solidarity with the demonstrators. They are all entitled to express their opinion, but the council is not the arbiter of US economic policy, nor should it try to be. The problem we do have to deal with is determining where the money to pay for this protest will come from. Last week, as cops on overtime pay filled the streets around the park, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testified that the prospects are grim for starting a new police academy class in January. Though the city has separate budget lines for overtime and regular pay, it all comes out of the NYPD’s overall allocation, which per the mayor now faces a new 2 percent cut. So, if the protests are to continue, policy-makers and legislators need to begin a serious dialogue over its cost. George Bush warned Congress New York’s Marxist epicenter Excerpt: The standard portrayal of the Wall Street protesters goes something like this: Ragtag group of unemployed young adults, venting often incoherent but overall legitimate populist outrage about economic inequality. But go down to the movement’s headquarters, as I did this past weekend, and you see something far different. It’s not just that knowledge of their “oppressors” -- the evil bankers -- is pretty thin, or that many of them are clearly college kids with nothing better to do than embrace the radical chic of “a cause.” I found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism -- and the need for a socialist revolution. It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system. Don’t try to explain to any of these protesters how those who sought to create a Marxist utopian dream of revolution also gave us the Stalinist purges, Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution and many other efforts to collectivize thought in the name of economic “justice.” One woman was holding a “Nationalize the Federal Reserve” sign; I tried to explain that the Fed is already nationalized, because it’s part of government, and she told me to “go check my f--king facts -- it’s privately owned.” That’s when I was handed a piece paper offering the following wisdom: “The Game of Capitalism Breeds Dishonest Men.” The author of such deep thinking was a dude named De La Vega, an artist convicted a few years back for painting graffiti on a warehouse in The Bronx. That was pretty mild compared to the sentiments offered in the official “Statement of the League for the Revolutionary Party” on the protests. These guys view as the enemy not just Wall Street tycoons, but also liberal labor leaders like Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO. Thousands of fraud cases just 'tip of iceberg' Excerpt: A group that monitors elections in Minnesota and roots out fraudulent votes is warning ballot fraud is on the rise across the nation, and if unchecked, the ultimate consequences would be an electorate that simply doesn't believe the system works and refuses to participate – "a total breakdown in the cohesion of American society." That's from spokesman Dan McGrath of the Minnesota Majority, which advocates for traditional values in state and federal public policy through grassroots activism. The group also contributes to the work of ElectionIntegrityWatch.com to focus specifically on elections and voter fraud. The Obama bus trip: A political guide Excerpt: President Barack Obama’s summer Midwestern bus trek was about reconnecting with disaffected independents, but the North Carolina and Virginia road trip that starts Monday is a more narrowly targeted exercise in 2012 politics. The three-day bus tour, with stops in rural towns, suburbs and several cities, literally traces an escape route for Obama’s reelection campaign through two states he carried in 2008 that are must-wins next year even if Obama succeeds in recapturing lost ground in more traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida. (Will Obama actually ride the bus this time, or will it be flown place to place as a prop as in the last “bus trip.”? It’s the taxpayers who are being taken for a ride. ~Bob.) Kenya sends troops into Somalia to hit al-Shabab Excerpt: Witnesses described dozens of military vehicles pouring over the border, backed by planes and helicopters. Reports say al-Shabab, which denies carrying out the abductions, has begun preparing militias to fight back. Al-Shabab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage told the BBC Somali service: "We will defend ourselves. Kenya doesn't know war. We know war. The tall buildings in Nairobi will be destroyed. "We have fought against governments older and stronger than Kenya and we have defeated them." Several Westerners have been seized in Kenya by suspected Somali militants and reportedly taken into Somalia. (Go, Kenya! Maybe we can help with drone strikes and/or military aid. Let’s see, does having family in Kenya outweigh ignoring the “youthful excesses” of struggling young Muslims? Obama may have a tough choice to make. Ron P) Detroit struggles to keep lights on: Copper thieves, aging equipment darken blocks in cash-starved city Excerpt: Like many swaths of the city, Keith Wicks' historic Indian Village neighborhood has remained largely dark at night after vandals destroyed transformers in nearly every streetlight pole that powers them. On a recent rainy day, Wicks, 64, a retired GM engineer who has lived in Detroit for decades, watched as city Public Lighting workers put new transformers at the top of the aging wooden poles. Just days later, those streetlights were out — again. "We've still got a ways to go," Wicks said with a laugh. The growing lack of public lighting has become a troubling problem for cash-starved Detroit, where entire stretches of neighborhoods and thoroughfares — such as portions of the Southfield Freeway — are feeling the effects. "This city…it's dark without streetlights," said Wicks, who lives on Iroquois. "You look down Iroquois at night now, it's black. It's very dangerous." The war to keep the lights on in Detroit is a serious one. Thieves, antiquated equipment and a lack of funding have made it impossible for city officials to catch up to the problem. (This story fits very well the picture who wrote of in your recent book; the failure of city government to provide the normal services plus the bad guys taking over. Naturally, for the bad guys to steal what they have and in such quantity and then sell it some "legal" businesses are a major part of the problem. Figured you'd find this of interest. –T.) A pact signed in Jewish blood by Caroline B. Glick Excerpt: No one denies the long suffering of the Schalit family. Noam and Aviva Schalit and their relatives have endured five years and four months of uninterrupted anguish since their son St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit was abducted from his army post by Palestinian terrorists and spirited to Gaza in June 2006. Since then, aside from one letter and one videotaped message, they have received no signs of life from their soldier son. There is not a Jewish household in Israel that doesn't empathize with their suffering. It isn't simply that most Israelis serve in the IDF and expect their children to serve in the IDF. It isn't just that it could happen to any of our families. As Jews, the concept of mutual responsibility, that we are all a big family and share a common fate, is ingrained in our collective consciousness. And so, at a deep level, the Schalit family's suffering is our collective suffering. And yet, and yet, freedom exacts its price. The cause of freedom for the Jewish people as a whole exacts a greater sacrifice from some families than from others. Sometimes, that sacrifice is made willingly, as in the case of the Netanyahu family. Prof. Benzion and Tzilla Netanyahu raised their three sons to be warriors in the fight for Jewish liberty. And all three of their sons served in an elite commando unit. Their eldest son Yonatan had the privilege of commanding the unit and of leading Israeli commandos in the heroic raid to free Jewish hostages held by the PLO in Entebbe. Obama's worst nightmare By John Hughes http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1011/obama_worst_nightmare.php3 Excerpt: Excerpt: What would be the mother of all nightmares for Barack Obama before next year's presidential election? A nuclear-armed Iran. President Obama has declared he will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear-weapons capability. But his options are limited. A strike against Iran's nuclear installations? That would mean starting another war in the midst of the US election campaign. Unlikely. Dissuade Israel from striking Iran — an attack that would necessarily involve US moral and practical support during campaign season? For Israel, a nuclear-armed Tehran is a death sentence. So reining in Israel is also unlikely. Accepting the reality of an Iran with nuclear weapons, but publicly warning Tehran against using them? Possible, but dangerously weak-looking for a president up for reelection who promised not to let this happen. I hope someone in the White House is working on this. I hope Iran is not able to do it. Report: U.S. Abandoning Plans to Keep Troops in Iraq Next Year Excerpt: The Obama administration will withdraw all but 160 American troops from Iraq this year, abandoning a plan to keep troops there past a deadline set for the end of the year, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. The Pentagon was considering keeping up to 5,000 troops in Iraq next year, in order to train Iraqi forces. The 160 American troops that will remain are attached to the U.S. embassy, the AP reported. "We remain committed to keeping our agreement with the Iraqi government to remove all of our troops by the end of this year," Pentagon Spokesman George Little said in a statement. "At the same time we're building a comprehensive partnership with Iraq under the Strategic Framework Agreement including a robust security relationship, and discussions with the Iraqis about the nature of that relationship are ongoing." (That will be a very busy company of Marines guarding the Embassy. Ron P. Unless Obama orders them to surrender without defending themselves, as Carter did with the Marines guarding the embassy in Iran. If that happens, they will be dead. Or they will try to trade them one by one for KSM and other captured terrorists, as Hamas just did with Israel. ~Bob.) Occupy Wall Street Goes Global Excerpt: The Occupy movement went global on Saturday. Rallies were held in more than 900 cities around the world, with violence breaking out most notably in Rome, where 100 people were injured and police were forced to use tear gas and water cannons to break up a mob that burned cars and smashed the windows of shops and banks. 175 protesters were arrested in Chicago, when they attempted to set up camp in Congress Plaza, and 92 were arrested in New York. Another 8 were arrested in London. In Hong Kong, Derrick Benig, a 22-year-old art student, expressed what is rapidly becoming the over-arching theme of these demonstrations. “I want to tear down capitalism,” he said. Mr. Benig is hardly alone, but the number of really dubious actors expressing support for such an idea is growing. On Sunday, the American Nazi Party released a statement decrying the “judeo-capitalist banksters who swindled the American taxpayers out of A TRILLION dollars in the ‘bailout’ scam AND continue to oppress the White Working Class” even as they urged their members to “utilize and support every movement of dissent against this evil American empire.” Not to be outdone, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) also expressed solidarity with the demonstrations, which they characterized as the “the newest wrinkle in the all-people’s upsurge against the banks and corporations” and which they hoped would lead to “more advanced programmatic ideas like nationalizing the banks and socialism.” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is convinced the protests will destroy capitalism and bring about the downfall of Western civilization. (I suppose it is comforting to know it’s not just the US that has raised a generation of idiots. ~Bob.) Green Tesla Motors: Another Day, Another Solyndra Excerpt: The resignation of Jonathan Silver, the U.S Energy Department’s top loan officer, over the Solyndra scandal may be the tip of the iceberg. He supervised a much larger DOE loan program that suffers from the same problems as Solyndra: over the last 18 months, the Department has awarded more than $9 billion in below-market loans to auto companies under its Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program. The most troubling transaction: a $465 million loan to California’s Tesla Motors. Tesla received a loan rate of 1.6% from DOE to manufacture an all-electric car that will sell for nearly $50,000. It will not exactly be the people’s car. Tesla also builds luxury sports cars that retail for $103,000 to $128,000. Tesla also is no simple new age car company. It is owned and financed by big donors to the Democratic Party and to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Tesla’s principal owner is Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal. He has an estimated personal wealth of $672 million. His firm received venture capital from The Westly Group, Daimler Chrysler, and from Abu Dhabi investors. The firm has partnerships with luxury sports car manufacturer Lotus and with Mercedes-Benz. The secret to access to the DOE money is The Westly Group, run by California Democratic Party stalwart and big Obama campaign bundler Steve Westly. The former eBay executive wasn’t merely a prodigious fundraiser for Obama, raising $500,000 for his presidential campaign. He also served as the president’s California campaign co-chairman. (At what point does it stop being “incompetence” and become “corruption?” Ron P. It’s “incompetent corruption.” They can’t even buy votes right. ~Bob.) The taxpayers should never be forced to pay for entertainment: sports, NPR, public TV or the arts. ~Bob. Excerpt: If you want to know how ingrained the dumb is within our government and the “right wing” (including the so-called “Tea Party” that utterly refuses to face the mathematics of what they’ve done), look at this: HOUSTON – Hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” when it opened in 1965, the Astrodome now sits vacant and in disrepair out on Interstate 610. The world’s first domed sports stadium lost its last major tenant eight years ago. It hosted occasional functions afterward – a family rented the floor for a bar mitzvah party for $15,000 – but has been virtually shut down for two years. Its exterior metal work is rusting. Water stains surround the base. It’s no longer up to code. “It’s just sad,” Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said. “It’s beginning to look like an old ship that just kind of washed up out there.” Harris County pays about $4 million annually just to maintain and insure it. The debt totals about $40 million on a project that cost $31.6 million to build. If you think this is somehow unique, you’re wrong. We have an example of it right here in Niceville. The Mid-Bay Bridge, built in 1994 at a cost of $67 million, will have more than $350 million in debt laid upon it. The traffic levels have been declining (Ok, let me give you another quick example of the stupid projects described below: Harrisburg Airport at Middletown, PA. Every time I have ever been there, it is almost empty. The staff on the grounds tell us that very few ever use the facility. After all, there are Philadelphia airport, Reagan Airport and Washington-Baltimore Airport at Baltimore within driving distance and the flights out of Harrisburg are more expensive. But someone in government owed someone else a favor and your money was used to build and maintain the boondoggle. This sort of thing now goes under the heading of "stimulus." That is, it stimulates the tax payer to go find a second job or moonlight to pay the bills and the increasingly high taxes needed to pay for it and other swindles like it. I am sure every one of you knows of something similar. This also goes under the subheading "corporatism" or "crony capitalism," because the corporations that designed and built the project were pals with the politicians that approved it and gave them sweet kickbacks. This is not an example of the free market in action, although both political parties insist that it is. And if you complain, they remind you how the Soviet Union was so much worse. Worse, yes, but not that much worse any more. At this rate, in a few years, we will catch up with the former Soviet Union in terms of graft, corruption and loss of individual freedom--in the name of stimulus. --Don Hank) The 'Occupiers' do not represent Americans or their beliefs Excerpt: Sneer though many of them did, liberals envied the success of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Desperate to embrace an authentic populist movement of their own, they have been buoyed by the results of a Time magazine poll this week, purporting to demonstrate that the nascent Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, at 54 percent approval, are more popular than the Tea Party. As The Examiner's Phil Klein pointed out earlier this week, however, the numbers produced by the Time survey are quite misleading because of the magazine's unusually vague but artful wording of questions. For example, Time's survey described these anti-capitalist protests to respondents as being against the "government's bank bailout and the influence of money in our political system." The same description could be said of the Tea Party. In fact, other polls from reputable firms that used more objective questions have pegged OWS support in the low thirties -- and with slightly negative net approval ratings. Obama gets back on the bus for trip to 2 states Excerpt: President Barack Obama is targeting vital North Carolina and Virginia this week, as he kicks off a three-day bus tour that is as much about campaigning for his jobs bill as it is shoring up support in two southern states he wrested from Republican control when he won the White House. Obama's 2008 victories in North Carolina and Virginia were due in large part to the states' changing demographics and his campaign's ability to boost voter turnout among young people and African-Americans. But nearly three years after his historic election, the president's approval ratings in both states are sagging, in line with the national trend. A Quinnipiac University poll out earlier this month put Obama's approval rating in Virginia at 45 percent, with 52 percent disapproving. The same poll showed 83 percent of Virginians were dissatisfied with the direction of the country. In North Carolina, Obama has a 42 percent approval rating, according to an Elon University poll conducted this month. Most national polls put Obama's approval rating in the mid- to low-forties. … The president faces significant obstacles in Virginia as well. While Democrats had hoped Obama's victory signaled Virginia's shift to a Democratic-leaning state, momentum has since strongly turned back in favor of Republicans, most notably with Gov. Bob McDonald's win in 2009. That shift has some Virginia Democrats, especially state legislators running in next month's General Assembly elections, less than thrilled about Obama heading to their state this week. In coal-mining southwestern Virginia, Democratic state Sen. Phil Puckett has flatly renounced the president. With Republicans running television ads and erecting billboards showing Puckett campaigning for Obama in 2008, Puckett said in a television interview he would not support Obama in 2012. TX High School Students Made to Recite Mexican National Anthem, Pledge of Allegiance Excerpt: Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson. It happened last month in an intermediate Spanish class at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Did 2008 Come True? Excerpt: Then came the election, and a perfect storm of events. The general unhappiness with Bush over deficits and Iraq, the recession that had started in December 2007, the absence of any incumbent vice president or president in the race for the first time since 1952, an unusually unenergetic McCain campaign, and a nakedly partisan media — all that by early September still had not given Obama the lead. But the mid-September 2008 financial crash did. And so what in the last fifty years was usually considered improbable — the election of a northern Democratic liberal — soon seemed foreordained. We are now nearing the third year of the Obama administration. Were those worries of 2008 at all justified? Let us briefly review them in the same order (…) The skeptics of 2008 proved prescient; those who demonized them should be embarrassed. And we should remember that candidates, of both parties, will govern mostly as they campaign. Slips are not indiscretions, but often will prove in hindsight windows of the soul. Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy Excerpt: Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs. Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer. Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again. It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital. Don't prejudge police officers' actions Excerpt: I am continually surprised by the way the news media and the public seem to take joy in criticizing the actions of police officers before it is known exactly what happened in a controversial incident. It seems they think it is possible that law enforcement can be accomplished with no injuries, or no hurt feelings, if officers could just understand the people they come into contact with each day. If only this was possible. I'm sure the vast majority of officers wished it were so as well. But the fact is that officers come into contact every day with individuals who are feared and loathed by society and who couldn't care less if the officers - or, in some cases, they themselves - live or die.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Hunter S. Thompson 31 July 2007 Here's my entry, taken on July 29th, aboard JetBlue Flight 1100 from RDU to JFK, around 6:30 AM and near the NC/VA border as indicated by Google Maps. Got the shot with my iPhone. Microsoft has released the new version of Microsoft Works as a free, ad supported office package that will compete directly with Open Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The Works package offers word processing, spreadsheet and slide (powerpoint) functionality partially based on code from older versions of Microsoft Office. 30 July 2007 New Life on the Web for a Killed Newspaper Column (New York Times, 30 July 2007) “The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.” The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also give away music. “While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10 percent in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a ‘whopping 27 percent, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced,’ ” Mr. Goldstein wrote. “Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.” Related: The actual, original column can be read here: LA Observed: Goldstein's Killed Column A private e-mail address, linked to a pseudonym that I use for occasional print and Web articles, has been helpfully subscribed to an "online dating" site. The word "dating," in this case, seems to have the same euphemistic meaning that the transsexual hookers in New York City's Meatpacking District always understood: "...honey, want a date?" (a line not infrequently delivered in a disconcerting basso profundo.) Even better: Having logged in with the credentials provided by the semi-literate prankster who set this up (since he or she used my e-mail address, I got all the notifications of account creation, as well as the many "special offers" that begin pouring into my inbox this morning)... there is no way to delete the account from the site via the web interface. Okay. Scratch one e-mail account, set up another, add some random characters into the name. Good thing they're disposable these days. 29 July 2007 (Crossposted to Flickr groups What's In Your Bag and The Items We Carry.) Anyone can play along at home - if you add your photos to the Flickr pool, please give a shout in the comments. 28 July 2007 The first doctor gave her six months to live. The second and third said chemotherapy would buy more time, but surgery would not. A fourth offered to operate.Cancer Patients, Lost in a Maze of Uneven Care (New York Times, July 28, 2007) Karen Pasqualetto had just given birth to her first child last July when doctors discovered she had colon cancer. She was only 35, and the disease had already spread to her liver. The months she had hoped to spend getting to know her new daughter were hijacked by illness, fear and a desperate quest to survive. For the past year, she and her relatives have felt lost, fending for themselves in a daunting medical landscape in which they struggle to make sense of conflicting advice as they race against time in hopes of saving her life. “It’s patchwork, and frustrating that there’s not one person taking care of me who I can look to as my champion,” Ms. Pasqualetto said recently in a telephone interview from her home near Seattle. “I don’t feel I have a doctor who is looking out for my care. My oncologist is terrific, but he’s an oncologist. The surgeon seems terrific, but I found him through my own diligence. I have no confidence in the system.” Sadly, "I have no confidence in the system" is a very well-informed, thoroughly educated position to take, especially when it comes to any condition where the treatment options are complex. And the "one person taking care of you who you can look to as your champion" pretty much has to be you (with support from your loved ones, hopefully)... and that at a time when, to put it mildly, you aren't feeling very well. 27 July 2007 The National Maritime Historical Society (http://www.seahistory.org/) has invited me to talk about "No Higher Honor: Saving the Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf" tomorrow near their New York headquarters. When: noon, Sat. July 28 Where: The Hendrick Hudson Free Library, 185 Kings Ferry Road, Montrose, N.Y. 10548 -- Phone: 914-739-5654 -- Google map: http://tinyurl.com/2smrqt The event is open to the public; please come! Brad (The reason that you hang the clothes you've cooked in, and don't sleep in them, is that if a bear wanders into your camp at night, you, smelling of food, in your sleeping bag, will appear to be something that was packaged by Kraft.) Anyway... meet Ursack. At a veterans’ hospital [in Pittsburgh], nurses swab the nasal passages of every arriving patient to test them for drug-resistant bacteria. Those found positive are housed in isolation rooms behind red painted lines that warn workers not to approach without wearing gowns and gloves.Swabs in Hand, Hospital Cuts Deadly Infections (New York Times, 27 July 2007) Every room and corridor is equipped with dispensers of foamy hand sanitizer. Blood pressure cuffs are discarded after use, and each room is assigned its own stethoscope to prevent the transfer of microorganisms. Using these and other relatively inexpensive measures, the hospital has significantly reduced the number of patients who develop deadly drug-resistant infections, long an unaddressed problem in American hospitals. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected this year that one of every 22 patients would get an infection while hospitalized — 1.7 million cases a year — and that 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure. The cost of treating the infections amounts to tens of billions of dollars, experts say. “People don’t believe it’s in their institution, and, if it is, that it’s too big to do anything about, that you just have to accept it,” said Terri Gerigk Wolf, director of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare Systems. “But we have shown you can do something about it.” I have more than a passing interest in this topic. Both of my parents have contracted HAI's (hospital/healthcare-acquired infections) while patients in hospitals or nursing homes, and an multiple-antibiotic-resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae, acquired during a hospital stay, killed my father. - Centers for Disease Control: The Impact of Hospital-Acquired Bloodstream Infection "Nosocomial bloodstream infections are a leading cause of death in the United States. If we assume a nosocomial infection rate of 5%, of which 10% are bloodstream infections, and an attributable mortality rate of 15%, bloodstream infections would represent the eighth leading cause of death in the United States." 26 July 2007 Qualifying RFP-based leads (Knowledge Work) Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who knew a thing or two about strategy, once explained why he typically ran an offense that relied heavily on the running game, shunning the forward pass: “Three things can happen when you throw a football, and two of them are bad.” When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.Nursing home cat can sense death, ease passing (Reuters via Yahoo News) In his two years living in Steere's end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence. He wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine. "It's not that the cat is consistently there first," Dr. Joan Teno, a professor of community health at Brown University, who sees patients in the unit. "But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours." The staff don't believe that anything supernatural is going on; rather, they posit that Oscar is sensitive to some kind of biochemical change that is taking place in the unit's patients as death approaches. However, definitely check out Oscar's picture in the Yahoo News article cited above. He appears to be a very wise cat, with a great deal of Buddha-nature. You can just tell that the little guy has quite a bedside manner. Related: Dosa, David M. A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat N Engl J Med 2007 357: 328-329 25 July 2007 24 July 2007 Dad's math book makes the grade (The Detroit News, 20 July 2007) Some parents pitch in with homework when kids get bad grades in math. Nicholas Aggor literally wrote the book. The Riverview engineer was so distressed when sons Samuel, 14, and Joshua, 13, brought home bad marks, he took it upon himself to rewrite their textbooks chapter by chapter. Four years later, they are in advanced classes and the Ghana native's pet project has become a passion that's produced a math curriculum for grades kindergarten to nine -- 14 books in all. And soon, it may not be just his kids whose grades are improving. Hat tip: deVille 23 July 2007 In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway -- by startups and big companies alike -- required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.HP buys my company Opsware for more than $1.6 billion in cash (blog.pmarca.com) The eight years that have followed have been an unbelievable journey... Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share. Paul represents a different Republican Party from the one that Iraq, deficits and corruption have soured the country on. In late June, despite a life of antitax agitation and churchgoing, he was excluded from a Republican forum sponsored by Iowa antitax and Christian groups. His school of Republicanism, which had its last serious national airing in the Goldwater campaign of 1964, stands for a certain idea of the Constitution — the idea that much of the power asserted by modern presidents has been usurped from Congress, and that much of the power asserted by Congress has been usurped from the states. Though Paul acknowledges flaws in both the Constitution (it included slavery) and the Bill of Rights (it doesn’t go far enough), he still thinks a comprehensive array of positions can be drawn from them: Against gun control. For the sovereignty of states. And against foreign-policy adventures. Paul was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988. But his is a less exuberant libertarianism than you find, say, in the pages of Reason magazine.The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul (New York Times, 22 July 2007) 21 July 2007 Sometimes you can travel north to go south. As removed as it might seem from the easy pace and wide open spaces of the Southern states, New York City still knows about life below the Mason-Dixon Line. Tucked away on side streets and in basement clubs, an authentic culture thrives, and it welcomes visitors who want to slip away from the bustling city for a few hours of downhome hospitality. Based on analysis of the site logs: - Country share: the US leads with not quite 80%, with the remaining 22% (in declining order) split among the UK, Canada, India, Sweden, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Spain, Singapore (Hi, Fiona!), Germany, Belgium, Japan, Israel and Norway. - OS share: 65% of you are running Windows XP; a whopping 25% of you are using Mac OS X (results likely skewed by the links we've been picking up from MacSurfer lately; see below.) The rest of you (10% in aggregate) are using older or newer Windows variants (Vista penetration: less than 3%) or Linux; at least one brave soul is browsing the site using OS/2! OS/2 guy: Rock on with your retro-bad self. - Visit duration: most enrevanche visitors linger for between two and three minutes per visit, an absolute eternity in blog-time. (It takes me less time than that to *write* many of the posts.) - Top referring sites in the last month, in order: - Bill in Exile (warning, NSFW and try not to be drinking any beverages while reading) - Real Clear Politics - Top search engine: Google. - Top Google search strings bringing unwary visitors to the site this week: Westell 327W, Sunrocket 20 July 2007 I am the very model of a modern Libertarian:There's much, much more. I teem with glowing notions for proposals millenarian, I've nothing but contempt for ideologies collectivist (My own ideas of social good tend more toward the Objectivist). You see, I've just discovered, by my intellectual bravery, That civic obligations are all tantamount to slavery; And thus that ancient pastime, viz., complaining of taxation, Assumes the glorious aspect of a war for liberation! 19 July 2007 I can't hope to add anything to the voluminous coverage of this incident, except to relate another incident that took place in my office last night. The explosion occurred just before 6PM, at the height of the evening rush hour, and shortly thereafter a number of us gathered in the Network Operations Center, where a local news channel was tuned in and patched through to the overhead projector. The initial images were really startling - the steam-geyser was achieving some incredible heights, and it was evident that the steam pipes had taken out quite a bit of additional infrastructure with them when they blew, as there was an enormous amount of debris in the mix. "Damn," one of our senior engineers observed. "Looks like it took out a sewer line, too." One of the new guys objected. "The news says that's mud." The senior guy said, "Dude, I've worked in IT for over 20 years now. Don't you think I can recognize a fountain of shit when I see one?" (P.S. While Doc is on travel, I'm going to be posting occasionally at They Rode On, a blog I encourage you all to check out. Doc's kin to me, but please don't hold that against him. This is crossposted there.) 18 July 2007 State Division of Motor Vehicles Commissioner George Tatum resigned today, a spokesman said. The resignation comes a little more than a week after The News & Observer reported an allegation that Tatum had helped a friend get a replica of a 1937 Ford truck titled as the real thing. DMV Commissioner Resigns (Raleigh, NC News and Observer, 18 July 2007) This is *so* Southern, I can't even begin to cope with it. Dude resigns in shame and disgrace because he got caught helping a friend counterfeit a pickup truck. The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.AP Poll: GOP pick is "none of the above" (AP via Yahoo News) GOP rally cheer, early in the third quarter of 2007: Who do you want? When do you want them? Photos of what appeared to be every page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling, were circulating around the Web today, potentially upsetting the most elaborate marketing machine ever mobilized for a book.New Potter Book May Have Made Its Way to Web - New York Times "May" have made its way to the Web... “BUT I DON‘T—” “And then we’re going to the Apple Store.” Leta suddenly remembers all those times Daddy has taken her to the Apple Store to pass the time, those outings where he would inspect new hardware while she got to play Dora games on an iMac at the back of the store. “Daddy!” Her tone changes instantly from CURRENTLY DYING to polite conversation over tea at the tennis club. “I’m going to the Apple Store with you! I love the Apple Store.” Jon staggers backwards two steps, holds his hand over his heart and says, “If I were a normal man? This—” and he points back and forth between himself and Leta signaling what they have between them, “—this would be me teaching my son how to throw a baseball.” 17 July 2007 16 July 2007 Yeah, Sunrocket's history: SunRocket, one of the largest start-up companies offering Internet phone service, has ceased operation and is moving its customers to one or more other companies, a person briefed on its status said yesterday. A message on SunRocket’s customer service line said the company was “no longer taking customer service or sales calls.” Executives of SunRocket, which is based in Vienna, Va., and had 200,000 subscribers as of April, could not be reached for comment. Mattel’s virtual world Barbie Girls hit the 3 million user mark in its first 60 days and is growing at the rate of 50,000 new users a day, according to a report from the Scientific American.TechCrunch: Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World? To put that in perspective, Second Life took 3 years to get to 1 million registered users. At its current growth rate, Barbie Girls should pass the number of Second Life registered users between November and January based on Second Life’s existing growth rate. Barbie Girls would also pass World of Warcraft around the same time as well. A funny thing has happened on the way to the 2008 US Presidential Elections, and it’s all got to do with Web 2.0.Techcrunch: Ron Paul: A Distributed Web 2.0 Campaign (16 July 2007) Ron Paul is a name many will immediately recognize, but for those who don’t, Ron Paul wants to be the next President of the United States of America. Paul’s platform is very, very different to most (if not all) of the other candidates, both from his own Republican Party and the Democrats. Paul is a classic conservative, a believer in small Government and a believer that the individual is more important than the State. He’s also anti-Iraq war, and in a historical sense broadly anti-interventionist as well; Paul is a candidate who believes the Monroe Doctrine is simply wrong.Paul is also the underdog in the Presidential race, dismissed by the mainstream media and political pundits as nothing more than a kook with no hope at all. And yet if you believe online polls and surveys, Paul will be the next President of the United States. 15 July 2007 Arkansas was scary, but not as scary as Mississippi. In Mississippi, you could end up in a coffin just trying to scribble in your notebook. In 1962, a European reporter by the name of Paul Guihard had been crossing the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, there to cover the protests against troops guarding James Meredith as he integrated the school. Someone blew a hole in Guihard's head with a gun. Simeon Booker was at Ole Miss that autumn. He knew the dark, kaleidoscopic danger of the place. He had been in Mississippi -- at that courthouse in Sumner to cover the Emmett Till murder trial. Till -- a 14-year-old black youth murdered by two white men in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a woman who was married to one of the men -- was Booker's damn story, and he knew it, his fingerprints on the reporting of it from the very beginning. They all knew it, every one of the reporters, the ones from the white press and certainly the ones from the Negro press...The Man from Jet - Washington Post, 15 July 2007 ...[H]e was the man from Ebony and Jet magazines, which meant, in a symbolic manner, beginning in the 1950s, he was the man from Negro and black America with a press pass. He was all over the South -- before it became a beat and a newspaper cause -- writing up his stories, getting them printed. When it was happening, when history was rolling like some kind of grainy as-yet-unseen newsreel, he didn't think about it much at all. "You just did the job," he says. The wheels of the car rolled on then, and the notebooks stacked up in the glove compartment. He covered protests in Birmingham, Ala., civil rights deaths in Mississippi, voting marches in the Carolinas. He went out on campaign trails with the Kennedys. (The Kennedys liked him, learned much about black America from him. He was invited to JFK's funeral.) He covered the young John Conyers in Detroit. He walked down the streets of Harlem with a smile on his face, looking for musicians, looking for Adam Clayton Powell Jr., trying to find a slice of sweet potato pie. He was so revered that when young black reporters came out of college in the 1950s, they looked him up. Like English department grads trekking off to Havana to find Hemingway. Yuppie customer: Can we have the tasting menu?Overheard by: The Professor via Overheard in New York, Jul 15, 2007 Waitress: You eat everything? Yuppie customer: Yeah, sure. Yuppie customer: I'll eat the asshole if you put a tasty sauce on it. Waitress: We don't serve assholes here. Yuppie customer: This is New York. How do you stay in business? 14 July 2007 Yes, Google's $625 million deal for spam-fighter Postini adds another business application to its portfolio. But when I heard about it, I thought only one thing: Our bosses will gain an ever more powerful tool to search and analyze our e-mails and messages.Google with Postini: Searching Our E-mail (BusinessWeek Blogs, Stephen Baker, 10 July 2007) As Google storms into the market, more managers will be able to search employees e-mail the way they now search the Web. Imagine being able to call up every e-mail in the enterprise over the last month, for example, that mentions a key competitor and an upcoming product or service. Want to see it as it's happening? Sign up for an alert for certain keywords. It doesn't have to stop there. Once these data are searchable, it will become ever easier for managers to apply advanced analytics to corporate messaging. They'll be able mine these data for the latest trends of words and subjects that employees are writing about. Mapping the social networks inside and outside the company will be a cinch. And as automatic reading programs improve, companies will also be able to track the rising and falling sentiments of their work force. Watch the exact position and additional data (heart rate, cadence, speed, power) of the racing cyclists on an interactive map. 13 July 2007 I've cut out and taped the key question from #10 to my monitor: Britannica Blog, "10 Ways to Test Facts" (Gregory McNamee - June 26th, 2007) 10. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that we all tape this little note to our telephones: “Are you sure?” The message is meant to serve as a reminder to help stem wrongheaded talk, idle gossip, and pointless argument. For myself, I keep that question affixed above every computer I own, within sight of my phones. It doesn’t prevent me from being wrong, would that it did, but it has spared me a bit of embarrassment from time to time. And think of how the world might be if we all had that question before us at all times. Are you sure about those WMDs? Are you sure about that yellow cake uranium from Niger? Are you sure there’s no such thing as global warming? The list goes on, and on... PALAZZOLO SULL’OGLIO, Italy — They have names like the Brilliance BS6, the Landwind Fashion or the improbable Hover Wingle, and though these sedans, vans and sport utility vehicles are hardly as familiar to Europeans as, say, a Volkswagen Golf, they are beginning to show up on European roads. “I’ve got air-conditioning, ABS brakes and air bags,” said Carlo Scalvini, describing his Hover, a big and boxy sport utility vehicle built by the Great Wall Motor Company, with headquarters in Baoding in eastern China. “And the price is competitive: you pay 10,000 euros less in the end,” more than $13,000. The enthusiasm of people like Mr. Scalvini could influence the global auto industry and China’s place in it. China’s quiet inroads into Europe are the first test of rich markets by Chinese automakers as they build dealer networks and deliver small shipments of cars to test the reaction of drivers and auto industry experts. Low-Cost Chinese Cars Making Restrained Entry to European Market (New York Times, 13 July 2007) Great Wall Motor Company Limited (Baoding, China)... where, in addition to the Wingle, you can learn about other models called (I am not making this up) the Safe, the Sing, the Pegasus, the Deer, the Sailor and the Socool. China is making huge strides in economic development, but it's clear that sixty years of Communist rule have stunted their vital, strategic branding skills: The first high-pressure common rail & high-end diesel pickup in China. Creation embodies charm, technology fulfills leadership. As China's first high-end diesel pickup, Great Wall-Wingle creates a new realm of high-grade Pick-up, and goes forward towards the world as the Chinese Pickup leader. Fashion in every detail demonstrates innovative design concepts, creative design and avant-garde daring style, without any meaningless decoration. Brilliant achievements in their careers enjoy life passion.Yeah! Here's my entry. I call this piece “Outmoded.” Pictured, left to right: Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry Curve, generously provided by my employer, adjacent to Apple’s new iPhone, generously provided by me, both displaying a favorite blog. 12 July 2007 Rumors on stock discussion boards being seeded and spread by sock-puppets are nothing new. Usually the sock-puppets only claim to have inside information and are looking to manipulate a stock's price.Sometimes, the sock-puppets actually HAVE inside information, and their goals are... hmm. In January 2005, someone using the name "Rahodeb" went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share. "Would Whole Foods buy OATS?" Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats' stock symbol. "Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small." Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management "clearly doesn't know what it is doing .... OATS has no value and no future." The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer's identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share. 10 July 2007 "EFF Receives First Set of FOIA Documents on the FBI's Misuse of National Security Letter Authority" (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 9 July 2007) EFF has obtained FBI documents showing years of chronic problems with its use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The issue first drew widespread attention four months ago, when the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report [31M PDF] revealing extensive misuse of NSLs in a sampling of four FBI field offices.These findings were, unfortunately, not surprising to critics of the Bureau's NSL power. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001, the FBI could unilaterally issue these demands only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the changes made by the controversial anti-terrorism law, however, the FBI can now use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about anybody -- without any court approval -- as long as it believes the information could be “relevant” to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation. Current, apparent definition of a terrorist: Anyone the FBI would like to get a free pass to wiretap. Time is running out. New royalty rates will go into effect on July 15th which are 6 times more than SomaFM's total revenues. If not changed, SomaFM will be forced out of business by the RIAA. I need you to call SomaFM's congressional representative in San Francisco, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at (415) 556-4862 and ask her to use her office's influence to demand that the RIAA come to a settlement with small webcasters. Identify yourself as a listener to SomaFM which is based in her district. It doesn't look like the IREA will get passed before the July 15th deadline with the RIAA's aggressive and false-pretense lobbying against it. Our only hope now is for a settlement, which ideally will be codified into law later. The RIAA is blocking the IREA from passing with propaganda and downright false statements. And the worst thing is they're being sneaky about it... trying to pretend that this propaganda is coming from SoundExchange. Because everyone knows you can't trust anything the RIAA says. But the RIAA is the puppeteer pulling the strings on SoundExchange, and makes up the majority of the seats on SoundExchange. The independent artist representatives on SoundExchange's board support independent internet radio and aren't trying to kill it, but the RIAA cronies have the majority vote. At this point, it doesn't look like the IREA will pass, the RIAA has been very good in their lobbying. (Well, I should say, they're very good at hiring expensive lobbyists - after all, they're using SoundExchange's money to do it, and all that money comes out of the royalties paid to SoundExchange before the artists see it. Oh, the irony! Internet radio stations are paying SoundExchange royalties which are being used to lobby against net radio, and not actually paid to the artists. Yet they have the balls to tell the artists that it's internet radio that's stealing from the artists. And even though we play very few RIAA-related labels, the RIAA has successfully made it so that even if we play independent artists, we still have to pay them royalties. More at http://somafm.com/blogs/rusty and http://somafm.com/crb 09 July 2007 By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month. If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks. New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown (New York Times, 9 July 2007) Science-fiction author David Brin has some very interesting ideas on topics like this. Despite a vibrant local economy, Atlanta homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments and losing their homes at one of the highest rates in the nation, offering a troubling glimpse of what experts fear may be in store for other parts of the country.Increasing Rate of Foreclosures Upsets Atlanta (New York Times, 9 July 2007) The real estate slump here and elsewhere is likely to worsen, given that most of the adjustable rate mortgages written in the last three years will be reset with higher interest rates, said Christopher F. Thornberg, an economist with Beacon Economics in Los Angeles. As a result, borrowers of an estimated $800 billion in loans will be forced in the next 12 months to 18 months to make bigger monthly payments, refinance or sell their homes. Review: 6 Skype Alternatives Offer New Services (David DeJean, InformationWeek, 3 July 2007) 08 July 2007 "If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down!" Thus Madonna revealed her plan to combat global warming. Clad in a black satin leotard, she gyrated with dancers and simulated sex with an amplifier and a guitar. Along with the Foo Fighters, the 48-year-old Queen of Pop transformed a Live Earth concert that at times had seemed earnest and slow...Live Earth London's Glacial Pacing (Washington Post, July 8, 2007) The interspersing of musical numbers with lectures on climate change gave much of the show a staccato feel... It's an inconvenient truth, but mixing rock with recycling is awkward. In a TV interview earlier this week, Matt Bellamy of the band Muse mocked the event as "private jets for climate change." John Buckley of Carbon Footprint, an organization that helps companies reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, said Saturday that Live Earth will produce about 74,500 tons of the gas."We would have to plant 100,000 trees to offset the effect of Live Earth," he said, speaking by telephone. A guy with a “Nuke The Moon” T-shirt in line to give blood. How a writer lost one of Heinlein’s cats, and who’s got the last cat now. Who wrote about the size of Heinlein’s package and what happened when Heinlein found out. Who fought with whom in reasearching the man’s life, and who screwed whom over, and who’s got the only copy of the political papers and can’t give them up yet. The amazing kindness and gifts the Heinleins gave to fans and writers of time, expertise and sometimes rent money, including a preternatural ability to somehow know when a writer was in trouble and needed help but wasn’t telling anybody... It's with a great deal of regret that I am announcing the closure of Etherbeat Radio.Subscribers were tipped off via e-mail on Friday that this was going to happen--and I got confirmation this morning that the site was closed for business (see above). Proposed legislative changes are signalling a new climate for internet radio in which enthusiast stations like Etherbeat can't survive. Besides this, I've just found it to be too much about business and paperwork lately and not enough about music AND I'm all out of cash! So it really is time to move on to something different... The promise of the Internet, for creative types, has always been that with enough connectivity, there is an audience for every taste. There might not be twenty-five people in your hometown who would have cared to listen to Etherbeat (I'm betting there were a lot more than that) but worldwide, the potential audience might have easily numbered in the millions. Whatever else it was, Etherbeat was a labor of love, and largely a one-man show; JC poured his heart and soul into the operation, and while there were shortages of cash at the end and exasperation with the legislative machinations currently underway, there was never any shortage of love. You could hear it in the music every day. As I wrote to my Congressional reps a few months back: Internet-based broadcasters are filling a culturally important role by providing high-quality alternatives to the homogenized dreck that flows over the public airwaves. They are offering music lovers a choice and presenting an incredibly diverse palette of musical styles and options to their listeners.With Etherbeat gone, the dreck quotient just went up a little. The mourners are checking in. For me -- well, my days will be a little longer without Etherbeat streaming through the speakers of my work PC. JC, you're the reason I bought a subwoofer for my work rig. ;-) And let me tell you, brother, you sold a lot of records... I can't tell you how many CDs I bought after first hearing an artist on Etherbeat. Be well, and good luck with whatever's next for you. 07 July 2007 Cheerleaders for renewable energy are fond of pointing out that patches of desert receive enough energy each year from sunlight to power the entire world. But few deign to explain how the construction of the millions of solar cells required to convert that energy into electricity would be financed. Utility bosses and policymakers tend to dismiss wind and solar power as noble but expensive distractions, sustainable only through lavish subsidies. But new studies suggest that renewables might not be as dear as sceptics suspect.The Economist: Cheap Alternatives (July 5, 2007) Tata, who writes the delicious and funny Poor Impulse Control, has tagged me with a blogmeme: "Thinking Bloggers." About Enrevanche, Tata was kind enough to say: Barry thinks about things I don't or they wouldn't cross my path. His cat is a humble rock star. I read Enrevanche about once a week. If I skip it, I feel like I misplaced my car keys.And once you read it, you feel like you misplaced your antipsychotic medication, no doubt (if I'm doing my job right.) Anyway, here's how this meme works: 1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,To avoid the appearance of (b)logrolling, Poor Impulse Control (Tata's blog) is not on my list, but I will say that I check in at her place at least a few times a week. She can make you laugh, make you cry, spur you to rage or provoke contemplation--the raw, confessional stuff she wrote during her father's last days was absolutely heartbreaking. Day to day, though, she's just one of the funniest, smartest people in the blogosphere. And although our politics appear to be very different, I think we would have a huge time over a big plate of food and several glasses of wine. 2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme, 3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote. OK. Here's the list, in alphabetical order, of Blogs That Make Barry Think: - Chapomatic. One of my oldest friends in the world also writes one of the best blogs out there; reading his stuff convinced me to start blogging. Take Chap's advice about music as if you were Moses on the mountaintop taking dictation straight from God. - Cobb. A self-described conservative and Black nationalist with a serious love for funk and a deep structural knowledge of information technology. - Don Surber. Don writes editorials and columns for the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail, and for years he blogged at Blogspot. He recently began blogging for his employer, and Don's take on the news is always worth reading. - Music and Cats. Musings on architecture, recipes, and loads of beautiful photography, much but not all of which involves kittycats. - Sisu. Sissy Willis comes from a different part of the conservative tradition than I do, but her political posts are always closely reasoned and well argued, and her sublime naturalist instincts and visual aesthetic sense are always refreshing to encounter online. Plus, the woman loves to cook. #1 on the list of bloggers I've never met in person that I'd like to throw a dinner party with. They're throwing a big party for Bob in Kansas City this weekend. I know somebody who's going. You know, when you're a kid, you read a lot of books and you listen to a lot of music that later, as an adult, you simply can't stand. Most of the science fiction I read in my youth falls into that category. Heinlein, on the other hand, just gets better and better. 06 July 2007 Case in point: Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.Now that, by God, is a lede. It gets better. Count Gottfried von Bismarck (Obituary, The Daily Telegraph [UK], 4 July 2007) 04 July 2007 So why is the viral-spread aspect so cool? Well, from a starting point of a few dozen folks a few weeks ago, my Geni tree has grown to almost 400 people. Southerners, in addition to the more conservative forms of Protestant Christianity, tend to practice ancestor worship, so this is not unusual, but the Midwestern Jewish side of the family is more than holding its own. The Geni system sends you updates when people are added to "your" tree, no matter how tenuous the links might be. Some folks have gotten so enthusiastic about entering family members that there are now people I've not only never met, but never even knew existed, in our tree. This system notification from Geni is the winner so far: XXX just addded YYY, your first cousin's daughter-in-law's ex-husband's ex-wife.That right there is damn nearly a country and western song. Whew! Greenwich Village Idiot, July 4, 2005 Happy Fourth of July, everybody! - "4th Of July" by Aimee Mann - "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" by Bruce Springsteen - "All the Way from America" by Joan Armatrading - "America the Beautiful" by Ray Charles - "American Tune" by Willie Nelson - "O Superman (For Massenet)" by Laurie Anderson - "Rednecks, White Socks And Blue Ribbon Beer" by Johnny Russell - "Revolution 1" by The Beatles - "Star Spangled Banner" by Jimi Hendrix - ...and spoken word performances by Richard Pryor and the late Bill Hicks Also: Barry discovers a way to podcast and catblog simultaneously (special subvocalizations and sound engineering courtesy of Mister Gato.) Direct download: July_4_2005_Greenwich_Village_Idiot.mp3 While GrandCentral transitions to Google, they have switched from an "open signup" to "invitation only" model. As a current GrandCentral subscriber, I have a few (a very few) invitations to give away; if you'd like to try this service and you're a regular enrevanche reader, drop me a line. As predicted, Google has actually acquired GrandCentral: We're pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.Official Google Blog: All Aboard Related: GrandCentral's FAQ on the Google acquisition 03 July 2007 Originally uploaded by rdr07. Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of "The Simpsons" fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art."Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart?" - AP story on 7-11/Kwik-E-Mart stunt Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees. Other recent examples of reverse product placement include Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, which spun out of the Harry Potter books and movies, and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants, which opened after the movie " ." Anyone who likes iced coffee should check out this excellent, brief piece of service journalism in the Times, which describes how to make cold-brewed iced coffee that tastes better than hot coffee cooled down. (Related: Recipe link.) 02 July 2007 01 July 2007 No iPhone for me, not yet, no sir. And I was pretty damned smug on Friday about all the folks standing in line for their Jesus Phones. (I don't stand on line for *anything*. If the restaurant doesn't take reservations and it's full, I go somewhere else.) My sainted grandmother gave me some good advice once: "Make your words sweet, son, because someday you might have to eat 'em." And then a guy in our building reported a completely painless experience picking up an iPhone today... I must admit that the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue was handling a daunting logistical challenge with grace and style. Nobody enables better. The place was *packed* with people... but the longest and most difficult part of the transaction was getting up and down the stairs as the crush of acolytes descended and ascended. From the time I walked into the store until the time I walked out with the iPhone... eight and a half minutes. Total time, once home, to download iTunes 7.3, sign up for an AT&T account and switch our service from Sprint, and start receiving calls on my existing cell phone number on the iPhone: 45 minutes. So far I am completely and utterly delighted. We're all living in a science-fiction novel; you realize this, of course. :-)

