Ichabod Speed Test

Bandwidth is comforting, too.

The new connection from Cox downloads at 20 megs, uploads at 3 megs. The first is a distinct advantage for teaching online. The second is good for the Internet broadcasts. Both are tremendous improvements over Qwest's 20th century glacier-speed technology, iceberg customer service, and Soviet-style maintenance.

The world's smallest chapel now has a dedicated computer to handle the services. That will make it possible to monitor the service from another room and to avoid problems like the mike being on the default setting instead of the proper one.

Sing This Hymn at the Next Church and Change Conference for WELS

Bruce Becker is the Administrator of WELS Parish Services (Wayne Mueller's old job) but he failed to inform the Synod President that DPS was calling Paul Kelm back to The Love Shack. Rev. Bruce is also a board member of Church and Change, where Wayne Mueller's son is a bigwig.

Paul Kelm, Larry Olson, and James Huebner were trained at Fuller Seminary to be Parish Consultants. That is Kelm's new call, to spread the false doctrine of Fooler Sem and Willow Crick Community Church. No decision so far.

New Age Methodist Leonard Sweet was head of the seminary that trained Rev. Jeremiah Wright ("God _____ America!"), so Church and Change made him their keynote speaker. The fierce rabbits of the WELS ministerium finally stomped on their paws and said, "No!" blocking the conference. Church and Change pouted, regrouped, and launched their next conference from the WELS.net website. Doubtless they were helped by having the head of WELS technology as a Willow Crick addict, who once channeled Hybels in every sermon - verbatim.

Church and Change was founded to overturn Lutheran doctrine. They imagine they own the Wisconsin sect now. No one elected them at convention. As evidenced by Kelm's stealth call, they do not think they need to be courteous or orderly.

"Lord Jesus Christ, With Us Abide"
by Nikolaus Selnecker, 1532-1592
Selnecker was an editor of the Formula of Concord, 1580. He was bitterly attacked and severely persecuted by the Reformed, deposed when Augustus died, reduced to poverty, and not allowed to remain in Leipzig as a private citizen. [GJ – Imagine that!]
Theodore E. Schmauk and C. Theodore Benze, The Confessional Principle and the Confessions, as Embodying the Evangelical Confession of the Christian Church, Philadelphia: General Council Publication Board, 1911, p. 310ff.

1. Lord Jesus Christ, with us abide,
For round us falls the eventide;
Nor let Thy Word, that heavenly light,
For us be ever veiled in night.

2. In these last days of sore distress
Grant us, dear Lord, true steadfastness
That pure we keep, till life is spent,
Thy holy Word and Sacrament.

3. Lord Jesus, help, Thy Church uphold,
For we are sluggish, thoughtless, cold.
Oh, prosper well Thy Word of grace
And spread its truth in every place!

4. Oh, keep us in Thy Word, we pray;
The guile and rage of Satan stay!
Oh, may Thy mercy never cease!
Give concord, patience, courage, peace.

5. O God, how sin's dread works abound!
Throughout the earth no rest is found,
And falsehood's spirit wide has spread,
And error boldly rears its head.

6. The haughty spirits, Lord, restrain
Who o'er Thy Church with might would reign
And always set forth something new,
Devised to change Thy doctrine true.

7. And since the cause and glory, Lord,
Are Thine, not ours, to us afford
Thy help and strength and constancy.
With all our heart we trust in Thee.

8. A trusty weapon is Thy Word,
Thy Church's buckler, shield and sword.
Oh, let us in its power confide
That we may seek no other guide!

9. Oh, grant that in Thy holy Word
We here may live and die, dear Lord;
And when our journey endeth here,
Receive us into glory there.

The Lutheran Hymnal
Hymn #292
Text: Luke 24:29
Author: Nikolaus Selnecker et al., 1611
Translated by: composite
Titled: "Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ"
Tune: "Ach bleib bei uns"
1st Published in: Geistliche Lieder
Town: Leipzig,1589

***

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Sing This Hymn at the Next Church and Change Confe...":

Pres. Schroeder didn't know Kelm was called to "the Love Shack"? This is just one example of how you spread lies. Did Pres. Schroeder tell you this, or did you just pick it up on Bailing Water? Ever hear of the 8th Commandment?

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Sing This Hymn at the Next Church and Change Confe...":

I personally emailed Schroeder concerning Kelm's call. Schroeder (sic) response was identical to Reverend Jackson's explanation of events.

