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Hot oil treatment is good for all types of hair such as oily, dry, thin and more. The magic touch of this treatment is that you are not faced with any adverse side effects as people often simply have to undergo while using chemicals in the name of hair products, so as the first thing; you need to give up the use of chemically prepared hair products for good in order to get the best out of it.
Most of the hot oils are made of keratin as the main ingredient, and you know it's a proven agent for soft and luscious hair. These oils are available in various kinds and types but the actual point is the right selection of one of them depending on what the current hair condition you are in.
If you own dry and dizzy hair, Avocado oil can be a perfect choice for you. And if you are on the lookout for the best oil for the damaged hair, you are supposed to try Argon oil. Here are some of the oils that can work to your advantage in a good many ways.
- Avocado oil
As a matter of fact, when you grow dry hair, negative impacts on your personality come about. How beautiful you may be, but if your hair is dry, you are not in the list of a fine figure of a woman.
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Well, your hair has been damaged, and no cure seems effective as you've already tried what you could have had but without a success. If this is the case with you, Argon oil is made for you.
- Castor oil
Fortunately, your hair isn't dry but it is very thin and weak, and therefore you are suffering hair fall issue. In that case, you actually need castor oil. These are only a few examples; for more oils, you can visit africanamericanhairstyles.org/hot-oil-treatment-natural-transitioning-hair. Stay updated with the latest posts on the site, thank you. We wish you good luck ever!


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In today's age of transparency, there will always be people to call you out if there's even a hint at secrecy or untruthfulness by your brand. It happened when Subway didn't measure up to their foot long sub and now it seems Double Stuf Oreos may not have actually double the stuff. While these two examples may simply be a matter of teenagers with too much time on their hands or a high school math teacher getting creative with homework, they do illustrate that people now demand and expect the truth and won't be shy about taking a company to task on it.
Social Media Outcry
A smartphone and a Facebook account is all someone needs to challenge you these days. No longer do we need to rely on the media to be the gatekeeper. The public is the watchdog, and sometimes in attack mode.
Record-breaking long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad completed the crossing of the Florida Straits last week. But some fellow long-distance swimmers have flooded social media channels and blogs to question the authenticity of the 64-year-old's 110-mile swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida.
Theories are floating that Nyad was assisted by support boats and that she violated traditional sport guidelines by wearing a specialized mask and wetsuit to guard from potentially deadly jellyfish stings.
Nyad's team has strongly denied allegations of wrongdoing, and said in a statement: "Diana is proud of what she and her team accomplished last week, and she is committed to complete transparency."
She's invited a dozen veteran marathon swimmers from all over the world to participate in a panel discussion via Skype this week to address the claims.
How You React Defines You
Nyad chose to face her skeptics head on. Bodyform did the same, although in a humorous way.
The feminine hygiene product company touts its products as something women want to wear, not just something they use. They say they are all about comfort and quality and being "for" women. So, when Richard Neill posted on Facebook that he had been deceived that a woman's time of the month wasn't all biking, dancing and parachuting like depicted in the ads, Bodyform responded with this video.
This hilarious response pokes fun at Richard "tearing down the veil" and exposing men to the reality that there really is no such thing as "a happy period". It's obviously resonated with the public as the video has almost 5,300,000 views.
The Trend of Transparency
Brands are turning to content marketing to tell their authentic stories to the public. Through blogging, websites, social media and video, companies understand they need to be true to gain trust. Stories of brands embracing content marketing and going a step further like J Crew and LUNA Bar to evoke emotions from their consumers inspired us to write our own book on the trend of transparency.
Just released last week, "Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency and Grow your Business through Content Marketing" provides examples of companies coming clean while others are still hiding behind the curtain of secrecy. Co-authors and SPROUT Content Co-founders Dechay Watts and Debbie Williams searched the globe for telling examples of brands, both big and small, who are using content marketing to show their human sides. Their success stories and tips will inspire you to be open and transparent in order to:
Earn consumers' trust and loyalty
Position your brand as an industry thought leader
Build stronger relationships and win more customers
After reading this book, you'll realize that being candid and honest about who you are is the only way to do business now. You may even rethink your entire marketing strategy.

subset: commoncrawl


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Encounters 2016 wrap up - Art Collector
|Installation view featuring the works of Indonesian artist collective Tromarama, New York based artist Lawrence Weiner and Filipino artist Roberto Chabet
Alexie Glass-Kantor, executive director of Artspace, Sydney curated the Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong for the second year running. This year Encounters presented 16 artworks by artists from 12 countries and territories including Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mainland China, New Zealand, Philippines, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Each year Encounters shows artworks on an institutional scale, presenting large-scale sculptural and installation pieces sited in prominent locations throughout the fair. Features work by Brook Andrew, Charles Avery, Hans Berg and Nathalie Djurberg, Roberto Chabet, Chen Zhen, Isa Genzken, Kyungah Ham, Arik Levy, Peter Liversidge, Richard Maloy, Tintin Wulia, Tromarama, Keiji Uematsu, Lawrence Weiner, Pae White and Zhang Ding.
Glass-Kantor reduced the presentation to just 16 works, proving the old adage "Less is more" when it came this year's install. The number of exhibits was capped at 16 so artists and their galleries could be more ambitious in their presentations. This year's edition included five site-specific installations and six artworks that premiered at Encounters, including works by Brook Andrew, Isa Genzken, Arik Levy, Richard Maloy, Lawrence Weiner, Tintin Wulia and Zhang Ding.
Of the exhibit, Glass-Kantor remarked: "I'm delighted that this year, close collaborations with the participants have resulted in a number of works that will be premiering at Art Basel, as well as site-specific works that have been created as a direct response to exploring what an encounter is or could become."
Art Collector's snapshot highlights from the fair can be seen below
|Australian artist Brook Andrew and his installation Building (Eating) Empire, 2016.
|Auckland-based Starkwhite's presentation of a site- specific installation Yellow Structure, 2016 by New Zealand artist Richard Maloy.
|Korean artist Kyungah Ham's artwork series Chandeliers for Five Cities, 2016. Presented by Kukje Gallery of Seoul and Tina Kim Gallery of New York.
|German artist Isa Genzken's Schauspieler (Actors) series. Schauspieler III, 1 was created in 2015 and comprises elaborately outfitted mannequins holding an array of props and accessories. Presented by David Zwirner, with spaces in New York and London.
|Jessa Melicor


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We have just released rsyslog 6.1.5, the new v6-devel.
This is both a stability and a performance enhancement release. Most importantly, imtcp was enhanced to support a small number of worker threads for imtcp processing. This will increase overall processing performance for high-end environments. Stability has improved by including a number of important patches, some of which fix abort conditions.
Please see the ChangeLog for more details.
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Best regards,
Tom Bergfeld


