Monthly Archives: May 2022

One of the fallacies, I believe, of modern thinking is that if one does everything they are supposed to do, then everything will turn out fine and life will be and become a journey of smooth sailing.

It is almost an assumption, a foregone conclusion: If I live a good moral life, keeping my nose clean, my checkbook in order, and work hard at the details, then things will turn out right, my kids will grow up to be fine adults, and all will be wonderful.

There almost seems to be an idealism that says if we live right and do good for our fellow man, then we should be exempt from the difficulties that seem to plague everyone else. We live our lives comparing ourselves to others, and often we come away saying, Well, I did pretty well this time around.

Difficulties come to somebody else. Someone else gets sick with COVID-19 or cancer. Someone else has the rebellious children. Someone else has the financial dilemmas. The bad things always happen to someone else.

Whats more? They probably deserved it. They did not live their life as God-honoring and faithful as you did, and therefore God is just getting even with them.

No matter what our situation in life may be, whenever we go through trials or difficult circumstances, our tendency is to dwell on the circumstances so much that we lose sight of the eternal.

How many times have you struggled with the thoughts that life should be smooth sailing, that life is a bowl of cherries, and that life should be a sweet-smelling aroma as in a garden of roses?

Reading Erma Bombecks famous book, If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? or listening to that once-popular old song, I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden (Or almost any other country-western song, for that matter!) should cause each of us to wonder if our view of life as a rose garden or a bowl of cherries is somewhat erroneous.

As I read the Scriptures, I am impressed that such pictures (as a rose garden, or a bowl of cherries), pleasant though they may be, are not the artwork of the Bible. In fact, the Bible throughout pictures the journey of life as a rough, pot-hole-filled road with difficulties, trials, and hardships throughout.

Peter in his first letter writes: Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you (1 Peter 4:11). He is saying to us that we should not look at difficulties as unusual, but as the norm for life.

If you think about the Bible stories you know, isnt that the case. There was always something that was going wrong, whether it be eating fruit from the wrong tree (Adam & Eve) or getting mad and killing someone you should not have (Cain & Abel) or dealing with a worldwide natural disaster (Noah), or being confronted with a personal moral dilemma (Abraham, in sacrificing Isaac). On and on we could travel through the pages of the Old Testament and everywhere we turn we find hardship and difficulty such as these.

But even in the New Testament, we see the same sorts of things. The disciples were getting into jams continually it seems, and they could not find their own way out of the dilemmas in which they found themselves.

One of my favorites of the Gospel stories is the account of Jesus leaving the disciples and going up to the mountain to pray. He sent them in a fishing boat to go over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.

While He was praying a storm came up on the lake, and the disciples were again confounded, because they could not control the boat, and they could not keep the water out. They look up and see Jesus walking on the water towards them, and they get afraid. They think it is a ghost. He is appearing to them outside of their known sphere of reference for Him.

So they simply mock Him as a ghost. Peter even suggests that this ghost if He is really Jesus as he claims He is, will invite him (Peter) to walk towards Him on the water.

No one was more surprised than Peter to hear Jesus reply: Come! And no one was more intimidated into trying this than Peter. I mean, after all, he had to save face before these other guys who didnt make such a bold request of the ghost!

When he stepped out onto the water, I believe there was no one more afraid to let go of the boat than Peter, but when he realized he was walking, now that was exciting for all! But then he sank, and it was Jesus who had to come get him. (Check out Matthew 14:22-33).

This passage has reshaped my whole view of suffering.

First, Life is a journey of storms, moving from one storm to another. There might be respite from time to time, but storms are the norm of life not the exception. If you think about it, every mountain peak is surrounded by valleys.

Second, Jesus will come to us during the storms if we will look for Him. He does not want us to drown in the high seas of life.

Third, if we keep our eyes on Jesus we will not sink. Peter only began to sink when he started looking at the stormy sea instead of the steady Savior.

Our task then is to keep our eyes fixed upon Jesus, and He will see us through whatever storms we face, no matter how intense they get, no matter how afraid we may be.

