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Schneider's purpose is to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. We call this Life Is On. Our mission is to be your digital partner for Sustainability and Efficiency.
We drive digital transformation by integrating world-leading process and energy technologies, end-point to cloud connecting products, controls, software and services, across the entire lifecycle, enabling integrated company management, for homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries.
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The Power of Protein
Endurance athletes use protein for maintaining aerobic metabolism. When athletes don't get enough, the body takes protein from lean tissue, which gives overtrained endurance athletes a gaunt appearance. A protein deficit also slows recovery. The recommended dose is 1.2 to 1.4 g per kilogram of body weight/day of protein. For a 130-pound athlete, this means a total of 72 to 84 g protein a day.
–American Journal of Sports Medicine, March 1987; European Journal of Applied Physiology, 1996, vol. 74, no.5

subset: commoncrawl


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Although Todd Goldman began painting in high school, he didn't pursue his artistic interests until years later. Instead, he earned a degree in accounting from the University of Florida and worked as a CPA for six years followed by a handful of odd jobs. Frustrated with the state of things, Goldman began to doodle just as he had when he was younger, "making fun of the world through his stupid doodles." After six months, Goldman had collected enough designs to start david & goliath, a t-shirt company based on his doodles, in 2000. Currently, david & goliath makes all kinds of products with thousands of unique designs – "if it's funny and stupid, they'll make it." Goldman himself continues to create his own art and doodles as well as several side projects, which included compiling a book of his art called "Boys Are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them," released in 2005. Since then, Goldman has released other books, like "Girls are Weirdos But They Smell Pretty" and the two children's books "Animal Soup" and "The Zoo I Drew." In 2007, Goldman began working with FOX on a show called "The Uglies" and with Ashton Kutcher on an animated series called "BLAHgirls.com." After witnessing the resounding success of his pieces in galleries around the country, Goldman opened his own gallery, Pop-Factory, in 2008. Goldman's artwork is exhibited and collected all around the world. Collectors of his works include Jessica Simpson, Rihanna, John Goodman, and Sir Paul McCartney. Goldman usually has at least ten art shows in any given year, from Los Angeles to London to Japan.


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Program helps reduce conflict as St. Cloud struggles with race issues
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A program at St. Cloud State University is teaching high school and college students how to better communicate with people from different backgrounds.
It's a long-term project taking place during a difficult time in St. Cloud, as the area faces challenges that stem from rapid demographic shifts.
The St. Cloud school district has come under fire for its handling of allegations of racial and religious bullying at two high schools. The high school students in this program say it's transformed how they deal with their peers when conflicts arise at school.
Fardowsa Iman, a Somali student at St. Cloud Technical High School, says she's learning how to deal with conflict through "Communicating Common Ground" program.
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Iman is one of nearly 30 high school students from the St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids-Rice school districts participating in this program at St. Cloud State University. Iman said she is learning that people with differences, from cultural to religious, share more common goals and concerns than most people think. She's learning how to ask thoughtful questions and reflect on these differences.
"You get more answers and you feel better talking it out than just fighting, because if you fight you really don't resolve anything," she said. "And talking it out usually makes you feel better and you're much happier, and (have) less consequences, too."
Recently, Iman argued with one of her friends. While her friend decided to hit another student in their circle of friends, Iman decided to walk away from the situation. Her friend was expelled from school.
Iman says before this program, she probably would have fought back. Iman and Tech High assistant principal Stacie Vos shared this positive example during the program's last session of the year.
Vos says many of her seniors in the program have participated since they were freshmen.
"And as seniors this year, I'm really seeing some nice leadership skills in them," Vos said. "For instance, we've had some conflict that occurs in classrooms or in the hallways that our students have now stood up to intervene and mediate and I'm very proud of the fact that they're doing that."
Vos attributes these leadership skills to communication strategies her students are adopting during the project's sessions. She says these skills will be necessary at all levels into the future.
"We realize that we have work to do, because we are always going to have new kids coming to us that need to be educated about each other and the better I become at finding different strategies to make that happen, the more peaceful our schools are," she said.
St. Cloud State students enrolled in an intercultural communication course moderate these sessions. Professor Eddah Mutua-Kombo, who leads the program in partnership with the St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids-Rice school districts, said it gives students a comfortable space to get to know one another.
Mutua-Kombo has trained about 30 of her students each spring semester for the past four years to help high school students respond to daily challenges they encounter based on their differences. She teaches students what happens when communities, such as St. Cloud, struggle with change.
"For a very long time, St. Cloud was a racially and culturally homogeneous community," Mutua-Kombo said. "And then in the last 10-15 years, people from different cultures, with different religions, with different lifestyles come into this community that had been homogeneous for quite a while, so that in itself is going to create problems."
Mutua-Kombo says these problems aren't unique to St. Cloud -- they happen all over the world. She has done extensive research on peace and conflict in Africa, including Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, which helps her understand how to manage conflict.
"I truly believe (through) the experiences that I've had outside of the United States and here, I am able to develop a sophisticated way of looking at conflict and being very careful in the way I analyze conflict, being very patient, and looking at multiple factors that explain that state of discomfort, that state of misunderstanding," she said.
"And not using or limiting myself to one given variable, because I recognize that there are too many of them that will cause that friction, tension, discomfort, and anger."
She teaches her students the communication styles of different cultures -- western and nonwestern -- to avoid misunderstandings.
For example, in some cultures, people are assertive, which may come off as rude, while others may become emotional when trying to communicate why they're upset.
Mutua-Kombo said that may stem from living in a country with a bitter or oppressive history. Students are learning that conflicts can arise even within groups of people.
The program started out as part of a national initiative that began in 2000 with more than 30 partnerships.
The project was co-sponsored by the National Communication Association, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Campus Compact, and American Association for Higher Education.
California State University in Northridge was among one of the first participating colleges that partnered with Ulysses S. Grant Senior High School, where tensions between Armenian-American and Latino students were long-standing.
The project's goal is to help young people respect and understand diversity, in hopes that THAT will trickle into neighborhoods across the nation and reduce prejudice and discrimination.
Now local projects, such as the one in St. Cloud, are continuing on their own. Mutua-Kombo said this isn't a quick fix to current tensions in the St. Cloud area, but rather a long-term project.
"And that is why 'Communicating Common Ground' plays that role of preparing the future community members to be more receptive, to be more understanding, to have the vocabulary, to have the language, to have the consciousness for the future people that might come," Mutua-Kombo said.
Technical High School Assistant Principal Stacie Vos says she and her students are starting their own mini-version of the project at their high school campus. They're getting together every other Friday during lunch to lead discussions on campus and reach out to students who aren't part of the St. Cloud State program. Fardowsa Iman says she's excited about that prospect.
"In our school, [some students] have a hard time dealing with the Somali community and they have a lot of misconceptions and sometimes they don't know how to come up and ask [questions]," she said. "So I'm hoping that we just kind of educate the kids in our school and in our grade."
Since 2006, about 175 college and high students have gone through this program. While tensions remain in St. Cloud, organizers say they believe this generation of students can help change the climate in the community down the road.


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From Christian Peacemaker Teams based in Hebron:
19 April 2010
CPT-Palestine has decided to endorse formally the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as called for by Palestinian NGOs, because sixty years of negotiations and diplomacy have only enabled Israel to solidify its military occupation of Palestine. The international community has long called for Palestinian society to resist the violence of the Occupation nonviolently, so we, as members of an international peace organization, believe that when Palestinians mount nonviolent campaigns against the Occupation, we are morally obligated to support them.
We affirm the words of Palestinian Christian leaders in their Kairos Document: "These advocacy campaigns must be carried out with courage, openly and sincerely proclaiming that their object is not revenge but rather to put an end to the existing evil, liberating both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice. The aim is to free both peoples from extremist positions of the different Israeli governments, bringing both to justice and reconciliation. In this spirit and with this dedication we will eventually reach the longed-for resolution to our problems, as indeed happened in South Africa and with many other liberation movements in the world."
