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Passion ignites success, and Mike Piazza is realizing a different kind of baseball dream these days.
He is rediscovering ancestral roots in Italy and helping to make baseball relevant there. Piazza is the hitting coach for the Italian National Team that won the European Championship this year. He will serve as hitting coach for Team Italy in the 2013 World Baseball Classic.
Piazza is becoming quite fluent in Italian, as he learns more about himself as a coach and a person.
"This has become a passion for me,'' Piazza told The Post from his home in Miami Beach. "I just got back from Italy, and I am doing a lot of research on my family roots from Sicily. During your baseball career you really can't focus on things like that because you are concentrating on playing. I'm trying to help grow the game in Italy.
"This is a great escape for me and at the same time a way to stay connected to the game I love,'' he said. As for speaking Italian, Piazza noted, "I enjoy the challenge of it, and I've been told I have a pretty good accent.''
Piazza, 44, is married to Alicia Rickter, and they have two daughters, Nicoletta Veronica, 5, and Paulina Sophia, 3. The family will soon be traveling to Sicily for a month.
Piazza's coaching style has proven to be a big hit, which is not surprising considering his success in the majors.
"When I was coming up with the Dodgers I learned from Reggie Smith, and he was a direct disciple of Ted Williams,'' said Piazza, who hit 427 home runs and batted .308 over his 16-year career as a catcher, eight of which were with the Mets.
"I really benefitted a lot from good coaching, so I feel I can impart my knowledge, and that is my way of giving back to the game. And you can tell, obviously with our success and winning two European Championships since I've been there, it works,'' Piazza said. "The players really listen, and it's fun for me. I get a lot of joy from doing that. I'm not a huge 'change a guy' type of coach, I keep it simple. I'm not very autocratic. I don't try to pound my system into guys. To me, hitting is personal.''
This is a big year for Piazza, as the 12-time All-Star is eligible for the Hall of Fame for the first time. Only five Hall of Famers have hit more home runs while hitting for a higher average than Piazza: Stan Musial, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx and Babe Ruth.
That is quite a list.
"It's always exciting to think about it,'' Piazza said of Cooperstown. "But it's like anything, you just hope and see what happens, that's all you can do. Through the years I've been fortunate to meet with Golden Age players like Ted Williams, and it's great. I was fortunate to be in that era of between old school and new school, and I met so many great players coming up with the Dodgers like Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Roy Campanella. It was like baseball heaven for a minor leaguer, and that was one of the main things that helped me. It inspired me and helped me develop.''
Piazza, 44, would like to return to the majors someday in some capacity and continues to keep the lines of communication open with the Mets and Jeff Wilpon. He feels for the Mets and their fans.
"The Mets have gone through a lot of transition the last couple years,'' Piazza said.
What's right for him now is making Italy the best it can be in baseball.
He played with Italy in the 2006 WBC, and that opened these new doors.
"I never really identified myself as being Italian,'' Piazza said. "When I threw some feelers out there, the overwhelming response was 'yes.' I started a relationship with the Italian Baseball Federation and its president Ricardo Fraccari.
"When I retired [after the 2007 season] I really wasn't ready to get back into the game on a regular basis. I wanted to kind of detach from the game, but you still love the game, and I could take it as it goes, and obviously trips to Italy aren't a bad thing. I kind of fell in love with it, and I have great friends over there now."
Baseball is carving a niche.
"Alex Liddi, who played for the Mariners, is the first big leaguer to be born in Italy in a long time, since the '50s,'' said Piazza, who also noted pitcher Alessandro Maestri, who was in the Cubs organization, is having success in Japan.
He said there is young talent on the way as well, noting teams have revved up their scouting in Italy.
"There are some pretty good ballplayers, but it's different there because they don't have any sports in their schools,'' Piazza said. "They have to go to an academy system, kind of like the Dominican Republic. But there is one academy for the size of Italy and there are like 26 academies in the Dominican Republic.''
To that end, Piazza is spearheading a venture to get more investment into Italian baseball.
"Italy can produce players, I'm convinced of that,'' Piazza said. "This year we won our first European Championship on Dutch soil since 1978.
"They had a great team,'' Piazza said of the Netherlands. "They were defending world champions. They beat Cuba, 2-1, in Panama. So there is some success. This is fun for me, but with that being said, the money doesn't exactly flow to the program. They have to rely on their Olympic committee, and with baseball not being in the Olympics, is a tough political situation to get funding for the program.
"Now that I have kind of rolled my sleeves up and been in the trenches over there, it's something I want to continue and hopefully get a full-time academy down south where the weather is better, and just grow the game with MLB investing more money.''
Piazza said young Europeans that play are "fanatics'' about the game.
"They just don't have the facilities to play," he said. "The incentive is there. It's promising.''
Italy is in a difficult WBC bracket
— it includes Team USA, which is gearing up like never before with Joe Torre the manager and recruiting young, hungry players. For the first time, Team USA will not be a squad filled with stars on the downside of their careers.
"There is a lot of cloak and dagger out there,'' Piazza said with a laugh. "I'm really looking forward to the Classic. It's such a great tournament.''
At this stage of his life, Piazza said, the timing is not right to get back into the major league game, but that day could be coming.
"I just don't know what the future holds,'' he said. "I know I really enjoy doing this, and maybe in the future I would love to get back to it full time. The thing I love about this is I remember when I was in the minor leagues. I remember when I was in Mexico making $1,100 a month. It was fun. To me, it's not where you are, it's who you are with. As long as I'm with good guys and having fun, the camaraderie part, that's important, and I would be willing to roll up my sleeves one day and coach full-time.
"I think there is so much pressure on these hitting coaches,'' he said of the major leagues. "If the players aren't hitting, it's not the hitting coach's fault. It's just amazing the game today. There is so much information and almost too much information, and there is paralysis from analysis.''
Piazza played for Bruce Bochy and said he understands how the Giants have won two of the past three World Series.
"He's a great manager, and he's fun to play for,'' Piazza said.
He related this story about one late night with his manager, during their year together in San Diego in 2006, and how Bochy coaxed him into staying out a little longer than he wanted while on a trip to Washington.
Bochy promised Piazza he would not start the next day. Then the manager added, "But I'm going to need you to come off the bench for me and go deep.''
"The next day I get there late,'' Piazza said. "I got off the bench for him.''
Piazza went deep, too. He hit a pinch-hit home run in the ninth inning off Chad Cordero to beat the Nationals, 10-9, home run No. 409 of his magnificent career.
"It was so funny, after the game, we were just giggling, but Bochy is that kind of guy,'' Piazza said admiringly. "I'd run through a wall for him.''
The game was so much fun for Piazza, and now he is bringing that same joy and passion to the country of his ancestors and loving every minute of la dolce vita in Italy.


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Universal Music Uses Bogus DMCA Claim To Take Down Negative Review Of Drake's Album
from the free-speech? dept
Drake - 'Take Care'Not particularly positive, but not particularly scathing either. He also posted another post on About.com that merely pointed to that review, but included no additional content other than that he wrote a 50-word review.
A briefly entertaining, occasionally ponderous, sometimes lazy, sometimes brilliant, slow-rolling, rap-singy, bulls-eye missing, kitten-friendly, runway-ready, mega corny, lip-smacking, self-conscious, self-correcting, self-indulging, finely tuned, Houston infatuated, crowd pleasing, delightfully weird, emotionally raw, limp, wet, innocuous, cute, plush, brooding, musical, whimsical, exotic, pensive, V-necked, quasi-American, strutting, doting, cloying, safe alternative to sleeping pills.
Best Song: "Lord Knows"
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Either way, both of those links are gone from Google's search. Why? Because just as someone filed a bogus DMCA to take down one of our key SOPA posts, Universal Music, via the BPI (British RIAA) filed a DMCA notice with Google claiming that both of those pages were infringing. That's clearly a false takedown, and pretty clearly designed to stifle a negative review.
But, no, there's no free speech concerns around the DMCA, right?

subset: commoncrawl


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The DeVore House • Alpharetta, Georgia
Sophisticated. Glamorous. Stunning. The DeVore House is available now to host your wedding reception, party or special event. Call now to tour The DeVore House and sample some of our award-winning cuisine, as well as browse through our many photographs of food displays and previous wedding celebrations.
Call (770) 565-4146 now for an appointment.
About Us
ur beautiful facility is the perfect selection for your private social occasions, as well as corporate entertaining and meetings.
The DeVore House
is a 4,000 square foot historic home decorated with subtle elegance and is available to host events from 50 to 200 guests.
riginally a small country church, a one-room schoolhouse and then the residence of the our namesake, The DeVore Family,
The DeVore House
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n the brick terrace, your guests can enjoy the tranquility and romance which helps to set the perfect cocktail setting under the stars. On the back terrace, there is a decorated arbor that is the perfect back drop for your romantic ceremony. We can also host your ceremony inside our ballroom with such an ease of change-over, your guests will be amazed.
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© Copyright 2019 • The DeVore House • 34 Church Street • Alpharetta, GA 30009 • Phone: (770) 565-4146 • Email:


