O come, O come, Emmanuel is a translation of the Latin text (“Veni, veni, Emmanuel“) by John Mason Neale and Henry Sloane Coffin in the mid-19th century. It is a metrical version of a collation of various Advent Antiphons (the acrostic O Antiphons), which now serves as a popular Advent and Christmas hymn. Its origins are unclear, it is thought that the antiphons are from at least the 8th Century, but “Veni, veni Emmanuel” may well be 12th Century in origin.[3][4] The text is based on the biblical prophecy from Isaiah 7:14 that states that God will give Israel a sign that will be called Immanuel (Lit.: God with us). Matthew 1:23 states fulfillment of this prophecy in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth
https://twitter.com/AllGenevieve/status/543487966715199488/photo/1
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/544220811377143808/photo/1
Sierra Leone Cancels Christmas Because of Ebola
Remember Ebola? Yes, it’s still a thing and yes it is still wreaking havoc and killing thousands of people in West Africa.
The government of Sierra Leone has banned all public Chrismas and New Years celebrations in an effort to deter the spread of the deadly virus, which has reportedly infected 1,319 more people in the last three weeks. Sierra Leone is very serious about this ban and has plans to deploy soldiers during the holiday season to keep people from celebrating and encouraging them to stay indoors. Palo Conteh, head of the government’s Ebola response unit, made a statement to reporters, via AFP:
http://jezebel.com/sierra-leone-cancels-christmas-because-of-ebola-1670752578
https://twitter.com/USAinUK/status/544150619410288641/photo/1
Video shows John Crawford’s girlfriend aggressively questioned after Ohio police shot him dead in Walmart
Video shows Ohio detective accusing her of lying and threatening her with jail
Tasha Thomas only told of Crawford’s death after 90-minute interrogation
Officer who shot black man in Walmart lied, victim’s mother says
Ohio Walmart video reveals last moments before officer shot man
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/14/john-crawford-girlfriend-questioned-walmart-police-shot-dead?CMP=share_btn_tw
Report: Bob Jones University shamed victims of sexual assault
The ‘fortress of faith’ caused extensive harm to sexual abuse victims, according to a two-year independent investigation
December 11, 2014 2:30PM ET
by Claire Gordon @clairedon Google+
Watch Al Jazeera America Thursday at 9 p.m. for more on the Bob Jones University revelations, including exclusive TV interviews with two alleged abuse victims who attended the school.
For decades, Bob Jones University (BJU), a self-described fundamentalist Christian college, has urged sexual abuse victims not to go to the police and counseled them to repent for the blame it said they share, according to an extensive independent investigation published Thursday.
The report, nearly two years in the making, is a catalog of grief stretching back four decades, based on hundreds of survey results, dozens of in-depth interviews and a wealth of corroborating documentation. It details a culture that shamed victims into believing they were ruined by their abuse. It also strongly criticizes the school’s brand of counseling, which rejects modern psychology and urges victims to look for the “sin” behind their rapes and view their continued trauma as a struggle with God.
More than half the alleged victims surveyed reported they felt the school’s response was hurtful or very hurtful. Some victims said they found counseling sessions worse than their abuse. But the vast majority of the 50 self-identified victims interviewed for the study said they loved Bob Jones University, that they wished it no ill and hoped sharing their experiences would bring much-needed change.
A nonprofit group, Godly Response for Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), conducted the probe at the request of Bob Jones, after revelations that one of the university’s trustees covered up sex abuse at his church. The scope of such a review would be extraordinary for any university, but BJU, a campus of about 3,000 in Greenville, South Carolina, known for its strict biblical teachings, is one of the most insular in the country.
The GRACE report not only indicts the culture and counseling philosophy at BJU but also names four individuals it considers the main architects of the school’s approach. Among its many policy recommendations, GRACE urges BJU to strip its campus bookstore of the works of these individuals, bar its onetime primary counselor from counseling and take action against Bob Jones III — the chancellor and a former president of university and a grandson of its founder, for whom it was named.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/12/11/report-bob-jonesuniversityshouldrepenttorapevictims.html
“How One Lawyer’s Crusade Could Change Football Forever”
There are 1.27 million lawyers in the United States, one for about every 300 Americans — about 400,000 more of them than there are doctors. Their work is rarely glamorous, and especially for those just starting out in the profession, it can be grinding and repetitive. Jason Luckasevic, hired out of law school in 2000 by a firm in Pittsburgh, passed the bar exam on his first try and was quickly sworn in to practice. The ceremony, such as it was, took place on a Thursday in a clerk’s office, rather than in a courtroom in front of family and friends, because his bosses needed him to get started. The following Monday morning, he drove to Johnstown, about 90 minutes away, where he spent the day taking depositions from former employees of an enormous steel plant that had exposed them to asbestos. Late that afternoon, he climbed back into his Honda Civic and headed home. He repeated this routine for the next six months, five days a week, racking up some 400 depositions and about 20,000 miles on the road…
As Luckasevic was getting started on his legal career, his older brother, Todd, was in his medical residency at the Allegheny County medical-examiner’s office, working under a forensic pathologist named Bennet Omalu. The Nigerian-born doctor spent some Thanksgivings with the extended Luckasevic clan. He and the Luckasevic brothers sometimes went out for beers together or to hockey games. Luckasevic found Omalu to be good company, “an easy guy to be around, even though you could tell he was brilliant or even a genius.”