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CocoMelody's Light and Airy Beach Wedding Dresses
Destination Wedding is another option marrying couples could consider. Nowadays some couples prefer a Beach Wedding; it allows you to relax while having one of the most special events in your life. Though a beach is a chill kind of place, the bride's wedding dress is still one of the most awaited highlights of the romantic event. Thus, choosing the perfect beach wedding dress is a must!
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Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Graduating renal fellow survey
Time is running out for graduating fellows to complete the quick 9 question survey to find out what kind of jobs are out there. It only takes a minute! RFN will take the poll down in a week then Dr. Deepti Torri and Dr. Kellie Calderon will compile the results and report back to RFN with the results. Click here to take survey
Posted by Matt Sparks at 8:28 PM
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Christopher Hitchens and David Allen White discuss the impact of Christianity on Western Civilization
HH: Welcome to a special couple of hours on the Hugh Hewitt Show. This is the second in a series of conversations about the role of God or not God in the modern world. The principal interlocutor on the party of not God is Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist, author most recently of the New York Times bestseller, god Is Not Great, frequent contributor to the program, and Professor David Allen White, for more than 25 years, a professor of English literature at the United States Naval Academy, the author of the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare and most recently the Horn of the Unicorn. I describe Professor White as a supporter of the Society of Pius X, a Roman Catholic. Today, these two hours, not theology, but really culture and the Church and culture, and whether or not Western civilization is better off for there having been a robust Christian faith. Welcome to you both, gentlemen. Christopher, welcome back, David Allen White, welcome back, good to have you both.
CH: Thank you.
DAW: Glad to be here, Hugh.
HH: I'd like to start, since we're taping this on August 8th, which is the feast of St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans, the teaching-preaching order, by asking David Allen White, and then Christopher Hitchens, is it a good thing that Dominic lived, and that the Church embraced his tradition?
DAW: Well, being a Catholic, of course, I'm very fond of all the saints. Catholics have special favorite saints, and St. Dominic plays a very special role, again, not just in teaching, but in preserving culture. The establishment of the monasteries and the establishment of the Dominican order, extraordinarily important, I think, in holding onto civilization and advancing civilization, and I do see the two very much as interconnected. I'm not sure there can be one without the other.
HH: Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Well, I say in my book that religion was our first, and for that reason partly our worst, but still our first attempt at philosophy, at understanding the world and our place in it, and that this is obviously attested by the libraries of the monasteries, as it is with the building of the cathedrals and the content of many great art galleries. What I argue is that religion can no longer perform that function, and if you're going to claim that for it, Professor White can claim today for the Christian Church, but you can't deny that claim to the rabbis who kept a lot of scrolls going, and spread a great deal of learning and establishing a number of schools, though they teach a ridiculous orthodoxy, nor indeed to the Muslims who at a time of extreme darkness in Christian Europe, have kept alive the ideas of Greek philosophy and retransmitted them to us, to Peter Abelard and other Catholic philosophers. So I elucidate, it doesn't say anything to the credit of Islam that Muslim societies did that.
HH: Would you deny that legacy to them, Professor White?
DAW: Oh, I'm not claiming exclusivity in that sense. Of course there have been many, many different factions, different visions that have helped keep civilization alive. But I would assign something of a special role to what I call the Christian West. In fact, it's one of the things that troubles me about god Is Not Great. There is a sense all the way through, and being a Catholic, that's what I must defend. I can't defend those things I don't necessarily believe in. But I of course have a sense of the role they have played in the advancement of civilization. But there is a sense in the book of looking at the dark side and the down side, almost exclusively, there's a wonderful comment by Dorothy Sayers about people who only read the Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy. And she says it's a bit like visiting one of the great cities of Europe, say Paris, and only spending your time in the sewers.
CH: (laughing)
DAW: If you come up above into the landscape, you're going to see not just Notre Dame, but the Louvre filled with paintings, you're probably going to have a fine French meal as well, which I think is part of that civilization. And the incredible diversity that Catholic culture spread throughout Europe is still fascinating and part of our legacy. Not denying the others played a role, but I would assert there is something special and extraordinarily beautiful in what the Church offered.
HH: Christopher Hitchens, did you go out of your way to avoid elaborating on Christianity's gifts to civilization?
CH: First, I should just say Professor White, I think he, I suspect in of undue modesty here, that does he not in fact say that the Catholic Church is the one true Church?
DAW: Yes, I do. Absolutely, I do.
CH: So what Mr. Hewitt believes as a Christian is, in a sense, irrelevant to you? I mean, you just think he's wrong? He's in the wrong Church? He's not really a proper Christian at all?
DAW: Well…
CH: I think we should all…I mean, since my views are probably very well advertised, I think we should understand that I'm not arguing with one of those a la carte Catholics this time. You're the real thing, aren't you?
DAW: Well, let's…I think of myself as a traditional Catholic. Let me put my cards on the table. From about age 17, I was raised very liberal Protestant, and at an early age, about 17, lost any faith at all, so I read your book with a familiarity, because I made many of the same arguments myself at one time. I came into the Church, the Catholic Church at the age of 31, and I must say one of the men you respect, I think, I don't want to put words in your mouth, one of the men I think you respect, Evelyn Waugh, was very influential in leading me towards the Church.
CH: Indeed, yes.
DAW: But as you well know, Waugh was troubled at the end of his life at what was going on in the Church. As he said at one point, Vatican II knocked the guts out of me. So when I came in, I began trying to get a sense of what was going on, and found what is called the traditional movement. It's simply those who are maintaining what the Church had always taught over the centuries.
CH: Yeah, well I say in my book that I think it was a great loss to the Church, I rather sympathize with Evelyn Waugh on this point. By the way, I'm not dodging your earlier question, I'm coming straight to it. But the abandonment, particular of the Latin Mass, the so-called Tridentine Mass, was an enormous blow to the morale of the Church, and the subsequent rituals appear to be extremely banal. But does that not give you some difficulty in that that must mean that along with people like Mel Gibson and others, you essentially say that Pope John XXIII was not just not infallible, but deeply in error?
DAW: No, because…
CH: And from the Catholic point of view, isn't there an element of impossibility in that position?
DAW: No, and fortunately, I don't have to say that, because the last infallible pronouncement of a pope, as you also mention in your book, was the Doctrine of the Assumption, which came out in 1951. The so-called liturgical changes in the Church were never in any way decreed as doctrine or dogma. Now obviously, it's troubling, and I do find it very interesting, in fact, I've talked on Hugh's show about this, I'm delighted that the Latin Mass is "back," although as the Pope himself has admitted, it was never abrogated, never really went away. And I know for a fact that there is a surge going on out there of priests who are now learning the traditional Mass.
CH: Well, and there was always the movement associated with Archbishop Lefebvre, though I mean, I'm nostalgic for the Latin Mass in the aesthetic sense that you were talking about earlier. But I'm, I don't miss the expression perfidious Jew, which was one part of its ritual, for example.
DAW: Well, it is in the Good Friday service, when we pray for almost everyone. The prayers go on at length, and indeed, that phrase is used, but as you probably know, it means fallen away. It is not in any sense a judgment on them, and of course, one is under the obligation to pray for all souls to come into the Church, because as you said, I do believe it's the one true Church.
CH: Well now, then…I'm glad we've clarified that. Look, on the point of whether one only emphasizes the bad, my book is written as a critique of religion, so I take it for granted that those who believe in the virtues of it already know what those are. Now I couldn't be without Notre Dame, for example, nor could I be without quite a lot of devotional music. I could actually do without a fair amount of devotional painting, but who cares what my opinion on paintings are? My point would be this. We have no means of absolutely knowing for certain that the people who built and painted and composed those things were themselves believers. What we do know is that it would have been very dangerous for them not to be, extremely dangerous, and that many of them did have to write and perform in fear. We know that because of what happened to Giordano Bruno, to Galileo and to many others, and from many other testimonies. I actually don't think St. Peter's in Rome is that wonderful a building. But if you think it is, and if you want to take credit for it, then you have to accept also the responsibility for the fact that it was built on the revenues of the special sale of indulgences.
DAW: Chalk and cheese. Let me just clarify one thing. If you're speaking about the artists, I think it's true, it's very difficult to get at the core of an artist's intentions. The question of them living in fear I don't know about, and then the examples you give are two scientists. That to my mind is very much a separate issue. I would say this, it seems to me very difficult to come up with what I think we might agree on, as masterpieces of music, literature, painting, sculpture, if there isn't some higher vision, if there isn't something motivating it. I don't know of many great artists who have created great art solely out of fear.
– – – – –
HH: When we went to break, Christopher Hitchens, the question on the table was without a higher vision, can there ever be great art?
CH: No, I would say there could not. I mean, I think that there's a big confusion, though, in many people's minds between the transcendent and the supernatural. I have a special passage in my book trying to speak about this. I think is one wants to consider the awe inspiring and the infinite and the majestic, that actually, there's more to be found if you study the photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, or examine the extraordinary beauty and implications of the double helix, or read a page of Stephen Hawking on the event horizon than there is in, say, the contemplation, I'm very sorry to say, of St. Dominic, and that the natural world is wonderful enough, and as Einstein says, the miraculous thing about it is they aren't in miracle, that it works with an impressive, extraordinary underlying regularity. Now Dr. White can't follow me in this by, it seems to me, by definition, because he's obliged to believe that the Church has recorded and established Divine interventions that are responsive to prayerful intercessions that changed the natural order in favor of those praying, for example, a belief that I'm sorry to say, I must get out of the way, I think is utterly nonsensical, and actually sinister.
HH: David Allen White?
DAW: A number of things to comment on there. Let me start with a word of praise for the book. I find in it one of the more interesting passages. I wish I could quote it at length, but in the book, Mr. Hitchens talks about indeed those staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, talks about the glorious mystery and the symmetry of the double helix. I wouldn't disagree that those are remarkable things, and that science at its greatest has allowed us view that. Now obviously, our response to that will be different. But I do have a question, and I would like to get to the other issue about prayer in a moment, but let me put it this way. One of the great events in modern human history was that man stepped off the planet. It was an extraordinary scientific event, it was an extraordinary human event, an engineering feat that in its way was incomparable. I know of only two works inspired from that event. One, Norman Mailer's Of A Fire On The Moon, which I'm very fond of, even though Mr. Mailer drives me crazy much of the time with things he says, but I think he is a fine writer and an interesting writer.
CH: Well, we agree about that.
DAW: And the other is a minor poem by W. H. Auden. And I'm wondering if it will be possible that great art can indeed be inspired by these events in the same way that for example, St. Francis, that in the book is referred to as a mammal who was said to have preached to birds, has inspired artists from Dante and Giotto, back in the 14th Century, up until our own time when Francis Poulenc has a beautiful setting in the 50's of the prayers of St. Francis, and Olivier Messiaen's fascinating new opera from the early 80's, St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis is still inspiring artists. I admit there are glories to be seen in what science has shown us. I don't know if they can inspire art, or would do so 600 years in the future.
HH: Mr. Hitchens?
CH: Well, I was just going to say that I agreed with most of that, but wouldn't…isn't it a somewhat depressing thought that the ability of religious faith to inspire great painting and music and architecture seems somewhat, though, diminished? The examples you give are not bad, and like you, I'm also a great admirer of W.H. Auden, as well as a critic and admirer of Norman Mailer. But just as the age of miracles and of great religious writers, and people like Aquinas and Augustine seem to be somewhere behind us, because it's not possible to hold the positions of faith with the same absolutely uncritical devotion as it used to be. I think the same is true of the aesthetic, but again, I repeat, the same claim can be made for Hinduism, for the splendid and barbarous temples of pre…not Hindu, but Buddhist…Cambodia, for example, or Burma, for the grand mosque in Damascus, and for many other things, that at least speak to me at any rate, not at all of the truth or validity or moral standing of the faith that inspired them.
DAW: I would agree with you very much in that there has been a diminishment in the number of these works that have appeared. But again, I would say you can't have it both ways. You are expressing a kind of, a kind of gratitude, would that be fair, that finally religious faith is diminishing?
CH: Yes, that would be fair.
DAW: But one of the consequences is we are losing the art, the artists, the literature. I'm sure you know this, because you refer to the book often, and I'd love to talk about it maybe sometime during the course of the discussion, one of my favorites, which is the Brothers Karamazov…
CH: Yes.
DAW: You know the great scene where old Theodore, the father, has two of his sons, Ilyusha and Ivan at the table. And he says to them directly, is there a God? And Ivan says no, there is not God. He asks Ilyusha, the young monk, is there a God? Ilyusha says there is. He follows. Is there immortality? Ivan says no, no immortality, Ilyusha says yes, there is. Now Ivan goes one step further then, and takes the cognac away from his father, and says without God, there will be no cognac, either. There would be no civilization at all if God had not been invented. Now I think that's your claim, fair enough, that God was an invention?
CH: Yes, absolutely. It's a manmade construct. It's a reification of our peers, and also of our self-centeredness.
DAW: I guess what I am suggesting, and Dostoyevsky said himself in a letter he wrote after the book was finished, that he thinks he made better arguments than the atheists themselves had made. He was an honest man and a brilliant man, and in that taking away of the cognac and saying there can be no more civilization, I think he is absolutely correct in that civilization is connected directly to the religious impulse, and that what we are likely to see is a dissent into mere political power, as Waugh called it in his great novel Helena, power without grace. Maybe we can explore that later.
HH: Christopher Hitchens, you've got a minute to the break, so are you destroying civilization by attacking God?
CH: Well, right…Well, Oscar Wilde, who we'd both have to agree was a rather heterodox Catholic, did, I remember once say, that there were religions that invented green chartreuse can never truly die. And like you, I'm a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, but I'm sorry to say that the will to power, which Nietzsche said would be all that was left of that religion, is expressed through religion as well. You don't get away from the will to power by invoking faith. It's part of the will to power, and it's always been used for it. And if you want instances of power without grace, there are many theocracies to which I can point you, sir, as you must know.
DAW: Oh, of course I know, but again, it doesn't invalidate the notion that grace exists, and power is more dangerous without grace.
– – – –
HH: Professor White, as I went to break, and I said it quite seriously, I wanted to ask you, since it's the feast of St. Dominic, we're taping this on…his mission was to the heretics, in many sense. Are you concerned with the soul of Christopher Hitchens, and what happens to him if he stays in the state of atheism that he's in?
DAW: Well, let me put it this way. As a believing Catholic, I'm concerned for all souls. But I have no business making any pronouncements whatsoever upon what happens to any individual soul at the time of death.
HH: What does the Church teach about a soul that is not convicted?
DAW: Well, this is very interesting. In fact, in the book, there is a fascinating passage. I assume you know the one I refer to, Mr. Hitchens, about Mary McCarthy?
CH: Yes.
DAW: …who was shocked at learning from a Jesuit preacher that her Protestant grandfather was doomed to eternal punishment because he had been baptized the wrong way. Now I'm not a fan of the art of Mary McCarthy, but she was a bright woman, and she was deeply troubled. Now my own, I do object to a phrase you use. The Mother Superior consulted higher authorities, and you say there was a loophole in the writings of Bishop Athanasius, who held that heretics were only damned if they rejected the true Church with full awareness of what they were doing. That is a Catholic doctrine simply called invincible ignorance. The Church has always said we do not know how God will judge any individual human soul. It is not my place to say anything. It's my place to have a conversation with Mr. Hitchens to try to convince him. Obviously, there is a great gulf fix between what the two of us believe, but we have certain things in common. We can have a serious discussion about things we have in common, and maybe I can hope to move him one way or another, believing in prayer. I could pray for him. It is I think terribly unfair to make any assumption about what will happen to any soul. As a Catholic, I can't do that. One other quick comment…
HH: But wait, that undermines a lot of the Hitchens argument about the Church, that the Church is judgmental and condemning.
