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New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
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Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
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Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
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Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
RYERSON, EGERTON (his complete given name was Adolphus Egerton but he never used the first), Methodist minister, author, editor, and educational administrator; b. 24 March 1803 in Charlotteville Township, Norfolk County, Upper Canada, fifth son of Joseph Ryerson and Mehetable Stickney; m. first 10 Sept. 1828 Hannah Aikman (d. 1832) at Hamilton, Upper Canada, and they had two children; m. secondly 8 Nov. 1833 Mary Armstrong at York (Toronto), Upper Canada, and they had two children; d. 19 Feb. 1882 at Toronto.
Two circumstances in Egerton Ryerson’s early life exercised a lasting influence on his career. One was the loyalist environment in which he grew up. His father, Joseph, and his uncle Samuel Ryerse*, both American born, had served as loyalist officers in the American revolution and afterwards had fled north to New Brunswick before moving to Upper Canada in the 1790s. As a half-pay officer Joseph had received a substantial land grant and established his family on a farm near Vittoria, the first capital of the London District. Appointed to a series of important local offices, both Joseph and Samuel became part of the loyalist establishment in the district while members of their families married into other leading loyalist clans in the area. Joseph and his three eldest sons all served against the Americans in the War of 1812. Egerton, too young to be actively involved, saw a brother badly wounded and the destruction of lands and property belonging to friends and relatives. Among the Ryerson family, memories of pioneering a new land and defending it, of principles sustained and loyalty reaffirmed, would breed a deep and abiding attachment to both their native land and the maintenance of the British connection in North America.
The second great formative influence was evangelical Christianity. Like so many of his generation Ryerson was touched early in life by the wave of Protestant revivalism that swept North America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Ryerson children were raised by a devout mother of Methodist sympathies who taught them a personal and vital form of Christian belief and her precepts were reinforced by the Methodist circuit-riders who criss-crossed Norfolk County during Egerton’s childhood. Some time immediately after the War of 1812, according to his own account, Egerton, like three of his elder brothers, “became deeply religious. . . . My consciousness of guilt and sinfulness was humbling, oppressive and distressing; and my experience of relief, after lengthened fastings, watching and prayers, was clear, refreshing and joyous. In the end I simply trusted in Christ, and looked to Him for a present salvation. . . .” In 1816 his mother and two of his older brothers joined the Methodist Church. His Anglican father was “extremely opposed” to the Methodists and when at 18 Egerton applied for membership in the local Methodist society he was told “you must either leave them or leave my house.” Egerton took the latter course. The rift lasted for two years and was repaired only when the father acquiesced in his son’s convictions. The episode reveals something of the determination and impetuosity characteristic of Ryerson all his life. It also reveals the depth of his “conversion” experience. From the time he was a young man Ryerson’s personal odyssey was defined by his determination “never to rest contented until he [Christ] becomes not only my wisdom, but my sanctification and my full redemption.” Loyalism and Methodism would form the warp and woof of Ryerson’s life and thought throughout his long career.
Ryerson’s family was sufficiently well off to enable him to take advantage of the limited educational facilities available at the time. Most of his schooling took place under James Mitchell at the London District Grammar School in Vittoria. Between 1821 and 1823 he served as an assistant to his brother George, who was master in the school. During these years Ryerson absorbed the essentials of an English and classical education and was also introduced to two works that would become lasting influences – William Paley’s Principles of moral and political philosophy and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries. In August 1824, perhaps with the intention of becoming a lawyer, Ryerson went to Hamilton to study with John Law at the Gore District Grammar School.
After only a few months’ study in Hamilton, Ryerson’s formal education was ended by a prolonged illness in the winter of 1824–25. During his recovery he became convinced that he had been preserved from death to serve God’s purpose as a Methodist minister. He irrevocably accepted God’s call on 24 March 1825, his 22nd birthday, and preached his first sermon at Beamsville on Easter Sunday of that year. Thus Egerton became one of five Ryerson boys to enter the Methodist ministry: he followed in the footsteps of William* and John* as George, the eldest, and Edway (Edwy) Marcus, the youngest, would follow in his. Formally received on trial in September 1825 by the Canada Conference, the governing body of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Upper Canada, Egerton served his apprenticeship on the York and Yonge Street circuit and then as a missionary among the Indians at the Credit River. In September 1827 he was admitted to full connection and ordained. He spent the next two years assigned to the Cobourg and Ancaster circuits.