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Did you read today's front page stories & breaking news?
From the Wires
Risky Business - Uninsured Small Businesses Face Failure
Allianz report shows significant lack of insurance among small business
By: PR Newswire
Nov. 14, 2012 05:34 PM
SYDNEY, Nov. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A report commissioned by Allianz from the Cameron Research Group, The Australian Small Business Market for Financial Services: 2012, reveals that 65 per cent of small businesses do not have business interruption or loss of profits insurance, despite 77 per cent being aware of it and 88 per cent believing that they are adequately insured.
The Report also revealed that:
Commenting on the Report, Allianz Managing Director, Terry Towell, has urged small business to consider the risks of not taking out important business insurance covers such as machinery and computer breakdown, and business interruption insurance.
"Such high levels of non-insurance, particularly in the area of business interruption insurance, will result in many small businesses being forced out of business in the event of a significant loss," he said.
"While business interruption and machinery and computer breakdown cover is less well known than that for property loss or damage from things like fire and burglary, understanding the risk of losing sales revenue and the resulting adverse impact on the capacity to continue operating is essential if small business is serious about planning for business continuity in the event of unexpected events," according to Mr. Towell.
"Few businesses would consider operating without property damage insurance caused by perils like fire and storm. However, for a range of reasons, the loss or damage to key machinery or equipment, or even the business premises itself, may take some time to repair or replace, severely impacting the ability for the business to generate income for an extended period. Business interruption cover can replace lost income so that the business can continue to pay fixed outgoings like wages and rent until it gets back up and running," Mr. Towell said.
About Allianz Australia
Allianz Australia delivers a wide range of personal, commercial and corporate insurance products and services to more than 2 million policyholders. Over 50% of Australia's top 200 BRW-listed companies have some form of insurance cover with the group and the group provides workers compensation services to around one-fifth of Australian employees.
*Australian Insurance Industry Awards
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Nicholas Scofield
SOURCE Allianz Australia
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- Información
Facilidad de empleo
- Se cierra suavemente y el funcionamiento del pedal es súper ligero.
- Cierre a prueba de olores.
- Base antideslizante – protege el suelo y hace que el cubo permanezca estable en su sitio.
- Fácil de transportar – con una práctica asa en la bisagra de la tapa.
- Incluye un paquete muestra de bolsas PerfectFit de Brabantia (código G) – fáciles de colocar evitando el antiestético efecto de sobresalir del borde.
- 10 años de garantía y servicio.
- Con la certificación Cradle to Cradle. Hacer las cosas bien es sinónimo de sentirse bien.
Garantía Brabantia
10 Años
Número de artículo
- Revisiones
Cubo Pedal newIcon, 30 litros, cierre suave, cubo interior de plástico - Moss Green clasificado de 5 por 48.Rated 4 de 5 por Butty1 de Unbeatable I bought my new bin to replace my old Brabantia as it had got a bit tatty looking - but still fully functional after 7 years! First impression when it arrived I have to say I was disappointed as I thought I had bought like for like but obviously hadn't. I now realise I would have had to pay over £100 to do that - and for a bin that's just a bit above my budget. Anyway since using it - it's great - the modifications have improved the usage of my bin (it is now lighter and sleeker so doesn't bang on my kitchen wall). To be honest I have looked at lots of bins (boring I know) but no one comes close to Brabantia.Fecha de publicación: 2017-01-10Rated 5 de 5 por Milan182 de Great Quality Bin This is a really high quality bin. It is very smart looking, stylish, lovely finish, hopefully won't show fingermarks too much. I bought 30L Almond, which is perfect for a family of 4 for everyday rubbish bin. The enclosed bags fit very neatly, and the inner plastic bucket has a series of vents near the base to stop a vacuum forming. The bin opens with the lightest of pressure on the pedal and the lid is damped, so it has a soft close, also it does not let out any smell. Bin has a carrying handle which is very cleverly designed and grips well. This is a high quality bin and it comes with a 10 year warranty which is brilliant. I would highly recommend this BIN.Fecha de publicación: 2017-01-30Rated 5 de 5 por Rachey de The Ideal Bin Frankly, I do not usually waste my time on reviewing things I buy. However, this is a truly marvellous bin. Having spent the last few years with a bin you had to open with your hand which, as a result, you couldn't scrape food into, then with a bin with a foot pedal so badly made that it broke in less than a year, I marvel at the wondrousness of this bin. It has a lovely, smooth opening foot pedal, it doesn't travel across the floor when opened, you can put the bags in and there really is "no unsightly overhang", it has a lovely, slow closing action. And, it was no more expensive than the last rubbish (in both senses of the word) bin I bought. And, best of all, it's yellow! And it was in stock! I bow down in wonder at its all round loveliness!Fecha de publicación: 2016-11-15Rated 5 de 5 por Evyie de Pedal Bin Matt Steel fingerprint proof It is the Ferrari of the bin world. Looks great. Perfect size for my small kitchen. Love the pedal action that lifts the lid and shuts it back automatically but ever so gently. The bin does not move as you use it. The inner container has some very useful anchors for the bin bag to fit perfectly. The fingerprint proof is an added convenience. Love it! Love it!Fecha de publicación: 2016-11-12Rated 5 de 5 por ana123 de Not "just" a bin Every little detail it has makes this bin more than a bin. The bin bag doesn't show. The lid closes slowly so my daughters fingers do not get trapped,... Not to mention that little fingerprints don't stay on it, so it's easy to keep clean too!! There is a "inner" bin that you take out to put the bag in and which also makes it easier to clean. There isn't anything bad I can think of to say about this bin and I've had it for 3 weeks now.Fecha de publicación: 2017-05-22Rated 5 de 5 por Milly1 de Very Pleased This is a very neat and unobtrusive bin which fits nicely into a little niche in my kitchen. The bags fit nicely and are not visible from the outside. Good capacity and very pleased with purchase. About to order another.Fecha de publicación: 2017-03-18Rated 5 de 5 por Moidnns de Brabantia great again I brought this to replace my last Brabantia bin that broke after 25-30 years. Got brabantia bin liners too, the best. If lasts as long that one will outlive me!Fecha de publicación: 2016-10-30Rated 5 de 5 por JulieB de Pricey but smart Nice looking bin, like the soft close.Fecha de publicación: 2017-06-29
- Piezas de recambio
Piezas de recambio
Cubo Pedal newIcon, 30 litros, cierre suave, cubo interior de plástico - Moss Green
El material que ha seleccionado es Moss Green
Si no es el color correcto, seleccione por favor el color deseado más abajo.


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Angelina Jolie Starts Drama With Gucci
Angelina Jolie is in talks to star in the new drama Gucci, to be directed by Ridley Scott.
According to Variety, the film, set to start shooting next year, is about a famous fashion family stricken by scandal and murder as Angie's character's plots to kill her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci.
No word on who may play Maurizio – Ridley Scott has approached Leonardo DiCaprio about the part, but Leo's not attached to the film at this time.
As soon as a deal is stuck, Angie will star in The Tourist – production will likely take place in early 2010 before Gucci filming begins.


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The Word Was God
Open Your Bible
John 1:1-50, Genesis 1:1-5, Isaiah 55:10-11, Hebrews 1:1-4
BY Kaitlin Wernet
Text: John 1:1-50, Genesis 1:1-5, Isaiah 55:10-11, Hebrews 1:1-4
Gathered around the living room, we remained seated as the doorbell continued to ring. We didn't need another casserole or vase of sympathy flowers; we needed words.
Void of compassion, the blank document—an unforeseen obituary—stared back at us, wringing all adjectives of their meaning, one after another. Each suggested description seemed to shrink our beloved boy, the one who held the titles of both my best friend and my younger brother, into someone foreign and unrecognizable. The task of fitting all of his life and all of our love into one small newspaper column was exhausting, so we traded our pencils for pillows and gave up for the night.
A few hours later, unable to sleep, I rolled over to see a small beam of light coming from downstairs, and decided to follow it. I found my sleepy-eyed father furiously scribbling notes on a stack of white index cards. Between the light blue lines were favorite stories, memorable quotes, and beloved quirks. My dad handed me a stack, and as the dark sky faded into morning, our collection of cards finally created the outline of something familiar—someone familiar.
I imagine the Apostle John sitting down to translate the encounters he'd had with Jesus into suitable words. To him, Jesus was not a faraway character, but a trusted friend and beloved Savior. Writing these words, this Gospel account, John probably recalled intimate details about Jesus—the way He smelled, what His favorite foods were, the sound of His laugh. He could clearly call to mind the expressions his friend made when feeling tired or excited or somber. Yet, John undertook the task of assembling words to describe the heaven-sent Son of God to those of us who didn't know Jesus in the flesh.
John must have had a wealth of stories to choose from when deciding how to open his eyewitness account. But, through the Holy Spirit's inspiration, this dear friend of Jesus begins his narrative with the thing that identified Jesus most:
"In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God."
– John 1:1
After years of witnessing Jesus' parables, miracles, and interactions firsthand, John presents Jesus as the Word—a tangible love letter from God. Jesus did not come to merely deliver a message from God—He Himself is the message.
"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
– John 1:14
The Apostle John's words are not only the beginning to another chapter in the Bible; they are the beginning to understanding who Jesus is. He is our promised Savior. He is the one who has been with God from the beginning. He is the Word.
Post Comments (192)
192 thoughts on "The Word Was God"
Thank you She Reads Truth. These lessons are a blessing! I look forward to them. I pray God's richest blessing for all who are a part of this ministry.