CH: It would if it were true, but I mean, but what Professor White has to do before he goes any further is to say that he repudiates the decades, generations in which children were told in blood-curdling tones by elderly virgins, that they would go to hell if they played with themselves, even though they were Catholic, and those who weren't Catholic would go to hell no matter what, if they had turned away from the Church, if they were the wrong kind of Christian, or if they were Jewish, or Muslims. And the whole argument of invincible ignorance is invented to deal with an insuperable problem, which is this. Why did the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth only begin and occur in a small, remote, inaccessible, illiterate part of Palestine? Why are the millions and millions of people who've been born and died never hearing of it, why there are still millions and millions of people who never had the chance to be redeemed in the only available way? The Church says extra-ecclesia nulla salus. Am I not correct?
DAW: That's absolutely correct, yes.
CH: That you can't be saved without it, but that therefore, what are we going to say to the people who never even had the chance. Now this, I think, simply shows how crudely manmade religion is, not just how manmade and manufactured it is, but how very crudely they suddenly have a thought that if it was allowed to occur properly, would demolish their whole premise.
HH: Professor White, you have a minute to the break.
DAW: Let me answer the first part of that, and may I answer the second when we come back from the break?
HH: Yes.
DAW: The first part is this. Thank Heavens I don't have to defend those who are ignorant of the teachings of their own Church. Now admittedly, this suggests of flaws in the hierarchy, flaws in the way in which doctrine has been taught, and certainly misconceptions that have been forced on a number of young people. In any educational system, I hope you would agree with me, very often there is bad teaching. I've been a teacher for 37 years. I know it happens. It certainly happens in the Church. That doesn't, however, change the actual doctrines and dogmas that the Church does hold, and I will answer the second part of that after the break, if I may.
– – – –
HH: When we went to break, we'd gotten around to this issue which is very central to god Is Not Great, that Christianity is a rather crudely made manmade religion, because no one would think up a religion so awful in its consequences for so many people bereft of the even the opportunity to embrace it. David Allen White, you were going to speak to that?
DAW: Let me just say, and I will submit to a higher authority here. Being a traditional Catholic, my impulse is just to submit to the higher authority. Being a teacher of literature, let me submit to Dante. There is a magnificent scene in Canto 19 of the Paradiso, and by the way, I would disagree with you that no really tempting vision of Heaven's ever been created. I'd point to Dante's Paradiso, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest poetry that can be written. But in any case, he is in the sphere of justice, the sphere of Jupiter, and that is the precise question he asks. A man is born along the shoreline of the Indus River, none is there to speak or teach or write of Christ. He as far as human reason sees in all he seeks, and all he does is good. There is no sin within his life or speech. That man dies unbaptized, without faith. Where is this justice then that would condemn him? This is Dante, the Catholic, asking that question when he's in Heaven. The response of the Eagle of justice is very interesting, in that the first response is take care of your own business first before you start worrying about others who are on the banks of the Indus River. But then the answer comes in a very strange scene in Canto XX. Dante is about to shoot up to the sphere of Saturn, and before he goes, he sees souls in Paradise, including Trajan and the Trojan Ripheus, neither of whom could have been baptized. And he shouts aloud, can such things be? These men have made it into Heaven. It was indeed Pope Benedict XV who said Dante's the greatest Catholic artist, and his theology is sound, meaning the Church admits there may well be souls in Heaven that we will be surprised to see there, may not understand how they got there. They may not have gone through the usual process we think of. It's God's domain, not ours. We should tend to our own knittin'.
HH: What do you make of that, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Well again, I think it's a perfectly defensible…well, it's not defensible, it's a perfectly reasonably expressed viewpoint. It just isn't what the Church has been preaching. I mean, just to take a very recent example, I mean, Pope Benedict, the current pope, the very one who's recently reaffirmed that the Catholic Church is the one true and only Church, upon his visit to Brazil was forced to make some apologetic remarks about the Church's history of forcible conversions. I mean, in point of fact, these things were not done by aberrant teachers or overzealous missionaries, they were done institutionally by the Church. Now in the…I forget, you'll probably know, Professor, if it's in the…or the Nicene Creed, it may be in both, but one is required to say that after being crucified, dead and buried, Jesus descended into hell. And my understanding is that he went down to rescue those who'd been boiling there for eternity before his opportunity for redemption became available. Now that simply to me smacks of squaring the circle.
DAW: If I may respond to that…
HH: Please.
DAW: That is indeed in the creed, that he descended into hell. What is interesting again is what we find there is he is freeing those souls that had at last will be released into Heaven. It's a comment you make in the book as well that I would quarrel with a bit, and that is that they've been boiling there. The fact is He goes to limbo, and not only do we meet in limbo those great figures from the Old Testament, but we also meet a number of great pagan philosophers and poets, and you give the impression that they're all boiling. What Dante sees when he gets there is that they're living in a rather pleasant place. Their suffering, as he describes it, is that they are giving up sighs from sorrow because they know they're missing something, but they're not quite sure what. They're living in an exalted castle, circled by towering walls, with a fair stream running around it, and they go to a meadow of green flowering plants. If that's boiling, it's okay by me. But it is not the fullness of Heaven, so that yes, He goes down, He frees them, but they have not been suffering, although you do make it very clear, and I agree with it, much lower down, we do find a Mohammed who is suffering, and even the Inferno, in the Catholic vision, is hierarchical.
HH: Christopher Hitchens, you've got about a minute to our break.
CH: Well, I mean, to be exact, I mean, Mohammed is, the prophet Mohammed, is revoltingly described as being repeatedly disemboweled full of excrement, and then sewn up and disemboweled again. Again, as with all these things, if we're going to take good bits of Dante, you have to take all of them as well. You have to accept the responsibility for that…I thought I was going to be the one to mention limbo. Am I not correct in saying that that's what St. Augustine said the souls of unbaptized children went?
DAW: And indeed, Dante…
CH: And that it took until very recently…
DAW: Dante includes those…
CH: Until very recently, the Church has now told us well, you can relax about this, because it turns out there's no such place as limbo after all. Now doesn't this again materialize my point? This is a manmade fable, all of it is a manmade fable, and it shows.
DAW: What is very interesting is that that debate is currently going on in Catholic circles, because as you well know, there have been some recent pronouncements about limbo. They have not been definitive, but it is…you may find it crazy that this is being debated right now. I find it actually very interesting.
HH: Well, to both of you…
CH: I find it both. I find it both crazy and interesting.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, you argue in god Is Not Great that this has to be manmade, it's so stupid and cruel, Christianity in particular, but religion generally. And I look at the same field, and I say this has to be Divine, because it's so infinite, complex and grace-filled. I think whatever you argue, there's a reverse to it.
CH: Well, when you say, as you were just saying before the break that God wouldn't make it easy for us, and that there would be enormous complexities, possibly infinite ones, I think you say no more than the truth. That's why people are, in my opinion, obliged to be atheists, because we say that those who claim to know God's mind cannot possibly know what they claim to know. We can't prove that this entity or this force does not exist. We can only say that there's no evidence that He does, and therefore the hypothesis for that existence has been exploded or abandoned. The other side can't say that. They can't say that there's mysteries we're not even meant to understand. They say no, we, our pope has the keys of Peter. He's the vicar of Christ on Earth. He can interpret God's will, he knows what God wants you to do about, for example, your sex life. Now this is claiming more than any human being can possibly hope to claim to know, and thus, religion falls in my view.
HH: Professor White?
DAW: Well, I'm not sure it would be fair to say that the Church claims to know the mind of God. What the Church claims is that revelations came from God, telling us the things we needed to know to eventually attain salvation. In the simplest terms of the Catechism, the first question of the old Baltimore Catechism, why are we here? To know, love and serve God in this world, and be with Him in the next. There's no claim that we have the entire picture. We can never as humans fully grasp the mind of God. It's a great blessing that we've been given a glimpse of it as we have, and that He's spoken to us, and told us what we need to know. But it's very interesting, you know, in a sense that the debate will rage on. I think eventually, a revelation will come even to those who don't believe. But a little line from William Blake. He who doubts from what he sees will never believe. Do what you please. There is a kind of entrenchment in positions, I think more now than ever before, because science offers an alternative. And it may be more difficult to believe now than it's ever been in the past, and I think that may be a sign we're in, as the Chinese say, interesting times.
HH: Last 30 seconds to you, Christopher Hitchens, of this hour. We'll be back for hour two?
CH: Can't do it in 30 seconds.
HH: All right, I'm not surprised. We'll be right back, America. Don't go anywhere.
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HH: Welcome back, gentlemen. Christopher Hitchens, in our first conversation in this series, and I hope there will be more, I had you opposite theologian Mark Roberts, and I quoted to you from Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein, in which Einstein said, "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that behind all the discernible laws and connection, there remains something subtle and tangible and inexplicable, a veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend, and that is my religion. To that extent, in fact, I am religious." Now David Allen White says science destroys religion. It seems to me that Einstein is saying it builds upon it.
CH: Well, I'm saying that if you take religion as being the pantheism of Spinosa, who was in fact Einstein's favorite philosopher, a man not just excommunicated by his own synagogue, but that excommunication enthusiastically seconded by the Catholic and Protestant authorities of the day. It was a very highly dangerous heresy. Then it amounts to then what I was saying earlier about the Hubble telescope or the double helix. Of course there are things that are awe inspiring that make us feel small, that inspire in us the transcendent. But these have nothing to do with the supernatural. The insistence of Einstein is that there are no miracles, there are no changes in the natural order, God does not intervene in our affairs, there is no such person, in fact, to do so. And his statements about organized religion throughout his life were uniformly contemptuous for that reason.
HH: David Allen White?
DAW: Let me ask a question. I want to clarify one thing. I am not in any way against science. It seems to me fairly obvious that there have been scientific discoveries of the last few centuries that have been absolutely remarkable. I'm in total agreement with that. And everything from the exploration out there, which is fascinating…I mean, the pictures from the Hubble telescope are indeed awe inspiring, as well as going deep inside, the miracles of biology and what we've learned about the human body. This is remarkable. There is a role for science, it has to do with nature, it has to do with our understanding of the way things are created, and how they operate. My concern is that there is a corresponding diminution of the inner life. Let me put it this way. I ask my students this often. I ask them to name their five senses, and they can all do it, of course, instantaneously. And those five senses are the means by which we know nature and the outside world. Back in the Middle Ages, there was the notion of the five wits: common sense, fancy imagination, estimation, sometimes call judgment or memory. They have not idea of these. And the fact of the matter is there is an inner life, there are things going on inside us. Now I understand, given the book, that religion is rejected by Christopher Hitchens, but is there not an inner life that is worthy of exploring that can take us to places that the discoveries of science and nature cannot? Let me ask you a specific question. In the book, you refer more than once to the conscience. Would you agree that the conscience is part of what I'm calling the inner life?
CH: Absolutely I would. I believe that's why I spent a little time discussing Socrates and what he called his daimon, his inner prompting that warned him when he was being dishonest or in an argument, for example, that made him break off from doing so.
DAW: Exactly, so…
CH: We know that there are some people who are born without this. We call them sociopathic, or we know that some people are born positively like flouting such admonition, and we call them psychopaths. C.S. Lewis said that of course, the conscience was in a way the proof, the demonstration of the existence of God, which I don't think you can claim that it is. But that's why I began by saying that religion has to be understood as our first and, alas, worst, because first attempt at philosophy, at understanding who we are, why we're here, what we're for, and what ultimately our duties are to one another. As all these matters can be just as profoundly addressed in the absence of any belief in the supernatural, or any hope, and this is important, I think, of a Divine reward or a Divine punishment.
DAW: Well, if I may say so, Socrates also believed in that. As you know in the Fido Dialogue, he posits not just an afterlife, he's talking about the immortality of the soul, but curiously posits a place of judgment. Those who have committed terrible wrongs are thrown into the lake of Tarterus, and never emerge again. And then he talks about those who have done things wrong, but basically curable, who after they spend their time are released, and then those who go immediately to a very pleasant place. I mean, he, through reason, he comes to Dante as well. But let me ask one…
CH: Well, he ought to have a description of what an afterlife could be like if he was lucky, which was endless Socratic dialogues with old and departed friends. But he hastened to add he could be wrong about that. It's a very old dream that there would be such a thing, but there's unfortunately no reason at all to believe it. Look, may I just walk back one stage to before the break when you were saying about religion and science? And I think in this case, though generally, you've made the Church seem a much more friendly institution than it is or has been, and it is as if it's one opinion among many, and you can take it or leave it, which isn't actually how Catholicism was spread. But it was, in fact, a Catholic scientist, a Frenchman who's name has just for the moment escaped me who came up with the idea of what we call now the big bang, quite a long time ago, too. I mean, nearly a century ago, very impressive. And unlike many Protestant Churches, the Catholic Church has never really bothered to try and forbid the teaching of evolution. It seems to have learned from its mistakes with Galileo and with other scientists. But here's what makes, I think, religion and science ultimately incompatible, and it's simply this. We agree, since I'm not arguing with the Protestant who thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that the human species is what, at least 100,000 years old, homo sapiens. Do we agree on that?
DAW: Not necessarily. Not necessarily.
CH: Ah. Well, how many years would you allow then?
DAW: Let me put it this way. I have absolutely no idea.
CH: Ah, very well.
DAW: And it is in no way…
CH: Look, I'm…
DAW: And it is no way necessarily a doctrine.
CH: All right, well then I'll say if. I'll have to say supposing.
DAW: But let me do say one thing to get the point clear, I do believe in an original Adam and Eve. That I do believe in…
CH: Do you? How fascinating, so a firm…
DAW: …which I suspect you will find overwhelmingly ignorant on my part.
CH: Well as a matter of fact, I mean, it does seem that at a certain point in the evolution of the species in Africa, we were down to a very few hundred people, and there was panic and dismay, and the threat of extinction, very nearly went extinct, and then gradually left Africa in different directions. So there may be some metaphorical truth to that story. But shall I just say, then, since we're not going to agree that it seems to me the absolutely unarguable consensus that homo sapiens is approximately, not less than 100,000 years old. Now if that's the case, I'll have to say, since you don't agree necessarily with it, it would have to be believed that Heaven watched the first 98,000 years of this go by, people be born, struggle, strive, die, probably very young or in childbirth, famines, turf wars, plagues, all of this, and only two thousands years ago decided to intervene, and in an intervention that takes the form of a blood sacrifice, a human sacrifice in a very primitive part of the Middle East. Now I would just simply have to say that I could not be brought to believe that under any conditions whatever, and I very much doubt that anyone really seriously does believe it. It's believed because those who claim to hold the belief, of being able to use it to acquire political power in the only world we have, and the only world that matters, the here and now.
DAW: Well, let me state something that I find very curious. You say in the book that there is some doubt as to whether Socrates existed.
CH: Uh-huh.
DAW: You state there is some doubt as to whether or not Christ actually was a figure who walked the Earth. You say there is some doubt as to whether Shakespeare wrote the plays or not. You say it doesn't really matter to you. You hope it's not Bacon who wrote them. But you have no doubt that 450 million years ago, the genetic march inaugurated before life left the ocean, or before the evolution of bones. How on Earth can one have doubts about a philosopher whose works have been studies for centuries now, a, I believe, the Son of God who inaugurated this extraordinary religion that I do believe in, I do believe Shakespeare wrote the plays, but you have no doubt of when someone tells you what went on in a mudhole 450 million years ago. That really does puzzle me.
HH: And I want to be fair to you, Christopher. We have 30 seconds to the break.
CH: Well, I can't do that.
HH: So I want you to hold your response to Professor White. We'll come right back to you after the break.
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HH: At the break, Christopher Hitchens, Professor White had asked how could you doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays and a number of other things, but have no doubts about evolution?