During these years the rigorous routine of a travelling preacher’s life was interrupted by two diversions that would put Ryerson’s name before a much wider audience than any Methodist circuit could offer. In 1826 a sermon, delivered the previous summer at the funeral of Bishop Jacob Mountain* by John Strachan*, appeared in print; in it Strachan, the leading Church of England clergyman in Upper Canada, traced the rise of the Anglican church in the colony, contending that it was the established church and attacking the Methodists as ignorant American enthusiasts, unsound in religion and disloyal in politics. None of the arguments were new, but on this occasion the Methodists in York chose not to remain silent and Ryerson, still a probationary preacher, was one of those invited to frame a reply. In a long letter printed in the Colonial Advocate (York) in May 1826 he challenged all of Strachan’s assertions. No less than Strachan himself, Ryerson sought a society that was both Christian and British. But he denied that an established church was either scriptural or an essential part of the British constitution, and quoted authors ancient and modern to support his case. He rejected the charges of ignorance by citing the intellectual training required of all Methodist preachers and also challenged the contention that most of them were Americans. Ryerson’s letter and the ensuing debate in the provincial press “thrilled the Methodist mind in the country,” in the words of John Saltkill Carroll, and called attention to Ryerson’s remarkable abilities as a spokesman for the Methodist cause. In 1827 Strachan again put forward his claims in a series of letters written in England to garner support for both the Church of England and the colony’s newly chartered university. In the public uproar that followed, Ryerson was only one critic among many, but in eight clearly reasoned and broad-ranging letters, published first in the Upper Canada Herald (Kingston) in June 1828 and later that year as a pamphlet, he again defended the character of Methodism, argued the case for religious equality, and broadened his attack to include the educational policies of what he claimed to be an Anglican-dominated executive.
His forays against Strachan brought Ryerson to the centre of Methodist affairs. In 1829 he was elected by conference as the first editor of the new Methodist newspaper, the Christian Guardian. Over the next decade he would be its dominant editorial voice, responsible for the paper from the first issue in November 1829 until August 1832, from October 1833 until June 1835, and again from June 1838 until June 1840. A large Methodist constituency and Ryerson’s own editorial talents made the Guardian one of the most widely read and politically influential papers in the colony. From the beginning it reflected not only the temporal but also the spiritual concerns of Ryerson’s own life. One subsidiary object of the paper, he wrote in 1830, was “to support and vindicate religious and civil rights”; but the paper’s principal purpose was to promote “practical Christianity – to teach men how to live and how to die.” Serving also as book steward for 1829–32 and 1833–35, Ryerson established a book room and helped lay the foundations of a flourishing publishing establishment which eventually became the Ryerson Press.
During the early 1830s Ryerson was involved in another important aspect of the institutional development of his church. In 1832, at the invitation of the colonial administration, the politically conservative British Wesleyans decided to expand their own work into Upper Canada. Colonial Methodists were divided over the appropriate response. Although some objected to any cooperation at all, the majority of conference, led by John Ryerson, voted to support a union between the two churches in order to avoid wasteful duplication and open conflict and to disprove the continuing charges of American sympathies. Egerton vigorously supported this policy in the Guardian and within conference, and was selected to go to England to complete the negotiations with the English conference as well as to lay a variety of Methodist interests before the Colonial Office. He returned to Upper Canada in September 1833. Just 30 years of age, fresh from his first trip abroad and the successful representation of his church in Britain, and re-elected editor of the Guardian, Ryerson had begun to establish himself, in Carroll’s words, as the Methodists’ “leader in all public questions.”
The style and character of the man had also begun to take permanent shape. Summarizing contemporary opinion, Charles Bruce Sissons* concludes that Ryerson was a competent rather than an outstanding preacher. The basis for his public reputation would lie in the written rather than the spoken word. At his best Ryerson could write prose laced with vigorous rhetoric, flashes of wit, and powerful imagery. He could also, particularly as he grew older, be long-winded and pontifical, his prose weighted down by endless quotations and irrelevant appeals to the history of any subject from time immemorial. His style was shaped by the Methodist homiletics of the day and encompassed the best and the worst of the genre.
To his many friends and admirers Ryerson was a generous, warm, kind, inspiring man, “trusting and trustworthy,” endowed with “grand qualities of mind and heart.” Others, particularly those who ran afoul of him in controversy, did not share this opinion. In his younger days Ryerson was generally careful to distinguish between the personalities and the arguments of his opponents. As editor of the Guardian he did not routinely indulge in the character assassination and innuendo typical of contemporary colonial journalism. Yet he was also acutely sensitive to slights or imputations about his own character and principles, and when provoked could descend into excesses of personal abuse unbecoming in a clergyman and public figure. These tendencies increased as he grew older so that even a sympathetic contemporary observer was led to remark that “both in writing and in debate he is not very choice of the means by which he abolishes an opponent, so long as it is done.” His was not a singular failing in mid-19th-century Canada and in many instances Ryerson had a strong claim to just cause. None the less he himself recognized it as a flaw. “I have,” he told his daughter, Mrs Sophia Howard Harris, in 1870, “written and printed many things that I afterwards very much regretted. For many years I have been accustomed to keep for a day or a week what I have written, before committing it to press.”