WINNIPEG — Rabbi David Dunn Bauer came to the rabbinate somewhat later in life. Rabbi Bauer, who was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2003, spent the first 20 years of his adult life working internationally directing theatre and opera. From 2000 to 2010, he served as spiritual leader of congregations in Great Barrington and Amherst, Mass. He’s currently a queer spiritual counselor based in San Francisco and serves as the Bay Area director of programming for Nehirim, a national U.S. group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews. As well as leading services at the 21st World Conference of GLBT Jews, held July 5 to 7 in Winnipeg – it was the first time a Canadian city has hosted the event for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews – Rabbi Bauer led two workshops, the first on July 6 on “Jews and Gender Non-Conformity in Cinema” and the second on July 7 focusing on comparing traditional Jewish sexual ethics with gay sexual ethics. Keynote speakers at the conference were transgender memoirist and poet Joy Ladin, and Jay Michaelson, the founder of Nehirim and the author of five books, most recently God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. In his July 7 talk, Rabbi Bauer defined sexual ethics as a community’s “self-imposed taboos.” Orthodox Judaism, he pointed out, emphasizes modesty. “It is not considered proper among Orthodox Jews to see other men naked,” he said, also citing the rules in the Torah about not uncovering nakedness. Orthodox Judaism, he continued, also teaches that we have an obligation to please our partners sexually and that the primary purpose of intercourse is for procreation. The basic rule for gay sexual relations, he noted, is to do no harm. In other words, members of the gay community have to be always aware of the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases and take the appropriate protective measures. Also important in sexual relations in the gay community is mutual consent and good communication between partners. “Jewish sexual ethics are defined by tradition,” he noted. “Gay sexual ethics are determined more on a personal level.” Rabbi Bauer also spoke about the position of power among men vis-a-vis women in a traditional Jewish relationship, a situation that may or may not be part of a gay couple’s relationship. Bauer finished his presentation by giving audience members two gay relationship scenarios and encouraging them to discuss the proper ethical responses in each. He concluded by observing that gay Jews are willing to address ethical issues that straight Jews may be reluctant to talk about. “We have wisdom that we can impart to youth groups, congregations and others, and we should,” he said. The next print edition of The CJN is Aug. 1.

Buzzworthy's Rachel and Jenna "hugging" One Direction.... Well, their cardboard cutouts, anyway. We'll take what we can get. I've always been what you might call an "indoor person." I hated summer camp growing up (and being an East Coast Jewish kid, you'd better believe that I went every year without fail), the idea of voluntarily "roughing it" makes me feel nauseous, and if it's raining outside, just forget it. Forget everything. Forget the plans we've made, because I am flaking out on that ish and running home to bury my face in blankets and old "Gossip Girl" episodes on Netflix. It would take a truly special experience to make me ignore bad weather and say stuff like, "Rain? Who cares? It's all good." And One Direction's June 28 outdoor concert at Jones Beach -- which got straight-up rained on -- was IT. Read more about One Direction's Jones Beach concert after the jump. First off, even if you didn't make it to 1D's show, you'll probably already guess that Harry, Niall, Louis, Zayn, and Liam spent the entire time being the very picture of charming, where they did stuff like pinch each other's cheeks, smack each other's bums, and throw their arms around each other like total bro-lads (between singing songs like "One Thing," "Live While We're Young," "Kiss You," and an AMAZING cover of "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus). They may not have danced (save for a few "Robot" moves), but heck, they actually seemed to LIKE each other! And did they care that it literally started to pour the second they went onstage? NOPE. We didn't have umbrellas, and neither did they. (All I'm saying is, "HARRY STYLES IN A WET T-SHIRT.") One Direction's most devoted fan army! Also, and perhaps most crucially, can we talk about the amount of screaming, crying fangirls? Unreal. Some even came dressed in coordinated 1D cheerleader outfits (see above photo), some sobbed uncontrollably when the guys sat down to sing a slowed-down rendition of "Little Things," but most brought homemade signage to wave furiously at the boys in between songs. My favorite moment, though? Definitely hugging a five-guy, life-size cardboard cutout of One Direction. Because that might be the closest I'll ever get to ACTUALLY hugging them, but, hey, I'll take what I can get. It's not every day five very cute boy banders make me forget about my fear and loathing of stormy weather... Which I may or may not have bought a 1D sweatshirt to shield myself from. Which I probably would have bought anyway. #OneDirectionExcuses. THE CROUD. THE SIGNS. Stay tuned for more "It's All Good" summer music moments with Fruttare. Photo credit: Rachel Brodsky

Welcome to the 1911Census.org.uk site ...information about the 1911 census, how to access the census online, how to make the most from your searches, what is available and not available, and much, much, more. 1939 National Identity Card A census of the United Kingdom was due to be taken in early 1941 but this never happened because of World War II. A census had been taken in 1931 but, for England and Wales, personal information has been lost, see here for more details and one was taken in 1951 but this leaves a big gap for family historians. However at the outbreak of the war, National Identity Cards were issued to everyone resident in the United Kingdom and the information recorded has been retained, so in a limited way we do have a 1939 mini census, which partially makes up for the lack of a 1941 census for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.. Basic facts about the 1939 National Identity Card Taken on the night of Friday 29th September 1939. Details recorded for each person were: As war approached, preparations were made to enable a national register to be rapidly compiled and identity cards issued. A National Registration Bill was quickly introduced and royal assent given on the 5th September 1939, just two days after the declaration of war and a few days later it was announced that National Registration Day would be Friday September 29th 1939. Three main reasons were put forward by the government for passing the law in September 1939. The first was the major dislocation of the population caused by mobilisation and mass evacuation and also the wartime need for complete manpower control and planning in order to maximise the efficiency of the war economy. The second was the likelihood of rationing, actually introduced from January 1940 onwards and the third main reason was that the Government needed recent statistics about the population. As the last census had been held in 1931, there was little accurate data on which to base vital planning decisions. The National Register was in fact an instant census and the National Registration Act closely resembles the 1920 Census Act in many ways. The decision was made to use similar methods as for the census for which planning had started for the 1941 census. Basically 65,000 enumerators across the country delivered forms ahead of the chosen day. On the 29th, householders were required to record details on the registration forms and then on the following Sunday and Monday the enumerators visited every householder, checked the form and there and then issued a completed identity card for each of the residents. Information gathered for each person was their address, name, sex, date of birth, marital condition, occupation and whether a member of the armed forces or reserves. Approximately 46 million cards were issued. The identity card had 2 pages and at top of each page the enumerator entered the person's name and their identity card number. This card number consisted of a four letter enumeration district code plus the line number of the schedule that was completed by the enumerator, e.g. for area ABCD, schedule line 24, 3rd person in the household the card number would have been "ABCD 24/3" On the right hand page of the cards was a space for the cardholder's full postal address and signature but when originally issued in 1939, there were strict instructions that this should be left blank for now. "Do nothing with this part until you are told. Nothing whatever must be written on this portion. It is there as a reserve provision for a certain kind of contingency which may or may not arise. If such a contingency does arise the public will be told what to do by broadcast or otherwise. Even in wartime allowances were made. The Daily Mail reported that members of the Wearside Jewish community who had been celebrating the eight-day Festival of the Tabernacles were allowed to delay for 24 hours the completion of their registration forms because they were forbidden by their faith to use pen or pencil during the festival. The Daily Mail also warned that anyone neglecting to register may have great difficulty in obtaining a ration book later. It did emerge subsequently that in some areas, a significant number of mothers had omitted their sons from the registration because they did not want them to be called up for National Service but later came forward to register them when they realised it was needed for ration books. In December provision was also made to make it possible to exchange an ordinary buff identity card for a green card with room for a photograph and description of the holder; the reason for this was to assist anyone who needed to provide better evidence of their identity where they did not possess any other acceptable document, for example if they required access to enter a protected area under the defence regulations. Later in late May 1940, presumably as the danger of an invasion increased, instructions were issued that everyone over 16 must now sign and date the card and write their address on the right hand page of the card and also that the card must be carried at all times. In the case of under 16s, the parent or guardian had the responsibility of signing the card and entering the address; under 16s were instructed not to carry the card with them but instead follow advice given earlier of carrying a luggage label or card with them with their name, address and national registration identity number. Initially, adult identity cards were buff, the same colour as children's cards, but in 1943 when registration and rationing were combined, a blue card was introduced and issued to all adults, replacing their previous cards. A new buff card for children was introduced at the same time but existing children's cards were not replaced apart from when a new card was necessary. The Identity Card was finally abolished in February 1952, but the identity numbers were used within the National Health Service to give everyone an individual number. People who had a national identity number during the Second World War or just after still have the same number as their NHS identity today. The 1939 Identity Card Registers for England and Wales, the 1939 Register, is now available on line at www.findmypast.co.uk/1939Register. Access to the register is available as part of a findmypast annual (note not monthly) subscriptions or by using separately purchased credits The 1939 Identity Card Information is now in the care of the NHS Information Centre since it was used to form the basis of the NHS Central Register, a list of everyone who is, or ever has been, registered with a General Practitioner in England and Wales since the foundation of the National Health Service in July 1948. Until 1991 a manual (paper-based) system was in operation, since then a computer system known as CHRIS (Central Health Register Enquiry System) has been used. Guy Etchells who was responsible for the challenge to the Information Commissioner that resulted in the 1911 census for England and Wales being released "early" (well early as far as the government was concerned) also challenged the refusal of the NHS Information Centre to release information taken during the 1939 Identity Card Registration and in late 2009 received a ruling by the Information Commissioner partially in his favour where that information relates to deceased persons. The ruling can be seen here. In response to this and a large number of people following Guy's lead and also making requests, the National Health Service Information Centre introduced at the end of January 2010 a formal service for people to request data held on the 1939 Register for England and Wales. There is a charge for this was £42 but this service has now ceased as you can get all the information from findmypast. If you do not want to use findmypast, you can make a request to the National Archives for a search of closed records within the 1939 Registers. The charge for a search is £27.30. More details here. Identity Card Information for Scotland is not available at findmypast. For Scotland, there are details here on how you can order an official extract. The charge is £15 for a person search. A copy of the death certificate of the person who is the subject of the enquiry is required if the death of the person was not registered in Scotland. If no trace is found, then the charge is reduced to the "no trace charge" of £5. Applications should be sent to the General Register Office for Scotland, New Register House, Edinburgh EH1 3YT and you can pay by cheque or credit card. For Northern Ireland, the records are the responsibility of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. There is no formal process set up to obtain data; you will need to make a FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the archives. We always welcome any comments, suggestions or corrections - you can contact us at the feedback email address on the left

Express shelters under Mirror umbrella The takeover of the Daily Express by Trinity Mirror is unlikely to produce more than one winner, the shrewd vendor Richard Desmond pictured above being the most likely. To some observers The Daily Express under Desmond’s management has effectively become the UKIP Daily News. While that may not be entirely accurate, the paper is certainly more right wing now than it was when controlled by its founder, Lord Beaverbrook. Bringing both titles together under the same holding company was unthinkable all through the 20th century. But as news is increasingly disseminated by the Internet, the sales and advertising revenue of the once all-powerful printed titles have been in free fall and the impossible has become reality. While Express readers fear their beloved title will be hauled left by the Mirror, as red as it ever was in the halcyon days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, a bigger threat is the jobs that will be lost as Trinity Mirror cuts the costs that the takeover makes possible. All publishers are trying to save money, so stories are frequently recycled without fact checking. As rewriting is not journalism, many relatively new entrants are turning to PR. For Press Gazette’s take on the situation follow this link: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/source-ripping-culture-at-national-newspaper-website-prompts-most-graduate-trainees-to-leave-journalism-for-pr/ As Britain’s national newspapers are being pushed towards extinction by information technology, the fine reputation British journalism once had could not be earned today. So it seems a good time to share some of my favourite pieces from the past. Please scroll down: The Austerity Olympics, Ben Macintyre in The Times, March 31 2012 The photographs of the 1948 Olympics evoke an earlier, simpler sporting world: unglamorous, unsophisticated, threadbare and yet, in its post-war, chin-up, make-do spirit, profoundly moving. The athletes had knobbly knees and bad teeth. They ran in homemade shorts on a converted dog-racing track lined with cinders collected from the domestic hearths of Leicester. They brought their own towels, ate cheese sandwiches and slept in wooden huts; they competed ferociously to win medals, and to celebrate peace. The London Olympics of 1948, staged just three years after the end of the Second World War, was an avowedly political event. The conflict had threatened to kill off the competition, and war coloured every aspect of the occasion. Captured German POWs laboured to build the facilities. Many athletes had seen wartime service and some bore the physical scars. This was the DIY Olympics, scraped together from whatever could be found, adapted or borrowed. At Richmond Park, 2,000 athletes slept on iron bedsteads in wooden army huts. Many competitors sewed their own kit. Basketballs, footballs and boxing gloves were sold off afterwards to recoup some of the cost. Milk, eggs and cheese were still rationed, although Olympians were permitted twice the normal calorific ration. The first chill of Cold War was in the air, but the focus was firmly on healing wounds of the last war. On entering Wembley, spectators were greeted with the words: ‘The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.’ The message was clear: had the Allies not fought well, there would have been no Olympics. The long-distance runner Emile Zátopek caught the emotive significance of these cheap, cheerful, history-changing Games: ‘After all those dark days – the bombing, the killing, the starvation – the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out.’ The very frugality of the ‘Austerity Olympics’ was a repudiation of Hitler’s Olympic propaganda extravaganza in 1936. Britain put together an Olympics with what was left after Hitler had done his worst. Assembled from shreds and patches in a spirit of optimism and friendly international rivalry, the 1948 Olympics mended the soul of sport. Stick it up you punt-er, Kelvin Mackenzie in The Times, 17 November 2009 One day while editing The Sun I came to a momentous conclusion about my colleagues: they weren’t academic enough. Glancing round the newsroom I simply couldn’t see University Challenge material. There wasn’t much evidence of Blue Peter material either. A revolution was needed. A new hiring policy would be adopted to raise the IQ in the newsroom. Out would go the traditional employment pool of Britain’s No 1 selling newspaper, ie, the devious, the deceitful and those with alcohol-dependency issues. Instead, from now on, all the new reporters would come from Oxbridge. It would be brains, brains and more brains. The Sun, as you may have already concluded, is not the natural dropping off point for academia, but slowly, as word spread, the firsts and PhDs began making their way to my office. I hired them in a matter of seconds. Balliol College, Oxford, you’re in. Trinity, Cambridge sign here, Magdalen, Oxford, welcome aboard. Satisfied that my bold move would take The Sun to a higher plain I waited for the results. They were not forthcoming. In fact, very little emerged from my new hirelings. Most disappointing. I had to get to the bottom of this. It became clear that with their keen and analytical minds they had made a fatal mistake — they had continued investigating every story to the point where they had satisfied themselves that there was no story at all. This would not do. I called in one of the super-brains and explained a philosophy that had served me and the paper reasonably well over the years. The reporter leant forward with an earnest look as I told him the secret: if a story sounded true it probably was true and therefore should appear in the paper or there would be lots of white, unexplained spaces. Whether it was my pep talk or the sense that The Sun was not for them I will never know, but over the months ahead they slowly headed for the door never to return. I had only one O level and it was a massive disappointment that I was not to be surrounded by clever clogs, but we were now short of reporters and therefore a fresh approach was needed — one that I could not pass by the HR department. From this day forth, we would employ only women with large breasts. You may not be all that surprised that this initiative was a major success. It became clear that a grisly and overworked chief superintendent at a murder scene responds more warmly to questions from a lady with a hint of cleavage than a balding newshound with four pints of Boddingtons on his breath. And, frankly, who can blame him. Even to me it came as something of a shock that breasts beats brains, but you have to embrace change, don’t you? So it was with some sense of trepidation that I arrived in Cambridge the other day to see a new tabloid that was entirely run by the brains department. It’s called The Tab, an online newspaper, aimed at the 15,000 students in the city. The speed with which The Tab brings university news to the students gives it the edge over its print rivals Varsity and the student union newspaper. Competition has reached the kind of open warfare witnessed only between Lidl and Tesco. One Tab writer told me: “I used to be quite friendly with the editor of Varsity, but once we started Tab she cut me dead in the street . . . In fact she turned her head into the wall the other day.” (I used to hate the Editor of the Daily Mirror in the same way when he sold four million a day and we were the underdog. Now that The Sun is top dog by many millions while the Mirror manages only just over a million a day, I feel vaguely sorry for him for having such a bloody awful job and also being forced to support Brown every day. Life doesn’t get much worse than that.) The fascinating thing is that I didn’t have to lecture the team on the joys of tabloid — it was already in their genes. They knew what their audience wanted — the secret of The Sun’s 40-year success. So as I said farewell to Cambridge I realised that I made a mistake all those years ago — I should have persevered with the brains. They are the tabloid titans of today — and tomorrow. And yet . . . By the time I got home, I found myself wondering how these youngsters would deal with the rough and tumble of real politics — “the dark actors playing games”, as the late weapons expert Dr David Kelly so graphically put it. John Major once asked me, just before the paper was to be printed, how we were going to report Britain’s exit from the ERM, which was going to cost our country around £5 billion, thanks to his ineptitude. I told him we were going to pour a bucket of shit over him. My sense is that the Cambridge mob are too middle class, too well-mannered, too educated to pour anything but a bucket of Puligny-Montrachet over anyone’s head. That’s their one drawback to a life in the tabloid arena. They were simply too nice. How awful. Their Worships were not amused, Western Morning News, 16 April 1994 Barnsley: A Monty Python fan came up with something completely different when he appeared before Barnsley magistrates. When the clerk to the magistrates asked the man for his name, he replied: ‘Mr Two Sheds Luxury Yacht Patang Patang Biscuit Barrel Community Care Over The Top Jackson.’ Magistrates were not impressed and remanded him in custody for four weeks. Sticky end for Pooh, Steve Absalom in the Daily Mail, 15 May 1987 Winnie the Pooh has been branded fat, unfit, and self-indulgent – by a honey firm. Gales, who dropped Pooh from their product advertising, have now rejected an offer to back a musical based on A.A. Milne’s classic character because he is giving honey a bad name. The bear of little brain and bulging waistline, who for six decades has gorged on the sticky delicacy, is considered out of step with our health-conscious times. The snub – likely to shock residents of 100 Acre Wood – came when theatre producer Vanessa Ford approached Gales parent company Rowntree Mackintosh. She asked them to sponsor the music, which is set to come to the West End later this year. ‘They wrote back saying they felt the market for their product had changed, and they did not feel they could promote Winnie the Pooh when he looks as if he is self-indulgent and fat because of honey,’ said a bewildered Vanessa. Vanessa, whose touring company is one of Britain’s most successful, said she considered her request to Gales perfectly reasonable. But the firm is adamant that these days honey should be portrayed as a natural, fitness-inspiring health food, and not the sort of delicious indulgence whose pursuit leads to rotund bears becoming wedged in rabbit holes. ‘We were astonished when they told us what they though of Pooh,’ said Vanessa. ‘It’s quite ludicrous.’ And in Pooh Corner, Fleming, Devon – the house where A.A. Milne’s 67-year-old son Christopher Robin lives – there was also regret that Pooh has become a victim of nouvelle cuisine and healthy living. Mr Milne’s wife, Lesley, said: ‘He’ll be sad that Pooh is now thought too plump to be a West End star.’ Last night a Gales spokesman said: ‘We don’t really want to comment on this.’ But Miss Myra Ibbotson, of The British Dietetic Association said: ‘There’s no particular nutritional benefit in honey. It is high in calories.’ They eat horses, don’t they?, Daily Mirror Comment*, 10 September 1980 A world survey by a French magazine says that the best friends of France are the English, which will surprise a great many Englishmen who think we hate each other. Noel Coward summarised the Anglo attitude to the French when he said: ‘There is always something fishy about them.’ The fact is that we don’t know them very well and what we don’t know we don’t trust. It is true we have often fought in the same wears. But the only time we came close to losing was when they were our side. Maybe they do have the best wine, the most glamorous women, the cleverest cuisine and the most elegant style. But do they deserve any of them? It is said that they cook while the British only open tins. But what do they cook? Snails (disgusting). Frogs legs (distasteful). And horses (barbaric). They grow an apple to Golden Delicious which is green, not gold, and about as delicious as a ball of wool marinated in castor oil. What’s more, it’s putting our growers out of business. And now we are told we are their best friends. It’s ridiculous. The only thing we’ve got in common is the English Channel. The English Channel. * Written by Joe Haines Remembering Uncle Leib, Donald B. Williams in the Jewish Chronicle, 25 March 1975 Uncle Leib was what I called him. But he was known officially as Louis, referred to by his mother as ‘Lentchie’, by Livaks as ‘Label’ and Pollaks as ‘Libel’. If he had ever had his IQ tested, a record low score might well have been achieved. He was nevertheless a compulsive reader in the same as others are compulsive eaters, drinkers or smokers. When I was a child, he read my comics. During my adolescence he read my Rover and Hotspur. While I was a student, he once went as far as to read part of Kant’s work on Categorical Imperative when there was nothing else to read after he had read Sporting Life. He could never have been handsome, children often teased him about his features, although they loved him as he clearly loved them. They treated him as one of them. One of his other nephews had to be packed off to bed for calling him ‘Frankenstein’ to his face. To compensate for all this and as an extra bonus, Uncle Leib had been given a warm, golden heart as big as his enormous height. I was just beginning my National Service and in the middle of square-bashing when he died. There is little of significance for me to remember of my two years in the RAF apart from the vaccination I was given on the day of my 21st birthday, the time I fell asleep while on sentry duty (punishable by death in time of war!) and the rather enjoyable week out of uniform on a model Leadership Course organised by the Rev I. Levy. But Uncle Leib’s death had repercussions he could never have envisaged. The sad news was conveyed to me during one of my numerous phone calls home. The corporal in charge told me it might be a good opportunity to apply for compassionate leave. He understood that ‘your people’ go in for funerals in a big way and intimated that I would be missing something really special if I remained in camp. He offered me a form of application to put in to the CO. My excitement was without bounds. The continual marching and drilling in frosty weather, the endless polishing of brasses and blanco-ing of webbing, being bullied by all above the rank of AC Plonk and looming above all, the assault course (some, we were told, had broken legs, arms or had died) on the following day contrasted in my mind with the prospect of a few days at home. The words to put on the application form were not easy to find. It was all right as far as ‘I humbly apply to me Commanding Officer for compassionate leave to attend….’ But how to describe it? I could not tell anyone that, under Jewish Law, we tend to bury our dead quickly and that kaddish had already probably been recited at Uncle Leib’s graveside. And what word in the English language (or any other language for that matter) can convey all that is implied by the shiva with its procession of well-wishing visitors, the expression reserved for such occasions, the faces of instant members of the family never to be seen at weddings and barmitzvahs, the shmaltz herrings, the baigels, to day nothing of the boxes of chocolates and cigarettes left half-guiltily in the hall for the benefit of the mourners? There was only one word that came to my mind – after ‘…compassionate leave to attend;’, I honestly scribbled the words ‘the funeral celebrations of my late Uncle Louis.’ The corporal obviously thought it was the right word. He had visions of the bottles of whisky at an Irish wake. He initialled the form which was then passed on to the sergeant, who uttered a vile string of obscenities about religion before adding his reluctant approval. Not long after, during drill instruction on the icy parade ground, the message came through. I was ordered to ‘fall out’ amid the groans of envy from the others. My application had been granted. After a short, tearful but not unpleasant few days’ reunion with my family, I returned to camp. Not only had I missed the assault course, but somehow an entry had been made in the official record that I had passed as a ‘first class shot’ on the rifle range, without a shot being fired by me. Uncle Leib would have been proud of me! Prince of petomane, Peter Lennon in The Guardian, July 1967 For 14 July, the time when the Parisians give voice with pêtard and brass-band to whatever dry store of joy is still left in them, a publisher, M. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, has very appropriately produced a handsome tribute to one of the most celebrated noise-makers the European stage has ever known: M. Joseph Pujol. At the height of his career as a star of the Moulin Rouge Marcel Pagnol in his book ‘Notes of Laughter’ tells us that Joseph Pujol could draw matinee gates worth 20,000 francs, while Sarah Bernhardt the same week only manager 8,000. Eyewitnesses claim that he was one of the greatest amusers of all time. His career spanned more than 20 years. Why then does the name Pujol mean nothing to us today? Because to perpetuate his name it is necessary to describe what he did, and for a couple of generations this simply could not be done in print. (Perhaps it still can’t.) Dear me, how styles of entertainment have changed! Pujol described himself as ‘Le Pêtomane.’ Not to beat about the bush Pujol’s talent was that he could fart like nobody else in the world, before, then or since. He could fart tenderly (le petit pet timide de la jeune fille) or aggressively (le pet rond du macon) rapidly like a machine gun – or he could produced a deep, slow cannon-roar lasting up to ten seconds. He could give a very good account of a do ra me fa derriêre-wise, imitate a violin, a bass, or the timbre of a trombone. Pujol was no scurvy, back-street, perverted farter. He only farted in the very best places, and for considerable sums of money. Eyewitnesses insist on the gravity and impassibility of his performance, and the essential seriousness of this father of ten buxom children. In 1887, the year Mallarmê published ‘L’Apres midi d’une Faune’, Pujol, aged 30, appeared for the first time on a public stage in Marseilles. His talent had already been the envy of his schoolmates, the admiration of his regiment, and evoked the solicitous respect of his family. Within a week Marseilles, Paris, Brussels, North Africa, all over Europe Pujol presented an unchanging ritual. Dressed in a red coat and black satin knickerbockers, he would approach the ramp and announced gravely: ‘Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs, I have the honour to present to you a performance of petomania….’ He would then stoop and begin his finely graded escalating performance. In his history of the ‘Caf’conc’, Jacques-Charles describes the scene at the Moulin Rouge. ‘At first the audience would remain astounded. Then someone would be stricken with a crazy laugh. In a moment people would be howling and staggering with laughter. Some would stand paralysed, tears pouring down their cheeks, while others beat their heads and fell on the floor. Ladies would begin to suffocate in their tight corsets, and for this reason there were always a number of white-coated nurses in attendance.’ Mlle Yvette Guilbert wrote: ‘It was at the Moulin Rouge that I heard the longest spasms of laughter, the most hysterical cries of hilarity that I have ever heard in my life.’ The King of the Belgians travelled incognito to Paris for as private demonstration by M. Pujol. But it was not only an audience in search of a belly laugh who flocked to see Pujol; the Academy of Medicine in Paris was, so to speak, hot on his tail. Pujol, partly to prove the authenticity of his performance (which he could hardly do on the stage of the Moulin Rouge) submitted to a number of elaborate medical examinations which are described in ‘La Semaine Medical’ of 1882 by a Dr Marcel Baudouin with a zest for enthusiasm for detail which unfortunately cannot be reproduced here. Pujol finally broke with the Moulin Rouge and opened his own theatre, the Pompadour. Then, in 1898, the year Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium, Pujol discovered that the Moulin Rouge were going to present a rival female pêtomanie. He brought an action for unauthorised imitation. Lawyers had to attend the theatre and note the range, quality and form of the lady’s performance. But before the cased actually came to court the lady was exposed as a fraud (she had whistles hidden in her skirts). Pujol, who lived to be 88, was an outstanding example of man’s ingenuity in making the best of whatever gifts nature bestows – be they every so curious. With extraordinary courage, and by the sheer quality of his performance, he imposed the fart on a stupefied but defenceless Europe. He was a star until 1914 when the countries of Europe decided to get together on a roaring orgy of petomania of their own which was no doubt distasteful to this gentle and scrupulous performer. (By the way, he claims never to have suffered from stagefright.) How has his name come to light again? Simply because his family of honest bakers and masons in Marseilles were pained that their famous ancestor had become so neglected. Around 14 July (last year) they had the idea of appealing to a pair of well-known journalists on the ORTF pointing out the injustice that: ‘France has done nothing for the memory of its petomane!’ Now justice has been done. But, alas, given the standards of our time the tribute could neither be aural nor visual.