CH: Well, first, I should say what context I say that it's possible that…we don't have absolute proof of the existence of Socrates. We have what seems like a pretty good eyewitness account of his life. But it doesn't matter to me whether he existed or not, because I'm only interested in his ideas, I mean, and in the method that he used to argue. Though it's one of the early atomists, a Greek, contemporary of Democritus, may not have existed, either. He's been given a name, but we don't have any absolute certainty that he existed. As for Shakespeare, I say it matters to me that it's canonically written by one person, who incidentally was probably a secret Catholic. And I have no reason to doubt that he's the author of all of those plays, but I have read persuasive stuff, oddly enough, always by right wing Catholics like Tom Bethel and the other name will come to me in a second, Joseph Sobran, who say that it was the Earl of Oxford. This is terribly interesting, but nothing depends on it. I'm not saying that you'll go to hell if you don't agree with me, or that…
HH: Actually, David Allen White might think you're going to hell if you think that it's the Earl of Oxford.
CH: He might.
DAW: (laughing) No, I am…
CH: I simply don't like to argue in that way. Of course it has to be doubted that there was, as described, such a person as Jesus of Nazareth. I think the preponderance of evidence is that there was such a person, but the stories of him, even given by his enthusiasts, are so wildly discrepant as well as unbelievable that obviously a large part of it has to be admitted to be myth, as is a great deal of the life of the prophet Mohammed. Now this is not comparing at all to say the theory of evolution by natural selection, of which there are working computer models that can show to an extraordinary degree of accuracy how evolution occurred. I will have to say in passing, I don't mind conceding that an irony of the modern world is that probably the average person does have to take more on faith than almost ever before. If I…I could not prove to you that the Apollo mission actually got to the Moon. I think that it did. But it's quite beyond me to prove how that happened. And there are innumerable other discoveries, and they're multiplying all the time, where one feels rather like a peasant in the Middle Ages, simply having to take on faith extraordinary claims. But I am able to read the books of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, and Steven Weinberg and others, and make some kind of sense of them, and there's absolutely no motive at all, there's no will to power in the fabrication, if there had been one.
DAW: But I am very pleased to hear you say that it is making an act of faith. And let me tell you why I'm an agnostic when it comes to computer models. I teach Shakespeare. There was a buzz about six, seven, eight years ago, time goes too swiftly, I could be wrong there, that a new Shakespeare poem had been discovered, an elegy for a young man who had died. And one of the proofs given was they ran it though the computer, and it worked. It was consistent with his other works. Well, anyone who knew Shakespeare could read about six lines and realize this was not written by the man who wrote the plays or the other poems. But the computer had proven it. And I am very doubtful about computer models.
CH: So am I when they're applied to literature, but not when they're applied, for example, the evolution of eyes since the age of sightless bacteria. There, I think it's just, there isn't any longer an argument. We can show how the eye evolved, and he can do it very minutely. You don't have to take it on faith. It just repays a little study. It takes quite a lot of work. And I don't think a computer can hope to do that with a sonnet or a symphony.
DAW: But it is very clear that it is the computer model that is giving the, if you will, hard evidence that you claim is hard evidence. Let me say one other thing about computers that troubles me greatly. I'm back to the whole notion of the inner life. I see my students sitting in front of screens day in, day out, from the time they come into the world, the television screen, the computer screen, the video game screen, it goes on and on and on. And what I fear is being lost again is any sense of that inner life that can even begin to lead to a conscience. If I may make the following point, before we can get to conscience, if you would agree or disagree with this, there are a couple of preliminary steps, one of them is consciousness itself. It is reflected most brilliantly, I think, in Hamlet, where we have the mind conscious of itself. Would you admit that self-consciousness is something that science has not yet unlocked?
CH: I think I'd have to agree with you there, yes.
DAW: Would it be fair to say that we cannot have consciousness of the self if there wasn't something mysterious in us that has to do with language itself? That is, could we think about ourselves if we didn't have language?
CH: No, I'm sure not, but I think there are non-linguistic intuitions that one can have.
DAW: Oh, absolutely. Certainly, there could be intuitions, but let me put it this way. Could we have a Hamlet without the words? And I don't think we could. What troubles me…
CH: And now you're going to say that in the beginning was the Word?
DAW: Well, I would say that. I wasn't going to, but I thank you for adding it, because I do believe that absolutely. And I do think the mystery of when language became part of however you want to take it, the human experience, is absolutely significant, and that language is unlike anything else. Self consciousness, language, lead to conscience. It's all part of that inner life that I'm talking about, and science cannot crack the mystery of language. It is very peculiar, we are peculiar creatures as a result, and even with the glories of the computer, and it can do extraordinary things, beating the greatest chess master, for example, man is still superior, because the computer will never know it won, and the greatest chess master can throw chairs and demand a bottle of vodka to ease his pain, because of his self-consciousness that he lost the match. We are mysterious creatures at our core.
CH: Well, look, you're on my wavelength very much, as, by the way, we seem to have similarly old-fashioned attitudes towards the teaching of literature. And apparently we both admire this elegy for William Butler Yeats. Auden says that time, which is intolerant of the brave and innocent, and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique, worships language…
DAW: Absolutely, absolutely.
CH: …and everyone by whom it lives. And since language, and there's also linguistics, in the field of linguistics, there have been tremendous breakthroughs made which do suggest an underlying in common, heritable, generative grammar. We owe a lot to Professor Chomsky in this field, if not in all others, and I myself have experienced seeing two of my children grow up speaking two languages without realizing that they're separate, English and Greek, and mastering them in a way that no adult could possibly hope to do, quite extraordinary. But it doesn't suggest anything supernatural to me at all.
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HH: Professor White, I go back to you with two questions. A quick one, ought we to virtually burn the heretics, Bethel and Sobran about their Shakespeare identity, just because we left it hanging, and why does the development of language support the supernatural, to return to the conversation?
DAW: Fair enough. I am so weary of the Shakespeare authorship question. All I can say is the man wrote the plays, and let's give him credit for them. I'll let it go at that.
HH: All right.
DAW: If I can state something of how I view the mystery of language, and I think it is very mysterious…by the way, I do agree with you, I took an interesting course once on the whole notion of generative grammar and substructure, linguistics. It is quite interesting. I'm not totally convinced. It's obviously worth the study. But what I'm talking about is something even more mysterious. Example, I was once sitting at the dinner table with a Godson who had not spoken much, and suddenly looked up from the table and said I want more peas. The parents jumped up, ran to the phone, called the grandparents, there was a big to-do, he'd spoken his first sentence, and the kid sat there mystified, because he didn't get his peas. Now it's a very simple example, but the fact that something happened in the brain of the child that those little round green vegetables were called by the signifier peas, and he had to use the word to get the thing, and he made the connection, and uttered it forth, is unlike anything else in the world, and certainly not like nature in that, I think you would agree with me, everything in science and nature basically we understand by cause and effect. Fair enough?
CH: Yes, that's why I say the natural world is wonderful enough.
DAW: But that cannot explain this mysterious and I defer to an American philosopher named Charles Pierce, who states that the mystery of what happens when a child looks at a furry beast and says cat, or round green vegetables and says peas, is not cause and effect, but he uses the word triadic, because you need the brain of the child, you need the furry animal, and you need the signifier cat, and we suddenly have something that's three way, not cause and effect. Now you can probably guess where I'm going. You certainly wouldn't agree with me, but in the beginning was the Word, let there be light, and suddenly we have in man something that I would say in the inner life goes beyond what can be explained by science in the world of nature. That is for me the beginning…
CH: All right, well first, since known to my family there was a little boy who just didn't speak for a long time, and then finally did utter a not bad sentence, and he was asked by his astounded parents you know, what had taken him so long, and he said he hadn't been able to think of anything worth saying.
DAW: (laughing)
CH: We know that some of what you say is self-evidently true, because for example, children say mouses instead of mice.
DAW: Yes.
CH: You don't hear adults say mouses. So they see a mouse, then they see two, and they say mouses. They're clearly using something that isn't taught them.
DAW: Well, it's true.
CH: It's innate.
DAW: But what I'm saying…
CH: But I mean, much, much, much, much more impressive than the opening passage of the Gospel of St. John is the realization that at a certain point, not very far back in the midst of evolutionary time, we split off from our cousins, and developed a pre-frontal lobe, and the ability to master language, and acquire memory.
DAW: But where did it come from?
CH: We are not absolutely clear exactly how this happened, but we're a lot, a lot clearer than we were even, say, two or three years ago. And I make no doubt that it will soon be very apparent how this happened. All the intervening steps will be known.
HH: And will be know, Christopher Hitchens…
CH: All the evidence is on my side then.
HH: Will we know, Christopher Hitchens, where the big bang came from in the relatively near future?
CH: No, I think quite possibly not, though if you read the work of Professor Steven Weinberg, a book called Looking Upward is I think it's title, I'm sure that's it, there are some incredibly marvelous and suggestive essays about that. The work of our great physicists is already making Einstein seem dated.
HH: And you think we already know, David Allen White?
DAW: I think we know and we've been told, but again, I hear this as another act of faith, that in the future, the revelation will be given to us, and then we will understand.
CH: No, no, no.
DAW: So…well, the revelation will come…
CH: It's not. Excuse me, sir…
DAW: …through exploration through computer models…
CH: Now you let yourself down. You let yourself down. What I just said was nothing like a prophecy. It's an exponential projection of extraordinary accumulations of scientific work that have already been brought about.
– – – –
HH: Professor White, right before we went to break, Mr. Hitchens said that his confidence in the explanation for unknown mysteries about the person and science is "the exponential projection of accumulated experience with fact." If you take that standard and apply it to the exponential projection of accumulated experience with the unknown, beginning with Socrates and extending through Walker Percy, doesn't that point us overwhelmingly to a belief in God, contrary to Mr. Hitchens' most recent book?
DAW: Well you see, that is precisely what brought me back to questions of faith, and eventually brought me into the Church. To quote my…well, if I may, one of our favorite writers, Evelyn Waugh, the Church is there, and it is a coherent philosophical system that Waugh says make intransigent historical claims. It's difficult to ignore. Let me just put it that way. But in any case, I do see at the center of things a mystery. But that mystery and the acknowledgement of that mystery allows us to go exploring. My worry is that science is turning into scientism as such, and too many people are taking it exclusively, and as they do so, the mystery of man himself is disappearing. You quote this line in the book, and it's appropriate, Hamlet saying to Horatio there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. By the end of the play, there's the astonishing moment at the death of Hamlet when Horatio, the skeptic and the agnostic, in his farewell, says goodnight sweet prince and flights of angels, sing thee to they rest. I find it overwhelmingly beautiful, and a great mystery that Horatio has learned there is more than he believed of in that universe. I find the mystery, the emotion, the beauty of it overwhelming, and I don't think it was based on something false or phony. I believe it has a very real base that is different from science, because we are half dust, and we explore the dust through nature, and we're have divinity, and the language the mystery of the internal life, and our spiritual yearning, which I think you now put into the world of science, draw us in that direction.
HH: Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Yeah, well I don't think Hamlet saw the ghost, either, though it's very…you can't have the play without it. But you see, you're trying to force me to sound like an absolutely dry and arid materialist.
DAW: No, you're not, and…
CH: I mean…
DAW: Let me…no, no, let me be fair…
CH: The fact that Democritus and Epicurus and Lucretius worked out, I have no idea how they managed to do this, that all matter was made of atoms. I daresay you don't contest that?
DAW: Matter, I would certainly say that matter is made of atoms…
CH: Well, for a long, long time, the atomist theory was viciously persecuted by the Church, and the works of Lucretius were nearly, were by the way, very beautiful poetry, were very nearly completely destroyed. Only one copy survived the Dark Ages.
DAW: Well, let me put it this way. The problem is when it becomes…
CH: It doesn't…The fact that I'm made of the same constituent matter as other animals and vegetable and mineral doesn't depress me. I'm sorry, it just doesn't. I find it rather a wonderful thought, if anything. But here's the thing, it doesn't matter subjectively whether it depresses me or not. The question is, is it or is it not the case? And you seem to be almost to be saying, which I think is, by the way, almost inseparable from the concept of faith, that we would be happier if we believed this kind of thing, not that it's true or that it's morally valid, but that it's consoling. Now again, I cannot make my mind work like that.
DAW: Let me give an example, Would you say that an Alexander Solzhenitsyn going into the gulag as an atheist, and coming out of the gulag as a believer, and indeed an orthodox Christian, was simply seeking some kind of comfort, a security blanket because of the horrors he was exposed to?
CH: Well, I don't think your example's a particularly fortunate one, because the brand of Russian orthodox Christianity that is actually advanced out of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a very deeply chauvinist, xenophobic, traditionalist, nationalist one to which I'm not surprised there's a number of Russians would have resorted under the pressure of Stalinism, but doesn't make it any more agreeable. If you're going to take a conversion experience of that kind, then you have to them all. More Jews gave up religion because of the Holocaust than adopted it, and it's so very, very easy to see why, in my opinion, unless you take the view that is taken by some rabbis, that the final solution was a punishment for the exile.
DAW: Well, again…
CH: Where the very teaching, in fact, that made many people pick up and leave the synagogue, and rightly so, that didn't believe that God would organize the burning alive of children in furnaces. So I don't know why they wouldn't believe that, since I think actions of that kind are actually very strongly recommended throughout the New Testament.
DAW: Oh, well, you know, that's another show right there. Don't have time to pursue that.
CH: I'm sorry to hear it.
DAW: Would you say that a Solzhenitsyn who came to faith under those circumstances was doing it out of a kind of cowardice?
CH: No, I certainly wouldn't say that, no.
DAW: But you would believe he was misguided?
CH: I think Russian Orthodoxy is a terrible belief held by a ghastly Church, with a hideous history. These are the people who brought us the protocols of the elders of Zion, among other things, and who said the czar was the holy father, a blasphemous thing to say, I would have thought from a Christian point of view, not that I should perhaps arrogate that position to myself.
DAW: You know, my other…
CH: There are many, many people whose experience of persecution and suffering have led them to doubt the existence of God, as you must know.
DAW: My worry, and it happens continuously now, is that the modern mind, and I think it's the modern mind that is absorbed in science, immediately goes to abstractions that will cover all cases, as opposed to the individual case, that is love thy neighbor as thyself, one on one, and that the individual soul, which is what I believe in an individual relationship with God the Creator and Christ the Redeemer of mankind, is quite literally responsible for choices and decisions on an individual basis. I am responsible for my actions. And to somehow make a large group or even an institution responsible is incredibly unfair, particularly the Catholic Church that puts the burden on me as an individual soul with the duty to save itself.
– – – –
HH: It's been fascinating. I want to thank both Christopher Hitchens and David Allen White for this conversation on faith, science and culture. Christopher Hitchens, I want to give you the opening of the closing statements. Your reaction to the conversation of the last couple of hours?
CH: Well, can I just take up very directly the point about responsibility?
HH: Yes.
CH: That Professor White just made? One of my most deeply rooted objections to Christianity is the idea of vicarious redemption, the idea that by human sacrifice of someone claiming to be, or claimed to his supporters to be the Son of God, that you can throw your sins on him and be, and have them washed away. I regard that as frankly a flat-out immoral doctrine, because vicarious redemption precisely robs you your personal responsibility. I think that the responsibilities we have to ourselves and others are inevitable and social, and come from our existence as a social species. When I give blood to somebody, I get satisfaction from doing it. I don't…double satisfaction, in point of fact. I don't lose a pint of blood, because I easily regenerate it, someone else gets one. That pleases me very much. I also feel I've done a good thing, and I also have a rare blood group, and I may one day need a transfusion myself, so I hope other people are doing the same thing and thinking in the same way. There's absolutely no need at all for a supernatural or Divine permission for this kind of thing, and if we didn't have it, we would have died out, and as we yet may.
HH: David Allen White, the conclusion goes you.
DAW: Well, I am a human being stumbling through this world, a pilgrim on a pilgrimage, often a poor sinner. I'm very grateful that God is there, and sent Christ to redeem us, and I'm grateful he founded a Church, and I'm particularly grateful for the Mass and the Sacrament of Confession that may help me on the road there. The argument will continue, and we'll find out at some point, one way or t'other.
HH: And since the two of you live all of ten minutes apart, though David Allen White is over the Potomac, and Christopher Hitchens on the Maryland side of it, perhaps you can meet at some point and discuss it in person. Once again, thank you, Christopher Hitchens, thank you, David Allen White, fascinating conversation.
CH: Pleasure, thank you.
End of interview.