When he believed it to be necessary Ryerson could rethink his positions and make tactical compromises but his reluctance to admit such shifts publicly left him open to recurring charges of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. Such assessments were also encouraged by a strain of self-righteousness in his personality. Though his diaries and private letters often reveal him struggling with self-doubt, his public demeanour bespoke great assurance that his designs and God’s were one. Thomas Dalton* was one of the first of Ryerson’s contemporaries who captured this trait when he wrote in 1834 that Ryerson “pretends to be Heaven’s Lord Chancellor, and consequently the depository of all the secrets of that high court.”
Throughout his life Ryerson was a relentless worker. He could call up enormous reserves of energy, endurance, and discipline – products of his early labours on his father’s farm, the physical rigours of a circuit-rider’s life, and above all, the conviction that he must be a worthy steward of the time God gave him. He was also a constant student. He was forever learning a new language: Ojibwa at the Credit River mission, Hebrew in his spare time in the early 1840s, French and German on his trips to the Continent. The core of his religious and social thought had been shaped by rigorous study of the scriptures and the great Methodist divines: Wesley himself, Adam Clarke, and Richard Watson. He was also an avid reader of the classics of British and European history and political thought, and the “serious” contemporary literature such as the great English quarterlies. On any subject he chose he could command a remarkable variety of sources and quotations. His persistent interest in secular knowledge and in contemporary cultural and political affairs tempered the asperities of a faith that in other men could breed a disdain for temporal things or even an outright anti-intellectualism. On the other hand his secular interests, reinforced and justified by his religious convictions, also drew him into the political conflicts that haunted the colony in the 1830s and 1840s to a degree that, amongst Upper Canadian clergymen, was matched only by his great antagonist, John Strachan.
As pamphleteer and editor between 1826 and 1832 Ryerson had gradually become associated in the public mind with those who identified themselves as political Reformers. It was a natural alliance at the time, for many of the issues that galvanized Reformers were also those of most concern to Methodist leaders: the disposition of the clergy reserves, the right to solemnize marriages, the control of many of the educational institutions by the Church of England, and a number of similar issues affecting denominational equality Ryerson’s spirited editorial attacks on Anglican ascendancy, his leading role in organizing and drafting the petition of the Friends of Religious Liberty in December 1830 [see Jesse Ketchum*], and his denunciation in 1831 of the attack by Sir John Colborne* on the Methodists for political meddling, all seemed to identify him not just as a leading Methodist but as a leading Reformer as well. Thus it was not surprising that in 1832 a Tory mob in Peterborough, looking for symbols of reform on which to vent their anger, set fire to effigies of both William Lyon Mackenzie* and Ryerson.
When Ryerson returned from England in the autumn of 1833, however, he struck an unexpected theme. In the first of a series of “Impressions of England,” published in the Guardian, he attacked as infidel, republican, and anti-Methodist, radical leaders such as Joseph Hume and John Arthur Roebuck* who were close allies of Canadian Reformers. At the same time he praised the English “moderate Tories” among whom were to be found “a considerable portion of the evangelical clergy and, we think, a majority of Wesleyan Methodists.” Their political prudence, “genuine liberality and religious beneficence,” he concluded, “claim respect and imitation.” The “Impressions” caused a political uproar. To friends and enemies alike Ryerson appeared to reverse direction and commit himself to Toryism. The Reform press had a field-day at his expense, condemning him as an apostate and traitor, and many of his Methodist brethren concurred. To Ryerson himself, however, the change was one of emphasis, not principle. His passionate recitals of the grievances of Upper Canada had in fact masked an intellectual temper that was profoundly loyalist and conservative.
