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Motherly tenderness: Pope says church must embody, mirror God's mercy
POPE-MERCY Aug-2-2013 (950 words) Backgrounder. xxxi
Motherly tenderness: Pope says church must embody, mirror God's mercy
 Pope Francis addresses journalists on his flight from Rio de Janeiro to Rome. (CNS/Paul Haring) |
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Mercy is a word Pope Francis uses often, and an attitude he believes the Catholic Church must embody and all Catholics must mirror.
"This is the time for mercy," Pope Francis told reporters July 28 during his flight back to Rome from Brazil. "The church is mother and must follow the path of mercy, and find mercy for everyone."
"This age is a 'kairos' of mercy," he said, using the Greek word for a special or particularly opportune moment.
The church has a special obligation particularly to the many who are suffering because "of the not-so-beautiful witness of some priests, also the problem of corruption in the church, and the problem of clericalism, for example, which have left so many wounds, so many wounded," he said. "The church, which is mother, must go and heal those wounds."
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told Vatican Radio July 30 that one of the things that strikes people most about Pope Francis is his "great effectiveness in helping people understand the theme of God's love and mercy, which reaches out to soothe and heal the wounds of humanity."
For Pope Francis the best place for an individual Catholic to experience God's mercy is in the sacrament of confession. But he has insisted that human repentance does not trigger God's mercy -- God already is waiting for his children to return.
When speaking about God's mercy, Pope Francis often uses the story of the Prodigal Son from the 15th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, and he used it with the reporters as well.
"When the Prodigal Son returned home, the father didn't say, 'Sit down. Tell me what you did with the money.' No, he threw a party. Maybe later, when the son was ready to talk, he spoke. The church must be like that," the pope said. And like the father in the story, the church must not "just wait, but go out and watch" for those in need of mercy and forgiveness.
In his first Angelus address, just four days after his election March 13, he told a crowd in St. Peter's Square that "God's face is the face of a merciful father who is always patient. Have you thought about God's patience, the patience he has with each one of us? That is his mercy. He always has patience, patience with us, he understands us, he waits for us, he does not tire of forgiving us if we are able to return to him with a contrite heart."
In that same address, he said the book "Mercy" by retired Cardinal Walter Kasper "has done me so much good," particularly its insistence that the church needs to develop a stronger theological reflection on "this mercy of God, this merciful Father who is so patient."
"Let us remember the prophet Isaiah who says that even if our sins were scarlet, God's love would make them white as snow," the pope said. "This mercy is beautiful!"
In one of his daily Mass homilies in late April, Pope Francis told Vatican employees that going to confession is not like going to "the dry cleaners," but is an encounter with "Jesus who waits for us as we are," helps people feel shame for the wrong they have done and embraces them with God's love so that they know they are forgiven and can go out strengthened in the battle to avoid sin in the future.
In his speech to Brazilian bishops July 27, Pope Francis said, "We need a church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of entering the world of 'wounded' persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love."
When he spoke to reporters on the plane, Pope Francis said the need for a new age of mercy was an intuition of Blessed John Paul II, who wrote an encyclical, "Rich in Mercy" in 1980, and instituted the celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday on the Sunday after Easter.
Pope John Paul's encyclical, like Cardinal Kasper's book, recognized that many people assume that God's mercy is limited by God's omnipotence and justice, but -- as the late pope wrote -- even in the Old Testament God's mercy "is shown to be not only more powerful than justice, but also more profound."
Love and mercy, Pope John Paul wrote, condition God's justice and, "in the final analysis, justice serves love."
"No human sin can prevail over this power (of God's mercy) or even limit it," the late pope said. "On the part of man only a lack of good will can limit it, a lack of readiness to be converted and to repent."
Cardinal Kasper wrote that mercy isn't God's response to a person's conversion; rather his mercy is "a grace that aims at conversion."
Although it's not an exchange or barter -- God saying he'll be merciful if one promises to repent -- Cardinal Kasper said God's mercy also isn't the "cheap grace" denounced by the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp.
"Mercy without truth would be a consolation lacking honesty," Cardinal Kasper wrote; it would be "empty chatter."
"On the other hand, however, truth without mercy would be cold, off-putting and ready to wound," he said. "The truth isn't a wet rag that you throw in someone's face, but a warm cape that you help him wrap around him" to protect and give strength.
All of the sacraments are sacraments of God's mercy, the cardinal wrote, but the sacrament of penance is the one where an individual actually hears God's voice say to him or her personally, "I absolve you."
END
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Source: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1303341.htm
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Great getaways: The life aquatic in the Maldives, grape escape in Burguny, a really wild show in Africa, and fly and flop to the Greek islands
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Source: www.independent.co.uk --- Saturday, August 03, 2013
The life aquatic ? ? ? ? ...
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Microsoft boosts Xbox One GPU clock speed
The latest in the series of many changes to the Xbox One since its announcement is an increase in its GPU performance. Although the hardware in the Xbox One is more or less identical to the one in the PS4, due to differences in tuning it is theoretically slower compared to its Japanese rival.
With the update, however, Microsoft has reduced the gap, albeit by a small amount. The GPU in the Xbox One was originally clocked at 800MHz but Microsoft has now confirmed that it has now been increased to 853MHz. This makes it 6.5 percent faster than before in theory but it is still slower than the PS4.
Even though the PS4 is still more powerful than the Xbox One, it is best not to read too much into the numbers. Technically, the PS3 is also more powerful than the Xbox 360 but that difference never actually showed up in the games. The PS3?s convoluted development process coupled with developers choosing to optimize their cross platform games for the lowest common denominator (which was the 360 in that case) meant that the Xbox 360 was not just on par with the PS3 in terms of real world performance but often bit better.
