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Month: October 2006

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Current Events

Firefox 2.0 arrives early

Julio Ojeda-Zapata reports on the early release (tomorrow) of Firefox 2.0 in The browser race is speeding up. An excerpt follows:

I love technology, but I’m fanatical about only a few things high-tech. Firefox is one of them.

The Web browser has always been an underdog to Microsoft’s market-dominant Internet Explorer, but Firefox is vastly superior in features and usability. That’s why it’s my fave browser.

So I am excited this week because Firefox creator Mozilla Corp. is releasing version 2.0. (It’s due to be available on Tuesday afternoon.) Its improvements aren’t revolutionary, but I’m rooting for the increasingly popular program to maintain its momentum in a suddenly intensified browser race.

That’s right: Dozing giant Microsoft recently awoke after neglecting its browser for years and also is offering a revamped version. It was released in final form Wednesday. While this new Internet Explorer isn’t revolutionary, either, and won’t make me ditch Firefox, it’s just useful and powerful enough to keep Microsoft in the browser game.

I test-drove near-final versions of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 on a Windows XP computer. There’s also a Macintosh version of Firefox, which I put on a new Intel-based Mac mini as well as an older, pre-Intel iMac machine…

The article goes on to evaluate Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0. Check it out.

Current Events, Political

Union pokes U.S. in the eye

The AP reports on more union terrorism, and the requisite trouncing of the U.S. in front of the whole world. What Soviet and Chinese Communists couldn’t accomplish the homegrown ones are.

See: AFL-CIO files complaint with U.N. labor group: Protest is aimed at ruling on role of supervisors

WASHINGTON – Organized labor is filing an international protest about a federal decision redefining which workers are supervisors exempt from legal protection to join unions.

The AFL-CIO, a federation of about 50 labor unions with 9 million members, said it would file a complaint today with the International Labor Organization of the United Nations about a decision this month by the National Labor Relations Board.

The decision, covering a series of cases known as the Kentucky River cases, involved the role of a supervisor.

The board ruled that nurses who regularly run shifts at health care facilities should be considered supervisors and exempt from federal protections that cover union membership. The decision potentially has major implications for workers in other fields.

While the U.N. committee of labor law specialists from around the world has no enforcement power, the AFL-CIO is looking for support in efforts to restore the more traditional view of what makes a supervisor.

“This will demonstrate how far outside the mainstream of accepted international law the U.S. is moving,” said Craig Becker, a legal counsel to the AFL-CIO.

NLRB decisions cannot be directly appealed in the U.S. courts, although those issues might reappear in the courts in other labor cases, he said.

Workers classified as supervisors under the ruling would not be protected by the National Labor Relations Act. Dissenting members of the NLRB said the decision “threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.”

Current Events, Poland - Polish - Polonia

Tidbits from Poland…

Polish coders hard at work

As posted at Reg Developer: Poland triumphs in Google contest: Gratuluje Tomasz!

The finals of the first ever European* Code Jam, based on Google US’s annual programming contest, saw Pole Tomasz Czajka finish in a triumphant first place, in a final that was dominated by competitors from Eastern Europe.

Although Czajka had to see off 49 competitors from 15 countries to secure the €2,500 prize money, eight of the top ten finalists were from Russia, Poland and Estonia. Nearly two thirds of the final 50 were also from the East.

Western Europe made a relatively poor showing. Germany had the best representation with six contenders in the last 50. Sweden managed to field four, while the UK could only muster two.

The contestants spent an all-expenses-paid week in Dublin for the final rounds of the contest. Nearly 10,000 people entered in all, and were gradually whittled away over three rounds by tougher and tougher programming challenges.

In the final, competitors had to devise their own algorithms. Points were scored for unbreakable code, and lost if a competitor managed to crack it…

Jewish revival in Poland

From the AP: Poland’s 1st progressive rabbi since Holocaust to be installed

WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s first progressive rabbi since World War II is to be installed in Warsaw Friday evening, marking a milestone in the revival of Jewish life that was shattered by the Holocaust.

Rabbi Burt Schuman, a New Yorker who arrived in Poland in July, will be installed during Friday evening Sabbath services at Beit Warszawa, home to Warsaw’s Progressive, or Reform, community.

The ceremony will be led by Rabbi Uri Regev, the president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

“The installation of Rabbi Schuman as Beit Warszawa’s first full-time resident Rabbi marks a historic milestone in the revival of Progressive Judaism in Poland and in the creation of a dynamic, inclusive and pluralistic Polish Jewish community,” Regev said.