Defined as the “act of ascending,” making Aliyah by moving to Israel is one of the most basic and fundamental tenets of Zionism. When the State of Israel was established in 1948, the country served as a haven for Jews worldwide fleeing oppression and anti-Semitism. In Israel’s short 70-year history, a tremendous shift has occurred: Jews from North America and Canada are making Aliyah not because they are forced to, but out of a desire to actively participate in writing the next chapter of Jewish history. 57,000. That is the number of immigrants who have come to Israel since 2002 thanks to Nefesh B’Nefesh, in cooperation with the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency, Keren Kayemeth Le’Israel and the Jewish National Fund USA. The mission of the organization is to facilitate Aliyah for Jews from North America, Canada and the UK. Recognizing significant contributions Five years ago, in 2013, Nefesh B’Nefesh decided it was time to formally recognize the significant contributions of English-speaking immigrants to the State of Israel in the form of the Bonei Zion Prize. This award is an expression of support for Olim whose contributions have helped better Israel in a meaningful way, and an acknowledgement of those who encapsulate the spirit of modern-day Zionism by contributing toward developing the State of Israel. Thanks to the generosity of Sylvan Adams, each year Anglo Olim who are building, developing and advancing their respective fields, are chosen to be recipients of the Sylvan Adams Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize (www.boneizion.org.il). “In my role as ‘ambassador,’” says Sylvan, “I am promoting Israel both locally and internationally, showing off what I like to call ‘normal Israel,’ that is, a small country disproportionately succeeding and leading in a world-beating, exemplary fashion for the betterment of our earthly community. Showcasing and celebrating the impact of Anglo Olim within Israel and beyond is an integral piece of this mission.” In describing the importance of the Sylvan Adams Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion awards, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Nefesh B’Nefesh Rabbi Yehoshua Fass referred to the prize recipients as “everyday heroes who are the foundation of the Jewish State and the lifeblood of our people.” This year’s winners This year, seven outstanding immigrants are being celebrated for their role in improving Israel through science and medicine; education; young leadership; community and non-profit; Israel advocacy; culture, sports, and arts. In the science and medicine category, Dr. Marcia Javitt, MD, FACR, FSAR, FSRU, made Aliyah from Maryland in 2013 and joined the faculties of both Rambam and the Technion in 2014. She was recruited to Israel as chairman of Radiology at Rambam to transform diagnostic imaging for northern Israel’s two million citizens who rely on Rambam as their primary medical center. In only three years, Dr. Javitt initiated collaborative innovative research in prostate cancer focal therapy and began development of a new breast cancer screening modality without ionizing radiation. In the Israel advocacy field, Arsen Ostrovsky is no stranger to the fight for Israel and the fight against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Ostrovsky, originally from Australia, made Aliyah from New York in 2012. An international human-rights lawyer and executive director of the Israeli-Jewish Congress, he has testified and spoken in support of Israel before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the United Nations in New York and the European Parliament. Linda Streit, who made Aliyah from London in 1978, received the prize for culture, art and sport. In 2003, she founded what would become Israel’s leading facility for rowing, sailing, kayaking and dragon boats; the Daniel Amichai Center for Rowing and Nautical Studies was named in memory of her son, Daniel Amichai Marcus, who, at the time of his death, was a promising athlete. The center also serves as the home of the national Olympic and Paralympic team. Maj. Keren Hajioff received this year’s Young Leadership award. Born and raised in the UK, Haijoff made Aliyah soon after high school in 2009. A month after moving to Israel, she joined the IDF, serving as an instructor in the Artillery Corps. She moved quickly through the ranks and graduated from officers’ school. She currently serves as the head of public diplomacy in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and was recently promoted to the rank of Major. Kalman Samuels was awarded the prize for his nonprofit work in the community. After making Aliyah from Vancouver in 1983, Samuels, together with his wife Malki, established Shalva, the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities. Throughout the last 28 years, he has made an everlasting impact on Israel’s social services structure and beyond. The recipient in the education category, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin, has dedicated his entire life to serving the Jewish people. He made Aliyah from New York in 1983 and his visionary contributions have redefined Modern Orthodox leadership, reshaping the face of contemporary Jewish education. Riskin also played a massive role in empowering women to partake in the highest levels of Jewish learning, spiritual leadership and meaningful service in the IDF. The Lifetime Achievement award went to Morris Kahn. After making Aliyah in 1956 at age 26 with his wife and two children, Kahn realized that foresight and business acumen were key to achieving his first large-scale success in the business world with the establishment of Israel’s Golden (Yellow) Pages in 1968. Recently, Kahn has increasingly focused his attention on philanthropy and venture philanthropy. He supports, among other things, cutting-edge stem-cell research, including the establishment of a laboratory for fertility preservation among cancer patients at Sheba Hospital; and a biomedical research laboratory focusing on genetics and genetic mapping. His philanthropic endeavors have also made cataract and trachoma surgery available to Ethiopian villagers. He is a major donor to the NGO Save a Child’s Heart. The goal of the Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize has been to highlight to Jews worldwide that one can succeed in Israel even as a newcomer. The prize recipients exemplify how Anglo Olim are making historic advancements and contributing, each in their own field, to the success of the country and the Jewish nation. Want to enjoy 'Zen' reading - with no ads and just the article? Subscribe todaySubscribe now

… is Far From Being Right Q: Hi Kevin. I was wondering: we have some friends here that have gotten into the… stuff [being espoused by a controversial Jewish-roots teacher, i.e.], “special” understanding of the calendar, New Moon by email sightings in Jerusalem, etc. We know [from personal experience that the teacher is] bad news. This time around it’s divisive—for example, [while our congregation observed] Rosh HaShannah on 9/8 with the rest of the world, [our friend insisted it should be] on 9/10 when his email says the moon was seen ([and] therefore all the [following holy] days [are to be observed differently] as well). If you choose to observe some other date, [most Jewish people are] only going to be aware of the dates on a generic calendar, and [if they want to attend a Messianic synagogue service]… you miss the chance to witness to them about Messiah. Have you ever had to try and lead someone out of [this] kind of junk? Thanks! A: On one hand, I’m sympathetic to the desire to follow Israel’s calendar according to observation, rather than the often inaccurate, traditional Jewish calendar. I have to admit that knowledge of the erroneous nature of the currently accepted calendar makes me yearn for the calendar’s restoration. In my experience, however, most people’s motivation for such a restoration comes not out of a desire for the restoration of the Jewish people, but out of the desire to be “right.” Sometimes this desire is pure, wanting to honor the Word of God, but more often, I have seen it spawn from negative, anti-authoritarian sentiments, usually aimed at proving Christianity wrong—and in this case, it would be to prove everyone wrong, including Rabbinic Judaism. While I am no fan of rabbinics, my personal desire for a restored calendar does not come from a need to disprove a practice of Judaism and assert an alleged spiritual superiority. All that to say, when dealing with such a person, it is crucial to discern the motives of his heart (Prov.16:2) before confronting him about the division that is being caused. It is quite likely that the reports out of the Land that your friend is referencing regarding the moon are accurate. The teacher to whom you refer has historically worked with a non-Yeshua-believing Karaite Jew who has made inroads among the Messianic fringe. The Karaites in general practice the observation of the moon in the Land, and this particular Karaite broadcasts their findings on the internet. My issue with altering the traditional calendar based on the word of the Karaites, however, is not due to their suspected inaccuracy, but because I don’t recognize their authority. Why would I submit to one non-messianic authority (Karaites) to subvert another non-messianic authority (the Rabbinic calendar)? I address this issue at length at https://www.perfectword.org/dtc—it might be a beneficial read for you. From a practical standpoint, if it were me, I would counsel your friends to just celebrate everything twice—once as part of the community, the other time to satisfy their conscience. Even the traditional calendar makes provision for multi-day observance exactly because of discrepancies in the observance of the new moon. That said, if someone is benefiting from being part of the community, then unity ought to be a priority, especially when creative ideas can help resolve conflict. How do you lead someone out of this “junk”? First realize that the “junk” is probably rooted in a lack of secure identity in Messiah, and in his overall approach to Scripture. In this instance, he is very “right” in his assessment of the facts. The problem is in his motivation for being “right.” It is more important for him to be “right” about a non-eternal, exclusively-Israeli issue* than to find a way to bring consensus among the community (1Co.1:10)—or even consider the possibility that he is mistaken in his making such waves. Unless your relationship with this brother is one in which you are mutually accountable to one another (Ep.5:21), you really don’t have the ability to offer correction—whether it’s correcting the facts, his heart-attitude, or both. A disciple reflects the attitudes and teachings of his master. If your friend is subjecting himself to “bad news,” and he is not open to your counsel, he needs your prayers and compassion, and to be exposed to voices that will nurture positive change in his walk with the Master. *The whole thing is moot because neither you nor he—nor I—are in the Land, therefore, none of us can truly “keep the feast.” What do you think? Weigh in with your comments below. This “Messy Messianics” article was originally published in Messianic Jewish Issues. Messy Messianics, a recurring feature in Messianic Jewish Issues, is provided as a resource for helping troubled friends back from the fringe.

GI SPECIAL 3D35: Americans Welcome Iraqi Troops An American man speaks to his son while Iraqi Marines watch in the courtyard of his house in El Paso, Texas, eight miles from New Mexico, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005. Americans thank the Iraqi soldiers every day for liberating them from the Bush regime. Although they have occupied the United States for nearly three years, most Americans do not wish them to leave, fearing that Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and other Americo-fascist terrorist gangs fighting the occupation will seize the country if they withdraw too soon, leading to a bloodbath of sectarian violence and civil war. Elsewhere in America, nine Iraqi soldiers were killed and four wounded by an IED near Amarillo, Texas. Although a video tape from the Patrick Henry Brigade claimed responsibility, General Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Commander of the Multi-National Liberation Forces, said that the Charles Manson terrorist organization, made up of foreign fighters, had organized the attack. The Manson Network has been blamed for most of the terrorist attacks launched against Iraqi soldiers. His primitive fanatical fundamentalist followers believe that if they die fighting Coalition forces, they were be taken to heaven on the wings of an American bird called a "dove" and welcomed there by Jesus. There is a reward of 25,000,000 dinars offered for Mansons' capture. General al-Hakim noted that "This is really about a clash of civilizations. The Anglo-Saxon culture, which dominates in America, is directly descended from the Vikings, who looted, raped, burned, slaughtered the innocent, and spread terror throughout the civilized world. Nothing has changed since. We are here on a civilizing mission. Someday they will thank us. And their children are so cute. They just love the candy, pencils, and soccer balls we give them." Commenting on recent news stories, the General denied that American prisoners were being tortured in Coalition detention centers. "Of the 6,495,000 American now detained, only a few have complained about their treatment. What would you expect terrorists to say? Ha ha." The General admitted that nearly 18,000 Americans have been killed at Coalition checkpoints, but said that "they have all been warned, and only crackheads and drunks" have been shot. When asked about children killed at checkpoints, he noted that "in America, even children become crackheads and drunks." "It is regrettable, but this is war, and the American terrorists are responsible for every death," he said. "If they would only accept reality, and stop their attacks on Coalition forces, there would be no casualties." IRAQ WAR REPORTS Florida Marine Killed Marine Sgt. Daniel J. Clay, 27, of Pensacola, Fla., was killed, Dec. 1, 2005, in the explosion of a roadside bomb during a foot patrol near Fallujah, Iraq. (AP Photo/Department of Defense, Helene C. Stikkel) Texas Marine Killed Marine Lance Cpl. Robert A. Martinez, 20, of Splendora, Texas, was killed by a roadside bomb while on foot patrol Dec. 1, 2005, near Fallujah, Iraq. (AP Photo) California Marine Killed Sgt. Andy A. Stevens 29, of Tomah, was killed in Fallujah. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, based in Twentynine Palms, Calif. Stevens, who joined the Marines in June 1995 and was serving as a scout sniper, deployed to Iraq with his unit in July, the Marine Corps said. (AP Photo/U.S.M.C.) Two U.S. Soldiers Killed In Baghdad Suburb Dec 4 (Reuters) BAGHDAD - Two U.S. soldiers were killed and several others wounded when their convoy was attacked in a roadside bombing in a south eastern suburb of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. A military spokeswoman said that two Humvees were destroyed in the ambush. West View Soldier Killed December 4, 2005 By Luis Fabregas, TRIBUNE-REVIEW A West View soldier killed in Iraq last week had been traveling in a six-vehicle convoy when it was ambushed by insurgents, military officials said Saturday. Sgt. 1st Class Brent A. Adams was the driver of a 5-ton reinforced truck that was hit by a rocket at about 4:30 p.m. Thursday, said Lt. Col. Chris Cleaver, a Pennsylvania National Guard spokesman. Adams served as a motor sergeant, supervising maintenance men who work on military vehicles. Adams was six months into a one-year deployment. Before arriving in Iraq in June, he had spent six months training at Camp Shelby, A 1995 graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Adams had spent 18 years in the military after enlisting in Ford City in 1987. Adams is survived by his wife, Marilyn, a 4-year-old son, Daniel, his parents and a sister. U.S. Soldier Wounded Near Balad Dec. 4 (UPI) The U.S. military said one of its soldiers was injured and two insurgents killed in clashes near the town of Balad, in which U.S. F-16 jet fighters launched laser-guided missiles on the area. Three U.S. Soldiers Wounded By Southern Baghdad IED Dec. 4 (UPI) Three U.S. soldiers were also injured by an explosive device targeting a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol in southern Baghdad. Two U.S. Soldiers Wounded By Western Baghdad IED US forces reported a roadside bomb attack on one of its convoys in Khadra, a neighbourhood in western Baghdad. Master Sergeant David Abrams, a military spokesman, said: "It looks like there were two wounded who were taken to a nearby medical NO HONORABLE MISSION: BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW Two U.S. soldiers walk among the rubble of collapsed building in central Baghdad after two early morning explosions November 18, 2005. REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz "Measuring Dead Or Captured Iraqis Has No Relevance" Looking at the strength of the insurgency, however, makes it clear that measuring dead or captured Iraqis has no relevance. While U.S. and coalition forces have killed or arrested 40,000-50,000 Iraqis since the war began, the resistance continues to thrive. Over the last year their estimated strength remained unchanged with 20,000 fighters and 200,000 sympathizers. November 21, 2005 By Adil Shamoo, Foreign Policy In Focus In the wake of the 2,000th U.S. soldier dying because of the Iraq War, the Bush administration has begun to count the number of Iraqi dead and captured. These metrics, reminiscent of those used in the Vietnam War, will be touted by the administration as an indicator of success for military operations and to give the impression that the insurgency can be neutralized. Looking at the strength of the insurgency, however, makes it clear that measuring dead or captured Iraqis has no relevance. While U.S. and coalition forces have killed or arrested 40,000-50,000 Iraqis since the war began, the resistance continues to thrive. Over the last year their estimated strength remained unchanged with 20,000 fighters and 200,000 sympathizers. The Bush administration continued focus on killing and detaining of Iraqi insurgents clearly is not working. The numbers suggest that every insurgent killed or captured results in new recruits. Even if the 160,000 U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq could figure out a way to kill every insurgent, it is the occupation of the country that is breeding new recruits. Iraqis have no tradition of suicide bombing but the recent Iraqi suicide bombers in Amman, Jordan is a good example of the new challenges that are arising from the war. Compounding the problem, the U.S. has ignored the voices from Iraqi people calling for ending the occupation. Over the last eighteen months, Iraqi voices for U.S. withdrawal have become louder. They are now reaching a crescendo that if unheeded, may breed a new nationalistic and expanded insurgency born solely as a result of our continued occupation of Iraq. If this happens, the new insurgency will be wider and stronger than the present one. Its focus, in most parts, will not be directed against Iraqis; rather it will be directed against the U.S. All of the ingredients for such an insurgency to occur First, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis opposes occupation. Second, most Iraqi households possess arms. AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS Resistance Attacks "Near Daily" December 1, 2005 By Griff Witte, Washington Post In the past two weeks, Afghanistan has experienced The recent attacks -- including at least nine suicide bombings -- have shown unusual levels of coordination, technological knowledge, and blood lust, according to officials. Although military forces and facilities have been the most common targets, religious leaders, judges, police officers, and foreign reconstruction workers have also fallen prey to the violence. Attackers have also shown a growing appetite for strikes in cities, particularly Kabul, setting residents' nerves on edge and leading them to take new security precautions at work, home, and social events. "Patience Is Running Out" [Thanks to JM, who sent this in.] 01 Dec 2005 By Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters [Excerpts] KABUL: Nearly four years after the Taliban were forced from power, the country remains mired in poverty and corruption, and frustration with the government is growing. While some main provincial road links have been rebuilt and new buildings, including shopping centres and a luxury hotel, have gone up in the capital, prices have also been rising fast and many people feel their lives have not improved. A problem for President Hamid Karzai, a year after he formed a new government following a sweeping election victory, is that people's expectations have been raised, but not met. "Only make promises you can fulfil," said an old man who approached Karzai while he was on a recent visit to Herat, Afghanistan's most prosperous city, near the border with Iran. Just before that encounter, Karzai had made a speech to Herat citizens in which he spoke of his government's determination to improve the economy, the livelihoods of the people, and to rebuild roads, schools and hospitals. "People have become fed up with promises and not seeing much improvement practically," said Wadir Safi, a law professor of While foreign aid workers and top government officials drive around Kabul in luxury cars and live in smart houses, some costing $5,000 or more a month, rebuilding has been slow and even non-existent in many places while corruption is rampant, critics say. Kabul has endured intermittent blackouts for weeks -- not a problem for those with generators and money to fuel them but infuriating for The government recently announced the fulfilment of one of Karzai's long-awaited promises; increasing salaries of civil servants and The pay rise of nearly 40 percent sounds impressive but for most it worked out to a pittance -- just $7 a month -- taking an average salary for a civil servant to just over $20 a month, according to officials. Many of those who got the pay rise ridiculed it and the next day, dozens of women teachers from Zarghona High School, a famous Kabul school, protested over the paltry raise in a rare display of assertiveness by women in the conservative Muslim country. "Karzai promised to raise government employees' salaries more than three years ago," said a woman teacher Nadira Ahmadi from another school. "But with this rise you can hardly pay for one meal a day for our small family." Accommodation costs in the capital have skyrocketed in the past four years. Rent for a three room mud-built house is at least $200. Commodity and transport prices have also soared. Many people make ends meet by taking up second jobs, such as running market stalls, at least part time. Patience is running out, another government worker said. "The rise is like giving chocolate to a crying baby to calm him down, but without thinking whether he is sick or wants milk," said an information ministry official. "We are being treated like kids and the situation is getting intolerable for people. It is more than enough". In this year's $678 million budget, police and law enforcement agencies got $157 million, defence spending totalled $126 million and education was allocated $117 million. We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Insider Says Troops Want Out of Iraq Now Nov 27, 2005 by egrass, Stevegilliard.blogspot.com [Excerpt] I'm back from Thanksgiving with my wife's family and I've got some first-hand feedback from the troops on Iraq, leaving Iraq, and Murtha. You see, my wife is a former military officer and her brother is an active-duty Major, decorated Army Ranger, and West Point graduate with more than 15 years in and about to ship out to Afghanistan. My wife is a good liberal on military issues, while my brother-in-law has always been a thoughtful and nice guy, but very conservative, especially on military issues. We've always gotten along well and been very respectful of each other, but totally disagreed on Republicans and military issues. My brother-in-law thinks that Murtha is 100% right and that we should pull back in Iraq to forward operating bases in Kuwait, if not leave entirely. Even more interesting, my brother-in-law says that ALL of his officer friends in the 10th Mountain (a real front-line outfit) and around the military agree as well. My brother-in-law is a gregarious, well-connected guy and literally has hundreds of well placed friends at the rank of Major and above. He says that ALL of his military friends feel Iraq is a "mistake" and a "meatgrinder" that serves no purpose anymore if it ever did. They would all be perfectly willing to serve and even die there if some good might come of it, but they all see that it makes no sense at this point. (My brother-in-law is no pacifist. He fought in Somalia and Haiti and killed several people there. He thought both missions were important and the right thing to do). Apparently, one key thing that has really pissed off my brother-in-law and his friends is that young guys like them are being thrown into the position of making foreign policy on the ground. He said that his buddies around his level are being given entire towns to run in Iraq and essentially told to make up what to do. From what he hears, there basically is no overall strategy, just a bunch of LTs, CPTs, and Majors making it up as they go. My brother-in-law laughed off as ludicrous the claim that troops are somehow undercut by people debating the usefulness of their mission and questioning whether to pull out of Iraq. I told him the liberal comment (I think by Atrios) that if liberals really didn't support the troops they would lie the country into a war, send troops to war without proper equipment, and then keep them there to die for no apparent reason. He got a kick out of that and said he would tell some of his buddies. I told my brother-in-law that I regularly read message boards like Kos and others populated by liberals and that the vast majority of people here (and elsewhere) wish him all the best in his mission in Afghanistan and a safe and speedy trip home. He has a wife and two young daughters. Your prayers will be appreciated. Dissention In The Ranks: "I Find It Easier To Make Contact With Soldiers And Marines In Uniform And Harder To Get Permission To Quote Them By Name" 24/11/2005 Reporter: Tony Jones, Australian Broadcasting Tony Jones interviews JAMES FALLOWS, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST. James Fallows, author of a detailed investigation published in this month's Atlantic Monthly JAMES FALLOWS: There's been, for me as a reporter, there's been a fascinating evolution in the last three years that I've been working on stories like this, which is that the members of the sort of the - not at the general level or even the colonel level but every rank below that - there's a real sense of concern about the direction of the policy about the welfare of the American forces and about the mission they're on. And, so, with each passing month I find it easier to make contact with soldiers and marines in uniform and harder to get permission to quote them by name, because there's more and more of these disaffected reports. But there's a large network of people I talk to on the phone, I have email exchanges with, I meet in off-the-record conversations, and there is a sense the military itself is in trouble. TONY JONES: And, in general terms, then, who are these people who are speaking out? Are they people involved - I know you can't name them, obviously - but are they people involved in the training program itself or who historically have been? JAMES FALLOWS: Yes. There are several cadres. One is a group of sort of senior advisers who have either personal or memory experiences of Vietnam. They can say, "Yes, we've seen this pattern before," and it's surprising how often they make flattering comparisons to the army of South Vietnam, saying, well, that at least with that army we had this or that advantage. And then there are those on combat missions in Iraq trying to maintain the peace and they're talking about how, basically, the fabric of the US military is essentially being chaffed and worn out in a way that may not be sustainable for the long run. TONY JONES: Now, one of the other strange things was that the general who in charge of the invasion, Tommy Franks - you report sources saying that after the invasion, in the critical early stages of the occupation, he was more interested in writing his memoirs than doing anything else. JAMES FALLOWS: Well, there was a larger pattern here in that there was much more glamour for the military in general in the so-called 'kinetic phase' of action, that is combat, than in the past... TONY JONES: That's what they call it now? The "kinetic phase" is it? JAMES FALLOWS: Yes. (Laughs) What you and I might call combat action is now called 'kinetic action' or the 'kinetic phase', and what comes after that is phrase four, which we would call the occupation. So, there was this general pattern. But General Franks, in particular, I heard from countless people, just lost interest once the battle for Baghdad was over, and was ready to get home and write his memoirs. I tried many times to contact him, but to TONY JONES: How did this glamour thing, this kinetic versus reconstruction, how did that play out when it came to training troops? When it came to the critical reconstruction phase? JAMES FALLOWS: People often described this to me as the 'Team B' phenomenon, that if you were a real 'comer' in the US Military, if you were somebody with real ambitions, what you wanted was a combat command - you wanted to be leading those tank units leading the paratroop units. What you didn't want was to command a training unit - that had no glamour, that was like a supply depot job. Do you have a friend or relative in the service? Forward this E-MAIL along, or send us the address if you wish and we'll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, at home and inside the armed services. Send requests to address up The Revolt Of The Generals December 3, 2005 ALEXANDER COCKBURN, CounterPunch [Excerpt] The immense significance of Rep John Murtha's November 17 speech calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it signals mutiny in the US senior officer corps, seeing the institution they lead as "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth", to use the biting words of their spokesman, John Murtha, as he reiterated on December his denunciation of Bush's destruction of the Army. A CounterPuncher with nearly 40 years experience working in and around the Pentagon told me this week that "The Four Star Generals picked Murtha to make this speech because he has maximum credibility." It's true. Even in the US Senate there's no one with quite Murtha's standing to deliver the message, except maybe for Byrd, but the venerable senator from West Virginia was a vehement opponent of the war from the outset, whereas Murtha voted for it and only recently has turned around. So the Four-Star Generals briefed Murtha and gave him the state-of-the-art data which made his speech so deadly, stinging the White House into panic-stricken and foolish denunciations of Murtha as a clone of Michael It cannot have taken vice president Cheney, a former US Defense Secretary, more than a moment to scan Murtha's speech and realize the import of Murtha's speech as an announcement that the generals have had enough. And Now, A Word From The Army War College 2005-11-29 By Stephen Collinson WASHINGTON, Middle East How many, and when? -- the raging political argument on US policy in Iraq is throwing up two key questions over the much awaited return home of US troops. "We can't stay, we can't leave, and we can't fail," was how a recent report by the US Army War College summed up the "No Words Came" [This is from a very long story in the Los Angeles Times, 12.4.05, by P.J. Huffstutter, Times Staff Writer, about a family with two Marines; father, Kendall Phelps, 58, and his son, Chris, 35, both veterans of the Iraq War, and both for the war. [Chris Phelps visits an elementary school to tell the children all the good things the U.S. occupation is doing in Iraq. On a recent evening inside an elementary school cafeteria near his home in Shawnee, Chris talked to several dozen Cub Scouts and their parents about his experiences. He told them how the Iraqis were excited about the idea of holding elections. How Iraqi children attend schools with no blackboards, no books and no playgrounds. How children played in the streets, despite the danger of sniper fire. "We promised these people that we would help them change their country," Chris said. "When you make a promise, it's important that you keep it. We need to be there and finish what we've started." "Chris' style was relaxed and warm. As a father, he understood how to captivate the imaginations of boys: On a nearby table, he put out military helmets and an Iraqi police flak jacket they could try on. A somber-faced boy in the back raised his hand, and looked Chris straight in the eye. In a quiet voice, the child asked, "What started the war? Why are we there?" Silence fell over the cafeteria. Chris opened his mouth to answer, but no words came. He quickly changed the As Suicides Spread, VA Appointments Cancelled For Returning Iraq Vets December 4, 2005 By DAVID McLEMORE, The Dallas Morning News Since combat operations began in Iraq in March 2003, 45 soldiers have killed themselves in Iraq, and an additional two dozen committed suicide after returning home, the Army has confirmed. And while no one knows precisely what pushes someone over the edge, the unresolved stresses of combat on the soldier's heart and mind are Veterans in several states have found that Veterans Affairs had to stop scheduling appointments because of a lack of staff or a shortage of funds, said Mr. Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "For the Guard and reserve, it's particularly bad," he said. "Their soldiers are separated from the Defense Department support system almost immediately after deployment and sent home to VA hospitals and clinics that are already overwhelmed and backlogged. "We have to recognize the need and provide help, not wait for the veterans to ask." Harassment Of Military Bloggers Stepped Up: [And How To Evade It] registration could be tough because bloggers are often anonymous and can post to their sites from Internet cafes set up in Iraq or from laptop computers in November 28, 2005 By Kelly Kennedy, Army Times staff writer One year ago, 1st Lt. Neil Prakash decided to brag about his tank crew on his blog, "Armor Geddon." "I wanted to get out the picture that most combat isn't that scary," said Prakash, who served as a tank platoon leader in Iraq with 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armor Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. "It's fun. And these soldiers love their job." One month ago, the Silver Star recipient found out the Army was using his blog as an example of bad operations-security practices. The OpSec lessons are part of the Army's new campaign to tighten online security. The Army now requires that all soldiers in Iraq register their Web logs with their commanders. Mobile training teams are being sent out to train soldiers down to the brigade level to make sure everyone knows the rules about the Internet. "None of it's new," [Capt. William Roberts, Army spokesman in Iraq] said. "It's just being strictly enforced." Soldiers also must clear all photos through their unit public affairs representative, Roberts said. Enforcing blogging registration could be tough because bloggers are often anonymous and can post to their sites from Internet cafes set up in Iraq or from laptop computers in their rooms. IRAQ RESISTANCE ROUNDUP Assorted Resistance Action The body of a slain Iraqi guard is loaded in the back of a police vehicle in Baghdad, Dec. 4, 2005. Insurgents opened fire on 5 people working for Al-Nissor private security Company in Al-Amiryaa neighborhood, killing one and wounding four others. (AP Photo/Asaad Muhsin) December 4, 2005 AP & Reuters & Aljazeera & By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer & Agence France-Presse Insurgents killed an Iraqi police commander. In two cars, they opened fire on police commander Lt. Col. Abdul-Razaak Abdul-Jabbar as he was heading to work in western Baghdad, police Capt. Talib Thamir said. AHMAR - Two Iraqi policemen were killed when armed fighters attacked their patrol in Ahmar village, about 40 km (25 miles) east of Baquba, police said. ISKANDARIYA - Five members of the Iraqi security forces were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. Reports conflicted about whether they were members of the army or police and one source said one wounded man ZARKUUSH - Two people were killed, including a policeman, when a bomb planted on the side of the road exploded in Zarkuush, a village 70 km (43 miles) east of Baquba, police said. Iraqi police sources said a roadside bomb exploded in Alexandria in southern Baghdad targeting a police patrol, killing one of its members and injuring three others. A soldier was shot dead as he left his home in Hay al-Amin, in the southeast of the capital, while another was killed in Al-Bayyaa, in southern Baghdad. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE RESISTANCE END THE OCCUPATION Angry Iraqis Stone CIA Collaborator Dec 4, 2005 By Khaled Farhan, Reuters & By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer A crowd hurling shoes, rocks and tomatoes forced former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to cut short a visit on Sunday to Iraq's holiest Shi'ite shrine during a campaign trip to the city of Najaf, police officers A police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a large crowd of worshippers at the Imam Ali mosque hurled sandals and shoes at Allawi -- a grave insult in Iraqi culture. A second police officer said some of Allawi's bodyguards fired in the air to disperse the crowd and that also threw rocks, sticks, tomatoes and other projectiles. Police also intervened to break up the disturbance, he said. "His American and Iraqi guards fired in the air when everyone started throwing shoes and sandals at him." Allawi, who spent three decades in exile working partly with British and U.S. intelligence after breaking with Saddam Hussein and his Baath party, was named prime minister in mid-2004 by U.S. occupation In August 2004, when Allawi was prime minister, Iraqi and U.S. troops took over Najaf from firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's followers after heavy fighting. Many Shiites have not forgiven Allawi for his role in the "Betrayal" Should Be A Psychiatric Diagnosis December 4, 2005 Mike Hastie in Vietnam American soldiers and civilians are dying every day in Iraq, most Americans do not want to know or see the details, because it would upset them. When I came back from Vietnam, most of the people I encountered wanted to talk about nice things. When I tried to tell them the truth, they often turned and walked away. Thirty years later, their grandchildren are dying or getting wounded in Iraq. I was a pearl they threw away. Photo and caption from the I-R-A-Q (I Remember Another Quagmire) portfolio of Mike Hastie, US Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71. (For more of his outstanding work, contact at: ([email protected]) T) The Harder They Fall To: GI Special Sent: December 04, 2005 Subject: the harder they fall ogoreru hito mo hisashikarazu tada haru no yo no yume no gotoshi takeki mono mo tsui ni wa horobinu hitoeni kaze no mae no chiri ni onaji The arrogant ones as well will not continue long, only like a night in spring, when dreams are short. The high and mighty too are brought down in the end and are blown away like dust before the wind. from The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) 14th century Japanese war chronicle December 1, 2005 From New York Times Editorial Mr. Bush's vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi forces well enough to free American forces for more of the bloody and ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that accomplish little beyond alienating the populace. Want To Boost Troop Morale? "Remember, This Country Was Born In Revolution" November 21, 2005 Tibor R. Machan, Orange County Register Does President Bush believe that by his announcing that critics of the Iraq war dampen our troops' morale he will prevent such criticism? Does he believe his words will silence critics and raise troop This is America, and if Americans share a common trait, it's rebellion at those who wield power. Well, they used to, anyway - most of Remember, this country was born in revolution. No, Mr. President, it is not a wise thing to tell us all to shut up to suit your likely embarrassment over an impossible situation from which you will not likely emerge with a swell presidential legacy. The troops, by the way, will do just fine. They may even be proud knowing that citizens back home haven't gone to sleep on their citizenship job of taking government to task when it's justified. What do you think? Comments from service men and women, and veterans, are especially welcome. Send to [email protected]. Name, I.D., withheld on request. Replies confidential. They Never Learn To: GI Special Sent:, November 30, 2005 Subject: They Never Learn "But there have been signs of disenchantment within the (Zarqawi) organization. An intercepted letter from a top Zarqawi lieutenant in Mosul complained about a lack of money and experienced terrorists. U.S. military commanders have said that some of those captured say they were misled by recruiters about what America is trying to accomplish in Sound familiar? This one could be applied to the US troops--complaining about a lack of training and about being "misled by recruiters" about "what America is doing" in Iraq "A U.S. intelligence official said, "A lot of these people should not be called foreign fighters. They should be called 'foreign ordnances' because they blow themselves up. They don't fight." Imperial arrogance... I guess they'll never learn. [Quotes from THE WASHINGTON TIMES, November 29, 2005] The Great Iraq War "Phased Withdrawal" Fraud Phased withdrawal is an empty slogan that can only result in prolonging the war. It is knowingly advocated by those who wish to prolong the war, and naively advocated by some who earnestly oppose the war. Nov 29, 2005 By Mark Rothschild, Asia Times Online Ltd. [Excerpts] The various phased withdrawal plans proposed by Congress and the Pentagon would permit a steady withdrawal of US troops over time as Iraqi government forces increase their fighting abilities. According to this approach, a strengthened Iraqi government force would suppress and contain the Sunni insurgency as American troops come It is hard not to conclude that withdrawal would leave Iraq with a ground-only military completely dependent on US air power for its Indeed, there are signs that the Pentagon is prepared for New military communication systems are now being deployed that point to a permanent US presence in Iraq - after an ostensible phased The semi-permanent communications systems deployed prior to the battle for Fallujah are now being augmented with a permanent enduring communications infrastructure. This new permanent communication infrastructure will provide commanders with secure video, voice and data communications via satellite, microwave and fiber throughout the Iraq-Kuwait theater of The system, which will crisscross Iraq and connect more than 100 bases, is projected to cost $4 billion - although the Pentagon has been leaking the story that just four stay-behind US bases will remain in Iraq after From the foregoing, it is hard not to conclude that phased withdrawal is being utilized as a slogan under which military operations will continue - and that thousands of American combat troops may still be in Iraq for many years to come. Those Democratic members of Congress who think well of themselves for now advocating phased withdrawal are either deluding themselves, or they are continuing to play the same double game many of them began playing when they originally voted to authorize the use of force - and then sniped at the Bush administration over the subsequent conduct of the war. Phased withdrawal is an empty slogan that can only result in prolonging the war. It is knowingly advocated by those who wish to prolong the war, and naively advocated by some who earnestly oppose the war. To the limited extent that a phased withdrawal does result in a draw-down of the number of American combat troops, the pernicious policy will place those troops remaining in ever-greater danger and thereby increase the number of dead and maimed American soldiers. This is because under a phased withdrawal, Iraq would become progressively more dangerous for American troops, more lawless, and then eventually fall under the sway of the most ruthless and violent of the insurgent and paramilitary forces. From a military-political point of view, the Iraq war is unsustainable. It will not change the facts to point out that the US could defeat the insurgency over time. There is no more time. The American people will not abide Iraq for 10 more years. In fact, the longer American forces are in Iraq, the more impatient Americans have become. As the months go by without visible progress, it becomes more and more clear that time is not the problem - nor the solution. There is no military problem on Earth that the US armed forces cannot resolve, but Iraq is not a military problem - it is a political problem, and the root political problem of Iraq is the widespread perception among Iraqis that its government is politically illegitimate. The perception that the Iraqi government is illegitimate does not stem from the government's inability to establish basic civilized living conditions for it citizens; rather, its illegitimacy stems from the government's origins in invasion and occupation - and from its continued dependency on the US. Blinded by hatred of an anti-American regime and their ignorance of an exotic culture, US decision-makers have plunged the American people into a quagmire. Cowardice In The Face Of The Enemy: Leading Organizations And Figures In The Antiwar Struggle Are Retreating Into Talk Of 'Exit Strategies' And 'Responsible December 2, 2005 LANCE SELFA and ELIZABETH SCHULTE, Socialist Worker [Excerpts] REP. JOHN Murtha's (D-Pa.) November 17 press conference was, if nothing else, a wake-up call to the Washington establishment from one of its own. The U.S. "cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," Murtha said. "It is time to bring them home." Judging by the abuse he received from outraged Republicans and the cheers heard in antiwar circles, you might have thought that a pro-war politician had decided to become an antiwar activist. Newly elected Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) almost provoked a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives when she accused Murtha, a decorated combat veteran, of being a coward. At the same time, Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the antiwar group Code Pink, in an article on the "10 Reasons to Give Thanks" this year, put at the top of the list: "We're thankful that Congressman John Murtha has joined us in calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq." RHETORIC ASIDE, the text of Murtha's proposed congressional resolution never uses the word "withdrawal"--but rather "redeployment"--when referring to plans for U.S. troops in Iraq. But in a maneuver aimed at embarrassing the Democrats, the Republicans rushed through an alternative resolution to Murtha's proposal, calling for the immediate withdrawal of all forces from Iraq. The Republican resolution went down to defeat by a vote of Virtually all of the liberal Democratic members of Congress who claim to be allies of the antiwar movement voted against a resolution that--whatever the Republicans' intentions--proposed the movement's common point of agreement, at least on paper: get U.S. troops out of Iraq now. Sadly, many liberal voices outside Congress defended the For example, the Progressive Democrats of America, which styles itself as a grassroots lobby to pressure Democrats to oppose the Iraq occupation, issued a statement supporting Democrats who voted against the replacement resolution--which it called "an attempt to trick Democrats into supporting a 'cut-and-run' position on withdrawing U.S. troops." Middle East expert Stephen Zunes, one of the leading intellectuals in antiwar circles, went even further, urging the antiwar movement to embrace Murtha's call for a rapid reaction force to prevent the victory of the Iraqi resistance to occupation. "The peace movement should be open to such a strategy," Zunes wrote, "since it ends the occupation, it shifts our policy to diplomacy, and it creates the common ground necessary to unite politically around the language of Rep. John Murtha, a retired Marine and staunch supporter of the military, who calls for America to get out of Iraq 'as soon as practicable.'" ALL OF this might be mystifying to antiwar activists. The Democrats seem unable to capitalize on an opportunity, dropped in their laps by an Iraq war hawk, to rally around a genuine antiwar position. And while more Americans than ever are willing to hear a straightforward antiwar message, leading organizations and figures in the antiwar struggle are retreating into talk of "exit strategies" and "responsible The debate that has erupted in Washington between Republicans and Democrats isn't between those who support the war and those who oppose it. It is between two ruling-class parties that start from the same assumption that U.S. global and regional interests must be preserved, but bicker over the best strategies to accomplish that. The Democrats may have small differences about how to "get the job done"--troop redeployment, greater collaboration with international bodies like the United Nations, using the cover of "humanitarianism"--but their "job" is the same as the Republicans. IF THE Iraq War hadn't become such a disaster and Iraqi resistance to occupation hadn't been so fierce, the current congressional "debate," such as it is, probably wouldn't be happening. Instead, politicians from both parties would be trying to associate themselves with Bush and his But with more and more sections of the ruling class becoming concerned that the Iraq debacle is undermining the U.S.'s ability to pursue its global agenda, the Democrats are offering themselves as new managers who can put the U.S. imperial train back on the tracks. Relying on the Democratic Party to set the terms of the debate is a losing proposition for antiwar activists. It only makes the antiwar movement weaker to applaud the compromised half-measures put forward by the Democrats. If the antiwar movement is going to stop the occupation, we have to organize an opposition independent of the Democrats and their cynical maneuvers. We have to continue to press for nothing less than an immediate and complete withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from Iraq and the How Bad Is It? 01 December 2005 By Rupert Cornwell, The Independent UK Iraqi government officials say that without US support they could not hold much of Baghdad. Many Iraqi units are "ghost battalions", the number of soldiers inflated by commanders who pocket the pay of non-existent men. OCCUPATION ISN'T LIBERATION BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW! Bush Asks Iran Government For Help In Iraq! [Thanks to PB who sent this in. He writes: A SIGN OF DESPERATION: DR. AXIS OF EVIL COUNTRY, PLEASE HELP US IN IRAQ.] Nov 30 AFP & 29 November 2005 Aljazeera. Iran has no plans to cooperate with the United States, its foreign ministry spokesman said, after reports that Washington would reach out to Tehran for assistance in quelling unrest in Iraq. "Entente with the United States is not on the agenda of the Islamic Republic of Iran," Hamid Reza Asefi said after meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara. Newsweek magazine reported Sunday that President George W. Bush has asked US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad to seek assistance from Iran, in what would be the first high-level US contact with Tehran in "It's a very narrow mandate that he has, and it deals specifically with issues related to Iraq," spokesman Sean McCormack said The United States has also sought Tehran's help to seal off its border to Iraqi insurgents and to avoid meddling with the country's Iran's official news agency IRNA quoted the English-language daily Iran News as saying: "Some observers believe the US has finally come to the realisation that stability in the region is not achievable without Iran." A Billion Dollar Cry For Help 03 December 2005 By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times The US Agency for International Development is offering more than $1 billion for anyone - anyone at all - who can come up with a plan to pacify and rebuild 10 Iraqi cities seen as vital in the war. Maybe the White House should apply - Usaid's proffer says the "invitation is open to any type of entity." THE FUTURE CONFRONTS THE PAST Palestinian girls confront a Zionist soldier at a checkpoint that Palestinian children cross daily on their way to school in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron Dec. 3, 2005. Palestinians protest unnecessarily intrusive searches by soldiers of children on their way to school. (AP [To check out what life is like under a murderous military occupation by a foreign power, go to: www.rafahtoday.org The foreign army is Israeli; the occupied nation is Palestine.] DANGER: POLITICIANS AT WORK Take Your Pick 12.1.05 Rupert Cornwell, The Independent UK Iraqi government officials say that without US support they could not hold much of Baghdad. Many Iraqi units are "ghost battalions", the number of soldiers inflated by commanders who pocket the pay of non-existent men. 'Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy, cleaning out areas controlled by the terrorists and Saddam loyalists, leaving Iraqi forces to hold territory taken from the enemy, and following up with targeted reconstruction to help Iraqis rebuild their lives.' Bush Speech at Annapolis, 11.30.05 [Thanks to Z, who sent this in.] "My Son Is Against This War But Still Serving" Sent: December 02, 2005 Subject: Military Families My name is J My son is against this war but still serving. He has already served two deployments to [X] where he was injured and received the [X] star and the purple heart. If he speaks out he will lose his security clearance. He knows he can't reign me in however and I'm a vehement advocate to end this illegal war now! My son encourages me to speak out. I am also on the board of [X] Military Families Speak Out. I was in Crawford and I marched on Washington on Sept. 24th, 25th and If I can be of any assistance just let me know. REPLY: From your letter, looks like you're being of magnificent assistance already to the movement to bring the troops home now! Respect to you! T To: Col. Of The 704th MP Brigade; "You All Are Nothing But 'Perfumed Princes' As Col. Hackworth Called You" [This open letter is in response to GI Special articles about the mistreatment of anti-war soldier Sgt. Kevin Benderman, and reports of torture of prisoners at Ft. Lewis.. T] To: GI Special Sent: December 01, 2005 Subject: Col. of the 704th MP Brigade To whom it may concern; You people stink. You all are nothing but "Perfumed Princes" as Col Hackworth called you. I am appalled at the way Kevin was treated. I cannot wait until he gets out and perhaps write a book about you all. You will never get my grandson, I promise you that, nor any child that I have come in contact with. Just a very disgusted Grandmother and once a Patriot. Beware The Democrat In Republican Clothing From: Alycia A. Barr To: GI Special Sent: December 04, 2005 Subject: Beware the Democrat in Republican clothing I'm with Mr. Goff...we got their number and we won't go We'll use the bodies of our loved ones, piled up in front of you to go right over you. In Peace and Humanity, Alycia A. Barr "The News You Send Out Is Terrible To Read" To: GI Special Sent: November 30, 2005 Thanks for all you are doing. The news you send out is terrible to read, but we need to see the truth... Reply: The thanks go to you and other activists organizing and fighting to stop the war. It's what happens on the ground that counts. T GI Special distributes and posts to our website copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law since it is being distributed without charge or profit for educational purposes to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for educational purposes, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. GI Special has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor is GI Special endorsed or sponsored by the originators. This attributed work is provided a non-profit basis to facilitate understanding, research, education, and the advancement of human rights and social justice Go to: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml for more information. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. If printed out, this newsletter is your personal property and cannot legally be confiscated from you. "Possession of unauthorized material may not be prohibited." DoD Directive 1325.6 Section 18.104.22.168.