If we keep our eyes on Him, He will see us through every storm we face.

God bless

Chuck Tabor is a regular columnist for the News Journal and a former pastor in the area. He may be reached at [emailprotected] .

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Eyes on the savior, not the storm - Wilmington News Journal, OH

Love, Death & Robots is, as always, tremendous. Season three is a series of dreams that unfolds with a kind of absolute possibility. Im never tired of the soft interlude between one episode and the next, when the potential for the following imaginative leap is gently waiting behind the credits.

For those just discovering this dreamscape of a series: its frankly some of the best of what sci-fi can be. That is, it gives us an elsewhere in which to imagine our own mode of beinga radically different set of rules that can include anything from sentient planets to robot anthropologists to murderous sirens. Each episode is an animated short, each roughly ten to twenty minutes long, that plunges the viewer into a fresh reality, with all the concise elegance of a masterfully told short story. If my admiration is shining through, its because its hard to contain. What else has this kind of imaginative scopethis let-it-loose creative freedom meets time and resourcesof Love, Death & Robots?

Patrick Osborne, of 2014s adorable Feast fame, opens this season with a vision of post-calamity Earth, via a lark of a scientific expedition across Earth, through the ruins and scattered bones of humanitys various modes of apocalypse, from survivalist camps to libertarian sea-nations to cannibalistic nuclear bunkers. This exploration is all conducted by a trio of lovable and macabre robots, reveling over the destruction of the species that in turn allowed their own mechanized civilization to rise. Human skeletons lie in telltale tableaux, explicating the various frantic, horrific, and inhumane ways humanity tried to cling to life. The robots laugh. They were mean to robots and then robots killed them! Humans are the actual worst!And it goes from there.

Some gems of the season include Emily Deans The Very Pulse of the Machine and series producer David Finchers Bad Travelingtwo vastly different stories of space exploration, both powered by brutally beautiful tension.

Finchers much-anticipated episode, only the second in the new season, shifts tone rapidly to a grotesque and nightmarish horror story of the high seas on a distant planet. Bad Traveling is a psychological standoff between a monster of the sea and monstrousness within the human crew. Cue the Independence Day-style alien puppeteering of corpses. Its more classic psychological thriller than anything else, and I loved it.

Deans The Very Pulse of the Machine is tailor-made to my nerdy English major heart. An astronaut is trapped in a grueling odyssey for survival on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. But a simple quest for survival becomes a hallucinatory venture of wondrous possibility, swirling with Romantic poetry and unforeseeable horizons, voyaging through strange eons of thought, alone. Its gorgeously dreamlike, with the strange, instinctive dream-logic carried delicately into a roughly fifteen-minute run.

Throughout, the season rests on a preoccupation with powerspecifically masculine, militarized powerand its abuses for the sake of convenience, or simply of business as usual. In Jennifer Yuh Nelsons (of Kung Fu Panda!) brutal Kill Team Kill episode, a brass-tacks American military team embarks on a brutal warzone journey via simplistic animation that brings to mind comic book pages and GI Joe cartoons. The sci-fi emerges in the sudden appearance of a mechanical CIA-engineered bear-monster. War-machine-massacre horror unfolds, following the Whedonesquely funny crew of white men that seems to run on inexorable humor, including some pointedly distasteful Jihad-Joe Killing machine jokes. The vignette is a display of pointless slaughter in the name of more and more advanced technological weaponry.

Masons Rats, one of my favorite of the season, follows a similar tack, tracing the shifting sympathies of a futuristic Scottish farmer whose rat infestation has begun to exhibit an acceptable level of tool usee.g., has evolved into a small ramshackle civilization in his barn. Mason meets the rats with an increasing scale of violent extermination machines as the rats wage a hopeless war for survival. The Swarm tells another story of human hubris in the face of a foe they do not understand, while the season finale, Jibaro, depicts strange dynamics of sexual violence and military might, tumbled on their cliched heads. Night of the Mini Dead features a helpless U.S. military and a global wave of nukes. In Vaulted Halls Entombed introduces a maddening cosmic horror that shatters any perceived might the highly trained soldiers facing it might have foolishly assumed.

