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Land Distribution (Canada and Latin America)
After the American Revolution some Mennonites of Swiss origin in Pennsylvania moved to Ontario, which at that time was known as Upper Canada. One of the reasons for migrating was the availability of land, since inexpensive land in Pennsylvania had become scarce. Some of the land in Ontario was free; other land was available at an inexpensive price.
The first Mennonite settlement in Ontario was founded in 1786 in the Niagara Peninsula about 32 km (20 miles) west of the Niagara River. The second settlement was established about the same time in what became Waterloo County. In both of these settlements, land was purchased by individuals. When it was discovered that the Mennonites who had purchased the land in the Waterloo Township area had been defrauded and were about to lose their land, a stock company was formed by a group of Pennsylvania Mennonites. This stock company collected money in Pennsylvania, bought 60,000 acres (two-thirds of Waterloo Township), paid off the mortgage, and made the land available to Mennonites. A number of years later another similar stock company was formed to purchase 45,000 acres in Woolwich Township immediately north of Waterloo Township. This land was in turn sold to individual Mennonites. The land near Markham, Ont. was purchased directly by individuals.
The first Amish settlement in Ontario was inspired by Christian Nafziger from Bavaria, who took out an option on a large tract of land in Wilmot Township, west of the Mennonite settlements. Amish began to settle on this land in 1824, with individuals taking out title to their own land.
Russian Mennonites who moved to Manitoba in the 1870s also were looking for large tracts of land (block settlement) sufficient for their expanding populations. Many of the people who immigrated had been landless in Russia. In the Bergthal Colony in Russia in 1874, for example, there were 350 landless families. This included about half of the colony. When the Bergthal Colony decided to move, they devised a financial system whereby even the poorest could afford to migrate. The colony decided that all members who had money invested in the local financial institution (Waisenamt) would contribute 10 percent of their account toward the travel costs of the landless. This allowed everyone to move without a travel debt.
In addition to desiring land adequate for their population, Russian Mennonites who moved to Manitoba (3,000 Bergthaler, 690 Kleine Gemeinde, and about 3,240 Reinländer) desired to establish the traditional Russian Mennonite institutions. They established the civil administration of village and Gebietsamt (municipality) which was responsible for schools, roads, land distribution, and financial organizations. They also established church organizations (Gemeinden), each of which was led by an Ältester (elder) and ministers. The churches provided the religious rationale and basis for the institutions and patterns of living.
All three churches, the Bergthaler, Kleine Gemeinde and Reinländer, decided that in Manitoba they would establish the Russian Mennonite village pattern. Even though villages contravened the Canadian homestead provision which required each homesteader to live on the land to which he claimed title, the Canadian government acceded to the Mennonites' request and allowed them to settle in hamlets. Because the government decided that a hamlet had to have a minimum of 20 householders, original villages normally contained 20 farmyards, 10 on each side of a central street, with 20 quarter-sections (160 acres [65 hectares] per quarter-section) of land surrounding the village. Each quarter-section was legally registered in the name of one of the householders, but the village and the land within the 20 quarter-sections was divided according to the traditional pattern of a street village (Straßendorf), a large common pasture, and long narrow strips of land (kögel) upon which crops were grown. This redistribution of land generally had no basis in law, but was undergirded by the authority of the church. In those areas where church authority broke down or where churches split, the villages frequently disbanded. In Manitoba a tension was thus established between the wishes and the legal rights of the individual on one hand, and the good of the community on the other.
Some of the Bergthal villages in both the East and West Reserve in Manitoba fell apart fairly early. When the young people needed more land, land acquisition became an individual or family matter. This tended to cause economic differences to increase with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.
The Reinländer Mennonite Church on the West Reserve in Manitoba retained the village pattern, and land acquisition for its growing population was a community concern. The Reinländer church attempted to negotiate for larger tracts of land upon which villages could be established in the traditional pattern, and in which people could apply for homesteads or purchase land. Consequently the Reinländer church negotiated with the Canadian government for a large tract of land in the Hague-Osler area in 1895, and in the Swift Current area in 1905. Both regions were part of the Northwest Territories at the time of negotiation, and within the province of Saskatchewan since 1905. The terms of the reserve were that the land was set aside for exclusive Mennonite settlement, but all the land was purchased or taken up in homestead individually. The wealthier people were consequently able to purchase more land for themselves and their children than were the poor families.
The major reason for the Mennonite emigrations to Mexico and Paraguay from western Canada in the 1920s was the resolve by a number of churches to prevent the Saskatchewan and Manitoba governments from assuming control of their schools. In addition to this principal reason, the leadership of the churches had begun to view with some unease the growing general wealth, and the increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Some leaders felt that a difficult pioneer experience in a new land might help to level the economic ability of the members and create a more united church.
The groups which emigrated in the 1920s, namely the Reinländer (Old Colony) and Sommerfelder to Mexico, and the Sommerfelder, Saskatchewan Bergthaler, and Chortitzer to the Menno Colony in Paraguay, all decided to establish the village system in their new settlements. They laid out their villages in the traditional Russian Mennonite Straßendorf pattern.
When the Sommerfelder Church settled in Mexico it decided to allow its members to decide whether they wanted to acquire legal title to their land communally through a corporation from which the land would be purchased by individuals, or whether they wanted to own their land by individual title.
The Old Colony Church in Mexico, in contrast, decided that each colony, namely the Manitoba, Swift, and Durango colonies, would be owned communally in the name of a corporation consisting of men selected by the church in each of the colonies. The land was subsequently divided into villages, and the people, even before they left Canada, were able to select which land in which village they wanted to purchase. Those in Canada, who were wealthier, could purchase more land. All purchases were, however, made from the corporation and not from the government. In this way the church could control who initially bought land and to whom land could subsequently be sold. It is also evident the vexatious problem of economic disparity was built right into the initial Old Colony settlements in Mexico. Since the 1950s in the Old Colony settlements in Mexico, the economic disparities between rich and poor, landowners and landless, have become ever greater.
The Old Colonists who emigrated from Mexico to Belize, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina retained the Mexican pattern of land ownership. They settled in villages. The land on which the villages were laid out was owned by a corporation established by the church. The church was thus able to control the purchase and sale of land. This was considered an important protective device because nearly without exception, Mennonite churches from Canada or the United States carried on missions directed at the Old Colonists. If the land was not controlled by the church, the church feared that members who converted to these mission churches could break up the village communities as had happened in Manitoba before the emigration to Mexico in the 1920s.
Colonies in Paraguay which were founded by Mennonites who moved from Canada (Menno Colony, 1926; Bergthal and Sommerfeld, 1948) and from Europe (Fernheim, 1930; Friesland, 1935; Vollendam, 1948; Neuland, 1948) have also followed the pattern in which the land comprising the colony is legally owned collectively by the colony. The colony controls who can sell and purchase land. In some colonies, such as Menno Colony, the colony's producer-consumer cooperative handles the transactions of land. In the Fernheim colony the principal town, Filadelphia, has been opened up to permit non-Mennonites to reside in it. Generally, though, control of land purchase allows colonies to prevent non-Mennonite Paraguayans from moving into colony communities.
Mennonite missions in Paraguay have converted numerous members of two nomadic peoples, the Lengua and Chulub (Chulup), to the Mennonite faith. From their Mennonite mentors these nomadic people have learned the practice of settled agriculture. During the past number of years, Paraguayan Mennonites, with help from West German Mennonites, have helped these people purchase their own land.
Dyck, Isaak M. Auswanderung der Reinlaender Mennoniten Gemeinde von Canada nach Mexiko. Cuauhtemoc, Mexico, 1971.
Ens, Adolf. "Mennonite Relations with Governments--Western Canada 1870-1925." PhD diss. U. of Ottawa, 1978.
Epp, Frank H. Mennonites in Canada, 1786-1920: The History of a Separate People. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974.
Francis, E. K. In Search of Utopia. Altona, MB: D.W. Friesen, 1955.
Friesen, Martin. Neue Heimat in der Chacowildnis. Loma Plata: Menno Colonie, 1987; Altona: D.W. Friesen, 1987.
Sawatzky, Harry Leonard. They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico. Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press, 1971.
Sawatzky, Harry Leonard. Sie Suchten eine Heimat: Deutsch-Mennonitische Kolonisierung in Mexiko 1922-1984. Marburg, Germany: N.G. Elwert Verlag, 1986.
Schmiedehaus, Walter. Die altkolonier Mennoniten in Mexiko. Winnipeg: CMBC Publications, 1982.
Schroeder, William. The Bergthal Colony, rev. ed. Winnipeg: CMBC Publications, 1986.
|John J Friesen
|Date Published
Cite This Article
MLA style
Friesen, John J. "Land Distribution (Canada and Latin America)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1990. Web. 14 Dec 2019. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Land_Distribution_(Canada_and_Latin_America)&oldid=102331.
APA style
Friesen, John J. (1990). Land Distribution (Canada and Latin America). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 14 December 2019, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Land_Distribution_(Canada_and_Latin_America)&oldid=102331.
Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, pp. 505-507. All rights reserved.
©1996-2019 by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. All rights reserved.