Schuman, 58, who has his roots in Poland, said he “could not think of a more rewarding or more challenging rabbinic pulpit at this stage” of his life.

“The revival of Jewish life in Poland is no longer a dream: It is a living, breathing reality,” he said.

Until the war, Poland was home to a Jewish community of nearly 3.5 million, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. Those who survived faced repression under communist rule, which ended in 1989.

Since the fall of communism, the Jewish community has grown slowly, by and large dominated by the Orthodox movement.

Some estimates put its numbers today at around 30,000.

Google Poland

poland_logo.0.gif

Google has introduced an official blog for Google Polska. See: Witamy na oficjalnym Blogu Google Polska!

I like the artwork.

Homilies

The Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,
Jesus, the Son of God,
let us hold fast to our confession.

Holding fast to our confession, that is, to our faith, is exceedingly difficult.

I could say it is difficult in the face of the world and the ways of the world, but today I would rather focus on the problem of religious indifferentism.

What is indifferentism?

Indifferentism is a term applied to the theory that one religion is just as good as the next, that you can get God just about anywhere in equal shares. It is a theory that denies our duty to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion.

And, what do we mean by one true religion?

By one true religion we mean the religion that Jesus Christ established on earth, the Holy Catholic faith.

But deacon, isn’t Christianity the outward expression of God’s teaching?

I would reply that Christianity is indeed superior to all other faiths, while at the same time telling you that other expressions of Christianity, outside the Polish National Catholic Church, do not contain, or they corrupt, the essential aspects of faith in Jesus Christ.

Bishop Hodur, in writing the Eleven Great Principals of the Polish National Catholic Church stated:

Christ our Lord established the Church for this purpose: that His believers might carry on the work begun by Him, the work of human salvation. The apostles and disciples, as well as their successors, were to prepare and lead humanity into the Kingdom of God; assured that if they fulfilled this task, He would be with them, lo, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)

…

This presence of His, however, He made conditional. Christ would be with His disciples if they would gather together and work in His Name, for His purposes, according to the plan indicated by Him.

As Bishop Hodur wrote, this promise is conditional, conditional upon our personal acceptance of Christ, our common gathering in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and our common work.

He went on to outline Jesus’ promises, namely:

Therefore, if the members of the National Church will live according to these teachings of the Divine Master, and will propagate the democratic principles of Christ, they may be assured of His presence, help and cooperation.

To be a member of the Polish National Catholic Church is to be consciously aware of your decision for Christ and the true teachings of His Church. To be a member shows your cooperation in and with the work of Jesus. To be a member of the Holy Church makes you a participant in the victory of Christ to come.

Being a member imposes upon you an obligation of faithfulness. It imposes on you an obligation to follow-through on the choice you have made. It imposes on you an obligation to study and understand your faith.

Here are a few simple questions:

  • How many sacraments do you receive in the course of the Holy Mass?
  • What is the Church’s teaching on the devil?
  • What is the Church’s teaching on eternal life?
  • Did Jesus redeem the world or regenerate it, and what’s the difference?
  • How many sacraments are recognized by the Church, and what are they?
  • Why are our clergy married? Is it just a convenience?
  • Why are we democratic and what does that mean?
  • When is it permissible to attend mass in a Roman church?
  • What is the Church’s position on birth control, abortion, stem cell research?
  • Have your read the Confession of Faith and the Eleven Great Principals you say you believe in?

Can you answer them?

When you enter a Roman or Episcopal church you may very well recognize things that appear, at least outwardly, to resemble what occurs here. You may say to yourself, ‘It looks, sounds, and smells the same.’ What’s the difference?

I tell you that the difference is great. I tell you that your presence in another church tells all who see you there that your foundation is weak and that you adhere to whatever rules you run across. It says to the world: ‘Faith – hey I’m flexible.’

Do not be indifferent to Christ and to your faith, to what the Holy Church proclaims and teaches.

If coming to church is an exercise, if repeating responses during the Holy Mass is simply an act of mimicry, just as good here as it is there; if you really think that a pope or a lot of money give you power, give you gravitas, give you the truth; then you are sadly mistaken and you are missing the point. What you are seeking is not Christ, but convenience.

James and John made an infamous mistake. They put their selfish desires before Jesus.

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus and said to him,
“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

…and Jesus gave them that which would save them, not necessarily that which they wanted.