In 2002, Omalu performed an autopsy on Mike Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman and a member of pro football’s Hall of Fame. Webster was just 50 when he died, and he spent the last years of his life suffering from dementia, at times living in his pickup truck. When Omalu studied Webster’s brain in his laboratory, he noted a degeneration of tissue and other markers of decline usually present only in people decades older or sometimes in boxers suffering from “punch drunk” syndrome. Over the next few years, he autopsied five other former N.F.L. players, none of them old, and saw the same patterns: tangled brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein, a characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.
Omalu published his findings on Webster in 2005 in the journal Neurosurgery. He identified what he was seeing as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and suggested that football caused irreversible brain damage. The N.F.L.’s response was to attack him, and N.F.L.-affiliated doctors demanded, without success, that Neurosurgery retract the article. Later his conclusions were called “preposterous” and a “misinterpretation of the facts.”
Luckasevic by this time had begun to take on other types of cases: auto accidents, slip-and-falls — the bread and butter of the plaintiffs’ bar. He did not seem to be on the verge of initiating a landmark case. At first, his response to the public controversy picking up around Omalu, whom he occasionally employed as an expert witness, was just to step up and defend his friend. He remembers thinking: Why would Bennet make this stuff up. I mean, why would he? It’s just not done. He worried that Omalu would pay a professional price. “It looked to me like Bennet had raised his hand and said there’s a problem we need to be aware of, and he got savaged for it.”…
Luckasevic began to think about whether he could buttress Omalu’s lab findings. In 2006, he had his first meetings with retired N.F.L. players, who introduced him to other players. The damage that Omalu observed when he looked at brain tissue under a microscope, Luckasevic saw in human terms. Many of the men he met suffered from headaches, memory loss, depression and sleeplessness. He went down a checklist when one of them came into his office the first time. Was the former player employed? On disability? Could he follow the conversation, or did his wife have to fill in details and answers to questions? The worst off among them seemed many years older than their chronological age…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/how-one-lawyers-crusade-could-change-football-forever.html?ref=magazine&_r=2
New Photo Series Celebrates Black Women Who Are ‘Beyond Classically Beautiful’
December 11 4:00 PM
Leah Chernikoff |
A few months ago, in the wake of Alessandra Stanley’s tone-deaf and racist New York Times review of Shonda Rhimes’ How to Get Away With Murder, journalist and fashion blogger Abi Ishola posted a photo of herself to Twitter with the trending hashtag #lessclassicallybeautiful—a reclamation of how Stanley described the show’s star, Viola Davis.
“But for some reason, it felt wrong,” Ishola says of posting the photo. “I couldn’t settle on the idea of claiming that label. So I decided to think of a new label that speaks to the true beauty of black women. The first thing that came to mind was Beyond Classically Beautiful. In my mind it’s the best way to shake the idea of being ‘less’ anything. We are not less than. Black beauty goes beyond any label or word anyone can drum up.”
Below, see a selection of Ishola’s Beyond Classically Beautiful series, shot by Kunle Ayodeji—and then check out the full series here.
http://www.elle.com/news/beauty-makeup/beyond-classically-beautiful-photo-series
PragmaticObotsUnite @PragObots
WTF?? “@AP: Art or racist? Effigies of black lynching victims found hanging on Berkeley campus spur debate: http://apne.ws/1GnggiL ”
https://twitter.com/USATODAYsports/status/544201184912084994/photo/1
I suspected I had a reason for wanting the Browns to beat the Bengals (and I live in Cincinnati).
Occupying the Throne: Justine Tunney, Neoreactionaries, and the New 1%
Google software engineer Justine Tunney was never against the one percent—she just thought that the one percent were the wrong people.How do you go from far-left socialist to far-right monarchist in three years?
How do you go from, in 2011, marching in self-declared solidarity with the “99 Percent” holding a banner saying “Give Class War A Chance” to, in 2014, tweeting that liberalism is “Truly one of the worst ideas ever,” calling for a return to aristocracy with techies as the aristocrats and saying the solution to the unemployment crisis is to bring back chattel slavery?
You wouldn’t think it was possible. But Google software engineer Justine Tunney did exactly that.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/occupying-the-throne-justine-tunney-neoreactionaries-and-the-new-1-percent.html
Welp, finally got my tree up!
It took me 4 days to put up my Christmas tree. It was just sitting there on the floor. I had no energy. But yesterday was so good I found new energy and finished it. Yay!
What do you do to get yourself going? Cause it always fall on the Mom to get it done. I put on my Temptations ‘Give Love on Christmas Day’ CD and a couple other favorites and then that gets me going. I do love this season however Thanksgiving is my favorite.
I received new energy after seeing the massive turnout for the Justice4All March. I was so proud, I had new strength to finish. My youngest kept saying ‘Mama put the tree up’. Mama didn’t have energy.
I put my Christmas village up first because I love my village. Then I just do the rest of the decorating a little at a time. I figure that even if I only do the village it will be enough but somehow it always inspires me to finish.
I’ll bet it’s beautiful.
Give me strength, Lord, to bear this foolishness. I can’t never give up so help me to bear it.
Good Morning Everyone
Morning!