We recommend that members of our constituency review the following resources, so they can better understand the context from which the BDS movement has arisen:
1) The Kairos Palestine Document, "A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering." The document is available as a PDF file in seven languages at http://www.kairospalestine.ps/?q=node/2 and at http://www.oikoumene.org/gr/resources/documents/other-ecumenical-bodies/kairos-palestine-document.html
2) "Palestinian Civil Society Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel Until it Complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights 9 July 2005": http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52
3) "Who Profits from the Occupation?" http://www.whoprofits.org/
4) A 2009 report by a fact-finding committee of South African social scientists, which notes that "three pillars of apartheid in South Africa" are all practiced by Israel in the Occupied Territories: demarcating people into racial groups and allotting superior rights, privileges and services to the dominant racial group; segregating people into different geographic areas and restricting their movements, and suppressing any opposition to the regime using administrative detention, torture, censorship, banning, and assassination." <a href="http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-378.phtml# http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-378.phtml# <http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-378.phtml
5) Dr. Neve Gordon's reflection, "Boycott Israel: An Israeli comes to the painful conclusion that it's the only way to save his country," http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/20/opinion/oe-gordon20. See also "Palestinians, Jews, citizens of Israel, join the Palestinian call for a BDS campaign against Israel http://boycottisrael.info/content/points-unity and video clip by Israeli-American rap artist, Invincible, in support of the BDS movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepX0PcjzfA
After Gordon's piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times, he nearly lost his job at Ben Gurion University. See the critique of Gordon's position by famed peace and human rights activist Uri Avnery: http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1251547904 (which contains Archbishop Tutu's thoughts on the efficacy of boycotts) and subsequent critiques of Avnery's position by South African Ran Greenstein ("I agree more with Gordon than Avnery") http://gush-shalom.org.toibillboard.info/RanGreen.htm Abraham Simhony http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/archive/1251974606/ and Alternative Information Center director, Michel Warschawsky "Yes to BDS!" http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1733


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First among all nations the United States made "restraint of trade" a crime, and voted an economic ideal into law. One of its most energetic exponents looks back on that unique, vague, and unenforceable bit of legislation: the Sherman Antitrust Act
October 1960
Ever since the Civil War there has been a continuous conflict between two opposing ideals in American economic thinking. The first of them says that business management, if relieved from the rigors of cutthroat competition, will be fair and benevolent. The age of competition is over, the theory continues, and great corporations with the power to dominate prices benefit the economy. In the field of big business, this philosophy justifies giant mergers. In the field of small business, it leads to the passage of fair trade laws and similar forms of legalized price fixing.
J. P. Morgan is the traditional hero of this philosophy. He organized United States Steel, our first billion-dollar enterprise, to make investments secure, and to eliminate cutthroat competition in steel. Andrew Carnegie, who was doing pretty well as an aggressive competitor, was paid twice what he thought his business was worth to go along. Morgan made the steel business safer for the investor but tough on the consumer, and it has been so ever since.
The opposing economic ideal says that industrial progress can best be obtained in a free market, where prices are fixed by competition and where success depends on efficiency rather than market control. Under this theory it becomes the government's function not to control or regulate but only to maintain freedom in the market place by prosecuting combinations whenever they become large enough to fix prices. Henry Ford represents this ideal. By producing cars at cut prices on a nationwide scale, he helped wreck many of the existing automobile companies. But at the same time he revolutionized the industry.
This second ideal is also represented by a remarkable piece of legislation called the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed by Congress on July 2, 1890, which states that "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal." The act goes on to authorize the federal government to proceed against trusts which violate the act, and empowers federal circuit courts with jurisdiction over such violations.
If I may be permitted to say so, as one who has had some experience with enforcing it, this law is historically unique. Prior to the Second World War, no other nation had any legislation like it. It is different from any other criminal statute because it makes it a crime to violate a vaguely stated economic policy—and a policy, what is more, on which public: attitudes often change. The average American citizen—and, indeed, the average court which administers the Sherman act —would like to believe simultaneously in both of the conflicting economic ideals described above. For that reason, the Supreme Court swings back and forth in Sherman act cases, in more important ones splitting five to four. The history of the Sherman act is the history of the conflicts and compromises between these two economic ideals.
But the dominant ideal in our American economic thinking has been the ideal of the Sherman act. The business pressures against its actual enforcement are great, but support of the principle of the act is so unanimous that no one ever suggests its repeal. Big business, labor, farmers—each economic group wants the Sherman act strictly enforced, against everyone but itself.
In meeting these pressures the Sherman act has shown extraordinary elasticity. It may bend at times, but it always bounces back. Thus it is like a constitutional provision rather than an ordinary statute, and its history tells much about our national attempt to create an economy that will be at the same time both disciplined and free.
How was this ideal born in the first place? The most improbable feature of the Sherman act is that this apparently anti-big business measure was introduced by a senator who was a high-tariff advocate and an extreme conservative, and was passed with only one dissenting vote by a big-business Republican Congress.
The initial pressure for it came from agriculture, which since the Civil War had been reduced to a fairly steady depression. Railroad monopolies were charging farmers all the traffic would bear, and sometimes a little more. Rates were rigged to favor big railroad customers and ruin small ones. As farm income fell, prices that farmers had to pay rose steadily. Monopolies kept them high. If the pressure from the agricultural states was strong, so was the rebellion against other aspects of the dog-cat-dog business ethics of the times. The necessity of some restraint on such practices came at last to be recognized even by business itself.
Big business during the latter half of the nineteenth century had come to regard competition as an unmitigated evil which could be alleviated only by combination. At first the combinations took the form of "pools" or agreements—regional rather than national—to restrain trade, to control prices, to restrict output and divide markets. But businessmen soon learned that agreements between members of an industry were too weak. Only the surrender of business independence by the units could make domination of the market certain.
Pools gave way to trusts, the first of which, established by Standard Oil in 1879, became a model for subsequent business combinations. Each party to the trust surrendered his stock-voting power to trustees, receiving trust certificates in return. Thus the nine trustees of the Standard Oil Trust, without the investment of a dollar, obtained absolute power over the nation's oil industry. The pattern set by Standard Oil was so widely followed that the name "trust" became a byword for any large industrial combination even after the trust device had been abandoned.
Prior to the Sherman act the federal government had no power to prevent predatory business activities. Therefore, the states themselves began an ineffective attack on the trusts in state courts. In 1887 Louisiana prosecuted the Cotton Oil Trust. In 1889 California prosecuted the Sugar Trust; in 1890 Nebraska prosecuted the Whiskey Trust. The attorney general of Ohio sought to repeal the charter of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio.
In 1892 the supreme court of Ohio ordered the local oil company to sever its connections with the Standard Oil Trust. The order was never effectively enforced. But these state attacks on it made the device so risky that corporate organizations looked for some other form of combination that could not be prosecuted under state law. New Jersey provided the model, by amending its incorporation statute to permit one corporation to own the stock of another. From then on it was easy.
Corporations A, B, and C would give 51 per cent oftheir stock to holding company X. Holding company X would in turn give 51 per cent of its stock to holding company Y. Thus holding company Y, with only about 25 per cent interest in the operating companies, controlled them completely. Y would transfer enough stock to Z, at which point Z needed only 12½ per cent to control the industry. And so on until fantastic pyramids were built up. No state could attack these pyramids because they were legal in the state of incorporation. Only Congress could interfere with this process.
In July, 1888, John Sherman, senator from Ohio, introduced the resolution that led to the passage of the Sherman act. He had been Secretary of the Treasury under President Hayes and was known as an expert in finance and taxation. He was big business-minded and an ardent advocate of high tariffs. In this important respect, he was opposed to the very interests that were demanding antimonopoly legislation. In the farm belt the tariff was called the mother of monopoly. Sherman could have no part in such radical doctrine. His resolution reconciled that contradiction very neatly. It asked the Finance Committee to report on a bill that would
tend to preserve freedom of trade and production, the natural competition of increasing production, the lowering of prices by such competition, and the full benefit designed by and hitherto conferred by the policy of the government to protect and encourage American industries by levying duties on imported goods.
The Sherman act as it reads today was passed in the Senate 52 yeas to 1 nay, and signed by President Harrison on July 2, 1890. No votes were cast against it in the House.
