About damn time! :-)
In case this wasn’t abundantly clear, I have been SO WAITING for SpaceX to get this show on the road, and I’m SO HAPPY that they’re at this point. I do not blame them for taking time, and precautions, so that a day that should be a celebration doesn’t become something else. Fingers crossed, SpaceX. A lot of us are pulling for you.
"Trampling Down Death by Death" Icon of the Holy Resurrection, by Fr. Nicholas Papas
Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
— Hymn of the Resurrection
Russian Orthodox Rite
Let all pious men and all lovers of God rejoice in the splendor of this feast; let the wise servants blissfully enter into the joy of their Lord; let those who have borne the burden of Lent now receive their pay, and those who have toiled since the first hour, let them now receive their due reward; let any who came after the third hour be grateful to join in the feast, and those who may have come after the sixth, let them not be afraid of being too late; for the Lord is gracious and He receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes on the eleventh hour as well as to him who has toiled since the first: yes, He has pity on the last and He serves the first; He rewards the one and praises the effort.
Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness. Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Saviour has set us free: He has destroyed it by enduring it, He has despoiled Hades by going down into its kingdom, He has angered it by allowing it to taste of his flesh.
When Isaiah foresaw all this, he cried out: “O Hades, you have been angered by encountering Him in the nether world.” Hades is angered because frustrated, it is angered because it has been mocked, it is angered because it has been destroyed, it is angered because it has been reduced to naught, it is angered because it is now captive. It seized a body, and, lo! it encountered heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.
O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen and you are abolished. Christ is risen and the demons are cast down. Christ is risen and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen and life is freed. Christ is risen and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power for ever and ever.
Amen!
— Easter Homily, St. John Chrysostom
A bright and wonderful Pascha/Easter to all of my fellow Orthodox Christians!
And if you’re Christian but not Orthodox, and have never been to an Orthodox Christian Pascha service, you do NOT know what you are missing. Come visit sometime! ;)
So Rush Limbaugh thinks that any woman who believes that birth control drugs and medical devices should routinely be covered by health insurance plans is a slut. <yawn>
Well, I would yawn, except that I (to my embarrassment at the moment) agree with him about forcing employers to cover services that they have strongly held ethical or religious objections to providing. And Limbaugh took a perfectly reasonable objection — to the Obama Administration’s attempt to force Catholic employers and the Catholic church to pay for birth control and arguably for some types of abortion — and made a laughingstock of that position and those who hold it in the eyes of much of the public.
Today’s UK Telegraph published an explosive article titled, “Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say”. When I saw the link on the Telegraph web site, I did a double take and then opened the article, certain that I would find that the title was misleading. It was not misleading. The authors of an academic paper published in a respected academic journal on medical ethics, Dr. Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan (Italy) and Dr. Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne (Australia), took the position that abortion and infanticide are morally equivalent.
On February 11, a man who by all accounts was a giant of the Christian faith died: John Sperry, Anglican Bishop of the Arctic and author of a wonderful memoir titled Igloo Dwellers Were My Church. Bishop Sperry moved to the Canadian Northwest in 1950 and gave his life to ministering to a flock spread thinly over thousands of miles. Today’s UK Telegraph has a fairly good short obituary.
In 1986 (half my life ago), while on a trip up into the Canadian Arctic, I briefly met Reverend Sperry while wandering about Yellowknife. I also met his first flock while on a jaunt to the Arctic coast: the residents of a tiny village then known as Coppermine. (It has since been renamed Kugluktuk.) At the time I was still involved in a religious group that defined Christianity in narrow terms, and although I had started to break away was not yet comfortable treating an Anglican as a fellow Christian. Nonetheless the stories I heard of this man’s love and care for the people of Coppermine stuck with me, and still do.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that use of a GPS locator/tracker on a person’s car without a warrant is a violation of the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. All I can say is — it’s about d*mn time somebody stopped the headlong rush to make the 4th Amendment meaningless in practical terms, and it’s a good start.
Yesterday Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote a troubling op-ed article, 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free, that was published in the Washington Post. I’ve read it twice. I can’t find a substantive error in it.
Like most of you, I been aware all along that, in the panic after 9/11, the U.S. government has (to put it mildly) taken ever-increasing liberties with due process and the constitution when exercising its enforcement powers, and has grown impatient with constitutional limits, and civil and human rights. On certain specific issues, such as treatment of prisoners at Guatanamo and the TSA, I’ve been outraged and have spoken up strongly, in letters to Congress and this blog. But this article put the picture together for me.
