Tag: English

Linux Mint Mate: Menu Scripting

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags ,

I have been playing around with the Mate menus. Specifically I wanted a convenient way to create desktop files and stick them into the menu, or specifically into a submenu. I know there is webapp, but I wanted something a bit more customizable.

So, I wrote two scripts:

  1. mksubmenu, which takes a name and an icon and creates an xdg *.directory file in $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories. This effectively creates a new submenu under “Applications“.
  2. mkwebapp, which takes a name, url, icon, menu, and Chromium custom parameter and constructs an xdg desktop item in $HOME/.local/share/applications to call the url via the Chromium browser, with an optional Chromium custom parameter, using the specified icon and sticks it into the specified submenu or into “Other” if none is specified. I prefer this to the app shortcuts created from within the browser using the “Create Shortcut” (Chrome/Chromium/Iron/etc) or “Save as an App” (MS Edge) commands because my script creates shortcuts which are easier to edit and which survive browser changes or re-installs.

I have yet to create a script to create and install a desktop item for some random program, and there are some things I have not yet figured out:

  1. How to install a desktop item into one of the system submenus for which no xdg *.directory file exists, such ad Office or Internet;
  2. How to place new menus anywhere other than at the very top of the menu tree, just under Applications.

So I still need to use the “Edit Menus” feature to move things around.

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Thoughts on French Riots and What Caused Them

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , , ,

France has been rocked the past few days by riots and unrest in the wake of the killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merbouz at a traffic stop.

I don’t condone the riots and violence of the protesters (and Nahel’s grandmother agrees), but I cannot deny a certain amount of sympathy for the mostly young Arab and Black people of cities like Paris who have long complained of police discrimination. Since their complaints are basically being ignored by the authorities (a charge confirmed by the UN) the politicians cannot escape responsibility for creating the circumstances which lead to these riots.

Now French politicians, including President Macron, accuse social media of stoking the current riots and unrest.

It seems that what they are referring to is the wide distribution, via TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and other platforms, of videos which document police discrimination and brutality towards non-white citizens, such as the video giving the lie to the claim by police officer Florian M. that he shot Nahel in self defence; it shows Nahel fleeing the scene rather than attacking the officers by driving towards them.

Nahel was not, of course, an innocent; but in our societies driving without a license  and not stopping for a traffic stop are not supposed to be crimes deserving capital punishment.

That Mr. Macron and others apparently perceive the riots and the wide distribution of such videos as more problematic than what these videos show speaks volumes.

Florian M. has been charged with voluntary homicide; look forward to more rioting if he should be acquitted or convicted of a lesser offence.

Undoubtedly France has a massive problem with “foreigners”, i.e. people from different cultures. as do other European countries including my own, Austria, and I am not letting any of them off the hook when it comes to dealing with them fairly and equitably. But France’s problem, unlike Austria’s, is home-grown; it is the result of France’s colonial past. It is, so to speak, the sins of the fathers being visited on the children. All efforts to deport, incarcerate, or otherwise dispose of all these people from North and Sub-Saharan Africa will fail: the “ethnically pure nation-state” is an unrealistic pipe dream, and if the French, from the top politicians to the ordinary citizens, do not learn to live peacefully with all ethnicities and cultures in their country, I fear that we will see even more of such scenes in the future.

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First Reaction to the Refugee Boat Tragedy off the Greek Coast

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , , ,

Here is my reaction to the recent refugee boat disaster in the Mediterranean, with more than 500 dead:

I believe it is time that all of us here in the affluent West, both our governments and we as individuals, undergo serious soul-searching about how we deal with refugees.

1. We must stop using the lack of agreement within the EU as an excuse for doing nothing ourselves. To make our mercy and helpfulness dependant on that of others is a  declaration of moral bankruptcy.

2. We must abandon the distinction between those fleeing war and persecution (‘genuine refugees’) and those fleeing abject poverty in their countries of origin (‘economic refugees’). It is morally reprehensible to sit here in our still comfortable circumstances, despite inflation and rising prices, and shrug our shoulders at the desperate poverty of others.

3. To refuse assistance to those in need so as not to encourage traffickers is deeply immoral. In our countries we all have the criminal offense of Failure to Render Assistance; we are collectively guilty of this towards the refugees.

4. I disagree with those who want to pit defense spending against adequate aid to those in need: The past year has shown quite clearly that external military defense is necessary, just as  a functioning police force internally. And relying on the increasingly dysfunctional United States for our defense is recklessly dangerous.

