Yet also, yn the name of al that ys goode, studye biforehand and do nat place all of thy trust yn the All-Nighter alone. As yt ys wyth the feedinge of cattes, so wyth studyinge. Yf thou dost let the kibble disappear completelye from the catte foode bowle, the catte shal yowl and make great complainte and disaster shal folowe. But fille the bowl litel by litel, daye by daye, and the yowlinge and disaster shal nevir come and thy catte shal be moost mirthful. And so yt ys wyth the kibble of learninge and the bowl of thy mynde and the unrulye and demandinge catte of grades.

Just doesn’t feel good – Marco.org

Just doesn’t feel good – Marco.org

I was brought up in the church, back in the old days before the deluge when church-going, confirmation and so on were ordinary landmarks of life, but lost touch with it for twenty years, like almost all of my generation. I came to real belief as an adult, after a practical demonstration of God’s mercy at work in my life. I’m at the liberal end of the Christian spectrum, I suppose, in that I support the ordination of women, with full authority, to all three of the historic orders of priesthood; and I’ve come around, slightly to my surprise, to thinking that same-sex marriage is something we should be bringing within the Christian vision of a faithful, monogamous union. But though these things matter a lot to me as justice issues, they are not central to me as a Christian. If I’m a liberal, I’m a liberal saved by the blood of the Lamb. It is Christ that makes me a Christian, and the story of redemption and resurrection with Him at its heart. I come from a parish setting where it would seem a crazy luxury to pick and choose between different styles or schools of faith, not to mention weirdly beside the point. Locally, Christians of all kinds co-operate as a matter of basic survival – beggars can’t be choosers – but that seems right to me theologically as well. God is bigger than our tastes, our divisions and our theories. In Him is neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, and neither liberal nor conservative either. We’re all brothers and sisters. We should behave like it.
— My friend Francis Spufford, who is standing for election to the Church of England’s House of Laity.

[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17746”]

nemfrog: Firefighers practice a rescue, 1913

[gallery] 50watts:

Illustration by Heinrich Valk, Estonia 1976 (50 Watts collection)

[gallery] newberrylibrary:

This 18th-century infographic showing “English Government in 1790” was part of a pamphlet explaining different Western constitutional systems. In the diagram here, the center is occupied by the British crown and the outer ring (6) represents the disenfranchised class: “the Body of the People variously operated upon, and amused by forms, but having no election, choice, or share in the Political Government.” #ConstitutionDay (at Newberry Library)
Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.

Uninhabitable parts of the earth–the sea and the deserts–divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts (for instance, of the Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts (for instance, the Bedouin Arabs) who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right of hospitality, i.e., the privilege of foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions of the possibility of seeking to communicate with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.

But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world.

Ahmed

There are many, many things that could be said about Ahmed Mohamed’s experience, but the most important one, I think, is this: the staff at his school continue to believe that the most reasonable and appropriate thing they could have done when they saw Ahmed’s clock is to call the police and have the boy taken away in handcuffs and interrogated. Not talk to Ahmed, or ask him serious questions about the device he made, or warn him that such a thing could easily be misinterpreted, or contact his parents and get them involved … nope. Call the cops, cuff him, interrogate him.

[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:

Lesser Ury (Germany 1861-1931)
Abendstimmung am Grunewaldsee - Evening at Grunewaldsee (1910s)
oil on canvas 115.5 x 85.4 cm
The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users.