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Weekend TV: Rosemary's Baby, Penny Dreadful and Remembering Murphy
May 9, 2014 10:27 AM EDT
The devil made them remake it. What other excuse can there be for NBC's glossy but laborious two-part revisiting of the Ira Levin supernatural classic Rosemary's Baby (Sunday, 9/8c, concludes next Thursday)? Perversely scheduled to begin on the eveni… Read more


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Gerard Butler: Movie injuries are worthwhile
- Bang Showbiz
- 21 April 2013
Gerard Butler thinks the pain of shooting action films is worthwhile because it makes him feel like he really is the character he's playing
Gerard Butler thinks the pain of shooting action films is worthwhile.
The 43-year-old actor might have ended up with broken neck bones on the set of his new fast-paced flick 'Olympus Has Fallen' - which sees the White House explode after being targeted by terrorists - but he believes the cuts, breaks and bruises are all part of the thrill of the job.
He explained: "I broke two little bones in my neck. My arm turned black from getting punched for literally two days. It looked like a dead person's arm, it was weird.
"I hurt my throat, and I don't even know how that happened. But that's all part of it. You're in it! And you come out feeling like you're really in the White House fighting terrorists."
The crew had to recreate the White House for the film, with the set build taking place in Louisiana over the course of three months, and the difficult weather conditions made the action shots one of the toughest the actor has ever faced.
Gerard told Britain's OK! magazine: "It was tough - 12 of the builders had to be taken to hospital because the heat was so intense.
"So to go there and do action sequences, eight days of running around in the hottest week of the summer, at 118 degrees, was tough.
"I maybe did 300 takes over those eight days, and every time, you've got to look like you've already been running to the White House!
"Even sitting there in the shade was miserable, with explosions going off all around you!"


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The only guaranteed way to avoid becoming a casualty of a disaster is to be somewhere else when it strikes.
Such a mentality is easy to apply to disasters with advanced warning, such as a hurricane. But mass shootings don't fit into that category.
The horrific school shooting last December in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six adults, took place six months after a gunman in Aurora, Colo., killed 12 and wounded 58 at a late-night screening of "The Dark Knight Rises," and a white supremacist killed six and wounded four at a Sikh temple in Racine, Wis.
Closer to home, a gunman in February 2008 walked into a Northern Illinois University lecture hall and opened fire, killing five and wounding 21. That shooting took place barely a year after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, when a gunman at Virginia Tech University killed 32.
Other recent mass shootings include the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, and the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in which U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot.
People with McHenry County ties were among the casualties at NIU and Aurora, Colo.
After the Colorado shooting, agencies such as the Houston Department of Emergency Management released and promoted education materials in an effort to teach people how to escape mass shootings. The Northwest Herald through this article will do the same.
This article is not a between-the-lines commentary on gun control, concealed carry, violence in mass entertainment or other hot-button issues. Its sole purpose is to give you the best chance of survival should you find yourself in what law enforcement calls an "active shooter" situation.
Situations differ based on location, and whether you are alone or have the compounded nightmare of having family members with you whom you have to protect. But the general rule to remember is this:
Run and get away. If you can't get away, hide. If you're found, fight.
The moment you start hearing shots, get away. Don't take time to think whether the noise you heard was, in fact, shooting.
Leave your possessions behind. Your life is far more important than anything that you own.
Your escape is not complete once you leave the building. If the building has windows, get out of the line of sight. If the gunman inside can see you, he can shoot you.
Call 911 to alert the police after you have made your escape. If you see unaware people heading toward the building you just escaped from, stop them.
If you're trapped in the building and can't escape, find a room such as an office, with only one way in and without an interior window that the shooter can see or shoot through.
Lock the door and barricade it with heavy furniture to keep the shooter out, and take cover behind something sturdy that could help stop a bullet. In hiding, you want to seek both cover and concealment – concealment helps keep you from being spotted, and cover stops a bullet. Do not hide behind or in straight line from the door – you will be in the line of fire should the gunman decide to shoot through.
Turn off the lights and keep quiet – don't give any indicator that the room is occupied. If there are multiple people hiding in the room, spread out – people tend to huddle together in emergencies.
Fighting is a last resort to be taken only if you have no choice and your life is in imminent danger.
Your goal is not to disarm the shooter but to render him unable to fight. The most vulnerable places to hit the shooter are the eyes, head, throat and groin. There is strength in numbers.
Arm yourself with a sharp object such as scissors or a letter opener, a blunt object such as a chair, a pot of hot coffee, or anything else that can hurt the attacker. Fire extinguishers can be used both to blind an attacker and as a blunt-force weapon.
The first priority of first responders will be to stop the shooter, not to aid in evacuation or help the wounded. Help for the wounded will come when the building is secure.
When authorities approach, keep your hands visible at all times and follow their instructions promptly. Avoid screaming, pointing or making any sudden moves.
• In all too many cases, investigation after a mass shooting finds that the gunman left warning signs that were ignored or not taken seriously. If a friend or acquaintance makes comments about hurting people or "topping" previous tragedies, don't ignore them – report them to authorities.
• No matter where you are, you should always make yourself aware of where the exits, both regular and emergency, are located. Looking for the exits when any kind of emergency hits could mean the difference between life and death.
• Because your odds of being caught in a mass shooting are much lower than for other emergencies, it is always good practice to know at any given time where the nearest severe weather shelter, fire alarm and extinguisher are. And the same goes for the nearest automatic external defibrillator – the life that a little advanced thinking saves may not necessarily be your own.
• Senior reporter Kevin Craver is a former Army infantry sergeant.
On the Net
Visit http://shawurl.com/d1q to watch the instructional video produced by the Houston Department of Emergency Management. The video, which depicts such a shooting, is violent and may not be suitable for younger and more sensitive viewers.


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Iraqis aren't the only ones throwing shoes: Americans remain broadly critical of U.S. involvement in Iraq, a view unaltered by security gains. And Afghanistan presents its own challenges, with broad public worries about progress and prospects alike.
On Iraq, George W. Bush's surprise trip Sunday took him to the root of his own unpopularity: Sixty-four percent of Americans in this new ABC News/Washington Post poll say the war was not worth fighting, steady for two years. And in the dwindling days of his presidency, 68 percent disapprove of Bush's job performance overall.
Click here for PDF with charts and questions.
The two are inextricably linked.
Bush and the war have been unpopular for four years running, with an almost perfect correlation between the two views. While the economy's taken center stage, it's the Iraq war that's most damaged Bush over the long term.
The success of the "surge" of U.S. forces in improving security is almost an ironic twist.
Bush heralded it Sunday, and indeed 56 percent now say the United States is making "significant progress" restoring civil order in Iraq, up from 40 percent in April. (The rest may be reflecting on the ongoing, if less numerous, car-bomb attacks there.)
Even more, 65 percent, are now optimistic about Iraq's prospects in the year ahead, up 19 points from last year to a new high since 2004. Some of that stems from better ratings of security there; some, instead, from greater optimism among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents encouraged by Barack Obama's election.
In any case it's in the broader analysis, beyond the situation on the ground -- the cost in lives and dollars vs. perceived benefits -- that nearly two-thirds continue to call the war not worth fighting.
And as that view is unchanged, so is its intensity: Fifty percent feel "strongly" that the Iraq war was not worth it. Fewer than half as many, 21 percent, strongly feel the opposite -- tying the all-time low in strong support for the war.
Such views put some heat on Obama; not only do 70 percent say he should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, but, among many high expectations for the incoming president, 64 percent think in fact he will end the U.S. involvement there.
As Bush Nears Exit, Public Critical of Iraq, Afghanistan Wars
Views of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, also subject to a farewell Bush visit, are at once less critical but also less optimistic.
Fifty-five percent see the war there as worth fighting, a marked contrast with Iraq, where it's 34 percent. However just 44 percent characterize U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan as successful, vs. 51 percent who say it's been unsuccessful.
That's a vast difference from early in that war: In October 2002, 70 percent called the war in Afghanistan successful.
And, as noted, optimism is in short supply, with just 49 percent optimistic about the prospects in Afghanistan in the next year, well below the level of optimism about Iraq.
Those concerns are especially significant because Americans by a 51-40 percent margin believe that success in Afghanistan is necessary if the United States is to prevail in its broader campaign against terrorism.
Those numbers are reversed in Iraq; the public by 51-42 percent says winning there is not necessary to defeat terrorism more broadly.
Nonetheless, as ratings of security in Iraq have improved, so has the sense that winning there is necessary; today's 42 percent is up from a low of 31 percent last spring.
In Iraq, as noted, the change in optimism is not just a result of progress in security. Even among those who see no such progress, 52 percent are now optimistic, up from 26 percent a year ago. Again, that's because these people are disproportionately Democrats, brightened by Obama.
Specifically, a year ago a mere 30 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independents were optimistic about Iraq; today it's 67 percent. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents meanwhile have held steady -- 71 percent optimistic about Iraq a year ago, 68 percent now.
Other views on Iraq remain highly partisan.
Seventy percent of Republicans (and 78 percent of conservative Republicans) say the war was worth fighting; just 32 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats agree.
There's partisanship on Afghanistan as well, but somewhat less so: Seventy-six percent of Republicans say that war was worth fighting; 58 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats agree.
Majority Disapprove of Bush's Job as President
As for Bush, he's now gone 47 months without majority approval of his job performance overall, a record by far in 70 years of presidential approval polls, well beyond Harry Truman's 38 months in the doghouse from 1949-52.
Thirty percent now approve of Bush's work in office, up from his low of 23 percent in October (presidents generally recover somewhat as they leave office and step away from the political fray) but still remarkably low.
Sixty-eight percent disapprove, 5 points from Bush's record 73 percent disapproval two months ago, another record in presidential approval polls.
At 6 percent, Bush's approval rating among Democrats is 1 point from his all-time low Oct. 11; he's got 30 percent approval from independents and 66 percent from Republicans, up by 12 and 11 points, respectively.
He's got one new career low this month, 45 percent approval among conservatives.
The intensity of sentiment also remains strongly against Bush.
Fifty-two percent of Americans not only disapprove of his job performance, but "strongly" disapprove. Just 12 percent strongly approve.
And Bush, who received 92 percent approval a month after 9/11, the highest on record for any president in polls since Franklin Roosevelt, has subsided to a career average 51 percent approval across his eight years in office.
Only four presidents since 1938 have averaged lower -- Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Truman and Jimmy Carter, at 49, 48, 47 and 46 percent career average approval, respectively.
METHODOLOGY: This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 11-14, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cell-only respondents. Results for the full sample have a 3-point error margin; click here for a detailed description of sampling error and here for a pdf version with question wording and results. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by TNS of Horsham, PA.