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100 years ago
It was just four days ago (give or take a century) that the RMS Titanic set sail from Ireland, headed for the White Star docks at New York City.
Of course, we know the Titanic never completed its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. It was 100 years ago this morning (April 15) that the ship met its tragic fate and became one of the most famous sea voyages in history.
Whether you are new to the tale, are celebrating the re-release of the movie in 3-D, or are more deeply connected to the story -- like one of our patrons at Wheatfield who has stopped in all week to give staff a daily update of ship's speed, direction and position -- there is plenty at the library to meet your Titanic needs.
Part of a darkly funny but brutally honest children's nonfiction series, there's the cautionary tale You Wouldn't Want To Sail On The Titanic.
If you can, pick up the James Cameron movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Or check out one of our many non fiction books, DVD's or VHS tapes.
On a related note, we've also just added the series Downton Abbey, and the companion book The World of Downton Abbey. Fans of the PBS Masterpiece series can tell you it opens chillingly with the arrival of a telegraph that the Titanic has just sunk, and that as a result, the lives of the household are about to change.
Whatever you choose to read or watch this month, here is to a safe and peaceful voyage wherever you go. Pictured: The grand staircase of the RMS Titanic. Artist's sketch from Wikipedia.

subset: commoncrawl


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Cross Adventure
Finally got out on the cross bike for the on-road/off-road adventure I've been stoked on doing for awhile. First big ride of 09? I went out to meet up the Midnight Ridazz mountain bike extension, the Mountaineerz. They were meeting in Brentwood at 11am, which gave me enough time to be creative in getting there.
Many people have heard of Mulholland Drive, but did you know that a big section in the middle is unpaved? I find it outstanding and amazing that in the land of freeways and obscene love of pavement that this treasure exists. I've ridden the eastern side, which winds up from the 101 and the Cahuenga Pass past Runyon Canyon park and along the ridge of the Hollywood Hills, many times. It's twisty, fast and fun for about 15 miles. Then just beyond Sepulveda Pass it turns to dirt where I normally turn around and head back to the city.
Yesterday, riding my cross bike fresh with new front wheel, forks, stem, bars and 700x34 treaded tires, I kept going on the dirt. Climbed up and past the NIKE station. I've been here many times on dirt and now I've mentally connected where the pavement ends and the mountain bike spots begin. Turned left on Sullivan fire road and connected with the Sullivan Canyon single track where I had to defend my bike choice to some mountain bikers. Always makes me think of Chris Kostman's 1993 article, Mountain bikes? Who needs them?. Worth reading in its entirety, but this sentence sums it up well:
"The mountain bike is the most over-rated, most improperly used,
most over-built, and most greedily promoted piece of hardware to
hit the sport and fitness industry in modern history."
Hit the Whole Foods in Brentwood, grabbed some fruit and then 8 of us headed to near the PCH/Sunset Blvd for some single track climbing to fire road climbing to more exposed fire road climbing. Five 'normal' mountain bikes, one 29-er, and one single-speed with a coaster brake (was set up for the coaster brake only race series that recently ended). So much climbing. Though a positive correlation of climbing and the number of really attractive (and friendly!) female hikers helped. Went through Trippet Ranch, past Eagle Rock to 'the Hub'.
After descending reliable backbone through Will Roger park and back to Brentwood, the 30-mile Mountaineerz ride ended and I took the city route 15 miles back home. Seventy-five mile day? About half on dirt. Exhausting. Next I'd like to ride Mulholland in its entirety from Hollywood to the ocean and back, probably 120 miles round trip including the 30 off-road.


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Mayor's Office
Mayor Chris Beutler today invited Lincoln residents to participate in the next Taking Charge discussion on the City budget Saturday May 15. Those who took last winter's survey either by phone or online will be invited to attend the all-day program at the County-City Building. And, for the first time, all residents will be able to participate in an online discussion on the City's Facebook page. The Mayor said the City is in the initial stages of preparing the City budget for the 2010-2011 fiscal year, which begins September 1.
"For the past two budgets, we have asked for the participation of Lincoln citizens to help us as we prioritize services and make decisions," Beutler said. "Citizens across the community gave us their thoughts on how we should pay for the services that matter to them. It has given us important insights, made for a more inclusive budget process and most importantly, helped build the consensus we need to make progress."
The City is again partnering with the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center, which also helped with the PRIORITY LINCOLN project and earlier "Taking Charge" efforts.
The Mayor asked all those who took the recent survey to watch for an e-mail invitation to the May 15 discussion. Those interested in attending are urged to respond quickly because space is limited. About 80 people are expected to gather at the event to learn about the City budget and address several specific budget questions.
To participate in the online discussion, residents can go to the Taking Charge 2010 Facebook event page.
In addition to the on-site meeting and the online Facebook discussion, portions of the May 15 event will be carried live on 5 CITY-TV, the government access cable channel, and streamed live on the City Web site at lincoln.ne.gov (click on the 5 CITY-TV logo).