Al Qaeda is winning, people, although not in persuading others to adopt its twisted and murderous form of Islam. (My apologies to the over one billion decent Muslims in this world who find the very idea of comparing Al Qaeda’s views to Islam offensive, but Al Qaeda did in fact twist Islam and not some other religion to come up with its ideology.) Al Qaeda is winning because they hate our freedom, and by a few violent, murderous attacks that endangered individuals but in themselves did not and could not endanger this country, they persuaded us to forfeit that freedom. Worse, we forfeited freedom not for a little temporary safety, but for the ILLUSION of safety. :/ We aren’t safer today than we were; we’re just more frighted.
Enough.
I’m working like crazy on a project for my day job that’s due in a couple of days, but I needed to take the time to say this. Any politician who supports more limits on this country’s freedoms and specifically who votes for abominations such as the recent Defense Authorization Bill that allows indefinite imprisonment of Americans without trial or recourse will not receive my vote. Any candidate for political office who wants my vote and my support MUST convince me that he or she will at the first opportunity repeal the laws that allow violations of the first, second, fourth, fifth, and sixth and eight amendments to the U.S. constitution.
I’ll figure out what else to do after I get this book written. (Why do I think that this will be time consuming and expensive?) <wry grin>
I’m back from the holiday road trip. The first few days were gorgeous: brisk, cold, sunny, and lovely. We stayed two nights in Bend, Oregon, in a hotel with rooms that overlook the Deschutes River. I rafted on it over twenty years ago; it’s one of the better rafting rivers in the U.S. The Deschutes Canyon downstream (north) of Bend as it heads for the Columbia River is lovely, although not quite up to the mind-blowing vision of the Columbia Gorge.
Today Thomas Haynesworth was granted a “write of actual innocence” by the Virginia Court of Appeals. Haynesworth had already been released from jail on parole because of evidence that he was innocent, but had been on the state sex offender’s registry and under strict parole supervision. Now he can vote. Now he can ask a woman out on a date without first introducing her to his parole office. Now he can apply for a job or a mortgage without having to tell his prospective employer or bank that he is a felon convicted of rape. The conviction no longer exists legally.
As Mr. Haynesworth said, this has been a long time coming. Twenty seven years, to be precise.
I’ve blogged before about the exonerations of innocent people who were sentenced to jail or to death. These exonerations are usually due to DNA evidence conclusively proving that the convicted person is innocent, and usually happen because of the work of the Innocence Project. Today’s story is a bit different: DNA played a significant part, but DNA evidence was not available for two of the rapes, which made proof of his actual innocence considerably more difficult.
His case is yet another compelling testimony to the weakness of eyewitness testimony as a basis for criminal convictions. Several women who had been raped wrongly identified him as their rapist. In some of those cases, DNA evidence later proved that a different man in the same neighborhood was responsible. He resembles Haynesworth, and prosecutors believe that the mistaken identifications were in fact mistakes, not deliberate false testimony. A number of studies on the effect of certain crimes on the reliability of eyewitness testimony about those crimes have been done in the past three decades. Some witnesses lie, of course, but it appears that violent crimes and especially violent sex crimes disturb the mental processes of the victims and in some cases may interfere with the accuracy of their recollections. In other words, the most sincere, innocent, decent human being who has been raped can with no intent to mislead or lie and full belief in the accuracy of her (or his) memory identify the wrong attacker.
In other words, nature sometimes plays a *really* dirty trick on the poor victim and on the rest of us. :/ I hope that this case and others encourage prosecutors to be even more careful about the reliance that they place on eyewitness testimony in these sorts of cases. It was the cause of a large number of convictions and imprisonments that were later found to have been in error. Many of the wrongly convicted were sentenced to death for henious crimes. :/
We need to fix that broken part of our criminal justice system. We need to have a sense of URGENCY about it. :(
Yesterday a major urban fire broke out in Reno, Nevada, where I live. My husband Joe and I were already planning to visit his family over Thanksgiving, so we packed quickly, took a few things that we really didn’t want burned, and left a day early. Twenty years ago in the San Francisco Bay area I had watched as the Oakland Hills fire just west of me burned for several days, incinerating over a thousand houses and a number of people. I learned then that, when a large fire starts in an urban area, you REALLY don’t want to stick around unless you’re helping to fight it or take care of the victims.
That meant that we spent an extra night in Lee Vining, California, 120 miles south of Reno in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains by Mono Lake. Today we enjoyed ourselves. Joe took pictures. I thought I’d share.