[GJ - One typo in only one line, definitely a WELS writer.]

**

GJ - I have gone all day without being accused of violating the 8th Commandment. Of course, a false accusation like the one above is slander, anonymous slander at that. I verified the information, just as John at Bailing Water did (independent of me). John added that the call was intended to be "a kick in the groin for SP Schroeder."

Ichabodians can thank the apostates for being so quick to accuse me. I make sure I have the information exactly right. NorthWest says, "Any time I could verify the information, Greg, you were always correct."

Since Rev. Mouse is so keen to bring up how this happened, perhaps he could provide the memo, email, or other details about exactly when Church and Church board member Bruce Becker informed the Synod President about the call to Kelm. I eagerly await the results. Bruce Becker, Church and Change, and all The Love Shack denizens should admit to the Wisconsin Synod that they put out the news of the call so that the Synod President would learn about it the way everyone else did - from reading the call list. The time has come for the Augean Stables to be cleansed.

Hard Drives Do Crash

Computer experts learn the hard way to anticipate catastrophe.

The Plucked Chicken:
Update 2008-10-11

Amazon has shipped the new hard drive. (Amazing how cheap storage has become!) They estimate delivery on the 15th of October. I also need to buy a new fan for the power supply. The new hard drive will be the biggest in the house. I may use it in the machine that hosts the Plucked Chicken, effectively making it a file server for our house to which we can back things up. Or, I may swap it into my desktop machine. I like the idea of a large file server, though. Hang tight.

The Plucked Chicken is offline due to a hard drive crash. It may be possible to recover the old posts and comments from the database, which resides on a different hard drive. Whether or not that's possible, the Plucked Chicken will rise again... later. Right now there are other things to do.

***

GJ - Hard drives crash, often without backup. There are many ways to backup the most valuable files on a hard drive:
1. Upload them to a website, with the knowledge that people can find and read them, even when they are not linked on webpages.
2. Save them to your backup computer in the same location (not so hot when there is a fire or a flood).
3. Save them on a thumb (jump) drive, although these little miracles are the best way to lose large amounts of confidential data.
4. Back them up remotely with Norton 360, a service provided with their virus protection, firewall software.
5. Back them up remotely with Dell's service.
6. Back them up remotely with Carbonite.com ($50 a year). A new hard drive is cheap. Remote backup is probably cheaper.

I am not being holier than thou, because I have crashed three hard drives. I have lost work, but not enough, according to Rev. Mouse.

The remote backup is the best solution because remote Internet storage will check the computer every night and backup the newest files.

Look Out, Episcopalians

Will The Keys to Your Church Belong to The Episcopal Church in 2009?

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue

www.virtueonline.org

10/8/2009

If Katharine Jefferts Schori and her attorney David Booth Beers have their way a resolution will be put on the table at GC 2009 forcing all parishes to reconstitute their legal titles to reflect irrevocable trusts with their respective bishops as beneficiaries, and by extension, The Episcopal Church, VOL has learned.

According to a canon lawyer and bishop, the Dennis Canon does not currently (nor can it) require a reconstitution of deeds and local church titles. However, there MIGHT be a move to amend the canons to make new requirements. "It does appear that massive amendments on a number of issues is in the wind," he told VOL.

Although the Episcopal Church does not have a corporate identity beyond New York State, remaining orthodox' bishops will be hamstrung, unable to exercise their ecclesiastical prerogative regarding negotiating settlements with any parish wishing to realign.

Such an outcome will render any notion of "tolerance" within TEC the Big Lie.

In a comment during debate on resolutions, South Dakota Diocesan Chancellor Steve Sanford mentioned that he had spoken with Episcopal Church Attorney Beers about this issue. Beers replied that they would deal with this "exposure".

Beers apparently told the Chancellor that lawsuit problems would decrease in the future because TEC would deal with "the exposure issue."

TEC leaders are hoping GC2009 will give TEC the keys to your church. This makes it almost certain that there will be some new legislation for the 2009 General Convention.

Is this the springtime for Mrs. Jefferts Schori and David Booth Beers?