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Next Episode of The Archbishop of Canterbury's New Year Message is
Season 2020 / Episode 1 and airs on 01 January 2020 13:50
The annual New Years Day address is delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thoughts for the new year from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Rowan Williams(Rowan Williams)
Justin Welby(Justin Welby)
Looks like something went completely wrong!
But don't worry - it can happen to the best of us,
- and it just happened to you.
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text:
diff this!
Found a cool VIM's command -
:diffthis. Invoking it in two different buffers tells the editor to diff the buffers as if it was started as
vimdiff. Best (most interesting to me) part is that one can diff two unsaved buffers. E.g.:
" split the screen vertically
" paste first code fragment into the left buffer and
" press ^W^W to switch to the right buffer, paste the second code fragment and again call
To cancel the effect of
:diffthis one uses the
:diffoff command. The command is too buffer specific and has to be invoked in both buffers.
Another interesting related command is
:diffpatch {diff-file} which again invokes
vimdiff diffing the file currently in buffer against the file with the patch applied.


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79th Legislature, First Called Session, House Concurrent Resolution 11
Description: Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to granting the legislature permission to adjourn for more than three days during the period beginning on Tuesday, June 21, 2005, and ending on Monday, June 27, 2005.
Date: June 28, 2005
Creator: Texas. Legislature. House of Representatives.


text:
What is truth, what is myth?
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how to identify a venomous snake?
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In 2001, Hilary Swank rode her bike to the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, wearing a flirty white Marc Jacobs sundress. This year, stars rolled up to the show's new location—the massive LA Live complex downtown—in big black Escalades and wore sparkling and serious cocktail dresses.
Has the independent spirit shifted? "Some people have said, 'Oh you know, it's like the awards are selling out, they're trying to be the Oscars,'" said Best Supporting Female nominee Natalie Press ("Fifty Dead Men Walking"). "But I don't think that's the case at all. I think it's still really rock and roll."
As John Waters saw it, change is inevitable. "It's great, it's all new, it's exciting," said the director. "I used to go when it was on Hollywood Boulevard." But some actresses couldn't shake the sand from their sartorial choices. "I just keep thinking of being at the beach during the day," said Dana Delaney in a bright Prada sundress. "So I didn't want to give that up."
Regardless of the program's set up (which kicked off with Taraji P. Henson striding down the carpet with vacuums from sponsor LG), it was still more spirited—or atleast more obscenity laden— than the average awards ceremony. It was as if presenters and winners got a kick out of not being bleeped during the ceremony's live broadcast on IFC.
But honorary chairman Ben Stiller, who handed out the Best Feature trophy to "Precious," was not amused. In a critical but hysterical speech, he called out the organization for booking big name presenters with "a**ses you could fry an egg on" to grab ratings. And what about naming him honorary chairman, "even if the last independent movie I did was in 1990 when there still was an independent film industry." "You haven't pandered enough," Stiller continued. "It's 1:30 in New York. Anyone channel surfing at this hour is searching for porn." And so Stiller brought out two scantily clad women and one buff man in briefs who simulated sex acts while he named the Best Feature nominees. "This is Maggie Jizzenballs, Parker Pussé, and Phillip Semen Hoffman," Stiller said by way of introduction. Then, remembering where he was, added, "They're independent porn stars."
25th annual Film Independent Spirit Award Winners
Best Feature: "Precious"
Best Director: Lee Daniels, "Precious"
Best First Feature: Scott Cooper, Robert Duvall, Rob Carliner, Judy Cairo, T Bone Burnett; "Crazy Heart"
John Cassavetes Award: Lynn Shelton, "Humpday"
Best Screenplay: Scott Neustader and Michael H Weber, "(500) Days of Summer"
Best First Screenplay: Geoffrey Fletcher, "Precious"
Best Female Lead: Gabourey Sidibe, "Precious"
Best Male Lead: Jeff Bridges, "Crazy Heart"
Best Supporting Female: Mo'Nique, "Precious"
Best Supporting Male: Woody Harrelson, "The Messenger"
Best Foreign Film: "An Education"
Best Documentary: "Anvil: The Story of Anvil"
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, "A Serious Man"
Piaget Producers Award: Karin Chien, "The Exploding Girl" and "Santa Mesa"
Acura Someone to Watch: Kyle Patrick Alvarez, "Easier with Practice"
Chaz and Rogert Ebert Truer than Fiction Award: Bill Ross and Turner Rose, "45365"


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Things got a little weird on the "Today" show Wednesday morning when celebrity chef Paula Deen showed up for the appearance she bailed on two days ago to speak publicly about her use of racial epithets.
Appearing defensive and more than a little paranoid, she contradicted her own court testimony, claiming to Matt Lauer that she only used the "n-word" on one occasion, 30 years ago, after she had "a gun put to my head … [by] someone I had gone out on a limb for."
She blamed black people for making it hard to know if the n-word is even offensive.
"It's very distressing for me to go into my kitchen and hear what these young people are calling each other.... For this problem to be worked on, those young people are going to have to take control and start showing respect for each other and stop throwing that word at each other."
Then, after getting violently biblical -- "if there's anyone out there that has never said something that they wish they could take back, please pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me" -- she summed the whole controversy like this: "There's someone evil out there who saw what I had worked for and they wanted it."
And this, for reasons known only to him, is where Lauer decided to say, "Let's end on that."
Really? Really Matt Lauer? Let's end on Deen saying there is some super baddie who has orchestrated this entire scandal to somehow claim Deen's culinary empire? You don't want a name? I want a name or, at the very least, a Twitter handle.
One can only assume she means the employee who brought the lawsuit claiming that Deen and her brother maintained a racist and sexist environment at their restaurants. Although perhaps she, like others before her, has come to believe in a malignant entity lurking behind the media, social and otherwise.
Certainly she spent a large portion of her time with Lauer expressing outrage, though nary a detail, over the lies people have been spreading about her.
VIDEO: Paula Deen on the 'Today' show
Which was a bad choice, from a public relations standpoint. As of Tuesday evening, the crisis had entered something of a backlash; after the initial shock and condemnation of what many saw as Deen's fairly cavalier attitude toward racial slurs -- "yes, of course," she answered when asked if she had ever used the "n-word" -- many were coming to her defense, and not just the perpetually addled Glenn Beck.
Fans were calling for a boycott of the Food Network, which dropped her show, and John McWhorter, an African American associate professor at Columbia, wrote in Time that Deen was merely a product of time and place: "Deen is old and she's sorry. She should get her job back," he concluded, referring to the Food Network's decision to dump Deen's show.
Which was where Lauer, in full stern-face mode, began his interview, pointing out to Deen the importance of this interview and asking if she was doing it simply to stop the financial bleeding.
Not surprisingly, Deen insisted she was there instead to "tell you what I believe and how I live my life. I believe every creature on God's earth should be treated equal. That's the way I was raised and that's the way I lived my life."
Her message seemed to be: If you knew me, you would understand that these words are not a reflection of who I am. Which would have been fine if Deen hadn't apparently coached herself by viewing clips of Richard Nixon on YouTube. She's been in the public eye for quite some time and endured controversy before -- her high-fat, high-sugar cooking style put her at odds with the current obesity crisis, a fact underlined by her announcement last year that she had Type 2 diabetes.
PHOTOS: Hollywood backlot moments
But she hasn't learned that less is more, in terms of personal outrage as well as buttermilk.
"I'm not going to say all the things I've done for people of color," she said, "I'll let someone else do that."
"I'm heartbroken," she added. "I've had to hold friends in my arms as they've sobbed because they know what is being said about me isn't true and I've had to to comfort them and tell them, 'If God got us to it, he'll get us through it.'"
Who's the victim here? Deen, because "there's someone evil out there" who wants what she has.
Seemingly determined to cry, she worked herself into a state of emotional breakdown midway through the interview with an anecdote about her 7-year-old grandson who refused to lie about her letting him stay up past his bedtime. ("This is how I raised my children," Deen said, her voice cracking as she told how the boy "put down his iPad" to look her straight in the eye).
Her mascara was holding up beautifully, but still she didn't see the out Lauer had provided her after the "evil" comment. Rolling right over his fairly firm thanks-for-being-with-us, she continued to share her pain. "It feels so strange to come to this wonderful happy place … and to have these people believe those horrible, horrible lies," she said, providing a moment of unintentional hilarity.
Still reeling from the fallout of Ann Curry's firing last year, "Today" and Lauer know a little something about feeling unpopular. Amid all the bad press, they've finally found someone who still thinks of "Today" as a happy place. And it had to be Paula Deen.
Paula Deen suffers from Type 2 Racism
Paula Deen blames the media in 'n-word' controversy
Paula Deen's 'MasterChef' appearance: What will Fox do?
PHOTOS: TV shows and their spinoffs
Overrated/Underrated 2014
PHOTOS: 101 best-written TV shows of all time


