This is Bella, my friend's cat.
Either
a) she sees herself as the cat world's answer to Darth Vader
or
b) she has come to the conclusion she needs to swathe herself in the equivalent of a burka to protect the neighbourhood toms from the mesmerising effects of her loveliness
or
c) she is just horsing about with the rubbish bin lid.
You decide.
Showing just how unpredictable and all-consuming the massive Gulf oil spill can be, tar balls and small sheens of oil have entered Lake Pontchartrain and are hitting Texas shores for the first time.
John Lopez, director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation's coastal stainability program, spotted the first tar balls in the Rigolets Pass on Sunday. By Monday, the blobs of oil had washed ashore as far west as Treasure Isle in Slidell.
Cleanup crews used nets to scoop up the tar balls throughout the day, collecting more than 1,000 pounds of oil and waste. BP also deployed 19 manual skimming vessels and four decontamination vessels to the area, and placed 600-feet of hard and soft boom at a choke point in the Rigolets to prevent more oil from entering the lake. Cleanup efforts are expected to resume today.
Lopez said oil made its way into the lake because of winds from the far edges of Hurricane Alex last week as well as sustained east and southeast winds during the weekend. The winds from Alex pushed a large amount of oil into the Mississippi Sound for the first time, and the east winds during the past few days pushed oil into Lake Borgne, the Rigolets and eventually the eastern stretches of Lake Pontchartrain.
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"It has a fairly tortuous route to get to the lake, and that's why we're at day 70-something of the spill, and we're just seeing the oil reach Lake Pontchartrain," Lopez said. "This oil we're seeing probably headed east toward Alabama and Florida before it came this way. It's traveled probably at least 100-200 miles, depending on how far east it went."
Also on Monday, The Associated Press reported that Texas crews were removing tar balls from the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island.
The Texas landfall and the encroachment into Lake Pontchartrain weren't unexpected, but they were staggering nonetheless, as the previously spared gateways to the highly populated areas saw the first physical evidence that they would not be immune.
The fact that Jeffrey John has been nominated as Bishop of Southwark is intriguing. That it has been leaked reveals a great deal about the civil war within the church of England. Seven years ago Rowan Williams' attempt to get his old friend into the much less important job of Bishop of Reading led to his first – and, it seemed, decisive – defeat at the hands of hardline evangelicals. He cracked after two months of pressure and asked John to withdraw his name, establishing his reputation as a man who could be bullied. If he is beaten again, he is finished. If he wins, he will have shot the rapids and the Church of England will finally emerge from the turbulence of the last 30 years with a fairly clear and fairly coherent doctrine about sex.
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So: a church in which gays are all right if they are celibate, and women are accepted if they tolerate the people who can't stand them. Will that be the settlement of the fuss of the last 20 years? Perhaps not. Whoever leaked John's name made his appointment almost inevitable. But my sources suggest that the leak came from Evangelicals, not from the liberals. Someone is spoiling for a fight.
Conservative parishes in the Church of England could seek alternative leadership from abroad if a gay man is appointed as bishop of Southwark, clerics warned today.
The argument over homosexual clergy in the Anglican communion was reignited at the weekend when it was disclosed that Dr Jeffrey John, the dean of St Albans, is among nominations for the post vacated earlier this year by the Right Rev Tom Butler. In 2003, John was forced to stand down from his appointment as suffragan bishop of Reading because of his sexuality after protests from traditionalists.
Reform, a conservative evangelical group, has warned the church could split if John, who is in a civil partnership but celibate, is made bishop for the south London diocese.
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Writing in the Church of England newspaper last week, the Rev Ray Skinner, a rector in Morden, south London, said it did not take "a huge leap of imagination" to predict what would happen should John get the job. "As in North America, with its shrinking liberal Episcopal Church, and growing orthodox Anglican Church, there will be a formal divide. Maybe not immediately, we tend not to rush things. There are two new groups already within the Church of England, one called Inclusive Church, the other the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans linking with other Anglican provinces."