Obama Had a Bomb-Throwing Ghost Writer

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Obama didn't write 'Dreams from My Father'

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Posted: October 13, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

Jack Cashill

The emergence of a previously unseen writing sample proves all but conclusively that Barack Obama did not in any meaningful way write "Dreams from My Father," the book Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

The emergence of a second writing sample, this one by a legitimate author, provides convincing evidence as to who did.

In 1990, the University of Illinois at Springfield published a collection of essays called "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois." Obama contributed a chapter, titled: "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City."

The year 1990, by the way, was when Obama, the newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review, received a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster to write what would become "Dreams from My Father."

The publishers must not have read "Why Organize?" Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in "Dreams" and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication or promise.

Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian and wonkish – a B- paper in a freshman comp class. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range, or lack thereof:

Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.
But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well … and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.

These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas."

In "Why Organize?" Obama makes use of the fully recreated conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in "Dreams." Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:

"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."
"Why's that?"

"'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."

Obama asks us to believe that five years later, without any additional training, he was capable of writing passages like the following from "Dreams":

Winter came and the city turned monochrome-black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.
To read "Why Organize?" in its entirety is to understand the fraud that is Obama, the literary genius. As the reader will see, one does not need forensic software to sense the limits of Obama's skills.

Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself in a few short years from an awkward amateur into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write … and write movingly and genuinely about himself."

There is an element of speculation in this reconstruction, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive.

One clue comes from an unexpected source: Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, "Resurrecting Empire," Khalidi pays tribute to his own literary muse, the man who has made "unrepentant" a household word, Bill Ayers.

Writes Khalidi, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.

Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center was the charismatic Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know.

The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long, slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.

(Column continues below)




I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought his sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."

With all due respect to Sarah Palin, Obama likely saw Ayers and Dohrn less as "pals" and more as parents. Dohrn and Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, were born the same year, 1942.

In fact, as young women, the two looked enough alike that I had to double check before disproving that a photo floating around the Internet of Dohrn with Ayers was not a photo of Dunham with Ayers.

As to Ayers, envision him as the seafaring Odysseus to Obama's father-hungry Telemachus. By Obama's own admission, "Dreams" would become "a record of a personal, interior journey – a boy's search for his father."

The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then-obscure Obama.

Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout and the street cred. Ayers could also write, and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had several books published.

My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and he chose to mold it. The calculation in "Dreams" is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. And if "Dreams" were beautifully written, it could launch a career.

As I have documented earlier, one thread that ties Ayers to "Dreams" is the repeated use of maritime metaphors throughout both books, a testament to Ayers' anxious year as a merchant seaman.

There is, however, a deeper thread, namely a shared postmodernist perspective. A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.

In true postmodernist fashion, Ayers rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys with "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.

Thus, "Fugitive Days" is laced with repeated reference to what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." So, curiously, is "Dreams."

"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."

The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize?" into the sophisticated postmodernist of "Dreams," and he did so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text.

Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from "Dreams":

Ayers:
"The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. … But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."

Obama:

"And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged … "

Ayers:

"Narrative begins with something to say – content precedes form."

Obama:

"I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative …"

Ayers:

"Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."

Obama:

"Truth is usually the best corrective."

Ayers:

"The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."

Obama:

"Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that – on the surface, at least – contradict the world I now occupy."

Ayers:

The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.

Obama:

"But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."

Ayers:

"Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."

Obama:

"I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."

Ayers:

"But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."

Obama:

"At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."

Although I cite one example for each, "Dreams" offers many more. There are 10 "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle" and "journey."

To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers. There are fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors, and fewer still who write as poetically about the sea as Obama seems to do.

Of course, too, no one but Ayers got Obama named chair of the multi-million Chicago Annenberg Challenge months before his book was published, and no one else hosted his political debut months afterward, all in the magic year of 1995.

Two years later, in his 1997 book, "A Kind and Just Parent," Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the celebrities therein.

These include Muhammad Ali, "Minister" Louis Farrakhan, the "poet" Gwendolyn Brooks and "writer" Barack Obama.

The "writer" identification seems as forced as the listing of Obama among the notables. It is almost as Ayers were constructing his own narrative, one designed to climax in the White House, one that he may have the will and power to impose on America, truth be damned.

Life is all "a lie" anyhow.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Obama Had a Bomb-Throwing Ghost Writer":

Boring. Like everyone else, I'm not interested. Hysterical desperation! Get a life foe (sic) goodness sake. And while you're at it, get some self respect.

Natasha