5. In all of our countries there is enough savings potential in non-essential projects to be able to help much more effectively. We just have to want it and set the right priorities.

6. There are deeply indecent political parties in our countries that find it acceptable not to help strangers for some perverse ideological reason. If decent parties with a Christian or social-democratic value system pursue a “strict policy on foreigners” in order to steal votes from the indecent parties, then this is not only not very successful (because xenophobic people prefer to vote “the blacksmith than the blacksmith’s apprentice”), but also constitutes an immoral betrayal of one’s own values. Rather, what is needed are broad coalitions of the decent, even across ideological borders, in order to keep the indecent out of power.

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On Stupidity (D. Bonhoeffer)

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , ,

A few days ago I came across this video:[1]

It is based on a text Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943 while sitting in a Nazi prison.[2]

Bonhoeffer says that stupidity is more dangerous than malice because, as the saying goes, there is no cure for stupidity. or this reason stupidity is not an intellectual deficit but a moral one, a character flaw.

I find this explanation of stupidity and the danger it represents to be as relevant and compelling today as it was when he penned it. This is confirmed for me by the pervasive impact of conspiracy theories and the popular acclaim of politicians who promise their voters the moon, usually at the expense of some group of people or another.

A long time ago I came across the tag line, “Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by ignorance,” and it resonated with me so much that I used it in my e-mail signature for many years. And it reminds me, in this context, of a crucial difference between stupidity and ignorance:

Stupidity is willfully unteachable ignorance, denied ignorance, which does not want to be confused by facts which contradict its own, ignorant convictions.

I believe that part of the stupidity that prevails today is the pervasive rejection of faith in God: as the Psalmist says, The fool (the stupid person) says in his heart, “There is no God.”[3]

I am not a historian, but I would not be surprised ad all if the seed of the destruction of all past civilizations and empires was stupidity: the conviction that one knows it all, and knows it better than anyone else, and thus has no need to learn anything new or listen to any advice.

I fear that this could be the end of our civilization as well, if Christ does not return before then and makes an end to all stupidity and all malice.

 

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  1. Video by Sprouts, www.sproutsschools.com[↩]
  2. On Stupidity is an excerpt from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.[↩]
  3. Psalm 14:1[↩]
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A Cancer in the Body of Christt

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , , , , ,

The Roys Report writes about the arrest and charges against several present and former leaders of a Christian fraternity at several universities in Texas, for “continuous sexual abuse of a child.”

Some people call her a muckraker who craps into her own nest, but I believe that the investigative journalism of Julie Roys and her collaborators, as well as of others in the Catholic and Anglican context, is extremely important for the health of the church of Jesus Christ.

Situations like the ones described in this article are not harmful to the victims alone but are like cancerous growths in the Body of Christ: ignored and untreated they damage the health of the whole body.

A few years ago some Evangelicals looked almost gleefully at the Catholic Church when more and more cases of abuse and cover-up by clergy, all the way up to prominent Cardinals, came to light; but there have always been problematic free church groups like the extreme wing of the Exclusive Brethren[1]. A few years ago massive historic abuse situations were revealed in Protestant and Anglican schools in Germany, Canada, and Australia, and a year ago a series of investigative reports by some Texas newspapers uncovered not only a massive clergy abuse problem in churches of the Southern Baptist Convention but also an abject failure on the part of the denominational leadership to deal adequately and appropriately with this problem, all under the cover of “local church autonomy.”[2]

Today we know, not least through the work of Mrs. Roys and the Roys Report, that these cancerous growths flourish in all church traditions, including Pentecostal churches, the predominantly Charismatic independent churches, and even in the most prominent megachurches.[3] For much too long and much too often leaders in all traditions and denominations have looked the other way, have sometimes shown more empathy with the perpetrators than with the victims, and have worried more about the reputation of their respective institutions than about the well-being and safety of the flock entrusted to them.

I cannot tell to what extent this problem also exists in free churches in Germany and Austria; but statistics tell us that churches with a very conservative theology were men rule their families and pastors rule their churches, and dissent and criticism are discouraged, are particularly vulnerable and prone to both domestic abuse and violence as well as clergy abuse. And we do have such churches on the fringe of the Evangelical movement in the German-speaking countries. But even if everything were in order in our own circles and churches we cannot disclaim all responsibility: the church is, despite its sadly divided state and despite its geographic spread, one body, and “if one member suffers, all suffer together“[4]), the whole Body suffers.