Two central convictions, shaped by his early life and by his reading of Blackstone, Paley, Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, formed the core of his political thought. First, he revered the body of constitutional theory and practice developed in Britain since 1688 and inherited, he believed, by Upper Canadians through the Constitutional Act of 1791. To Ryerson, civil institutions were among the means established by God to enable man to seek sanctification in this life and everlasting happiness with God in the next. No system of government designed by man was better suited to serve these purposes than the British constitution. By providing institutional bulwarks against arbitrary rule, it protected the civil and religious liberties of the subject and, through petitions to parliament and appeals to the crown, it furnished the means of seeking redress of grievances. Because of its mixed nature – its incorporation of king, lords, and commons (in the colony, governor, council, and assembly) – it provided the mechanism to balance and reconcile the different interests of society and thereby secure good government for the whole community. Wise policy, Ryerson would repeatedly say, not only arose from but also ensured “both the prerogatives and due influence of the Crown, and the constitutional rights of the people.”
The second fundamental principle that shaped his political thought was the importance of the imperial tie. Given his warm attachment to British institutions, all proposals for outright independence were anathema. At the same time he believed that the imperial authority and its local representatives must be responsive to local interests and circumstances. Thus Ryerson, like so many others of his generation, had to come to grips with a proposition that, on the face of it, seemed absurd: Upper Canada could be both self-governing and a colony. If some believed that sentiment alone could keep separatist tendencies in check, many others, Ryerson included, did not. To him, the “responsible government” of Robert Baldwin* was but a first step to independence. Its logic was to destroy the mixed constitution by eliminating the independent prerogative of the crown, the most palpable link between colony and parent state. So long as the imperial government was broadly responsive to public opinion, preserved the right of appeal for redress, and followed existing constitutional usages in dealing with the colony, Ryerson would oppose any innovations that threatened to weaken the imperial tie or modify the constitution inherited by the colony.
From the late 1820s until the mid 1840s Ryerson would attempt to govern his political course in accordance with these two principles. It was not an easy task. It would lead him from one side of the political spectrum to the other and back again, and leave him open to charges of political opportunism that, in the eyes of many Upper Canadians though not in his own, were difficult to refute.
By late 1833, when he published “Impressions,” Ryerson had become convinced that the main enemy was the Reform movement, not the administration. He did not dispute the fact that Upper Canadians still had justifiable complaints but, he argued, appeals to the crown and the imperial parliament were bringing redress. In particular, the royal dispatches of 1832 and 1833 had led Lieutenant Governor Colborne to modify many of the partisan policies of the previous decade. To Ryerson, in other words, the cause of Reform had been largely won. Of course Methodists had changed their tune, he would reply to his critics in 1835, “and for a simple and sufficient reason, the administration of government towards them has been essentially changed.” The Reformers, on the other hand, were seeking no longer to remedy real grievances but to introduce organic changes in the constitution. Thus, with the same energy he had exerted on behalf of Reform in the early 1830s, by mid decade Ryerson had thrown himself into the defence of existing authority.
Ryerson was absent from Upper Canada from November 1835 to June 1837, having been sent by conference to England as part of an attempt to put the affairs of the Methodists’ new academy at Cobourg in order. Begun with the greatest optimism in the early 1830s, Upper Canada Academy was in the most desperate financial straits by mid decade. It was Ryerson’s job to obtain a royal charter for it and, more importantly, to travel throughout Britain soliciting money for its support. Both tasks proved difficult but the latter was the more painful: to be a stranger and to have to beg, he confided to his diary, was “the most disagreeable of all employments.” He obtained the charter, none the less, and promises of financial support from British Wesleyans and the imperial government. Though away from home during these months, he continued to be a force in Upper Canadian politics, writing lengthy letters to the Christian Guardian and to English newspapers criticizing the Reformers and defending the policies of Lieutenant Governor Sir Francis Bond Head*.
Ryerson ended 1837 with a blistering sermon condemning those who had participated in the rebellion. He himself, however, was already beginning to have second thoughts about Head’s administration. It was one thing to defend the existing constitution against “republican” or “democratic” radicalism but quite another to tolerate arbitrary rule. Despite the clearly expressed will of the crown and the assembly, the Legislative Council had refused to approve a loan to Upper Canada Academy in 1837 – a scandalous departure, Ryerson argued, from constitutional precedent. A Tory legislature appeared to be attempting once more to place the clergy reserves in Anglican hands. In the wake of the rebellion civil liberties were being trampled upon and early in 1838 the case of Marshall Spring Bidwell*, who had been forced into exile at the whim of the lieutenant governor, roused Ryerson to issue a ringing public denunciation of the authorities and a defence of the constitutional rights of the subject. In Ryerson’s view Head’s successor, Sir George Arthur*, brought no improvement; indeed Arthur seemed determined to sustain all of the most objectionable pretensions of traditional colonial Toryism. From June 1838, when Ryerson returned as editor of the Guardian, his energies were again directed towards attacking the policies of the local executive and its supporters inside and outside the legislature. Once more he had entered the camp of the anti-government alliance.