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Ladies and gents, I proudly present to you Ikon, Friar and Conquistador, one of my favorite essays from the country's best English-language writer, the late great Nicomedes "Nick" Joaquín (National Artist for Literature and a good friend of Señor Guillermo Gómez Rivera). If I'm not mistaken, this essay was written and published during the 1960s. It was recently included in CULTURE AND HISTORY, a collection of Nick's essays published by Anvil Publishing, Inc. (2004). Ikon, Friar and Conquistador explains most of what we have been fighting for all these years…
Nick Joaquín
The Filipino is most Christian when he doubts that he is, just as the saintly are those who know they are not. A saint thinks himself the blackest of sinners; the moment he thought himself a saint he would cease to be saintly. What a Christian culture creates is a self that's forever examining, questioning, doubting, denying and confessing itself. The paradox of the Christian is that he must achieve selflessness through maximum self-consciousness. There must be a self before it can be denied. The will must be strong that has to be curbed.
The Christian Filipino is self-conscious, is intensely, tormentedly aware of himself in a way that, say, the Igorot and the Moro are not — and may the statement give no offense, since its point is not that the Christian Filipino is better but, rather, that he sees himself as worse. He winces when he hears his country described as "the only Christian nation in the Far East." He looks around him and sees only greed, graft, vileness and violence, and he sneers: Is this Christianity? He questions the value of religious instruction for his children; he deplores the folk pieties of the ignorant; he concludes in despair that the Faith is a foreign irrelevance that hasn't touched his people. Some may see in such attitudes a decline of Christianity. Others may hail them as a triumph of the Faith, for the Christian affirmation is not, after all, Thank God, I am not like this Publican here but O Lord, I am not worthy.
If the Christian religion were to disappear, from the land, we would still remain Christian, not necessarily by being good but even in the way we are not good: that is, in the quirks and qualities of our character. The Faith has so formed us that even those of us who have left it still speak and write within its frame of reference, still think in terms of its culture, and still carry the consciousness of a will and a conscience at war that so agonizes the Christian. For good or evil, our conversion to Christianity is the event in our history.
We might be happier if we had remained within the tribal obedience (as the highlanders of the North and the Muslims of the South have done to this day) but we ourselves deny this when we argue that, even without Spain and the Faith, we would sooner or later have emerged from tribalism. The Conversion shattered for us the Magian cave of Tribe, from which we emerged Faustians, still infant Faustians it may be, but already evolving the infinite I within, which we call soul, and the infinite we without, which we call nation. Lapu-lapu was a patriot in the old reasonable sense, defending a local habitation he could personally encompass. But the nationalist is a madder chap. He worships and will defend a mystical extent of space that ultimately has no boundaries.
It would take some explaining to make a Badjáo see how he is bound to defend the waters of faraway Bolinao, or to make an Ilongot understand that Pagadían is also his homeland. These things can be taught in school, but they come by instinct to those born to the culture. The Christian Filipino who has never seen either Bolinao or Pagadían, who may not know even where they are and couldn't care less, will still, without question, go and die in their defense, as he would die for his own home, because they, too, are his own land. He will even, in defense of the homeland, fight outside the homeland, as Filipinos have fought in the Solomons and the Marianas, because the nationalism he carries in his blood is boundless. This seems starkly clear to us, but it's mysticism gone mad to a tribesman, whose loyalties coincide with the boundaries of his tribe. If he fights beyond, he fights as an ally, but not for a nation.
When we argue that, left to ourselves, we would, nevertheless, have evolved a confederation of tribes that in time would have become a nation, the testimony of 400 years is against us. In the last 400 years, the Philippine tribes that were left to themselves have never even approached the idea of union. The highlanders of the North, for instance, did not fuse into one nation in the mountains vis-à-vis the Christians in the lowlands. Nor did the Cagayán Valley become the empire of the confederated Ilongot tribes, whom we find, instead, to this day, still at war among themselves. And in Mindanáo, even Islam, a potent unifier, failed to unite the tribes that turned Muslim, though the Spanish campaigns against them should have made confederation inevitable. The Greeks, whose tribal city-states were similar to ours, and who suffered from an equally disjunctive localism, almost became a nation when forced to unite against the might of the Persian Empire. But the Moros stuck to the private small-scale raid. We try to ennoble those raids today as efforts on the part of our Muslim brothers to liberate us from Spanish rule, though the evidence is that, then as now, the raids were purely for slave and booty, and were thus resisted by the folk supposed to be rescued; but how glorious if there had really been a countercrusade from a Mindanáo organized under one leadership to liberate the land, and sending a mighty fleet northward for a new Battle of Lepanto! But the native aversion to the large effort made such a dream impossible, and the Moros, instead of confederating, have merely split smaller, until we hear of tribes that must have begun as one shredding into as many as 33 sultanates within a single province.
This should tell us that a will to unite and a sense of nation do not evolve inevitably, "sooner or later," not even when spurred by the force of circumstances. Considering the 400-year failure in this matter of the tribes left to themselves, and considering also the local diversity of tongues and cults, the unification of the rest of the country must seem nothing less than a miracle, and that achievement the basic fact of our history, since any historian would regard the epoch during which that labor was undertaken as our most crucial moment, when the Conversion made us this people and this nation. But we find ourselves being told today that those years of conversion and unification —the 300 years of Spain in the Philippines— are not our history, are of no import to us, are irrelevant and can be omitted from a true history of the Philippines, with the example cited, to prove the point, of the omission by certain Spanish historians of the Moorish period from their histories of Spain. But this example, instead of proving the point, disproves it.
Despite 800 years of the Moros, Spain did not become a Muslim nation but rather emerged from the occupation more fiercely Catholic than before, and can therefore be justified in ignoring the Moorish period as irrelevant since it wrought no radical reformation of Spanish culture. But let us assume that Spain did become Muslim because of the Moros — Muslim in faith, Muslim in culture: would a modern Spanish Muslim historian dare ignore as irrelevant the event in his history that made his nation the unique thing it is — the only Muslim nation in Christian Europe? Would he dare call the Moorish occupation, however hated it may have been, irrelevant to the development of his Muslim people? Or would he not rather say that the invasion was the starting point of his Muslim people's history and the Christian years that preceded it the irrelevance?
Or to cite a closer example: If a historian finally emerged among the Philippine Moros, would he dare say that the coming of Islam to the Philippines was of no import and the conversion of his folk to the Crescent an irrelevance in the history of his tribe?
If we had emerged from the 300 years of Spain not Christian in faith nor Christian in culture we could dismiss those 300 years as an irrelevant interruption of our history. But since it was those years that shaped what we are today, it's as impossible for us to reject them as for a tree to cut off its roots. This is the vital difference between the Spanish era and the American interlude. The latter was, like the British and the Japanese occupations, an interruption, which we now seek to annul, because we know that's possible, having realized it's not mainstream, as we used to think. But even the nimblest of historical wizards may find it hard to skip Spain and the Conversion and still tell a coherent Philippine history, since he would have, at one moment, a welter of warring pagan tribes and, in the very next moment, a people calling itself Filipino and fighting for its nationhood under the banners of the Cross, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Constitution of Cádiz.
What happened in between is too vital to skip, as vital as the forces —religious, cultural, political— that made it happen, and which may be represented by the three figures that loom on the stage of conversion: the Santo Niño, Fray Andrés de Urdaneta and Don Miguel de Legazpi. When we started to take off as a nation, after ages of static tribalism, we had for propulsion the triple thrust of Ikon, Friar and Conquistador.
The Santo Niño makes so perfect a symbol of Philippine Christianity because it came with Magellan, became a pagan idol, was reestablished by Legazpi, and has become so native that native legends annul its European origin by declaring it to have arisen in this land. The process was already in motion even in the days of Rajah Tupas. Within 44 years after its arrival, the Ikon had become so accepted no one remembered it any longer as having come from outside. The Cebuanos sent to Legazpi to ransom the image, offering any amount of gold for it, declared that it had been with them for ages and had been their god from time immemorial.
