All about spirit - Matoumba

Canonical Party Welcomes Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

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There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately How should fiction tackle subjects as immediate as the expenses scandal or Bernard Madoff's fraud? Which novels and plays - from Dickens to David Hare - have best captured current events? Ferdinand Mount on what makes politics work in literature

At some stage in their lives, writers of all sorts hear the call to write about the political events of their own time. They may think of it as a moral duty, an undertaking that it would be cowardly to resist, or they may think of it simply as an intriguing challenge. But for one reason or another, they take the plunge. They do not often tremble on the diving board. Is trying to make literature out of politics different from other kinds of writing? Are there peculiar dangers or interesting possibilities in tackling a subject so immediate, so familiar to your audience as the dodgy dossier or the expenses scandal? They may already have passionate views on the subject. Are there artistic dangers when you preach to the converted (preaching against the converted is more likely to endanger your personal safety)?

It is all very well to take the decision to engage, easy to choose your theme, what Henry James called your donnée. But as James never tired of pointing out to his friends and inferiors - HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Hugh Walpole - it is what you do with the donnée that counts, how you handle the material, which bits you select and which you leave out, what you are trying ultimately to achieve. The danger in choosing a political theme is always of not working it through properly, of revealing the thing in all its miserable nakedness as a book or poem or play about Iraq, or unemployment, or abortion, and nothing more than that. The audience becomes aware that the author is a kind of unlicensed intruder whose motives are too gratingly ulterior. The nest collapses under the cuckoo's weight. The problem is not so much the bad faith which intellectuals agonise about. The problem is bad art.

Take Harley Granville Barker's play Waste. Barker was perhaps the most intelligent English playwright of the 20th century. No one thought more deeply about stagecraft or playwriting, or especially about Shakespeare. At first sight, Waste looks like a richly wrought and carefully conceived piece. That is what entices talented directors in every generation to revive it. Yet however you produce it, it never quite comes to life, even in Sam West's fine recent production at the Almeida. The critics were not, I think, quite able to put their finger on why it didn't work. It certainly was not because of the actors: Will Keen was magnificent as the icy but passionate Henry Trebell and Phoebe Nicholls affecting as his sister. The themes of the play - political hypocrisy and abortion - are certainly not outdated. What several critics hazarded was that modern audiences could not be expected to warm to Trebell's obsession with his bill to disestablish the church. This was dismissed as a fusty theme with no relevance to our lives. Yet audiences have warmed to themes no less fusty, for example the supremacy of the church in the time of Henry VIII, as tussled over in A Man for All Seasons. Disestablishment mattered intensely in 19th-century politics and it has, as a matter of fact, resurfaced in church debate today.

The fault in the play is a rather different one. Barker simply tells us too much about the Disestablishment Bill, the arguments for and against, the difficulties of getting it through parliament, all those things that are the bread-and-butter of political life. He is too conscientious. He lacks the ruthlessness of the great artist. Disestablishment needs to be treated simply as a conflict about which the characters are passionately concerned but the precise details of which need not detain us. That is the lesson that Alfred Hitchcock taught so brilliantly. What he called the McGuffin is selected as the main driving force of the film, the holy grail, the object of everyone's frantic search, but to define it too exactly would only slow us down and might undermine our faith in the whole enterprise.

Real-life politics is full of McGuffins. That's the trouble. What occupies the obsessive attention of the Westminster world tends to be an imbroglio so complex and in many respects so absurdly trivial that it does not translate easily into art. In 1986 the Westland affair caused Michael Heseltine to stalk out of the cabinet and set off the internal conflict that destroyed the Conservative party for two decades, perhaps the worst civil war in the party since the reform of the Corn Laws. Initially, what the argument centred on was whether Mrs Thatcher had illegitimately manipulated the cabinet agenda; then it shifted to whether her allies had leaked a letter of advice from the solicitor general in defiance of long-established convention. For days, debate revolved furiously round this point, leading eventually to the forced resignation of the home secretary. Yet it was a pure McGuffin, because apart from the relative insignificance of the letter it was doubtful whether any such convention existed. In any case, to become absorbed in the actual details, as we all were, is to become a journalist. The artist simply seizes on the McGuffin and runs with it. He is interested only in the specifics that illuminate his theme.

Considered as literature, the perfect text is often one that offers no clear answers. In Little Dorrit, for example, what exactly is the nature of the debt which William Dorrit is imprisoned for non-payment of? What precisely does Mr Merdle do to make his mountains of money? What is Daniel Doyce's brilliant invention that the Circumlocution Office refuses to support? Dickens offers us the barest minimum of information about such things. Indeed, we are told that "nobody knew with the least precision what Mr Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money". It is his marvellous mysteriousness that makes all his investors feel so privileged to be allowed to put their money with him, from his fellow millionaires down to Pancks the rent collector, who assures Arthur Clennam: "I tell you, Mr Clennam, I've gone into it. He's a man of immense resources - enormous capital - government influence. They're the best schemes afloat. They're safe. They're certain." The point is that Pancks has not gone into it, any more than the just-sentenced Bernie Madoff's willing victims went into his business. The suspension of disbelief is the first secret of the fraudster's art. And it is precisely by denying the reader all those financial details that you would find in a modern bestseller about Wall Street that Dickens breaks through to a finer truth.

Merdle is based on the real-life Madoff or Maxwell of his day, John Sadleir, an Irish banker and MP, who took poison after his enormous swindles had been exposed and was found dead near the Spaniards' Inn on Hampstead Heath while Little Dorrit was being written. What fascinated Dickens was Sadleir's utter lack of flamboyance or personal magnetism: he was a cold, sallow-faced, wrinkled bachelor who appeared to take no pleasure in his fortune or in human company. Merdle too, we are told, did not shine in company. Just like Madoff in Florida, he seems to have reassured investors by his combination of relentless hospitality and personal inconspicuousness.

Dickens's urge to fictionalise and politicise real contemporary events was both immediate and passionate. While he was writing Little Dorrit, he wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts that he remained "a Reformer heart and soul. I have nothing to gain - everything to lose (for public quiet is my bread) - but I am in desperate earnest because I know it is a desperate case". Not only does the book satirise the appalling ease with which fraudsters could relieve the public of huge sums, it is also directed against two other scandals of the day: the injustice of imprisonment for debt and the maladministration in Whitehall which was responsible for hardship and delay at home and disease and death in the Crimea. All three scandals were red-hot at the time - the Crimean war was still going on - and although specific prisons reserved for debtors no longer exist, all three issues remain red-hot today, substituting only Madoff for Merkle and Iraq for the Crimea.

Dickens's techniques were much resented by the Sir Humphreys of the time. His satire was said to be unfair and exaggerated and to take no account of the real problems of governing the country. I remember, when I first read Little Dorrit, feeling that the Circumlocution Office was a rather crude caricature. That was before I had any direct experience of the higher bureaucracy. Re-reading Little Dorrit now, I am struck rather by the brilliance of the description of Clennam storming the Circumlocution Office to try to find out why William Dorrit is still in the Marshalsea after so many years. After several false starts, he is directed to the room of Mr Wobbler in the Secretarial Department: "He entered the apartment, and found two gentlemen sitting face to face at a large and easy desk, one of whom was polishing a gun-barrel on his pocket-handkerchief, while the other was spreading marmalade on bread with a paper knife." I might have found this fanciful if I had not once entered a private secretaries' room in Whitehall at a quiet time in the parliamentary recess and found one of the inmates with his ear to Test Match Special while another in his braces was aiming paper darts into a waste-paper basket.

In a larger sense, Dickens communicates his political message by transcending it. We never lose the sense of the Marshalsea as a grim, enclosing institution, but what anchors it in our minds are the ways in which the inmates have made a home and a society out of a prison. We share Dickens's exasperated affection for all Dorrit's pompous self-deception, just as we too are carried away along with the punters by Mr Merdle's air of knowing the secrets of the financial universe.

Here perhaps we begin to glimpse an essential condition for turning politics into literary art: that our affections have to be engaged, even against our best intentions. If the monsters are to be real, they must seduce us a little. I remember one or two complaints that either David Hare and Howard Brenton or Anthony Hopkins, or a combination of the three of them, had made the monstrous colonial press baron Lambert Le Roux in Pravda too devilishly attractive. To mount an effective attack on press corruption, the argument went, he should have been unmitigatedly repellent. But, like it or not, in real life the Beaverbrooks and the Murdochs are attractive, albeit in a piratical, reptilian way. It is often only this menacing charm that conceals the tycoon's inner dullness. That is partly how they got where they were, and that is why Pravda succeeds so brilliantly and in its heightening is truer to life. To fail to see this is to fail to see the boundary that separates agitprop both from literature and from life.