The act is unexampled in economic legislation. In effect it says: "We want competition in the United States and we will leave it to the federal judiciary to determine, case by case, just what action constitutes a restraint on competition." That this law could be passed by a conservative Republican Congress whose most influential leaders were closely associated with big business is remarkable in the extreme. Many writers have argued that the act was a hypocritical piece of legislation, designed as a political sop to the farm belt, and that no one expected it to be of any consequence. For example, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, who was known as J. P. Morgan's floor broker in the Senate, voted for it.
Such facts are sometimes cited to support the view that the original passage of the bill was only an attempt to placate western senators in exchange for votes on higher tariffs. But this interpretation has been completely refuted by Hans B. Thorelli in his recent book, The Federal Antitrust Policy, the most complete and objective analysis of the history of American monopoly policy. Thorelli concludes that a majority of congressmen were sincere and that the Sherman act represented for men of both parties the symbol and the image of what they sincerely desired the American economy to become.
By that I do not mean that the Republican supporters of lhe act would have welcomed the breakup of great American combinations into smaller units. At the same time, they would have instinctively rejected the system of domestic and international cartels that had been growing up in Germany and spreading to France from 1870 on, which would surely have become the American pattern if the Sherman act had not been passed.
The Sherman act filled in with the American economic and legal philosophy that was religiously held in 1890 and which is still our dominant philosophy today. In 1890 Americans distrusted any form of governmental regulation. It was the tradition of the American common law that the relation between business and government should be based on some broad common-law principle which would acquire delimit meaning only through a series of court decisions. The Sherman act followed that tradition. Our faith in the common law was such that Congress believed that the courts could give a better and more practical meaning to the principles of the act than Congress could possibly do by further definition or regulation.
The Sherman act was definitely on the shelf during the administrations of Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley. Cleveland's attorney general not only instituted no proceedings but dropped the prosecution of the notorious Cash Register Trust, even though he had won a victory in the lower court. Under Cleveland the principal impact of the Sherman act was against labor in breaking the Pullman strike. McKinley was equally indifferent to the Sherman act. During his four and one-half years only three suits were brought. The first Sherman act decision by the Supreme Court was in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight & Co. It amounted to a virtual repeal of the act. The Supreme Court held that the Sugar Trust, in acquiring a monopoly over sugar manufacturing, affected interstate commerce only indirectly and, therefore, did not violate the act. As Justice John Marshall Harlan pointed out in his dissent: "While the opinion of the Omit in this case does not declare the Act of 1890 to be unconstitutional, it defeats the main object for which it was passed." The Knight case thus emasculated the Sherman act. As a result of that decision the government became powerless to prevent the formation of a monopoly through the device of a holding company.
Yet within the short space of eight years, through the daring and ingenuity of Theodore Roosevelt, the Sherman act was transformed again from a meaningless and ineffective formula into a sharp weapon. Theodore Roosevelt was one the few politicians of his time who had seriously studied the antitrust problem. He had his first experience with monopoly power as a New York State assemblyman during the investigation of Jay Gould. He campaigned for re-election on the antimonopoly issue in 1882. In 1899, as governor, he wrote: "I have been in a great quandary over trusts. I do not know what attitude to take. I do not intend to play a demagogue. On the other hand, I do intend, so far as in me lies, to see that the rich man is held to the same accountability as the poor man, and when the rich man is rich enough to buy unscrupulous advise from very able lawyer, this is not always easy."(Italics added.)
It was the empire-building ambition of J. P. Morgan that gave Theodore Roosevelt his chance. During the last year of the McKinley Administration the Northern Securities Company had been formed as a compromise between E. H. Harriman and Morgan in their fight to control the Northern Pacific Railroad. The holding company device was used to combine under one man agement two of the nation's largest competing rail roads, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern. Had the scheme succeeded, it could have led to the domination of all American railroads by this group. It could have created a pattern for the cartelization of all American industry.
Roosevelt, as one of the first acts of his Administration, determined to attack this respected citadel of corporate power. This enterprise was very different from that of using the act to attack mere dishonesty in business, and Roosevelt must have realized that the legal odds were very much against him. A careful lawyer would have advised him that the Knight case exempted J. P. Morgan's ambitious plans. The decision in the Knight case stood for the principle that the acquisition of monopoly control was immune from attack because, though it affected prices "indirectly," it was not a conspiracy to fix them "directly."
The issue as Roosevelt saw it went far beyond the merger of the two railroads involved in Northern Securities. The issue was nothing less than effective national sovereignty. The federal government had been relegated to such minor roles as distributing the mail and collecting tariff duties. Big business was the real sovereign in infinitely more important areas. In the Northern Securities case, Theodore Roosevelt was to obtain for the federal government a magna carta limiting the power of the business princes.
Roosevelt gambled that the Supreme Court, with new faces in it since the Knight case, would repudiate or at least alter that decision. He directed Attorney General Philander C. Knox to draw up a case against the Northern Securities Company. It was to be a head-on attack on the philosophy of the Knight case decision. Fully aware of the tremendous pressures that would be exerted against him, he directed Knox to prepare the prosecution in complete secrecy. Not even his close friend and adviser, Elihu Root, the Secretary of War, was told.
When Knox finally released to the press his intention to prosecute Northern Securities, there was consternation and panic in the financial world. Root, a Wall Street lawyer, was dismayed and resentful. Morgan and his like-minded friend, Senator Chauncey Depew of New York, descended upon the White House like the emissaries of some independent sovereignty whose rights were being invaded. But by that time the prosecution was a fait accompli.
The Court was bitterly divided, five to four. The majority held that the Sherman act was intended to prevent giant combinations formed under any device and that such exercise of congressional power over industry was not unconstitutional.
Holmes, who wrote one of the two principal dissents, made the statement, believed by many at that time, that the Sherman act was not intended to prevent combinations in restraint of trade. He said: "It was the ferocious extreme of competition with others, not the cessation of competition among the partners, that was the evil feared."
Justice Holmes had faith in the benevolence and efficiency of the rich. He believed that the Constitution should protect them in their efforts to create industrial empires. But the ideal of a dynamic competitive economy and government-maintained freedom of industrial opportunity, I believe, was beyond him. He would have sincerely approved of the system of domestic and international cartels that dominated industry and caused it to stagnate in Europe before World War II.
Roosevelt, though a rich man himself, was one of the few men of his time to realize the destiny of America as a land of economic freedom. He had the ability to infuse the public with his point of view. Senator Sherman initiated the antitrust act, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who gave it vigor and meaning, made the policy of the Sherman act an economic religion and its violation an economic sin, and, finally, made it emotionally impossible for American business to co-operate in the European cartel system.
To appraise the effect of the Sherman act on American business institutions correctly we must view it apart from particular prosecutions, or particular periods of enforcement or nonenforcement. Theodore Roosevelt's achievement was to enshrine the ideal of the act as part of our national folklore. And its influence has continued in a far more potent way than perhaps any other statute on the books. The image of the Sherman act has not prevented tremendous concentrations of economic power, but it has prevented such concentrations from obtaining legitimate status.
Only once since its passage has the principle of the act been repudiated. That was in production codes of the National Recovery Administration during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. They were designed to raise prices and restrict production, after the European model. The theory was that this would protect investments and rescue business from insolvency.
But the competitive tradition represented by the Sherman act was too strong for the NRA. The Sherman act over the years, even when it was unenforced, had built up an abiding faith that the elimination of competition in business was morally and economically wrong. Then the Supreme Court threw out the NRA, and Franklin Roosevelt turned back to the antitrust laws as a major instrument of economic policy, and placed me in charge of their enforcement.
When I took office, years of disuse of the Sherman act, culminating in its repudiation by NRA, had made violation of the antitrust laws common, almost respectable. I will never forget the amazement of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, an organization whose profits were used to support the University of Wisconsin, when the Justice Department charged it with using a vitamin patent to raise prices and restrict manufacture of important food products. It never occurred to the high-minded management of this foundation that it was doing anything wrong. The indictment was considered an attack on education itself.
I believed that my principal function was to convince American businessmen that the Sherman act represented something more than a pious platitude; second, that its enforcement was an important economic policy. But there was very little support among economists for the latter notion.