When you consider your faith, your choice of Christ and His Holy Church, when you ask yourself that all important question, ‘What do I believe?’ Consider James and John. Consider whether you are asking Jesus for a church that gives you what you want, or the Holy Church which gives you what you need.

Christian Witness, Current Events, Media

Standing in the dock – for the truth

Robert Fisk writing in The Independent takes a stand against Holocaust deniers in Turkey. He’s ready to stand-up for the truth.

Check out: Let me denounce genocide from the dock: Suddenly, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting “Turkishness” (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of “civil war” – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger…

A thank you to Serge, the original blogging Young Fogey (ref. here) for pointing to this.

Everything Else

The weekly iPod shuffle

Fr. Jim Tucker is away for a couple weeks and it looks like he will not be doing his weekly call out for an iPod shuffle. In Fr. Jim’s honor, I’ll carry on.

  1. Zakwitła rutka —“ Promni, A witajcie przyjaciele
  2. Dance Away —“ Roxette, Look Sharp!
  3. Don’t Ask Me No Questions —“ Lynyrd Skynyrd, Second Helping
  4. Katmandu —“ Bob Seger, Beautiful Loser
  5. Venite, exultemus Domino —“ Taizé, Venite Exultemus
  6. La Grange —“ ZZ Top, The Best of ZZ Top
  7. Desbocado – Bruno Battisti D´Amario, Samba para Ti & More
  8. Take Me —“ George Jones & Tammy Wynette, Love Songs
  9. O Holy Night —“ Sufjan Stevens, Hark! Songs for Christmas
  10. Na Końcu Mapy —“ Pod Budą, Kraków, Piwna 7

As Fr. Jim would say:

The rules, for bloggers who want to play: Get your iPod or media-player of choice, select your whole music collection, set the thing to shuffle (i.e., randomized playback), then post the first ten songs that come out. No cheating, no matter how stupid it makes you feel! Maybe link the songs to online music stores for readers’ convenience.

Saints and Martyrs

October 21 – St. Ursula and companions (Św. Urszula i towarzyszki)

The Legend of St. Ursula: Apotheosis of St. Ursula by Vittore Carpaccio

Dozwól nam wszechmogący Boże obchodzić uroczyście dzień tryumfu i narodzin dla nieba św. Urszuli i jej towarzyszek, a jeżeli godnie naśladować jej nie możemy, abyśmy cnotę jej należycie czcili. Przez Chrystusa Pana naszego. Amen.

Per Wikipedia regarding the Virgin Islands: Christopher Columbus named the islands Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Vírgenes (shortened to Las Vírgenes), after Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. The number of 11,000 is acknowledged to be in error. While there was a tradition of virgin martyrs in Cologne by the 5th century, this was limited to a small number between two and eleven according to different sources. The 11,000 were first mentioned in the 9th century; suggestions as to where this came from have included reading the name “Undecimillia” or “Ximillia” as a number, or reading the abbreviation “XI. M. V.” as eleven thousand (in Roman numerals) virgins rather than eleven martyred virgins.

Current Events, Political

From bad to worse

Monsters and Critics is carrying a story on the Iraq situation. See Eye on Iraq: What is going wrong in Iraq? which includes the following statement:

For it was those elections so eagerly pushed and hyped by the White House that gave the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq the great strategic goal for which they had previously been striving in vain for more than two-and-a-half years. It was those elections that transformed the Iraq conflict from a limited insurgency supported by a relatively small minority within an ethnic minority of only 5 million Sunni Iraqis — less than 20 percent of the total population — into a burgeoning full scale civil war between the two largest religious groups in the country comprising 80 percent of the population, or 22.4 million people between them.

For the elections led to a consolidation of Shiite political power in Baghdad and then to the empowering of Shiite militias by Shiite political parties dominating the new parliament. Shiite militia influence within the new Iraqi police and army rapidly grew.

Well today, the Shiite insurgency captured and took over an entire city, a provincial capital nonetheless. The NY Times reports on the situation in Attack on Iraqi City Shows Militia’s Power.

What’s wrong in Iraq is that we are there. What’s wrong is that we are powerless to stop the on-going civil war. What’s wrong is that the British, the national police, and the U.S. cannot stop a militia from doing these sorts of things.

It cannot be fixed, nor will it be right, so the very least we can do is to extricate ourselves, the sooner the better.

Vietnam again indeed… Another war skillfully avoided by George W. Bush.

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