In David Hare's most recent play, Gethsemane, the characters again appear to be based on recognisable real-life models: the cabinet minister whose husband is in trouble with the law, the minister's rebellious daughter, the oily fixer who thinks he is running the prime minister like a puppetmaster. But the characters don't seem to have much juice in them, or to have been conceived with any affection, even of the unwilling sort. The satire seemed rather inert. Is this perhaps because it is difficult to denounce Tony Blair and New Labour for betraying the party's old ideals, when the whole point of Blair's successful pitch for power was that this would be the first Labour administration which would not try to impose the party's ideals on the public? Or is it rather that the problems of defining and delivering the didactic message prevent the play from breathing its own air?

How exactly should a "political" playwright conceive his mission? Ibsen, we know, took it as an insult when he was congratulated and thanked for the help he had given to the women's cause. He told the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898: "I have never written a poem or a play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe." He added in characteristically grumpy vein: "I am not even very sure what women's rights really are." I am indebted for this quotation to an essay in these pages by AS Byatt who said, it seemed with some surprise, that each time she reads A Doll's House, she finds Nora less and less sympathetic. But that surely is why it is a great play. The cramping social restrictions which deny women a proper life operate all the more perniciously upon a wilful, difficult temperament. The play is about Nora, not about woman's place in modern society, just as Macbeth is about Macbeth and not about kingship in 11th-century Scotland. Nora needs to be played not by someone who instantly rouses our sympathy but by one of those actresses who are so good at playing irritating women, like Peggy Ashcroft and Juliet Stevenson. The same is true of Hedda Gabler, superbly done by Eve Best in a recent production.

The word to describe what I think must be avoided is "portentous". That word is derived from "protendere", to stretch forth, and it's that effortful stretching forward to bring out the politics which pulls the work out of shape. The leading American novelists of the past 30 years are much admired in Britain for their willingness to tackle what Melville called "mighty themes", especially what they see as the mightiest of all, which is the state of America. Every time they sit down to write, they have their sights set on the Great American Novel, described by the literary editor John Walsh as "the big one, the single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics".

But is this what a novel should be doing? Over the years, I have certainly enjoyed most of the novels of John Updike and Philip Roth and Richard Ford, and quite a few of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Yet I cannot disguise the sensation that creeps over me halfway through most of these novels, that the message is being over-inked. Something is being said about American society - its racism, or its anti-semitism, or its solitary bleakness, or its greed - but it is being said too loudly and too often to allow the book to breathe. Something is also being said about the Kennedy years, or the Nixon years, or the Reagan years, as though human life and culture took its cue from whoever happened to get elected president. There is not enough sense of human existence going on independently of political events or social trends, little sense in particular of human relationships; for relationships, especially those between men and women, appear to have the life smothered out of them by that "single outstanding consciousness", invariably a man's.

Let me offer, by way of contrast, Alice Munro, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Annie Proulx. As Elaine Showalter points out, "serious women writers are much less likely than their male counterparts to celebrate themselves", and as a result they are much less likely to be celebrated as Great Writers. Yet their reach is no less large, their wit no less wicked, and their sympathies no less broad. There is nothing "domestic" about their scale. I would argue that their best books are more fully realised as works of art because they manage to deal with all the big themes without being overwhelmed by them. And I find more human relating in a single short story by Munro, recently awarded the international Booker prize, than in 500 pages inflated by the great Bellows.

A couple of years ago I happened to read no fewer than three American novels about estate agents: Ford's The Lay of the Land, Smiley's Good Faith and Tyler's Digging to America. You can see why the theme occurred to them all: the restlessness and impermanence of a people always on the move, the eating up of the land, the churning of homes into money. All three novels are highly readable, yet in the Ford the theme seemed too relentlessly forced, whereas Tyler and Smiley managed to deliver the message, if message there was, without being enslaved by it. I do not mean to imply merely that the women's novels achieve lightness, though they do. They are not just soufflés that have risen. They are aircraft that fly with a full payload.

At first sight, the theatre of Bertolt Brecht might seem to defy my contention that the politics must somehow be absorbed for the piece to succeed as a work of art. Surely the whole point of Brecht is to disdain artifice and give us the political message full-frontally. But Brecht simply takes another route to a similar destination. Yes, he puts his political anger nakedly before us, but he also presents it in a highly stylised way, like a Japanese play. This famous Verfremdungseffekt is only another way of transforming, a variant of the art that conceals art. It is certainly not to be belittled because it is a different way.

When I argue that the work needs to escape from the message or to transcend it, I am not seeking to erase the message or to deny that it may be perfectly valid. I see here twin fallacies that mirror one another. The first is what might be called the "agitprop fallacy": that the work is of value only in so far as it promotes the message and that a work which lacks any political purpose is worthless because it evades our moral responsibility for the state of the world. That, I think most people now agree, is a narrow and misguided view of both life and literature.

The mirror image of the agitprop fallacy is the belief that art should steer clear of politics and that any work which is inspired by political passion is flawed and lessened. We might call it the "art-for-art's-sake fallacy". This seems to me to relegate politics to a uniquely underprivileged role, reminiscent of the convention supposed to operate at Victorian dinner tables that certain topics, such as women and religion, were not to be mentioned. Political themes and passions surely have every right to muscle in on the act. The question remains what role they are to perform? What effect do they have or should they have on the world?

One point of view is that baldly expressed by Shelley in the closing sentence of his Defence of Poetry: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That famous phrase appears to assert that it is poets who are the advance guard of reform, the trumpeters at the head of the column. Yet the sentences just before this thumping conclusion qualify it. Shelley tells us that "an energetic development of the literature of England . . . has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will." So poetry doesn't always come first, it may happen alongside. Nor is it necessarily the case that poets think up the new stuff all by themselves. "The electric life which burns within the words" of the most celebrated writers of the present day may not be all their own work. In fact, "they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age." Poets are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." In Shelley's formulation, they sound almost like spirit mediums, not responsible for the messages they give voice to.

At first sight, Shelley appears to be contradicted by Auden's equally famous axiom in his "In Memory of WB Yeats": "for poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its making". Which sounds as if poetry is and should be cut off from the real world. Yet Auden too qualifies his utterance. At the end of the verse, he tells us that poetry "survives, / A way of happening, a mouth". So ultimately Shelley and Auden are not that far apart. What poetry does is give voice to the spirit of the age. It speaks for our hopes and fears, our sense of outrage or despair. I rather like the medieval poet's term "my plaint" - from plango, I beat, hence I beat my breast, hence I lament. The poet is the village breast-beater, the counsel for the plaintiff.

This giving-voice may have consequences in the real world. It may incite people to do things, it may unify them, give them hope or consolation. In old age, Yeats himself looked back on a public life sporadically concerned with political causes:

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great

strain

On that woman's reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have

checked

That whereby a house lay

wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and

die.

But this insomniac reverie is a medley of the public and the private. Yeats is thinking not only about his responsibility for helping to incite the Easter Rising but also about his affair with the mentally unstable actress Margaret Ruddock and about the abandonment and loss of his beloved Coole. Life of all sorts flows through literature; there is no special reserved status for politics.

Nor is there any standard time-relation between the political cause and the literary outflow. Political passion may flow hot and strong and instant, notably in writing about war. The war poems of Sassoon and Owen came straight from the western front. Their disillusion and disgust were as direct and unmediated as had been the enthusiasm of Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke at the outset of the war. Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in only a few minutes after reading the account of the disaster in the Times. There was a similar instant response to unemployment and hardship, in both the 1930s and the 1980s. The anti-Thatcher songs were not slow in coming.

Sometimes those who might seem best qualified to write directly about politics feel under no compulsion at all to do so. Goethe was for 10 years and more chef de cabinet to the Duke of Weimar, more or less prime minister of the little duchy. Yet his political experience does not find much immediate reflection in his work. Certainly he does not tell us a great deal about his encouragement of the textile and mining industries in Weimar or his reforms of the school system there. I do not mean that as a writer he was impervious to the outside world. On the contrary, as a young man he was a leader in the passionate romantic movement across Europe, patented in Germany as Sturm und Drang. In later life, he was a leader in the rediscovery of classicism which also spread across Europe in architecture and painting as well as in poetry and drama. His attitude towards Germanness developed in parallel with his stylistic development, all these sides of him being brought together in that extraordinary broken-backed masterpiece, Faust. Yet you would not think of Goethe primarily as a political poet or playwright, and you would not be surprised to be told that he had spent his whole life living by a millstream and had taken no part in politics at all.