As indictments of respectable people began to pour out from the Justice Department in unprecedented numbers, cries of outrage could be heard from coast to coast. I will never forget the pain and astonishment caused when criminal charges were brought against the American Medical Association, which had established a pretty effective boycott on all forms of group health plans. I was pictured as a wild man whose sanity was in considerable doubt. One major newspaper referred to me as "an idiot in a powder mill." Letters of protest poured into the White House. Adverse publicity reached its peak when the Associated Press was charged with violation of the Sherman act for refusing to sell its news service to any new newspaper that would be competing with one of its member publications. Editorials appeared from coast to coast accusing the department of destroying freedom of the press.
It is difficult now to appraise the economic effect of the revival of the Sherman act at that time. Opinions differ, and my own is, of course, biased. But this at least can be said: American business learned that the Sherman act was something more than a false front to our business structure. The public gained an idea of the purpose of the act, the act itself gained renewed vitality, and American business approved this revival.
There are two principal evils of concentrated economic power in a democracy. The first is the power of concentrated industry to charge administered prices rather than prices based on competitive demand. A second is the tendency of such empires to swallow up local businesses and drain away local capital. Prior to the Depression this condition had advanced so far that our concentrated industrial groups had helped destroy their own markets by siphoning off the dollars that could have been a source of local purchasing power. It is idle to say that periodic enforcement of the antitrust laws has solved these problems, but the laws themselves have given us as an image of what our economy should be. In the cartel economy no one could question the legitimacy of the recent rises in steel—or any other—prices. In an antitrust-minded economy it seems a legitimate and natural thing for a congressional committee to call the companies to account.
Some indication of what American industry might have become without the curb of the Sherman act is to be found in the Senate hearings on labor so widely publicized this past year. It had been my belief when I took office that labor unions, like any other organizations in business, were subject to antitrust laws when the large ones tried to swallow up the smaller ones by using the predatory practices of the old-fashioned trust.
A liberal majority on the Supreme Court of the United States refused to accept my argument that labor coercion (i.e., collective bargaining) should be limited to legitimate labor objectives. They gave the unions a broad and sweeping exemption from any application of the Sherman act, whatever they did, unless they combined with their employers. They permitted one union, by strike or boycott, to destroy another. Thus the Teamster with their control over transportation became the fastest growing labor union in the world. The only way employers could survive was to buy them off. The brigandry of the 1880's was repeated, but now by unions in control of bottlenecks in transportations and building. The unhappy spectacle that is presented to the American public today is a direct result of the Court's decision.
No doubt the liberal majority that bestowed the exemption felt, as Holmes felt about business in the Northern Securities case, that labor leadership if not curbed by the Sherman act would nevertheless be benevolent. But what has actually happened in the labor movement is the picture of what would have happened in American industry had Teddy Roosevelt lost his fight in the Northern Securities case fifty-six years ago.


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The Labor Department on Friday issues its report on inflation for the month of November. Consumer prices have been growing slowly, at an annual rate of about 2 percent.
The Consumer Price Index is one of the most familiar measures in economics and politics. But some in Washington want to change the way the index is calculated to better reflect people's shopping habits.
While the proposed change is described as a technical fix, it could also cut the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
It's a small number, but the inflation measure can make big waves. It's used to adjust Social Security and other retirement benefits. And like any government statistic with the potential to move markets, it's a closely guarded secret until the official announcement.
"The areas where the people that produce the CPI work are certainly sealed off from everyone else during this period," says John Greenlees, who heads the Division of Price and Index Number Research for the government. He says behind that little number, there's an army of consumer lookouts who roam the country looking for changing prices.
"They visit stores and doctor's offices and barber shops and hospitals, collecting prices throughout the month," he says.
These part-time government shoppers compare the same basket of goods and services every month, to see which prices have gone up and which have gone down, and they crunch those numbers together to get the Consumer Price Index.
The only problem, say critics, is that's not how consumers actually shop.
"If the price of turkey goes up and I buy more ham, or if the price of oranges goes up and so I buy more apples, that's not accounted for in the current price index," says Marc Goldwein of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "It thinks I continue to buy those oranges, no matter how expensive they get."
Goldwein wants to adjust the inflation measure so instead of comparing the same basket month after month, analysts would make substitutions, just the way real shoppers do. He stresses that he's not talking about customers who reluctantly switch to an inferior product.
"It's not as if people are always going from steak down to chicken. Sometimes people are going from chicken to steak," he says.
The federal government already calculates this alternative measure of inflation. It's called "chained CPI." And over the past decade, it has typically shown prices rising a little more slowly than the regular Consumer Price Index -- about a quarter to a third of a percent slower each year. That might not sound like much, but over time it adds up.
If the government switched to chained CPI for cost-of-living adjustments, Social Security payments and other benefits would grow more slowly. And tax revenues would go up, because parts of the tax code are also indexed to inflation.
Goldwein, who worked for the Simpson-Bowles commission, estimates that the switch would shave more than $200 billion off the deficit over the next decade. Because most of those savings would come in later years, it wouldn't be an immediate drag on the economy.
"Given that the economy is still weak, we don't want massive amounts of deficit reduction right now," Goldwein says. "That's the whole reason we're avoiding the 'fiscal cliff.' It's too much deficit reduction too fast. The chained CPI is the best of all worlds, because it gives you a credible way to reduce future deficits but with barely any effect in the short term."
But some seniors are up in arms over the idea.
Cristina Martin Firvida of AARP says if Social Security payments grew more slowly, the very elderly would suffer the most. She also complains that chained CPI doesn't reflect the actual cost of living for seniors.
"Obviously, more of their money goes to health care. Health care grows faster than inflation. And if folks want to have a conversation about accuracy, we would welcome adoption of a more accurate market basket. And one that really reflects the spending patterns of the retired and the disabled," Firvida says.
The government actually has another inflation measure that's specially tailored for seniors. Unlike chained CPI, it tends to show more inflation rather than less. That measure is based on a smaller sample, though, and it's not officially recognized.
Congressional Republicans call for switching to chained CPI in their deficit-cutting proposal. So far, President Obama has been noncommittal.
Goldwein says despite the controversy, chained CPI is one of the least painful deficit-cutting moves the government could make. If there is any big budget bargain, he says, the new inflation measure is likely to be part of it.
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit www.npr.org.


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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 24, 2002
President Bush, President Putin Announce New Energy Dialogue
Joint Statement by President George W. Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin on the New U.S.-Russian Energy Dialogue
Go to the President's
Trip Portal Page
Successful development of the global economy depends on timely and reliable energy delivery. In this context, we welcome the fact that the Russian Federation has confirmed its role as a major world energy provider. In order to strengthen our overall relationship and enhance global energy security and international strategic stability, we have agreed to launch a bilateral energy dialogue.
Through this Dialogue we seek to:
We intend to discuss energy issues at our future bilateral meetings, and direct that these issues be integrated into our bilateral agenda, at all levels of our governments. In this context, we welcome the creation of the Russian-American Working-level Group on Energy Cooperation.
We are encouraged that our commercial cooperation occurs not only in Russia and neighboring areas such as the Caspian region, where multiple pipelines and joint upstream investments in the energy sector strengthen the sovereignty, prosperity, cooperation, and global economic integration of all participating states. We also welcome our commercial cooperation in the United States and in other countries where our companies' and their international partners' experience, technology, and capital can be joined to provide the commercially reliable energy supplies which are essential to fostering prosperity and global stability.
# # #


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The 100 Americans profiled in the book have just been posted!
Check out the list and let me know what you think in the comments section at the bottom of the list.
Is there someone you think should be on the list who isn't? Or someone who is on the list who you don't think should be there?


text:
10 Unrestricted Business Opt-In PLR Articles
In this PLR Article Pack, You will get 10 Unrestricted Business Opt-In PLR Articles with Private Label Rights to assist you in dominating the Business market.
Full Description
10 Unrestricted Business Opt-In PLR Articles
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Building a Highly-targeted Opt in List: When Money Lies Beneath the Lists
Are you successful with your Internet business? Better yet, do you think you are successful with your online business? When most online entrepreneurs are asked with these questions, they often brush it off. This is because most of them, who have not yet realize the right way to succeed in Internet Marketing, continue to believe that the mere fact that they have a website is already enough to succeed on the Internet.
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Niall Horan Speaks out About Cyber Abuse Aimed at Female Artists
Niall Horan is defending celebrities, especially female artists, that suffer from cyber abuse at the hands of trolls on social media.