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A Guide To Forskolin – The Ultimate Weight Loss Herbal Extract
Today, the name Forskolin is no more unknown to the doctors as well as the people who know a little bit about medicines. For the people who don't know, Forskolin is derived from a herb which ignites your body to burn fat in the most natural way possible. But there are many misconceptions and one of the most famous one is that the effects of the medicine which contain this herb are immediate, herbal effects are fast but they are not magic tricks.
What is in Forskolin which makes it the best weight loss Supplement?
Forscolin is derived from the Herb Coleus forskohlii which grows in the regions of Nepal and in some parts of India. The property which makes it the fat killing machine is its effect on the cell-regulating enzyme known as cyclic andenosine monophosphate (cAMP). The supplement causes cAMP to get rid of fatty acids from the body at faster rate and hence result in weight loss. This herb helps to lose fat up to large extent in few weeks with consistent doses in proper amount. It is most favoured because the weight loss due to it occurs in gradual durations; this makes it all look natural and healthy.
Are there any side-effects?
No, herb itself has no side effects. This is also one of the major reasons why Forscolin is the most popular medicine for the weight loss treatment. Though you should not blindly purchase this medicine just because it contains herb. You must verify the brand before buying it as there are fake products in the market too which promise immediate weight loss at very cheap rates.
Why is Forskolin such an important herb?
Apart from its ability to make weight loss come quicker, it helps to treat the patients of Asthma and also helps the patients recovering from heart problems. This herb is been matter of fact for thousands of researches due to its large amount of medical applications. It helps in lowering the blood pressure to relax the heart muscles and therefore it is advised to take controlled dosage of the pills as it may end up as low blood pressure in body if extreme doses are taken.
Which brands are the best for the Weight loss?
It depends from person to person. Some brands have high amount of the forskolin but that does not mean they will help you lose weight by blinking your eye. Effects can differ from person to person as well, on some it may be immediate on some it may take time, patience is the key to weight loss.
For best results you must follow your diet and exercise routines while taking these supplements. After all they are just supplements. If you are specific about brand then you can opt for cambogia garcinia on Amazon website. It has abundant amount of Forskolin and shows gradual results after few weeks.
There are many brands which offer all kind of weight loss supplements and you must take your doctor's advice before starting the doses.