Sometimes, too, one is struck by the complete absence of literary reaction to great events, by a silence that may seem more awesome than speech. The two greatest Italian poets of the 20th century, Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, both fought in the first world war on the Italian front, which was just as horrific as the western front, the trenches just as muddy, the slaughter as terrible, the senselessness even more evident, and the mountain terrain infinitely harsher. Yet Montale published only one, rather elegiac and personal, poem about the front, and Ungaretti's war verse, which remains very popular in Italy, tends to look for lyrical transcendence in the moonlight over the mountains and soldiers bathing in the river.

In prose too, the horrors of the Italian front were passed over in near-total silence, until Mark Thompson's wonderful history, The White War, came out last year. There was one glorious exception to this long silence, and that too was written by a non-Italian, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I thought, in a superior way, that I had grown out of Hemingway, but when I re-read the book recently I was recaptured from the first page. What I now know from reading Thompson is that A Farewell to Arms also gives a pretty good account of the war, being closely based on Hemingway's experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver. When the narrator comes to his famous denunciation of the cruel and senseless nature of the war, it is not glib but fully earned.

There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately. That may be more or less what Theodor Adorno meant by his well-known declaration that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". For some unlucky nations, writing recent history is too raw, too painful, too embarrassing. It may take years for writers who have been through such terrible times to find the proper voice to write about them. Often the literature does not "accompany or precede", as Shelley claimed. It lags a long way after. A Farewell to Arms was not published until 1929, more than 10 years after the events it describes, and the same year as other classics of the Great War: Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front. Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer came out the following year.

The horrors of the Holocaust were known and undeniable as soon as the camps were liberated and the living skeletons stumbled out in front of the newsreel cameras. But it was years before memoirs and novels began to explore those horrors. Sometimes this was because the writers could not face reliving the experience. Sometimes it was because publishers thought that their readers did not want to face it. Primo Levi wrote most of If This Is a Man in 1946, only a year after being freed from Auschwitz, but only an amateur publisher would take the book and it sold a mere 1,500 copies. It was not until 1958 that Giulio Einaudi brought it to a wider audience.

It has taken longer still for German writers to confront the Hitlerzeit. In the end, the task has been left to the generation who were either children or not born at all in those years, so that the sins they are writing about are not their own but those of their fathers and grandfathers.

In Britain, we have been energetic in writing about the misdeeds of other peoples, but we have had our own Great Silence. During the years immediately after the union flag was hauled down, first in India then across the rest of the British empire, there was a remarkable reluctance to think or write about the imperial experience. It was old hat, an embarrassing joke. We told ourselves that the whole thing had really had remarkably little impact on us. Then, quite without warning, the outpouring began, in novels and memoirs, and radio reminiscences and huge TV series. The outpouring seemed to be all the more heartfelt for having been so long delayed. Our sudden eagerness to recall the Raj and every other outpost of empire was also pushed on by the appearance, equally unexpected, of writers of brimming talent from every quarter of the imperial diaspora. In some years, it seemed there was scarcely a native British writer on the Booker shortlist. In fact, native British writers began to look rather dowdy and provincial, as though excluded from (if not actually deaf to) a globalised culture that revelled in diversity and displacement. It was almost like a reverse colonisation.

There is something rather impressive about these Great Silences. They seem to be observed by some mutual agreement that is itself tacit. They are like the silences observed on Remembrance Sunday, except they last 10 years rather than two minutes.

And the silences teach us something that is useful beyond their immediate context. They teach us that in whatever sense you choose, broad or narrow, local or global, politics is as fit and necessary a subject for writing about as anything else in life. But it is not therefore an easier subject. On the contrary, it is often much more difficult and requires reserves of tact and(...)

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4 Rotten Websites That Everyone Should Hate

MakeUseOf.com

- 1 days and 1 hours ago

Anyone who has spent any time simply browsing the Internet for interesting things to read quickly realizes that while the Internet is certainly filled with interesting and fascinating websites covering all sorts of useful topics, it’s also overrun by countless rotten websites that promote things like racial hatred, anti-semitism and even encourages fanatical censorship.

Sound hard to believe?

While here at MakeUseOf, you’ll always find lots of great advice about cool websites, such as Aibek’s list of 40 unusual websites you should bookmark or his other article on 5 cool websites to procrastinate at work, in this article, we’re going to take a stroll down a few dark alleyways of the Internet; and carefully take a glimpse at the seedy underworld that exists there - like a growing, cancerous lump that you didn’t realize was there until it was too late. These are a list of 4 websites that you shouldn’t ever bookmark.

Taking Pot Shots at Rotten Websites

Revealing the slimy side of the Internet is dangerous business. Many people reading this may actually secretly hold some of the views or beliefs expressed on some of these websites.Â In the end, whenever you label anything as “rotten” - you’re going to tick certain people off. With that said, it’s also critically important in the world we live in to acknowledge and accept that hate exists in many forms all around us. And yes, some of us (myself included) have, at one time or another, allowed hatred toward a group of people to exist inside of us. Then, a day comes when you meet one person who falls within that category of people that you’ve built stereotypes in your mind about. That one person blows all of those stereotypes away - and suddenly you realize that the hatred you’d formed for that group is baseless and without any real foundation.

Here at MakeUseOf, writers are from a very wide range of nationalities, religions and other groups. Every day, we collaborate and work together to present readers and the Internet community with unique ways they can “make use of” the Internet. In the spirit of that borderless cooperation, it’s time to break down a few more walls and expose some of the hate-filled or fanatical content that exists on the Internet today.

Jew Watch - A Zionist Conspiracy or Anti-Semitism?

One thing I’ve noticed about most “hater” websites is that they try their hardest to come across as educated, professional and scholarly. It’s sort of like they think if they throw enough sugar on the whole mix, people won’t realize the level of rotten website they’ve just landed on. Jew Watch was founded by James Stenzel, and is touted by the site’s “librarian” Frank Weltner of St. Louis, Missouri, as an “oasis of news for Americans who presently endure the hateful censorship of zionist occupation.”

In reality, this is one of the worst rotten websites on the web, not so much a “news” site, as it is a conspiracy theory site filled with empty propaganda and some of the most shoddy research in history. While the primary publicist and author at the site, Frank Weltner, points out that he doesn’t believe “all jews” are bad -Â Jew Watch is built around the strange theory that there is a well-organized, elite wealthy group of Jews trying to take over the world. This paranoid conspiracy theory mirrors other common ones such as MJ-12, the Illuminati, and many others. In the end, this fear-mongering does nothing more than encourage hatred toward an entire population based on nothing more than their heritage.

Hatebook - Like There Isn’t Already Enough Hate in The World?

We live in a world where there are shootings, domestic violence, child abuse and so many other atrocities, it seems inconceivable that someone would come up with the idea that what the world needs is a social network based on “hate.”Â That’s exactly what HateBook is all about.

HateBook is a Facebook copycat social network where anti-social folks can join together and celebrate their hateful behaviors. On HateBook, they can either tell secrets (or even lies) about someone. The concept of this particular rotten website is that the “enemies of your enemies are your friends.” In other words, if you’re able to find out who else hates the person that you hate, you can essentially team up against them. They even have a label for such groups called “hate-clans.”Â How lovely.

ChildCare Action Project - A Cover for Orwellian Style Censorship

As a writer and an avid reader, I have an especially strong aversion to censorship. I am, in fact, a religious person - but I also abhor zealous religious fanatics who turn spirituality into a badge of righteous indignation toward all things they deem “improper”. What is improper, exactly? By whose terms and by whose culture should those limits be drawn from? Certainly what’s considered moral in the U.S. may not be so in India or China - and vice versa. So, who gets to decide?Â Apparently, the founders of the CAP Project have given themselves that honor regarding the movies that people watch.

This fanatically religious organization wouldn’t have made the list of rotten websites if it simply provided full reviews of the parts of movies that some parents may consider “objectionable” for their children to watch. However, this organization takes it a step further andÂ also offers W.I.S.D.O.M. rankings. These are rankings on whether the film has wanton violence, impudence or hate, sexual immorality, drugs or alcohol, offense to God, or murder or suicide.Â While these rankings sound semi-reasonable, the reasons they offer for degrading a film are ludicrous and a bit disturbing. For example, the site degraded the children’s film “Narnia” for attempted murder and planning of murder, a tame scene of childbirth, lying, and “unholy” mythical beasts and magical themes. Say what?Â Look, when I was a kid, I stood up with all of the other children and clapped for Tinkerbell to magically come back to life, and I turned out okay! Sort of…

88Tube - Just Innocent White Pride or Tasteless Hate?

As usual, I saved the best (or I guess I should say “the worst”) for last. For those who don’t know about it, 88Tube is a white supremacy website where proud white dudes can express pride in their heritage by sitting in front of their computer watching such enlightening and uplifting videos as “Adolf Hitler talking to German Youth”, “The Revival of the Klu Klux Klan”, and “All Heil to the Great Nazi Power!!”Â Oh yeah - those sure make me proud to be white… Ugh.