In a series of tweets, the 26-year-old asked fans why people can't just appreciate the artists they do enjoy, instead of bashing the ones that they hate. "I see a lot of abuse aimed at artists online," he began. "Why can't everyone just concentrate on the artists they like and if you don't have anything nice to say about artists you may not like, well just keep your mouth shut."
Fans then asked if he was talking about dealing with social media hate himself, which he confirmed that he was not. The "Nice To Meet Ya" singer said that he doesn't care about the hate he receives because he has "better things to be worrying about," but what he's seen online has been "shocking."
"I'm not talking about any artist in particular," he continued. "I'm talking about the culture on here of just abusing people because you can. It's not like you would walk down the street screaming out loud about the people you dislike a small bit."
He then reiterated that it hasn't affected him since he's a private person and does his best to not read things online. "Every now and then I'll look [online] and I see people just saying awful things, especially to the female artists," the singer said.
"These girls work so hard on their craft and lyrics, dance routines, screen content, marketing, etc.... and then they just get ridiculed by trolls online," he concluded.
Fans have rallied around his positive comments, which opened up a dialogue about hateful social media abuse.
See Horan's series of tweets, below.


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20. God Is So Good
Jesus was on the road, making His final journey to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. This time He Himself would be the Passover Lamb, slain for the sins of the world. As He walked along with His disciples, a young man ran up to Him, knelt down in front of Him and asked, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10:17)
"Good Teacher"—that was an unusual form of address. In all of Jewish religious literature, no rabbi was ever called good. Only God and His law were considered to be good. Was this a case of empty flattery, or had this young man become convinced of something that the rest of the religious establishment had refused to admit—that Jesus Christ was actually God in flesh?
"Why do you call Me good?" Jesus asked. "No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18). His comment was not a denial of His deity, as some have suggested, but rather an opportunity for the rich young ruler to confess his faith in Christ's divine person. That confession never came, indicating the man's lack of spiritual understanding. But Christ's statement tells us something about God that we need to consider if we ever hope to know Him intimately. God is good, and beyond that, He is the only one who can rightfully be called good.
The Nature of God's Goodness
The word for good which Jesus used refers to what is excellent in its character or constitution and beneficial or useful in its effect. The Old Testament equivalent means pleasant, agreeable, excellent, valuable, benevolent, and kind. Two separate ideas begin to surface as we examine these words that describe God's goodness. One has to do with the perfections of His person and the other with the kindness of His acts.
Both ideas occur together in one verse in the Psalms: "Thou art good and doest good" (Psalm 119:68). First of all, God Himself is good; that is, He is everything that God should be—the ideal person, the sum total of all perfection. There are no defects or contradictions in Him, and nothing can be added to His nature to make Him any better. He is excellence to an infinite degree, possessing every desirable quality, and therefore of inestimable value. God is good.
Because God is Himself the highest and greatest good, He is also the source and fountain of all other good. He does good things. He extends His goodness to others. It is His nature to be kind, generous, and benevolent, to demonstrate good will toward men, and to take great pleasure in making them happy. Because God is good, He wants us to have what we need for our happiness and He sees that it is available to us. Every good thing we now enjoy or ever hope to enjoy flows from Him, and no good thing has ever existed or ever will exist that does not come from His good hand.
That is why Jesus could say to the rich young ruler, "No one is good except God alone." No other being is infinitely and innately and immutably good. All goodness that exists outside of Him finds its source in Him. Even a man as godly as the Apostle Paul had to admit that in his natural being there was no good thing (Romans 7:18), and we have to admit it too. If there is any good to be found in us, it had to come from God, for we are incapable of producing it ourselves.
In addition, everything God does is good—specially tailored for our benefit. Asaph began Psalm 73 by stating quite literally, "Only God is good to Israel." In other words, God is nothing but good. He can do nothing but what is absolutely best.
A little fellow was heard praying at bedtime, "Help me to be a good boy—but you be a good God too." But there is no need to remind God to be good. He cannot possibly be otherwise.
If everything God does is good and all His acts are the outflowing of His goodness, it would seem that this attribute embraces all His other attributes. There is some Biblical evidence for that. God promised Moses that He would make all His goodness pass before him (Exodus 33:19). When God did pass before him the next morning on Mount Sinai, He revealed His compassion, His graciousness, His long-suffering, His mercy, His truth, and His forgiveness (Exodus 34:5-7). Evidently all those attributes were summed up in His goodness.
We readily can see the relationship between goodness and some of God's other attributes. For example, when His goodness gives of itself unconditionally and sacrificially, it is love. When it shows favor to the guilty and undeserving, it is grace. When it reaches out to relieve the miserable and distressed, it is mercy. When it shows patience toward those who deserve punishment, it is long-suffering. When it reveals to us the way things are, it is truth. When it bears the offense of our sin and absolves us of our guilt, it is forgiveness. When the Bible says that God is good, it is referring to all these qualities and more.
Praise the LORD, for the LORD is good;
Sing praises to His name, for it is lovely (Psalm 135:3).
The Expression of God's Goodness
Although God's goodness is unfolded in all that He is and all that He does, the Bible reveals some specific expressions of it. For one, it is demonstrated in His creation. Seven times in Genesis God said that what He made was good (Genesis 1:4,10,12,18,21,25,31). The final statement sums it up: "And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). No one can observe the grandeur of God's handiwork and deny that it is good. Even though man has managed to mar it considerably, it was good the way God made it and it still reflects that goodness: blue skies studded with fluffy white clouds by day and spangled with sparkling bright stars at night; glistening snow-covered mountain peaks; fields and trees with infinitely varied shades of green and gold; brilliant, multicolored flowers with lovely fragrances. There is no end to the goodness we enjoy in God's creation: "the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD" (Psalm 33:5 KJV). The beauty of God's earth reminds us of His goodness.
Then there is man, the zenith of God's creative genius. God made him with eyes to behold the beauty of nature, ears to hear its lovely sounds, nostrils to enjoy its pleasant aromas, taste buds to relish its infinite variety of eatable delights, a sense of touch to help communicate love to someone precious to him, and a mind to comprehend the meaning of it all, to name just a few evidences of God's goodness. He affords us no end of good things: the warmth of sunlight, the joy of loving family and friends, the satisfaction of productive labor, the exhilaration of physical exercise and recreation, the refreshment of a good night's sleep, provision for our daily needs, and so many others that enrich our lives. These blessings turn our minds to Him in adoration and gratitude.
These "good things" are blessings God bestows on all mankind. They are not reserved for believers alone. King David wrote:
The LORD is good to all,
And His mercies are over all His works (Psalm 145:9).
The eyes of all look to Thee, And Thou dost give them their food in due time.
Thou dost open Thy hand, And dost satisfy the desire of every living thing (15-16).
Jesus said He makes the sun rise on the evil as well as on the good, and sends the rain on the unrighteous as well as on the righteous (Matthew 5:45). He deals bountifully and kindly even with ungrateful and wicked men (Luke 6:35). Paul said in a message to a group of unbelievers at Lystra, "He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with good and gladness" (Acts 14:17).
Unbelievers have a tendency to take God's goodness for granted and exploit it for their own ends. But the person who knows Him personally, who understands and appreciates His goodness, will not only enjoy His blessings fully, but use them thankfully and unselfishly, giving glory to Him. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, if it is received with gratitude" (1 Timothy 4:4).
Along with the general benefits which God has bestowed on all people, the believer has additional good things to enjoy. For example, he has in his possession the Word of God which is described as good (Hebrews 6:5). He can know and do the will of God which is called good (Romans 12:2). He has the assurance that his good God will work every detail of his life together for good (Romans 8:28), the minor annoyances as well as the major crises. The expressions of God's goodness to His children are endless.
How great is Thy goodness,
Which Thou hast stored up for those who fear Thee,
Which Thou hast wrought for those who take refuge in Thee,
Before the sons of men! (Psalm 31:19)
The Psalmist goes further: "No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly" (Psalm 84:11).
Our family has seen innumerable evidences of God's goodness through the years. One small but unforgetable incident occurred when our youngest son was about five years old. We were spending the week at a Bible conference and Tim had gained a new friend named Peter. One evening we overheard him say, "Peter, let's pray that we will find a treasure on the beach tomorrow."
