There has been a choir of boys and gentlemen at St Paul’s Cathedral for over nine centuries. The earliest records date from 1127, when the Bishop of London, Richard de Belmeis, founded what was the first choir school and made provision for ‘almonry’ boys to serve the cathedral.
2nd of December 1697 saw the opening of Wren’s great cathedral following the Great Fire of 1666. John Blow, the Minister of the Choristers, wrote his anthem I was glad when they said unto me to be sung at this grand occasion. He was assisted by his pupil Jeremiah Clarke, who was to become the first official Organist of the new Cathedral. Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate was also performed, accompanied by Father Smith’s large new organ, esteemed the best in Europe according to the diarist John Evelyn.
In 1860 a significant change in the building took place when the screen on which the organ was housed was removed and in 1872 the Cathedral took two major steps – building a new organ and appointing John Stainer as Organist.
Stainer proposed a choir of 40 boys and 18 men (or Vicars Choral) to achieve the necessary vocal power to fill the cathedral following the removal of the choir-screen. He demanded more rehearsal time for the Vicars Choral and encouraged a more professional approach altogether. This meant that he was able to extend the musical repertoire enormously, and began to sow the seeds of the musical tradition we know today.
The present Cathedral Choir consists of 30 choristers (boy trebles), eight probationers (who will become choristers) and 12 professional adult singers (or Vicars Choral): four altos, four tenors and four basses.
At the very heart of the Choir’s being is the ancient monastic tradition of singing daily services. You can hear the Choir during term time as follows.
Did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commit perjury when she claimed in a Senate hearing that she did not know whether the U.S. mission in Libya was procuring or transferring weapons to Turkey and other Arab countries?
The goal of the alleged weapons shipments was to arm the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Any training or arming of the Syrian rebels would be considered highly controversial. A major issue is the inclusion of jihadists, including al-Qaida, among the ranks of the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups
During the recent hearings over the Obama administration’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Clinton was directly asked about alleged U.S. weapons shipments out of Libya.
Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND have said U.S.-aided weapons shipments go back more than a year, escalating before the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi.
In fact, the Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND since last year describe the U.S. mission in Benghazi and nearby CIA annex attacked last September as an intelligence and planning center for U.S. aid to the rebels in the Middle East, particularly those fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The aid, the sources stated, included weapons shipments and was being coordinated with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The specifics of the New York Times reporting, meanwhile, open major holes in Clinton’s sworn claims to be in the dark about the alleged weapons shipments.
President Obama is quietly moving forward on gun control.
The president has used his executive powers to bolster the national background check system, jumpstart government research on the causes of gun violence and create a million-dollar ad campaign aimed at safe gun ownership.
The executive steps will give federal law enforcement officials access to more data about guns and their owners, help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, and lay the groundwork for future legislative efforts.
Well finally, someone in Congress is calling out Barack Obama for his sleazy exploitation of the Sandy Hook tragedy and the ineffectiveness of the gun control proposals he’s backing.
“I think it’s a mistake for either side to politicize this. The president uses them as a backdrop and drama for getting some kind of political will. But, my question to the president is, ‘Call me if any of your reforms would have saved those kids at Sandy Hook.’ If anything he’s proposing would have changed the outcome I’ll listen to him.”
On March 12th, a pro-life group at Johns Hopkins University, Voice for Life (VFL), was denied the right to become an official student club by the Student Government Association (SGA) during a student Senate meeting, after having been recommended for approval by the SGA Appointments and Evaluations Committee. At that same SGA meeting, though, another new group was approved called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Although SJP has a history of anti-Semitism and disruption on other campuses, the SGA decided that the students from JHU creating the group were separate from other campus affiliations, and they couldn’t be punished for potential violations. Somehow, these standards were not applied to Voice for Life.
This general body meeting was followed by an SGA Town Hall meeting the next day whereupon the decision was further expounded. The SGA explained that they decided not to grant official club status to Voice for Life because:
1) The pro-life group’s intentions to peacefully engage in sidewalk counseling off campus at a Baltimore abortion facility “clearly violates the JHU Harassment and Code of Conduct policies.”