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Stereotypes and pigeonholes can, in a stable multiethnic society, act as sanctuaries as much as cells. In the heyday of urban ethnic immigration, even anti-Semites allowed that Jews were good at selling drygoods and producing movies, just as Irish Catholics were known to keep a good saloon and walk a decent beat. The ugliest of these pigeonholes suggests a comparative advantage, anyway: to be thought to tap-dance well implies that you can, at least, do that.
American Mormons, in this sense, seem to have been rather flatteringly typed. The Mormon executives and advisers around Howard Hughes were famous for their probity, their clean living, and their loyalty. As with the blond Scandinavian bodyguards who attended the Byzantine emperors, their uprightness was all the more starkly evidenced by the shiftiness of the guy they were protecting. The details of their religious views had nothing to do with the social role they played. The Osmond family was the Mormon family: too many kids and too many teeth, maybe, but always solid, always smiling, always temperate—no alcohol, no tobacco, not even caffeine. In an entertaining new autobiography, "The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith" (Free Press), Joanna Brooks recalls ecumenical birthday parties as a young Mormon in California, and the anxiety she felt about simply seeing a bottle of Coke; Mormon parties featured (non-caffeinated) root beer. Nor were the Osmonds an outsider's image: to this growing girl's self-conception, the Book of Marie—"Marie Osmond's Guide to Beauty, Health & Style"—seemed far more important than the Book of Mormon. Be perfect even as Marie on television is perfect, and you will be happy.
A lot of this is standard minority-faith stuff, including the perceived power of popular entertainment to validate a whole group. (Recall how Nathan Zuckerman's father swells with pride when the Andrews Sisters sing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.") It's only later in the cycle of integration that the group comes banging on the door—as Jews and Catholics did, in the nineteen-fifties—for more general admission, not as cardboard stage-ethnic types good at one or two things but as people available to do everything, just like the ruling Wasps. That's when everyone starts asking what it is these people really believe. So, right on cue, we find ourselves in the midst of an efflorescence of Mormon jokes, Mormon books, a Mormon-themed Broadway show—and four new scholarly books. Matthew Bowman's "The Mormon People" (Random House) offers a comprehensive, neatly written synopsis of the whole history of the Latter-day Saints movement; Paul C. Gutjahr's "The Book of Mormon: A Biography" (Princeton) traces the origins and afterlife of Latter-day Saints scripture; J. Spencer Fluhman's "A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth Century America" (North Carolina) shows how much Mormon-hating helped shape standard American Protestantism; and John G. Turner's "Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet" (Harvard) is a definitive biography of Mormonism's greatest activist and apostle.
All four authors retell Mormonism's origin stories. In the eighteen-twenties, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith—who had already been arrested for "glass looking," the phony detection of underground treasures—said that an angel named Moroni had directed him to a set of buried golden plates, inscribed with an ancient script, which, after various stops and starts, Smith and a friend had translated into a Biblical-sounding English. The plates contained the Book of Mormon, the secret history of a native people of America, who turned out to be lost tribes of Israel. They had long ago emigrated to America, and were the ancestors of the contemporary Indians. These American Hebrews had divided, after long internecine warfare, into two groups, the Lamanites (mostly bad) and the Nephites (mostly good), and—during a trip somehow overlooked by the Gospels—had been visited by Jesus, after the Resurrection and before the Ascension.
Scholarly opinion on Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville's "Confidence Man" reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn't clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition:
The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.
The reader who sits down to read the Book of Mormon today may find it even harder going than Twain suggests. One expects the tale of Nephi's emigration to America, for instance, or of Jesus' visit to Missouri to be at least soberly vivid, like Early American folk art; but the writing is so compulsively Biblical that all the action seems to take place underwater, and you have to thumb back through the pages when you realize that something cool—Israelites travelling in a boat to these shores—has already happened. Smith mimicked the endless, generation-counting longueurs of the Old Testament so skillfully that he rendered the book dead as literature while giving it credibility as a sacred text: a book as boring as this could have been inspired only by the breath of God.
The Book of Mormon is, in any case, only one of many pronouncements that Smith offered his new troops, apparently improvising as he went along, according to the shifting spiritual needs of the moment. (After other followers began to have revelations from angels of their own, the Holy Ghost inspired Smith to the conclusive revelation that only his revelations ought to be church policy.) As all our authors remind us, Mormonism was just one of countless sects dating from the Second Great Awakening, that period of the early nineteenth century which saw the first expression of the kind of hyper-emotional, revivalist Methodism that has remained the signature style of American Christianity into our own time. Smith's part of upstate New York was called, Gutjahr tells us, "the 'Burned-Over District,' because the region was so often swept by the flames of the Holy Spirit." All the sects had their own creeds, visionaries, and beliefs; they ranged from the Millerites, an upstate cult whose founder taught that the world would come to an end and Jesus return on March 21, 1843, all the way to the Oneida Community, whose members believed that Jesus had already returned and given everybody license for free love.
What made Smith's followers stick by him, even after the local Protestants became openly hostile and the Latter-day Saints had to flee from state to state and town to town? One thing—and it seems peculiar to the Mormons—was the thrill of believing in a wholly American revelation. It happened here, to people like us: angels came and told us that the land was not story-less and virgin but ancient and possessed of a secret history. (This meant assigning the native people a made-up past and ignoring their actual past; what to do about the Indians, who were both the "ancients" and the "Others," became a source of theological and practical grief.) Curiously, the Americanness of the revelation was also one of the things that made it irresistible to the thousands of working-class Englishmen and women who converted to the new faith in the eighteen-thirties and forties; visiting Mormon apostles, led by a promising Smith lieutenant named Brigham Young, told prospective immigrants that "millions upon millions of acres of land lie before them unoccupied, with a soil as rich as Eden."
The powers that possession of the Book of Mormon conferred mattered more than the doctrines that it contained. "Rarely did missionaries draw on the verses and stories of the Book of Mormon in sermons," Bowman explains. "Rather, they brandished the book as tangible proof of Joseph Smith's divine calling." Some holy texts, the Gospels, for instance, are evangelical instruments meant to convert people who read them; others are sacred objects meant to be venerated. The Book of Mormon is a book of the second sort. As the French religious historian Jean-Christophe Attias points out, in traditional Judaism the physical presence of the Scripture is at least as important as its content: when the Torah is unrolled during the service, it's meant to be admired, not apprehended. That the Mormons had a book of their own counted for almost as much as what the Book of Mormon said.
Mormonism had other assets. Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species. "God that sits enthroned is a man like one of you" and "God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man" were two of his most emphatic aphorisms on the subject. (People who were "exalted," in Smith's language, were men moving toward godhood, as God himself had once been a man who achieved it.) Although in many other respects, as Fluhman and Bowman point out, Mormonism was orthodox in its outlook—Jesus is the sole Messiah, and his history as told in the Gospels is taken to be true, if incomplete—the doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith's cult from the others, and scared the pants off even charismatic Protestantism: the Protestants were willing to accept that we are made in his image, but not that we are made of the same flesh.
This doctrine led in turn to various theological niceties, which seem to have risen and receded in the faith's theology over the years: one is that the birth of Jesus had to have been the consequence of a "natural action"—i.e., that God the Father knew Mary in a carnal way, in order to produce the Messiah. (This doctrine is currently in disfavor, but it had a long life.) Another is that God, being an exalted man, must have a wife, or several wives, as men do; she is known as the Heavenly Mother, and is a being distinct from Mary. (Smith's belief in exaltation evolved into the belief that other planets were inhabited by men even more exalted than we are; Smith taught that the truly exalted will get not just entry into Heaven but a planet of their own to run. This is now taken, or taught, metaphorically, the way conventional Christians often think of Hell, but it was part of the story.)
And then the Book of Mormon, unlike anything in the five books of the Torah, is told in a kind of flat first person: the book's opening chapters all begin with the formula "I, Nephi." This was not just an American Bible; it was a Bible with an evangelical, camp-meeting tone laid over the Old Testament vocabulary. The testimonial is the essential genre of the Great Awakening, and the Book of Mormon, for all its pastiche, is at heart a testimonial—starting with Nephi's own account of how he got his people here. Even if you didn't stay to find out what I, Nephi, did, the fact that I, Nephi, did it counted for a lot. Among other Christian texts, perhaps only the Gnostic Gospels of the early Christian centuries use the first person in quite this way. (Luke and Revelation begin with a personal introduction, but aren't really personal stories.) And, though the charge of Gnosticism was often directed at them maliciously by other Christians, Mormonism does have a definite Gnostic aroma. Like the Gnostics, the Mormons thought that the conventional texts had too much atonement and too little attainment. Mormonism objects to making a big deal of the morbid agony of Jesus on the Cross at the expense of the more cheerful apparition of Man-made-into-God. This is why there are no crosses on Mormon temples; our guy triumphed far more than he suffered.
America, one might fairly say, had two foundings: the first under the Enlightenment guidance of its rich intellectual founders, and a second with the popular, evangelical Second Great Awakening, which flamed a quarter century afterward. Ever since, the two have, like the Lamanites and the Nephites, been at war for the soul of the country, with the politics not always easily predictable; it was really the Awakening side that led to abolitionism. (Smith ran for President on an advanced abolitionist platform, in 1844.) Over time, the spiritual descendants of the Awakening have sought to annex Enlightenment doctrines, chiefly through the claim that the Founders were not skeptical Enlightenment deists but passionate Evangelical fundamentalists, while the Enlightenment-minded have tried to annex the Awakening's passionate energy to their causes, as in the civil-rights movement, where black churches became the emotional engine of what was, on its face, a legal argument about public facilities. Mormonism is a child of this fracture. In one way, it is a product of the Enlightenment love of secret histories and societies and rococo cosmologies—a "Magic Flute" for America, sung with a massed choir. (Many of its rituals and symbols seem to have a source in Freemasonry; Smith was an inducted Mason.) But it is also an instance of popular religious turbulence, not at all esoteric in its appeal but fully open to the world and evangelical in spirit.
As Fluhman shows in marvellous detail, Mormonism was the great scandal of American nineteenth-century religion, somewhat as Scientology is today, though Mormons understandably dislike the comparison. Mainstream Protestants couldn't dismiss Mormonism, couldn't embrace it, and couldn't quite understand it, and yet it thrived. For American Protestantism, Mormonism was the other: you defined yourself against those nuts. Indeed, to this day, Joanna Brooks tells us, Mormons perceive their persecutors to be not atheists or secularists, let alone Jews or Catholics, but Protestant Evangelicals. ("And then it happened. My mother put her hand on my knee as we made the turn. There they were, those words—MORMONS: CHRISTIANITY OR CULT?—on the Trinity marquee. Anger burned between my temples again, and tears stung my eyes. 'I heard they held up garments' "—Mormon sacramental underwear—" 'in church last Sunday, too,' my mother told me, pityingly.")
Forced out of New York by an earlier version of that fierce Protestant hostility, Smith and his followers began their years of wandering. Wherever they went, they infuriated the non-Mormon locals, and also managed to infuriate one another: the early history of the movement involves a bewildering series of excommunications, internal banishments, and the increasing threat of violence to enforce new rules as Smith received them. Smith was eventually martyred by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, while in the local jail awaiting trial for treason. Which of his doctrines enraged the mob is hard to grasp, but it may have been sex more than heresy. You could have as many doctrines as you liked, but not as many wives.
There the story might have ended. Yet as a rule the success of a new religious movement depends not so much on the mystical visions of its founder as on the executive energy of its first evangelist. Christianity may be Jesus' intuition, but it is Paul's institution, and the Nation of Islam owed less to the mysterious preachments of Wallace Fard than to the organizational tenacity of Elijah Muhammad. Brigham Young inhabited this role for the Mormons, and about as fully as any apostle ever has. Young was one of Smith's earliest followers, a hard-bitten character from Vermont who, inheriting Smith's mantle, got his posse of believers out West and, instead of pushing forward along the Oregon Trail and joining the gold rush, chose an arid but suitable piece of land, planted his people there, and, in 1847, began building a wooden tabernacle in the town he called Salt Lake City.
Young's accomplishment in getting his unruly congregation out of their contentious place in settled country to a new territory of their own is genuinely remarkable. As the first governor of Utah—he preferred the Mormon name Deseret—he ruled more or less alone over a huge chunk of Western territory, including a lot of what is today Wyoming, Colorado, and Nevada. Understandably, Turner is inclined to see Young as a kind of Western hero, the John Wayne character in a Howard Hawks Western, rough around the edges; he is one of the few nineteenth-century public figures to be routinely on the record saying "frigged" and "shit." Yet the figure who emerges in the biography starts off more like Jim Jones or David Koresh. He preached a brutal doctrine of "blood atonement" that Turner describes as a "chilling perversion of the golden rule." Young's formulation: "Will you love that man or woman enough to shed their blood? That is what Jesus Christ meant." For a time, he tolerated a group of frontier thugs who acted as personal emissaries, and, despite Smith's gestures toward universalism, imposed a hard anti-African and pro-slavery line. (Blacks were excluded from the priesthood and from temple ceremonies.) Young was in power at the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1857, in which more than a hundred peaceful non-Mormon emigrants were disarmed under an elaborate promise of safe conduct and then murdered en masse. "The attackers mercilessly shot, stabbed, and slashed the throats of emigrants who pled for their lives," Turner recounts, in an event he describes as "a heinous crime executed after careful deliberation and subterfuge." For all that, the killers "appeared to remain not just in good standing but in Young's own personal favor," Turner notes. It's a long way to the Osmonds.
Young's brutality, and his insistence that Utah belonged exclusively to the Mormons, led President James Buchanan to send in the troops; Young armed his men and swore that they would burn down Salt Lake City before they bowed to Washington. All the elements for full-scale religious warfare seemed set, and the thing might easily have ended in a counter-massacre and the collapse of the Mormons as a force in North America.
In the end, Young backed down and accepted federal supremacy in the territory. He knew that his people had little hope against the Army—but this is not a thought that has stopped religious zealots in the past, from Masada on. (Had Young somehow found a way to repel that pre-Civil War Army, a large tract of the continent might now be a religious state called Zion.) Something more was at work. One element latent in Smith's theology that Young brought forward was a kind of sanctified materialism. His brand of Mormonism might at times have been extra-planetary, but it was scarcely otherworldly. Right here on earth, he insisted, men became saints and even approached godliness. Smith taught that Gods and men were one species; Young made this idea a practical guiding principle. "We are not going to wait for Angels" was his very American aphorism on the subject. "We intend to build up Zion on the earth." Since we are angelic already, we should not let the forces of Lucifer drive us from the Heaven we've found. There was no virtue in letting your enemies send you to that other, better place, if Salt Lake City was essentially just as good.
The implicit social treaty to which the Mormons in Utah agreed meant giving up their claims to autonomy and the practices that their countrymen found most distasteful (notably, polygamy), in exchange for recognition of their primacy in Utah and a readiness in the rest of the country to tolerate their faith. Mormons effectively turned away from spiritual adventuring toward the gospel of prosperity. After the Civil War, Brigham Young sponsored the first Mormon department stores and commercial franchises, the Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institutions, through which, Turner says, "Mormon merchants would earn reduced profits, but undercut the non-Mormon counterparts and keep Zion's wealth within its borders. . . . Merchants who invested in the enterprise displayed a ZCMI sign on their storefronts, consisting of an 'All-Seeing Eye' and the phrase 'Holiness to the Lord.' " The Salt Lake Zion was now a commercial capital. Turner shows that the Z.C.M.I. in part reflected the socialist and communalist doctrines that Smith had taught, and were opposed by more laissez-faire Mormons. Still, the stores were there to sell Eastern goods to Utah shoppers.
Turner's book approaches its end with a photograph of the grandest of the Z.C.M.I. department stores, the capital's Eagle Emporium, attended by a stern-faced honor guard of local Indians. An emporium civilization had taken over from the territorial one. It was a victory of Gilded Age capitalism (enforced perhaps by the railroads, which made indefinite isolation an unrealistic goal) over Great Awakening spiritualism. Fluhman writes of this alteration a little regretfully, as a kind of spiritual sellout. The Sacred Tabernacle had allied itself with the Big Store. But, as usual in America, the squalid turn toward vulgar prosperity was also a sane turn toward social peace.
Mormonism remained more or less theologically whole, with its holy book and its distinctive doctrines. But this sublimation of the energy of the faith into the energy of commerce seems always to have marked it afterward. Many faiths know a moment when a territorial practice gets pointed toward a symbolic and indoor activity: thus, most famously, the move from the Temple Judaism of ancient Israel to the Talmudic, rabbinical Judaism that arose after the destruction of the Temple. Less noted, perhaps, is the retrenchment of Roman Catholicism in France from the aggressive political role it played as recently as the Dreyfus affair toward the inward-turning N.G.O. it is today: the energy that produced Sacré Coeur in Montmartre now expresses itself in the number of water wells dug in Africa. For Mormonism, the intensity of the faith got sublimated into missionary zeal and commerce. Joanna Brooks explains this nicely: "Being Mormons we were taught never to go in for the bamboozle of mysterious sacraments of grace embraced by the rest of apostate Christendom. . . . No, no, we Mormons were taught that our works must carry us there." The emphasis on works is a Protestant standby, but in this case it is without the grim Calvinist suspicion that maybe the works won't get you to Heaven. Mormons know they will. Work and grace are not in tension but in neat accord. A mercantile church and a missionary church move in the same holy direction, and the vector that points both forward is the energy of enterprise.
Yet how much do specifically Mormon beliefs matter to contemporary Mormons? Brooks's story, give or take a Nephite or two, could unfold in any fundamentalist community that provides comfort and meaning if you're prepared to park your critical intelligence in the lot outside the church door. She writes, often quite movingly, of the persistent ambivalence of her feelings about her natal faith, but any strayed member of a tight community of believers feels this way about it. Nephi, the Lamanites, the approaching apocalypse in Missouri—these things hardly come up. What resonates for her is the Mormon elder who said that heavy-metal music had secret satanic codes—the same preacher you find in any fundamentalist camp. These stories of attachment and repulsion are being played out in or around Hasidic communities in Brooklyn every day, and surely, for that matter, among Sikhs and Jains in Queens, too. This is the story of faith, not of Joseph Smith's faith. The allegiance is to the community that nurtured you, and it is bolstered by the community's history of persecution, which makes you understandably inclined to defend its good name against all comers. It isn't the truth of the Book, or the legends of Nephi, that undergird Mormon solidarity even among lapsed or wavering believers; it's the memories of what other people were prepared to do in order to prevent your parents from believing. A critique of the creed, even a rational one, feels like an assault on the community.
One has a strong sense, reading the literature, of a contemporary Mormonism that has deliberately placed its most distinctive doctrines and icons in eclipse. Mormon art produced one camp genius, the mid-twentieth-century painter Arnold Friberg—he won non-Mormon fame as Cecil B. De Mille's designer for "The Ten Commandments"—who illustrated Smith's scripture in a style that's a cross between Norman Rockwell and a "Conan the Barbarian" comic; his image of Nephi is canonic among believers, and, it must be said, looks exactly like Mitt Romney. But these eccentric triumphs have been largely hushed, and Mormonism now emphasizes its congruence with conventional Christianity rather than its differences. Walk by the Latter-day Saints church on the Upper East Side of New York, and you will see only images of Jesus and scenes from the Gospels, even if the Mormon Jesus looks more corn-fed and burly than the gaunt, ascetic one in the Protestant church around the corner. The continuing Mormon suspicion of Evangelicals, and the Evangelical hostility toward Mormons, could be politically significant only if the guy on the other side is a credible Evangelical, at least in emotional style. When the other guy is at best an intellectual and at worst an Arab, political solidarity is bound to trump inter-sectarian mistrust.
The image seems to have turned yet again, and now the Mormons of the popular imagination are not so much honest as innocent. In Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (whose title refers to the Mormon myth), the Mormons, though repressed, are failures only at living up to their own potent mythology of an American Eden. The Mormons in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "The Book of Mormon" are not the heretics of the early years, or the separatists of the mid-nineteenth century, or even the trustworthy men of the Hughes period. They are well-meaning naïfs, essentially sweet and admirable—though, to be a little heretical myself, this may be evidence, along with much of "South Park," of Parker and Stone's wanting to take credit for being bold without ever taking the risks or responsibility that come with being brave. (By mocking the Mormon kids while not mocking them—because everyone else is ridiculous, too—and getting laughs from racist clichés while making it clear that they know they're racist clichés, they want the thrill of being thought satirists while seeking the safety of mere silliness.)
All of which leads to the inevitable question: To what degree is Mormonism responsible for Mitt Romney? Is there a thread, dark or golden, that runs from Moroni to Mitt? Garry Wills has argued, after all, that Irish Catholic ideas about sin—that sin is negotiable currency, to be practiced, done penance for, forgiven—allowed John Kennedy some serenity as he screwed his way through the White House typing pool, just as the habits of Protestant Evangelical belief, in forgiveness and temptation and forgiveness, in a never-ending cycle, helped Bill Clinton find a common language with working-class people. The most striking feature of Mitt Romney as a politician is an absence of any responsibility to his own past—the consuming sense that his life and opinions can be remade at a moment's need. Romney, according to Romney, never favored the individual mandate, or supported abortion rights, or opposed the auto-industry bailout, or did any of the other things he obviously, and on the record, did.
One could presumably make a case that beleaguered faiths always shy from admitting errancy in public. Dominant faiths can afford tales of failure and redemption, with sinners becoming saints and saints dropping in and out of the calendar like blue-plate specials; beleaguered ones have to put on a good face in public and never lose it. Donny Osmond talks about the anxieties that arose from a need to appear perfect, and the impossibility of admitting in public to flaws or errors. Better to have a new revelation about, say, health-care mandates that renders the previous one instantly inoperable than spend time apologizing for the old ways. When, in 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned the rule prohibiting blacks from serving as priests, one church leader, Bruce McConkie, explained, "It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June 1978." You could find, or think you've found, a similar logic behind Romney's blithe amnesia when it comes to the things he used to think and say.
Yet class surely tells more than creed when it comes to American manners, and Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer. Most of what is distinct about him seems specific to the rich managerial class of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and is best explained so—just as you would grasp more about Jack Kennedy from F. Scott Fitzgerald (an Irish and a Catholic ascending to Wasp manners) than from St. Augustine. In another way, though, this is precisely where faith really does walk in, since commerce and belief seem complementary in Romney's tradition. It's just that this tradition is not merely Mormon. Joseph Smith's strange faith has become a denomination within the bigger creed of commerce. It's unfair to say, as some might, that Mitt Romney believes in nothing except his own ambition. He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.
Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. Forced into a corner by the Feds, Young's followers put down their guns and got busy making money—just as the Oneida devotees who made silverware for a living ended up merely making silverware. (The moneymaking activities of the major churches hardly need outlining.) Christmas morning is the American Sabbath, and it runs, ideally, all year round. The astonishing thing, and it would have brought a smile to Nephi's face as he and his tribe sailed to the New World, is that this gospel of prosperity is the one American faith that will never fail, even when its promises seem ruined. Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates. ♦