April 26, 2012 by Zaharibu Dorrough, J. Heshima Denham, Kambui Robinson and Jabari Scott of the NCTT Corcoran Security Housing Unit (SHU) “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. |Michael Zaharibu Dorrough and his family are not the sort of patriarchal, authoritarian family that prepares children to confuse the interests of the ruling 1 percent with their own interests and to submit to oppression without protest.| Steadfast greetings, brothers and sisters. Our love and solidarity to you all. We felt it appropriate to open this statement with Dr. King’s call, which has been applicable to any given period where injustice is rife. We felt compelled to provide some necessary clarity and context to the struggle taking place. The National Occupy Movement has been magnificent in how it has changed the framework in which the discourse on unequal distribution of wealth must be made. But in order for the movement to develop into the popular movement that it must become to effect permanent and meaningful change, the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” must become a reality. It is imperative that both Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy the Hood (OTH) struggle together to form a popular movement. It is crucial to any lasting progress that we reignite the cultural revolution that was started early in this nation’s history but never fulfilled: John Brown’s revolt, Thomas Dorr’s rebellion, the civil and human rights struggles of the 1950s-‘60s, the armed revolts throughout this nation’s history, including the rebellions in Watts, Oakland (Kambui and Jabari’s hometown), Harlem, Detroit, Cleveland (Zaharibu’s hometown), Chicago (Heshima’s hometown), and Kent State, to name a few. These struggles laid the foundation for the cultural revolution that the U.S. was in the process of undergoing up until the later 1970s. No society can make the necessary transformation from a capitalist, patriarchal, authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic, unjust one to one in which democratic ideals can prevail and fulfilling one’s potential is actually possible and encouraged without undergoing a cultural revolutionary transformation. We are not talking about what kind of government we want; that can and will occur in time, and you will know when that time comes just as you knew that the time had come to fight this battle. A cultural revolution occurs during the transitional stage in the struggle and consists of people from different cultural – i.e., racial, ethnic, religious – backgrounds and schools of thought varying politically, economically, socially, spiritually, intellectually, educationally and sexually all coming together to realize a vision for the kind of society they want to share and live in. It is quite possibly the crucial step in a society transforming itself. That’s exactly what was underway toward the mid- to late 1970s. We believe that because of the overall political immaturity of all but a few of the liberation groups at that time, the movement was not able to develop into a cohesive popular movement. As a result, groups were crushed, individuals either went into exile, were assassinated or imprisoned, while a lot of others in the movement were co-opted by the system. Billions of dollars were spent on social programs during the Johnson administration. Yet most, perhaps all, of these programs no longer exist. The cultural revolution of that time – traditionally called the “social revolution” – was re-characterized as the “sexual revolution” by the ruling class, reduced to a period of time in which citizens engaged in promiscuous sex – nothing more. It was part of the ruling class’s effort to de-legitimize the efforts made by those brave citizens who dared to struggle! Simultaneously, they were re-enforcing the puritanical component of the authoritarian mass psychology. It was also the intention of the ruling class to re-write the historical record of the period, thus depriving future generations of a historical record to build on. There is already an understanding of the underlying conditions that are responsible for so much misery, and those conditions have always existed, but what is not as clear is why have so many accepted these conditions for so long? We will try to address that here. But what must be clear at the outset is change, developing a popular movement, must consist of OWS and OTH forging meaningful coalitions with one another. Coalitions that recognize that this struggle is not a “white” struggle; it is a people’s struggle. The Occupy Movement is not a “white” struggle; it is a people’s struggle. The middle class must be prepared to take the necessary steps to reach these goals and that includes reaching out to the underclass. It must be recognized that in order for OWS to mature into a popular movement, the participation of OTH is required. Those citizens within OTH, the leadership, must mobilize with OWS. This is a protracted struggle. The middle class must be prepared to take the necessary steps to reach these goals and that includes reaching out to the underclass and OTH. OTH must see that it is in their interests to reach back and unite in this struggle. What is a cultural revolution? But what is it that we are struggling against? Exactly what is a cultural revolution? Why is it necessary, and what does it entail? How can it be waged successfully? The answer lies in the nature of the struggle of the National Occupy Movement itself, the struggle between the interests of the ruling 1 percent and those of the 99 percent. It is a struggle between ideas that have been imposed on the people as a direct result of the changes in economic modes of production and the people’s unconscious acceptance, support and identification with those ideas and new ideas that reflect these warped artificial psychological structures in favor of those that free them from an exploitive political and economic relationship that serves a wealth elite. It must be understood that our movement will NOT succeed in effecting a fundamental change in the mass psychological structure which supports this exploitive relationship. This is the core purpose of a cultural revolution, to eradicate unprogressive values, tendencies, sentiments and modes of thought. But before we can expound upon the characteristics of the cultural revolution, we first need to clearly analyze the core impediment to the successful conclusion of attempted cultural revolutions in the past. The chief obstacle to the realization of progressive social change here has always been the patriarchal authoritarian psychological structure of reactionary men and women in the U.S. These concepts may be complex for those new to them, so we’ll attempt to be as clear and brief as possible. For most of U.S. capitalist society’s existence, it has brutally exploited the labor, ideas and political will of the vast majority of its population to maintain and expand the wealth, power and privilege of a greedy elite ruling class the movement has identified as the 1 percent. It has been this way for hundreds of years and each time progressive social forces have attempted to cast off this yoke of oppression or move the nation closer to the idealistic sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence, those forces have been repressed, not simply by the ruling 1 percent and its tools, but by vast segments of the oppressed masses themselves. What causes this illogical contradiction? What prevents the socio-economic situation they’re suffering through from reflecting the psychic structure of the masses? Again and again, throughout the history of progressive social movements, we see the economic and ideological situations of the masses in the U.S. not coinciding and in fact being at considerable variance. The socio-economic reality of the people is not directly and immediately translated into political consciousness; if it were, the social revolution would have been realized years ago. The answer lies in the unique historical processes that forged the character structure of the average Amerikan worker. That process began with the introduction of patriarchy as the dominant force in social ideology in Europe and its impetus toward authoritarian control of every aspect of social life of the remaining members of the family unit, especially as it relates to the negation of natural social and biological processes. In the figure of the “father” the authoritarian ruling class has its representative in every family, so the family unit becomes its most vital instruments of power. This patriarchal authoritarian process’ chief component is puritanical repression, and this is also the manner in which the ruling 1 percent chains the ideological structure of the lower middle and middle classes to its own interests. Unlike patriarchal authoritarianism, puritanical repression as a tool of mass social control is fairly recent – in the last 300 years. If we analyze the history of puritanicalism and the etiology of the repression of natural human biological expression, you’ll find its origins aren’t at the beginning of cultural development. No, it was not until the organized establishment of patriarchal authoritarianism and the class system that puritanicalism starts to assert itself and begin to serve the interests of the ruling 1 percent in amassing material profit. There is a logical reason for all of this when seen from the perspective of the thriving exploitation of human labor and the apparent enthusiasm of the people to accept that exploitation. You see, the ruling 1 percent very rarely need to resort to brute force to maintain control of society, as the owners of the means of production prefer to employ their ideological power over the oppressed as their primary weapon, for it is the ideology of puritanical patriarchal authoritarianism that is the mainstay of the ruling elite. The ruling 1 percent very rarely need to resort to brute force to maintain control of society, as the owners of the means of production prefer to employ their ideological power over the oppressed as their primary weapon. It is within the authoritarian family that the merging of the economic arrangement and the puritanical structure of society takes place; religious and other puritanical interests continue this function later. Thus, the authoritarian state has an enormous stake in the authoritarian family; it becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology is molded. Man’s authoritarian psychology is thus produced by embedding these puritanical inhibitions, guilt feelings and fear of freedom to experience natural forms of human expression. The suppression of one’s economic needs compasses a different psychological reaction than one’s natural human drives. The suppression of one’s economic needs usually incites resistance, while the repression of natural biological needs removes those desires from the consciousness, embeds them in the subconscious and erects a “moral defense” against them, and in so doing prevents rebellion against both forms of suppression. The result is the inhibition of rebellion itself. How the 1 percent suppresses the cultural revolution In the average Amerikan, there is no trace of revolutionary thinking. It is this process that has strengthened political reaction in the U.S. and made far too many victims of economic inequality here passive, indifferent and apolitical. It has succeeded in creating a secondary force in man’s mind, an artificial interest that supports the authoritarian order of the ruling 1 percent. In the average Amerikan, there is no trace of revolutionary thinking. Yes, most are truly “trapped in the matrix.” This is observable at every level of this capitalist society. It is the conservative who first suggests reactionary repressive measures or curtailing civil liberties in the face of civil disobedience or broad political dissent. The Occupy Movement continues to experience this firsthand at the hands of national police forces. The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition here in the Corcoran State Prison SHU and in Pelican Bay continues to experience waves of retaliation from state prison industrialists. This “fear of freedom” is inherent to the authoritarian character structure of conservative man. The conflict that originally takes place between natural desires and authoritarian suppression of these desires later becomes the conflict between instinct and morality within the person. This, of course, produces a contradiction within the person. Since man is not only the object of the historical processes that created the economic and ideological influences of his social life, but also reproduces them in his activities, his thinking and acting must be just as contradictory as the society from which they arose. The U.S., for instance, is a society founded on the premises of “equality, freedom and the unalienable rights of man,” yet its formation, history and modern structure contradict this. When we speak of the realization of U.S. “manifest destiny” or the development and maintenance of its global hegemony, we are speaking of the systematic genocide of Native Americans, the organized theft of Native land, the slavery and brutalization of Africans and New Afrikans, the maintenance of institutional racism and sexism, imperialist war mongering, state-sponsored kidnapping, torture and targeted assassinations, suppression of sexual democracy, state imposition of religious moral imperatives that deprive others of their equal rights, the naked exploitation of human labor and suppression of organized labor, and the mass incarceration of the poor and people of color – all while espousing the ideas of “opportunity, fairness and equal protection under the law.” This is the historical legacy of contradiction in the development and maintenance of U.S. society. These same contradictions are reproduced in the psychic-structures of its people. Should the middle strata of White Amerika lose these warped concepts of “morality” to the same degree it continues to lose its intermediate position between the average worker and the upper class, this would seriously threaten the interests of the ruling 1 percent. You see, lurking also among this strata of the people, ever ready to break free of its reactionary tendencies, is the inherent revolutionary imperative of their socio-economic situation. This is why since the start of the 2008 recession the FCC and virtually every segment of public and private enterprise has increased its push for “morality” and “strengthening traditional marriage,” because the authoritarian ideology and family unit forms the link from the wretched social reality of the lower middle class to reactionary ideology and social conservatism: The ideology of the 1 percent. Where this ideology is uprooted from the compulsive family unit, the authoritarian system is threatened. They sense it on the horizon, and historically this is when the greatest ideological resistance asserts itself. The socio-economic exploitation of the 99 percent, in its myriad manifestations, would not be possible without the psychological structure of the masses that accepts that status quo. It is when the economically disenfranchised and dissatisfied classes begin to organize themselves, begin to fight for socio-political improvements and begin raising the cultural level of the broader masses that these authoritarian “moralistic” inhibitions set in. The bottom line here is every social order produces in the masses of its members that structure which it needs to achieve its main aims. The U.S. is no different. The socio-economic exploitation of the 99 percent, in its myriad manifestations, would not be possible without the psychological structure of the masses that accepts that status quo. There is a direct correlation between the economic structure of capitalist society and the mass psychological structures of its members, not only in the sense that “the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class,” but more essential to the question of a resurgence of the cultural revolution in the U.S. is that the contradictions of the economic structure of society are also embodied in the psychological structure of the subjugated masses. The role of the cultural revolution Which brings us to the cultural revolution itself. The role of the cultural revolution is to uproot these old unprogressive ideas and values which have served to keep us shackled to the legacy of oppressive relationships that define the majority of U.S. history and usher in new values which reflect the universal mores of freedom, justice, equality and human rights. A cultural revolution is a reconstruction of a people’s way of life in order to move them to a given objective; it forms a new historical continuity in which re-evaluation of self, the people and the society compels us to cast aside historical revisionism. It will place the political power back in the hands of the people, rescue democracy from the stranglehold of corrupt political influences and corporate super-PACs. The role of the cultural revolution is to uproot these old unprogressive ideas and values which have served to keep us shackled to the legacy of oppressive relationships that define the majority of U.S. history and usher in new values which reflect the universal mores of freedom, justice, equality and human rights. A true cultural revolution entails more than simply chanting slogans, protest actions, hunger strikes or occupations. It’s more than changing our looks or altering our polling strategy to more closely reflect support for those issues dear to the movement. No, it entails changing our core psychology, how you think, changing your conduct and activities, your interactions and methods in order to transform society as a whole. Cultural values are produced by economic and political systems. As we struggle against the institutional inequalities inherent in the U.S. capitalist arrangement, we will lose the cultural values of that system and will forge more humane values as the basis of new political and economic relationships. Such a revolution must encompass the common man and woman, illuminating for them the inherent interests in this national transformation of values and how it will positively impact their lives and the lives of their friends and loved ones. This is the reason the National Occupy Movement must organize and grow together. Cultural values are produced by economic and political systems. As we struggle against the institutional inequalities inherent in the U.S. capitalist arrangement, we will lose the cultural values of that system and will forge more humane values as the basis of new political and economic relationships. This calls for unity, the conscious development of united fronts and strategic alliances that grow deeper and richer as they experience trials and adversity, pass through ease and danger. Essentially this process IS the cultural revolution. What must be understood is these different groups represent different class interests, political interests and economic interests and have different ideologies. It is the reality of this dynamic that has been the basis for the divide and rule politic that has governed life in this society and most others since the rise of monopoly capitalism. It is the basis of the primary contradiction now. We have demonstrated how for the vast majority of this nation’s history, the ruling 1 percent has been successful in convincing desperate segments of society to identify their interests with the ruling 1 percent’s. Playing on “this” economic class interest of the middle strata or “that” religious moral lean of the lower middle strata, all along ensuring that whatever the ultimate outcome, their interests, the interests of the 1 percent elite, will be preserved as the ruling interests. For the vast majority of this nation’s history, the ruling 1 percent has been successful in convincing desperate segments of society to identify their interests with the ruling 1 percent’s. They’ve been consistently able to do so despite centuries of material evidence of their duplicity because they’ve been capable of maintaining control of not simply the context of these national discussions, but of the apparatus in which they’ve been held – corporate mass media – and the very cultural values upon which those discussions are based. There is a relevant maxim which states, “The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.” The current struggle we are waging now in the National Occupy Movement, prisoner hunger strike solidarity movement, anti-imperialist movement etc. is a manifestation of the people’s consciousness that their interests and the interests of the ruling elite are not the same interests and in fact are and have always been diametrically opposed. Winning the cultural revolution It is for this reason that corporate entities, government officials, their police forces and corporate-owned mass media have made a collective and coordinated effort to downplay, discredit, underreport, dismiss, brutally attack, pass laws against and ultimately crush the movement before it can lead to a true cultural revolution which could force upon them a progressive transformation in the nature and structure of U.S. society. This has been the historical trend in the U.S.: Cultural revolutions of these types in the U.S. historically all have a central purpose: to destroy the oppressors’ conditioned mores, attitudes, ways, customs, philosophies and habits that the dominant power base has instilled in us which allow these exploitive and repressive relationships to exist. A cultural revolution is a revolution of one’s values, and the ruling 1 percent recognizes your values dictate your actions. They also realize where such a transformation in your worldview would lead; it was even noted in the Declaration of Independence: “(A)ll experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.” A cultural revolution is a revolution of one’s values, and the ruling 1 percent recognizes your values dictate your actions. As long as the ruling 1 percent can keep you convinced that its values and interests are your own, you will continue to suffer oppression without protest. As long as they can keep you convinced that the interests of the ruling 1 percent are your own, you will continue to be content to suffer the “evils” that you have without protestation. Thus, at all costs they must ensure you don’t realize that the values that have been instilled in you for generations – those of greed, racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, elitism, naked self-interest, religious intolerance, classism and thinly-veiled hypocrisy – were instilled to ensure you never realize you’ve long since been “reduced under absolute despotism,” and the political and economic choices available to you, no matter what your decisions, favor their interests first, and whatever interests support theirs most effectively secondly. The entire purpose of socio-economic stratification and institutional racism is to ensure the ruling 1 percent can maintain control with “a minimum of force, a maximum of law, all made palatable by the fanfare of unity and patriotism,” as Howard Zinn wrote in “A People’s History of the United States.” Brothers and sisters, this will not be easy because the most vital battles will have to be waged within you. But the reassertion of the cultural revolution is necessary if the movement is to realize actual success and not become just another footnote in the crushed movements of American history. We will stand with you, wage struggle with you, but in the final analysis only you, the people, the 99 percent, can hoist this banner and carry the cultural revolution to its victorious conclusion – and on the other side a new and brighter world for us all. Until we win or don’t lose. For more information on the NCTT (NARN (New African Revolutionary Nationalism) Collective Think Tank) Corcoran SHU and its work product, contact: Editor’s note: This comes from the brilliant minds – locked away in one of the most restrictive prisons in the U.S. – who brought you “California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement,” the Bay View’s most read story, with 9,980 pageviews, from Dec. 6, 2011, to Feb. 19, 2012. by J. Heshima Denham, Zaharibu Dorrough and Kambui Robinson of the NCTT Corcoran Security Housing Unit (SHU) “But beneath this conventional enthusiasm and amid this ingratiating ritual toward the dominant power, you can easily perceive in the wealthy a deep distaste for the democratic institutions of their country. The people are a power they both fear and despise.” – Alexis De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” Greetings, brothers and sisters. A firm, warm and solid embrace of revolutionary love is extended to you all. As we proceed in this period of evolution in our struggles for substantive social change in the U.S. via the national Occupy Movement, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Movement, the Anti-Imperialist Movement etc., it is imperative that we not only understand that we are all representative of a single socio-political and historic motive force, but those in opposition to our democratic aspirations are the very same political, social and economic powers that this nation has relied on to ensure the integrity of democracy, social justice and economic equality. This is a contradiction. This historic contradiction will NOT be resolved via our disparate efforts. Substantive change will only be realized through a comprehensive strategic approach, coordinated and conducted by us all. Simply put, we are a single movement, and for us to have the social impact necessary to compel progress we must proceed with this realization as out guiding ethos. We of the NCTT (New Afrikan Collective Think Tank) in the Corcoran SHU (Security Housing Unit) have a proposal on effective strategic organizing we’d like to share with you here, but before we do so we think it is imperative that you all understand the historic significance of what we are all a part of. It is our assessment that what is occurring today as it relates to the national protest movement (i.e., Occupy Wall Street, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity etc.) is the unfinished legacy of the struggle for social justice necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its democratic potential. This struggle is part of the rich and courageous legacy of abolitionists, women’s rights activists, organized labor, populists, human and civil rights activists and other democratic struggles of the nation’s past. |Cincinnati – Photo: J. Cherise McIntosh| Social revolution has always been imperative to this type of substantive change. This calls for the recognition and coming together of people – citizens from different cultural, economic and ideological backgrounds – realizing the common interest inherent in this truth: that we all inhabit the same planet, breathe the same air, are part of the human family. The social revolution of the 1960s, once it was contained by the conservative, corporate counter-culture, was reduced to being characterized as a “sexual revolution” in the same disparaging terms that the social revolution we are waging in this nation today is being characterized as a kind of mindless, leaderless rabble who simply dislike the wealthy, or “gang members,” whose only interest is imposing themselves on the larger population. These intentionally dishonest characterizations are not being made by the average reasoning man or woman – but instead by those we’ve vested with the responsibility of governing our political, social or economic institutions. CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton, when asked about the alleged “suicide” death of a “jailhouse lawyer” in Pelican Bay’s ASU (Administrative Segregation Unit), responded, “Why are you concerned about that? … Was the inmate someone important? You know, someone well known like Charles Manson?” This is typical of the wealthy and their tools. Was it any surprise that former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain described Occupy Movement activists as “stupid” because they opposed the inherent institutional inequality of the capitalist arrangement? Neither were we shocked that CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton, when asked about the alleged “suicide” death of a “jailhouse lawyer” in Pelican Bay’s ASU (Administrative Segregation Unit), responded, “Why are you concerned about that? … Was the inmate someone important? You know, someone well known like Charles Manson?” This is typical of the wealthy and their tools. We began this discussion with a quote from Alexis De Tocqueville to illustrate not only the disdain in which the power structure in this society holds the people’s democratic expression but the fear and resentment they hold towards those who dare challenge this status quo in capitalist Amerika. We represent nothing more to these overseers and shareholders – and that’s just what the politicians, policy makers, prison industrialists and corporate executives are – than billions of dollars in potential profit to be extracted from our human misery. CDCR and its lobbying body, the CCPOA, has succeeded in extorting budgets in excess of some nations’ gross national product by using us as the centerpiece of their distortion and false propaganda campaign of fear and dehumanization. For example, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and its lobbying body, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), has succeeded in extorting budgets in excess of some nations’ gross national product by using us as the centerpiece of their distortion and false propaganda campaign of fear and dehumanization. They’ve duped taxpayers so successfully for so long at the expense of our very humanity that we had no choice but to take up a strategy in which the ultimate sacrifice may yet be necessary. Following the ending of the last hunger strike in October, most of us, particularly those of us in these short corridors here and in Pelican Bay, were refused any medical treatment though we lost over 20 pounds in the 13-day period the second hunger strike lasted – and we hadn’t yet recovered from the first. The kind of sacrifices being exemplified by courageous nationalists and activists like you in the Occupy Movement – we love it, we love you and we stand with you. Our hunger strikes were the only way to effectively resist the nonstop assault on our humanity which is the inevitable consequence of burying us indefinitely in these sensory deprivation torture units. Equally, when working wages or employment itself are so shamelessly inconsistent with the cost of living, resulting in conditions of poverty, there is a corresponding poverty of spirit. The success of the Occupy Movement, like the hunger strikes, requires sacrifice and strategic insight. The kind of sacrifices being exemplified by courageous nationalists and activists like you – we love it, we love you and we stand with you. Seizing the reins of history What we all must come to understand is our struggle – like the vision of a new social structure inherent in this movement – must adopt new methods of ensuring its survival and expansion. The shear absurdity of some of the political pandering and positions in this election season, from Newt “Gingrinch’s” espousal of the merits of exploiting child labor in the underclass to discussions of cutting unemployment benefits by Tea Party Republicans in the face of record unemployment and cash-fat corporations refusing to hire, highlights how out of touch these puppets of the 1 percent ruling elite are with the daily challenges of the common man or woman. Simultaneously, we are being asked to trust these same people who are responsible for creating conditions for, and exploitation of, human misery. We have been doing so for centuries and it has only moved us from one socio-economic crisis to the next. Only when the people, the 99 percent, seized the reigns of history has the democratic destiny of humanity and its most noble ideas – unity, equality, self-determination, cooperation, freedom, justice and human rights – been advanced to any appreciable degree. Each progressive step forward – from the Suffrage Movement, which seized a woman’s right to vote from an entrenched chauvinistic privilege, to the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement that repealed segregation, to the empowerment and self-defense tactics of the national liberation movements that followed – was punctuated by a coherent strategic approach whose relative success or failure has been equal to the resonance it found in the nation’s mass psychology. We cannot expect paths to social change to be laid by the forces of oppression, which means we must pursue self-determination and self-sufficiency, demonstrating the validity of our vision of society through social practice. No one with a modicum of intelligence would disagree with the validity of our message, the righteousness of the Occupy Movement’s 10 core demands or the correctness of our aspirations. Yet this is not enough to sustain a movement so vocally opposed to the entrenched power structure of the 1 percent and all the tools of repression at their disposal. |UC Berkeley – Photo: Brian Nguyen| No, what will be needed is nothing short of the unified might of the 99 percent, most if not all of us speaking with one voice, with one will, animated by this same spirit throughout. We cannot expect paths to social change to be laid by the forces of oppression, which means we must pursue self-determination and self-sufficiency, demonstrating the validity of our vision of society through social practice. We possess all the tools necessary to transform our occupations into practice programs which address some of the core inequities in the capitalist arrangement we currently stand in opposition to by imbedding them in the most underdeveloped and disenfranchised communities of the 99 percent, where the effects of corporate greed and institutional inequality are most visible. There is another common thread running through the Occupy Movement, Hunger Strike Solidarity Movement and Anti-Imperialist Movement: Most of us engaged in these movements either champion, hail from or have been forced into the underclass of the U.S. socio-economic strata. I want you all to ask yourselves, after a cursory examination of U.S. society, who has done most of the work, most of the dying, most of the time in prison or on the unemployment line? Who has little or no interest in the maintenance of the current status quo, who has been disproportionately affected by the sub-prime loan fiasco and the socio-economic impact of corporate greed and political corruption? Invariably we must answer it is the underclass communities of this nation, Amerika’s ghettos, hoods, barrios, trailer parks and projects. Their unfortunate position in the capitalist arrangement and desperate historical relationship to the productive system forces this segment of society to the forefront of any revolutionary scheme. Who has done most of the work, most of the dying, most of the time in prison or on the unemployment line? Who has little or no interest in the maintenance of the current status quo? It is the underclass communities of this nation, Amerika’s ghettos, hoods, barrios, trailer parks and projects. When the honorable Comrade George Lester Jackson expressed this same analysis some 40 years ago, people did not fully grasp what he meant. Yet here we are still pursuing the victorious conclusion of the same democratic process. Three pilot programs What we propose is harnessing the full spectrum potential of the Occupy Movement at every level and lining it with the untapped power and potential of the millions and millions in underclass communities across Amerika via three pilot programs which are complimentary, self-sustaining and socio-economically empowering for all of the 99 percent, while proving definitively that the spirit of cooperation is more socially fulfilling and impactful than the greed and avarice promoted through capitalist competition. We propose organizing major segments of the movement and those they serve to not only safeguard the survival and forward progress of the cause itself, but open an entirely new front for the struggle. The Occupy Wall Street Movement, Occupy the Hood and the underclass communities, each working in coordination, could prove an unstoppable force if organized and mobilized with unity of purpose. Each segment of this broader organizing force possesses mutually beneficial qualities whose socio-economic and political impact far exceeds the sum of its individual parts. We of the NCTT Corcoran SHU urge you to distribute this strategic proposal to all the various Occupy Movement groups nationally, all the various chapters of Occupy the Hood – especially its founder, Malik Rhasaan – and that together they bring this proposal to the underclass communities across Amerika. We want to urge all our brothers and sisters in lumpen organizations within these communities, no matter what set you claim, nation you ride – Sureño or Norteño – hood you represent or crew you roll with, to support and defend these brothers and sisters from all aspects of the Occupy Movement as they enter your/our communities, many living in and being from those same or similar communities, to build with us a new dynamic that will enrich us all. Equally we want to urge all our brothers and sisters in the Occupy Movement to learn from the people as you enter and work with the underclass community so we all may better serve the interests of the 99 percent. For some of you, it will be a new and sobering reality, completely outside of your experience, and should provide an uncensored view of the human misery and socio-economic inequality in Amerika. It is imperative that you all look upon the interests of the movement and those communities as your very own; the survival of the movement and hope for substantive change in the daily dynamic of economic desperation and despair in the underclass communities of the U.S. may well depend on it. We want to urge all our brothers and sisters in the Occupy Movement to learn from the people as you enter and work with the underclass community so we all may better serve the interests of the 99 percent. Look upon the interests of the movement and those communities as your very own. The three pilot programs we are proposing are NCTT word-product, either drawn from our archives or uniquely developed to ensure the success of this enterprise. This venture will require some structural organization amongst you. We suggest you adopt a democratic centralist organizational structure which will allow everyone to air their views, opinions and suggestions – be they popular or unpopular, correct or incorrect – in group discussions on policy decisions. Yet those with the greatest knowledge and insight on the specific subject matter being disclosed should have the greatest influence on the policy ultimately adopted. |Philadelphia – Photo: Larissa Mogano| Such an approach will encourage the broadest possible participation in the decision making process, while securing the most viable and sagacious ideas and preventing the cropping up of ultra-democratic ideas, where someone has something to say on every little thing and nothing ever gets accomplished, just bourgeois aversion to the collective will. These programs are intentionally designed to be universally adaptive, modifiable and amendable to work in any community. The success of some aspects of these programs will be benefited by specialized knowledge, insight or skill sets. We are aware that the Occupy Movement in its various permutations, as well as the underclass communities in which these programs will be imbedded, possess intellectuals, professionals and technicians whose knowledge and participation will prove essential, and we urge you all to begin taking stock of these skill sets and maintaining – or creating – a local database of each activist or participant’s skill sets, such as computer engineering, drywall, agricultural expertise, technical engineering, plumbing, visual art etc. To facilitate the success of these collective work initiatives and as we see success, we expand these efforts into new areas of development. Our brothers and sisters already doing vital work in the Occupy the Hood chapters, such as the “Feed the Hood” program, we ask you now to expand your relationship with the Occupy Wall Street Movement beyond the confines of the people of color working group and enter a new and broader phase of community development and social organization which will see a true union of all of our social forces in the practical work of building an entirely new basis for relating to the productive system. |Oakland – Photo: Ben Margot| Occupy the Hood is the natural bridge between all aspects of the 99 percent, and it is only through a functional union such as this that our movement can be transformed into a true social revolution and perhaps more. Occupy the Hood is the natural bridge between all aspects of the 99 percent. To all you brothers and sisters on college campuses or in unemployment lines across this nation, if you don’t have an Occupy Movement chapter established in your city, contact the nearest Occupy Movement chapter to you and establish one of your own. It is in your interest to alter the fundamental dynamic of human relationships and the basis for prosperity in this nation, and what we propose here may well give us the greatest possible chance to do just that. The three pilot programs we propose are: 1) the closed circuit economic initiative; 2) the sustainable community agricultural commons; 3) the block vote democratic initiative. We will explain each here in basic terms and should you need detailed program formats or other help, you need only contact us directly. We have done our best to give you all the necessary information needed to start here. Please bear with us. I assure you it’s worth your time. The Closed Circuit Economic Initiative The Closed Circuit Economic Initiative (CCE Initiative) is a cooperative economic venture designed to amplify local wealth by re-circulating it in the community in which it originated, while providing collective ownership of the venture to the community and movement, while simultaneously addressing local unemployment in the community in which the venture is based. The CCE Initiative was originally designed to address the flight of wealth from New African communities to more affluent ones that actually owned the businesses in New African (Black) neighborhoods. We discovered that a single dollar will circulate in the Jewish community for some 35 days, in the Korean community for 28 days, yet a dollar circulates in the New African (Black) community for an average of 70 seconds. Yes, seconds. However, what we also learned through further analysis was this was in fact, to a greater or lesser degree, a universal disparity throughout underclass communities regardless of their racial or national makeup. The wealth of underclass communities rarely, if ever, went to enriching those same communities. But there is within our power a way to change that. Similar to the electrical charge fulfillment action of a closed circuit capacitor – where circulating a charge through a catalyst in a closed circuit will ultimately fulfill a storing device’s capacitance with no need to increase the voltage yield of the charges – it is possible to increase the economic capacity of a community by circulating its wealth in that community for a longer period. This capacitance is increased if the community itself controls the economic circuit in which current exchanges flow. Similar to the electrical charge fulfillment action of a closed circuit capacitor, it is possible to increase the economic capacity of a community by circulating its wealth in that community for a longer period. This capacitance is increased if the community itself controls the economic circuit in which current exchanges flow. Here is how we will accomplish this: The Occupy Movement will prepare fliers and pamphlets outlining this initiative in clear, easy-to-understand terms, specifically referencing the unique conditions on the ground in the local underclass communities you hope to begin in. The larger the community, the more impactful it will prove. |Oakland – Photo: David Bacon| Occupy the Hood activists, organizers and leaders from the community slated for the initiative, along with Occupy Wall Street activists, will canvas the hood together distributing these educational fliers door to door, to churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, pool halls, the street corners, the hood spots and homie hangouts, salons, barbershops and wherever our people congregate, answering questions and promoting the value of the initiative. Next a survey flier will have to be produced which asks each individual in that community the three top goods and services they most frequently spend their money on – and/or the largest portion of their money on – and/or the largest portion of their money every month. This may vary depending on the community, from groceries to gasoline, from laundrymat services to parking. Once these surveys are collected and their results compiled and we have the top three goods and services that particular community spends their money on, we’ll have the basis for our first economic venture and a business plan to produce based on the No. 1 pick. For example, let’s say food and home supplies is the area where the most money is spent in Southeast San Diego’s Skyline community. The first venture in this community’s CCE Initiative would be a grocery store, which brings us to our next step: a true community organizing meeting – or several – will have to be held with the entire community and movement activists participating to elect economic trustees for the CCE Fund: one from Occupy the Hood, one from Occupy Wall Street, and two from the community in which the venture is based. These four will collectively oversee the CCE Fund for that community, allowing those funds raised to be accepted only by those four persons together – no single individual will have access to the fund – and only for the CCE Initiative venture agreed to via the democratic will of all involved. This will ensure checks and balances are maintained and trust is assured. To fund the grocery store, we will ask each individual in that community to contribute $1 or $2 bi-monthly, along with their names, addresses and phone numbers to the CCE Initiative for a six-month period. Let’s say there are 10,000-15,000 residents in this community, along with those local Occupy Movement activists who wish to contribute. Each individual will receive a CCE certification card for their contribution, no matter how small. All these funds will be deposited in the CCE Fund’s interest earning account, which would raise an estimated $100,000 in that six-month period. We use the lion’s share of those funds to purchase or build our own grocery store in that community, owned by that community collective who are on the CCE registry; if you contributed, you’re on the registry. We will then hire only people from that community or from the local Occupy Movement who are unemployed. Those Occupy Wall Street activists with accounting, business, tax, zoning, law, real estate, grocery or other related expertise should provide that expertise to ensure the success of these ventures and receive a CCE certificate for their contributions to the effort’s creation and continued success. Once established, we need not worry about patronage or marketing because those who own the venture – the community itself – will, of course, shop in their own grocery store and encourage others to also before going elsewhere. All the profits, minus overhead, will go back to the CCE Fund with 60 percent being paid out monthly to all CCE Initiative registrants – those with a CCE certificate of contribution – in the form of a dividend check, the other 40 percent gaining interest in the CCE fund. We need not worry about patronage or marketing because those who own the venture – the community itself – will, of course, shop in their own grocery store and encourage others to also before going elsewhere. We will keep contributing and collecting the $1-$2 every two weeks, depositing it in the CCE Fund. Also, in the next six months, we purchase a “sympathetic-support venture,” one that depends on or contributes directly to the initial venture; let’s say a bakery. The grocery store will purchase its baked goods inventory exclusively from the CCE Initiative bakery. Again, the bakery will hire only people from that community or local movement without a job. Again, we repeat the process. In the next six-month period we purchase a second sympathetic-support venture; let’s say an organic grain and produce farm, again hiring only those from the community and local movement who are unemployed. Grain, flour and product inventories for the bakery and grocery store will be purchased from our farm – all of these ventures buying and selling to one another while servicing the broader community which owns them. |Miami – Photo: Miami Workers Center| Again we repeat the process in six months, this time acquiring a small cannery and packaging factory to begin offering our own canned foods and packed goods from both our farm and bakery to our grocer – and on to the broader market. Again, we hire only from that community and local movement’s unemployed. As this proceeds with each expansion of the CCE Initiative venture, the local unemployment rate drops, the amount of dividend checks paid out to CCE Initiative registrants rises, until eventually that community reaches 100 percent employment, with a second revenue stream directly linked to their own consumer choices. As the prosperity of our collectively-owned businesses grows, we will inevitably reach complete community economic interconnection and social empowerment for the people and the movement. As the prosperity of our collectively-owned businesses grows, we will inevitably reach complete community economic interconnection and social empowerment for the people and the movement. The CCE Initiative dividend checks may begin as small as $.30 or $.40, yet in 18 months could be $30-$40. The CCE Fund can then turn its attention to establishing a local credit commons, where the community can invest in its own people’s interests, not to generate profit from usurious interest rates, but to promote community prosperity and meet human needs. Here, people from the community and local movement can get micro-loans, home and auto financing, and standard banking services. |Cincinnati – Photo: J. Cherise McIntosh| In this way, the underclass community becomes entirely independent of the standard competitive capitalist economy through simple unity, cooperative economics and collective work, distribution of wealth and ownership. All dividend adjustments will be distributed equally amongst everyone in the CCE Initiative, regardless if you contributed $1 or $2 or your specialized knowledge and insight. So long as you contribute to the CCE Initiative, you’ll receive an equal share of dividends. By means of the CCE Initiative, we can clearly demonstrate cooperation serves the interests of the 99 percent where competition has clearly been unequal to the task. Once a full community economic circuit is closed, it can be joined to others in the region or nationally, providing a socio-economic alternative to the yoke of wage slavery offered us all by the 1 percent ruling elite. We need only touch the corporate capitalist economy where our own innovation and enterprises fail to meet the capacity or are simply unable to. But we here of the NCTT are always thinking and, in truth, the only limitation to the CCE Initiative meeting the material needs of the 99 percent is your own imagination; we assure you there are further options. By means of the CCE Initiative, we can clearly demonstrate cooperation serves the interests of the 99 percent where competition has clearly been unequal to the task. By those means we establish a true transfer culture from which substantive change in the nature and structure of U.S. society can be realized. This CCE Initiative corresponds to Nos. 1, 2, 9 and 10 of the 10 core demands of the national Occupy Movement. The Sustainable Community Agricultural Commune Chronic poverty and underemployment – the legacy of corporate greed and political corruption in Amerika – can be directly linked to chronic disease, high obesity rates and the plethora of health problems that accompany them. These types of physical debilities impact underclass communities disproportionately due primarily to anemic access to quality produce, meats, grains and vegetables in our communities. Of equal concern is the ecological impact of multinational corporate agri-concerns, from the exploitation of Third World brothers and sisters – some 90 percent of the produce consumed in the U.S. is grown in the Third World, while the majority of the rest comes from large corporate farms – to the adverse environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions from shipping food thousands of miles to reach our tables. Yet it is within our power to change this dynamic by embracing sustainable urban farming as a viable alternative. Throughout the underclass communities of Amerika, especially in the wake of record foreclosures and the intentional gentrification of our communities, there are vacant lots, open plots and tracts of aimless dirt that we can reclaim and transform into urban gardens that will not only feed the communities healthy and nutritious food, but also provide a valuable and significant source of revenue for them. Consider that less than 2 percent of the food consumed in metropolitan areas in the U.S. is grown there. Yet urban areas consume billions of dollars worth of food each year, including junk food, sodas, fast food, condiments and processed snacks that, unfortunately, are staples of many poor folks’ diets because the stuff is cheap and filling. But if our food was locally produced, it would not only be healthier and 50 percent cheaper than if you bought it at your supermarket, but also serve as a source of revenue for the community by selling the surplus to local chefs, restaurants and our own farmers markets, while relying on organic and other agricultural advances to increase both quality and yields. Less than 2 percent of the food consumed in metropolitan areas in the U.S. is grown there. If our food was locally produced, it would not only be healthier and 50 percent cheaper than if you bought it at your supermarket, but also serve as a source of revenue for the community. I’d like to illustrate what we propose more clearly using Cleveland, Ohio, as an example. According to Entrepreneur Magazine (October 2011), by increasing local urban farming by 5 percent in greater Cleveland it would translate into $750 million more in revenue for local purveyors. When was the last time a $750 million business was relocated to your community, let alone the hood, barrio or trailer park? Cleveland based business development analyst Michael Shuman did a study on what would happen if northeast Ohio managed to provide 25 percent more of the food it consumed. This report revealed that such a move would create over 27,000 new jobs, increase annual regional output by $4.2 billion and grow tax revenue by more than $125 million. If northeast Ohio managed to provide 25 percent more of the food it consumed, it would create over 27,000 new jobs, increase annual regional output by $4.2 billion and grow tax revenue by more than $125 million. In 2007, Cleveland became the first city in the U.S. to zone for community gardens. It now subsidizes farms in the city’s core and the 6-acre farm plot that opened recently in the heart of the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, only a few blocks from the Riverview Towers projects, not only services surrounding restaurants, but our brothers and sisters from the Riverview projects can buy fresh produce just outside their building, closer than the Safeway, Kroger or fast food joint, and 50 percent cheaper than its regular price. Now imagine if that 6-acre farm was collectively owned and operated by the residents of the Riverview Towers projects. That’s exactly what we are proposing here. |Orlando – Photo: Beverly Campbell| We call on our Occupy Movement brothers and sisters – both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Hood – to link with local underclass community organizers and pool their assets, expertise and labor to educate, organize and mobilize the community’s residents for the sustainable community agricultural commune (SCA commune). We call on our Occupy Movement brothers and sisters – both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Hood – to link with local underclass community organizers and pool their assets, expertise and labor to educate, organize and mobilize the community’s residents for the sustainable community agricultural commune (SCA commune). Simultaneously, another survey of that community and the local businesses which use produce and poultry must be conducted to determine which fruits, vegetables, herbs and grains are most widely consumed, popular and commercially valued in that community and area. Once done this must be compared to which crops among those will grow most effectively and profusely in that unique climate and environment. In so doing we must also consider new agricultural innovations such as vertical urban gardening, poultry cultivation through modern chicken coops such as those offered by “chicken cribs” (go to Backyardchickens.com) and free range techniques. The diversity of industry and innovative insight based in the Occupy Movement will prove particularly valuable as we seek contacts and assistance from conscious industry proponents, such as Jac Smit of the Urban Agriculture Network, Michael Shuman, author of “Community Food Enterprise,” who is currently a consultant at Cutting Edge Capital in Oakland, California, or Dickson Despommier of the Vertical Farm Project and those amongst movement activists with the same expertise, insight or skill set. Equally essential at this stage will be our brothers and sisters of Occupy the Hood in organizing movement activists, community organizers and residents into the divisions of labor necessary to initiate the commune. Following the collective ownership format, we go to the people soliciting contributions of $.50-$1 from community residents and movement activists over a 90-day to six-month period, while securing volunteers from across the community and local movement to work the farms on a rotating basis. If one cannot contribute money, they can contribute their labor or both if they like. Everyone who contributes something to that cycle will be given a commune membership card entitling them to 50 percent in produce and 50 percent in dividends. Therefore 50 percent of the seasonal yield will be set aside to feed the commune and 50 percent will be put on the market for sale. All produce sold to residents of that community will be discounted at our farmers’ markets, while chefs, restaurants and other businesses interested in our locally grown produce will receive it at the going rate. Sixty percent of all profits (minus overhead) from the SCA commune fund will be divided amongst commune members equally as dividends, while 40 percent will continue to incur interest in the fund as the $.50-$1 that community residents and local activists continue to contribute to the fund to expand our farms and branch out into poultry production and other husbandry. This will provide quality, organic and free range meats for our commune and potential customers in the same percentages and allotments previously discussed. We encourage the movement to reach out to conscious businesses like Greenaid, a L.A.-based guerilla gardening company that makes clay, compost and seed balls that can be tossed in derelict urban areas to make them green spaces, and Urbio, a San Francisco-based company that makes planters for vertical urban gardening, for donations to this effort of equipment and material. As the commune grows, the SCA fund can turn its attention to funding other sympathetic ventures, such as a mobile slaughterhouse and produce distribution trucks, all employing only people from the communes or that community’s local movement who are unemployed, broadening the scope of our farms and their positive impact on the underclass communities in which they are based. Our urban farms will provide a safe place of peace and prosperity for our people, our children and our youth to fellowship as they build a brighter future for themselves, their communities and this world, all from the power of their hands, heads and hearts. The SCA commune will serve to literally root the movement in the community while effecting positive change in the daily lives of the people. By providing these communities with healthy and nutritious food, creating a vital source of collective wealth, reclaiming and breathing life into what would be eyesores or an impetus for fascist tools of the ruling 1 percent – police, sheriffs etc. – to harass poor people in their own communities, we improve the quality of life for those of us most adversely affected by the current social order. Our urban farms will provide a safe place of peace and prosperity for our people, out children and our youth to fellowship as they build a brighter future for themselves, their communities and this world, all from the power of their hands, heads and hearts. In addition we open an entirely new industry with limitless economic potential in the center of the underclass communities of Amerika, and it’s owned, operated and patronized by those who are its residents, the 99 percent. This program corresponds to No. 2 of the 10 core demands of the national Occupy Movement. The Block-Vote Democratic Initiative In our last communique we definitively established that the ruling 1 percent had successfully hijacked the political process in Amerika. If any of you have been watching the partisan insanity playing out in Congress, the tripe being spouted by mental midgets like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, the ultra-right wing pandering of Mitt Romney or the fence straddling timidity and status-quo maintenance of the Obama administration, you should have no doubt we speak the unvarnished truth. We have also articulated the fact that the reason so few people vote in underclass communities is the socio-economic and race-based disparities that are responsible for the human misery in these communities are institutional and systemic to U.S. capitalist economics. No matter who they vote into office, their plight does not change. The problem is not the democratic process, which is as yet unfinished in Amerika. No, the flaw lies in the legalized corruption of politicians at the local, state and national level. The reason so few people vote in underclass communities is that no matter who they vote into office, their plight does not change. Similar to the conflict between federalists and republicans during the inception of the U.S. two-party system in the 1700s, once the people elect these pawns of the 1 percent, they feel the people should just sit down and shut up, while their ears turn only to the voices of lobbyists, special interests, and those who can improve their political careers and coffers. But it need not be this way if the incalculable power of the democratic will of the underclass can be awakened. Before the sleeping giant of underclass democratic power – the poor man and woman’s vote – can be strategically harnessed, there must be some assurance that their interests will be realized. This effort will provide that interest for all the 99 percent. What we propose in the Block-Vote Democratic Initiative (BVD Initiative) is to do just that by bypassing these corrupt politicians altogether by putting the policies we, the 99 percent, support on the ballots of local, state and national elections via petition with a simultaneous voter registration “block” comprised of Occupy Movement activists and entire underclass communities, so the shear number of affirmative votes passes the policy measures outright. What we propose is to have Occupy Movement activists – both Occupy the Hood and Occupy Wall Street – prepare informative pamphlets specifically targeted to their local underclass communities and districts containing our 10 core demands and issues of particular interest to that community which the vast majority of the people support. Once we’ve assessed the will of the people, ballot measures and signature petitions should be prepared based directly on those policies most widely supported, with voter registrations drives to register everyone in the community and movement who supports the policy. Each local policy initiative or position on a bill should be organized as a block capable of passing – or defeating – the initiative outright. On the state level, greater coordination between underclass communities will have to be organized through Occupy Movement activists, and again if possible our “block” should be so overwhelming as to pass the initiative outright. On the national level that will prove even more difficult as the concurrence on the specific policy will lose resonance in direct proportion to the site of the population we seek to serve. Nevertheless, we should still seek to pass these measures outright. To facilitate this, each measure’s vote should be preceded by at least two weeks of demonstrations corresponding in size to the measure’s social impact – i.e., local measures warrant local demonstrations, state measures should warrant a statewide wave of demonstrations, and national measures should see demonstrations from coast to coast. This will raise awareness and galvanize support in other segments of the social strata ensuring the measures pass. There are three possible measures reflective of our 10 core demands we are fairly certain would find overwhelming support in underclass communities across Amerika: 1) A total ban on all corporate and financial influences, including lobbyists and “strategic analysts,” from any aspect of the electoral process. Only individuals should be able to influence the polls with their votes and campaign contributions – see No. 7 of the 10 core demands of the national Occupy Movement. Only individuals should be able to influence the polls with their votes and campaign contributions. 2) Establishment of community based parole boards, with a panel from the community where the offender actually lived and would return, determining when an indeterminate term – such as 25 to life, three strikes etc. – has been sufficiently satisfied and he or she is ready to return home. This contrasts with the current panel of DAs, police and other law enforcement officials that make up parole boards today. Most prisoners hail from underclass communities and it is these communities who should decide when they are sufficiently rehabilitated to return. This corresponds to No. 6 of the 10 core demands of the national Occupy Movement. Most prisoners hail from underclass communities and it is these communities who should decide when they are sufficiently rehabilitated to return. 3) Establish universal health care for the poor. All individuals making under $25,000 a year and families making under $50,000 a year should be provided access to a comprehensive universal health care system. This corresponds to No. 2 of the 10 core demands of the national Occupy Movement. Establish universal health care for the poor. Such measures would pass overwhelmingly in the underclass communities of Amerika, serve to empower those most disenfranchised segments of society, and improve the quality of life for over 100 million people in the U.S., all because we, the 99 percent, via the BVD Initiative, removed corrupt politicians from the policy creation and implementation process. Any force opposing this undiluted expression of the will of the people would be by definition undemocratic. It is our sincerest hope that you all see the merits of what we propose here and act in accordance with it. In any conflict resolution scenario, the first step that should be made is a strategic analysis of yourself and those forces aligned against you to ascertain your relative strengths and weaknesses. The wise know such assessments, especially in socio-political conflicts, must be constantly studied and reassessed because they are in a state of constant change. If this is done correctly, we can calculate the prospects of victory or defeat. Conflict resolution and warfare are based on identical principles. Sun-Tzu, in his sage masterwork, “The Art of War,” stated, “If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of 100 battles.” If we analyze the actions and reactions of the tools of the ruling 1 percent, it’s clear they are pursuing a course of encirclement, isolation and marginalization against the national movement, hoping that their control of the mass media and a lack of broad-based organization in the movement will allow them the opportunity to erode support for it over time, isolate it from positive public opinion and ultimately destroy it. It is a posture and strategic approach that has worked for them in the past. This is possible only if we allow it. The ruling 1 percent are pursuing a course of encirclement, isolation and marginalization against the national movement, hoping that their control of the mass media and a lack of broad-based organization in the movement will allow them the opportunity to erode support for it over time, isolate it from positive public opinion and ultimately destroy it. The most prudent way to counter such an attempt is to place the movement in a position of invincibility, while simultaneously redefining the nature of the conflict itself. The movement is strong – we’ve shown that on every front, be it on the streets or behind these walls – yet it’s largely unanchored to the material interests of those we represent. A seed in the ground is easily uprooted, a tree with deep roots, however, is a monumental task to remove. Zhuge Liang, a famous general from ancient China’s “warring states era” (180-234 A.D.), in the chapter, “Discerning Bases,” in his essay, “The Way of the General,” said: “If you attack evils based on social trends, no one can rival you in dignity. If you settle victory based on the power of the people, no one can rival you in achievement. If you can accurately discern those bases of action and add dignity and faith to them, you can take on the most formidable opponent and prevail over the most valiant adversary.” Truly basing the movement in the people ensures no force on earth can prevail against it. It truly becomes invincible. Conclusion: You can transform the world For all of you reading these words, we want you to really understand what you are involved in and what’s at stake. You are on the cusp of making history, of quite literally changing the world. Right now you have it within your hands to transform the nature and structure of the most powerful nation on earth, and thus transform the world. You represent the ongoing struggle for democratic change in the U.S. A historical legacy reaching back hundreds of years is now in your hands. The means for victory are at our collective fingertips; you need only reach out and seize this opportunity. Will it be easy? Of course not. Nothing of value comes without cost or sacrifice. Power concedes nothing without demand. But what must be understood is that we, the people, the 99 percent, are the most powerful force in this world and our cause is just. Proceeding from this truth with strategic intent we cannot lose. We are on the right side of history. Our ideas are moral; our cause is just. We, the people, the 99 percent, are the most powerful force in this world and our cause is just. But understand we cannot assume this is self-evident, nor that it will be enough to win. We must promote and demonstrate the correctness of our view through social practice. Understand we will not win this conflict without public and political support, but people who may agree with us will still not join the movement unless it’s clear our cause is righteous and just. Yes, the corporate-political power structure is authoritarian, hypocritical and avaricious. Greed and corruption define the very fabric of U.S. institutions and power considerations. You are expressing the frustration and hostility the people already feel. But still this is not enough. There must be a qualitative transformation in that moral outrage. If we view morality from a historical perspective, it has evolved over time into a system of ethics societies use to create values that serve the public good. If these values cease to fit the vast majority of the people’s interests, the morality of society slowly shifts, evolving new values. The morality of corporate capitalism, where “Gordon Gekko” clones live, the ethos “Greed is good” does not fit the vast majority of the people’s interests; it never has. Yet now, that moral self-realization is inescapable. The highest form of strategy is to win without fighting. When time is not an option, we must rely on an approach just as good: to win first and fight second. This is what we are proposing here. If you succeed in waking the sleeping giant of socio-political and economic potential lying dormant in the underclass communities of Amerika in pursuit of this equalitarian democratic imperative, we will have already won. Should the 1 percent, or their tools, be fool enough to oppose the inevitable conclusion of such a social revolution, they will reap a fool’s reward. If you succeed in waking the sleeping giant of socio-political and economic potential lying dormant in the underclass communities of Amerika in pursuit of this equalitarian democratic imperative, we will have already won. U.S. Army Col. John Boyd, in his analysis of how to suppress guerrilla insurgencies or popular revolutions, stated the only effective countermeasure to our strategic approach: “Undermine the … cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve the needs of the people rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite. (If you cannot realize such a political program, Boyd noted, you might consider changing sides now to avoid the rush later.) Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate major grievances and connect the government with its grass roots.” In essence, to defeat us they would have to capitulate to our 10 core demands without struggle. Well, brothers and sisters, with the unholy alliance of corporate interests and political patronage that defines the modern political and economic power structure in the U.S., we need not fear such countermeasures anytime soon. It is our sincerest hope that you all find some value in our counsel and take up these ideas as your own. Our love, loyalty and solidarity to all those who love freedom, justice and equality and fear only failure. Until we win or don’t lose. |J. Heshima Denham| For more information on the NCTT Corcoran SHU or details on these programs, contact: Read these brothers’ previous stories: “Feeling death at our heels: An update from the frontlines of the struggle,” “California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement,” “A brief hunger strike update from the front lines of the struggle: Corcoran-SHU 4B 1L C-section Isolation Unit” (second story in that post), “From the front lines of the struggle,” and “We dare to win: The reality and impact of SHU torture units.” This story was typed by Adrian McKinney. December 6, 2011 by Heshima Denham, Zaharibu Dorrough and Kambui Robinson “The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of this American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the Blacks, the Natives, the very poor Whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law – all made palatable by this fanfare of patriotism and unity.” – Howard Zinn Greetings, Brothers and Sisters. A firm, warm and solid embrace of revolutionary love is extended to you all. These words by Brother Howard Zinn are particularly relevant to the survival of the evolving Occupy Wall Street Movement, as these truths have been integral to the success of populist organizing in the U.S. historically and are central to the proposal we’re putting forward here. Like the Arab Spring, which is still rocking the Middle East, and our own struggle to abolish indefinite confinement in sensory deprivation SHU torture units (see the five core demands from Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity), the Occupy Wall Street Movement expresses a fundamental rule of materialist dialectics as they apply to social development – i.e., the transformation of quantity into quality – expressed eloquently by the Honorable Comrade George Lester Jackson some 40 years ago: “(C)onsciousness is directly proportional to oppression.” “(C)onsciousness is directly proportional to oppression.” – Honorable Comrade George Lester Jackson The purpose of the NCTT primarily is to act as a clearinghouse for progressive and meaningful solutions to the ills of society from our unique and scientific perspective. As we have followed and supported the Occupy Wall Street Movement, discussing its great potential, analyzing its character, composition and socio-economic motive force, predicting the inevitable violent reactionary response of the fascist state in defense of its capitalist masters, the ruling 1 percent have never, nor will they ever, concede anything, surely not substantive changes, without struggle which requires unity of purpose, broad-based organization, fluid strategy and effective tactics. Populist and progressive movements in this nation have succeeded or failed, lived or died, based on how effectively they understood and adapted to this reality. We learned this in the epoch following the Civil War as reconstruction gains were effectively repealed and Jim Crow law was introduced. The Civil Rights Movement taught us the necessity of broad-based organization and accurate agreement of the opposition’s center of gravity: their point of weakness. Only a few years later we learned not to underestimate the power of the ruling 1 percent and insidiousness of its state tools when the Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) dismantled the Black Liberation Movement, imprisoned many of us, and ushered in the world of individualistic pursuits, greed, corruption, gross inequality and mass incarceration you all have now inherited. As we watched the National (International) Day of Action unfold and the days that have followed, witnessing the predictable brutal response of the tools of the 1 percent as they beat young men and women bloody, pepper sprayed and pummeled peaceful youth at UC Davis, destroyed the people’s property across the nation, and even peppersprayed and dragged away 68-year-old women and pregnant ladies alike, with great effort we detached from our rage and analyzed the comments, ideas, and responses of various political pundits, common people on the streets, agents of the state and our protestors themselves. Three things immediately became obvious from that analysis: 1) The mass media and far too many of the various pundits were in essence counting on the national Occupy movements to just peter out and fizzle away. It was this message that those who own these mass media outlets – the 1 percent – want to be disseminated as broadly as possible to undermine mass support for the movement. The mass media were counting on the national Occupy movements to just peter out and fizzle away. It was this message that those who own these mass media outlets – the 1 percent – want to be disseminated as broadly as possible to undermine mass support for the movement. 2) We, the 99 percent, have no intention of going anywhere until substantive change is realized, and though most in this nation not involved directly in the occupations themselves agree with our ideas in opposition to corporate greed and institutional inequality, there were no clearly articulated demands or objectives around which the movement could organize the broader masses. 3) This lack of clearly articulated demands/objectives and coherent strategic and tactical organization by the national Occupy Movement was undermining its intent, diluting its potential, and degrading its motive force. This state of affairs left unaddressed, as in most every similar movement in the U.S. historically, will lead to its isolation. This cannot be allowed. The first step in defeating an enemy as powerful, all-encompassing and organized as the ruling 1 percent is understanding the nature of struggle and the basis of their power. When you analyze opponents, you must see beyond the superficial for the origins of that power, the point of vulnerability upon which it is based. Striking this point of vulnerability will inflict disproportionate damage. It must be understood that substantive, radical, progressive social change is no different than warfare and warfare is a form of power. Power systems, no matter their myriad manifestations, share the same basic structures. The most visible thing about them is their appearance, what is seen and felt. Great power systems first try to ignore challenges to them, to dismiss them. When this fails, they opt to crush them. This is exactly what the Occupy Movement has experienced thus far. But all too often this outward display is a deceptive fabrication, a manifestation of insecurity, since power dares not expose its weaknesses. The key lies in determining what their point of vulnerability is, and to do so you must understand the structure of the power system and the culture in which it operates. I began this discussion with a concise analysis of just this point by Howard Zinn. The real point of vulnerability in American democracy is the social and political support of its citizens. Unfortunately, the key apparatus in influencing public opinion is the American mass media – yet, ironically, they are equally vulnerable to the power of the mass support of the people. The key factor thus far in failing to harness this mass support is the lack of broad-based, articulable demands/objectives around which the uncommitted people who may support our message but not our movement can be educated, organized and mobilized to join the movement and transform not only the nature and structure of U.S. society, but the WORLD. The key factor thus far in failing to harness the mass support of the people is the lack of broad-based, articulable demands/objectives around which the uncommitted people who may support our message but not our movement can be educated, organized and mobilized to join the movement and transform not only the nature and structure of U.S. society, but the WORLD. To that end the NCTT Corcoran SHU has made a comprehensive analysis of statements from participants of all the national Occupy movements and some of those abroad and compiled these ideas into 10 core Objectives of the Occupy Wall Street Movement national coalition. We call on you brothers and sisters to disseminate these 10 core objectives to all the Occupy movements across the nation and the world, and we call on all the Occupy movements to convene a national forum – which can take place online or at a national convention – to discuss the adoption of these 10 core Objectives as the definitive goals and organizing points around which the movement is based and the next level of our struggle is to be waged. These 10 core Objectives can be modified, augmented or amended to take into account the broadest cross-section of the 99 percent possible and the collective will of the movement: The 10 Core Objectives of the Occupy Wall Street Movement National Coalition 1. We want full employment with a living wage for all people who will work, and for employment to be enforced as the right which it is. The U.S. Declaration of Independence states in part “that all men … are endowed … with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” “Life” is thus a right guaranteed by this nation and the means to live – work, making a living wage for all of those who will and can work – must be equally guaranteed as the right which it is – as must a guaranteed income for those who can’t work. This is the responsibility of the federal government. If the corporate U.S. businessmen will not provide full employment even as they sit on trillions of dollars in cash reserves fleeced from the surplus value of labor, then the means of production should be taken from them and placed in the community so the 99 percent of the people can organize and employ all the people, ensuring a quality standard of life for all. 2. We want an end to institutional racism and race- and class-based disparities in access to, and quality of, labor, education, health care, criminal defense, political empowerment, technology and healthy food. We recognize institutional racism – the U.S. race caste system – and systemic class disparities in the U.S. capitalist structure as not simply an obstacle to equitable educational opportunities, labor access, wage equality, proportionate rates of chronic disease management, access to quality and preventable health care services, non-predatory community policing, equitable treatment of criminal offenders, access to the political process for all, access to communications technology, the internet and fresh, unprocessed foods but as structural features of U.S. market capitalism primarily designed to prevent broad class cooperation between the 99 percent from various racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We will no longer allow this divide and rule arrangement to govern the socio-economic relationships upon which the nature and structure of U.S. society is based. 3. We want decent and affordable housing for all people and for it to be enforced as the right which it is. We recognize that housing, like living wage employment, is a fundamental necessity of life and as such a right that we have invested this government with securing on our behalf. Instead, government has consistently sided with those on Wall Street, who are responsible for the single greatest loss of housing in the nation’s history, while federal, state and local officials have in essence criminalized homelessness and chronic poverty and made a practice of attacking, destroying the property of and displacing the homeless wherever they’ve tried to erect shelters in this locked, anti-poor society. Since it was corporate greed, government deregulation and financial speculators that led to the creation of exotic financial instruments like credit default swaps and sub-prime loan bundles which fleeced the 99 percent of much of their wealth and home equity, the government should mandate a “cost of living” readjustment to home equity debt on all U.S. homes so what the people owe actually reflects what these properties are now worth. This would eliminate “underwater” homeowners and bail out the 99 percent of the people for a change. Simultaneously, vacated and empty federal housing authority properties (FHA) should be made into cooperatives so that our communities, with government aid, can create and build decent housing for all. 4. We want affordable and equal access to higher education for all and access to education that teaches the true history of colonialism, chattel slavery, repression of organized labor, the use of police repression and imprisonment as tools of capitalist exploitation, and the perpetuation of imperialism in the development and maintenance of modern U.S. power systems and corporate financial markets. As current trends in the national unemployment rate indicate – for the 99 percent nationally, the rate is 14 percent for Latinos, 17 percent for New Afrikans (Blacks), yet only 4 percent for those with a college degree – higher education has a direct correlation to socio-economic opportunity and prosperity. Since equal opportunity is a fundamental right of U.S. citizenship, the 99 percent should have equal access to higher education without speculative corporate profiteering in industries related to higher education driving up tuition costs and student loan interest rates to usurious levels, leaving most in perpetual debt and simply pricing the very prospect of higher education out of reach for those in communities of color and the poor. 5. We want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of oppressed people in the U.S., particularly in the New Afrikan (Black), Latino, immigrant and underclass communities and among those protesting in this nation. We recognize the police and other state paramilitary agencies – sheriffs, FBI, correctional guards etc. – are, and have always been, the enforcement army of the ruling 1 percent. This was again proven when these fascist forces moved nationally, en masse, to attack, pepper spray, beat, destroy the property of, arrest and attempt to crush the national Occupy Movement and its supporters at the two-month anniversary of the worldwide action and every day since. We recognize such brutal and unwarranted treatment is the daily existence of New Afrikan (Black), Latino, immigrant and underclass communities and people in this nation now, and historically, all to ensure the 1 percent “keeps us in our place,” the unfortunate victims of the race/class arrangement. We recognize the police and other state paramilitary agencies – sheriffs, FBI, correctional guards etc. – are, and have always been, the enforcement army of the ruling 1 percent. Self-defense is a human right and both the action and means are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and state laws (see the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and California Penal Code Section 50). We believe community organized oversight and self-defense forces should be organized to monitor and record all police interactions with the people and defend them against ruling class directed and racist attacks when necessity dictates. The hypocrisy of the government and media is exposed as they criticize Syria, China and Iran for attacking peaceful protestors while they do the same across the U.S. daily. We will suffer no more attacks like those at UC Davis, no more Scott Olsens, Fly Benzos or Oscar Grants to be injured or killed at the hands of the tools of the 1 percent. The hypocrisy of the government and media is exposed as they criticize Syria, China and Iran for attacking peaceful protestors while they do the same across the U.S. daily. We will suffer no more attacks like those at UC Davis, no more Scott Olsens, Fly Benzos or Oscar Grants to be injured or killed at the hands of the tools of the 1 percent. 6. We want an end to the expansion of the prison industrial complex, as a profit base – from our tax dollars – for the disposal of surplus labor and the poor. We want an end to the use of indefinite solitary confinement torture units in the U.S. as they are inhumane and illegal. The mass incarceration of people of color and the poor will no longer be tolerated as an acceptable alternative to enforcing socio-economic equality in America. The disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and opportunity in a society is the origin of all crime. The U.S. has one of the greatest disparities between haves and have nots on earth. As a result, the U.S. has the largest prison population on the planet with some 2.7 million of our citizens in prison, 67 percent of them New Afrikans (Black) or Latinos, though they constitute only 26 percent of the nation’s population. The prison population in the U.S. has exploded some 600 percent since 1981, with state and federal prison budgets in excess of hundreds of billions of our tax dollars a year lining the pockets of corporate interests that build, supply and maintain these prisons, jails, courts and staff, not to mention the labor aristocrats like the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) guards union, who’ve created a socio-economic and political power base that guarantees their job security and ever increasing salaries and benefits, while maintaining a lobbying stranglehold on state politicians. We recognize, in the face of such a corrupt cabal of government and business, the purpose of imprisonment in the U.S. now has little to do with public safety and rehabilitation and more to do with the development of a self-perpetuating, poverty-fueled, recession-proof industry and an accompanying socio-political accommodating labor aristocracy of prison guards, cops and staff as a support base for the interests of the ruling 1 percent. Prison is a socially hostile microcosm of society’s contradictions, possessing the same race/class and state/class contradictions that currently define the socio-economic inequality that is capitalist Amerika. Prisons serve as warehouses for surplus labor, the poor and those who have been forced to the bottom rung of society. It is the systemic race/class disparities, intentional criminalization and underdevelopment of poor communities and social apathy which have forced most offenders into the underground economy as the only viable option to survive. This is unacceptable and unsustainable, equally repugnant, fundamentally inhumane, and illegal as the continued gross violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture – to which the U.S. is a signatory and we agree is the law of the land – which prohibits long-term solitary confinement for extracting information, political views or as punishment for any reason – which is the very purpose of SHU units – as torture, but it is being practiced in numerous U.S. prisons with government approval. The continued indefinite confinement of human beings in SHUs, SMUs and other supermax torture units must be abolished in the U.S., as they violate the basic tenets of human rights this nation has sworn to uphold. The basis of true rehabilitation, such as tech and computer-based vocational programs, access to higher education for prisoners and community-based parole boards must become the new order of the day. This is the only way to guarantee true justice in an unjust social arrangement and see our imprisoned citizens are capable of making a meaningful contribution to our society and prosperity. The disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and opportunity in a society is the origin of all crime. The U.S. has one of the greatest disparities between haves and have nots on earth. 7. We want an end to all corporate and financial influences in the political process in the U.S. We recognize, since its inception, the nature and structure of U.S. society has been one of the rich, for the rich and by the rich, in which the 99 percent have served as a source of exploited labor and a consumer market for the goods and services of those who own the means of production. This pattern of usurpations has evolved into a political process in which public policies and elected officials are more often than not determined by lobbying dollars, manipulation of public opinion by corporate-controlled mass media, and the overwhelming influence of financial markets and industries on policies and policymakers, effectively marginalizing the people, their interests and their will, reducing them to pawns in a game of corporate pandering. This will stop now. The U.S. will finally become a nation of the people, for the people and by the people, where only individual citizens may have any influence in the nature and structure of the democratic process in the U.S. This means banning all lobbyists, donors, financial market proxies, strategic advisers and special interest groups from local, state and federal electoral and legislative processes in the U.S. We are sick of this “legalized” corruption. 8. We want an end to imperialist wars of aggression and sending our youth off to kill and die to enforce the economic interests of big oil and other corporate concerns seeking new resources to exploit, new markets to open for sale of their goods and services and as an impetus to keep from addressing domestic ills. We recognize, as Bolton Hall said, “If there is a war, you will furnish the corpses and the taxes and others will get this glory. Speculators will make money out of it, that is, out of you (us).” Thousands of our young men and women died in Iraq and across the Middle East and caused the deaths, either intentionally or unintentionally, of many thousands more Third World people, all based on the lies of greedy and bloodthirsty politicians with multiple ties to big oil and corporate interests. The current administration has only slightly modified this same imperialist tendency by shifting it to a more palatable target at the cost of billions of our tax dollars and thousands of our youth that could have been contributing to the prosperity of the nation and its people. We support our young men and women, but we do not support imperialism. 9. We want a bottoms-up approach to economic development and labor-capital relations in the U.S. This nation is empowered by “we the people,” the 99 percent, to secure our rights to life, liberty, and prosperity; yet we recognize the state has aligned itself so intimately for so long with the exclusive interest of the ruling 1 percent that it has become enamored exclusively to a top-down approach to socio-economic and political solutions which always favors the rich first and everyone else when or if possible. This has resulted in a 281 percent increase in the growth of wealth in the top 1 percent of this nation, while the bottom 90 percent have seen their incomes flat over the past 20 years. We recognize that this fascist alliance between corporate capital and government has become obstructive to the ends of securing the rights of life and prosperity to the 99 percent of this nation’s people and will now come to an end. Socio-economic and political policy must now uplift the quality of life from the bottom rung up – empowering the disenfranchised, providing opportunities for those with no options and directing bailouts and subsidies to the people, not banks and billionaires. We recognize the state has thus far been a tool to guarantee the dominance of one class over others, of the 1 percent over the 99 percent, and that arrangement will now come to an end. Socio-economic and political policy must now uplift the quality of life from the bottom rung up – empowering the disenfranchised, providing opportunities for those with no options and directing bailouts and subsidies to the people, not banks and billionaires. 10. We want a more equitable distribution of wealth, justice and opportunity at every level of society, reflecting the objective reality that it’s the socio-economic, political, intellectual and cultural contributions of the 99 percent upon which this society stands. We recognize that there is enough food in this nation that no one need be hungry, enough unoccupied structures in this nation that no one need be homeless, enough educators, institutions, knowledge and technology in this nation that no one need be without a degree or skilled trade, enough work to be done that no one needs to be without a job; and it is only due to the insistence of an entrenched, super-rich 1 percent and their stranglehold on every institution and apparatus of this nation’s infrastructure from the government to the mass media that their opulence and privilege be maintained at the expense of the 99 percent. We recognize that this is not our national reality, the ruling class has mismanaged our society – woefully and criminally mismanaged – and those in power at every level are either unable or unwilling to change the nature and structure of capitalist society. So it falls to us, the 99 percent, to forge a new basis upon which socio-economic relationships will be based, ushering in a new social order in Amerika and around the world, that serves the interests of all the people and not simply the privileged few. It is our request that all of you please send a copy of this proposal to each individual Occupy Movement coalition, which includes but is not limited to Occupy Wall Street (New York City), Occupy Oakland, Occupy NOLA (New Orleans), Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Boston, Occupy L.A. (Los Angeles), Occupy Seattle, Occupy UC Davis, Occupy Phoenix, Occupy Fresno, Occupy Cleveland, Occupy Chicago et al. Post a copy of this proposal online at as many sites for the Occupy movement as possible. Post it on Facebook, blog sites and wherever social commentary is held. In addition, we call on each individual Occupy Movement to begin organizing in and with the underclass communities in your city or town and for all my brothers and sisters in the ghettos, projects, barrios and trailer parks across this nation to begin organizing with Occupy Movement coalition reps around collective programs that can serve to begin realizing these 10 core Objectives by our unity and contributions alone. The NCTT, both here in Corcoran SHU and Pelican Bay SHU are committed to making meaningful contributions to the development of such community action programs, which we will outline in our next communication. We call on each individual Occupy Movement to begin organizing in and with the underclass communities in your city or town and for all my brothers and sisters in the ghettos, projects, barrios and trailer parks across this nation to begin organizing with Occupy Movement coalition reps around collective programs that can serve to begin realizing these 10 core objectives by our unity and contributions alone. But what must be understood is social movements of this nature are supported only to the degree that their ideas find resonance in the psychological structures of the masses, but even this is not enough. To ensure the realization of any substantive change in the nature and structure of U.S. capitalist society and to prevent this movement from being isolated and neutralized by the forces of repression, it must be firmly embedded in as broad a cross-section of this population as possible. There are some 47 million people in Amerika living below the poverty line, another 150 million or so barely getting by – two thirds of this nation’s population, all of them part of the 99 percent. It is here that we will find our most lasting support, and thus it is here that you must begin forging meaningful ties. These are overwhelmingly New Afrikan (Black), Latino, immigrant and poor communities. You champion us all with your ideas and the courage of your convictions, just as we continue to support you with our sacrifices and insight. It is now time to take the movement to its next evolution and ultimately to its inevitable conclusion: victorious revolutionary change. Your greatest power lies in your unity and cooperation and ultimately your organizational ability. The power of the people far surpasses all the repressive violence of the Babylons attacking you/us or the wealth of the 1 percent, who will stop at nothing to silence us all. The power of the people far surpasses all the repressive violence of the Babylons attacking you/us or the wealth of the 1 percent, who will stop at nothing to silence us all. This is a protracted struggle; there will be no 90-day revolution here. Victory will require sacrifice, tenacity and competent strategic insight. The question you must ask is, Are you prepared to do what is necessary to win this struggle? If you answer in the affirmative, commit to victory and accept no other alternative. The people, as we are, are with you. Until we win or don’t lose, our love and solidarity to all those who love freedom and fear only failures. Send our brothers some love and light: Zaharibu Dorrough, D-83611, CSP-COR-SHU 4B1L-53, P.O. Box 3481, Corcoran, CA 93212; J. Heshima Denham, J-38283, CSP-COR-SHU 4B1L-46, P.O. Box 3481, Corcoran, CA 93212; and Kambui Robinson, C-83820, CSP-COR-SHU 4B1L-49, P.O. Box 3481, Corcoran, CA 93212. And read their previous stories: “A brief hunger strike update from the front lines of the struggle: Corcoran-SHU 4B 1L C-section Isolation Unit” (second story in that post), “From the front lines of the struggle,”and “We dare to win: The reality and impact of SHU torture units.” This story was typed by Adrian McKinney.