It was in these circumstances that Ryerson was temporarily converted to the constitutional proposals of Lord Durham [Lambton*]. To those who recalled with some glee his earlier opposition to colonial cabinet responsibility he replied in June 1839 that “the history of the last three years” had proved that no other means existed to ensure a just and equitable local administration. By the end of 1840, however, Ryerson had returned to more familiar ground. In Lord Sydenham [Thomson*], who was determined to form a broad party of moderate opinion, to treat all denominations equally, and to be responsive to public opinion while at the same time preserving the prerogatives of the crown, Ryerson believed he had found the patriot governor who could implement “truly liberal conservative policy” and thus sustain the mixed constitution in the colonial setting. When Sydenham died in 1841 Ryerson wrote an obituary that heaped encomium upon encomium. At its heart was an expression of his own most fervent wish for the province: “his Lordship has solved the difficult problem, that a people may be colonists and yet be free.”
In June 1840 Ryerson ended his last stint as editor of the Guardian and was assigned to a pastorate in Toronto. He remained, however, a central figure in Methodist affairs. A number of issues had begun to divide Canadian and British Wesleyans in the late 1830s, raising doubts about the value of the union into which they had entered in 1833. One of these was the editorial policy of the Guardian, which members of the British conference felt Ryerson had made into “a political and party organ” of colonial radicalism. Though Ryerson was sustained by large majorities at conference, clashes over this and other matters of policy led to the dissolution of the union in 1840. Egerton and his brother William were appointed delegates to the British conference and spent the summer of 1840 in England negotiating the details of separation. In the following year Egerton was selected as the first principal of Victoria College, the successor to Upper Canada Academy, though he was not formally inducted into the post until June 1842. He remained principal until 1847 but his active role in the college was short-lived. In 1844 he took up a new post as a government administrator and, at the same time, became involved in one of the most celebrated political conflicts in Upper Canadian history.
In November 1843, because of a dispute over control of patronage, Governor Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe*’s Reform ministers had resigned from office. In the next few months Metcalfe and his new chief minister in Canada West, William Henry Draper*, began to search for a base of support in the leading moderates of both parties and all denominations. Among those consulted for general advice was Ryerson and, most probably in January 1844, consultation turned into a more positive offer of a place in the administration.
It is not difficult to see why Metcalfe wanted Ryerson. An appointment for Ryerson would disprove charges that he was too partial to Anglicans and high Tories and would favourably influence the large Methodist vote. Ryerson was on close terms with other political moderates and his accession might bring their support as well. A place on the council itself was, however, out of the question. Ryerson did not want an unequivocally political appointment and Draper discovered that it was not possible in any case. Thus Ryerson was offered the post of superintendent of schools for Canada West, which was not formally political; his acceptance would, however, signify his support for the ministry.
Why Ryerson himself was tempted by the offer is another question. Certainly he believed that at stake was a major constitutional issue upon which men must declare themselves. Moreover, he had always thought that an effective system of national education was one of the highest goals of practical, liberal policy and he was no doubt deeply attracted by the chance to play a role in promoting its development. But there may have been other reasons as well. On two previous occasions in the early 1840s he had expressed an interest in becoming involved in primarily secular projects and it may have been that Ryerson was somewhat restless in these years and eager to test his talents in a wider sphere than that afforded by Upper Canadian Methodism alone.
He may also have been tempted by the new political atmosphere of the years after 1840. The many leading politicians of the decade with whom he was on close personal terms accorded him a degree of respect he had not received from an earlier generation of Upper Canadian notables. Moreover, whatever their differences on particular issues, Ryerson’s vision of the future development of Canadian society had much in common with that of such men as Draper and Francis Hincks. They were ready to recognize the legitimate interests of Methodists and other dissenters within the body politic, they were men of the centre who rejected the extremes of either radicalism or Toryism, and their concern for economic development and the modernization of public services and institutions was as great as their commitment to the preservation of a distinct British-American society. In other words, Ryerson may have been attracted to the job because he believed that politics and policy were moving in more congenial and promising directions than in the conflict-ridden decade of the 1830s. In any case and for whatever reasons, Ryerson accepted Metcalfe’s offer in early 1844, though his appointment was not formally announced until September.