One legend has it falling from the sky; another has it rising from the sea; but both sea and sky are Philippine. The legend that recounts how futile were the efforts to hack it to pieces may be mythic shorthand for the vain war waged against it by native priestesses during its 44 years as the last and greatest of our pagan gods. The translation into Christian worship of the rituals with which it was worshipped as a pagan god, and which survive to this day, is the first and still the best example of folk Catholicism, a fusion of the Christian and the pagan that reveals how the Church triumphed in the Philippines: by assimilating and preserving (as it did in ancient Rome and heathen Europe) whatever of the old cults it could Christianize, so that not only the Pit Senyor of the Santo Niño but similar pagan rites like the tatarín of Manila, the turumba of Páquil, and the ati-atihan of Aclán have survived under the auspices of the Church. It's ironic, therefore, that those who look back with such reverence to our pre-Hispanic culture should be the loudiest sneerers at Christianity in the Philippines as being mere folk Catholicism, or superstition. They mourn for being lost what they attack for surviving. When they decry the town fiesta they are decrying the old pagan harvest festival, which, as may be observed in the highlands of the North, also entailed open doors, loaded tables and a lot of conspicuous consumption.
That Christianity in the Philippines, like the Santo Niño, adapted itself to paganism, to reach our pagan minds, should cause no surprise, since history shows that the Faith becomes primitive again with every primitive people. It carried all Greek learning within it when it reached Europe, but in Europe, during the Dark Ages, it became a magical nature religion. To the Gauls of the time of Clovis, Christ was not the highly metaphysical Greek Logos but simply a great witch doctor, who proved the potency of his magic by rising from the grave. Centuries has to pass before Christian Europe could produce an Aquinas, a Francis, a Teresa. The Faith respects the human process; and even as Christ himself began as a baby, so every Christian nation begins in spiritual babyhood, with naïve faith. The Philippines, too, had to undergo, is still undergoing, this spiritual childhood, because human processes are gradual, and we cannot, in the wink of an eye, shed all the previous pagan ages. So, the Santo Niño was willing to become a pagan god for us. Yet we hear the charge that violence was done to the Filipinos when a faith alien to his culture was thrust upon him.
Rizal lamented that his people were converted to a religion they did not understand. It's absolutely sure that the early native converts understood the Faith no more deeply than did the Gauls or Goths of Europe; but if the same argument had succeeded in stopping the introduction into Europe of an alien Oriental religion the world would not have had Chartres or Giotto or Chaucer of Michelangelo. We complain that our forefathers suffered in assimilating forms of culture not native to them. Absolutely. Learning is not an easy process, as our proverbs ("Burning one's eyebrows") warn. But if man had limited himself to what was easy because familiar, he would still be in the caves. It's the accepting of the challenge of the new, the unknown, the alien, the mysterious, that has unlocked wilderness, ocean, the atom and outer space. None of these things came easy; why should Christianity?
We sneer that the Filipino is no more virtuous today than 400 years ago, and that the Faith has had, not only no moral, but no social effect on us. But even the gradual evolution of the Faith in the Philippines has been in the nature of a revolution. The Filipino woman of today, for instance, is not quite the same as the women that Pigafetta and the other early explorers described. And even the modern Filipina who asserts that her pagan ancestress was actually nobler, because uninhibited, would balk at restoring the old uninhibited practices, like getting a daughter deflowered at puberty or making her little boy wear a nail through his phallus. The Filipina may still try to keep men under the saya, but not in such literal sexual subjugation as symbolized by the fettered phallus.
That there was a revolution can be seen by comparing our Christian and pagan arts. When the Club Filipino organized such a comparative exhibit of our pagan and Christian arts in juxtaposition, one could see at a glance how the static forms of paganism —stolid, squatting, expressionless figures— were succeeded, in Christian times, by forms in dynamic motion: gesturing hands, advancing feet, upturned heads, vivacious faces and whirling draperies. The most startling juxtaposition of forms was of the Pregnant Woman, an immemorial Philippine motif that evolved, with the Conversion, into the Pregnant Virgin. But glancing from the pagan to the Christian version, one was amazed to see how forms so similar could be so different. What one saw was not evolution but revolution, the static becoming ecstatic. For the pagan Pregnant Woman —stolid, squatting, expressionless— seems rooted to the ground, earthbound; while the upright Pregnant Virgin, so graceful though so gravid, and leaning impulsively forward, as though about to run a race or take off for the sky, seems the very epitome of the liberated spirit. The testimony of yesterday's art refutes today's reading of history. Our folk art records a transfiguration as remarkable as that moment in Greek art when classic serenity, disturbed, became Byzantine rapture.
In this, the Philippine folk artist is not a solitary witness, for our reception of the Faith was indeed not uniformly naïve. Within a century after Magellan, an authentic mystical movement had already appeared in Manila, contemporary with and of the same spirit as the metaphysical movement in 17th-century Europe. The lives of these natives anchorites and contemplatives who founded the beaterios, organized the Third Orders and formed the confraternities, indicate how deep and swift the impact of the Faith was. Yet no study has been made of this movement as a whole, fascinating and significant though it is, because we scorn our own history. The history of the beaterios is surely not the history "of Spain in the Philippines" but of the the Filipino as Christian; and it reveals the revolution being wrought in his country, in his society, in his character.
The testimony offered by folk artist and folk mystic should cause second thoughts among those who assert that the Conversion was no event in our history. It was —and is (for it's still in progress)— an event not only in our history but in our very souls; and when we confront it we confront the friar, who started the act that's still transforming us. But the friar also played an earthier role in our history than as missionary, and could just as well be portrayed with wheel and seedling as with cross. Economically he was our culture hero.
Urdaneta makes so perfect a symbol of the friar in the Philippines because he could just as well be depicted raising the Compass as the Cross. To the Conversion, as to Legazpi, he was Chief Pilot; and he was Renaissance Man in all his awesome vitality: sailor, soldier, explorer, adventurer, and yet combining with the man of action the man of thought, otherworldly and God-haunted, afflicted with his epoch's 'fever of the marrow' and suddenly abandoning the world, like so many adventurers of his time (Charles V, John Donne), to vanish into the cloister and there start still another adventure, another exploration, this time in the realms of the spirit. Summoned from the cloister by his king, he willingly set out on a final expedition, though already in his 60s, and guided Legazpi's armada to the Philippines, where he built the first church, enthroned the Santo Niño, baptized his first converts, was the colony's first spiritual head. Then he performed a final feat: discovered a safe return route across the Pacific to Mexico, after which he vanished again into the cloister, where he died in obscurity, a man whose voracity for experience the whole world could not satiate, and who therefore yearned beyond. Plus Ultra!
Only heroic ages can produce a clergy in the grand style, not dainty curates, but warrior-priests like Urdaneta, men of the world and of their time, though transcending both. But the challenge of the Philippines, of the Orient, was picked up by a host of such mystic men of action. The Franciscan Pedro Bautista came to the Philippines during the Conquista, built the first church in San Francisco del Monte, ranged Southern Luzón, then dashed off to new frontiers in Japan, where he was martyred; is now honored on the altar as a saint. The Dominican Francisco de Capillas explored the wilds of Cagayán, evangelized the North, built and baptized, then went off to dare the perils of China, is now honored on the altar as a martyr. Of such steel were the athletes that evangelized the Philippines.
Into our soil, the friar poured his blessings. He shaped our economy by what he put in; and our history to this day, and our daily lives, are determined by the crops that he brought in: tobacco, maize, cotton, coffee, cocoa, naranja, guava, melon, sincamás, achuete, avocado, pineapple, chile, peanut, squash, cabbage, tomato, industrial sugar, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. We hear of convent yards that were veritable plant nurseries, where imported seed was tried out, nurtured, bred, crossbred, developed, and then given out for general culture.
The revolution here can be appreciated if we imagine that most typical of Philippine scenes: a carabao pulling a plow. We think this "immemorial," but it isn't. The pre-Hispanic carabao was a meat, now a work, animal. Tilling, planting, gathering then were all done by hand, which necessarily limited what a farmer could produce. The friar brought wheel and plow here and he turned the carabao into a draft animal, to pull the plow, to pull the cart. This lifted a mountain of labor off the farmer's back and expanded his ability to produce.
If this had happened in an earlier age, myth would have turned the friar into a generic culture hero depicted, like Ceres, with a crown of vine leaves, seedlings in hand, and enthroned on crop sheaves. Thus the Greeks developed a generic figure, Dionysus, for the culture hero (probably from Asia) who brought them the culture of the grape. Thus the American Indian developed a cult to the god who introduced corn and tobacco to his land. Thus might we have had a culture hero called Parecura, a nature god that came out of the sea to bring us corn and roses, beans and spices; who gave us the wheel and the plow, the horse and the cow, the goose and the turkey; who built dams to check our rivers and canals to irrigate our fields; who flung roads through jungle and mountain and bridges across rivers; and who fixed on paper the turmoil of our tongues and scripts. For Parecura was not only a god of agriculture; he was also, like Apollo, a god of art, music and learning. He trained our wood carvers and painters, taught us architecture, developed our singers and musicians, gave us books on our flora and chronicles of our land, showed us how to dress food and how to tailor clothes, and gathered us together, made us one, with the magic sound of his bell.