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A prominent gun rights attorney has agreed to represent pro bono the family of a Southern California high school student who was ordered to remove an National Rifle Association T-shirt over fears it promoted violence.
Haley Bullwinkle, a 16-year-old sophomore at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, wore the NRA shirt last month to school. The shirt had a silhouette of a hunter holding a rifle with a scope, a deer and the American flag.
Citing a policy prohibiting clothing "depicting or promoting violence," school staff gave her another shirt to wear, school officials said in a statement.
U.S. & World
But after her parents contacted the school expressing concern, the principal determined the shirt logo did not promote violence and that she could wear the shirt.
The Bullwinkles also received an apology from the school and an assurance that training will be provided to staff "so an incident like this does not occur again," school officials said.
Attorney Chuck Michel, who volunteered to help the family with their case, said he believes the school violated her First Amendment rights.
"It's ludicrous to claim that the American flag, a deer or a hunter somehow promotes or depicts or threatens violence," he said.
Michel said he would push to make sure school officials explicity lay out in a dress code what's banned and what isn't.
Michel suggests a double standard is in play as the school's pep squad practices with dummy rifles and the school's mascot is a Commanche warrior.
Canyon High School made headlines last year when it nixed its longtime tradition of having students dress up as gardeners, gang members and even a pregnant woman pushing a baby stroller as part of an annual, Mexican-themed show dubbed "Senores and Senoritas."
More Southern California Stories:


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I think nearly all of us have experienced this. I found it even worse in the United States than I do here in conservative, heavily Catholic Costa Rica.
Psychology Today:
Why are Americans afraid of atheists? The belief that god does not exist is not hard to come by these days, and appears to be growing throughout the world. But as a Pew Research Center report put it, when it comes to religiosity, "the US is closer to considerably less developed nations, such as India, Brazil and Lebanon than to other western nations..."
Views: 757
I submit that one of the main reasons they fear atheists is for the simple fact that the majority of us know more about the bible than they do. I was raised in a christian home, I always had my doubts about the bible even when I was young. In order for me to totally abolish what I was taught, I felt that I needed to read the entire bible and know for sure what I did not believe in.
Most christian people believe because of the possible consequences if they do not so they have no reason to know exactly why they believe. all religion is fear - based. but the ones that just believe out of fear are not the ones we need to worry about, it is those who actually believe in a talking snake and a virgin birth that scare the hell out of me, I guarantee that I fear that level of logic just as much if not more than they fear Atheism.
Definitely true where I live. I am the endless subject of campus gossip... "Did you know that he is an atheist?" To them, it is as strange as having 12 fingers.
Much is definitely the fear they feel of the whole silly house of cards falling down around their ears if they dare let any rational thought in - this is also why they always feel we are being "mean", "aggressive" and "militant" by simply existing.
Much spookier to me personally is that so much of the structure of their delusion is propped up with fear - many of them live in a constant state of low-level terror, walking on eggshells for fear of their imaginary god, like kids both hopefully loving and terrified of an abusive parent. They fear that their god will rain horror down indiscriminately on us but also on them for tolerating the existence of the whole list of unacceptables which includes smarty-pants rationalists, gays, uppity women, uppity poor people, and pretty much anyone and everyone - and I fall into a few of these categories.
Very well reasoned and expressed Carolyn
Its nice to hear that people worldwide are waking up. I see the opposite here in California lately, seems the churches have mastered brainwashing. My wifes family puts their children in these bible quiz tournaments now. As young as 5 pretty sickening to me.
the establishment has always used religion as a control mechanism for the masses. Religion also helps to galvanise political and idealogical thinking. there is also the idea that without moral imperatives we would all run around killing, stealing and raping which i have some sympathy with for it does seem looking at historical and contempary evidence where the rule of law breaks down men do indeed run around stealing, killing and raping. Also people do not like to be told they are stupid and in essence thats the message they get from the atheist community and rightly so.
Part of the problem, too, is that believers have been told repeatedly that They Are SINNERS, that they can't redeem themselves on their own, that they were born broken and only through the Blood of JEEEZUS can they extract themselves from the predetermined course to hell which their deity has ordained.
They've been told this in one way or another since they were kids, and so naturally, they're already scared. Now they've got US telling them that they've been conned, that the whole business is a bunch of Big-Lie-enhanced bullshit. They've been raised to be dependent on the church, and, as I've stated before, they are addicted to it.
I think we need to be more cognizant of the fact that we're asking them to quit cold turkey, then to face what would look very much like withdrawal symptoms. I'm not saying we need to lighten up. I just want us to be more aware of the state of our audience.
Perhaps since the underlying pathology is a belief in unworthiness, we should begin by communicating, "I'm OK, You're OK." Address the underlying "lie" which facilitates addiction.
Simply put, the country as a whole is afraid of atheism and its rising numbers because it represents a loss of control and authority over the people. When religion controls thoughts and beliefs, it also controls behaviour. There are so many people who ask questions, and when they get answers like "because the bible says so" or "because god says so", they take that as a good enough reason and go on with their day. With the increasing numbers of atheists who do not accept these as legitimate reasons for doing things, the people in power now have to come up with other explanations and reasoning, which they are often incapable of doing, in turn making themselves look weak.
I just wrote the great author Sam Harris about this subject. That "void," that Mr. Harris speaks of is very real to someone of faith. Below is a small portion of the story that I sent to Mr. Harris. My nephew was only 21 years old when he took his own life. Here are the txt messages sent to him, from me, a week before his passing.
August 20 4:27pm
Me: Do you study debate/psychology or have speech classes.
CJ: I'm gonna have a psych class in the next semester
Me: Ok cool. If you wanna get a heads up on the competition do you know who Sam Harris is? (Meaning it would be a great debate subject)
CJ: No i don't
Me: This guy is fearless. I enjoy debate watch it all the time. This guy is the best speaker I've ever heard.
CJ: Ill look him up
Me: Watch: "Sam Harris simply destroys Catholicism while in debate at Notre Dame" (YouTube)
Me: I've read the moral Landscape its good but the end of faith is supposedly his best work
My fiancee woke me up, screaming about the tragedy, and my first thought was the debate video.
Did depression,inevitably, kill CJ? Will the autopsy find a tumor on his brain? Was he murdered? Or the question I ponder the most in my mind...Did the video I sent him (Sam Harris Simply destroys Catholicism in a Notre Dame Debate) taken in the wrong context, plus depression, make him feel that void (you speak of) was too much to handle? Did this void make him think it was acceptable to commit the selfish act of taking ones own life?
Mr. Harris, that void you write about is very real. I can attest. I often ponder all the time wasted in my life with the absurd Catholic religion that I participated in as a child and young adult. Its easier for me to deal with it because I'm used to being an outcast (politically) for being transparent and honest.
Interesting article, thanks. Glad I live in an urban area.
Well, being a polite rooster bye and large, I will be gentle with my thoughts as to why Religious-Americans fear Atheist-Americans, not wanting to offend anyone. =]
I feel it is because right from the first European invasion of the American shores, people have been telling themselves (religious) stories that excuse their behaviour there. It is just human nature after all.
"Bringing the Civilising Word of God to the Benighted Savages" was one of the very first stories, and the moral blemish of actually being a ursurping, nation destroying, rapacious pack of pirates to the Native-Americans was washed out of the French, English and Spanish soul by sticking hard to the story.
Later, with the slavery thing, it was justified again by the same "But we lifted them out of Benighted Savagery in Africa, of course they are better off here in a Christian land, as slaves".
Also the "We Escaped from Religious Persecution to practice Our Faith in Peace and Equality" story was told, as a pleasant mental wash to dissolve all the instances of Religious Persecution the "Pilgrim Fathers" indulged themselves in.
To this day the Religous-Americans have preferred the story to facing the past straight on. And if they have to give a place to people who refuse to believe the story, look at all the crimes they will have to acknowledge as their heritage. Just mho of course.
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Kate Bosworth was stoked to go from waif to warrior.
The gamine-like starlet of "Blue Crush" and "Superman Returns" may look like a slender and girly little thing, but don't get into a knife fight with her. For her new film "The Warrior's Way," a visually arresting martial arts/Western hybrid, Bosworth threw herself into the role of a free-spirited frontier femme fatale with a way with the blade.
"From the moment that I went to New Zealand, the first thing that I was wanting to jump into immediately was the martial arts element," Bosworth told PopcornBiz. "Because I'd never taken any kind of martial arts and was completely unfamiliar with it."
Bosworth said it took time to hone her knife-throwing and swordplay skills.
"I don't know if I'm particularly the most coordinated person on the planet," she said. "When you have a sword in your hand that you're having to swing around and then having to center yourself and then move the other way, it's so much harder than you think. Especially turns, twirls, holding your balance and also having to focus.
"The routine that was the most terrifying to me in a way was the sort of frenzied love dance scene," she recalled. "I started out just being horrible, and then started getting better the more time that I did it. It was just like anything: repetition and practice and being tough on yourself when it comes to athletics."
Despite her newfound skills, the actress said she's not accepting any challenges to throw down with daggers in the wake of the film. "I think that I've forgotten everything! I haven't really kept up with the whole knife-fighting thing," she laughed, admitting that even her ability to hang ten has suffered in the years since her breakthrough in "Blue Crush."
"I haven't surfed in so long and that's so disappointing," Bosworth said. "When surfers come up to me, they're so excited and I feel like I really let them down when I say, 'I haven't surfed in so long.' I feel like I need to apologize and then I go, 'But I did at the time. I was so into it,' and I overcompensate."