All over this season are stories of militarized failures, familiar structures of power confidently deployed and then destroyed. Besides simply being damn good storytelling, this new season speaks to a sense of helplessness in the face of intelligence too strange or new to be readily understood. Fear breeds a response of force over and over again. Humanity tries to reassert its power, its reason, its dominance.

This is undoubtedly a reductive response to a dynamic, genre-breaching, boundary-pushing series. Its almost as if its a deeply nuanced series that should be watched and appreciated on its own terms. But I cant help thinking of the insanity of bullets, bombs, and military preening in the face of an enemy that couldnt care lesssay, a virus spurring a global pandemic.

And as always: The series relies on gore to an extent that can be stomached largely because of the animated nature of the visuals. Dismemberment, bodies shredded by bullets, grotesquely distorted corpsesyou get one or more in just about every episode. While the level of gore can sometimes read as flippant, its deployed to great impact and is certainly effective in distinguishing Love, Death & Robots from a jaunty action-movie spectacle.

All-in-all: another triumphant season of a treasure-trove anthology.

But boy, it sure is something to have this fantastic sci-fi anthology generating income for the same streaming platform that repeatedly promotes stale, whiny comedians trying to proffer transphobia as edgy humor year after year. So yeah, humans are the absolute worst.

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Header Image Source: Netflix

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'Humans Are the Actual Worst!': 'Love, Death, and Robots' Season 3 - Pajiba Entertainment News

Readers are invited to dive into the depths of the ocean this summer with the Jefferson public library free summer reading programs. With a theme of an Ocean of Possibilities, there will be five summer reading programs for youth of all ages to explore.

The summer reading program will include an infant-preschool program, a school age (K-4th grade) program and a teen (5th-8th grade) program, along with a new high school summer reading program. Because families are one of the most important parts in raising readers, Friday Family Days will start June 17.

Readers in the school age program will collect 52 sea creatures throughout the summer. These sea creatures will then be placed on the wall aquarium in the library. Activities will be held Monday afternoons from 1 to 3 for the school age program. There will also be activities available for children throughout the week if they arent able to attend Monday afternoons. All children will receive a bag, book, and a chance to win prizes for completing the summer reading program, including a new bicycle sponsored by Home State Bank. The winner will be announced at our end of the summer party on July 28 with Happy Faces Entertainment High Seas Adventures.

The infant-preschool program is for families with children birth to preschool. Summer story time will be Wednesdays at 10 am. Children who are registered and complete this program will receive a bag, a book and a prize.

Teens may chart their own course on how many books they will read. Teen activities will be held Thursday afternoons at the library.The program will end with the Waves of Danger murder mystery at Spring Lake on July 28. Registered teens in this program will also receive a bag and a chance to win some prizes.

New this year is the high school challenge summer reading program. Participants will receive a list of suggested books to read. They will receive a prize for completing each book challenge. We know that high schoolers are busy with jobs and sports, but hopefully they will find time to read this summer, even if its just 20 minutes a day, said youth services librarian Stephanie Hall.

Fridays will be Fin-tastic Family Friday. Every Friday at 10 am, starting June 17, families are invited to the library for socializing, activities and stories.

Registration for each of these freeprograms is open now until June 6. Registration can be done on the Jefferson public library website or in person at the library. Summer reading program sessions will start June 1.

These Oceans of Possibilities programs are made possible by sponsors Greene County board of supervisors, Friends of the Library, Home State Bank, Breadeaux Pizza, Peoples Bank and Heartland Bank. We thank them for their support, Hall said.

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An 'Ocean of Possibilities' at the Jefferson public library this summer - Greene County News Online

A Russian TU-95 bomber flies with Chinese H-6 bombers over the East China Sea, Tuesday, May 24, 2022. (Japan Ministry of Defense)

Japan scrambled fighter jets Tuesday in response to Chinese and Russian bombers flying near its airspace just as President Joe Biden met with leaders of the Quad grouping in Tokyo, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters Tuesday.