Jewish World Review Feb. 26, 2004 / 4 Adar, 5764 Bush strikes backhttp://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Tired of being a punching bag for Sen. John Kerry and the rest of the Democratic Party, President Bush hit back Monday night (Feb. 23). In an address to Republican governors in Washington, Bush displayed quiet confidence in stark contrast to the anger and invective heaped on him. Instead of attacking leading Democratic presidential contender Kerry by name, the president referred with humorous jibes to "a Massachusetts senator." The initial strategy - which could change if it doesn't work in raising Bush's sagging poll numbers and lowering Kerry's - is to portray Kerry as a political opportunist, changing his mind when it suits his personal political agenda and standing for nothing as a matter of principle. In his speech, the president suggested the country could not afford to have a president who is double-minded about the military and the war on terror. There is plenty of material from which to draw. The Republican National Committee and various pro-Bush Internet sites have posted multiple pages of information on Kerry votes in the Senate that either seemed inconsistent then or are inconsistent now with what he says he believes. He voted for the Iraq war but didn't think the president would go so far. He served in Vietnam but opposed the war when he returned, thus giving encouragement to the enemy at a time when his fellow soldiers were still being shot at, wounded and killed. He might have gotten away with that had he not slimed all in the military as mass murderers. During testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, Kerry spoke of "war crimes" committed by his fellow soldiers (he didn't say if he had committed any) and alleged that such war crimes were "not isolated incidents." Rather, he claimed, they were "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Kerry claimed that American soldiers had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, (blew) up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." It is one thing to criticize a war that many came to believe was poorly conceived and wrongly fought by the political leadership. It is quite another to slander your fellow soldiers who remained in peril. If Kerry had names and evidence supporting his claims of atrocities - whether on a small or large scale, as he asserted - why didn't he turn them over to the proper authorities for investigation? On Feb. 27, 1992, Kerry delivered a speech on the Senate floor defending Bill Clinton's non-service and avoidance of the draft as irrelevant and lamenting that Vietnam had been "inserted into the campaign." Another presidential candidate at that time, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, was using his own Vietnam service as a political weapon against Bill Clinton (history does repeat). John Kerry told his fellow senators, "What saddens me most is that Democrats, above all those who shared the agonies of that generation, should now be re-fighting the many conflicts of Vietnam in order to win the current political conflict of a presidential primary ... We do not need to divide America over who served and how" (emphasis mine). Kerry continued, "If support or opposition to the war were to become a litmus test for leadership, America would never have leaders or recover from the divisions created by that war." The Bush reelection team will take such statements, along with scores of what appear to be pragmatic flips on a number of issues, and assert that Kerry doesn't know what he believes and cannot be trusted, especially at a time of grave peril to American interests and security. From his understated counter-punches at Kerry, it is clear that the president is confident he won't run out of material between now and November. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