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Nuggets from Facebook's new IPO application continue to be parsed, this time it's about salaries -- and one investor friendly fact.
CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will make $500,000 in salary this year, qualifying for performance-based bonuses worth up to 45 percent of that figure ($225,000), according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is set to make $300,000.
The company, which is valued at $103.4-110 billion based on a Sharepost auction on Thursday that had shares at a high of $44.
Interestingly, there is no golden parachute arrangement for Zuckerberg or Sandberg, according to the Contra Costa Times. That may make the investors happy to hear.


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No relation to bands of the same name from California or from England, this Kaleidoscope was Mexican, though like the other two bands, they also operated in the late 1960s. Their sole album (sung completely in English) was a pretty fair, if pretty typical piece of garage rock-psychedelia, heavy on thick vibrating organ, fuzz guitar, and surly vocals. The album sounds very much like a soundtrack to a circa-'67 psychsploitation flick, but with a better band than most such films enlisted, with some unpredictable wacky effects and lead vocals (only betraying faint foreign accents) affecting a nonchalant cockiness. It's been reported that just a couple hundred copies of the LP were pressed when it first came out, and though it was reissued on La Ciruela Electrica, that was a limited edition of only 600 copies.
Similar ArtistsSee All


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I've just had the honor of speaking at this year's InfoComm conference and wanted to share with you some of the ideas I explored in depth during my session. It'd be great to hear your thoughts in response and get a conversation going … because, to me, that sort of collaboration is just what the future of digital communication is going to be about.
The way I see it, we're moving from an "Internet of Things" to an "Internet of Everything." The Internet of Things is the connection of the 50 billion apps and clouds and devices that join up to networks and enable some level of communication. But the Internet of Everything is about synthesizing these connections and data to transform business processes and make them accessible to people in ways that matter in the real world. The real value is in the connections—in other words, it's about enabling truly powerful collaboration. The value of the Internet of Everything is only as good as the breadth of the people, process, data and things it can reach.
The best collaboration systems take a standards-based approach and unleash the value of the people using them. They raise the value of human interaction over distance with voice, video and content sharing all rolled into one experience. They give these people the flexibility to work from anywhere, from Starbucks to the boardroom, with equally important impacts on the projects in which they're engaged. Ultimately we should be able to interact on any pane of glass and by augmenting personal interactions with information from data and things it makes it better than being there!
We're striving to keep people at the center of everything we do, so while we work to bridge the gap between location flexibility and users' choices of devices and media, we're thinking less about the fanciness of the technology and more about providing a single, high-quality experience for users. That experience will comprise cloud, video and mobility, integrating them in a way that's intuitive and productive for our customers.
The future of collaboration will take users beyond their own companies and extend to remote suppliers and partners, all the way to a call center to service the end user. This collaboration will unite the entire business production line, will be simple enough for a non-techie to figure out and will provide any-to-any communications between telepresence rooms, desktop phones, iPhones, laptops and any other devices.
Also, don't forget: we believe that it takes a combination of software and hardware to get this vision realized. It's hard to interact with the physical world of things with software alone. Take a holistic view of the supply chain – browser, user device, sensors, network optimization, codecs, ASICs, etc. Both software and hardware are needed to deliver a high quality collaboration experience.
I'm excited about this Internet of Everything and about being part of the effort to bring it to fruition. Where do you see this next wave of collaboration taking you and your business?