My wife and I thought that maybe we ought to plant something in the sand for him to find, in order to help God out a little and bolster our young son's budding faith, but we completely forgot about it. As we relaxed on the beach the next afternoon we heard Tim suddenly exclaim, "I found it! I found a treasure!" He had dug a nickel out of the sand, and as an added bonus it had been minted in the year of his birth. It was just a little thing—but another evidence that a good God loves to do good things for His own.
The Objections To God's Goodness
Of course, not everybody agrees that God is good, and it should be no surprise that His goodness is being called into question today. It was probably the first attribute of God to be attacked in human history. When Satan met Eve in the garden, he implied that God was less than good for denying her the luscious fruit of that one forbidden tree (cf. Genesis 3:1-5). Men have been challenging God's goodness ever since. How can a good God allow evil to exist in His world? How can He permit disease, pain, suffering, poverty, hunger, prejudice, greed, exploitation, crime, violence, war, bloodshed, catastrophe, and destruction? They argue, either He is not very good or He does not have the power to stop it.
It is difficult for us to understand how these human tragedies can possibly be good, and quite frankly, we may never fully understand it. God tells us that His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9), therefore we cannot expect to understand everything. We do know, however, that God is not the author of sin (Habakkuk 1:13; James 1:13; 1 John 1:5). We also know that God in His sovereign good pleasure created man with volition—the ability to choose good or evil. The first man chose evil of his own will, and his sin affected all of God's creation. All of the heartache and suffering in this world today are the direct result of that choice, the consequence of living in a world affected by sin.
In addition, our suffering is intensified by repeated sinful choices; not only our own, but those of individuals and nations around us. We may suffer when a drug addict decides to secure the money he needs for his next fix or when the leaders of some nation decide to enlarge their sphere of influence. The only way to remove all suffering from the world would be to deny everyone all of their freedom, to make them all automatons. None of us would opt for that.
God knew before He created him that man would choose evil, but He also knew that creating him was the best way to demonstrate the greatness of His person and the perfections of His nature—in other words, to show who He really is and to bring glory to Himself. He even has the power to overrule man's sin to accomplish that good purpose. In fact, He promises to overrule all things for good: "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28). That is so difficult to accept in times of great trial, even for true Christians. "If God is so good, why did He let my mate get cancer, or why did He allow my child to be taken away from me, or why did He let my marriage fall apart, or why did He let me lose my job, or why did He let me lose my life savings? I'm not guilty of any great sin."
The cause of our dilemma is our failure to understand what is truly good for us. We may have the notion that our ultimate good would be to have things go smoothly for us all the time, to do anything we please, knowing that everything we do will turn out for our happiness, comfort, convenience, health, affluence, and success. But God in His omniscience knows that the choices we make in our human wisdom and with our sinful natures will not always make us truly happy in the end.
God's good goal for us is to make us like His Son. We should never separate verse 28 from the great promise of Romans 8:29: "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren." Our highest good is conformity to the model of humanity that Jesus presented to us. That will bring us maximum happiness. We can be growing toward that goal daily; any choice we make that fails to contribute to that goal is going to increase our unhappiness. In other words, we do not always know what is best for us.
Parents especially understand that. Children think they know what will make them happy, but since parents have lived a few more years and know a little more about life, they know better what produces true happiness. So they insist on what they know will be for their children's good, because they love them. Sometimes parents even have to make life unpleasant for them so they will learn to do what is best. To do less than that would be inconsiderate and neglectful.
When I was sixteen years old I wanted to buy a motorcycle. I pleaded with my dad for permission, but he refused to grant it. As I look back, I know his decision was best. With the lack of responsibility I had at that age, I probably would have killed myself on a motorcycle. I couldn't understand it at the time, but now I know that what he did was good and has worked out for my benefit.
Let me illustrate it from the world of medicine. Medical studies have determined that the disease known as Hansen's disease or leprosy does not damage the limbs and make the fingers and toes drop off as people historically have believed. It attacks the nervous system and destroys the victim's ability to feel pain. As a result, lepers damage their own limbs by such careless practices as grasping things too tightly, cutting themselves seriously and not treating the wound, or putting their hands in a fire to pluck something out. On some occasions their limbs have actually been chewed off by rats while they slept, and they never felt a thing.
Medical technicians have experimented with devices that inflict an electric shock whenever a vulnerable part of the patients' bodies is being abused. But the patients would switch off the current whenever they anticipated doing anything that might produce an unpleasant sensation, so the device did them no good. The only way a patient could be protected from destroying his own body and thus adding to his misery was to put the signal out of his reach. The pain of that electric shock, as unpleasant as it might have been for the moment, proved to be good and contributed to his ultimate happiness.5
Most of us would like God to turn off the current, to turn down the heat, to get us out from under our burdens. But that would not necessarily be good. It might be inconsiderate and neglectful. If we had an on/off switch, we could take care of it ourselves, but that would not be very smart. True happiness can be found only when we get to know God and grow in the likeness of His Son. Nothing reminds us of that more dramatically or encourages us to grow in Him more effectively than pain and suffering. Without it we might drift away, live our lives apart from Him, and never know true happiness. Suffering does not cast doubt on God's goodness; it demonstrates it. The Psalmist saw it clearly:
It is good for me that I was afflicted,
That I may learn Thy statutes (Psalm 119:71).
Not only do we learn the truthfulness of His Word, we also learn firsthand the joy of His presence and the reality of His grace. It is often through suffering that we begin to appreciate God's goodness as never before.
Our Response To God' Goodness
When we become aware of God's goodness, it should elicit a certain kind of response from us. We see the proper response in a group of weary exiles who had made their way back to their promised land after seventy years of Babylonian captivity. Their goal was to rebuild the temple of God. Progress was slow, but in the second year of their restoration the foundation was finally completed. Those who had lived long enough to see Solomon's temple knew that this one would not begin to compare with it in size or beauty. But that made little difference to them. They were back in their land, and their temple was under way. "And they sang, praising and giving thanks to the LORD, saying, 'For He is good, for His lovingkindness is upon Israel forever.' And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the LORD because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid" (Ezra 3:11). God's goodness prompted songs of praise and thanksgiving. And that is exactly what it should do for us.
Praise the LORD! Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good;
For His lovingkindness is everlasting (Psalm 106:1).
(Cf. also Psalm 100; 107:1; 118:1,29; 135:3; 136:1; 1 Chronicles 16:34; 2 Chronicles 5:13.)
The word praise comes from a root that means "to be boastful." When we praise God, we are boasting in the good things He has done, not necessarily because He has done them for us (as though we deserved anything), but simply because they demonstrate who He is. People who know a good God have no cause to grumble and complain. Praise becomes a way of life for them.
Our response to God's goodness is not only praise, but also thanksgiving. If we take a few minutes each day to do nothing but thank God for some of the good things He has done, we may never get depressed again. So take a thanksgiving break! Thanksgiving is like a tonic that brightens the entire complexion of our lives. Learn to practice it. It may require discipline at first, but soon it will become a joyful and satisfying way of life. There is no better way to get it flowing than to rehearse the evidence of God's goodness.
God is so good! If you have not yet discovered it, heed the exhortation of the Psalmist:
O taste and see that the LORD is good;
How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him! (Psalm 34:8)
Action To Take
Sit down with someone close to you and rehearse some of the good things God has done for you through the years. Then respond to Him with thanksgiving and praise. If you are presently facing some trial, think of some of the good things God could be teaching you through it.
5 Related by Philip Yancy in Where Is God When It Hurts? Zondervan, 1977.
Related Topics: Theology Proper (God)


text:
Born in Flames
Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/4, 210 x 297 mm
Edition of 1000
Published by Occasional Papers
$18.00 · out of stock
'Born in Flames poses the question of whether oppression against women will be eliminated under any kind of social system. […] It is a fantasy presenting a group of women who, confronted with the very "ordinary" oppression women have been experiencing for decades, refuse to take it any longer and become armed fighters against the government. Their position is that oppression against women is not eliminated automatically with "socialism" — not only do political values have to change, cultural values must change and become embedded in practice.'