Reviewing these rotten websites filled with either religious or racial fanaticism sure makes it apparent that we live in a very disturbing world, filled with people who are disillusioned - or maybe just delusional. In either case, the ease with which such ideologies can proliferate throughout the Internet is something every honorable citizen of the world should be concerned about.

Have you ever come across fanatical websites on the Internet? What were they and how did you feel about them? Share your own opinions in the comment section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Our Bedlamite Riot [Topic: Sex and Culture]

BLOG and MABLOG

- 1 days and 3 hours ago

A friend sent me this link to a demolition job of Radical Orthodoxy. This is the kind of scholarship that makes you want to say something like "push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaay back!"

I am glad we still have scholars around who have the ability (and the olfactory tolerances) to sift through steaming piles of opaque eruditionizing, and to then show us all how silly it all was. It is a rare gift, not to be abused. But then there are the cut-to-the-chase fundies who noticed some time ago that Millbank was screwy on the homo issues, and that this, coupled with the Heideggerian Mithra cult jargon, promised us all an ill wind that blows nobody no good anyhow. Maybe that was me. I forget. And I can't let this mention of Heidegger, however glancing, go by without mentioning that he was a Nazi.

Millbank wants to walk away from philosophy, but wants to do it by means of an intellectual approach that is twice as turgid, and four times as worthless. The real way to walk away from philosophy is to transfer your major over to ag econ so that you can help feed the world with the fruit of good old-fashioned American factory farming.

I have mentioned before that watching life in the public square today feels like someone has locked me in a Walker Percy novel, and then screwed the lid on. Percy excels -- I am thinking of Love in the Ruins -- at describing little pockets of apparent sanity in a world gone nuts, with the contrast making the little pockets of sanity morph into another special kind of insanity. One man talking sense in the midst of bedlamite riot is simply part of the show.

But here we are, called to be faithful anyhow. Obama is going to buy us a couple trillion worth of fiscal discipline. In Iowa, girls can marry girls if they want. Grownups seriously maintain that our old-timey light bulbs constitute an assault on the public weal, and shout down anyone who would suggest anything to the contrary. In Massachusetts -- where Cotton Mather will come back to rule one day, if the legends are to be believed, and if truth is what the postmodernists say it is -- boys can marry boys if they want. Like that sentence? I thought of it myself.

This once-free society is slouching toward a genetically- engineered splice of Orwell and Huxley, and the process is, if not comic, at least cartoonish. Those who want to fight it, and there are more than a few, need to remember a few things though. Don't get shrill. Don't go live in the fever swamps. Don't believe the Republican establishment. And don't go live in your perfectionistic unibomber cabin either. Get yourself a rapier, practice your horse laugh, read your Bible like a Christian, walk with the Holy Spirit, and keep your joints limber.

"All right, all right!" said Sam. "That's quite enough. I don't want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead" (The Return of the King, p. 279). "If I hear not allowed much oftener," said Sam, "I'm going to get angry" (The Return of the King, p. 281).

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The Amazing Transported Man

365 tomorrows

- 1 days and 17 hours ago

Author : David Bradshaw

I always believed that magic was simply what science had yet to explain or tame. When Ashford’s empty frame crashed to the ground, the wild forces at work became far more significant.

“It’s going to be one of mankind’s defining moments!” Ashford ranted in the bunker’s cafeteria earlier that day, “And I’m going to be in the middle of it...” He trailed off, wistfully.

Since we got clearance to run a human trial, he’d been like this, cycling between raving and muttering. Ashford was supposed to be the world’s first living human to undergo transportation.

Ingram snapped at him, “Don’t be a show off. Sit down and eat something.”

“Hell no. Anything in my stomach will just be more for the machine to chug. Besides, I’ve been too jittery to eat much today, too excited,” said Ashford. He kept good spirit, I had to give him that.

I excused myself to get to work preparing the apparatus for the afternoon’s test. The hours disintegrated into minutes, then seconds, and blew away.

Eventually various personnel from the labs trickled in, huddled around the camera for a good view. Despite not being known to the press or public, this was going to be a popular show.

When the whole team assembled, Ashford stepped forward to address his audience.

“This is test 5.1, the first living, human transportation. As you can see behind me, two tanks are positioned side-by-side. I, Dr. Joseph Ashford, will enter the chamber on the left and be transported to the chamber on the right. I assure you,” he said with a grin, “this is not a trick or a joke.”

Ingram could hardly contain a groan. Ashford was just a natural showman, or at least too charismatic for just a scientist.

He stepped into the chamber and gazed confidently upon his fans. The bright white lights on the equipment became stage lighting. The door sealed behind him, a red curtain descending.

All eyes were on the video feed. I began counting down. In my head, a calming habit of mine, I thought the numbers in Latin: Decem, novem, octo, septem, sex, quinque, quattor, tres, duo, unus.

As I stabbed the button deep into the terminal, a thought appeared at the forefront of my mind, “Magic is what science cannot yet explain. We’re standing on the edge of something magic cannot explain.”

In the first chamber, Ashford went to dust. In the second, dust went to bone, to flesh, to skin, to hair, and to a body. It lamely collapsed against the cool metal. As the door automatically pulled open, Ashford’s sepulcher gave birth to his limp corpse.

A dozen scientists in the room, we all started talking. Rushed yet hushed chatter. A skittering cacophony flying across every surface like a cockroach. Ingram checked the thing’s pulse and, finding none, let its arm drop to the ground, unceremoniously.

I looked down at the button I pressed that initiated the sequence that teleported Ashford. I doubted that anything could pull me away from the image of what was let. Guilt couldn’t drive out the horror.

A small voice in the crowd of sound and fury pierced every other word uttered, “Did we... Get his soul?”

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Mark Shea and the Desperate Defense of Marian Mythology