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Hi guys, how's life? I haven't blogged in a while, I was a little bit busy... So, I am going to do a short post about what I've bought lately...
my recent buys: Lea & Levi's
I bought those jeans a couple days ago
the pockets
|both are skinny
|I love blue jeans
|my loyalty cards
Lea and Levi's always deliver good quality for a fair price! First, they felt tight for my usual size but lately I can feel them stretching out! Psssssttttt..... I tell you a secret, I don't have a sexy butt, so I love the way my butt looks in those!!
God Bless!


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Our annual plant sale is only weeks away!
This year we will have loads of veggies, herbs, annuals and perennials! If you love gardening and growing your own food, you don't want to miss our sale!
We will also have our Home Show, White Elephant Table and Hand-Painted Rocks! Over 100 lady bug rocks and many other fun rocks to place in your garden or a garden pot!
We look forward to seeing your happy face and if your anything like us, dirty hands from digging in the earth!


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Birthday Parties & Field Trips at Mills Gymnastics USA
Have a flippin' great time at Mills Gymnastics USA for your child's next birthday!
Experience the unique thrill of having a gymnastics-themed birthday party!
Foam pits, trampolines, bounce house, games, obstacle courses and more!
Parties are offered on Sundays at 11:00am, 12:30pm and 2:00pm.
Overnight parties are available on Fridays and Saturdays 8:30pm-8:30am.
Party Packages Include:
- 2 staff that set up, clean up and run your party
- 1 hour of private gym access
- 1 hour in a private celebration room
- Paper products (Cups, plates, utensils, etc.)
- Invitations
- 15 children
Let us help you plan an exciting and unforgettable party for your child.
Click here to download our: Birthday Party Flyer
Click here to download a Birthday Party Agreement form: Birthday Party Agreement
Prime times are booked 8 weeks in advance.
Call us at (734) 283-6550 to book your party today!
Field Trips
Mills Gymnastics USA offers field trips for children Monday – Friday.
We offer custom times too!
We work with:
- Preschools
- Girl / Boy Scout Troops
- Mom Groups
- Homeschool Groups
…and anybody else who would enjoy a day of fun at Mills Gymnastics USA!
Your field trip can be an instructional class or simply fun and games in one or multiple programs. Our staff will work with you to fit the needs of your particular group.
Click here to download a Field Trip Agreement form: Field Trip Agreement