Apparently Metcalfe and Draper had asked only that Ryerson agree to serve as superintendent of common schools. It seems to have been Ryerson himself who proposed that he also step into the public arena in defence of the governor. He did so in part because he thought that his appointment was at risk unless the ministry was sustained by the electorate. But his behaviour was also fully in character. For Ryerson it was never enough to stand up and be counted; he had to smite the enemy hip and thigh as well. Thus he set about writing Sir Charles Metcalfe defended against the attacks of his late counsellors, published first as a series of letters in the British Colonist (Toronto) in the late spring and early summer of 1844 and later that year as a pamphlet of some 165 pages.
Though the letters ranged widely over British and colonial constitutional and political history and included a variety of arguments favourable to Metcalfe’s position, Ryerson focused on the patronage question. The Reform ministry, he argued, proposed to use patronage to strengthen the grip of extreme partyism on the country. This in itself was dangerous enough, for partyism prized partisanship and factionalism over independent judgement and the public interest, and rewarded loyalty rather than merit. In this respect the Reformers were reviving all the evils of Family Compact rule when patronage had been used for the benefit of a faction and a sect rather than the community as a whole. But more importantly, by attempting to control patronage, the Reform ministers were attacking the British connection itself: to put the control of patronage primarily in the hands of the council was to undermine the independent authority of the governor and thereby fatally weaken the link with the crown. To accede to such a principle would give Canada “Responsible Government in a sense that would make the Crown a ‘tool’ in the hands of a party; or in a sense, as the Imperial Government emphatically declare, would make ‘Canada an independent republic.’” Thus the duty of the people of Canada in the present crisis was clear: to sustain the kind of responsible government which had been established by Sydenham, which was approved by the imperial government, “and which Sir Charles Metcalfe has most explicitly and fully avowed.”
The Metcalfe ministry won the elections of 1844 for many reasons, though no doubt Ryerson’s “Defence” and the loyalty cry he helped to raise played a part in influencing moderate opinion. His appointment to an important public position may also have influenced Methodist voters for it represented a long-delayed recognition of their importance and their claims to full membership in Upper Canadian society. The affair also won Ryerson the lasting enmity of some Reformers, George Brown* amongst them, and a recurring epithet, “Leonidas,” for Ryerson’s smug comparison of his own role in 1844 with that of the hero of Thermopylæ. Ryerson himself left Canada West in October 1844 for his first tour of educational establishments in Britain and on the Continent, and did not return until December 1845. In the following year, working closely with Draper, he began the task of reorganizing the structure of elementary education in the colony.
He could not, however, detach himself immediately from the political role he had played in 1844. He had publicly allied himself with Metcalfe and with Draper’s Conservative ministry. Upon the victory of the Reformers in the elections of 1847–48 it was commonly rumoured that Ryerson would be replaced as superintendent of schools. He survived for several reasons. Impressed by his competence, Lord Elgin [Bruce*] gave Ryerson his full support against those who wished to dismiss him for political reasons. Ryerson also had warm allies within the ministry, such as William Hamilton Merritt*, and influential admirers within the party. Above all, Francis Hincks, worried about the Methodist vote, was prepared to bury the political enmity of the mid 1840s. By late 1849 Ryerson had prevailed. His chief enemy in the ministry, Malcolm Cameron*, had resigned, new school legislation that undercut Ryerson’s position had been set aside, and Ryerson had been invited to remain in office and to prepare a revised school bill incorporating the experience of his four years as superintendent. The way was now clear for him to begin the most significant phase of his life’s work.
Ryerson’s main preoccupation in the two decades after 1850 was to give form and substance to his vision of the appropriate system of education for Canada West. That vision had been taking shape for years, derived in equal parts from the lessons of scripture and Methodist theology, from his reading of the early 19th-century debates in Britain and America about the importance of popular education, from his participation in the editorial warfare over educational policy in Upper Canada, and from his study of other school systems during his tour of Europe in 1844–45. Though Ryerson wrote voluminously about education throughout his public life, his ideas were expressed most fully and systematically in his Report on a system of public elementary instruction for Upper Canada, written after his return from Europe.
At the heart of his educational ideas lay his Christian faith. Next to religion itself, he believed, education was the great agent of God’s purpose for man. Carried out in a Christian context, education promoted virtue and usefulness in this world and union with God in the next. Because it made good and useful individuals it was also a key agent in supporting the good society, inasmuch as it helped to promote social harmony, self-discipline, and loyalty to properly constituted authority. To Ryerson it was the duty of education to develop “all the intellectual powers of man, teach him self-reliance as well as dependence on God, excite him in industry and enterprise, and instruct him in his rights as well as the duties of man.”