Pros Apologian

- 1 days and 18 hours ago

James White

   I just received my set of Mark Shea’s three volume set, Mary, Mother of the Son. I began looking through it a bit Tuesday evening, and noticed no personal references in the indexes. But, as I looked at his attempt to force Revelation 12 into one of the few supports for the edifice of Marian theology I noted that either his publisher did not include footnote references in the index, or, they just didn’t want to include my name. In any case, ironically, yesterday morning I was sent this from Shea’s blog:
I'm happy to report that I have not yet seen a single negative review! Catholic response has been uniformly thumbs up, which makes Papa proud of his baby. (Of course, there will *be* negative reviews from guys like James White, Eric Svendsen, James Swan and the other nattering nabobs of anti-Catholicism, whose *job* is to give a negative review to stuff like this.) But once you get away from the anti-Catholic fever swamps, I will be interested to see how the book fares in place like Christianity Today, where you have honest Evangelicals who are serious about trying to engage Catholics, well, honestly.   Well, isn’t that special? Shea is one of the more acidic Roman Catholic apologists, and, of course, we see he is one of the less honest ones, for he, like so many others, dehumanizes his opponents through the “anti-Catholic” moniker, that arrogant mark of the Roman Catholic who is so enamored with the Papacy that they are willing to define others solely upon the basis of their relationship to Rome. I doubt he sees how inane the constant use of the “anti-Catholic” cudgel is in light of the wide range of work I have done over the years. I can just see a Muslim reading Shea’s words with a bemused look of confusion as to why Shea would be so narrow minded. Combine that with an implicit accusation of personal dishonesty, and you have another example of why I have repeatedly said that “Things aren’t very good in the Roman Catholic apologetics community.” I suppose it is a positive for Shea that at least he hasn’t been investing his life in digging out old posts from years ago to put them back on his blog, like Dave Armstrong has been doing the past few weeks in his on-going jihad against Tim Enloe (a spectacle in and of itself).
   In any case, I would not wish to disappoint Mr. Shea. Let me begin by talking about...global warming. You see, there are many, many people in Western Culture who are absolutely convinced that mankind is harmfully warming the earth through the production of carbon by-products, especially carbon dioxide, the chief of the “green house gases.” And those folks are now in charge in most Western nations, and they are ravaging the economies of those nations in an attempt to “save the planet.” So rabid are the devotees of this position that they have become dogmatic in their demands that everyone agree with them. They brook no opposition. They will not debate the viewpoint. They have declared all opposition null and void, the discussion is over, the facts are all theirs! Despite a wide and deep variety of counter-evidence that demonstrates their position to be mythological in nature, not factual or scientific, they boldly proclaim their position to be the truth, and all who would dare oppose it are censored. As some may know when the High Priest of Global Warming, Al Gore, “testified” in Congress recently, the “other side” was not even allowed to respond. And just this past week news broke (thankfully!) of the gross bias of the EPA in suppressing a study that demonstrates that carbon dioxide and water vapor actually can function to suppress the warming process in global weather systems.
   So why do I mention the global warming myth in response to Mark Shea? Because of the parallels I see between the wild-eyed fanaticism of the global warming proponents, who can twist any fact, any statistic, into evidence of global warming (a new record high? Global warming! A new record low? Global warming! A cat-5 hurricane? Global warming! Few hurricanes in a season? Global warming! Record cold beginning of the summer in many places? Global warming! Cardinals play in the Super Bowl? Global warming!), and the dogged, devoted, fanatical re-reading of all of history, logic, and theology that is needed to pry the Marian doctrines into the Bible, the teachings of the Apostles, and the early church. Just as the global warming advocate will trot out his “facts,” which are almost always either 1) irrelevant, 2) localized, or 3) a-contextual, so too the Marian devotee will comb through the entirety of the Bible and the corpus of ancient writers looking for anything to substantiate the massive cathedral of Marian theology that has been produced by Rome over the past centuries. And once again, most of the time the “facts” they produce are irrelevant or a-contextual as well. Though the broad body of current data, if interpreted without a horrific bias, speaks loudly against the current mania to “save the planet,” the global warming advocate has no ears to hear; he or she can only “see” the facts that support his or her theory. In the same way, the Bible and the writings of the early church together testify loudly that the Marian dogmas were unknown to the Apostles and only slowly developed as concepts over time, first outside the faith, then slowly infiltrating into the external church, eventually reaching the status of “dogma” only through a process of evolutionary degeneration and change. Just as global warming is not the “clear verdict of the scientific evidence,” so too the Marian dogmas stand against the entire weight of the evidence of sound biblical exegesis and fair-minded, non-anachronistic reading of the patristic literature.
   But a fair, non-anachronistic reading of either the Bible or the early church is not what you are going to find in Shea’s 3 volumes (which, I note, could have easily been a single larger volume). This is the work of a Marian devotee, so do not expect any fair handling of the objections to the rise of the Marian dogmas. Any reference to Mary, even if it is not amplified by the early writer from whose work it is culled, is anachronistically expanded into a wildly major element of that writer’s theology, and, hence, emblematic of a widespread Marian devotion or belief. It is not like Shea can avoid such manhandling of the patristic materials: it is the bread and butter of all Marian devotees, and hence much of modern Roman Catholic historiography, at least that which comes from the conservative elements of Rome. Anachronism is the necessary result of Rome’s dogmatic claim of infallibility and patristic consensus: those who defend Rome must “see” in the patristic sources what their ultimate authority has dogmatically defined to be there. So Shea can repeat the party line about Ignatius and the concept of the literal bodily presence of Christ as if Ignatius holds to the modern Roman dogma. We have demonstrated this is a horrible misreading of Ignatius, unsustainable for anyone who reads the text in its context, here. Now it must be remembered, Shea has already expended a lot of energy in his previous writings laying a foundation for the utter muddling of exegesis. No context is clear enough to overthrow his appeal of the “senses” of Scripture. Clearly, Scripture is but a pile of clay in the hands of the follower of Rome who wishes to “find” in its words something to substantiate what is, in reality, the teaching of the Magisterium and nothing else. So we are hardly surprised to find a world of difference in Shea’s excuse making and circular reasoning and the sound exegesis to be found in classical Reformed works relating to the Bible or church history. Again, he can’t help it: when you seek to promote that which is a-historical, that kind of thing happens. It “comes with the territory.”
   In any case, I turn to the text I ran into while thumbing through the books when they first arrived. I was naturally drawn to the chapter where Shea attempts to provide a biblical basis for his Marian doctrines. This is truly where the wheels fell off for Gerry Matatics in New York in the mid 1990s, for the only way to make the Bible teach what Rome teaches today about Mary is to twist and distort it to a massive degree, and that is harder to do in a debate where the other guy has equal time to point out your errors. In any case, Shea pulls a fast one on his readers, starting with pages of discussion of how the New Testament reads the Old Testament--an obviously important issue. But he then attempts to utilize his conclusions on that matter as a springboard for reading Marian fulfillments into New Testament passages. There is one problem: the New Testament writers never even attempt to make the application Shea does. That rather major discontinuity should not be forgotten.
   What follows is the standard issue “Mary is the Ark of the Covenant” presentation made by modern Roman Catholic apologists. I have dealt with this many times in the past (Shea shows no familiarity with the rebuttals offered). He even repeats some of the same errors Matatics did in the initial presentation of this material I heard back in 1994 or 1995. He correctly states that the verb επισκιάζω appears in Luke 1:35 relating to the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Spirit, and says the same verb is used of the Shekinah glory overshadowing the “place where the Ark was kept” in Exodus 40:35 and 1 Kings 8:10 (p. 110). And just as Matatics did fifteen years ago, he moves quickly on, seeking to create a “wave” effect by throwing an entire series of claims together, hoping the combined weight will have the desired impact upon the reader. But just as I did back in 1994 or 1995, once again I stopped the freight train and began examining each point of the argument for consistency and truth value. And immediately we find problems.
   First, the cloud under discussion in Exodus 40:35 settled upon the tent of meeting, not merely upon the Ark of the Covenant. There were lots of other items in the tent of meeting other than the Ark: why are they not relevant? Why can’t we find a picture of Paul, or James, in, say, some piece of the furniture found in the same location? Secondly, the cloud was that which indicated the presence of Yahweh; when the cloud lifted, the people moved. It gave direction, guidance. Shall we try to read something into this, as well? But what is more, just as Matatics was in error fifteen years ago to say that the very same term is used in 1 Kings 8:10, Shea remains in error today. The verb found there is επλησεν from πίμπλημι,to fill.” I suppose the second reference could simply be to something “filling” the house of the Lord, but again, it is not the same term. So what is the relevance of 1 Kings 8:10? We can’t tell.
   So, the first part of the argument, one that Shea is going to claim is as “plain as day,” is that if the cloud settled on the tabernacle of meeting, and the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, then clearly, Mary is the tabernacle of meeting...no, wait, she’s the Ark of the Covenant.
   Next, 2 Samuel 6:9 is cited, where David is afraid of Yahweh because of the Uzzah incident, and he asks a rhetorical question about how the Ark could ever come to him in Jerusalem in light of what has happened in striking Uzzah dead. This is forced into a position of parallelism with Luke 1:43 where Elizabeth asks, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” The only parallel is “to me” (the verbs “to come” are different---if Luke was trying to parallel, why did he not use the same words?), while the contexts are completely different, one expressing fear and frustration, the other blessing and honor. One’s credulity is truly strained at this point, but Shea presses on.   At this point we find Shea using another tactic so clearly illustrated by Matatics, that of the convenient “insertion” of text into a citation. He writes, “In 2 Samuel, we’re told ‘David arose and went’ to the hill country of Judah, ‘to bring up from there the ark of God’ (2 Sam. 6:2; emphasis added). (ibid). Notice that “to the hill country of Judah” is not a quotation, because, if you actually take the time to read 2 Samuel 6:2 (and most folks reading Shea’s book will not do so) it nowhere mentions the “hill country of Judah.” It mentions not a single person going up, but, David and “all the people” went to “Baale-judah.” While it is quite possible to place this location in the general area of “hill country” (most of the region could thusly be described), it is necessary for Shea to insert the parallel language, something the readers of Luke’s gospel would simply never do. In any case, he then notes that the Ark stayed in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite for three months, and then provides the parallel:
Not accidentally, Luke notes that Mary “arose and went to the hill country of Judah” (Luke 1:39) where she remained with Elizabeth for “three months” (Luke 1:56; emphasis added).    If people were not in the habit of “arising and going” a whole lot in the Bible, we might find that a truly compelling argument. Evidently, the fact that Mary did so hurriedly (and David did not) is not relevant (there really are no rules to this kind of interpretation); the verbs are amongst the most common in the Scriptures, of course. For some reason Shea does not mention that Luke says Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months--one would think (again assuming Shea’s conclusions) that Luke would be far more specific if he were attempting to do what is being suggested. Why not use specific terminology, rather than vague, every-day language? Why show a lack of concern for the specific time frame, “about” three months?
   The last attempted parallel Shea brings forward comes from paralleling David’s “leaping and dancing before the Lord” in 2 Samuel 6:16 (ὀρχούμενον καὶ ἀνακρουόμενον ἐνώπιον κυρίου) with Luke 1:41 and the baby leaping in Elizabeth’s womb at the greeting of Mary (ἐσκίρτησεν τὸ βρέφος ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ αὐτῆς). Once again, however, the parallel is in the English, not in the original tongue. Luke uses a different verb (again, very odd if we grant Shea’s conclusion that Luke is “plainly” seeking to draw these parallels); David is worshipping, the baby is (by the Spirit’s intervention) giving testimony to the presence not of Mary but of the Son of God in Mary’s womb (a major disjunction that only a devoted follower of Mariolatry would miss).
   Having presented these less-than-compelling parallels, Shea concludes, “To a reader immersed in the Old Testament, these connections between Mary and the ark ar plain as day.” Well, to the devoted Mariolater, these may well be “plain as day,” but to the devoted student of Scripture, they are hardly foundation for the massive edifice of Roman Catholic Mariolatry that has been built up over the centuries.
   So it is in this context that Shea grabbed a passing quotation from my 1992 debate with Gerry Matatics (p. 112) where in reference to Revelation 12 I said, “In the early fathers, the Blessed Virgin, the Immaculate Virgin, is always the church, not Mary.” I was here addressing the issue of how one defines the traditions Mr. Matatics was claiming we needed to hold to. I would assume I was praphrasing George Salmon, from his book, The Infallibility of the Church, pp 161-162:
I think it is a very significant fact that early Patristical interpretation is altogether blind to indications of the dignity of the Blessed Virgin. In the Book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars, who brought forth the man child, and then was made to flee into the wilderness (chap. xii.), in which description modern Romanists find a prediction of the glory of the Virgin, is by the ancient commentators, with absolute unanimity, understood of the Church.
   He gives as an example Hippolytus, On Christ and AntiChrist, 61.
   Shea offers two citations in rebuttal of this claim, one from Quodvultdeus of Carthage (d. 450) wherein he says the virgin “signifies” Mary, and makes not an exegetical presentation from Revelation 12, but the claim that just as Mary remained a virgin, so the church gives birth to sons without losing her virginal integrity.
   The second is from Oecumenius (sixth century) and his commentary on Revelation. Now I know that Oecumenius’ commentary on Revelation would have been unknown in Salmon’s day. And I would imagine the Quodvultdeus statement would not amount (for Salmon) to Patristical interpretation, i.e., commentary on the text itself, as it is much more an illustration or similitude as he expresses it. But for me, there is a much more relevant issue: when I speak of the early writers, I am thinking second, third, and fourth centuries, not fifth and sixth. Augustine may sometimes be considered “early” but is most often much more of a transitionary figure into the next stage in church history. So in any case, I was speaking of an earlier period than these two citations represent.
   But what struck me more than these details was this: doesn’t Shea, and his Roman Catholic readers, see something that is plainly demonstrated by his own counter argumentation? The earliest of his citations, that of Quodvultdeus, is from the 40th volume of Migne’s Patrologia Latina. Forty volumes precede it, and that is just in Latin (that does not include the Greek volumes). How did the early church manage to crank out forty volumes of material (and, of course, even Migne is not exhaustive or complete) over four centuries without once mentioning this interpretation? The fact is, those earlier centuries do witness interpretations of this text, but not the Roman Catholic one. Don’t they see what this means? The answer is, no, they do not. The fact that generations of Christians could live and die without once invoking the name of Mary, praying to her, believing the things modern Roman Catholics do about her, is lost in the scramble to find anything, and shred of evidence, upon which to hang a truckload of modern Roman Catholic teaching. If someone said a single kind thing about Mary, well, of course, they must have believed what we believe about her! They were probably praying to her and celebrating the Assumption, but they just sorta forgot to mention it. And that passage in Revelation? Sure they thought it was Mary. Just a few idiosyncratic interpreters saw it differently, and for some reason, their writings survived, while the ones that supported our view didn’t. Or something like that. When your ultimate authority is Rome’s dogmatic teachings, these kinds of things happen all the time.
   So while I had not intended to get to looking at Shea at the moment (far more pressing things to do), his taunt yesterday morning prompted the effort. Now let’s see if he responds to the facts of the matter, or does what he, Ray, and others have been known to do in the past: respond with mockery, derision, and ad-hominem argumentation.