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Product Information
Attractive as well as practical, the Original Corona range of pine bedroom and living room furniture is made from solid pine with a distressed waxed finish. It features eye-catching handles, hinges and wood carving detail for a time-worn look.
The Original Corona Pine 6 Seat Dining Set with Brown Seat Pads allow you to share a great meal with friends and family with a touch of Mexican flair. The large solid pine rectangular table is the centrepiece of this set and is finished with decorative iron studs. The six chairs feature distinctive backs and seat pads in brown faux-leather upholstery for the comfort of your diners.
Distressed Waxed Pine
Dining Table: W182.9cm x D91.4cm x H76.2cm
Dining Chairs: W41.9cm x D45.7cm x H106.7cm
- Dining Table and 6 Chairs
- Rectangular Top
- Brown Seat Pads
- Part of the Original Corona Range of Distressed Pine Furniture
Item Code:


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Registered: Oct 2000
Location: JP's bedModerator
Registered: Feb 2005
Location: Kamino Boot Camp
| Sigs | My Artwork | Sig Duel Record 24:4 | Alliance Respect Thread |
Registered: Jun 2005
Location: Singapore Star System
"I still find your lack of Faith disturbing..."
quote: (post)Originally posted by queeq
The canon never CONFIRMS Anakin is the chosen one... Lucas does.
quote: (post)Originally posted by queeq
Hey, I allowed you to disagree, extend me the same courtesy. I am not rewriting the saga, I would have preferred another path. There is a difference.
Registered: Jul 2005
Location: In your pants
"Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one." -Dr. Seuss
Registered: May 2004
quote: (post)Originally posted by queeq
But Anakin is never a guy we can cheer for, like Luke. And I think that sucks...so he always was a pathetic lifeform... why do we have to watch six hours about a pathetic life form???? Who does not change drastically except in outfit???
I say: Luke rules and he is the TRUE chosen one.
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Black Hawk Down is the classic modern military movie. An instant classic that is beloved by service members, veterans, and the public at large, the movie portrays the 1993 mission to capture Mohamed Farah Aidid and the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu.
Despite being an in depth look at what happens when everything goes wrong on a mission, Black Hawk Down is a pro-soldier movie showing the agony and heroism of modern combat – as well as the complete clusterf***s and how they impact the soldier on the ground.
But here are a half dozen things I bet you didn't know about Black Hawk Down.
All of the actors went through intensive training courses based on who they were portraying.
Fearing that the actors wouldn't seem authentic to audiences, the producers arranged for all of the actors playing Rangers to go through a one-week Ranger "boot camp" at Fort Benning. But they got off easy.
The actors portraying Delta Force commandos, the best of the best, took an intensive two-week course from the 1st Special Warfare Training Group at Fort Bragg.
Ron Eldard and the other actors playing the pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment met with captured pilot Michael Durant.
"Only the dead have seen an end to war."
The original quote was going to be from T.S. Elliot: "All our ignorance brings us closer to death."
But producers went with "Only the dead have seen an end to war" and said it was a Plato quote. Nope. It was written by George Santayana in "The Life of Reason". Whoops.
Luckily, we can blame it on Gen. Douglas MacArthur who used the quote and mistakenly attributed it to the Greek philosopher.
All of the fast rope scenes are real – the only animations are the crash sequences.
How do you make a military movie more realistic? You get the Department of Defense to provide you with a platoon of Army Rangers for all your fast-rope scenes. And that's exactly what happened.
Of course, you also need to have real helicopters and pilots. So why not grab some of the veterans of the actual battle from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Even the Ranger "extras" were actual Rangers from the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.
The outpouring of patriotism after 9/11 added to the movies success
Released just three months after September 11, 2001, and before major combat operation began, the swell of national pride and patriotism bolstered audiences.
The movie was based on a book. The book was based on a newspaper series.
The script from the movie was adapted from the book "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden, which itself was adapted from a 29-part series on the Battle of Mogadishu that Bowden did for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The helmets were a judgement call by director Ridley Scott.
Throughout the film, the Rangers all wear helmets with their last name written on them in Sharpie. While not factually true, Scott said it was needed to help the audience distinguish between characters because "they all look the same once the uniforms are on."


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(see here). There will - in the fullness of time - be better directions for putting it together than is now up at the Sampler-blog, but ... here are the pictures to tide you over :-)
|The front, all pieced together and with the border attached.
|Backing, pieced from left overs, miscuts and other scraps of the two fabrics used in the top.
|Marked up! and with the thread ready to roll.
|Gratuitous kitty-picture


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An initiative that began in May 2013, with the support of Café L'Artère, Coopérative de Solidarité, GENDER B(L)ENDER is Montréal's only queer open stage! The basis is fairly simple: create a safe(r) open stage where queer artists can freely explore their craft of performance… (read more)
"From Thick Skin to Femme Armour," in my ongoing project that seeks to visibilize and honour the resistance and resilience of transfemmes of colour through history and across generations as well as in contemporary everyday life. I use the figure of the femme amour as a literal, figurative, magical, spiritual, aesthetic, and political trope of resistance throughout this series. This project is comprised of a multiplicity of sculptures/outfits/installations, a photography project, two videos installations, a 30-mins performance set, and a series of articles, talks and collaborative workshops… (read more)