From these principles Ryerson drew his particular goals. First and foremost, a system of education must be Christian: a secular education was a danger to the child and the society as well as a denial of God’s message to mankind. Secondly, in order to have its intended effects on all children, schooling must be universal. A truly national system must also be “extensive” or “comprehensive”: it must meet the needs of all ranks and vocations by providing both elementary and advanced institutions of education. As well the system must be both British and Canadian. The schools had a duty to uphold the British tie and respect for British constitutional government, and at the same time to foster local patriotism and serve the particular needs and circumstances of Upper Canada’s social and economic life. Finally, the system must be the active concern of government. As an ordinance of God “designed by the Supreme Being ‘to be a minister of God for good’ to a whole people,” government had a duty to sustain and encourage those institutions which promoted the temporal and eternal welfare of its citizens. These were the goals Ryerson would pursue in his remarkably long career as superintendent of education in the upper province.
When Ryerson first took office in 1844 there were already more than 2,500 elementary schools in Canada West: financed by a combination of government grants, property taxation, and tuition fees; run by locally elected boards of education; and supervised and coordinated, though in a somewhat ineffective way, by an established central Education Office. Ryerson, in other words, did not create a school system; he inherited one. Throughout his career, moreover, his success was in large part the product of a climate of opinion highly favourable to his aims. Politicians, editors, and other public figures of all religious and political persuasions were sympathetic to the expansion of schooling. School boards and taxpayers provided most of the financial and political support at the local level and imposed broad limits within which central policy could operate. Thus system-building was a cooperative venture rather than the sole achievement of any one individual. More than anyone else, however, it was Ryerson who gave the emerging system its particular shape and character. Between 1844 and 1876 he was involved in a multitude of projects, ranging from the drafting of his major school legislation of 1846, 1850, and 1871 to writing school textbooks, promoting school libraries, and creating a museum of art and science. But his four major achievements were the creation of conditions which made universal access to elementary education possible, the promotion of improvements in the quality of the school programme, changes in the function and character of the grammar schools, and the establishment of an effective administrative structure.
He sought universality and improved quality in several ways. In a period when much of the province was still being settled Ryerson provided the legislative and financial devices that enabled even new, small communities to provide schools for themselves. He also led the campaign, which culminated in the Schools Act of 1871, to make every elementary school tuition-free and to introduce Ontario’s first tentative measure of compulsory attendance. For Ryerson, however, it was not enough to ensure that the rudiments alone were universally available. Through exhortation and regulation he tried to make certain that the programme of studies extended well beyond the “three Rs” so that the elementary schools not only began but completed all of the schooling most children and their parents would want or need. He tried to ensure that textbooks were pedagogically sound and reflected the political, social, and religious values he believed should underpin Upper Canadian society. Finally, he did what he could to promote improved teaching. In 1847 he established the first teacher-training institution and he constantly attempted to set progressively higher standards for the certification of elementary school teachers.
Ryerson’s achievement with respect to the grammar schools was twofold. First, by persuading the politicians and the public to accept the principle that grammar schools should have access to local taxation, he put these institutions on a sound financial footing for the first time in their history and transformed them into unequivocally public institutions. Secondly, he attempted to turn the grammar schools into effective secondary schools. By the gradual introduction of an entrance examination and a prescribed curriculum that clearly delimited the functions of elementary and grammar schools, he linked these institutions hierarchically. At the same time, he attempted to ensure that the grammar schools would offer a high-quality, broadly based education, consisting of English, mathematics, and classical studies, to that minority of students continuing beyond the elementary level.
By creating an effective administrative system for his own department, Ryerson became a member of that small group of pioneer public servants who, in J. E. Hodgetts’ words, made responsible government “a working reality.” He established a strong central authority and a system of local inspection designed to ensure that provincial policy could be implemented and enforced. His own daily routine was dominated by an immense volume of correspondence generated by the problems of institution-building at the local level – correspondence that required him to write hundreds of letters a month in response to requests for guidance and advice. By careful attention to the detail of the organizational machinery at his command he secured both financial and administrative responsibility throughout the system. He reduced the routine work of administration as well as his relations with the local authorities to a body of systematic procedure that covered everything from the gathering of a multitude of statistics to the means by which local boards could function fairly and efficiently in the day-to-day running of the schools. An intensely methodical administrator, Ryerson created the first effective social service bureaucracy in the province’s history.
He was, however, not only a school administrator but, in Alison Prentice’s phrase, a “school promoter” as well. Through his speeches, his educational tours of the province, and the Journal of Education for Upper Canada, which he edited from 1848 to 1875, he reported the best ideas from home and abroad, exhorted local boards to introduce this or that new idea, and launched his own campaigns for such major innovations as free schools and compulsory education.