On the same day, South Korea scrambled fighter jets as Chinese and Russian warplanes passed through its air defense identification zone several times, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Near Japan, two Chinese H-6 bombers flew from the East China Sea to the Sea of Japan, where they joined a pair of Russian TU-95 bombers, Kishi said in a statement posted on the Ministry of Defenses website. The Sea of Japan is also known as the East Sea.

The two Chinese bombers were later replaced by a second pair of warplanes believed to be Chinese, and the four aircraft then flew out toward the Pacific Ocean, Kishi said.

None of the aircraft entered Japans national airspace, he said.

A nations air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, is a broad territorial boundary over which it maintains air traffic control for the sake of national security. It is much more expansive than national airspace, an area over which a state exercises full sovereignty and into which foreign military aircraft cannot enter without permission.

Kishi characterized the bomber flights as a provocation timed with the meeting of the Quad nations leaders.

Biden met with Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese, Australia's newly elected prime minister.

The four nations make up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a loosely formed security pact with a stated purpose of promoting a free-and-open Indo-Pacific.

The cooperative is essentially a means of countering Chinas growing economic, political and military influence in the region, and the collaboration has not been welcomed by Beijing.

The China Ministry of Defense described Tuesdays sorties as a joint aerial strategic patrol, in a statement posted online Tuesday.

The militaries of China and Russia staged the joint aerial strategic patrol in accordance with their annual military cooperation plan, the statement said.

Kishi said this was the fourth long-distance joint flight between China and Russia around Japan since November.

A Russian IL-20 reconnaissance plane also flew over the high seas from the northern island of Hokkaido to the Noto peninsula on Japan's main island, Kishi said.

Meanwhile, four Russian and four Chinese warplanes entered South Koreas ADIZ on Tuesday, according to Reuters. The aircraft passed through the defense zone several times throughout the day, entering and leaving via the Sea of Japan, Reuters said in a report attributed to South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The aircraft included fighter jets and bombers from both China and Russia, the report said.

This was the first reported excursion of Russian or Chinese warplanes into South Koreas ADIZ since South Koreas newly elected president, Yoon Suk Yeol, took office on May 10, Reuters said.

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China and Russia sent bombers near Japan as Quad leaders discussed security in Tokyo - Stars and Stripes

The new Maserati MC20 Cielo has been revealed, ots the spyder version of the MC20 coupe. The model is shaped in a tunnel with clean lines that open up and become one with the clouds and stars.

The MC20 and MC20 Cielo are two distinct models yet united by the racing spirit and performance of genuine sports cars. Cielo offers a new driving experience courtesy of its electrochromic (smart glass) roof which at the touch of a button opens the top up to the sky and can be changed from opaque to clear.

Additionally, the state-of-the-art Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystal (PDLC) technology allows you to look up at the stars even when the roof is closed. The Cielo will also be available in the exclusive Aquamarina colour; a three-layer paint is based on a racing-inspired grey with an iridescent mica in aquamarine.

The PrimaSerie Launch Edition is a limited series which makes the connection between the spyders elegance and sporty features even more exclusive. The limited series has exclusive features including Aquamarina bodywork, ice-colored interior and golden details.

The MC20 Cielo is powered by a petrol twin-turbo V6 Nettuno engine with technology derived from Formula 1. The engine generates a maximum output power of 630 hp in 3000 cc of displacement.

Additionally, the North Sails Capsule collection has been designed exclusively for the MC20 Cielo, its extraodinary success on the high seas enables every generation of explorers to push the boundaries of challenge. The upshot is a collection of high-performance clothing directly inspired by the PrimaSerie Launch Edition and its exclusivity.

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Maserati MC20 Cielo: The Spyder Version is Finally Here - GTspirit

But then Russia invaded Ukraine. Almost immediately, Polish consumers experienced an unprecedented rise in fuel prices of 40 percent over two weeks as well as increasing food prices while the zloty depreciated rapidly, temporarily hitting an all-time low of 5 zloty against the euro. As a result, inflation rose to 11 percent in March and 12.4 percent in April. It is predicted to peak at around 13 percent in May and to remain in double-digits till the end of the year, driven by price increases in almost all categories as the price-wage spiral is beginning to spin out of control.