by: Svend White on April 11th, 2012 | 2 Comments » Belated but sincere Easter wishes to Christian friends out there. And a hearty Chag Sameach to Jewish friends who are observing Passover. To make amends for my tardiness, I am sharing a link to this piece arguing for a reappraisal of the New Testament as “Jewish” literature. I’m not convinced by all its arguments, but it’s very interesting and thought-provoking and seems especially apropos as both communities observe intertwined holiday seasons. In “What Jews (and Christians too) Should Know About the New Testament,” Amy-Jill Levine wrote (Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr 2012): Most Jews do not grow up with New Testament stories. While the term “Prodigal son” may be familiar, Jewish readers may not know that this very Jewish parable, which begins “There was a man who had two sons” (Luke 15:11), evokes the Hebrew Bible stories of Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob. Jews who attended U.S. public schools prior to 1962 likely recited the “Lord’s prayer” every morning, but not a few believed the words included “Harold be your name” and “Lead us not into Penn Station.” Most Jewish readers approach the New Testament, if they approach it at all, with at best a certain unfamiliarity. This is unfortunate, for much if not all of the New Testament is Jewish literature. [...] But for most Jews, especially those aware of the difficult history of Christian-Jewish relations, the dominant first impression may well be one of dismay, if not worse. Some will conclude the text is a message of hatred for Jews and Judaism. Others will find blasphemous the announcement of Jesus’ divinity. Still others will find illegitimate the assertions that Jesus fulfills Jewish prophecy. For these dismayed readers, a second look is advisable. When the New Testament is understood within its own historical contexts, not only can Jews recover part of Jewish history, but also the polemics, the assertions of Jesus’ divinity and the claims of fulfilled prophecy become comprehensible. [MORE] There is a lamentable tendency to project the contemporary cultural values and power relations onto scriptures written millennia ago, in vastly different circumstances. Sometimes such ahistorical interpolations serve a salutary purpose by reminding us of things we’d otherwise like to forget, but in any case they’re unlikely to help us understand the texts themselves, their actual impact at the time or why contemporary believers continue to accept them today. Incidentally, while the particulars are different, I think analogous historical and political dynamics must likewise be kept in mind when one attempts to evaluate Quranic pronouncements critical of Jews or Christians (not that all of them are negative).

Jewish World Review April 10, 2012/ 18 Nissan, 5772 My Father's 1959 Tax Return By Tom Purcell http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | I stumbled upon my father's 1959 income tax return a few years ago. Oh, how I long for the simplicity he enjoyed when he filed that year's taxes. For 1959, my father paid a measly 5 percent in federal taxes, even though his name wasn't Rockefeller. How did he do it? It was easy. For a year when the top income tax rate was 91 percent -- President Kennedy would slash rates a few years later -- deductions were many. Even middle-class people like my dad enjoyed their fair share of perks. He was a heavy smoker then -- who wasn't? -- and was able to deduct every penny he paid in cigarette taxes. He was able to deduct every penny he paid in gasoline taxes. If we had such a perk now, the federal government would go broke (that is, more broke than it is now). And he was able to deduct every penny he paid in state sales tax in Pennsylvania, another wonderful perk that would save the average Pennsylvanian a boatload in federal taxes every year. He took a $600 tax deduction for each of his two dependents, my sisters Kathy and Krissy -- a lot of dough relative to his income. For 2011, the deduction for each dependent is $3,750. On paper that is six times what my father got in 1959 -- but if properly adjusted for inflation it would be about $5,000 today. Here's one that grabbed my attention: In 1959, he paid only 2.5 percent of his income toward FICA (then, Social Security; now, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid). Now, aside from a temporary 2-percentage-point FICA tax break, the average employee pays 7.65 percent and his or her employer kicks in another 7.65 percent. I, being self-employed, have the pleasure of paying the full 15.3 percent myself. Despite the 2-percentage-point break for 2011, I will write out a sizable check to bring current the more than $12,000 in FICA contributions I am on the hook for. In any event, my father had his fair share of simple deductions in 1959, which helped offset his federal taxes. That helped him keep his total federal tax tab at a measly 5 percent. Better yet, his tax form was one sheet of paper printed on both sides. He had no calculator, nor did he need one. He did a test run in pencil on one copy of the form, then finalized a second in ink and mailed it in; he always got a refund. Which is why I long for the simplicity he enjoyed back then. In 1959, the federal tax code was about 15,000 pages. Today, it is more than 70,000 pages. Unlike my father, who was able to calculate his taxes quickly, I spend days getting mine in order, so I can hand them off to my CPA, so he can tell me I owe lots more than I feared I would. This year, after all my deductions for business and pain and suffering -- including the agitations of three rental properties and thousands of dollars invested in a big renovation project -- I will pay about 25 percent of my gross income in federal, state and local taxes. I consider myself lucky. Still, as April 17 approaches (April 15's on a Sunday this year), I look back fondly on 1959. I didn't pay a dime in taxes that year. I didn't waste a moment getting hundreds of receipts in order and panicking when my CPA told me what I owed. I wasn't born until 1962. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. © 2012, Tom Purcell

The Listening Party aims to connect songwriters to their influences and dig at the inspired fan in all of us. As curator, I choose music for artists to discuss based upon what I feel has either been an influence or will facilitate an interesting discussion. In turn, I also ask them to provide music that has recently inspired them. In a perfect world, this would occur with libations and prolonged discussion. Improvise at your own will. For this inaugural interview, I talked with Toby Driver, leader of the forward-thinking and genre-bending Kayo Dot, who just released the fantastic Gamma Knife. He was kind enough to donate time while touring with the Secret Chiefs 3 and provide insight into both his songwriting process and musical inspirations. . . . What are some of your earliest and/or biggest musical influences as a songwriter? The earliest definitely are not the same as the biggest. Since I did start writing songs when I was pretty young, you can understand that those influences might be considered pretty unexciting now–Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, Jane’s Addiction, My Dying Bride. As for the biggest influences, it kind of changes year to year based on what I’ve been recently inspired by. I’m not sure I can say there’s any artist like whom I’ve always aspired to write. My biggest influences are transient. How would you describe both your progression as a songwriter and your writing process? I like your use of the term “songwriter” here–I think it’s really apt; what I’ve always tried to do is maintain a sort of songwriter’s sense of populism and trajectory, informed by the greats, in my compositions while still exploring my more abstract ideas. That’s one reason why almost everything I’ve done still has lyrics and vocals even though the music may have had the potential to go another way. I think perhaps the most important development in my writing during the past few years is that I have a very clear picture of what my own language is. As for writing process, lately, you can imagine it like molding a horse out of clay. You have a block of clay, and you quickly mold a crude shape which you can tell is supposed to be a horse . . .so in one way, the sculpture is finished, or the most basic version of the idea has already been expressed. Then, over the course of time, you sculpt finer and finer details in. The crude idea was laid down long ago but the process of definition is gradual. Do you find that, in general, you’re more influenced by music (what you’re currently listening to) or your environment (what’s happening in your life)? How do the two interplay? I think an equal amount, which I’m really happy about and I think is the perfect balance. They interplay in a way that I wish were common to all musicians . . . take in a lot of information and use what inspires you in a way that expresses your own experience, in your own language. What are some of your musical guilty pleasures? Haha! Well, what qualifies as “guilty” just depends on who I’m around. Lots of the music from my teens and 20s whose aesthetic has not had any influence on my peers. For example, My Dying Bride, Tiamat, Anathema, In The Woods, stuff like that. It’s funny, there are bands that I would put in a very similar category of aesthetic, though, who I can play around my friends, and it does resonate with them. When you look at the objective quality or aesthetic, they line up, but guilty pleasures like these seem to often be about just what you happened to come across when you were growing up. It’s largely about nostalgia. . . . Mare – “Anisette” I love this song and am already really familiar with the whole amazing album. This record came out around the same time as Choirs of the Eye, so it was really curious to see another band doing something that I felt was really close in style (kind of through-composed, orchestrated post-hardcore, I guess) at the exact same time. I’ve always been impressed at how young the Mare guys were when they made that album, too. . . . Ulver – “Dressed in Black” Ulver was one of my favorite bands when I was in high school and college, and I kind of fell off following them closely after their William Blake album. I still like what they’re doing, though, even though I’m not listening obsessively. I just got Blood Inside, actually, so am looking forward to finding a good context for it in my life. Stuff from this era of Ulver is not really the type of music I want to listen to on my headphones . . . the production is too saturated. Rather, it’s something that I’d want to have on in the distance while doing things around my house. I hope that doesn’t sound like a dig or anything . . . that’s actually how I do most of my listening these days. . . . Ennio Morricone – “Un Uomo da Rispettare” This track is awesome . . . I already love Morricone but hadn’t heard this one before. Since it’s soundtrack music, I’d really want to see the film it comes from before making a conclusion about it, but I love it musically. One of my favorite things about Morricone is the way he uses rock instruments (such as drums and bass guitar), synths, and effects (delay, reverb) in a concert music/orchestra setting. He has such a unique and tasteful way of contemporizing the orchestra, and no one else has ever been able to do it quite like him. Additionally, the analog and live recording of this track is exactly what I want to be listening to closely these days, as opposed to heavily overdubbed studio music like the Ulver track you sent. . . . Jeff Buckley – “So Real” This is actually the first Jeff Buckley song I ever heard. I was packed in a small car with 6 other friends during university, and it was late summer and we were headed through the woods to a friend’s parents’ house for a weekend party. I was kind of zoning out of the conversation and was in my own world, when this song came on . . . My attention came back to reality pretty much during the vocal climax of the song. I was totally blown away by the singing and had to ask who the fuck is this??? For some reason, I never checked out Buckley again until maybe 6 years later when I finally picked up the album this track is from (Grace). Love the whole record and it’s interesting to think about how if I had not been in that car right at that time, I probably never would have become a Jeff Buckley fan and my musical path could have been really different, since practicing along to his vocals helped me become a better singer. . . . Masada String Trio – “Rssasiel” Zorn’s string writing is always amazing and an exhilarating listen. He’s definitely one of the world’s musical treasures, and I’m lucky to be a bit close to it. Some of the most curious things about the writing here are these moments in it that give you a little bit of a Bach vibe but simultaneously sound like they fit into the realm of Jewish music. Additionally, it’s great how this piece is just LOUD and intense . . . you could have the same parts played by entirely different people, and it wouldn’t work. So Zorn has always been great at picking the right performers and pushing his compositions to the next level in terms of how the musicians dynamically take the music off the page and into a higher sphere. Also, another fun thing about this track. Zorn’s basically a musical god on earth, but with that in mind, it’s fun to note the bad edit in this track right at 2:30 Something I’m into right now: I also hang out with Mario a lot and even play music with him sometimes, but I can’t say enough good things about his music. He’s one of my favorite contemporary composers, and my favorite composer who’s just about my age. All his music is just perfect. I want it to be my own music. I don’t actually write anything like he does, but his music fits perfectly with my internal world. This track is the first one from his new album, Hypnos. Never-ending-story-core. . . .

NEW YORK -- A firm that manages assets for U.S. Quakers has sold its holdings in three companies after investors raised concerns about their dealings with Israel. Friends Fiduciary Corp., a Philadelphia nonprofit, sold its shares in Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Veolia Environment after a review was requested by the Ann Arbor Friends Meeting. The Michigan Quaker group wanted to avoid investments in companies that provided products to the Israeli military. Jeffery Perkins, the Friends Fiduciary executive director, said the nonprofit does not comment on its investment decisions. However, he confirmed the contents of a letter he wrote to Ann Arbor Friends last month stating the fund could not determine whether the products Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard sold to Israel would be considered "weapons components" according to criteria Friends Fiduciary uses for responsible investing. "In the absence of that information, we chose to sell our holdings based on the peace testimony," Perkins wrote, citing the core Quaker teaching against the use of weapons. The fund dropped Veolia because of "environmental and social concerns," Perkins wrote in the letter. Activists protesting Israeli policy in the territories say Veolia holds contracts to transfer trash from Jewish housing settlements in disputed areas. A North American spokesman for Veolia could not be reached for comment. Caterpillar equipment gained notoriety in March 2003 when an armored bulldozer crushed an American activist, Rachel Corrie, in the southern Gaza Strip while she tried to prevent it from toppling a home. A subsequent military investigation ruled Corrie's death an accident. Caterpillar spokesman Jim Dugan said in a statement that the company does not equip tractors with armor or sell directly to the Israeli military. Instead, he explained that bulldozers such as the D9 tractor are first traded to the U.S. government and then resold to Israel, among other countries, which can then outfit the bulldozers for their own use. "As a values-based company, Caterpillar has deep respect and compassion for all persons affected by the political strife in the Middle East and supports a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Dugan said. "However, we believe it is appropriate for such a resolution to be reached via political and diplomatic channels." Friends Fiduciary said it had reviewed Hewlett-Packard's information technology consulting with the Israeli Navy. A Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday. Perkins did not release a dollar value for its investments in the three companies. Friends Fiduciary says it manages about $200 million for nearly 300 Quaker groups.