The marvel here is that this is not myth but history, our history, though we now insist it's only the "history of Spain in the Philippines." But was our entrance into wheel culture an event in Spanish or in Philippine history? Was the introduction of corn and tobacco, of horse and cow, an event in Spanish or in Philippine culture? Was the rise of the native baroque church and house (which are neither Spanish nor Mexican) an event in Spanish or in Philippine society? Was the romanization of our script and the introduction of printing an event in Spanish or in Philippine letters? Was the native santero and event in Spanish or in Philippine art? And was our learning of the guisado an event in Spanish or in Philippine life?
We contend that we would have gotten or learned all these things anyway, eventually, sooner or later, even without Spain and the friar; and we point proudly to the international contacts we had even before Magellan. But what's so noteworthy about those contacts is how little they did for us. We hear of ships from Siam or China or Java or Arabia sailing to Cebú to trade, but we don't hear of ships from Cebú, or even from Manila, going to Siam or China or Java or Arabia to trade. This international trade we boast of was so one-sided it can hardly be called trade, since our role in it was purely passive: the folk to whom the trade happened, to whom the traders came, and from whom the payment exacted were slaves or the right to work local mines. Not until the Galleons was our country to play an active role in trade, on a global scale, for Manila became the point of exchange between East and West.
All these cultures we were in contact with were already wheel cultures, but none of them seems to have had the charity to introduce us to the wheel. We had to wait for the friar to do that. They were already building in brick and stone; did any of them care to instruct as in the art? Was a Javanese-style or a Siamese-style temple ever built in the Philippines to serve as model? Not untli the friar came and discovered the possibilities of our adobe did we develop an architecture of our own. We are age-old neighbors of the spice islands, yet never had a spice culture of our own until the friar tried to give us one. The Chinese, we have always had with us. They killed our pottery with their porcelain; did they at least have the goodness to teach us their ceramic secrets? They have always been famed for their cooking, did they teach us how to dress food? They sold us silks and other fabrics; did they ever teach us how to make them? The Arabs were then, vis-à-vis Europe, in the position of Russia today vis-à-vis America – that is, the rival culture. Yet what of Arab culture, aside from its faith, ever actually reached us? The Arabs had great armies and navies then. We say we were in contact with them; but we were still fighting with bow and arrow — with bows of poor tensile strength and arrows unshafted with feathers. Couldn't the Arabs have trained us in their style of warfare? Or they could at least have brought us the horse, for which they were famous. Did they? Only in the present day has the mother realm of our South deigned to establish cultural interchange with our Muslims.
All the things that the Javanese and Chinese and Siamese and Arabs could have brought us, could have taught us, we had to wait for Spain and the friar to bring us, to teach us. If we had relied on the Javanese, Chinese, Siamese or Arabs to help us advance, we might still be — as indeed the highlanders of the North and even the Moros of the South still are — in a prewheel, prestone, pretrade and prebook culture.
Moreover, Spain's economic legacy was as nearly disinterested as any act in this selfish world can be. We cannot say that sugar was developed here because Spain needed a sugar bowl, or that tobacco was introduced here to give the Carmens of Seville employment, or that the copra and hemp industries were established to feed the mills of Madrid and Barcelona. In the nearly four centuries under Spain, we never had what might be called a colonial economy, tied to the factories and markets of the mother country. When we broke away from Spain we did so with no fear of economic upheaval, because we were economically independent of her. But in the next years this independent economy was to become a colonial economy, so tied to the markets and factories of the United States that, even today, several decades after political independence, we are still, economically, an American dependency, and tremble to think of the upheavals that separation would cause.
The funny thing is that the Americans introduced into this country not a single crop that may be said to have transformed our economy and affected our history, like the crops that Spain brought. Nor was the existing economy developed save to serve the interests of the American market. During the war, the Japanese here ostentatiously planted Virginia tobacco, asking us, with a leer, why the Americans never developed a Virginia tobacco culture in the Philippines. It was then that a prewar vaunt —"More progress in 50 years under America than in 300 under Spain"— became so hollow as to make one wonder how it could ever have been believed. For we are, today, still vexedly trying to undo the effects and solve the problems caused by that "progress" made under America; but on what Spain brought and planted here depend our lives, trade, culture, progress and history for all time to come. The wheel brought here is in permanent revolution, is dynamo.
The friar planted crop after crop with no thought of how this might be to the benefit or detriment of the mother country on the other side of the world. He was not thinking of the mother country, he was thinking of "this republic," as he loved to call the Philippines. "Esta corte" and "Esta república" resound repeatedly from his pages. He was —consciously or not— creating the idea of an independent realm. And everything he did increased that independence. Those crops he planted created economic independence. His revolt against the authority of his superiors in Spain resulted in independent friar provinces for the Philippines. His propagation of the dialects instead of Spanish — whatever his reasons for disobeying royal orders in this matter — bred an independent Philippine Christian culture that's not merely a mirror culture of the Spanish or the Mexican. He organized our dialects into grammars; opened up and mapped our lands; and pulled us out of the mists of folklore into the ear of written history. The churches, roads, bridges, dams and irrigation systems he built, we are still using today. From any viewpoint, his is one of the great civilizing labors in the history of mankind.
But the friar as culture hero shared the fate of Dionysus, who was destroyed by the same folk that hailed him for his gift. Like Dionysus, the friar was, in the end, torn to pieces by the women. They were his first foes when he first came; but in subduing them, he succumbed to them, and perished. But culture heroes all have a tragic end — Prometheus, the bringer of fire culture, chained forever and forever devoured; Noah, the inventor of wine culture, castrated; and Osiris, the introducer of agriculture, rent limb from limb and scattered. Like these, Parecura suffered a mythic doom — which is, most improperly, a stealing of the show, since his role in the Conquista was, properly, that of Sancho Panza (the practical one, the realist) alongside the Conquistador's egregious Quixote.
Which brings us to the last and most poignant figure in our trinity.
Legazpi makes so perfect a symbol of the Conquistador in the Philippine because, when he came here, he was over 50 years old and a grandfather. Quixote, too, was an old man when, the Age of Chivalry long past, he rode forth on knight-errantry; but Quixote in India is an even older man, and even farther away from when knighthood was in flower. Quixote in India is a gaunt, grave, grizzled grampa riding forth to conquer the Orient. He took Cebú, he took Manila, he extended the empire up to the Ilocos, and he died poor. But in less than a decade he had established a base, a springboard, for Oriental operations.
Quixote, however, was too old to conquer Cathay and the Indies, and died of his mad dream. But for a moment the dream flickered with wild brilliance and it seemed that the Conquistador, who had welded the Americas into one empire, would repeat his feat in the Orient and bring under his flag and the Cross all the region from the Himalayas to the Antipodes. For a moment, greatness of realm seemed the destiny of the Philippines, potential heart of an Asian empire.
In those alarums and excursions, which we bewail for the blood and labor they cost us, the prize at stake was our own magnitude; for if the Conquistador had succeeded, the Philippines might have extended from Indo-China to Australia. Even up to the middle of the 17th century, it seemed certain that the Philippines would at least include Formosa, the Moluccas and Borneo. Restored to his throne with the help of Spanish arms, the sultan of Borneo had sworn fealty to Spain in the person of Philippine Governor-General Francisco de Sande. The Moluccas were conquered in the early 1600s, Formosa in the 1620s. Our geography was still fluid, still in formation.
The Dutch wars (through the first 50 years of the 17th century) posed another big If. Was the Philippines to become Spanish or Dutch domain? Would Philippine culture have a Catholic or a Calvinist accent? Or, the Dutch being no gospeleers, were we, with the Spaniards kicked out, to continue, under the Dutch, the interrupted process of our Islamization?
Such questions show how these wars, which, we huffily say now, were no concern of ours and therefore not our history, were actually decisive in history, since they determined our fortunes and even the shape of our land. But for the Moro wars, which stopped the Conquistador in Mindanáo, Borneo might have been definitely annexed — and we would have had a deeper South, plus oil and ore. But for the Dutch wars, which nailed the Conquistador to the Philippines, Formosa and the Moluccas might not have been lost — and we would today enjoy larger boundaries, plus granaries of rice and spice. But for the 50-year resistance of the Philippines at all today: we would be a province, under another name, of Indonesia.