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Madoff, Sanford, and FSU: Buzz Week in Review

Yahoo! Buzz Log

- 1 days and 20 hours ago

by Mike Krumboltz

NothingÂ moves theÂ search needleÂ like scandals. This past week, it wasn't so much the scandals themselves, but how people reacted to them that stirred the Web. Read on forÂ the scoopÂ on three big transgressions. Here's hoping next week is a bit more honorable.

Ruth breaks her silenceÂ
While many may find comfort that BernieÂ MadoffÂ will die in prison, others couldn't help but wonder what his wife thinks of his spectacular fall from grace. Until this week, Ruth Madoff had kept silent. SomeÂ interpreted that as meaningÂ she didn't care about the victims of her husband's crime. Not so, says Mrs. Madoff. On Monday, she released a statement thatÂ reads "not a day goes by when I don't ache over the stories that I have heard and read." Searches on Mrs. Madoff soared 2,754% over the past seven days, due in large part to the $2.5 million of shared assets the government is letting her keep. According to insiders, she tried for the fur coat, but the feds saidÂ no dice.

All eyes onÂ Jenny Sanford
Mark Sanford's wife Jenny may have forged a new path for spouses of unfaithful politicians. Following her husband's press conference in which he admitted anÂ affair, Mrs. Sanford said that "his career is not a concern of mine. He's going to have to worry about that." Then,Â after the governor's most recent admission that he had crossed lines with other women, his wife issued another statement that said that in the "spirit of forgiveness, it is up to the people and elected officials of South Carolina to decide whether they will give Mark another chance..." In other words, she forgives him, but don't for a second think she's going to forget. Queries on "jenny sanford biography," "jenny sanford photos," and "first lady jenny sanford" all posted breakout gains in Search.

A tomahawk chop to theÂ win column
Florida State UniversityÂ made some noise in the Buzz after claiming that the NCAA sanctionsÂ over theÂ school's academic cheating scandal are just too darn tough. The NCAA had elected to punish the Seminoles by taking away wins from some of Florida State's athletic teams, including 14 victories from football coach Bobby Bowden. Why does Florida State care so much about past wins? The fact that Mr. Bowden is currently one victory behind Penn State's Joe Paterno for all-time victories is likely contributing to the outrage. Queries on "fsu scandal" and "bobby bowden wins" both spiked this week. This article from Sports Illustrated offers an in-depthÂ explanation ofÂ the hubbub.

Also buzzing this week...
· Johnny Depp's "Public Enemies" sparked renewed interest in bank robber John Dillinger.
· The world's obsession with Megan Fox continued unabated.
· Obama'sÂ White House released the salaries of all its staff.

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Cranmer Prays to the Trinity

The Scriptorium Daily: Middlebrow

- 1 days and 21 hours ago

Can you pray to the Trinity?

Of course, the very definition of Christian prayer is that it is trinitarian: We pray to God the Father, in the name of Jesus the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s the logic of mediation that’s built into Christian prayer, no matter what words we use in the prayer.

And keeping in line with that logic, the most “theologically correct” way to pray is to address yourself to God the Father, in the name of Jesus. There is also biblical warrant for praying to Jesus Christ, and doctrinal warrant for praying to the Holy Spirit. But the formula, “To the Father, by the Son, in the Spirit” is the structure of most Christian prayer.

So obviously we can and do pray to the Trinity. But can we say a prayer that begins, “Dear Trinity,” and bring a prayer to the one, the triune, God?

Thomas Cranmer (born on this day, July 2, in 1489) thought that we could, at least on special occasions. The special occasion he had in mind was Trinity Sunday, which comes just after Pentecost in the church year. The late Peter Toon wrote a short essay on this, available at the website of the Prayer Book Society, entitled Praying to the Holy Trinity with Thomas Cranmer.

There are two places in the prayerbook where you can see Cranmer’s theological thought on this subject. One is the Collect for Trinity Sunday, and the other is the Proper Preface for that Sunday.

The Collect, which Cranmer simply translated from the older Latin prayer book sources (the Sarum Missal of 1549), goes like this:

Almighty and everlasting God, which hast given unto us thy servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity: we beseech thee, that through the steadfastness of this faith, we may evermore be defended from all adversity, which livest and reignest one God, world without end.

To anybody with ears trained for the prayerbook’s normal way of phrasing things, that Collect has an odd ending: It ought to include the phrase, “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” but it does not. That shows that this prayer, in addressing the “Almighty and everlasting God,” is addressing the one triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It wouldn’t make sense to pray to Jesus “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” and it wouldn’t make sense to pray to the Trinity that way either. So the old Collect leaves out that mediatorial phrase.

