Farmers Markets Online: http://www.farmersmarketonline.com/fm/Illinois.htm

Wikipedia’s entry on the Mennonite church / movement notes:

Persecution and the search for employment forced Mennonites out of the Netherlands eastward to Germany in the 17th century. As Quaker evangelists moved into Germany they received a sympathetic audience among the larger of these Dutch-Mennonite congregations around Krefeld, Altona-Hamburg, Gronau and Emden. It was among this group of Quakers and Mennonites, living under ongoing discrimination, that William Penn solicited settlers for his new colony. The first permanent settlement of Mennonites in the American Colonies consisted of one Mennonite family and twelve Mennonite-Quaker families of Dutch extraction who arrived from Krefeld, Germany, in 1683 and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Among these early settlers was William Rittenhouse, a lay minister and owner of the first American paper mill. Jacob Gottschalk was the first bishop of this Germantown congregation. This early group of Mennonites and Mennonite-Quakers wrote the first formal protest against slavery in the United States. The treatise was addressed to slave-holding Quakers in an effort to persuade them to change their ways.

Yep – we Rittenhouses came here because we were a religious minority that the locals in Europe were working over.   We were invited  by William Penn to come here and enjoy religious freedom and get out from under the thumb of  governments that liked to determine what was and wasn’t the ‘right’ way to worship their God.

In my own more immediate family history, there’s lots of religious dissenters and minorities that got a rough number here and abroad – Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, Unity, Theosophists, and several more.   My Chinese daughter would have been barred from immigrating to the USA – first by laws that forbade Chinese women as the forerunners of the Yellow Peril that would destroy America.   It wasn’t until very modern times that Chinese were seen as something un-threatening…

…and that could change if we ever got into a fight with them, and they could become uncitizens, as the Japanese and some Italians did during World War 2 – and Germans during both World Wars.  H’m – German-Americans means me again…even if all of them came to America before the Revolution.

One of my buddies here in Chicago had a dad who was wounded as a US solider in the war – while the rest of his family sat in an internment camp.  But the problem is that it’s just so easy to stop thinking things through and start hating and fearing.

Ask any Jew you know who had family gassed and incinerated in Europe to solve the ‘Jewish problem’, because it was easy and convenient to hate them and blame your problems on a whole race of people.

Ask the Irish about their families in Ireland who were treated like crap in Ireland and then came over here and were treated as a Catholic plot to take over the country.

Ask the Mormons about their faith’s treatment by the locals in the midwest, where they were killed and burned out until they had to escape to Utah – and then were attacked by the US Government.

I could go on and on with examples.  But I have some different things to say…

Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers from in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we’re supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems…

Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable.

The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer….

Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam–the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

The outcry over the building of the mosque, near ground zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. This is like blaming all Christians for the wars of aggression and occupation because some Christians supported the neo-conservatives’ aggressive wars.

The House Speaker is now treading on a slippery slope by demanding a Congressional investigation to find out just who is funding the mosque—a bold rejection of property rights, 1st Amendment rights, and the Rule of Law—in order to look tough against Islam.

This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

We now have an epidemic of “sunshine patriots” on both the right and the left who are all for freedom, as long as there’s no controversy and nobody is offended.

Political demagoguery rules when truth and liberty are ignored.

Blog entry on August 20, 2010

America is not a “Christian” nation in the way we think of “Muslim” nations. If it were, birth certificates would automatically indicate “Christian” as the “faith of birth.” It would be illegal to convert to another faith. Jews, Native American religions, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons and atheists would be unwelcome. They would need to practice their faith covertly, at great risk of discovery and penalties unto death.

That’s the way it is when a nation defines itself by the predominant faith of its people.

That’s the way it was for Baptists 400 years ago in Europe when they stood for freedom of conscience against state churches and in some cases were chained together and thrown into the river to be “baptized” by immersion. That’s why our ancestors fled Europe. That’s why Roger Williams eventually had to flee Massachusetts Bay Colony and establish Rhode Island.

Baptists must stand for the freedom of conscience for all, for which our ancestors died.

Any question of this mosque in New York City is not about the First Amendment’s precious words that the “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  The question of this mosque in New York City has everything to do with self-absorbed Americans nourishing our pain from 9/11 and continuing to look for someone to blame, for someone to pay, for something to make us feel alright again.

Because the radicalized terrorists who struck at our heart were Muslims, we somehow think that to deny unrelated American Muslims the opportunity to build a worship center close to where the World Trade Center towers once stood is to strike some kind of defiant blow against terrorism. We think it will raise freedom’s torch higher because we’ve defended the memories of those who died by denying a place to read, swim, meet and worship to people who claim the same faith as the terrorists.

I’m glad that standard doesn’t hold in North Carolina, where more prisoners indicate their faith of choice is “Baptist” than any other faith. As a Baptist, I would be held accountable for their crimes.

Norman Jameson is editor of the North Carolina Baptist Biblical Recorder.

See also: http://muslimrepublicans.net/Article.asp?ID=164

We had a slight delay (the surgeon, who was my podiatrist as well, was off to Portugal as a doc for the US Soccer Federation for a week) and Mere’s surgery happened on August 11th,  early in the morning.  She was very very brave going into the surgery, and we were told that she’d done well and the surgery had went just fine.

If you look at this picture, you’ll see a slight darkening on her right ankle – sort of a round spot – that’s where the surgery was.  (Mere hates the bandages and finds them horribly itchy and rough.)  The surgeon placed a cylindrical thing in her ankle area to act as a lever to cause the structure of her feet to change (one on each foot) and create a solid, lasting arch. See:

It was tough and unwilling to go; crashed the PC after an hour or two (it usually takes over 3 hours to scan my system on good days) of a run rather than let me run Trend Micro or another virus control program. Finally had to go for the portable version of SuperAntiSpyware; it didn’t crash, and removed the bulk of the virus files over a series of about 4 runs yesterday and last night.

This ate up a lot of time since Sunday at all sorts of hours; I’d have some sort of scan running all the time I could. As in waking up in the middle of the night to answer both nature’s call AND checking the last run and setting it up again.

Then I found out that the virus had blown the use of .exe files throughout the PC, and I had to muck with the Windows Registry to re-attach that connection, and that was just a whole lot of fun.

Now, as per suggestion, I’m doing a run with Malwarebytes, and it’s probably got another 30-45 minutes, and it’s turning up two files it says are bad news – don’t know where or what until it’s done. Once it’s done, and the offending files minced, I run it again…and there’s about seven other programs to go to use to restore things. I don’t imagine that I’ll actually lose anything of data in the process, but it’s just a whopping big pain and screws up me doing much else for work in the meantime while I clean things out and quintuple-check the results.

And no, I have no idea where this came from for sure. I’m usually very careful about such things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A

http://usarollersports.org/about-usa-roller-sports

For all the folks anywhere who invite me to events out of town (Chicago): Sorry, too laid up after the operation, and we need some time to recover from the summer, cash-wise.  Especially the many invites I’ve had to the big reunion of Wilbur Wright people this month…I appreciate the interest, really, but I’ll not be able to make it.

For all the folks asking about video or photos of the National Championship event that Mere took a gold in last week: We don’t have them yet, and we didn’t take video or photos there – Susan was too busy watching, and you had to pay the event organizers to get a license to video the thing.  I have ordered a DVD of the proceedings, and will be able to rip that WHEN it shows up.  Susan has (I think) ordered pictures from the pro photographer there at the rink, but we don’t know when they will show up.  One of the folks on our local rink’s team – her mom videoed the action on the rink, and we will be getting a copy of that that I can rip, but I just have no idea when that will be.   Sorry.