2) One of the 100 pro-life organization links on the Voice for Life website sent visitors to the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s website, which was judged to be “offensive.” CBR has brought their Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), which features images of aborted preborn babies, as well as Holocaust victims, and victims of lynching, to Baltimore near the JHU campus in the past.
On Tuesday, March 26th, JHU Voice for Life was rejected again by the Student Senate, and the case will now go to the SGA Judiciary Committee for review, which will be on Tuesday, April 9th at 5:00pm.
A Young Americans for Freedom chapter is demanding its school to pull funding from an upcoming LGBT conference, claiming a bias against conservatives and Christians.
Des Moines Community College student Jake Dagel, who chairs the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, is opposing the 8th Annual Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning) Youth and is calling for the school to pull its $1,000 sponsorship during a press conference announcing his chapter’s position. Dagel claims that conservatives and Christians will be bullied at the event.
“Any conference or event that attacks individuals for their beliefs is not diversity,” Dagel told the Iowa Republican. “We, the DMACC Young Americans for Freedom…believe that he LGBT community has every right to host this conference due to their First Amendment rights. However, as long as the conference hosts workshops that attack individuals, we will demand that DMACC revoke its sponsorship of tuition and taxpayer money from this conference.”
Dagel’s concern stems from two different workshops during the conference. One entitled, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Right Wing,” which according to the Iowa Safe Schools website (which founded the conference) attendees will “Learn messages and methods to fight back against propaganda from the extreme right wing, from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to Bob Vander Plaats and Jan Mickelson. Discover resources to get the most up-to-date information available and work toward a more progressive Iowa.” The other is a seminar that will have attendees watch the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So,” a documentary that shows how conservatives have “warped” their interpretation of the Bible to stigmatize homosexuals.
Vice President Biden today is enjoying his third vacation of the year, a five day sojourn on South Carolina’s luxurious Kiawah Island, where he will no doubt partake of his favorite pastime, golf.
Biden and his wife Jill arrived on the island – known as a golf mecca – Thursday night and are not scheduled to depart before Monday.
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Biden should feel especially refreshed when he returns given that he just had a vacation last month in Snowmass, Colorado, where he spent several days over President’s Day weekend. Close by in a neighboring section of Colorado’s ski country was First Lady Michelle Obama, who was taking her second vacation of the year in Aspen.
Over the same President’s Day weekend, President Obama was roving the fairways at an exclusive golf resort in Florida where he got pointers both from Tiger Woods and Tiger’s famous former coach. He and Mrs. Obama had already spent part of late December and early January in Hawaii.
Biden’s first trip this year was a sun worshiping exercise in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he stayed with his family from Friday, January 4 until Tuesday, January 8.
South Carolina is also a crucial presidential primary state that Biden – believed to be strongly considering a run in 2016 – no doubt has his eye on. Biden reportedly will be back in the state in May when he headlines the annual Jefferson Jackson Dinner, a Democratic fundraising event in the state’s capital, Columbia.
“A compromised candidate is not what we need,” said Bostic, the Marine Corps veteran and former Charleston County councilman who emerged from a 16-candidate GOP primary field to face Sanford in the runoff.
“Trust is a crucial issue,” Bostic said, adding that the possibility of Sanford winning the Republican nomination has made Democrats “excited about the possibility of taking this seat back.” Citing polls that show Sanford vulnerable against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, Bostic warned that if 1st District voters choose the scandal-stained Sanford, “We will lose this seat and lose it needlessly.”
Still, Sanford has formidable advantages in campaign cash and name recognition. He got 37 percent to Bostic’s 13 percent in the March 19 primary, and the brief two-week interval before the runoff doesn’t afford much time for the underdog to close the gap. And despite the 2009 scandal that wrecked Sanford’s marriage and ended talk of him as a potential presidential contender, the ex-governor still has many supporters — as evidenced by the applause for him in the debate at Porter-Gaud School — and he also still has indubitable political skills. Sanford displayed his jocular down-home charm repeatedly during the hour-long debate, and stressed the theme of fiscal conservatism throughout. In his closing remarks, he recited from memory a long quote by Barry Goldwater.