Inflation is expected to slow down only slightly to 8.2 per cent in 2023, which would place Poland in the top-three EU countries. It will be fed by the pass-through of energy-price and wage increases into the prices of products and services as well as by the increased demand driven by refugees from Ukraine and the increase in income related to the reduction in personal income tax. Only the increase in fuel prices will slow down, slightly, but they will still be 17.5 per cent higher on average than in 2022.

Inflation is expected to slow down only slightly to 8.2 per cent in 2023, which would place Poland in the top-three EU countries.

This and the fact that 2023 will be an elections year will make it extremely difficult for the government to wind down its anti-inflationary measures. In fact, it is planning to introduce additional policies aimed at soothing the pain of higher prices, such as cutting the rate of personal income tax from 17 percent to 12 percent and a 14th monthly pension payment per year. This loose fiscal policy aims to delay the problems caused by high inflation until after the elections. But higher public spending will eventually strengthen the wage-price spiral and lead to high inflation also in 2024.

In October 2021, the Monetary Policy Council started a tightening. Many economists had called for doing this earlier but the politically minded president of the central bank, Adam Glapinski, had stated that inflation was temporary and no action was needed. As it was late in counteracting the rapid increase in inflation, the Monetary Policy Council had to speed up the pace of interest rates increases until in May the reference rate was at 5.25 percent (up from 0.1 percent in the third quarter of 2021). Further hikes that will bring the rate to 67 percent are expected this year.

The fast monetary tightening has brought demand for credit to a halt, especially in the case of mortgages where the fall in credit affordability was additionally propelled by restricting macroprudential regulations. Together with increasing construction costs, this will translate into falling demand in the housing market after a five-year boom. Many households are currently unable to buy a decent property to live in, whichin addition to the lack of social housing and an unstable, expensive, and fragmented private rental markethas sparked social unrest across the country.

The rise in interest rates has also translated in a rise in mortgage repayments as almost all mortgages in Poland are on a variable interest rate. Many of those who took out loans during the housing boom have experienced an increase of 75 to 100 percent in their monthly repayments. On top of rising utility costs, this has decreased consumer spending, especially for durable goods, as well as threatened a spike in non-performing loans and, eventually, foreclosures. Therefore, the government introduced credit moratoria for the second half of 2022 and for 2023. This will bring some comfort to borrowers, but in the medium term it will result in higher inflation and in the long-term it will not solve the actual problem as interest rates will still be high after 2023 when the credit moratoria end.

The fast tightening of monetary conditions, not only in the country but globally too, poses a threat to the soundness of Polands fiscal situation.

The fast tightening of monetary conditions, not only in the country but globally too, poses a threat to the soundness of Polands fiscal situation. Currently, the government is using the windfall of higher tax revenues caused by higher inflation to finance its anti-inflationary measures and its expansionary fiscal policy. But in the coming years public spending will automatically be driven up by higher prices while debt-servicing costs will rise exponentially due to rising interest rates. The Ministry of Finance is trying to reassure the public that everything is under control but credit default swaps for Polands sovereign bonds have increased to the levels of those of peripheral eurozone countries, indicating that private investors see fiscal troubles ahead.

Summing up, Polands economy is in rough seas with a perfect storm brewing. Most likely the government will try to kick the can down the road until after the 2023 elections, keeping consumers, mortgage borrowers, and fixed-income investors pacified. Its temporary measures will bring some comfort but will eventually result in even bigger problems after 2023.

It will also be very difficult for PiS to roll out a generous political program aimed at boosting its electoral appeal through direct transfers. Its options will be limited and the opposition will exploit this situation during the elections campaign. This does not bode well for PiS. But regardless of the result of the elections, serious economic challenges lay ahead that will have yet to be solve by those at the helm afterward.

Adam Czerniak is chief economist and director for research of Polityka Insight.

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Poland Faces Economic Headwinds before the 2023 Elections | Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation - German Marshall Fund