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Hello! Today is the first day of Quilt Petite Blog Hop and I'm so thrilled to have snagged the place to be the first blogger to share what I have made from this really amazing book.
I have this "girl-crush" thing for Sedef Imer coz everything she makes is just oh-so-pretty. From color coordination to pattern design to sewing techniques, Sedef has them all. No doubt. I told myself I had to get this book no matter what just by looking at the enticing book cover. Truly, this book speaks wonders of how small patchwork sewing can bring joy to daily life. Every page is eye candy with pops of colours and close up shots of the beautiful projects from cushion to placemat to noticeboard and of course, mini quilts. Sedef's sewing is very precise and delicate as seen from the pictures. That's one of the reasons why I love Sedef's work so much.
There are many techniques shared in the book so you can learn a whole lot even by just flipping the first few pages. Reading is easy and instructions are simple to follow. One major brownie point of this book is that all templates are in actual sizes. It makes sewing so much more enjoyable without the need to enlarge or shrink templates.
Okay here's what I made from Quilt Petite book. Two things. Oh well, I just couldn't stop at one.
First sewing: Bon Appetit Placemat
This one is completely handsewn and handquilted. Most of the projects in the book can be handsewn from what I see. You just need a little more patience and time. I used my favourite floral fabrics just like what Sedef did! I wanted to follow her style of dreamy flowery fabrics.
I am in awe with how Sedef designed the templates so they all match when lined up. It was so therapeutic to sew this project.
Since we don't use placemat at home, I asked my daughter if she would like to draw something so I can practice sewing illustration. She gamely drew her "favourite elephant drink water in the jungle". Then I added "Thailand" word for a good memory that I made this in Thailand.
It's going to be a placemat for the flower vase instead.
I wrote in IG the other day that "I think I'm going a little overboard with this lace thing". I still feel the same way looking at it now. But I LOVE IT.
I even sewn an adorable fabric tag at the back. Even if no one will flip over to see.
Second sewing: Scattered Stars
This sewing is a completely surprise for me coz I didn't plan to do it this way at all. It was supposed to be a mini wall quilt like Sedef's but because of my slow handsewing, I had to forgo all my initial ideas of making five coloured stars. I think Sedef will not mind at all I hope!
So I call it Scattered Stars Zippy Long Pouch. It's pretty long-ish about 12" length.
I took some time to handsew the patchwork stars even though they are not so difficult. I think it might be easier to handsew than paper piece.
I have to show you the handsewing stitches at the back.
The stars are the medium sized ones. The floral zipper adds a little charm to the pouch. I chose the zipper before deciding how to make the pouch to accommodate the zipper length. It's a weird way but it's my preferred way.
This pouch is not totally handsewn as planned. Only the stars are handsewn. All the other quilting and sewing are done by my trusty sewing machine late into the night. I think it did a pretty good job.
I quilted around the stars to make them pop.
Pretty floral pink fabric for interior just makes my heart flutter.
I hope I didn't deviate too much from the original version of Scattered Stars in the book! I really love the one in the book with scrappy big, medium and small stars.
These are the two things I made from Quilt Petite book! I hope you enjoyed reading them!
Sedef will be giving away a book+fabrics+lots zakka goodies at the end of the blog tour so do stop by her blog! Everyday from today till December 11, there will be a super talented blogger sharing what she has made from the book. Here's the list for the Quilt Petite Blog Hop:
November 6: Sedef at Down Grapevine Lane (intro + giveaway)
November 7: Wynn at Zakka Art (that's me!:))
November 8: Sarah at A Little Happy Place
November 9: Bridgette at The Family Hearth
November 10: Heidi at Fabric Mutt
November 11: Minki at Minki's Work Table
November 12: Ange at A Little Patchwork
November 13: Lauren at Molly and Mama
November 14: Michelle at Cole & Taffy
November 15: Nadra at Ellis & Higgs
November 16: Amy at Nana Company
November 17: Faith at Sarana Ave
November 18: Debbie at Happy Little Cottage
November 19: Erin at Why Not Sew
November 20: Amanda at Jedi Craft Girl
November 21: Melissa at Oh How Sweet
November 22: Stacy at Stacy Olson Design
November 23: Ayda at Cafe Nohut
November 24: Peta at She Quilts A Lot
November 25: Amanda at A Crafty Fox
November 26: Keera at Live Love Sew
November 27: Sharon at Lilabelle Lane
November 28: Kate at The Homemakery
November 29: Jemima at Tied With A Ribbon
November 30: Jodie at Ric Rac
December 1: Anorina at Samelia's Mum
December 2: Alisha at Ministry of Fabric
December 3: Xanthe at Wife-made
December 4: Cheri at Tinker With This
December 5: Kristyne at Pretty By Hand
December 6: Kimberly at Fat Quarter Shop
December 7: Veronica at Vivid Felicity
December 8: Shari at Doohikey Designs
December 9: Jina at Jina Barney Designz
December 10: Emma at Emma Jean Jansen
December 11: Sedef at Down Grapevine Lane (wrap up + giveaway winner)
You can buy this fantastic book from Book Depository and Amazon.


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I just bought a new bag of chicken feed, what they call "scratch." It's mostly cracked corn, with some sunflower seeds in the mix. They also get a granular "laying mash" to get better egg production. Both come in heavy paper bags like this one. Couldn't get more plain and practical.
Decades ago, feed for chickens and other farm animals came in cotton bags. Once manufacturers realized thrifty farm wives were using the material for clothing, they began using attractive prints (like those at the right) and smaller labels, or paper labels that could be torn off.
I don't know when the practice ended, but they were still doing it in the 1950's when my father took his new, city-bred wife to live in the country, where they kept chickens and rabbits. My mother never took to farm life and it didn't last long, but she lived there when she became pregnant with me. And though she never could stand to kill and dress chickens, she could sew anything. (Still can.) So she used the feed bags to make a quilt for her first baby, using the appropriate theme - chickens, with a quilted pattern of chicken wire, which you can see on the left side of the picture above.
When I had my first baby I tried my hand at quilting, but I'm afraid Mom didn't pass her sewing talents on to me. But my mother's baby quilt hung in my daughter's nursery, and hangs in my bedroom today.


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Another election – still no representation
Like many Israelis, I have yet to decide exactly how to cast my vote in next week's election. A succession of polls indicates that around one in four Israelis have yet to choose who to select at the ballot box. Unfortunately, calculating who to vote for in Israel is rarely a simple exercise and the decision often boils down to little more than an educated guess at which party will pursue the most palatable agenda. Another troubling aspect of the electoral conundrum is the reality that my vote will not actually contribute towards choosing a representative, an individual likely to feel a responsibility towards me as their constituent. As such, the act of voting in Israel is reduced to participation in a formalized poll rather than the election of a representative. It is a serious flaw in our political process, which if rectified would immeasurably improve the way our country is governed.
A quick glance at the history of our electoral system is an indicator that it is in desperate need of reform. The system that we have in place today was inherited from the pre-1948 yishuv (Jewish community) and has remained largely unchanged ever since. In other words, we are using the exact same electoral system designed for a community of around 700,000 largely homogenous people, compared to a multi-faceted society of around eight million today.
The Israel of 2012 is almost unrecognizable from the Israel of the 1940s, yet we choose our parliament in almost identical fashion. Treating a population of several hundred thousand people as one electoral district, represented by all 120 members of Knesset, may have been appropriate seven decades ago. But in today's highly complex country of several million, it means that all are represented by everyone and consequently no one. Many rightly argue that our system, which invariably produces an unwieldy coalition packed with unfeasible multiple parties, is an obstacle to the stable government and sensible long-term decision making that our country needs. Perhaps just as important though, the lack of real representation engendered by the current system also makes a mockery of the fundamental bond between the people and its parliament.
The fact is that in Israel, we the voters are largely inconsequential to most members of parliament. Unlike other systems across the world, which employ local electoral districts, the ambitions and success of our legislators are almost entirely unrelated to the approval of the voters themselves. Members of Knesset are indebted to party functionaries who decide where they are placed on the list of parliamentary candidates. Their careers are far more dependent on party committees rather than public satisfaction. And who can really blame the MK who chooses to attend the bar mitzvah of the grandson of a leading party figure over a meeting of concerned citizens on important issues? With the party acting as a buffer between the voter and parliamentary candidates, our outdated system dictates that any vaguely ambitious politician must choose party before public. The result is that lawmakers are simply not duty-bound to represent the interests of the country's citizens. Consequently, you and I have no address to turn to for representing our concerns or problems to government. There is no representative mandated to present your objection to the Housing Ministry over a local construction project or to lobby the Education Ministry for additional schools in your area. The voter-parliamentarian relationship is an entirely one-way street. You elect them with little prospect of representation in return.
Of course, our political parties are not entirely unaware of the need to 'represent.' Most parties can be seen scrambling before an election campaign looking to muster a 'representative' list of parliamentary candidates – This usually includes a certain percentage of women (outside of the ultra-Orthodox parties), a balance of secular and religious candidates, a few Mizrachim and perhaps a Russian or Ethiopian candidate thrown in for good measure. Let's be clear, this is not representation. It is electoral lip service to the public. It mistakenly assumes that my concerns can be better represented by someone who happens to share the same skin color or level of religious (non) observance as me.
The real business of representation goes way beyond shared backgrounds. It also extends beyond shared beliefs. Even if you vote for a party that you assume will fight for the causes close to your heart, what happens if they don't receive enough votes to enter the Knesset? Quite simply, you are left without so much as even a theoretical representative. We persist with a 'winner takes all' model of representation where those unlucky enough to pick the loser have their parliamentary voice snatched out of sight. Real representation requires local electoral districts because they produce legislators who are dedicated to addressing the concerns of their constituents whether they voted for them or not. Whether these local representatives are committed to doing so out of a sense of public duty, or because they understand that it will help increase their support at the ballot box next time round matters little. One way or the other, through social conscience, self interest or both, they are required to take an interest in their constituents. As such, local electoral districts produce genuine public servants, which can only benefit Israeli citizens of all political persuasions.
Previous attempts at electoral reform have inevitably been nixed by those afraid of weakening their own political position. During the current campaign, such reform has remained a side issue at best. Yet the absence of local representatives remains a fundamental weakness in the way our country is governed, effectively denying the people direct access to parliament. Hopefully far-sighted legislators in the next Knesset will push the reform agenda, although this may be wishful thinking. More to the point perhaps, if a party existed that seriously prioritized electoral change and local representation, it would certainly help to solve my voting dilemma.


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I made unexpectedly good progress with editing last night and was able to complete the selection and set it uploading over-night. The photos are now all tagged and the set is linked from our Photos page.
I was able to walk more of the trail this year and there are more shots taken in forest than I've done for some years. Combined with the heavy overcast on the day I had to make some compromises, shooting at higher ISO (which tends to make the images more grainy) and lower shutter speeds (which tends to make the images less sharpe)
I'm not unhappy with the results, but you may find some of the images taken in lower light won't blow up as well in print, but they should be OK for viewing on a screen.