Today Dreste is searching for the queen, the elusive mistress of the hive, because if he doesn't find her and clip her wings, she'll sabotage the politics of the colony and his 2-year-old hobby as well. The bees' natural tendency is to divide the hive, Dreste explains, but if he finds the queen and snips her wings, she won't be able to defect with a swarm. He gently slides a bee-stuccoed frame from its slot, and a complaint rises like heat from the depths of the hive. "You've got to move slow and not distract them too much," he says, slowly reaching down for a handheld smoker, which, for some reason, is supposed to calm them down. "They aren't in too bad of a mood today." All in all, he figures, he's been stung about 50 times in the last two years, only about a third as many times as he's been arrested. In these four hives alone, there are 200,000 bees, and if he had a $20 bill for every single one, Dreste still wouldn't have enough money to pay off the most recent judgment against him. It's been two months since the end of the latest and most notorious trial, officially Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, Inc.; et al. vs. American Coalition of Life Activists; et al but more commonly known as the "Nuremberg Files case" or "that trial in Oregon," and Dreste thought a day away from the city, the publicity and the legal hassles might do him some good. He accepts the consequences of what he's done, for what he believes he's been chosen by God to do, but the costs, both physical and mental, are adding up these days. In addition to more than a decade of arrests, jail time, fines and more arrests, the 40-year-old St. Louis native has now been officially, federally and forevermore labeled a racketeer who co-conspired and threatened to kill, assault or do bodily harm to physicians who provide abortions. It was a federal trial watched around the country because its outcome would draw new boundaries around what was considered protected political speech. It was also followed closely by abortion opponents, who for years fought the legality of Roe vs. Wade, and by abortion providers, who for years lived in fear for their lives. The defendants, two anti-abortion groups and 12 individuals, including Dreste, were not charged with any of the 40 clinic bombings or seven murders that took place in the U.S. between 1983 and 1999, but they were accused by two abortion-rights groups and four abortion providers of setting off some of that violence through the use of Web sites, literature and posters. Dreste, in the middle of it all, was implicated in highly coordinated campaigns and conspiracies that the court found to be "true threats" not sheltered by the First Amendment. Before the federal trial, Dreste rode tall on the reputation he had garnered: domestic terrorist, religious fanatic, paramilitary right-wing nut -- in short, a royal pain in the posterior of the pro-choice movement. But this latest charge against him, the federal order and injunction, well, he just needed a day away. He comes to these woods often, for the bees or to hunt wild turkey and deer. He learned to shoot when he was 13, aimed at floating balloons on a pond, but for reasons as complex as the political system in the hives around him, he doesn't own a gun anymore. He has four hives of Carniolan, Italian and Buckfast bees that will produce up to 180 pounds of honey by August, and as he slides the first frame back into the top honey super and pulls another one out, the commotion in the hive grows louder, meaner, like caucusing before a riot. He pokes at something on the frame. "It's a swarm cell," he says from underneath the black net, "a new queen cell made specifically so they can swarm with the old queen. When you find one of these, you have to cut it open." He jabs at it, and the horde unites in a menacing condemnation heard 50 feet away. Unless he finds the queen soon, the toiling masses will mob. He works his way methodically from one frame to the other. But today it's a fruitless endeavor. Dreste knows everyone in the Apostolic Christian Church in Hazelwood, not because the tiny seven-pew sanctuary seats a maximum of 30 people but because of those 30 people, half -- maybe more -- are his relatives. "That man is my uncle," he says one Sunday morning from the back pew, where he operates the small sound board, "and that's his wife, and over there, that's my sister; there's another sister, and that man is a cousin, and those are his kids ... " And there are kids everywhere: in grandparents' laps; scrunched down beneath the pews. A young girl of about 9, the daughter of a cousin of an in-law, hangs adoringly on Dreste's arm. His family, the church, stresses doing God's work from a more practical point of view than many fundamentalist Protestant denominations, always reminding members that gaining entrance to heaven isn't like buying a lottery ticket. There is no magic to it, no speaking in tongues, no handling snakes, no eternal security. You work hard here on Earth, quietly, diligently, to retire in eternity. Your works are an outward manifestation of your faith, and your faith is what saves you. A young woman wedged in behind an organ calls out, "Somebody pick a hymn," and somebody else calls back, "How about 392?" There are no candles, no potted lilies, no ushers passing trays. There are no heavily robed ministers -- it's the congregation's job to learn and teach -- so Dreste's uncle, after the hymn, approaches the small podium to teach a lesson about the shootings in Colorado. While the congregation listens attentively, there are no amens, hallelujahs or praise-the-Lords; all eyes, at one point of the sermon or another, sneak a look at the back pew, where I'm seated. Afterward, several people ask politely, "So, how do you know Tim?" He later confesses that the church is trying to get him married. Most of the family and friends who've known Dreste over the years describe him as a "normal kid," "nice guy," "smart as a whip" -- but always add, "I never saw this coming." Whether they mean the militant anti-abortion activism he has engaged in since 1985 or his federal conviction this March is swallowed up in the person they knew "before." Dreste was born between five sisters and two brothers in a working-class neighborhood in Normandy that he still calls home. Like every other kid on the block, he flourished on baseball, movies and weekly family trips to church. As one childhood friend, Dave Gansman, now says, "He was a pretty normal kid. I mean, he's pretty outspoken now, but he has really strong beliefs and opinions, and he sticks by them. But he was a normal kid, a normal teenager. I mean, I never saw any of this coming." His parents, Mildred and Richard Dreste, were strict disciplinarians who instilled in their eight children the love of God and respect for worldly authority the Bible commanded. At a recent family gathering at his sister's house in Affton, Mildred explains that her grandfather founded an Apostolic Christian Church congregation in Ohio, "so it goes way back, it's been ingrained in us for years and years"; her children weren't even allowed to date until they found someone spiritually sound in the church. "A practice," she says smiling, "they still hold over my head." Predictably, Mildred describes her oldest son as an "intelligent" and "funny" child who never gave her any trouble. But Dreste's siblings, unable to keep straight faces, scramble over each other to tell all: the ornery sense of humor (he admits); the techniques for sneaking in after curfew (he admits); the homework he let them copy (he admits). Mildred's head snaps toward her son as if she's seen a vampire. "It's amazing," she says after a moment, "what you learn about your own children over the years." But like many church-raised children, Dreste didn't fully latch onto the church's teachings until he became a teenager, when, during a church youth rally near Peoria, Ill., he was asked whether he knew the Lord. "I realized that I really didn't," Dreste says sedately, "and I realized that that's what I wanted." So he was baptized, read the Bible with clearer eyes and thought about what it was God wanted him to do. Meanwhile, he learned to fix cars, fell in love with Star Wars, graduated from Normandy High School, skipped college and joined the Marine Reserves, where he was trained as a telephone and telegraph wireman. Then, in the early '80s, Dreste became a missionary for the church in Brazil, where he floated the Amazon and learned to speak Portuguese within two years. When he returned to St. Louis in 1983, Dreste found himself spiritually mired, stuck wondering what God wanted him to do next, and he wandered -- from working in an auto-parts store to repairing air-conditioners to fixing cars in a garage. At the time, he says, he couldn't have defined abortion if you asked him. Things changed when, in 1985, members of Missouri Right to Life showed the movie "Silent Scream," a video that showed an actual abortion at 11 weeks of pregnancy, at Dreste's church, and the implications of what he saw hit him like a 6-foot wall of rushing water. "I said to myself, 'I have to stop this now, the injustice of this,' and I started picketing every Wednesday night at the clinic in University City." It was there, on the picket line, that Dreste met a man named John Ryan, the Catholic director of the Pro-Life Action League, who changed both Dreste's life and the anti-abortion movement in ways no one had dreamed of several years before. Because abortion was the murder of a child, Ryan told his followers, there was an obligation on the part of Christians to save that child, that day, in any way within legal boundaries. The peaceful sit-ins of previous years no longer sufficed, and Ryan, who would later have whole chapters in books written about him, was getting arrested on a regular basis for his clinic blockades. As Ryan said later at a National Right to Life convention in Kansas City, "If it's radical for us to enter an abortion clinic and place ourselves between a murderer and his victim, then I want to be a radical." For Dreste, Ryan was a mentor. And from Ryan, Dreste began to learn that doing God's work, and doing it well, meant strategizing to overcome the rules of a secular society. Ryan taught that anything they as protesters could do within the law to keep a woman from walking into that clinic was acceptable, including the infamous clinic blockades. "And it was working," Dreste recalls, "because it allowed our counselors a longer time on the sidewalk to talk with the girls. I mean, you get 30 seconds to one minute to talk to these girls, but if you've got a lot of people blocking the door, you have more time. If you can just talk to them for a few minutes, there's good chance you can get through to them." Soon the pacifist, civil-disobedience movement transformed itself into an active "rescue mission," using Proverbs 24:11 as its key verse: "Deliver those who are being taken away to death/And those who are staggering to slaughter/O hold them back." For Dreste, and for his church, the next verse in Proverbs is equally significant: "And will He not render to man according to his work?" The abortion-clinic rescue was Dreste's work, and he toiled diligently. "The whole idea of a rescue," he explains, "is that you have some people doing the sit-in part of it; you've got sidewalk counselors who are talking to the girls as they're coming in; you've got picketers and people praying. It's essential to have all of those elements together. It's highly coordinated. It's not just people going out there sitting in. It was very effective." It is unclear just how many "rescues" were accomplished. What was clear was how the actions galvanized the anti-abortion movement. "With more and more people getting arrested, we got more media exposure and made it an issue. It was similar to the civil-rights movement. For people in the civil-rights movement, it was always an issue, but it wasn't an issue with the public until someone started making noise about it, getting arrested and stuff, which would cause the media to ask, 'Why are they getting arrested?' and you'd get the opportunity to explain." Dreste's first arrest came soon after he joined the Pro-Life Action League, and when they dragged him off to the precinct office and asked him for his name, he decided to answer everything in Portuguese -- anything to further clog up the system. When they asked whether he spoke any English at all, Dreste answered, "A leetle bit," justifying his answer by the fact that he probably only knew about 10 percent of the words in Webster's dictionary anyway. The movement was transforming rapidly, and St. Louis was in the thick of it all. Ryan was organizing dozens of major protests and leading a national movement to do whatever it took to stop abortions, but by 1986, his escalating activism cooled all support from mainstream anti-abortion groups such as Missouri Citizens for Life and the St. Louis Roman Catholic archdiocese, which wanted to keep their distance from the more militant segment. Back at Dreste's own church, feelings were mixed. Though the congregation supported in spirit what Dreste's movement was trying to do, they weren't completely comfortable with the way it was being done. "He was a man that had such definite convictions and was accepting the consequences of his convictions," says Dave Cordes, a longtime family friend and fellow church member. "He was very active in trying to protect the unborn, and while I want to do that, too, we're not all out of the same die, so there's disagreement to what extent we should go." The church prayed for Dreste anyway, because this was his mission. But it was a mission that was also part of a national political movement spiraling toward what some would later call domestic terrorism, with 133 acts of violence reported in 1986 -- including vandalism, death threats and arson -- acted out against abortion providers, according to statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation. It's 7 a.m., and the first of the anti-abortion protesters gather in front of the Hope Clinic for Women in the heart of Granite City, Ill. The two-story, concrete-block building is boxed in on all sides by factories, a VFW hall and bright-yellow strips of police security tape that, depending on where you stand, mark off where goodness ends and evil begins. In the clinic's front parking lot, a half-dozen orange-vested volunteer escorts stand in pairs chatting, drinking coffee and trying not to look at the people slowly gathering behind the yellow tape around them. The escorts, like the security tape, the armed guards and the bulletproof glass in the building, are there for a reason. Tim Dreste is a big part of that reason, though if you ask him whether the clinic employees have reason to be afraid, he answers that if they weren't doing what they were doing, you wouldn't have to ask. "Tim Dreste is one of the regulars," says Tracy McCreery, a volunteer escort for the Missouri NARAL Foundation. "He's pretty easy to pick out. He wears a camouflage jacket and says some pretty outrageous things. He's almost like a local hero for the other side." Dreste never wanted to be a hero, though, preferring the front-line work of the doers as opposed to the sideline strategizing of the leaders. But in 1988, after a philosophical split in the Pro-Life Action League, Dreste formed a new, more Protestant group called Whole Life Ministries, which in turn soon affiliated with the more radical national organization Operation Rescue. Headed by charismatic leader Randall Terry, Operation Rescue took the country by storm. Huge rescues were staged at clinics across the country and began garnering the praise of religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. Dreste, like the movement itself, was changing, becoming more savvy, confronting the system on the streets, and Whole Life Ministries started making headlines. In June 1988, 50 members were arrested outside the Womenscare Clinic in St. Louis County. In July, 60 more were charged with mob action for their protest at the Hope Clinic. One month later, 22 more. A day after that, 23. Getting arrested was not just an unpleasant consequence, a price to pay for the protest, but became part of the strategy. And Dreste understood this well. "We had a whole group of attorneys that would take all these cases pro bono," Dreste says. "If the prosecutors wouldn't give us a break, the attorneys would say, 'Fine, we all want individual jury trials, which will cost thousands of dollars and tie up the system for months.' They'd usually say, 'Well, all right, it's only civil trespassing charges.' We did whatever we could to tie up the system." By 1991, Operation Rescue was holding larger and larger protests, and Dreste attended as many as he could. That August, 2,500 people, including Dreste, were arrested for disorderly conduct in Wichita, Kan. The next year, in Washington, D.C., Dreste and 277 others were hauled in for crossing police lines to block clinic entrances. Back in St. Louis, Dreste continued organizing protests at places like Granite City, where the director of Hope Clinic, Sally Burgess, could only watch in horror. "They used tactics like, when a patient was walking toward the clinic out on the sidewalk, they would get right in her face, and your tendency when somebody does that is to reach out and try to push them back," Burgess says. "At that point, the protesters would call the police and file assault charges (against the woman), so that the patient would be sitting there in this very busy clinic and be dragged out by the police. Any little harassment thing like that, they would do." At the time, Dreste was still working as an auto mechanic, but the continual breaks he was taking for protests, jail time and trials were beginning to put a strain on his relationship with his boss. Some members of his family, too, were having a hard time accepting that they had a "criminal" in the family. Finally his church stepped in and asked him to become a full-time "missionary for the pre-born," and Dreste willingly accepted. Things moved forward at a dizzying pace, and the parallel lines of religion and politics began to merge. Dreste organized more protests, traveled more to others across the country and then decided to run for the state Senate seat held by Wayne Goode (D-Normandy) on a pro-life Republican platform. He knew his chances of winning in the heavily Democratic district weren't the best, but because he believed Goode's stand against abortion wasn't strong enough, and because the incumbent senator rarely ran opposed, Dreste decided to give him a little competition, a little political jog around the block. Meanwhile, violent incidents at clinics were reaching an all-time high, with 196 reported by the end of 1992, and disruptions, such as bomb threats and hate mail, rising to 3,379. But then the political bottom dropped out when the Reagan-Bush era was plowed under in the November '92 elections and the staunchly pro-choice Bill Clinton was elected to office, the pro-choice Mel Carnahan was elected Missouri's governor, and Dreste, not surprisingly, lost his own race. The following May, the newly empowered abortion-rights side fired its first volley in what would soon escalate into out-and-out war: Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Entrances Act (FACE), making it a federal crime to engage in violent or disruptive behavior at abortion clinics. It was a hammer to the head of the rescue movement, and while in jail for an earlier clinic protest, Dreste let loose and wrote a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch questioning why his people were being thrown in jail while "militant homosexuals invade church services and spread AIDS-infected blood in legislative chambers, all the while being cheered on by the left for standing up for their causes." Rendered impotent at the clinics by legislation, yet impassioned by the fiery rhetoric of the movement's leaders, extremists at the fringe began crawling out of the shadows, guns in hand. In March 1993, Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider in Pensacola, Fla., was shot to death by Michael Griffin. It was the first murder of an abortion provider in the U.S., and it set the stage on which an increasingly militant pro-life movement would, from then on, act. The murder also created a backdrop for abortion providers of fear and resentment. Bulletproof vests were donned, high-tech security systems were installed and police escorts to and from work became the norm. As described in Wrath of Angels, written by James Risen and Judy L. Thomas, "what was left of the movement was dominated by extremists who refused to place any limits on direct action to stop abortion." Gunn's murder also set the stage for Dreste. Days after the shooting, Dreste went home, made up a new picketing sign and marched over to the Hope Clinic wearing shotgun shells on his hat. On the sign, directed at a doctor inside the building, were big, bold words that shadow Dreste to this day: "DO YOU FEEL UNDER THE GUNN?" Again Dreste made headlines, but this time they questioned whether the missionary-turned-activist hadn't linked arms with the emerging violent fringe elements of the anti-abortion movement. Dreste dodges that bullet. "I guess it was using dark humor to get my message across, maybe, but in light of the fact that this was such an explosive issue, I just wanted to ask (the doctor) if he was sure this was something he wanted to do," Dreste says. "I mean, every time a skydiver gets killed, all the other skydivers who know him ask themselves whether they want to continue skydiving or not. I was just using Gunn's death as an opportunity to ask the doctor, 'Is this something you really want to be engaged in?'" After FACE became law in 1993, rescue, for all political intents and purposes, was dead. Dreste knew it, and others knew it, too. But it didn't stop the protests and only seemed to spur on the violence, directed at the doctors inside the clinics. The new strategy called for instilling fear among the abortion providers rather than persuading the pregnant women to turn around. That August, an anti-abortion activist named Rachelle Shannon shot and wounded Dr. George Tiller at his Wichita clinic; 437 other acts of violence, including 78 death threats and 188 stalkings, were reported nationwide. Dreste's own resolve grew stronger every day. No matter what the laws now said, no matter how the media responded to the killings, no matter how many complaints he received from his family, his friends or the members of his church, he knew he was doing the right thing. As Ryan said years before, somebody had to inhabit the trenches. But the old trenches were filled in by the new FACE Act, and Dreste had to figure out where to dig new ones. "Since rescue was dead, more or less, we had to find another way to be effective," Dreste says. "So we started making the abortionists the pariahs of their neighborhoods instead. If you go out and picket their neighborhoods, they scream and holler, and we just say, 'Well, isn't that what you do?' "You create that social sense within the community so he feels out of place," Dreste continues. "He doesn't want to go to the country club anymore; his neighbors don't see him as just a doctor anymore, they see him as an abortionist. When he feels he's losing face in the community and his reputation is not what it was, a lot of times they'll quit. Our goal was to go after the doctors, to make them decide that if they were going to do this, they were 100 percent committed to it and no matter what, even if they had to live like a monk on a hilltop to do abortions, let them decide if they're that dedicated." As Dreste's push to end legalized abortion intensified, so did his political activism. For the next three election cycles he ran unsuccessfully as a pro-life Republican trying to unseat Democratic pro-choice state Rep. Rita Days. But resentment against an unresponsive government, now a larger enemy than before, began constructing in Dreste's heart a firm structure of resolve. He began seeing the government's indifference to abortion and other conservative issues as a sequel to the British government's behavior toward the colonists before the Revolutionary War. In January 1995, Dreste joined the newly formed First Missouri Volunteers, a private militia formed by members plagued with similar worries that kept them up at night, members of the growing patriot movement. Because of his frustration over the years with mainstream attempts to change the system, joining the militia as its chaplain finally allowed him fellowship with the like-minded. They were a group on standby, prepared for anything from rescue-relief work to revolution, though they swore as members never to take up arms against the U.S. government -- unless the U.S. government took up arms against the people. In Dreste's mind, that day is perilously close: "There's a resentment against an unresponsive government. Historically, when that happens, people protest, and the government clamps down on them. They protest more, and the government comes down even harder. In any country where there's a revolt, it's because the government is clamping down harder and harder on the people." On the abortion front, Operation Rescue was falling apart. After Gunn's murder the year before, the national organization tried to patch up its reputation as an organization infested with violent factions by issuing an ultimatum to its members: Commit to nonviolence or get out. Heated arguments followed in the organization about whether killing abortion doctors was justifiable homicide. Some said it was, some said it wasn't, and still others, like Dreste, refused to condemn or justify the violence. What mattered to him, says Dreste, was that the edict was issued without the membership's being consulted. In his mind, Operation Rescue was operating now like the U.S. government, with little respect for the constituency and its views. Dreste suggested that some of the groups gather in St. Louis to talk about forming a new organization, which materialized in August 1994 as the American Coalition of Life Advocates (ACLA). Headed by David Crane, who publicly supported murdering abortion providers in the name of life, the fledgling group held its 1995 annual convention in St. Louis. For abortion providers in the area, word of the convention came like a dreaded late-night telegram. Dr. Robert Crist, who lived in Kansas City but flew once a week to St. Louis to practice, recalled in later testimony that he was contacted by St. Louis police officials, who warned him that extra security measures would have to be taken. He had, after all, been the earlier target of numerous death threats, and in 1993, in the middle of the night, a single shot from a 12-gauge shotgun shattered two windows in his son's playroom. In order to get to the St. Louis clinic the week of the ACLA convention, Crist was picked up at his home by two Kansas City policemen and taken to the airport's security area; then he boarded the plane from the tarmac, before any other passengers got on. Two armed security officers stood at the front of the plane until it took off, and before the plane landed in St. Louis, all the passengers were told to stay seated until Crist was escorted off the plane by four undercover St. Louis police officers. Crist was then whisked to the clinic in one car with two officers while the other two followed in an unmarked car. Outside the clinic, as Crist worked, three uniformed policemen and six plainclothes officers stood by. Meanwhile, at the convention, Dreste unveiled what would later be dubbed the "Wanted" poster, which showed a photograph of Crist below the words "GUILTY of Crimes Against Humanity." Below, Dreste listed Crist's home and work addresses, enumerated his "crimes" and then, in a bold black font, issued a $500 reward. Underneath, in very small print, Dreste added that the reward would be issued to any ACLA organization that "successfully persuades Crist to turn from his child killing through activities within ACLA guidelines." But the group's guidelines didn't take a position on justifiable homicide, only that members could not engage in any form of protest that required "more force than allowed by First Amendment protected activities." After Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of November '94 and its "Contract with America," the ACLA issued its "Contract with the Abortion Industry" in 1995, stating that abortion was murder and that the Bible required capital punishment by civil magistrates for murder. To complicate matters, similar posters had been circulated before the murders of several other abortion providers, and a petition was being circulated at the convention justifying the violence. Many of the ACLA's leaders signed the petition, though Dreste declined to do so. The ACLA also presented its "Deadly Dozen" list at the St. Louis conference, which, like Dreste's poster, cryptically accused 12 abortion providers of "crimes against humanity" and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to their arrest, conviction and revocation of license to practice medicine. "Abortion was provided as a choice for East European Jewish women by the (Nazi) National Socialist regime," the list stated, "and was prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials (1945-46) under allied control order No. 10 as a 'war crime.'" Back at the clinic, Crist was informed that the poster and the list were being passed out in the clinic's parking lot and tacked to telephone poles and trees by overflow protesters from the convention. "The police informed me that this was a serious threat," Crist later testified, "and that I should be seriously concerned about my safety." One policeman, Crist testified, told him: "Doctor, in my estimation, this is a contract on your life." Dreste says the posters and the list, like the neighborhood protests, were ways of embarrassing, not scaring, the doctors out of business. "I didn't do it to intimidate them," Dreste says. "I don't see how it can be intimidation to tell the world what a person does." The world, however, saw the poster and the "Deadly Dozen" flyer as nothing less than the hit lists of thugs. Because similar posters and lists had been issued earlier on doctors who were later murdered, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service contacted everyone on the posters and lists issued by the ACLA and urged them to take precautions. Four months later, in early 1996, the ACLA took another bold step by announcing in Washington, D.C., the creation of the "Nuremberg Files." At that point, the files were boxes holding photographs and information about abortion providers across the country that would be held by the group in the event abortion ever became illegal. The information, the activists believed, could then be used to prosecute, and presumably execute, the people whose names were contained in the boxes. Dreste himself took one more step toward realizing that goal of making abortion illegal by becoming the Republican committeeman for Normandy Township, where he lived, and by joining the Republican State Central Committee, the policy-making body of the party. Democrats on the sidelines didn't know whether to snicker or run for the cellar. "Here's this guy, a member of a paramilitary right-wing organization, i.e., the First Missouri Volunteers, that's related to white supremacist and violent activity, sitting on the state committee," says John Hickey, director of Missouri Progressive Vote, a group that actively campaigned against Dreste when he ran for state representative. "He's a member of the most extreme arm of the anti-choice movement who uses threats of violence and murder to make up for what he loses at the ballot box. Unbelievable." But Dreste never flinched. That year, he didn't think twice about telling the state GOP that it should add to its platform a murder penalty for all "abortionists, perpetrators of euthanasia and those who assist others in suicide." One year later, the Nuremberg Files were placed on the Internet by anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley, a computer programmer from Carrollton, Ga. At first the ACLA's name was published on the site, but later, at the group's request, it was removed. The bell had already been rung, though. Around the globe, people identified the ACLA with a Web site that called abortion clinics "baby butcher shops," and printed pictures of aborted fetuses that looked like mangled aliens. The site asked readers to collect "evidence" against abortion providers, including photos, videotapes, car makes and models, addresses, names of friends, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and the names and birthdates of spouses and children. It then printed the information alongside photos of the physicians in question. The most frightening aspect of the site was the list of abortion supporters, including doctors, clinic employees, relatives, judges and politicians whose names were printed in black if they were still alive, gray if they had been wounded and crossed through with a line if they had been killed. Left unsaid was the implication that more names needed to be crossed out. The rhetoric on the Web site was less subtle: "We can end the Abortion War if we ran the images of the babies being slaughtered into the minds of every citizen in this nation. Ram those images into their minds until the vast majority is ready to vomit out legalized abortion like Caesar vomited out the ancient church when he was moved to repentance by images of countless, unremitting, endless carcasses of God's children." For the rest of the world, enough had become enough. From 1994-96, four more clinic employees were murdered and 10 more attempts made. By this time, the number of clinic bombings had climbed to 32 and the stalking of providers to 323. At a Taco Bell in Granite City, Dreste hunkers down over a blank piece of paper, mapping the layout of the room in the U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., where, at the beginning of this year, he spent two solid months of his life. "Everything was pretty high-tech," he explains, circling the pen over the paper. "Each of the jurors and the lawyers had monitors in front of them. There was a gag order on all of us, so we couldn't talk to the press, and the media was banned from the courtroom. "Our attorneys were over here" -- he draws two squares marked with "D" for "defendant" -- "and theirs were over here" -- two more squares, each bearing a "P" for "plaintiff." The suit -- initiated back in 1995 by Planned Parenthood of Columbia/ Willamette, the Portland Feminist Women's Health Center and four physicians, including Crist -- charged that the defendants knew that the posters, lists and Web sites posed a threat to the abortion providers but continued to publish them anyway. Therefore, they argued, the defendants were violating FACE and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. As with the FACE laws passed back in 1993, the pro-choice side was firing back with the lawsuit, and this time they had Dreste specifically in their sights. The case was heard by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones, a 23-year trial veteran who told eight unnamed jurors that they were to decide whether three "statements" made by the defendants -- the "Nuremberg Files" Web site, the "Deadly Dozen" list and Dreste's "Crimes Against Humanity" poster -- were "true threats" against the plaintiffs. If they were true threats, he warned, they were not protected under the First Amendment. Time and again, the court transcripts show, Judge Jones repeated the definition of a "true threat" for the jury. "I am going to run it by you one more time," he'd say. "It's a statement that would be interpreted by the person to whom it is communicated as a serious expression of intent to inflict harm or assault." And time and again, Jones reiterated that "this is not a case about abortion or about whether abortion should be legalized or whether it shouldn't be or when it should happen. Do you understand that? This is strictly a case as to whether or not these words that were used are protected free speech or not." Sitting behind his lawyer in the courtroom, Dreste soon realized that this, like so many other battles in the ongoing war, would probably be lost. He knew the world was watching, and he knew the outcome could change the tactics of his fight against legalized abortion, but as far as he was concerned, everyone in the courtroom, with the exception of the jurors, already knew the story by heart. As his attorney, Michael R. Hirsh of Canton, Ga., now says, it was nothing but a "politically motivated, Planned Parenthood-financed show trial" from the beginning. Each side was given 36 hours to present its case when the trial opened on Jan. 7. Maria Vullo of New York, the plaintiffs' attorney, outlined why her clients felt threatened by the Web site, the Deadly Dozen list and Dreste's poster and how the defendants unlawfully tried to stop them from providing a legal medical procedure through "utilizing illegal methods of fear, intimidation and terror." She walked the jurors through the murders of three physicians who performed abortions -- David Gunn, George Patterson and John Bayard Britton -- and said that though none of the defendants had been charged with their murders, they all supported and endorsed the killings. In Gunn's case, Vullo noted, "wanted" posters with Gunn's name, address, photograph and personal information were circulated in Florida and Alabama, where he worked. "It threatened his life, and later he was murdered," Vullo said. She then pointed to Dreste and told the jurors about the sign he held up outside the Granite City clinic. "Just days after Dr. Gunn was murdered, defendant Dreste held up a sign of another doctor he was targeting, asking, 'Are you feeling under the Gunn?'" Vullo then described how similar "wanted" posters were created about Patterson and Britton and how, later, they also were shot and killed. Said Vullo: "The defendants did not make their threats in a vacuum. They are doing this knowing that doctors have been killed following the issuance of similar posters, and they are doing this knowing that the plaintiffs fear for their lives, because persons, like the defendants, have committed these violent acts in the purported name of God." Dreste's role in the story was clear. Except for the Nuremberg Files, which he says he didn't know about until long after they were created, Dreste was implicated as part of a nationwide conspiracy to threaten the lives of the plaintiffs. In its deposition summary, the plaintiffs' attorneys also noted that Dreste was a gun enthusiast and member of a private militia, which probably didn't help his case very much. Hirsh, Dreste's attorney, pointed out that the guns were used for recreational purposes only and that Dreste didn't own any at the present time. It didn't work. On Feb. 2, the jury found Dreste and the other defendants guilty of illegally threatening the plaintiffs and ordered them to pay $109 million in damages. Of that amount, $6 million was charged to Dreste. He just shrugs as early afternoon light filters down through a window display advertising Taco Bell's latest special for 99 cents. For Dreste, the verdict was conviction by the guilty: mock judgment, mere words on a page. It was an attempt by the world to trump an omnipotent hand, and was, like every attempt before it, the artless bluffing of amateurs. Six million dollars. They could have asked him to pay off the Third World's debts and gotten as much. He didn't have it and never would, but if they ever tried to get what little he did have, he'd simply hand it over and go back to where God first called him -- the mission field. "This was a show trial," Dreste says. "It was meant to scare other people in the pro-life movement. No matter what we do, they'll try to stop it. They tried to criminalize pro-life rhetoric by saying we have to stop using words like 'murder,' because it promotes violence. Well, something like 38 million babies have been killed, and how many abortionists have been murdered, maybe three?" Though the statement seems to imply a belief in the concept of justifiable homicide, Dreste isn't elaborating. "I don't talk about justifiable homicide," he says when pressed. "I talk about the things that I do, not the things that I don't. It's always been a policy of mine. These are the things that we do: We offer alternatives to women; we offer them whatever help they need; we go out and publicly expose the abortionists. Those are the things that we do. The things that we don't do are nonissues. "We say in our ACLA constitution that the organization doesn't have a position on justifiable homicide, so no one can say that this is the organization's position, but we all agree that we're not going to do it; we're not out here to promote it, we're out there to promote the positive things that we do." The day after the jury returned its verdict, Vullo asked the judge to ban any of the defendants, including Dreste, from publishing the Web site or handing out the lists and the posters. Though the judge wouldn't issue his injunction for several more weeks, Dreste responded to the lawyer's request immediately: Back in St. Louis, he stood in front of the clinic handing out as many "wanted" posters of the doctors as there were hands to take them. It would be the last time. On Feb. 26, Judge Jones upheld the jury's verdict. "I conclude," he stated, "that plaintiffs have proven by clear and convincing evidence that each defendant, acting independently and as a co-conspirator, prepared, published and disseminated the 'Deadly Dozen" Poster, the Poster of Dr. Robert Crist and the 'Nuremberg Files' with specific intent and malice and in blatant and illegal communication of true threats to kill, assault or do bodily harm to each of the plaintiffs." Jones' final decree drew fierce criticism from free-speech advocates who were not necessarily embroiled in the abortion fight. In Amsterdam, writer Karin Spaink, who describes herself as a "left-wing, atheist, cursing, slightly perverted, sex-loving, smoking, drugs-promoting, pro-abortion, bisexual, free-speech advocate," mirrored the Nuremberg Files Web site on her own home page, because "everybody has the right to advocate the opinion that abortion is murder." Soon, others followed, including Chris Ellison, founder of Internet Freedom, who wrote articles such as "Why We Must Defend This Repugnant Site," and pro-choice advocate Sallie Tisdale, who wrote for the on-line magazine Salon that "I'm not sure this case has been good for anyone." Hirsh, Dreste's attorney, now says, "I saw this case as a horrendous abuse of the process and the First Amendment rights of these individuals were being infringed upon" by the plaintiffs. "This had nothing to do with money, and it had nothing to do with threats. It had everything to do with silencing people to express a viewpoint that is in opposition to abortion. It was purely to silence a politically unfavored viewpoint." Meanwhile, the ACLU of Oregon issued statements of applause, saying that the court order "drew an appropriate line between political speech protected by the First Amendment and threats of physical harm, which fall outside the bounds of free speech." Likewise, pro-choice groups across the country congratulated the court's judicious move. As for Dreste, he barely shrugs. So he can't hand out the wanted posters anymore -- that won't hurt his reputation any in places like heaven, where it counts. His lawyer is filing an appeal anyway, and nothing bars him from going to Granite City on those Saturday mornings when he can make it. "It gets hard to come here every week," he admits at one point. "It's like going to work, only you're working around death, and that can wear you down. It gets to you sometimes." At one end of the parking lot of the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Catholic seminary students kneel on the pavement, finger rosary beads and pray. At the other end, Protestants hold large signs, stare at the building and wait to board a converted white school bus, called God's Bus, that will circle the clinic's perimeter until the last patient leaves, around 10 a.m. But it's still early now -- the girls won't start coming in for another half-hour or so -- and in the background, like the pulse of Zeus, beat the inner workings of the nearby National Steel yards. Ken Hamm, a member of Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in Cahokia, pulls up to the curb and unloads dozens of signs -- "Stop Black Genocide," "An 8-Week-Old Pre-Born BABY Feels Pain Responds to Touch" -- for people on either end of the parking lot to use. He's here every Saturday morning and heaps two folding tables with pamphlets at the parking lot's edge. Today's choices include "Higher Laws," by Randall Terry, and "Celebrate Life!" from the Belleville Diocesan Pro-Life Office. Everything he offers is free. "All of us who are Christians are brothers and sisters," explains Hamm, wearing a red Cardinals ball cap and a T-shirt that reads "Life Begins at Conception! "We're united with Christ as our head, and that allows us to communicate with each other in many beautiful ways," says Hamm. Everyone here, whether a kneeling Catholic or bus-riding Protestant, knows about the 2-month-old federal-court injunction issued against Dreste in Oregon. "We were praying for him the whole time," Hamm says, adding that they've been praying for Dreste for years. He's probably coming this morning, Hamm says as he lines up his pamphlets on the table and eyes the reporter with polite curiosity. After hearing the explanation, though, he nods his head and smiles: "Oh, Tim's got a story to tell, all right. Subscribe now to get the latest news delivered right to your inbox.

The free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wings in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own. But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. Xena is for X – the warrior princess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xena While Xena, the warrior princess was a fiction character in the TV shows and movies, the entire theme of evil turning to good where Xena goes through her path of redemption is impressive. Ofcourse, the LGBT undertones brought in spice to the Xena character. The reason i added Xena to the list is two fold – - While there were too many heroes for the little boys to idolize, there were hardly women characters for the little girls – Xena fills in the gap as a female action hero. - And i do not have any women impressive enough with their name starting with alphabet Z :) Teresa, Mother Teresa is for T of atozchallenge When I was at middle school, the non-detailed studies were mandated as part of English language courses – looking back, i realize how it helped me a lot to get a glimpse of wide world than I could imagine – Mother Teresa’s stories was one of the non-detailed study as part of my curriculum in middle school – while there is no real grades attached to non-detailed studies, my dad was encouraging us to read them during the summer vacation even before the school started. In the era of no internet, books were the best bet to entertain us during vacations. That is how i read about Mother Teresa and then started dreaming that I may also get enlightened one day like her if i continue to do the good deeds she recommends – ok, that is a cliche!! but that is what i thought when I was in middle school – I was obsessing on being a good soul and fancying secretly the greatness of being a christian missionary nun – I anyways already had a great impression about the christian nuns in their pure white habits – this is a result of going to a Christian convent for my junior school. Ofcourse, later when i read more about multiple religions, this fancy fad faded when I realized every religion is a framework with its own styles helping the humanity to attain the final goal of self realization! So, here goes my memory on one of the greatest soul who was of an Albanian descendant but made a sea change to the people of India and then the world. More about Mother in the below links Subbulakshmi is for S of #atozchallenge If you have visited Hindu temples, you have listened to MS Subbulakshmi’s songs without fail – the captivating voice is something which is unique even after so many years of her passing. Again, if you think it is good enough to be wowed by her voice and beauty, you are in for a surprise. Subbulakshmi persevered her life through various ups and downs and consistently kept her focus on music – she dedicated her life for music and in turn music let her conquer it. I have to share this short note about one of her habits. MS Subbulakshi used to get lot of silk sarees (Indian traditional women’s dress) as gifts whenever she is on music concerts. She had a great method to maintain her simplicity. She always had only 10 sarees – if she gets a new saree presented to her, she immediately will gift one of the existing sarees to one of her mailds. This way, she ensured that she only had 10 sarees at any time !! it was not only she was the queen of music, she seem to be a queen in her life with her passion and empathy towards others. MS amma – Queen of music!!!! R is for Rosa Parks for atozchallenge African American women have done extremely well for themselves – while i am of Asian lineage, and it is very natural to look at Asian women as role models, I am equally surprised by the wide diversity of area in which the African American excel well. Probably Rosa Parks is one of those first few women who stood up for themselves and in turn for the society. When she was subjected to a situation which she felt was wrong, she stood for the right – the right to be free and speak about it and do something about it – She had the courage to do what she thought was right and that in turn laid the foundation of a big change in the American history. If you want to pick up one person who taught that women can be fearless anytime, then you have to read more about Rosa Parks – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks It is the irresistible Queen of Sheba who is for Q of #atozchallenge. I first knew “Queen of Sheba” as a game which is played when you are in a group. A game which requires some intelligence to do what the queen is asking the participants to do. And then came the mythical character of Queen of Sheba in Bible, in jewish scriptures and also in Islam. One more instance of a strong powerful women who is known for her beauty, and more so for her intelligence. The story is that Sheba traveled to meet King Solomon of Israel to check his knowledge through her riddles. It is a very interesting story where Sheba is finally tricked by King Solomon and they have a son together – who becomes an important mythical character in ensuring the Ark (container of the sacred ten commandments ) is brought into Ethiopia. Lot of interesting stuff to read about mythology and Queen of Sheeba is one of those interesting characters. This is for those history buffs for a weekend read on Sheeba – http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/cultures/sheba_01.shtml O is for Oprah Winfrey in #atozchallenge Here is another women who created a brand for herself – media proprietor, talk show host, actor, etc, etc. She has come a long way from her childhood – she was born in a poor family of a single mother, underwent hardship including child abuse with hardly much support from any of her close family. She could have ended up as another woman with lot of bitterness in life – instead, she conquered her weaknesses , struggled and survived to be what she is today. She is one typical role model for little girls when it comes to courage in facing life and making the best of what is available. More details on Oprah here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey M is for Maya Angelou in #atoz challenge. My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry To get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return – Maya Angelou There are millions of reasons why Maya is regarded as one of the best authors who will continue to influence more and more individuals in all the generations yet to come. You can read through them in these web pages My one single reason is the wonderful poem by her…. J is for Joanne Rowling or JK Rowling in atozchallenge. We all grew up listening to lot of fairy tales – magic world is always intriguing with the witches and wizards when we were kids. And i was convinced that I grew up over years and matured and transitioned from the fairy tales to fiction and finally to non fiction and philosophy. I was reading Paulo Cohelo and extracts of Bhagvat Geetha and bingo…. i was again pulled into the magic world of wizards by the great HARRY POTTER series of JK !! The intelligence which is built by her into the Harry Potter series is astounding!!! The characters, the little details, the locations, the incidents, the good over evil – she wowed me!! She just made sure an entire generation of kids returned back to their reading habits and probably the so-called grown ups (like me!) went back to their world of fairy tales where the good triumphs over evil and got the hope back in life!!! Goes without saying that her personal life is also an inspiration – where she faced multiple disappointments before she became the current famous version of herself – JK Rowling!! JK – my vote for her in bringing back the hope of good over evil in millions of children and the grown-ups!! And then it made me realize that she has subtly included lot of philosophy into her wrriting – some samples below. Read more about her and her works in these two links I is for Indira Gandhi in AtoZ challenge. Anyone who lived in India during the period of Indira Gandhi will agree to the fact that she is one of the most charismatic political leader ever in the subcontinent! If I have to pick up one quality of her, then it is her courage which impresses me – the courage with which she went ahead and made those major decisions in Indian politics, Indian Government and in turn in the lives of Indians. While I am neutral politically, it goes without saying that she comes on top of my list if i look at all the prime minsters who held post in India in the past. There are multiple views on how the Nehru family and especially Indira patronized the monarchy model in the so-called democratic India – her dad Jawaharlal Nehru, she and her son Rajiv Gandhi all held the post of prime ministers of India. Still, when it comes to looking at that one women political leader across the world in all these years, Indira still is as impressive as she can get. If you need to read the life of an individual, who conquered her own demons and reached the pinnacle of power in politics in a developing country like India, INDIRA it is!!! For starters, to know more about Indira Gandhi Wiki is a good place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi !! Check out the few sample pictures if you want to find out what it means to be a Charismatic leader….i was tough to stop adding more pictures to this post!! Indira = Charisma !!!! H on #AtoZ challenge is Hillary, and obviously i never knew this is going to be a topical post when I decided it was Hillary for H. While there are many famous women who happen to be the wives of very famous individuals, Hillary was someone I noticed closely for one single reason.The reason was her strong clarity when the famous Bill clinton – Lewinsky episode happen. East or West, it is always a challenge to handle personal matters in the eye of media and that too, if it is a spicy extra marital affair of high profile. Hillary handled that phase of her life well. In the whole episode, all i was wondering was how will Hillary will really feel about it and how much she can acknowledge about it. And, definitely, she wowed me with her confidence through this episode. And now, here is she – “Hillary for America” and it will be of great interest to watch her emerge as the first American women president – while we at the east had multiple women political leaders, it is time the world’s super power gets ready for women power ! And her first video on her presidential campaign is likeable!! H for Hillary and Hillary for America

WHIPPANY — What began as a simple travel photo website to share with family and friends became much larger and more meaningful to photographer Beth Burstein. The collection of pictures resulted in “The Legacy: A Daughter’s Experience of the Holocaust,” a photo essay that opens Dec. 11 at the Gaelen Gallery West. Burstein, who was raised in Brooklyn and Matawan, said, “I continue to be troubled by the question of what the world would be like now if six million Jews and other victims of the Nazis had not been murdered, and their cultures had been allowed to thrive.” An opening reception will be held at 6 p.m. Dec. 11 at the gallery located on the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus at 901 Route 10 in Whippany. A gallery talk by the photographer will follow at 7 p.m. The exhibit will remain on display through Jan. 24. For more information including reservations for the opening reception and gallery hours, e-mail [email protected] or call (973) 929-3194.

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On Wenceslas Square, the protesters jingled their keys, a signal to the Politburo that it was time to go. By the end of the year, the Communist government fell and on New Year’s Eve, Havel, joined by Dubček, gave his first speech as president of a free Czechoslovakia. 128). For Secession, check out the turn-of-the19th-century apartment buildings in Josefov, along Pařížská and around the former Jewish quarter. You can’t help but notice the inlaid jewel- and tile-work embedded into the facades like a finely crafted jewelry box. Cubism came a few years later and like Art Nouveau was a reaction to the sterility of the 19th century. 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Travel to Poland Our country is more than a thousand years old and Poland's past is all around you when you visit us. A country with great culture, it the birth place of Copernicus, Chopin and Madame Curie. When you visit our old towns and villages you will see mediaeval castles and wealthy merchant houses. Old churches, Jewish synagogues, visiting Poland is like walking through history. We are proud of our lovely cities like Krakow, Gdansk and Wroclaw. Away from the big cities, Poland is virtually untouched and unspoiled. We still have European bison, wolves, wild boar and extraordinary bird life. It is a great country for trekking and adventure travel. More about Intercrac DMC Intercrac DMC Poland: We have been a DMC since 1989. We excel at groups, FITs and incentives. We have a very friendly team of experts ready to assist you. We are top of the list, each request is treated with great care. We are your reliable DMC in Poland and here to assist you with your travel, please contact us if you need more information.

Religion meets Grace The 3rd chapter of John’s gospel is one of the most well-known passages in the entire Bible, especially John 3:16, and for good reason. It is a beautiful, though brief, snapshot of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The next two verses add so much clarity to vs 16 that they should be quoted too when we quote verse 16 . 16 “For God so loved the world,that he gave his only Son, 16 that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. (John 3:16-18) This passage goes hand-in-glove with chapter 1:11-13 11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:11-1) Both passages are saying essentially the same thing. Jesus saves those who come to him by grace though faith. Men and women are not saved by heritage, ritual, good deeds, or religion but by the person and work of Jesus. Right away in the opening of John 3 we are introduced to a man, a leader of the Jews and a teacher, one Nicodemus. By human standards there is little doubt that Nicodemus was a good man. Perhaps one of the best men in Israel. But he was a dead man walking. He needed life, the eternal life Jesus gives as a free gift to those who trust him. John 1:17 says, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ“. Nicodemus was a Moses man, not a Jesus man. He was all about the law of Moses, he know nothing of the grace of God. In this meeting was the clash of two worlds, religion was looking grace right in the face! Yet, he didn’t see it. How many are the thousands who think that by faithful church attendance, giving to the poor, not swearing, etc., etc. that somehow God will see their goodness and approve them for eternity with him in the end. Here was a man who was more driven to keep and preserve the law of God than perhaps anyone. Because of his hard work and dedication to the law he had risen in the ranks to the very top of Judaism. He was religious but lost. Jesus was about to give him the news, good and bad. In John 3:1,2a, we read , “3 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night….” Why did he come at night? Scholars have discussed the question since the first century and they don’t know any more than I do. The Bible does not say why. I have even heard sermons on reasons as if the guy actually knew why. Some suggestions are that he came at night because he didn’t want anyone to see him meeting with Jesus. The cover of darkness would be less risky. Jesus was not popular with the Jewish hierarchy. Perhaps he came after dark because it was more comfortable to travel at night because of the heat. I think a good possibility was that he came when he was off work. He was a teacher, a leader of the Jews, a Pharisee and he sat on the Sanhedrin court. He likely had no time to travel even a short distance on foot for a conversation with a stranger during the day. Why he came at night is not important enough for God to tell us so we move on… 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” (John 3:2) On some level Nicodemus knew Jesus was different. He also was convinced that God was with him because of the “signs” (miracles) Jesus was doing. Beyond that, even though his scholarship was unquestioned and he represented God and God’s law to the people of Israel, he knew absolutely nothing more. It seemingly never once occurred to him that this “teacher” might just be Messiah. Jesus was an in-your-face evangelist. Right out of the box in answer to this respected Jewish leader’s inquiry Jesus dropped a verbal bomb! 3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3) Of course Nicodemus was caught off guard. What was Jesus talking about? “How can these things be ?” How could anyone be born a second time? It didn’t make any sense to him. Jesus continued then, saying, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 5b-8) Here I want to address perhaps the most controversial statements in the Gospel of John. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ What is the water of John 3 verse 5? I will only be able to draw upon my learning, what I have been taught, and what I have observed in my long life of study. I am not going to give these in order of importance. - The “water” of John 3:5 means physical birth. Most of the preachers in my early years believed this and preached it. While the next verse fits that meaning, “that which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit”, it is not logical. Nicodemus had been born, he was standing there in flesh. He did not need to have another flesh birth. It is true that before birth a baby is enveloped in a sac of water and so otherwise sound Bible preachers run off in the ditch here in my view. - The “water” of John 3:5 means ceremonial cleansing water. Earlier in John when Jesus turned the water into wine it was into those water pots regularly used to hold water for ceremonial cleansing. It is no small thing that those particular pots were used and that the wine as we know represents the blood of Christ which cleanses us in a way ceremonial water never could. This is important, every Jew with much training was well aware of the significance of water in the history of Judaism. Jesus said to Nicodemus in verse 10, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”. That question alone in my view disqualifies option 2. Nicodemus would have known about that “water”. - The “water” of John 3:5 means Christian baptism. Perhaps 2/3rd’s of all professing Christian believers agree that this is the correct meaning for “water” in the passage in question. So far as I know all believers with roots in the Stone-Campbell movement, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Orthodox, some Pentecostals and others to numerous to name accept this definition. Perhaps they are all correct. Now among those mentioned here there is wide differences about the significance of water baptism. Some people I believe go to far making baptism the Savior. Preaching water baptism is not the same as preaching the gospel. We must be careful to not go further on any subject than the Bible goes. - The “water” of John 3:5 means the Word of God. Many good scholars hold this view, and I might add, with very good cause. Look at these examples of “water” being used to describe the cleansing effects of the Word of God. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:25b-27) 22 Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, 23 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:22-23) 18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (James 1:18) 3 Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. (John15:3) It was not uncommon but rather very usual for Jesus to use symbolism and parables to get truth to the people he spoke to. He said “I am the door”, but he had no hinges or a latch. He said “I am the bread of life”, and he said as he dined with his disciples before his death “take, eat, this is my body”. And so when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus saying be born of “water and the Spirit” he was not necessarily speaking literally. The word translated “spirit” in our Bibles, in the Greek may be translated either “spirit” or “wind”. In fact Jesus compared a Christian, one born again, as being like the wind. The meaning was interchangable depending on the context of what was being said. Nicodemus questioned Jesus about this “water”, “spirit”, and “wind” talk saying “How can these things be”. From that point on Jesus spoke clearly and concisely, there is no ambiguity about what he said. Nicodemus left that meeting having understood what Jesus was talking about. 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” (John 3:9-21) “ And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. This is plain talk, easy to understand. Over and over and over again the Bible teaches that sinners are saved through the person and work of Jesus Christ by grace though faith. You and I don’t have to know the meaning of every verse in the Bible. But God has put the cookies on the bottom shelf when it comes to the gospel of Christ and salvation. As Jesus pointed out to Nicodemus, people refuse the message of Christ because their deeds are evil and don’t want the light of the world to shine on them. In closing. We should never allow our differences of opinion to interfere with our unity as brothers and sisters in the faith. No person or group has a monopoly on the truth. What we agree on far outweighs what we disagree about.