The same could be true for the Xbox One and the PS4. Although the PS4 no longer has the same complex development process thanks to the use of mainstream x86-64 architecture, developers are still likely to optimize for the Xbox One since it is the weaker of the two and few will take the time to tweak their games to take advantage of the PS4?s more powerful hardware.
As such, Microsoft choosing to increase the hardware performance of the Xbox One is not just good news for Xbox One owners but PS4 owners as well.
Source
Source: http://blog.gsmarena.com/microsoft-boosts-xbox-one-gpu-clock-speed/
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Sex, Violence, and Autocomplete Algorithms
There go your plans to have Google help you out with your search for boob-related things.
Fuse
Warning: This article contains explicit language.
Autocomplete is one of those modern marvels of real-time search technology that almost feels like it?s reading your mind. Thanks to analyzing and mining what millions of other users have already searched for and clicked on, Google knows that when you start typing a query with a ?d,? you?re most likely looking for a dictionary. Besides the efficiency gains of not having to type as much, suggestions can be serendipitous and educational, spurring alternative query ideas. In the process our search behavior is subtly influenced by exposure to query possibilities we may not have considered if left to ourselves.
So what happens when unsavory things, perhaps naughty or even illegal, creep into those suggestions? As a society we probably don?t want to make it easier for pedophiles to find pictures of naked children or to goad the violently predisposed with new ideas for abuse. Such suggestions get blocked and filtered?censored?for their potential to influence us.
As Google writes in its autocomplete FAQ, ?we exclude a narrow class of search queries related to pornography, violence, hate speech, and copyright infringement.? Bing, on the other hand, makes sure to ?filter spam? as well as to ?detect adult or offensive content,? according to a recent post on the Bing blog. Such human choices set the stage for broadly specifying what types of things get censored, despite Google?s claims that autocompletions are, for the most part, ?algorithmically determined ? without any human intervention.?
What exactly are the boundaries and editorial criteria of that censorship, and how do they differ among search engines? More importantly, what kinds of mistakes do these algorithms make in applying their editorial criteria? To answer these questions, I automatically gathered autosuggest results from hundreds of queries related to sex and violence in an effort to find those that are surprising or deviant. (See my blog for the methodological detail.) The results aren?t always pretty.
Armed with a list of 110 sex-related words, gathered from the linguistic extremes of both academic linguists and that tome of slang the Urban Dictionary, I first sought to understand which words resulted in zero suggestions (which likely means the word is blocked). In the following diagram, you can see words blocked only by Google or Bing, and by both or neither. For example, both algorithms think ?prostitute? is just dandy, suggesting options for prostitute ?phone numbers? or ?websites.? They?re not about sexual deprivation: Bing is happy to complete searches for ?masturbate? and ?hand job.? Conspicuously, Bing does block query suggestions for ?homosexual,? raising the question: Is there such a thing as a gay-friendly search engine? In response, a Microsoft spokesperson commented that, ?Sometimes seemingly benign queries can lead to adult content,? and consequently are filtered from autosuggest. By that logic, it would seem that ?homosexual? merely leads to ?too much? adult content, causing the algorithm to flag and filter it.
Initially it would appear Google is stricter, blocking more sex-related words than Bing. But really they just have different strategies. Instead of outright blocking all suggestions for ?dick? as Google does, Bing will just scrub the suggestions so you only see the clean ones, like ?dick?s sporting goods.? Sometimes Bing will rewrite the query, pretending a dirty word was a typo instead. For instance, querying for ?fingering? leads to wholesome dinner suggestions for ?fingerling potato recipes,? and searching for ?jizz? offers suggestions on ?jazz,? for the musically minded searcher, of course. Both algorithms are pretty good about letting through more clinical terminology, such as ?vaginas,? ?nipples,? or ?penises.?
For something like child pornography, the legal stakes get much higher. According to Ian Brown and Christopher Marsden in their book Regulating Code, ?Many governments impose some censorship in their jurisdiction according to content that is illegal under national laws.? So it?s not entirely surprising that, in order to head off more direct government intervention, corporations like Google and Microsoft self-regulate by trying to scrub their autocomplete results clean of suggestions that lead to child pornography.
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RadioShack Debt Gets Even Junkier
After markets closed last night, Standard & Poor?s downgraded the already junk-rated debt of RadioShack Corp. (NYSE: RSH) from ?CCC+? to ?CCC?. That?s eight notches below investment grade. S&P?s outlook on the company remains negative.
S&P said that the downgrade reflects the agency?s view that RadioShack could default within 12 months without a major turnaround or increased liquidity. We should probably count out more liquidity because lenders willing to front some cash to RadioShack are likely to be pretty scarce. And those that are willing will want a pretty steep premium, which will not help the company in the short term.
Earlier this year we closed our eyes and held our noses and put RadioShack on our list of the nine most promising turnarounds of the year. But we added as many caveats as we could stack up:
We would simply point out here that this is a situation where investors are betting with enough dollars that whatever turnaround plan that will be formalized actually works, or at least stops the bleeding. With a new solid CEO, our key-man concern is that RadioShack hired a guy with a drugstore background. Maybe it is that no one else was willing to gamble on a career here. We remain doubtful, unless RadioShack will open a prescription drug delivery service as well.
Shares are down about 10.4% in the early afternoon today, at $2.59, in a 52-week range of $1.90 to $4.28. That?s still a gain of about 36% from the low. It?s also about 40% below the high.
Paul Ausick
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/RyNm/~3/hSkw7JVUXSk/
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Astronomers discovery a graveyard for comets
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Astronomers have discovered a graveyard of comets. The researchers describe how some of these objects, inactive for millions of years, have returned to life leading them to name the group the ?Lazarus comets?.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/v-eo6TLocvs/130802080248.htm
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