The Easter season is a time for Christians to consider the resurrection of Christ anew. For atheist comedian Ricky Gervais, Easter is just another excuse to mock those of faith.
The British comic fired up his Twitter feed this week with a series of condescending jabs at Christians.
The National Science Foundation has given a grant that could wind up totaling almost a million dollars to a University of Iowa study researching which is better for New Zealand mud snails: reproducing sexually or asexually. The grant, awarded in 2011 to last until 2015, has already cost $502,357, and could wind up costing taxpayers $876,752 before all is said and done.
The abstract for the study explains why this research is so important:
Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction, yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs. This project will use a different organism, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, a New Zealand snail, which has both sexual and independently-derived asexual lineages that make it ideally suited to address fundamental evolutionary questions of how genes and genomes evolve in the absence of sexual reproduction.
The implication is that if the study can prove that there is no benefit to sexual reproduction, then an organism should simply reproduce asexually without a mate. The press release from the University of Iowa tipped the hand of the study by asserting that the slower rate of reproduction by sexual reproduction was “the cost of males,” that female organisms could conceivably reproduce without the need for male involvement.
Evidently, it takes four months and 100 pages for the RNC to figure out why the party lost the 2012 presidential election and how to fix it. Most of conservatives could tell you in three paragraphs. Those 100-page Growth & Opportunity Project tome was billed by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus as a “bold, raw, real” autopsy of the state of the GOP. Bold in what? It’s length? Raw in it’s stupidity? Real in its predictability?
How bold or honest can a report be when the five co-chairs of the Growth and Opportunity Project, who signed their names to the report, are establishment, country club Republicans and 2/3rds are white.
They are: Ari Fleisher, former spokesperson for President George W. Bush; Sally Bradshaw, campaign consultant to Mitt Romney and chief advisor to Governor Jeb Bush for over a decade; Henry Barbour, nephew of Governor and former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour; RNC Committeeman Glenn McCall and Committeewoman Zori Fonalledas.
“We encourage every Republican to read the report and review our findings,” wrote the co-chairs. By the time anyone gets through reading how the Republican Party can win elections again, it will be 2016 and nothing will have changed. Maybe that’s the whole point of this exercise. The RNC really doesn’t want anybody reading it so Priebus won’t be held accountable to the nonsense that it is.
The report boasts the RNC “spoke with more than 2,600 people, both outside Washington and inside the Beltway,” held 800 plus conference calls, 50 plus focus groups with voters in Iowa and Ohio, listening sessions with 3,000 people, 500 phone calls, and 250 meetings. More than 36,000 women participated in the online survey. I’m exhausted just writing this. Imagine how people will feel if they even bother reading the 98 other pages?
It is time to defend our values with vigor and courage. We are conservatives. We believe in limited government, low taxes, a strong national defense, individual freedoms, self-reliance, the importance of the family, and the miracle and authority of America’s founding documents. We know that government is best that governs least and governs closest to the people. We know that the private sector is the engine of economic growth. We know that America is the exceptional nation, the best that has ever existed. We know that the men and women who wear the uniform of the U.S. military are the greatest fighting force and the greatest force for good that the world has ever known.
We know that preventing this president from enacting devastating policies is not obstructionism. It is patriotism.
No reason to stand on your feet waiting to get your check. Just put your flip-flops next in line and go back and sit on your butt and play games on your free iPhone.
Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery,Johns Hopkins Hospital; Professor of Neurosurgery, Oncology, and Pediatrics,Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Education
Milton Academy Prep; Emory (dropped out); one year, Columbia U creative writing program
Detroit Southwest High; Yale (honors); University of Michigan Medical School
Actor Jim Carrey’s obnoxious anti-gun parody video “Cold Dead Hands” which made fun of rural gun owners and the late Charlton Heston, offended gun owners all across the nation. But never fear – it has been by rebutted by Reason TV with their own clever and much funnier parody. The video takes some jabs at Carrey for his own hypocrisy on guns, and his opposition to vaccines, among other thing.
Mild profanity alert asReason TV’s Remy accuses Carrey of “talking out your ass” complete with visuals from one of his movies.
Nice Deb 