So it is high time for us to no longer look the other way but to intercede for these situations and for the victims, and where necessary, have the courage to speak up.

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  1. particularly the Raven-Hale group in England, North America, and Australia[↩]
  2. Fortunately Southern Baptists have now begun, not without some internal opposition, to acknowledge the problem and to take measures to deal with it and prevent it in the future.[↩]
  3. I am not commenting here on the Eastern Churches (Orthodox and Uniate) because I have no information. But I don’t suppose that they are entirely free of this problem.[↩]
  4. 1 Corinthians 12:26 (ESV[↩]
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Emmanuël Nicolaïdes and the Trio Emmanuël

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , ,

In the late 1970s, while a student at the (now unfortunately defunct) European Bible Institute (EBI) in Lamorlaye, north of Paris, I came across an album by Trio Emmanuël, with lead singer Emmanuël Nicolaïdes, an alumnus of EBI. I never owned the album (it was part of the record collection at EBI’s small radio studio) and the compact cassette copy I had made for myself unfortunately got lost during one of our many moves, but the songs are so impressed on my mind that today, more than forty years later, I still remember most of the words. Some time ago, to my delight, I came across the songs from that album on YouTube.

Later Emmanuël lived in Canada, and while I never actually met him I briefly corresponded with him a few years ago. Two months ago I found out that he went home to glory about two years ago, after a long illness and Covid-related complications.

So, in memory of Emmanuël Nicolaïdes and Trio Emnanuël, here are the videos I found on YouTube.

Note: Unfortunately I don’t have the words, and my French is not good enough to do a satisfactory transciption, so if anyone out there can help with that, I would appreciate it.

Je chante pour Jésus

Je chante pour Jésus
Roc séculaire

Roc séculaire
Jésus vint

Jésus vint
Quand je contemple

Quand je contemple
Rends moi comme Toi

Rends moi comme Toi
Tu seras honoré

Tu seras honoré
Oh, Jésus m'aime

Oh, Jésus m'aime
Un jour dans ma memoire

Un jour dans ma memoire
Le Père admirable

Le Père admirable
Vers qui se tourner

Vers qui se tourner
Jusqu'à la fin

Jusqu'à la fin
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Judging But Not Being Judged?

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , ,

In the lectionary of the Lutheran churches in Austria and Germant the sermon text for today, Pentecost Sunday, is 1 Cor 2:12-16, where it says, among other things,

“But he that is spiritual judges everything but is himself judged by no one.”

Retired Pastor Detlef Korsen made this comment in his Pentecost sermon today:

You can brush this passage against the grain and the result is that spiritual people can judge anything and are not judged themselves. And immediately people who like to sit in judgment are drawn to this passage and say,

“Yes, I would like that too: that nobody can judge me, nobody can say anything about me; but I can say something about everything, and what I say about everything remains unchallenged, because I’m right!”

That is not how the Holy Spirit works. This is how the spirit of the world, disguised as the Spirit of God, works. So stay away from this attitude.

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Once more: Ascension

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , ,
Kenneth Tanner[1] writes:[2]
 

Imagine a human life born into the world the way we all are born into the world, coated in serum and blood, vulnerable to all that brings us harm, lain on a mother’s breast.

Imagine a human life born, like most humans, into a poor family with parents who sweat for their daily bread, a human life threatened from the start by homicidal mania.

Imagine a human life lived as a child in exile, in a land where they are strangers, where a different language is spoken, absent a community of trust and care.

Imagine that when Jesus comes home as a young boy to the village of his parents, people stare at him, and whisper “bastard.” Schoolboys taunt him, ask him if Mary knows his real father.

Imagine a mother with arms that console, with a voice that teaches him to love the Scriptures and to pray the Psalms. Imagine a human life that begins to see itself in the words read and the words prayed; imagine that the Word is so inscribed on this human’s body and mind and heart that the greatest teachers of his day hear in his voice the Wisdom that inspires the prophets, that gives harmony to the psalter.

Imagine a human life that gradually becomes aware that its life is somehow identical with the life that makes suns and galaxies, orchids and sequoias, eagles and panthers, that gives breath to all that flies and swims and crawls, a human that is One with the architect of atoms and cells, the kindler of stars, the molder of mountains.

The other humans, including his mom and stepdad are not quite sure what to make of his bewildering humility. He is always putting others first, always waiting on them and everyone in the smallest of ways without caring if anyone notices the kindness or him. At times they feel as though perhaps they ought to bow in reverence because his words and acts are so full of life and hope and healing.