On the positive side, the battles of the Conquistador had, for us, one tremendous and profound result: the formation of a native elite in close alliance with and practically the peers of the Spaniards. Imperilled by Dutch and English from without, and by Moro and Chinese from within, the Spaniards in the Philippines had to turn to some section of the population for help and support, and they got both from two tribes, the Tagalog and Pampango, but at the price of yielding part of their power and authority to the principales of these tribes. For the Tagalog and Pampango barons, or principalía, the Dutch wars were Runnymede. The Conquistador got the men, timber, provisions and ships he needed; the Tagalog and Pampango barons got, in return, municipal power and government, military authority, more and more of the old communal lands, prestige and privilege, and a liberal education. They could rise to captain and colonel, or maestre de campo, in the army; could be placed in charge of a garrison in the Moluccas; traveled from Borneo to Formosa to Acapulco and got a taste of the great world; and in their collaboration with the Conquistador, in dealing with him as his equals, developed a sense of destiny as a chosen people, as the ruling class. They were addressed as dons.
It's significant that what used to be our greatest local feast, La Naval de Manila, which celebrated the termination of and Philippine victory in the Dutch wars, was most fervently observed by the Tagalogs and the Pampangos. (It's still the main fiesta of Ángeles.) the feast had a double meaning for those two tribes. On the one hand, they celebrated the power and privilege they gained because of the Dutch wars. On the other hand, they celebrated the continuance of their ally, the Spaniard, in the land and the consequent continuation of their own power and privilege, which had created a grand style in them, the lordliness they have become noted for. The feast of La Naval encloses the first sprouting of native nationalism; the dynamo was already turning mass into energy, matter into spirit. (The rise of the Tagalog and Pampango principalía in the 17th century coincides, not so incidentally, with the native mystical movement in the same region.) One of the most staggering moments in Philippine history is that day in 1662, when, after a Chinese uprising, the Spanish government, in a symbolic act, turned over the walls of Manila to the Pampango armies, under the leadership of Don Francisco Laxamana, maestre de campo.
Throughout his sojourn in the land, the Conquistador held the Philippines only at the will of the Tagalog and Pampango barons, who exploited their position. Whenever the country was in peril and the seat of government had to be moved from Tagalog domain, the alternative capital was, significantly, always on Pampango soil: Bacolor, as during the British invasion, or Arayat, as Governor-General Basco proposed 30 years later. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Philippines was actually controlled by a triumvirate: the native-born Spaniard, the Tagalog and the Pampango. As long as the first had the other two with him, all the rest of the country could rise in revolt: the government stood firm. But when the Tagalog and the Pampango abandoned the Spaniard, as in 1896, the Spaniard could have all the rest of the country behind him to no avail.
When the Revolution broke out, it was precisely in that region —the Tagalog and Pampango provinces— that had, through three centuries, formed the elite of the land, that had acted as coruler, and that had developed a sense of destiny. (Old folks in Bulacán refer to the revolutionary days as "ang panahóng Tagalog.") And the reason for the Revolution was the breakdown of the old triumvirate and the reversion of the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango "republic" into a colony in the modern sense, the mishap that marked the final phase of Spain in the Philippines. For the almost 400 years that we lump into one era, the "Spanish era," were actually three distinct eras.
The first one, roughly the last 35 years of the 16th century, was the era of conquest and conversion.
The second, from the 17th century to around the beginning of the 19th century, was the era of a commonwealth quite independent of its alleged European metropolis, being ruled vicariously, at one remove, by the government in Mexico, which was also too far away to exert pressure.
The third, through the 19th century, was the era of a colony in the classic pejorative sense, controlled directly and oppressively by the mother country; and therefore also the era of the revolt against that status as colony.
A study of the second era, which forms the bulk or our history, clears up a lot of mysteries. Why, after almost four centuries of Spain, is the Philippines so little Spanish? And how could the Spaniards here disregard so flagrantly such royal orders as the teaching of Spanish to the natives? The great distance from Spain was merely an excuse, not the reason. What one finds is a departure from the Spanish policy in America, where a ruthless Hispanicization was pushed. But in the Philippines both friar and conquistador seemed intent on creating, not a New Spain, but an independent Indian Christian culture. In this, they were influenced, in one way or another, by the Laws of the Indies, a product of the American experience. Philip II would not even allow the term conquista to be used here, lest the word justify the use of force against the native or be an insult to his feelings. Certainly, the Spaniard in the Philippines showed more respect for the native cultures than he did in, say, the Caribees — a respect that explains the survival of our old cults, dialects, place-names, and barangays.
In the second place, the Spaniards who came here, came here to stay; and their sons, already born here, knew of no other mother country, could only pay lip homage to Spain, and would, in fact, later show as vehement a hatred of the Peninsular as any Propagandist. This attitude was displayed even by the friars of this epoch, who, though not native-born, had also come to stay, and therefore shared the Creole's antagonism to the governors-general, as transients and reminders of outside authority. So, there was a stressing of "this court" and "this republic"; a declaration of independence from the old friar provinces in Spain; cruel inquisitions of the governors at the end of their terms; and, among the Creoles, the establishment of the alliance with the Tagalog and Pampango leaders. Though still subsidized by the silver of the Americas, the Philippines was developing economic and political independence; and might have become, if this state of affairs had continued, a more or less sovereign commonwealth with a viceroy of its own, appointed directly from Madrid, but merely a figurehead in a government controlled by Creole, Tagalog and Pampango.
That this was in the offing is indicated by the increasing use of the term Filipino. We hear of an archbishop called a Filipino, of delegates to the Cortes styling themselves Filipinos, of a Manila Cathedral priest fighting for the Filipinization of the clergy — which was what secularization really meant. We reject the claim to being Filipinos of the archbishop and the delegates, but dare not reject the martyred priest, though Burgos was a Creole like them. But if Burgos was a Filipino, then the Creoles who regarded themselves, not as Spaniards, but as Filipinos, had a right to the name. The delegates to the Cortes were indeed proclaiming a new idea to the world: the existence of something called a Filipino. And once the idea had been proclaimed, the Creoles could no longer keep it to themselves. Within a generation, their age-old allies, the Tagalog and the Pampango, were appropriating it for themselves.
The vexed debate over what is a Filipino crashes against two extremes: one, that the idea has existed from time immemorial (as the Cebuanos came to believe they had had the Santo Niño from time immemorial), and two, that the idea sprang full-grown with Rizal, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. But no idea, alas, ever springs full-grown in this world of process. Every idea is like man himself, whose origin we trace through near-man, protoman, ape-man, and missing link. Similarly, the Creole archbishop, the Creole delegates, Burgos and Rizal, the Propagandistas and the Revolucionarios, were all equally stages in the evolution of the Filipino.
During the first half of the 19th century, Mexico and the rest of Spanish America broke away from Spain; this, plus the opening of the Suez Canal, doomed the comparative independence of the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango "republic" in the Philippines. Madrid took over direct control of the islands, and to them were diverted the bureaucrats, officers, friars and other parasites that had hitherto been dumped on America. The Creole in the Philippines found himself being elbowed aside by the Peninsular. For the first time, the Philippine colony found itself being actually used as a colony. The reaction was instantaneous: the revolt of Fathers Peláez and Burgos in the Church, the revolt of Novales in the army. The first would set up a "Filipino" clergy, to oust the Peninsular friars; the second would set up a "Filipino" empire, to oust the Peninsular officers who were taking over the posts held for centuries by Creole, Tagalog and Pampango. These latter two, on the other hand, also elbowed aside by the Peninsular, now found the Creole of no more use and abandoned him. The Tagalog and Pampango principalía was now ready for its own revolt, and the Conquistador lay on his deathbed.
While possessed by a sense of destiny, the Tagalog and Pampango rose to greatness and captained a nation — but they have been rather confused of late.
It's not yet, however, time for the oration by the graveside. Ikon, Friar and Conquistador were but the Sacrament of Baptism. The Filipino has yet to advance to the next stage, the Sacrament of Confirmation, when, having come of age, one makes a conscious act of faith and receives the Holy Ghost. Is that what we are doing on this fourth centenary of our converstion?
Whatever our qualms, may the cry today be: Plus Ultra!
The Filipino is still in progress; the dynamo still throbs.


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