But when you flip over to the communion service’s Preface, there is a special one, Proper for Trinity Sunday. That is where Cranmer the translator showed his theological hand. The old Sarum Missal had a Trinity Sunday Proper Preface that was addressed to the Father:

It is very meet, right, just, and our bounden duty that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto Thee, O Lord Holy Father Almighty, everlasting God, Who with Thy only Begotten Son and The Holy Ghost art one God, art one Lord, not one only Person, but three Persons in one substance…

but Cranmer must have decided to bring this Preface into line with the Collect, and re-phrased it to be a prayer directly to the entire Trinity:

It is very meet, right and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks to thee, O Lord, almighty everlasting God, which art one God, one Lord, not one only Person, but three Persons in one substance…

As Toon points out, this is not just a matter of Cranmer the editor deciding to tidy things up in translation and align the grammars. It was a decision to make the most of the teaching opportunity that was Trinity Sunday.

It’s one thing to teach the doctrine of the Trinity to a congregation, but it’s another thing to lead them in prayer, worshiping God the Trinity. They know you mean business when you pray to the Trinity. Another way to say that is this: Christians are confident enough that the doctrine of the Trinity is the truth about God that they will teach it and preach it to others. But Christians like Cranmer were so certain that the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that he was willing to say it directly to God. To take a theological confession straight to God like that is really taking your life in your hands. You’d better be right.

It’s also worth noting that Cranmer put this prayer addressed to the Trinity in place for one week out of 52 in the year. He was not recommending that all, or even most, or even very much, of Christian prayer should be directed to “the Trinity” or to “three Persons in one substance.” Most Christian prayer should be directed to God the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit. One Sunday out of the year amounts to a little less than two per cent. But it’s an important two per cent for faith seeking understanding in prayer.

By the way, the Prayer Book Societey pubishes a bimonthly journal called Mandate. The July/Aug 2009 issue on the season of Trinity is excellent, and is a free pdf download here.

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The Game to Play B.A. Baracus in 'A-Team'?

Cinematical

- 2 days and 1 hours ago

The Game Set the bar low enough, and it can only be exceeded. That's how I feel about the upcoming big-screen version of The A-Team, a 80s television series entirely beholden to the staid formula of the day and ripe for reinvention. I didn't hate the series so much as I found it routinely mediocre. My colleague Monika Bartyzel loved the series as a kid, yet still questioned the casting choices that were being entertained: Liam Neeson as Hannibal? Bradley Cooper as Face? Adding fuel to the fire, rapper The Game is being considered to play the role of B.A. Baracus, according to blackfilm.com, which quotes "a very highly reliable source in the entertainment industry."

For me, the only thing that made The A-Team watchable was the bantering between the characters, and the choices so far all indicate that director Joe Carnahan is aiming for a more straightforward action picture, based on a script by Wanted's Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. Which is crazy, like moving Miami Vice to Seattle or transforming the lead character in Get Smart into a fairly bland, somewhat competent secret agent. (Even though the latter still made money.)

The mistake would be in confusing brand recognition with brand loyalty. If you're promising fans of the TV show that you're going to deliver the same thing, only bigger and better, then you damn well better deliver something in the same spirit. I haven't seen The Game's work as an actor (Waist Deep, Street Kings) yet; is he any good? If this rumor is true, could he wear the mohawk of the immortal Mr. T?

Filed under: Action, Casting, RumorMonger, Fandom, 20th Century Fox

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Child Abuse: NCERT Style

Seriously Sandeep

- 2 days and 1 hours ago

Here’s a common reprimand parents give their errant children: Is this what they teach you in school?

Let’s recall Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. This path breaking book not only unmasked the eminences but awoke an entire generation of thinking Indian youth. In a way, it was a work that can rightly be termed as an effort in course-correction. In retrospect, the education system of my generation injected a healthy distaste for history: it’s all about dates and years and wars, who the fuck wants to know what Aurangzeb did, who cares what Indus Valley civilization was all about. The end of 10th standard exams meant freedom from history.

Reading Eminent Historians made me–and thousands others–realize that at least two generations of Indians were victims of child abuse thanks mainly to NCERT.

But reading about the historical misdeeds committed by these eminent historians is one thing and reading the actual “history” these worthies propagated is entirely another things. The former is akin to reading a crime report/FIR while the latter is like being present at the actual scene of crime. The first hand impact always hits you harder.

Eminent Historians did definitely initiate some course correction but it’s always easy, and quicker to relapse into bad habits. Enter Arjun Singh.

Recently, some kind folks pointed my attention to some “appalling” distortions in the recent NCERT history textbooks. I scanned through a few random items. Which was enough to make me take some of these history textbooks for some re-education–being present on the scene of the crime like I said. What I learned was severely interesting.

Our Pasts - II, the Class VII history text book is a brilliant specimen. While the instances Arun Shourie has quoted in Eminent Historians are good examples of pretty blatant distortions, the current crop is a study in nuance. It injects both a subtler form and variant of poison in impressionable minds untainted by ideology. Poor kids think they are actually getting an education. Some random examples follow.

Example 1:

A section on temple towns (Page 76-77) doesn’t mention anything at all about why temple towns were renowned as they still are. It simply calls it a “pattern of urbanization” and then drives the point home rather quickly and directly: they were commercial centers where “temple authorities used their wealth to finance trade and banking.” Show me exactly one historical temple town which did this. A simpler logic is available: what was the king for, if not to direct and manage trade and commerce?

Example 2:

The second exhibit is a repetition of the same fabrication quoted in Eminent Historians concering the destruction of temples. The last section on Page 65 is boldly titled Why were Temples Destroyed? The answer quoted verbatim: “Because kings built temples to demonstrate their devotion to God and their power and wealth, it is not surprising that when they attacked one another’s kingdoms they often targeted these buildings.” (Bold added) And who were these temple-destroying kings?

Shrimara Shrivallabha, a Pandyan king invaded Sri Lanka and removed all valuables and carted off lots of golden images of the Buddha in the Jewel Palace and other Buddhist monasteries. But didn’t the section title read “why were temples destroyed?“
Rajendra I, the Chola king who carted off lots of sculptures and idols of the Chalukyas and Kalingas of Orissa. Note again the mention about temple destruction. None whatsoever.
And then Mahmud of Ghazni gets ICU-level care compared to these vile (Hindu) kings. Reproduced verbatim: “During his campaigns…he also attacked the temples of defeated kings and looted their wealth and idols. Sultan Mahumud was not a very important ruler at that time. But by destroying temples…the one at Somnath…he tried to win credit as a great hero of Islam. In the political culture of the Middle Ages, most rulers displayed their political might…by attacking and looting the places of worship of defeated rulers.

This section is followed by a weighty question designed to instill the virtues of self-thinking as a way to stimulate the intellect of the student. Here’s the question: “In what ways do you think the policies of Rajendra I and Mahmud of Ghazni were a product of their times? How were the actions of the two rulers different?” The way the questions are framed leaves you no room for a “wrong” answer. Gold-standard Propaganda.

Example 3:

Next, the section on Sikhism is robbed similarly of context. Nothing about Guru Nanak’s (and most other Sikh Gurus) explicit proclamation of Sikhism as a movement to counter Islam’s barbarity is mentioned. Barring a stray mention of Jahangir’s clampdown of Sikhs fearing their revolt, the section completely emasculates the warrior spirit of this amazing race of people. The Sikhs were among the strongest forces who helped check the almost wholesale Islamization of the entire North India.

Example 4:

Basvanna and the Vira Shaiva movement is given selective treatment. The textbook glorifies this movement as a reaction against the evils of Brahmins, the caste system, rituals, and idol worship. I leave it to your learning of history to verify the degree of selectiveness this exhibits.

This level of finely-crafted distortion is hardly surprising if you look at the list of contributors to the textbook. Every eminence on the textbook committee hails from one or the other of the hallowed portals of secularism: Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University, and Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. The lion’s share of contributors hail–quite evidently, from the Mecca, JNU.

I found these four gems during just a quick scan. And this, just in one part of History textbooks for Class VII. If I dive deeper and cast my net wider, I’m sure to extract the almost limitless treasure hidden in the Ocean’s bottom. I intend to make an NCERT Child Abuse series. This is just the preface.

Tags: Arun Shourie, Attack on Hinduism, Commentary, Education, Eminent Historians, Eminent Historians Book, History, History Distortion Continues, India, Indian History Falsified, Indian Politics, NCERT Child Abuse, NCERT History Textbooks, NCERT Textbooks, Poisoning Children, Pseudosecularism Hall of Shame, Society & Culture, Toxic History Textbooks

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Soul Rebel Poster Tutorial

Abduzeedo - graphic design | design inspiration | design tutorials - tutorial

- 2 days and 5 hours ago

In this tutorial I will show how to create an awesome illustration that can be printed as a poster to hang it on your wall. I broke down step by step from the beginning to the end so you can follow and understand exactly what I went through while making this piece, and you get to download the .psd at the end.