"As in North America, with its shrinking liberal Episcopal Church, and growing orthodox Anglican Church, there will be a formal divide."
There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.
But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?
The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused.
But there are also centrist Democrats who have bought into the arguments against helping the unemployed. It’s up to them to step back, realize that they have been misled — and do the right thing by passing extended benefits.
"I believe the blogosphere first truly gained traction in America for a good reason. There is something about blogging's freedom from the constraints of conventional journalism that captures an American ideal: civic engagement totally free of anyone else's influence. It is an ideal of a fourth estate hostile to authorities public and private, suspicious of conventional wisdom, and, above all, confident, even when confidence seems absurd, in the power of the word and the argument to make a difference ... in the end. The rise of this type of citizen journalism has, in my view, increasingly exposed some of the laziness and corruption in the professional version - even as there is still a huge amount to treasure and value in the legacy media, and a huge amount of partisan, mendacious claptrap on the blogs.
But what distinguishes the best of the new media is what could still be recaptured by the old: the mischievous spirit of journalism and free, unfettered inquiry. Journalism has gotten too pompous, too affluent, too self-loving, and too entwined with the establishment of both wings of American politics to be what we need it to be.
We need it to be fearless and obnoxious, out of a conviction that more speech, however much vulgarity and nonsense it creates, is always better than less speech. In America, this is a liberal spirit in the grandest sense of that word - but also a conservative one, since retaining that rebelliousness is tending to an ancient American tradition, from the Founders onward. (My emphasis)
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Here at the Dish, we try and we fail at this every day. But we have never for a second doubted the imperative of this complicated, difficult and exhilarating task."
All the hoopla around the World Cup brings to mind another athletic celebration. In 1968 two American athletes stood on the podium in Mexico City and raised their fists. They wanted to make a statement about freedom and their lack of it, for they were black.
Even though the law insists that all people are equal, people of color continue to suffer injustice, in my homeland and, I think, in yours. Their salute got them thrown out of the summer Olympic Games, but it raised the consciousness of a lot of people, and helped the cause of freedom for many, many others.
In one of the biblical languages, the word for prayer means opening a clenched fist. That black power salute began another petition in a continuing prayer across the world, that all people might be free. The crucifixion is a cosmic version of that same prayer – Jesus’ arms and hands open so wide they take in the whole world, indeed, the whole creation.
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‘For freedom Christ has set us free. So stand up and stop being a slave,’ Paul says (Gal 5:1). But freedom isn’t only freedom from ; it’s freedom for – for loving self and others. We have been set free in order that we might become that same sort of liberating love in the world, setting others free.
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The freedom we have received in Christ is meant to give us larger hearts and wider-seeing eyes that don’t focus so much on our own fears. That sort of freedom gives us the ability to look for the larger good, rather than only our own.
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Will we see those self-centered responses that Paul calls works of the flesh: “strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy” – or together can we encourage works of the spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”? Even the simple act of attending, paying attention to the suffering of others, begins to unclench the fist.
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There’s something about the freedom we know in Jesus that cures our paralyzing fear of those on the margins. You know how that sort of clenching goes: “there but for the grace of God go I. Don’t let that happen to me – keep me far away from any hint of the possibility of homelessness or disability or disaster. Thank God I wasn’t born to that culture.” May the unclenching prayer in us be more like, “dear God, I see this suffering. Help me see you in my neighbor.”
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The freedom we have is to choose for those on the margins, to be in solidarity with the friendless and forgotten, the despised and the demonized. Exercising that freedom is almost always challenging – it annoys people who don’t see any need to change the status quo, it offends those in power, it challenges the ways of the world that say, “me first.”
Crossing those boundaries sent God into human flesh. Crossing those boundaries is the heart of God’s mission. It’s not for the faint of heart, but we find courage from our elder brother who has already opened his hands and arms wide enough for the whole world. We find strength in his body gathered here, and through all time and space. May we claim the freedom that is ours. May our fists open for all!
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