Imagine a human life lived for decades in obscurity, where at the end of most days, muscles tired and achy, he shakes sawdust from his hair and rinses grime from his arms, and sets a table for the widowed vulnerable Virgin who brought him into the world, who taught him so much, and now has him alone to protect and provide for her.

Then one day this woman asks him to do for others what he has on occasion done for her—to make wine where there is no wine. And then there is a baptism, and a sojourn in the wilderness, and a transfiguration. The blind see, the lame walk, and the dead live again because his spit and voice and breath are not only human but divine.

Imagine a human that does not seek equality with God but is among all humans as servant. Imagine a human life that refuses the sword and tells us to love our enemies. Imagine a life that does human things divinely and divine things humanly.

Imagine that living this kind of human life leads the church of his time and the rulers of his moment to plot against him and to snuff out his way of becoming human, to shame anyone in the future from even trying to be human as God is human.

Imagine a human that forgives our entire species even as we reject and despise and murder God.

Imagine that when this human dies from our violence he does not stay dead but that in death and beyond it he stays human. He so rearranges the structures of death that they are now instead a portal to the life of God for everyone who dies with him.

Imagine a human life that journeys to hell with the dead and preaches as a dead man to those bound in chains; that as he speaks the fetters that held them there are broken by love.

Imagine that the human life I’ve just described in all the ways I have described it appears embodied again after death, freed from death, liberated from any threat that can limit his promises to us and to the world.

Now, imagine that this is the sort of human life that ascends to the right hand of God. Imagine that what it means to live this sort of human life and to die this sort of human death is to ascend—to become forever the measure of what it means to be God and what it means to be human, for this Son who is given to us descends to become human and ascends to remain human.

And despite all appearances to the contrary his way of being human, his way of humility, is now the way things are with the world, and now death has no power over his ascended life or ours.

His humility causes our humanity to ascend with him so that right now what is truest about you and me is that our lives are hidden with Christ in God, that we are seated in Christ next to the Father; that we are in him there, and that he is in us here, and that with him we are One with the Father by the Spirit.

This is but one facet of the great mystery of Ascension, that complex, neglected, beautiful, and consequential reality that Christians trust and that we celebrate today.

Have patience. In time, God is kind with us and will help us know this reality and to live this reality, right now and forever.

Image: The Ascension of Christ, Salvador Dali, 1958

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  1. Kenneth Tanner is Pastor of the Anglican „Holy Redeemer“ church in Rochester Hills  Michigan.[↩]
  2. Original Facebook post is here.[↩]
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Google Translate has become almost usable

Posted on Author Wolf PaulCategories UncategorizedTags , ,

I’m very impressed with the progress Google Translate has made.

A few years ago I was asked to translate a book from German to English and as an experiment and in the hope that this would save me at least some of the tedious (and boring) backbreaking work, I sent the text through Google Translate . The result was unusable; the necessary post-editing would have taken more time and effort than a complete re-translation. Since then, I’ve only used the service to create short Facebook posts or comments, or emails, in French or Dutch, which I then edit; I find it harder to write in both languages ​​than to speak, but due to extensive reading I have a good feel for the languages and can edit the translations a bit.

Yesterday I wanted to translate an article about the Ascension of Christ, and because I am currently bedridden, I am somewhat restricted in terms of typing on a keyboard, so I sent the article through Google Translate .

To my astonishment, the result was vastly better than my experience of a few years ago. While there were a few glitches (snippets of text that had gone missing, a few bits that were gibberish for one reason or another), overall the text was quite readable. Most of the post-processing involved formatting.

This raises a similar question for me as using the ChatGPT AI engine . Most of the time ChatGPT answers questions correctly and in such elegant German and English that one can use them almost without editing; would it then be ethical to pass off such an answer as my own? In the end I decided to either attribute the answer to ChatGPT , or (if I’ve significantly edited or added to it) to call it a result of my collaboration with ChatGPT .

The more Google Translate (or other similar services) improves, the less post-processing is needed, the more problematic it becomes to pass off such a translation as my own. Again, indicating support from the translation service seems to be the ethical solution.

Next, I will try other translation services, such as Bing Translator from Microsoft or Deepl Translate , as well as ChatGPT for shorter texts (which currently has an output limit of 2048 characters per answer, even for paying subscribers).

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