— Lizzie Borden in Heresies #16, 1983
In the spirit of Borden's film, the publication was collectively funded by the following individuals and institutions:
Stuart Bailey, Heather Bradley, Eleanor Brown, Geoffrey Brusatto, Culturgest, Wayne Daly, Chris Evans, Beatrice Gibson, Nick Gordon, The Hawthorne Archive, Erna Hecey, Onno Hesselink, Will Holder, Jeff Khonsary, Koenig Books, Uriel Orlow, Falke Pisano, Philomene Pirecki, PrintRoom: Karin de Jong, Ewoud van Rijn, Pro QM, David Reinfurt, Jane Rolo, Catherine de Smet, Benjamin Thorel, Giulia Vallicelli, and Julia Zay.
Adele Bertei, Anarchy, Beatrice Gibson, Benjamin Thorel, Catherine de Smet, Chris Evans, Culture, Culturgest, David Reinfurt, Distribution, Eleanor Brown, Erna Hecey, Ewoud van Rijn, Falke Pisano, Feminism, Film, Geoffrey Brusatto, Giulia Vallicelli, Heather Bradley, Heresies, Jane Rolo, Jeff Khonsary, Julia Zay, Kaisa Lassinaro, Karin de Jong, Koenig Books, Lizzie Borden, Mayo Thompson, Nick Gordon, Occasional Papers, Onno Hesselink, Philomene Pirecki, PrintRoom, Pro QM, Red Crayola, Sandy Yang, Socialism, Stuart Bailey, The Hawthorne Archive, The Red Krayola, Uriel Orlow, Wayne Daly, Will Holder


text:
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Leviticus 17 Bible Commentary
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Leviticus 17
Matthew Henry Bible Commentary (complete)
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Leviticus 17
After the law concerning the atonement to be made for all Israel by the high priest, at the tabernacle, with the blood of bulls and goats, in this chapter we have two prohibitions necessary for the preservation of the honour of that atonement. I. That no sacrifice should be offered by any other than the priests, nor any where but at the door of the tabernacle, and this upon pain of death (v. 1-9). II. That no blood should be eaten, and this under the same penalty (v. 10, etc.).
Verses 1-9
This statute obliged all the people of Israel to bring all their sacrifices to God's altar, to be offered there. And as to this matter we must consider,
I. How it stood before. 1. It was allowed to all people to build altars, and offer sacrifices to God, where they pleased. Wherever Abraham had a tent he built an altar, and every master of a family was a priest to his own family, as Job 1:5. 2. This liberty had been an occasion of idolatry. When every man was his own priest, and had an altar of his own, by degrees, as they became vain in their imaginations, they invented gods of their own,
and offered their sacrifices unto demons,
v. 7. The word signifies
hairy goats,
because it is probable that in the shape the evil spirits often appeared to them, to invite their sacrifices and to signify their acceptance of them. For the devil, ever since he became a revolter from God and a rebel against him, has set up for a rival with him, and coveted to have divine honours paid him: he had the impudence to solicit our blessed Saviour to
fall down and worship him.
The Israelites themselves had learned in Egypt to sacrifice to demons. And some of them, it should seem, practised it even since the God of Israel had so gloriously appeared for them, and with them. They are said to
go a whoring after
these demons; for it was such a breach of their covenant with God as adultery is of the marriage covenant: and they were as strongly addicted to their idolatrous worships, and as hard to be reclaimed from them, as those that have given themselves over to fornication, to
work all uncleanness with greediness;
and therefore it is with reference to this that God calls himself
a jealous God.
II. How this law settled it. 1. Some think that the children of Israel were by this law forbidden, while they were in the wilderness, to kill any beef, or mutton, or veal, or lamb, or goat, even for their common eating, but at the
door of the tabernacle,
where the blood and the fat were to be offered to God upon the altar, and the flesh to be returned back to the offerer to be eaten as a peace-offering, according to the law. And the statute is so worded (v. 3, 4) as to favour this opinion, for it speaks generally of killing any ox, or lamb, or goat. The learned Dr. Cudworth puts this sense upon it, and thinks that while they had their tabernacle so near them in the midst of their camp they ate no flesh but what had first been offered to God, but that when they were entering Canaan this constitution was altered (Deu. 12:21), and they were allowed to kill their beasts of the flock and herd at home, as well as the roebuck and the hart; only thrice a year they were to see God at his tabernacle, and to eat and drink before him there. And it is probable that in the wilderness they did not eat much flesh but that of their peace-offerings, preserving what cattle they had, for breed, against they came to Canaan; therefore they murmured for flesh, being weary of manna; and Moses on that occasion speaks as if they were very sparing of the
flocks and the herds,
Num. 11:4, 22. Yet it is hard to construe this as a temporary law, when it is expressly said to be a
statute for ever
(v. 7); and therefore, 2. It should seem rather to forbid only the killing of beasts for sacrifice any where but at God's altar. They must not offer sacrifice, as they had done,
in the open field
(v. 5), no, not to the true God, but it must be brought to the priest, to be offered on the altar of the Lord: and the solemnity they had lately witnessed, of consecrating both the priests and the altar, would serve for a good reason why they should confine themselves to both these that God had so signally appointed and owned. This law obliged not only the Israelites themselves, but the proselytes or strangers that were circumcised and sojourned among them, who were in danger of retaining an affection to their old ways of worship. If any should transgress this law, and offer sacrifice any where but at the tabernacle, (1.) The guilt was great:
Blood shall be imputed to that man; he hath shed blood,
v. 4. Though it was but a beast he had killed, yet, killing it otherwise than God had appointed, he was looked upon as a murderer. It is by the divine grant that we have the liberty to kill the inferior creatures, to the benefit of which we are not entitled, unless we submit to the limitations of it, which are that it be not done either with cruelty or with superstition, Gen. 9:3, 4. Nor was there ever any greater abuse done to the inferior creatures than when they were made either false gods or sacrifices to false gods, to which the apostle perhaps has special reference when he speaks of the vanity and bondage of corruption to which the creature was made subject, Rom. 8:20, 21, and compare ch. 1:23, 25. Idolatrous sacrifices were looked upon, not only as adultery, but as murder: he that
offereth them is as if he slew a man,
Isa. 66:3. (2.) The punishment should be severe:
That man shall be cut off from among his people.
Either the magistrate must do it if it were manifest and notorious, or, if not, God would take the work into his own hands, and the offender should be cut off by some immediate stroke of divine justice. The reasons why God thus strictly ordered all their sacrifices to be offered at one place were, [1.] For the preventing of idolatry and superstition. That sacrifices might be offered to God, and according to the rule, and without innovations, they must always be offered by the hands of the priests, who were servants in God's house, and under the eye of the high priest, who was ruler of the house, and took care to see every thing done according to God's ordinance. [2.] For the securing of the honour of God's temple and altar, the peculiar dignity of which would be endangered if they might offer their sacrifices any where else as well as there. [3.] For the preserving of unity and brotherly love among the Israelites, that meeting all at one altar, as all the children of the family meet daily at one table, they might live and love as brethren, and be as one man, of one mind in the Lord.
III. How this law was observed. 1. While the Israelites kept their integrity they had a tender and very jealous regard to this law, as appears by their zeal against the altar which was erected by the two tribes and a half, which they would by no means have left standing if they had not been satisfied that it was never designed, nor should ever be used, for sacrifice or offering, Jos. 22:12, etc. 2. The breach of this law was for many ages the scandalous and incurable corruption of the Jewish church, witness that complaint which so often occurs in the history even of the good kings,
Howbeit the high places were not taken away;
and it was an inlet to the grossest idolatries. 3. Yet this law was, in extraordinary cases, dispensed with. Gideon's sacrifice (Jdg. 6:26), Manoah's (Jdg. 13:19), Samuel's (1 Sa. 7:9; 9:13; 11:15), David's (2 Sa. 24:18), and Elijah's (1 Ki. 18:23), were accepted, though not offered at the usual place: but these were all either ordered by angels or offered by prophets; and some think that after the desolation of Shiloh, and before the building of the temple, while the ark and altar were unsettled, it was more allowable to offer sacrifice elsewhere.