What I Blog About After years working in healthcare, I retired as a nurse practitioner to be a full time writer, co-author, and blogger. From the blog’s beginning in 2014, Before Sundown has been honored with awards, and blog tours. I’m ever grateful, and appreciative of dedicated worldwide followers who like, comment, share and tweet posts. I started the blog to connect with other bloggers, and in a way to learn more about writing. I also wanted to support other bloggers, friends and family by writing blog posts about them, their books, interests, professions and travels. The collections of sunsets/sunrises on the Welcome page came from bloggers all over the world. I wanted visitors to remember what made you smile Before Sundown. What better way then to offer breathtaking sunsets or sunrises? A monthly featured sunset continues. I’m writing Sunset Inn, a historical fiction book based on real and made up events and people during the period from 1859 to 1961. The research consumed many hours to get accurate history. The narrative and dialogue a continual challenge with different people at different ages telling the history related to them. I knew people wanted to read the story, not an information dump of historical facts. That wasn’t an easy task to show the political, social, and cultural environments. I’m grateful a professional researcher helped and sent me New York Times and Boston Herald articles, photos, and he created timelines of grandfather and his step-brother. The book theme follows an inquisitive nine-year-old granddaughter’s long search to uncover secrets in her famous German grandfather’s life. She overhears talk of her grandfather’s dying words, no one is to look into my life, that history dies with me, and wants to find out why. She has little help from her family, but, a lot of help from a local librarian, and her beau, a Jewish medical doctor. Together, the doctor and the granddaughter (a nurse) travel to Germany and uncover grandfather’s history, with a surprising link to her. The granddaughter is the real me. The “beau” is made up. With all the historical parts, the story needs a sparked up nurse/doctor romance. Fun Facts About Me I’m old as dirt, born in 1939, and plan to live beyond the 100-year mark. I love whimsy and humor. I try to interject both into blog posts and writing. I modeled for an Illustrator Photographer as a teenager, and was featured on east coast billboards; Give Life a Lift in West Palm Beach – Tropical Florida’s First Resort. I had jet-black hair and violet eyes, just like Elizabeth Taylor. I published poetry years ago, and that led me to write “free rein for the brain” fiction. I attended the same university as my sons, and at the same time. I also knew their girlfriends there (now wives). I was an honorary Frat Mom, and a designated driver. I lived in Italy, Greece and Japan (5 years in each country). The highlights: Travels through Italy, skiing the Matterhorn (Italian Alps), and ski slopes in France, Austria and Switzerland. Travels through Greece and to the Greek islands. Travels through Japan and to the temples in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Kamakura. I was a tech challenged blogger at the beginning in 2014, and I “learned by fire” how to put the WordPress site together and keep it “blazing” with published posts, and The Sunrise and Sunset Photo Gallery. Sunset Inn- Wish You Were Here – Your Friend, Elizabeth Christine Elizabeth’s Gallery

Dear followers: During the last month, I’ve had the opportunity to visit several organization. NESRI is a grass roots movement, established 10 years ago, to effect social change. The folks involved, live by their Mission Statement. - In Partnership with communities, NESRI works to build a broad movement for economic and social rights; including health, housing, education and work with dignity. This organization is based on the principle that fundamental human needs create human rights obligations on the part of government and the private sector. NESRI advocates for public policies that guarantee the universal and equitable fulfillment of these rights in the United States. - I’ve linked their 10th anniversary video for your education and enjoyment. It is satisfying to hear about an organization that sets goals for Social Action and works to empower “we the People” for positive results. - Please note: Cathy Albisa, The Executive Director and Co-founder of NESRI, has requested that I share their 10th Anniversary video with you, dear followers. Cathy urges me to “see and share their annivesary video”, celebrating 10 years of expanding the politically possible. - If you are interested in taking part in a rally and the educational event in Vermont on January 8th, 2015, concerning the passage of the first single payer healthcare system in the United States, please contact NESRI or those cited in the attached link. http://www.nesri.org/take-action/make-the-countrys-first-universal-publicly-financed-health-care-system-a-reality-calling-on-everyone-to-support-theI’ve been asked, if I know anyone really interested in in the health care fight? There is a big day being planned in Vermont on January, 8th, with events planned around the implementation of the new universal healthcare law . (full public financing for everyone) NESRI is trying to raise $1800 to bring organizers from Maryland, Maine and Pennsylvania who are trying to create similar campaigns in their state. - Impressive! Their funding is equally impressive: Atlantic Phianthropies, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, Ford Foundation, Jewish Communal Fund, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W.K.Kellogg Foundation to name a few of their current donors. - Each social action “win”, is only the beginning. NESRI gives National impact to local actions by developing replicable and scalable models and spreading them across the Country. Politics effects US. You have my voice, being involved is your choice.

Schlink’s novella depicts the failure of a German-Jewish dialogue through the private scenes of two lovers and explores the number of differences that a relationship can bear. The title, Die Beschneidung, on the one hand refers to the plot, since the German protagonist hopes to overcome his cultural differences with his Jewish-American girlfriend by converting to Judaism, which, for him, would involve circumcision. On the other hand, the literary text expounds the problem of circumcision on a metaphorical level by recounting how the protagonist ›cuts off‹ many topics, because he is afraid of being criticized for his thoughts by Jewish characters. As a victim of anti-German prejudices, he invokes several anti-Semitic stereotypes. This article explores how and if the novella sensitizes against such stereotypical thinking and thus subtly criticizes an anti-Semitic and revisionist discourse, or if, on the contrary, the text engrains itself in such a discourse.

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Editor's Note: Welcome to a new episode of 1 Minute Meal, a series of video snapshots documenting the places, people, and foods that make New York a vibrant food community. Khachapuri, an umbrella term for a variety of cheese breads, is something of a national pastime in Georgia. Running a gamut of baked goods from the pastry-like penovani to the boat-shaped, egg-crowned adjaruli, good khachapuri embodies Georgian cuisine's commitment to serious bread and hearty fare. Georgian Food (signed out front as "Brick Oven Bread"), a bakery and takeout in Brighton Beach, joins several other Georgian kitchens in adapting the ritual of baking khachapuri and shotis puri to South Brooklyn. Co-owner Shorena Dalakishvili, who founded the business with partner Mzia Induashvili after immigrating from Georgia, puts it plainly in this episode of 1 Minute Meal. Previously on 1 Minute MealDavid's Brisket House, the Jewish Deli Run by Muslims in Brooklyn » Georgian Food, a.k.a. Brick Oven Bread About the videographer: James Boo has been a Serious Eats contributor since 2010. Working as a freelance journalist, he is also the founder of Real Cheap Eats and a documentarian. Check out his food-and-travel blog, The Eaten Path, for more journeys to the real meal. About the music: Georgian folk performance recorded by Jeff Greene for Evergreene Music.

Just another WordPress.com weblog False Flag Operation Prototype for the Coming War with Iran: The Kuwaiti Incubator Baby Deception Last night at the gym after my usual stint at the pullup bar and the leg extension and leg curl machines, I proceeded to the treadmill. I was there for one hour at varying speeds and inclines throughout the 60 minutes. The ceiling-suspended television sets for treadmillers at this particular training location in San Antonio always involve ESPN; one of the major networks when it offers a bad soap opera or sit-com; and the incessant droning of the CNN newsroom where the presence of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper proves especially annoying and wearisome, although informative in ways not intended by the Masters of Corporate Media. Last night was more of the same. I was stationed in front of CNN during my treadmill session. Wolf Blitzer was interviewing a Fred Burton of Stratfor Global Intelligence based in Austin, Texas. Mr. Burton is their Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security. The subject was the mysterious January 16th, 2012 killing of Iranian medical student Gelareh Bagherzadeh, age 30, a woman with a profile as an activist in the Iranian women’s rights movement and professionally based at Houston’s world-famous M. D. Anderson Medical Center. She was found slumped over the wheel of her car after being shot in the head once by an unknown assailant. The crime took place at the site of the wealthy housing estate in Houston where her family lived. Houston police summoned after the gunfire found Ms. Bagherzadeh’s vehicle crashed into the door of a garage with the engine still running and the tires spinning. She had apparently been speaking on her mobile phone to an ex-boyfriend at the time of her death. It is still unclear whether she had been followed home, or the victim of an assassin lying in wait for her as she arrived. No one is presently in custody. She was a coordinator of a Houston-based protest organization called SabzHouston. Cursory scan of their web site reveals a strong affiliation with the Green Movement and the past Presidential campaign in Iran of Mir Hossein Mousavi. The site alleges massive fraud in the Iranian election of June 12, 2009. The site’s section dedicated to the memory of Gelareh Bagherzadeh asks for all to refrain from speculation about motivation for the tragedy. Someone forgot to inform CNN about the avoidance of baseless speculation. Wolf Blitzer’s line of questioning led Fred Burton of Stratfor into a line of analysis which revealed that although Mr. Burton had no factual basis for what he was implying, he was clearly hopeful that viewers would infer the direct probable involvement of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), both in the Bagherzadeh tragedy and in the allegations surrounding the supposed involvement of Tehran in a most improbable and counterproductive scheme to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States in Washington. This is all on top of the assumptions made by many Americans about Iranian involvement in reported recent acts of terror in Bangkok and Delhi aimed at Israel according to CNN and other media outlets. Gareth Porter’s recent article should be a word of caution on this. Ditto for Richard Sale’s recent piece on Israel and the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK/MKO/PMOI) chronicling this Demonic Dynamic Duo’s program of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and other related criminal acts of terror. My recent interview with the Habilian Association chronicled at Iran Interlink contains other articles and leads that may provide a completely different set of suggestions as to where to look for possible motives and answers in the Gelareh Bagherzadeh murder case in Houston. Be advised. There is much CNN did not say last night, or today, when Fred Burton of Stratfor was brought on again to spin the story of the Gelareh Bagherzadeh assassination. CNN viewers are not told about the biography of Wolf Blitzer for openers. As recently chronicled by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA): “Blitzer is a former employee of AIPAC, Israel’s behemoth Washington, DC lobby (see former Sen. James Abourezk’s “Wolf Blitzer, AIPAC, and the Saudi Peace Initiative” in the July 2007 Washington Report, p. 16, also posted on our Web site). The CNN anchor also is the author of Territory of Lies: The Exclusive Story of Jonathan Jay Pollard: The American Who Spied on His Country for Israel and How He Was Betrayed (the title seeming to imply that it was Pollard, rather than his native country, who was betrayed).” Neither does CNN mention the strong links between Stratfor and the Israeli intelligence and journalistic communities. The Austin-based intelligence oriented think-tank was begun by Zionist Texas academic Dr. George Friedman and figures prominently in some of the leaked cables emanating out of the Wikileaks/Bradley Manning case. Even stranger, a controversy has recently emerged on the American populist Right regarding charges that Texas-based populist radio commentator Alex Jones is Strafor linked. While that controversy remains in the realm of unproven allegation, Michael Collins Piper’s new book, “The Confessions of An Anti-Semite,” does provide possible context to Alex Jones’s attacks in recent years on members of the anti-Zionist American Right and his occasional apologies for Israel on page 23 of that volume: “On October 6, 1940, The New York Times featured a revealing story reporting that Arthur Greenwood–deputy leader of the British Labor Party and member without portfolio in the British War Cabinet–had ‘assured the Jews of the United States that when victory was achieved an effort would be made to found a new world order [emphasis added] based on the ideals of ‘justice and peace,’ and that–as the Times assessed it–’after the war an opportunity would be given to Jews everywhere to make a “distinctive and constructive contribution” in the rebuilding of the world.’ The Times not only featured the phrase ‘New World Order’ in the headline, as shown above, but in a secondary subhead repeated the concept: ‘New World Order Forecast.’ As anyone who understands the special role of the Times as a voice for Jewish interests–and the New World Order–knows, this specific phraseology was no accident. “Now, today, long after Hitler and the Nazis were vanquished in World War II, they are still the subject of constant discussion by Alex Jones–the self-described ‘biggest name’ in the ‘truth movement,’ whose lucrative career was launched by a Jewish-owned television station in Texas and now sponsored by the Jewish-owned radio giant Sirius–and by Glenn Beck, the television and radio rabble-rouser made into a superstar by Zionist billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. . . .” I now take the reader back to last evening and the gym treadmill. As Blitzer and Fred Burton of Stratfor were conversing, their discussion receded from my mind even as I continued watching the screen while speed walking. Suddenly, in my mind, I was back in my late godfather’s house in suburban Washington, D. C. in October of 1990. I had come out to see him for a couple of months after leaving Seattle for good in August of that year, the same month and year that Saddam Hussein and Iraq made a fateful decision to attack Kuwait claiming the latter’s guilt in a horizontal drilling scheme illegally siphoning Iraqi oil. President George Herbert Walker Bush was pushing for an American invasion and land war against Iraq, but polls at the time revealed a public division in the United States on the wisdom of this move. The division was roughly a 50-50 split. In this instantaneous mental reversion to October of 1990, I was suddenly seeing my godfather and I watching television in his den in Olney, Maryland. He had a fantastic mahogany bar in that den, to complement the considerable stash of liquid goodies. While he nursed a martini, I was imbibing courtesy of a bottle of German Weissbier. We were watching the evening’s replay on a local Washington station of some very interesting testimony before the House Human Rights Caucus that had transpired on a day far more pivotal in American and world history than either of us could possibly have imagined then. The young lady we watched testifying almost 22 years ago with great visible emotion in the voice and welling tears in the eyes was a 15 year old Kuwaiti testifying under the pseudonym “Nurse Nayirah.” The alleged reason for the phony name was “fear of reprisals.” The thrust of the testimony was her supposed firsthand knowledge of war crimes and atrocities being committed in Kuwait by the Iraqi army. The clincher in that day’s riveting witness by Nurse Nayirah is reprised here via transcript. It goes as follows: “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die. [emphasis added]“ After the performance was over, I asked my late godfather, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and past denizen of Air Force Intelligence what his reaction was to the hearing. There was a moment of silence while he downed the remaining portion of the martini. Then he opined, “Sounds like these Iraqi soldiers would be great employees in a routine day at an American abortion clinic. Aside from that, this woman’s testimony strikes me as total bullshit. That’s my reaction. Maybe we should have switched channels to watch pro wrestling. . . .” The Colonel passed away seven years later in 1997. He now rests in section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. He was a great man in more ways than can possibly be recounted here, but that single evening of watching Washington D. C. news in his den over drinks cemented the brilliance of his political instincts. The iron clad proof of his cut-to-the-chase discernment appeared in December of 1992. Now forgotten by a brain-dead American public is that in December 1992, there was the airing of a documentary produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and its television show entitled The Fifth Estate. The documentary is entitled, To Sell a War. That program, largely suppressed in the United States, revealed that Nurse Nayirah was none other than Nijirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah. She was never a nurse. Her entire testimony was a complete fabrication. Her lines, and her dramatic presentation, were the result of the coaching of PR firm Hill and Knowlton. This corporate exercise in perjury before Congress, a criminal offense, was joined by the obvious moral duplicity of the Bush Administration and other elements of the War Party, including Corporate Zionist News Media Incorporated. But it worked. Honest historians note that Nurse Nayirah, a. k. a. Nijirah al-Sabah, and her coached charade before the fawning House Human Rights Caucus, was the turning point in King George Herbert Walker Bush’s public relations campaign to rally the American public for a war mired in false premises, and for a campaign of two decades plus of duplicity, death, displacement, and destruction that appears headed for final consummation in Israel’s demand for preemptive war with Iran and the genesis of World War III. I reiterate what I have said continuously. It will begin with a False Flag Operation par excellence, likely to supersede 9-11 in galvanizing force and deception. Its endgame is to bring the United States into Netanyahu’s Crusade with the full backing of a comatose and moronic American electorate. Eretz Yisrael is the objective, as it always has been in American foreign policy in the Middle East. It is in light of this grim reality and circumstantial evidence surrounding recent events in Delhi, Bangkok, Mexico, and now Houston, with the advent of the Gelareh Bagherzadeh assassination, that the Wolf Blitzer/Fred Burton roadshow on CNN in the last 24 hours must be suspiciously evaluated. CNN now has Mr. Burton of Stratfor mentioning Gelareh Baghderzadeh’s past history in Paris as a possible point of intersection with what he claims is a major European center for intelligence operations of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mr. Burton omits what is far more provable, and what points in the opposite direction. Paris is a major point of intersection for the operations and presence of both the Israeli Mossad and the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK/MKO/PMOI). Why does he fail to consider the possibility that the Baghderzadeh killing is the work of the latter, in a developing campaign of ongoing false flag incidents designed to convince Americans that Tehran is in the process of commencing an all out war of terror in the United States as a means of providing the Zionist State and its backers in the American government and media with their own effective version of the Kuwaiti Incubator Baby Deception? I will reiterate the pattern I enumerated in my recent piece entitled, “Fort Sumter, False Flags, and The Empire’s Coming Crusade Against Iran.” This pattern is a recommended grid to utilize in evaluating everything that emerges in what may be the greatest unfolding tragedy in all of human history: “The pattern of Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Bush, and Obama has essential components and ingredients. Chief among these are: 1) The understanding of each of these Presidents that their continuance as a Chief Executive of the United States necessitated the furtherance of the power agenda of a central banking cabal; 2) This furtherance would require the involvement of their nation in a war; 3) Hostilities would commence courtesy of a false flag incident, used to disguise the identity of the real perpetrators and their agenda; 4) The war would of necessity involve the employment of mass media in legitimizing the rationale for the conflict among the masses with a barrage of viscerally powerful images and metaphors soaked in notions of moral crusade, absolutism, the sanction of Divine Providence, blind nationalism, and religious visions containing distorted notions of Manifest Destiny, messianic fervor, and millennial fanaticism; 4) Legitimate dissent from the Crusade, rooted in sounder notions of Constitutional restraint, diplomacy, and what Jesus Christ actually teaches about the Kingdom of God, would be met with demonization, economic impoverishment, persecution, imprisonment, and death. What worked for Lincoln in this final regard, is being arranged nicely for Obama in the form of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as demonstrated recently by Jonathan Turley in The Guardian (UK). Building on the foundations of the two Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the jettisoning of Posse Comitatus laws, the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretap program, and the circumventing of the Federal Court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NDAA has formally codified George W. Bush’s observation that the Constitution of the United States is nothing but a “Goddamned piece of paper.” Presumably the lives and liberties of American citizens, not to mention The Empire’s victims abroad, fall into the identically condemned status and subsequently fateful demise.” Well, Wolf and Fred, what do you think?

Curious, provocative, engaging, brave, and funny - women who change the world are diverse, intriguing and brilliant. Filled with wonderful illustrations, and engaging activities that will nurture your own varied skills, the Brilliant Women series compiles the stories of inspiring women from every field. Retelling their triumphs and adversities, this beautiful series of four books reveals and celebrates the women who have shaped the world we live in now. Perfect reading for the next generation of brilliant girls and boys.In Groundbreaking Science and Technology Pioneers you'll say hello to Hypatia, an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer. You'll learn about Lise Meitner, the heroic Jewish physicist who escaped the Nazis. You'll join Jane Goodall who lived in the jungle studying apes. These women are just a few of the many who followed their passion for science and technology, and weren't put off by people telling them they couldn't or shouldn't. And along the way they discovered radiation, wrote the first computer programme, expanded our knowledge of the universe and flew into space.

Andover High School is pulling its yearbook after administrators realized a senior used a Nazi quote as his senior quote, school officials said. In a letter addressed to the school community, Principal Philip Conrad said on Wednesday the administration was “horrified to learn now that one particular quote, unattributed on the yearbook page itself, is generally attributed to either Adolph [sic] Hitler or Joseph Goebbels about propagating lies and having people believe those lies to be the truth.” Conrad did not include the quote in his letter. On Thursday, in response to a request from the Globe, Conrad said the quote was “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Conrad said they didn’t make the connection until after the yearbook had already been distributed to some students, and “immediately” launched an investigation upon the discovery. The student had apparently gotten the quote from a source that did not identify its author, Conrad said, and “used it without any knowledge of where it came from or the hateful background with which it is associated.” “I am satisfied that he sincerely regrets his choice,” Conrad said. Conrad said he was disappointed with having to retract the yearbook given all the hard work that went into it, and said they will no longer be selling the yearbook until the page is replaced. Anyone who already bought a yearbook can either pick up a custom-printed sticker or have it sent to them, Conrad said. Or, they can return the yearbook to the school to have the page replaced by the publisher. In the letter, Conrad also referenced incidents from December in which swastikas were drawn on a desk of a Jewish teacher at the school. Since then, Conrad said, the school has begun taking steps to ensure that “hate and hate-speech be addressed directly in a straightforward and effective manner.” “Hate speech has no home here, least of all cemented in what should be a cherished keepsake,” he said. “This is not reflective of who we are.” This story has been updated to include the quote.Alana Levene can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @alanalevene.

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"Why do you continue to support this Nazi Policy" Why do upper middle class WHITE Americans chose to be so insultingly ignorant? If you don't like a governmental policy that does not make it NAZI ? Nazi's exterminated many members of my family. Nazi's propagated the worst institutionalized genocide in the is history of mankind, and in the modern epoch no less! For this suburban asstwat to compare HEALTH CARE REFORM to Nazism is so foul , misguided and ignorant..... ooh I feel a hate crime coming on! I digress... So She , this ignorant piece of entitled middle-class American bourgeoisie asks the question above to Barney Frank, gay ethnically Jewish Democratic senator form the state of Massachusetts Senator. His response makes me truly proud to be an American. We can disagree about health care reform, but there is no excuse for this ignorance. Trust me I've got a laundry list of issues with President Obama about unfulfilled campaign promises. I live in Oregon- I pay high taxes, and don't have equal rights. I have friends serving in silence in the military knowing at any moment their careers could be ended just for being who they were born. But this ignorant comparison is too far. During the campaign the Right swore Obama was a Muslim terrorist (unaware seemingly of American domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney, Terry Nichols) They refuse to accept if you are born in the state of Hawaii you are are an AMERICAN, if you have an AMERICAN parent, then again... you are AMERICAN... Ignorant!

Reality Bites Sometimes I left for Israel on New Year’s Eve. Most people were planning what to wear, what to drink, and probably knew who they were going to be at with midnight. Me? I had a date with a plane. I had been really excited about traveling to Israel, but when December 31st came, I had huge butterflies. More like dragonflies, they’re carnivores. At breakfast, I told my husband, this is the craziest thing I have ever done. I was starting to think I needed a Xanax. At the airport, we sat on a window ledge, next to the TSA agent who checks your boarding pass and I.D. for thirty minutes. I was doing the whole, ready? No wait, a few more minutes. Just like kids do when you have to make them take nasty medicine. Except this was going to be fun, right? After we said goodbye, I flew to New York. All was well. My lack of experience in traveling is in international travel. This would be my first stamp in my passport (they never stamped it on our cruise to Mexico). I was well-prepared for everything I could think of and my bags were carefully packed. I had all of my paperwork and a map of JFK to get from one terminal to another. And despite the next twenty-four hours, mostly everyone I encountered while traveling was very nice. I took the air train at JFK to the international terminal. When I arrived I didn’t know exactly where to go to find El Al. I asked a man who worked at the airport, and in his heavy (Nigerian?) accent, he said: follow the Jews. Okay, he also pointed in the direction I should go, but it was a funny set of instructions. But he was pointing at a lot of orthodox Jews, dressed in black. Men with traditional hats covering their Yamakas and women with long skirts and black stockings. So I followed them. I got to the El Al line, where a gentleman told me I had come to the right place. Then he began to question me. I was ready for it, so I showed him my letter from the Baha’i World Center, my Baha’i card, and my passport. He quizzed me on how long I had been a Bahai, did I know anyone in Israel, why was I going alone, how long was I staying, etc. And then he repeated those questions randomly. I got my boarding pass and was instructed to head to a screened off area. From there I was told to leave my carry on, but take my passport and wallet and “go shopping,” and come back in an hour. I don’t shop, so I went down stairs by the shops and talked to my husband, all the while hoping my stuff would be okay. When I returned, I was starting to worry about making it to the gate. It was 10:30 and my flight left at 11:50. I had yet to go through TSA security. I was then escorted to a tiny little room without my stuff, where I spent the next hour being searched and question but mostly waiting with my shoes in my hand listening to people talk in Hebrew. My hair was searched, my bra was taken and searched, I was searched . . . I was starting to feel less and less optimistic about this travel situation. At the end of it all, they handed me my travel pillow, a book, my phone, my passport and documents in plastic bag. No iPod, no carry on, no camera. They checked it into luggage for me and said I would get it back on arrival. I was escorted to the plane and, I sat in my seat. At midnight we were taxiing down the run way for takeoff and people around cheered happy new year. All around me were Jewish families and college kids going on birthright trips. People spoke in Hebrew all around me. Outside of the plane window, we could see fireworks over New York as we lifted off. When food was served they had no vegetarian meal for me. I felt lonely. I felt like crying. I felt like a foreigner. When I landed, I got my stuff. And it was all there. I was there. I headed to a sherut to go to the hotel and hoped it would all be better from that point on. Reality Bites Sometimes

When the Supreme Court decided on June 13 that unaltered human DNA cannot be patented, it was more than a victory for cancer patients and corporate rivals in the field of genetics; it was a reason to celebrate for Dr. Wayne Grody, a professor at UCLA School of Medicine who assisted... Iran, powers explore nuclear compromises as Israel hopes for failure Italy’s top court acquits Amanda Knox of murder Woman arrested for sexual abuse of teenagers at a bar mitzvah Jury rules gender not reason Silicon Valley executive not promoted New restrictions on L.A. residential development Following grave desecration, Tunisian president vows to defend Jews Holocaust survivors to restore Polish Torah scroll Ukrainian Jewish surgeon claims attackers shouted anti-Semitic epithets Tag: American Civil Liberties Union June 19, 2013 | 12:16 pm July 19, 2006 | 8:00 pm As local pro-Israeli and pro-Arab groups hold ever larger and more heated demonstrations, relations among Los Angeles Muslim and Jewish groups threaten to go into a deep freeze. In one reflection of the changing climate, a longtime Jewish member of the American Civil Liberties Union... June 17, 2004 | 8:00 pm At first blush it seemed an odd thing for an observant Jew to do: Slogging my way through morning rush-hour traffic to get downtown to demonstrate against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors' decision to remove a small cross from the county seal. And yet, I felt compelled to...

Hershey Felder, currently appearing in "An American Story" at the Royal George Theatre, will adapt, direct and produce the next production at that venue. But he will not perform. The pianist-actress Mona Golabek is the solo star. Entitled "The Pianist of Willesden Lane,' the new show from Felder's Eighty-Eight Entertainment is the story of a young Jewish pianist, set in Vienna and London, just before and during World War Two. It's based on a book penned by Golabek and Lee Cohen. Felder said that the piece was in the same style of "musical storytelling" (Golabek both acts and plays piano) with which his audiences associate him. Performances at the Royal George, 1641 N. Halsted St., begin Apr. 19. Copyright © 2015, RedEye

We Christians say that the Bible has the answers to all things. So how does it say to deal with Halloween? Oops…. Halloween is not mentioned in the Bible. Scripture does not speak at all about Halloween, but it does give us some principles on which we can make a decision. In Old Testament Israel, witchcraft was a crime punishable by death. Exodus 22:18 (NLT) “You must not allow a sorceress to live. Leviticus 19:31 (NLT)31 “Do not defile yourselves by turning to mediums or to those who consult the spirits of the dead. I am the LORD your God. Leviticus 20:6, 27 (NLT)6 “I will also turn against those who commit spiritual prostitution by putting their trust in mediums or in those who consult the spirits of the dead. I will cut them off from the community.27 “Men and women among you who act as mediums or who consult the spirits of the dead must be put to death by stoning. They are guilty of a capital offense.” In the New Testament we are warned that the occult and Christianity don’t mix. Acts 8:9, 18-24 (NLT)9 A man named Simon had been a sorcerer there for many years, amazing the people of Samaria and claiming to be someone great. 18 When Simon saw that the Spirit was given when the apostles laid their hands on people, he offered them money to buy this power.19 “Let me have this power, too,” he exclaimed, “so that when I lay my hands on people, they will receive the Holy Spirit!”20 But Peter replied, “May your money be destroyed with you for thinking God’s gift can be bought!21 You can have no part in this, for your heart is not right with God.22 Repent of your wickedness and pray to the Lord. Perhaps he will forgive your evil thoughts,23 for I can see that you are full of bitter jealousy and are held captive by sin.”24 “Pray to the Lord for me,” Simon exclaimed, “that these terrible things you’ve said won’t happen to me!” Acts 13:6-11 (NLT)6 Afterward they traveled from town to town across the entire island until finally they reached Paphos, where they met a Jewish sorcerer, a false prophet named Bar-Jesus.7 He had attached himself to the governor, Sergius Paulus, who was an intelligent man. The governor invited Barnabas and Saul to visit him, for he wanted to hear the word of God.8 But Elymas, the sorcerer (as his name means in Greek), interfered and urged the governor to pay no attention to what Barnabas and Saul said. He was trying to keep the governor from believing.9 Saul, also known as Paul, was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he looked the sorcerer in the eye.10 Then he said, “You son of the devil, full of every sort of deceit and fraud, and enemy of all that is good! Will you never stop perverting the true ways of the Lord?11 Watch now, for the Lord has laid his hand of punishment upon you, and you will be struck blind. You will not see the sunlight for some time.” Instantly mist and darkness came over the man’s eyes, and he began groping around begging for someone to take his hand and lead him. Acts 16:16-18 (NLT)16 One day as we were going down to the place of prayer, we met a demon-possessed slave girl. She was a fortune-teller who earned a lot of money for her masters.17 She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, and they have come to tell you how to be saved.”18 This went on day after day until Paul got so exasperated that he turned and said to the demon within her, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And instantly it left her. Acts 19:17-19 (NLT)17 The story of what happened spread quickly all through Ephesus, to Jews and Greeks alike. A solemn fear descended on the city, and the name of the Lord Jesus was greatly honored.18 Many who became believers confessed their sinful practices.19 A number of them who had been practicing sorcery brought their incantation books and burned them at a public bonfire. The value of the books was several million dollars. The name "Halloween" comes from the All Saints Day celebration of the early Christian church, a day set aside for the solemn remembrance of the martyrs. The day before all Saints Day, All Hallows Eve, the time of remembrance. "All Hallows Eve" was eventually contracted to "Hallow-e'en," which became "Halloween." When Christianity moved through Europe it had to deal with pagan cultures and their customs. The origins of Halloween are Celtic in tradition and have to do with observing the end of summer sacrifices to gods in Druidic tradition. In what is now Britain and France, it was the beginning of the Celtic year, and they believed Samhain, the lord of death, sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. The waning of the sun and the approach of dark winter made the evil spirits rejoice and play nasty tricks. Believe it or not, most of our Halloween practices can be traced back to these old pagan rites and superstitions. To deal with the customs and practices of these cultures which included holidays and festivals the organized church would move a holiday that was distinctively Christian to a place on the calendar that would directly challenge a pagan holiday. The intent was to counter pagan influences and provide a Christian alternative. But most often the church only succeeded in "Christianizing" a pagan ritual—the ritual was still pagan, but mixed with Christian symbolism. That's what happened to All Saints Eve—it was the original Halloween alternative! So, how should Christians respond? First, Christians should not respond to Halloween like superstitious non-believers. Many non-believers, and if we’re honest many Christians are superstitious. Christians are enlightened by the truth of God's Word. Evil spirits, demons, and ghosts, are no more active and sinister on Halloween than they are on any other day of the year. The day It doesn’t matter to Satan. 1 Peter 5:8 (NLT) Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. But always remember this; Colossians 2:15 (NLT) In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross. 1 John 4:4 (NLT) But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. Second, Christians should respond to Halloween with cautionary wisdom. The real threat on Halloween is from the social problems that attend sinful behavior—drunk driving, pranksters and vandals, and unsupervised children. The indencenses of satanic-associated attacks and other crimes performed by Satanists or witches are very low. Christians should exercise caution of their possessions and protect their families. Halloween parties are breeding grounds for trouble just because they can become rowdy just as other holiday parties. Halloween parties that are well-supervised can be fun and an alternative for Christian young people. Third, Halloween can be an opportunity for Christians to show the compassion of the gospel of Christ. The unbelieving world lives in fear of death, but more than that it’s the terrifying expectation of judgment for God’s adversaries. Witches, ghosts, and evil spirits are not really terrifying it’s God's wrath unleashed on the unforgiven sinner that is terrifying. Hebrews 10:27 (NLT) There is only the terrible expectation of God’s judgment and the raging fire that will consume his enemies. Christians can use Halloween and all the death imagery, superstition, expressions of debauched revelry, as an opportunity to talk about the forgiveness and eternal life revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember God has given everybody, and that means everybody, the saved and the unsaved, the ability to respond to His truth….a conscience.Romans 2:14-16 (NLT)14 Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it.15 They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.16 And this is the message I proclaim—that the day is coming when God, through Christ Jesus, will judge everyone’s secret life. Halloween can be a time that Christians can talk to unbelieving friends and family and inform their consciences of the truth about God, His Word the Bible, Christ, judgement, and the eternal life available in Jesus Christ for all those who repent of their sins. Under the no participation policy Christian parents, don’t allow their children kids participating in spiritually compromising activities. They don't want their children to dress up in costumes, go trick-or-treating or even attending Halloween alternatives. This policy is an opportunity for evangelism. When asked it’s an opportunity to share the gospel to those who ask. It's important that parents explain their policy to their children and prepare them to face the teasing or ridicule of their peers and the disapproval or scorn of their teachers and others. You could choose to lock yourself in the house with the lights off but that won’t really do anything other than get you a reputation as a grouch and you’ll miss an opportunity to share the gospel and since you are on your home turf they have to listen if they want the treats. Christian Harvest Festival Many Christian Churches hold Harvest Festivals as alternatives to secular Halloween parties. In this response the children can dress up. They can dress as famers, Bible characters, superheroes, angles, princess or cowboy . This was really the way that Halloween began in Europe. It is an effective way to reach out and evangelize your friends and neighbors. Limited, Non-Compromising Participation There's nothing inherently evil about candy (in fact I love Halloween for that reason), costumes, or trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. In fact, all of that can provide an opportunity to share the gospel. As long as the costumes are innocent and the behavior does not dishonor Christ, trick-or-treating can be used for the gospel. The Bottom Line The bottom line is that Christian participation in Halloween is a matter of conscience before God. However you choose to participate, you must honor God by keeping yourself separate from the world and by showing mercy to those who are perishing. Halloween is a great opportunity to accomplish both of those things. The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is holy and set apart from the world. It’s the message of a forgiving God. Halloween is a great time of year to share that message.

Conrad Veidt and Fritz Schulz in Different from the Others. Museum of Jewish Heritage / The New York Blueprint. Accessed September 2, 2016. http://www.nyblueprint.com/different-others. Archives don’t just safeguard primary sources for future generations – they preserve institutional memory. So often we preoccupy ourselves with issues of “worthiness” when trying to compile and weed our resources. But who has a say in what is and is not needed or necessary to both history and historiography? Such is the case of Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern), a 1919 German film denouncing Paragraph 175 (which criminalized homosexuality). Banned, burned, and then considered lost for over half a century, the film was recently restored by archivists. When the film was “lost,” had it also been forgotten? If the histories of marginalized communities are suppressed and hidden away, whose job is it to resurrect them? This year marks the 85th anniversary of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s visit to San Francisco, and the announcement cropped up in my newsfeed this past week. Hirschfeld co-wrote Different From the Others and had himself pioneered queer, cross-cultural archival work in the early twentieth century. Who knew that one hundred years later, the GLBT History Museum – home to one of the country’s largest repositories of queer archival materials – would be throwing an event in his honor? How have we gone from a society that would destroy these works to one that would revere them? My conservationist peers tell me that they only enjoy saving books that are “worth something” (monetarily or ideologically). Anything that has hateful implications or acts as superfluous ornamentation isn’t worth keeping for posterity. They would want to re-bind Mein Kampf just as much as they would a coffee-table book. Do we have a moral obligation to save everything? Should the ugly or the mundane be destroyed or maintained? Is erasure of history (its artifacts) ever acceptable? What we save, what we enshrine, can’t be separated from what we value. Different from the Others features the earliest film footage of gay men and lesbians dancing. Museum of Jewish Heritage / The New York Blueprint. Accessed September 2, 2016. http://www.nyblueprint.com/different-others.