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Category : Flow Chart.
Topic : Photosynthesis flow chart worksheet answers. Author : Tate Duffy.
Posted : Fri, Sep 20th 2019 18:16 PM.
Format : jpg/jpeg.
When writing technical papers, manuals, e-books, or research papers we often try to explain procedures, processes, and the proper way to make decisions based on that data or the task at hand. In explaining these processes it makes sense to use flowcharts, something that is very popular with academia, and business management gurus.


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Central African Republic rebels ignore negotiation
Dec 31, 2012, 10:42 PM EST
AFP/Getty Images
BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) — President Francois Bozize's government came under growing threat Monday as rebels vowing to overthrow him rejected appeals from the African Union to hold their advance and try to form a coalition government.
Meanwhile, dozens of troops from Republic of Congo arrived at sunset on New Year's Eve in Bangui, the capital, as part of an effort to step up the presence of a multinational regional military force.
After disembarking from their military aircraft, the group of about 120 men was headed toward the line between government forces and a coalition of four rebel groups known as Seleka north of Bangui.
The rebels have seized control of about 10 towns in less than a month's time, and now have moved within striking distance to the capital, a city of more than 700,000 people. The government has imposed a curfew of 7 p.m., leaving the streets largely empty on New Year's Eve.
Soldiers from Central African Republic and a regional military force are currently in Damara, about 75 kilometers (45 miles) from Bangui. The rebels, meanwhile, are holding the city of Sibut, which is about 185 kilometers (115 miles) away.
The rebels on Monday said they did not trust Bozize's offer to form a unity government, raising fears they could attempt confrontation with government forces in the coming days.
"We are not convinced of the commitments made ??by President Bozize," said rebel spokesman Juma Narkoyo when reached by telephone. "Bozize has always spoken, but he never keeps his word."
The rebels said they would enter negotiations "only if the head of state releases all our relatives they have arrested without reason."
The rebels claim that Bozize has abducted more than a dozen of their family members. They warned if the president uses foreign troops to protect his government, they may continue their campaign toward the capital.
In response the rebels were told by the African Union that if they seize power they will face sanctions and Central African Republic will be suspended from the organization.
Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande welcomed the efforts by the AU and the group of neighboring states to find a negotiated solution. Hollande called for "opening a dialogue between CAR authorities and all the parties present, including the rebellion."
Hollande last week said his government would only protect French interests in CAR, but would not prop up the Bozize government.
Central African Republic has suffered many army revolts, coups and rebellions since gaining independence from France in 1960.
The rebels behind the current instability signed a 2007 peace accord allowing them to join the regular army, but insurgent leaders say the deal wasn't fully implemented.
Neighboring African countries have agreed to send more forces to support the Bozize government.
Representatives from the 10-nation Economic Community of Central African States, or ECCAS, agreed at a meeting in Gabon on Friday to send forces to CAR, but did not did not specify how many troops would be sent or how quickly the military assistance would arrive.
The ECCAS states, with more than 500 soldiers via their regional peacekeeping force in Central Africa, warned the rebels over the weekend to halt their advances.
The neighboring Republic of Congo sent 120 troops from Brazzaville on Monday to bolster the regional force, according to a New Year's statement from Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso. Troops from Gabon and Cameroon also were expected in the coming days to join extra forces already sent from Chad.
The regional forces are there to help stabilize the area but "will be forced to defend ourselves" if the rebel forces open fire, said Gabriel Enteha Ebia, the Republic of Congo's ambassador to Central African Republic.
The ongoing instability here already has prompted the United States to evacuate about 40 people, including the U.S. ambassador, from Bangui on an U.S. Air Force plane bound for Kenya, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the operation.
The United States has special forces troops in the country who are assisting in the hunt for Joseph Kony, the fugitive rebel leader of another rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army. The U.S. special forces remain in the country, the U.S. military's Africa Command said from its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
The evacuation of the U.S. diplomats came after criticism of how the U.S. handled diplomatic security before and during the attack on its consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. The ambassador and three other Americans were killed in that attack.
In Washington, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland expressed concern "about the deteriorating security situation in the Central African Republic" and called on the rebel alliance "to cease hostilities and movements towards the capital."
At the same time, she urged the government to respect human rights, saying the U.S. is "concerned by allegations of arrests and disappearances of hundreds of individuals who are members of ethnic groups with ties to the rebel alliance."
She urged both sides to work with the Central African economic community "to seek a political resolution to this crisis."
China announced Monday that it is evacuating its 300 citizens from CAR, although its embassy staff will stay.
French diplomats have remained in Bangui, despite a violent demonstration outside its embassy last week. Dozens of protesters, angry at France's lack of help against rebel forces, threw rocks at the French Embassy in Bangui and stole a French flag.
CAR, a landlocked nation of 4.4 million people, is one of the poorest countries in the world. The current president himself came to power nearly a decade ago in the wake of a rebellion in this resource-rich yet deeply poor country. Despite Central African Republic's wealth of gold, diamonds, timber and uranium, the government remains perpetually cash-strapped.
Associated Press writer Kirubel Tadesse contributed to this report from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.


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Long Winter
|Long Winter
|Eriador, Dunland, Rohan
|November T.A. 2758 to March 2759
|Thousands of lives lost in Rohan and The Shire
|Hobbits, Dunlendings, Rohirrim
|Long, cold winter; Rohan covered in snow for five months
The Long Winter (November T.A. 2758 to March 2759[1]) was an extremely cold and long-lasting winter in Middle-earth, covering Eriador, Dunland and Rohan.
In T.A. 2758, Easterlings and Dunlendings (led by Wulf) attacked Rohan from both the north-west and east; not only was Gondor unable to help due its war with the Corsairs, but the Dunlendings were strengthened with the enemies of Gondor who had travelled up the rivers Isen and Lefnui. The Rohirrim were defeated; King Helm Hammerhand's son, Haleth, was killed; and Wulf sat in Meduseld declaring himself King.[1]
The Long Winter compounded the problems: Rohan was under snow for five months with both the Rohirrim and their enemies suffering grievously from famine. Meanwhile, King Helm took refuge in the Hornburg and the ravine behind (becoming known as Helm's Deep): at Yule a great counsel was held, and, against the King's advice, Háma, Helm's younger son, went out in a sortie and was lost in the snow. King Helm himself would secretly go out to enemy camps, clad in white, and slay many men with his bare hands - before he left he would always blow his great horn, striking fear into the hearts of his enemies. One day, the men heard Helm's great horn blowing in the Deeping-coomb, but when they came to him, they saw that he had died, standing upright.[1]
Come March T.A. 2759, the Long Winter ended and Fréaláf Hildeson, Helm's sister-son and new King of Rohan, came from Dunharrow and took back Edoras, catching the Dunlendings unaware and killing Wulf; the Dunlendings and Easterlings were driven out of Rohan (including Isengard), or else they had perished. The melted snow caused great floods with the Entwash becoming a vast fen; and in the spring, once Beregond, son of Steward Beren, had defeated the invaders from the south, Gondor sent aid to Rohan.
Although the Long Winter did not affect Gondor directly, it did have an indirect effect: in T.A. 2758, three fleets[1] of Corsairs and Haradrim began to assail the coasts of Gondor as far north as the River Isen;[2] due to the dual perils of the Long Winter and the war with the Dunlendings, the Rohirrim were unable to send help.[3]
After Beregond had defeated the invaders, Gondor began to recover to its former power. However, in T.A. 2758, seeing Rohan's weakness, the Steward, Beren gave the keys to Orthanc to the wizard Saruman.[2]
The Shire
The Long Winter resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Hobbits in The Shire.[4] Although the wizard Gandalf came to the aid of the Hobbits,[5] a dreadful famine followed the Long Winter, known as the Days of Dearth, which lasted into T.A. 2760.
The Long Winter had a more indirect effect on the history of The Shire and Middle-earth: it was during the Long Winter that Gandalf first became fond of Hobbits and their affairs, which indirectly led to Gandalf's selection of Bilbo Baggins to go on the Quest of Erebor:
- "And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember. They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity one for another. It was by their pity as much as their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived. I wanted them to survive. [...] And anyway you must begin at some point, with some on person. I dare say he was "chosen" and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo."
- ― Gandalf speaking to Pippin[6][7]
See Also
- Fell Winter (T.A. 2911-2912)
- Great Plague (T.A. 1636)
- Fell Winter (F.A. 495-496)
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, "The House of Eorl"
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, "The Númenorean Kings", "Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion", "The Stewards"
- ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Peoples of Middle-earth, "The Heirs of Elendil", p. 205
- ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, "Prologue", "Concerning Hobbits"
- ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix B, "The Third Age"
- ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), Unfinished Tales, "The Quest of Erebor"
- ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien; Douglas A. Anderson, (ed.), (2002) The Annotated Hobbit: Revised and Expanded Edition, "Appendix A. The Quest of Erebor", p. 370
|Preceded by:
War of the Dwarves and Dragons
|Major events of Middle-earth
|Followed by:
War of the Dwarves and Orcs