IV. How the matter stands now, and what use we are to make of this law. 1. It is certain that the spiritual sacrifices we are now to offer are not confined to any one place. Our Saviour has made this clear (Jn. 4:21), and the apostle (1 Tim. 2:8), according to the prophecy, that
in every place incense should be offered,
Mal. 1:11. We have now no temple nor altar that sanctifies the gift, nor does the gospel unity lie in one place, but in one heart, and the
unity of the spirit.
2. Christ is our altar, and the
true tabernacle
(Heb. 8:2; 13:10); in him God dwells among us, and it is in him that our sacrifices are acceptable to God, and in him only, 1 Pt. 2:5. To set up other mediators, or other altars, or other expiatory sacrifices, is, in effect, to set up other gods. He is the centre of unity, in whom all God's Israel meet. 3. Yet we are to have respect to the public worship of God, not
forsaking the assemblies of
his people, Heb. 10:25. The Lord loves
the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob,
and so should we; see Eze. 20:40. Though God will graciously accept our family offerings, we must not therefore neglect the door of the tabernacle.
Verses 10-16
We have here, I. A repetition and confirmation of the law against eating blood. We have met with this prohibition twice before in the levitical law (ch. 3:17; 7:26), besides the place it had in the precepts of Noah, Gen. 9:4. But here, 1. The prohibition is repeated again and again, and reference had to the former laws to this purport (v. 12):
I said to the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood;
and again (v. 14),
You shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh.
A great stress is laid upon it, as a law which has more in it than at first view one would think. 2. It is made binding, not only on the
house of Israel,
but on
the strangers that sojourned among them
(v. 10), which perhaps was one reason why it was thought advisable, for a time, to forbid blood to the Gentile converts, Acts 15:29. 3. The penalty annexed to this law is very severe (v. 10):
I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood,
if he do it presumptuously, and
will cut him off;
and again (v. 14),
He shall be cut off.
Note, God's wrath will be the sinner's ruin. Write that man undone, for ever undone, against whom God sets his face; for what creature is able to confront the Creator? 4. A reason is given for this law (v. 11): because
it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul;
it was appointed to make atonement with, because
the life of the flesh is the blood.
The sinner deserved to die; therefore the sacrifice must die. Now, the blood being so the life that ordinarily beasts were killed for man's use by the drawing out of all their blood, God appointed the sprinkling or pouring out of the blood of the sacrifice upon the altar to signify that the life of the sacrifice was given to God instead of the sinner's life, and as a ransom or counter-price for it; therefore
without shedding of blood there was no remission,
Heb. 9:22. For this reason they must eat no blood, and, (1.) It was then a very good reason; for God would by this means preserve the honour of that way of atonement which he had instituted, and keep up in the minds of the people a reverent regard to it. The blood of the covenant being then a sensible object, no blood must be either eaten or trodden under foot as a common thing, as they must have no ointment nor perfume like that which God ordered them to make for himself. But, (2.) This reason is now superseded, which intimates that the law itself was ceremonial, and is now no longer in force: the blood of Christ who has come (and we are to look for no other) is that alone which makes atonement for the soul, and of which the blood of the sacrifices was an imperfect type: the coming of the substance supersedes the shadow. The blood of beasts is no longer the ransom, but Christ's blood only; and therefore there is not now that reason for abstaining from blood which there was then, and we cannot suppose it was the will of God that the law should survive the reason of it. The blood, provided it be so prepared as not to be unwholesome, is now allowed for the nourishment of our bodies, because it is no longer appointed to make an atonement for the soul. (3.) Yet it has still useful significancy. The life is in the blood; it is the vehicle of the animal spirits, and God would have his people to regard the life even of their beasts, and not to be cruel and hard-hearted, not to take delight in any thing that is barbarous. They must not be a blood-thirsty people. The blood then made atonement figuratively, now the blood of Christ makes atonement really and effectually; to this therefore we must have a reverent regard, and not use it as
a common thing,
for he will set his face against those that do so, and they shall be cut off, Heb. 10:29.
II. Some other precepts are here given as appendages to this law, and hedges about it, 1. They must cover the blood of that which they
took in hunting,
v. 13. They must not only not eat it, but must give it a decent burial, in token of some mystery which they must believe lay hidden in this constitution. the Jews look upon this as a very weighty precept and appoint that the blood should be covered with these words,
Blessed be he that hath sanctified us by his precepts, and commanded us to cover blood.
2. They must not eat that which
died of itself
or was
torn of beasts
(v. 15), for the blood was either not at all, or not regularly, drawn out of them. God would have them to be curious in their diet, not with the curiosity that gratifies the sensual appetite, but with that which checks and restrains it. God would not have his children to eat every thing that came in their way with greediness, but to consider diligently what was before them, that they might learn in other things to ask questions for conscience' sake. Those that
flew upon the spoiled
sinned, 1 Sa. 14:32, 33. If a man did, through ignorance or inconsideration, eat the flesh of any beast not duly slain, he must
wash himself and his clothes,
else he
bore his iniquity,
v. 15, 16. The pollution was ceremonial, so was the purification from it; but if a man slighted the prescribed method of cleansing, or would not submit, he thereby contracted moral guilt. See the nature of a remedial law: he that obeys it has the benefit of it; he that does not, not only remains under his former guilt, but adds to that guilt of contemning the provisions made by divine grace for his relief, and sins against the remedy.
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text:
Once every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn nearly cross paths in the sky, and this year, the two largest planets in the solar system will cross paths during the winter solstice.
WATCH LIVE: The Lowell Observatory in Arizona has clear skies of the event. You can watch it live starting at 7 p.m. ET by clicking here.
According to EarthSky, the two planets will be just .1 degree apart at their closest point on December 21. Being so close, the two planets will appear to be roughly the same size as one-fifth a full moon.
According to EarthSky, the December 2020 conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is the closest the two planets have been to each other in the night sky since 1623.
However, people back then were not able to see the celestial event, because of its proximity to the sun, according to Amy Oliver, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Oliver told The Boston Globe that the last time people would have noticed two planets coming together this closely would have been in 1226, during the Middle Ages, nearly 800 years ago.
Scientists say the two planets will appear in the early evening sky for the rest of 2020 and Jupiter will be the brightest object in the western sky for the rest of the year.


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Great places are often referenced as places where people gather in urban centers around the world. In Cincinnati places like Fountain Square and Washington Park are often associated as the City's front lawn or back yard. Streets are often referenced as great places such as Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine (OTR), Hyde Park Square or Madison Avenue in Covington. These places usually already exist, are reclaimed and sometimes created brand new.
Creating great places not only involves understanding what makes places great but also spreading awareness, education and building partnerships to do the hard work of revitalizing and celebrating the urban environment. That is the central mission of the proposed new Midwest chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism.
The group was engaged by the national Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) to create a regional chapter of the organization spanning from western Pennsylvania to central Indiana and from Lake Erie to Lexington Kentucky.
They are having their first event which will be an introductory meeting and happy hour tomorrow May 17, at Graydon on Main in OTR.
CNU-Midwest is working to advance the issues of revitalizing urban neighborhoods in cities and towns across the region. The organization has three central goals including reclaiming public space for people, reactivating and reconnecting vibrant neighborhoods and championing urban development that is enduring, adaptable and human scaled.
"The ultimate goal is the reimagining and repopulation of our urban cores and inner ring neighborhoods," said Chapter Organizing Committee Chairperson Joe Nickol told UrbanCincy, "Starting at the level of the street and continuing up through the neighborhood, town, city, and region, we encourage the development of great, equitable, urban places where all people can enjoy all aspects of daily life."
By launching the CNU Midwest Chapter, the group aims to positively influence the dialogue around healthy urban policy and design within Midwestern cities.
This event which is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm is open to the public and will serve as an introduction to the group and networking opportunity for attendees. Anyone interested in participating can sign up here.
Graydon on Main is located at 1421 Main Street in OTR. There is a Cincy Red Bike station across the street and is easily accessible via Metro bus routes #'s 16,17,19,24.
The CNU is a national 501c3 organization which is dedicated to the cause of helping to create and advocate for vibrant and walkable cities, towns, and neighborhoods where people have diverse choices for how they live, work, shop, and get around. CNU's mission is to help build those places.
UrbanCincy is a media partner for CNU Midwest and a promotional partner for CNU24, the organizations annual Congress which is being held next month in Detroit.