Soul Rebel Tutorial

To get the feeling tune in to Bob Marley - Soul Rebel

In this tutorial I won’t be going into to small details, you have to know a bit more to understand what is being done but if you have any questions feel free to ask on the comments area.

To begin this image as always I take my time surfing through tons of stock photos looking for that photo that will take my attention, as I have seen so many cool images lately on Abduzeedo, specially the daily inspiration I decided to try something different, something that will pop out with great lightning and color.

In order to get that I wanted to get a full body shot of a girl just like the one I found at http://katanaz-stock.deviantart.com/ as you can see here:

katanaz-stock has great photos with high quality, make sure you take a look.

So I open a new file in Photoshop 18x24in 300dpi so at the end if the result is nice I can make a big print to put on my wall. You should always work with high dpi so your work can be printed with quality.

I select the girl and paste it into a light gray background and this is how my image begins.

What I want to do is to work on the girl photo by changing its color and illumination. First by adding Image>Adjustments>Curves with these settings giving a blue look to the photo.

Curve Settings

RGB
Output: 119
Input: 157

Red
Output: 121
Input: 153

Green
Output: 165
Input: 133

Blue
Output: 149
Input: 99

The result is good and I want to make the colors look more alike so I will make the light blue outfit more like the hat color by going to Image>Adjustment>Replace Color click on any part of the light blue and replace it to a light purple by using these settings:

And you result should look like this:

It’s almost the way I want, it’s always good to take time in order to get a good result at the end. What I want to do now is to get a better light on her face so I will duplicate the layer of her photo and using Image>Adjustments>Contrast (Brightness: 20 Contrast: 0)

And on the layer mask (if you used one, if not just create one) use the Gradient Tool to keep only the top lighter.

Now I will create a new layer on top of the girl and using the brush pack “41 Grunge Brushes” that was mention on the “10 Awesome Free Photoshop Brushes” I posted two weeks ago.

So selected a couple of different brushes from this pack and painted the left side of the girl image using the same colors from her image. Using the Eyedropper Tool click on the girl to select a color and paint it with the same color on the new layer you created and your result should look like this:

Now to give a even better look, I will go back on the girl layer and on the layer mask I will paint the left edge black using the same grunge brushes to give a impressions that the image is being painted on that side and I also cut the other leg on and angle.

I want to use the angle that I created on her left leg to be a base for the light and possibly a direction for the typo in case I decide to write anything in the future.

So I create a couple lines on a new layer on top of the background, this lines will give a special look on the background and also help me with the direction of everything and different spaces to work on.

So now I will start to work on the background I like what I have so far and what I will try to get is some kind of abstract background that will blend in well with what I have so far.

So I create a new layer on top of the gray background layer and with the Gradient Tool using the Radial Gradient I paint a circle from inside out to give a better illumination on the girl. Set the layer Fill to 75%.

Now I want to add a little something on the background so I got a bokeh photo that I desaturated and added on to the background, put the layer mode to soft light and the Fill to 46 %

Bokeh photo by http://ermenelwen.deviantart.com/

My Background is starting to look good still a lot of work to get the right look we need to get an impressive result. I like to experiment a lot, I tried a lot of thing until I got the results that I am walking through with you guys so it’s always to try a bunch a things and stick with the best results.

My new layer is going to have a dark area on the bottom of the image, I used the Gradient Tool using the Radial Gradient to create the dark area on the bottom as you can see here, I set the Fill to 80%.

Once again I create a new layer and with the Polygonal Lasso Tool I select the right bottom part of the image on the same angle the leg was cut and apply a Gradient Tool using Linear Gradient with white color.

And set the layer Fill to 20% to get this look:

Now using a Pattern I created by making a gray circle in the middle of a 30pixels square document as you can see here.

Set that as a pattern with a transparent background. Now create a new layer and select the middle part of the background and Edit>Fill Using the pattern you just created.

For a better look add a layer mask to it and using Gradient tool I create a shadow on the bottom part of it as you can see here

Now I am going to create a new layer and get a regular round brush, go to brush settings and mark Scattering and paint the whole layer with black, white and gray as you see here:

Now apply Filter>Blur>Motion Blur with the settings Angle: 45 Distance: 600 and set the layer mode to Vivid Light, and you should get something like this: (if it comes out too dark you can use brightness/contrast to make it lighter)

On a new layer I will apply some color now making some yellow stripes following the lines that I made in the beginning, set the layer mode to Overlay and Fill to 25%.

And you can also take a look of what you should have for the background layers.

I am going to use this photo that I took in NYC a while ago, and I am going to paste it on top of the background layer

Desaturate the photo Image>Adjustment>Desaturate and set the Fill to 40%.

Our background is coming along very well now on top of the yellow stripes layer we are going to create another layer that we will add a white light created using the Gradient Tool > Radial Gradient

Create another layer and with the Single Column Marquee Tool create a bunch of lines, when you get a good amount, rotate them on a 45 degree angle and place them on the top right as you can see on the image

Now is time to give the special look to the image by adding a tiger coming out of her body, so I had this photo here for the longest time and I always had a feeling I would use it for something good, so I did.

Photo from http://www.sxc.hu

Selected the tiger, don’t really need to be a good selection since we are going to apply the same technique we did with the right side of the girl with the 41 Grunge Brushes, do that around your selection on the layer mask and set the layer to Overlay.

You should get something like this:

I want to create some smoke on that background so I make a new layer and using the smoke brush pack that I posted here 25 Free Photoshop Brushes. Make some smoke on the right side and set the layer Fill to 50%

Just like we created the yellow stripes we are going to create a green stripe now only on the top part, set the layer mode to Soft light and the Fill to 75%.

If you have been following all the steps here is a look at the layers and what you should have so far.

We got a pretty good point so far I know the colors don’t look very impressing but I like to save that for last. Now I want to put some more stuff on the bottom right because I am thinking about adding a text there.

So first thing I do is using this galaxy photo I have

http://michalv.deviantart.com

Put it on our image on top of the girl layer and place it on the bottom right, desaturate the layer and set the layer mode to Exclusion, also give it a layer mask and go around the edges so it won’t be to rough as you see here

Now on a new layer I am going to add some smoke on that same area to fill up that space a little more.

One more thing that I want to do is create a new layer and add some more of that Grunge Brushes at the bottom of the girls to blend in more, so I do that using some dark colors as you see.

Our background is pretty filled up now and we got to the point that everything seems to be in place and looking good, to make an even better blend of the girl and the background I will add a typo on a angle right where here leg connects to the line.

As I have been listening to Bob Marley all through out the process of creating this image I wanted to name it Soul Rebel because that song got stock on my head and I kept playing it as I was finishing the image.

So I wrote down SOUL REBEL using the font MOD that can be found here Friday Fresh Free Fonts #1 set the layer Fill to 61% and to get the typo on the same spirit of the image I used that same effect on the typo using the Grunge Brushes as you can see.

Now with a smaller font I wrote LET YOUR INSIDE OUT with a darker color and set the layer Fill to 69%, but the darker color kind of blended in to the background and it’s kind of hard to see so I create a new layer under it, with a regular brush make a small line using color white, give some motion blur to expand the line and place it right under the typo, just like I did here:

On this point I can say that my composition is done, and I really like what I have, now is the part that I like the most, play with the colors. There is a lot of ways I do this and I am sure a lot of people do it differently and so on.

What I did was add a new layer on top of all the others, paint it bright yellow and set the layer mode to Linear Burn.

Now another layer on top and this one I am going to paint it light purple and set the layer mode to Linear Light and the Fill to 75%.

As a result we get this beautiful color and result to our image.

Now to give a final touch I create a new layer and I pick a very light blue as my color, and using the Gradient Tool / Radial Gradient I paint the light blue around my image, so I set the layer mode to Soft Light and the fill to 35% as you can see it gives a different color look around the image.

I really like that but I only want that effect on the bottom of the image so I add a layer mask to it and using the same Gradient Tool this time Linear Gradient I take off the top part as you can see here with the layer.

CONCLUSION

My advice to everyone that followed the tutorial, and want to take their work to the next level is to experiment a lot while creating your image, have a main idea in mind and work around it, give time to get your work done. It’s better if you create one good piece in a month than have 10 crap ones by the same time.

So here is the final result, I will put up the .psd on a lower resolution for download in case you have any doubts you can check out the .psd and have fun!

DOWNLOAD .PSD About the author User picture

Hi! I'm Paulo Canabarro and I'm here to post some really cool stuff for you, if you have any ideas or any requests please get @ me - paul0v2@abduzeedo.com you can also Follow me on twitter!