text:
Long Beach Airport will hold a full-scale emergency response exercise April 20, 2018.
Travelers departing from LGB are encouraged to arrive early due to increased security.
Long Beach Airport is building a better way to fly. Read the latest Capital Improvement Project Status Report, or view Long Beach Airport Modernization Plan Fact Sheets.
Although we hope drivers will rise to the occasion as they did last year and avoid the Sepulveda Pass during the I-405 closure September 29 and 30, you might want to prepare for lengthy delays.
Two F-18 fighter jets arrived at LGB today, April 13, 2012, at approximately 2:30 p.m. and 2:35 p.m. They are from Navy Squadron VFA-122, and will be conducting their famous flyovers this weekend for the Long Beach Grand Prix.
* Please note the I-405 freeway between Seal Beach Boulevard and the I-605 will not be closed in both directions simultaneously. Crews will close the northbound I-405 freeway first and at least one lane will remain open on the southbound I-405. Once they've completed work on the northbound side of the freeway they will close the southbound I-405 and one lane will remain open on the northbound I-405.
Due to the holidays the airport has instituted enhanced security measures and passengers should allow extra time for travel.


text: Thanks, I decided to go with the separate project Phantom_Phoenix_Serial, which is now up there. The code relies on my other project BioloidSerial, which I also slightly updated to match what was in my local project. In addition on the BioloidSerial project I uploaded a zip file that has my Arbotix Hardware branch that I am using to support the Arbotix on 1.5.6. This version of the library allows the default Serial1 object to be created which is used by BioloidSerial. I have tried using the BioloidSerial objects on the Arbotix as well as standard Arduino Megas and likewise now with the Teensy 3.1 with the Phantom_Phoenix_Serial code. Also I have also tried out running a slightly modified version of the Pypose code base on the Quad.


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Fox News host Glenn Beck made $32 million during a recent 12-month stretch ending March 1, according to an analysis conducted by Forbes.
In addition to his Fox News gig, Beck hosts a radio show, writes books, sells merchandise and goes on tour with a show that blends stand-up comedy and his brand of conservative politics.
Forbes estimates that Beck makes $13 million a year from his books and on a 10-issue-a-year magazine his company publishes named "Fusion."
Beck's radio deal attracts an additional $10 million a year — he is currently working through a five-year $50 million contract — and Fox pays him $2 million for his 5 p.m. show.
In addition, Forbes estimates that Beck makes $4 million off of digital ads and merchandise purchased at glennbeck.com and $3 million from speaking fees and event appearances.
His production company, Mercury Radio Arts, which POLITICO reported in January fell behind on paying its taxes, employs 34 full-time employees.
Forbes' story on Beck, which was posted online Wednesday night, will be the magazine's cover story later this month.


text:
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text:
Creation: Good Old Young Universe Part III
I documented evidence from comets, meteors and meteorites, our fellow planets in our solar system, and our sun. All of the empirical evidence suggests that the earth cannot be billions or even millions of years old. There are an astonishing number of factual evidences that our world is quite young.Pin It


text:
This sale has ended
Cracking Aussie Whites Dozen
If You're a Fan of White Wine and Your Fridge is Running Low, Stock Up with This Cracking Aussie Whites Dozen! Only $69 with Delivery Included (Value $189)
Never be short of an excellent bottle of white wine with this Cracking Aussie Whites Dozen!
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text:
In an honest and upfront piece over on serious news outlet Something Awful, the President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, has explained the reasons behind his country's highly unpopular (with XCOM leaders) withdrawal from the XCOM project.
While a "tragic incident at the gas station" seems to have been the straw that broke this camel's back, he lists numerous grievances with XCOM command, including a decision to send their only Skyranger to France (ignoring Nigerian pleas) on a "UFO vacation" and a lack of satellite coverage.
Jonathan announced that, in place of XCOM personnel, his people's defence against the alien invasion would be handled by a new Nigerian body, called UFO Force. Apparently the organisation "is being given a new base in the former gas station missing several walls and partly on fire. I assure you the fire has not spread to the important parts."
Why Damned XCOM is Abolished From Nigeria [Something Awful]


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FLATLANDS — More than 100 mourners packed into a Brooklyn church Thursday to remember 23-year-old Lauren Abraham, who was electrocuted by a downed wire while trying to capture footage of Hurricane Sandy.
During a tear-filled, two-hour service at the Christian Cultural Center, friends and relatives remembered Abraham as a passionate, ambitious woman who wanted to be both a teacher and a makeup artist.
"Most of us are either smart or creative," her brother, Corey Abraham, said at the service. "She was fortunate enough to be both."
Neighbors said they watched in horror as Lauren Abraham roamed barefoot in front of her South Richmond Hill home at the height of the storm Oct. 29 and shot images on her iPhone before slipping and falling on a power line knocked down by wind gusts.
Abraham's grief-stricken mother told DNAinfo.com New York Thursday that her daughter had been concerned that the wires were posing a fire hazard.
"My neighbor told me that she thought the house was on fire, and she wanted to check to make sure everything was OK," Kim Abraham said. "I'm just glad it was instant. [Coroners] told me she probably didn't suffer for very long, and I can take some comfort in knowing that."
Relatives said Lauren Abraham had enrolled in LaGuardia Community College but had put her education on hold to pursue another passion: cosmetology.
"Her talent as a makeup artist was something that you couldn't overlook," said Ernst Alvarez Jr., Abraham's boyfriend, who said one of the last memories they shared was creating spooky face makeup designs for Halloween. "She was just one of those people who once she was in the zone, you couldn't slow her down."
But Abraham's mother said she was planning on ultimately planning on becoming a mathematics professor like her idol and stepfather, who died in 2009.
Relatives described Abraham as devoutly religious and said she constantly nagged them to go to the non-denominational Christian church where her service was held.
The service included gospel songs performed by members of the church parish, along with poetry readings by Abraham's friends and relatives.
"You're with me every day," Abraham's cousin said in a poem she wrote called "Farewell." "Though we have to say farewell, Lauren, this is not the end."


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Book Tour and Activities on the Go!
Qing Xin Ling Leisure and Cultural VillageIt is one of the finest and latest tourist attractions in ipoh. The words Qing Xin Ling means serene hills. At a very minimal cost, you will be transported to a different planet to discover. The Qing Xin Ling Leisure and Cultural Village is set in a location captivated by stunning landscapes of mountains and jungles. There are lakes and fish ponds by the cottages and different fun activities for the tourists here. This location is a perfect family outing set up.
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