Part of his promotional task, perhaps the least welcome part, was to defend the place of grant-aided Roman Catholic separate schools within the system. Though these schools represented only a small proportion of the total number of schools in operation, they became the subject of prolonged political, religious, and sectional controversy in the mid 19th century. Though Ryerson had no a priori objections to denominational schools where a common faith was shared by the whole population, he did not approve of sectarian schools in a denominationally diverse society like Canada West. He thought such schools impractical in most parts of the country, divisive, and unnecessary on the grounds that all the essential, shared doctrines of Christianity could be taught in the elementary schools without reference to the peculiar doctrines of each sect. None the less he had inherited responsibility for the separate schools from the School Act of 1841 and could see no way of abolishing them, given the union of the Canadas which ensured the Catholic minority of Canada West the powerful support in the legislature of their Lower Canadian brethren. Thus Ryerson found himself repeatedly forced to defend the status quo, or to justify a succession of unpalatable political compromises on the issue, in an attempt to fend off both the abolitionists and those who sought the extension of the Catholic system. The additional rights won by Roman Catholics in 1853, 1855, and 1863 were modest compared to their demands; Ryerson was largely successful in preserving the unity of the school system. But his role made him appear to endorse the survival of the separate schools against the clearly expressed will of the majority of politicians and electors in Canada West, and kept him deeply embroiled in public debate from 1852 to 1865, when the issue was finally disposed of as part of the confederation settlement.
If Ryerson disliked the separate school controversy, however, it was because he believed the question to be insoluble and divisive, not because he thought it inappropriate for public servants to become involved in political questions. The modern conventions of civil service neutrality and anonymity were still in a formative stage in the period and Ryerson stands out as a Canadian example of that transitional group of mid-Victorian reformer-bureaucrats whom George Kitson Clark has labelled “statesmen in disguise.” Because Ryerson believed that the disposition of educational issues should not be subject to politics or partyism, he had made the Education Office a semi-autonomous agency with no distinct ministerial head. Though formally responsible to the Executive Council, Ryerson himself assumed an almost ministerial role. He established policy, sought political support for it inside and outside parliament, and defended it in public. Moreover his notion of his public duty transcended responsibility to a particular ministry or even parliament. In effect he saw himself as the guardian of the public interest in all educational matters. Even in the late 1860s Ryerson did not think it anomalous, when his own views conflicted with those of a member of the cabinet, to confront the minister with the threat that he would take his side of the case directly to the public. Nor did he feel constrained to keep his activities within the formal jurisdiction of his office. While in England in 1851, for example, he acted as an emissary for the administration to the Colonial Office on the clergy reserves issue and published anonymous letters on the same subject in the Times. He regularly exchanged political gossip and advice with politicians to whom he was personally close, especially William Draper, Francis Hincks, and John A. Macdonald*, and on at least one occasion privately used his influence among Methodist leaders to sway their politics and their votes.
Throughout his superintendency, moreover, he remained an active participant in the affairs of Upper Canadian Methodism. With the exception of the year 1854–55, when a brief but tempestuous dispute over the rights of Methodist ministers to require attendance at class meetings led to Ryerson’s temporary resignation from conference, he continued to serve on important conference committees, including the board of Victoria College. In the late 1860s and in the 1870s he was an active supporter at conference of the negotiations for Methodist union and was honoured in 1874 for his contributions to the institutional development of Canadian Methodism by his election as the first president of the Methodist Church of Canada. This continuing clerical role, however, involved him once again in a highly contentious political issue, the university question.
Ryerson always claimed that he was a warm supporter of a provincial university, and no doubt he was in the sense that he generally supported any measure that would sustain effective professional schools and provide common standards for examinations and degrees among the various colleges in the province. Indeed he himself had written the original draft of Hincks’s University Act of 1853, which incorporated these ideas. But Ryerson was also a resolute defender of the denominational colleges as agencies for ensuring a Christian education and environment for young men who did not live at home. And he had an immense personal commitment to the survival of Victoria College, which he had done so much to foster in the 1830s and 1840s. For both reasons he was an energetic supporter of public aid to the denominational colleges throughout the 1850s and 1860s. He took a leading role between 1859 and 1863 in the concerted attempt by several denominations to force the government to give them access to the funds of the University of Toronto and in the abortive campaign in 1868 to prevent the new government of Ontario from abolishing the existing grants to the denominational colleges. In the controversy surrounding the question, Ryerson always attempted to claim the high ground as champion of the interests of Christianity and high standards in education. But to those who believed in the virtues of a civic university, free from sectarian control and large enough to offer a comprehensive liberal and professional education, he inevitably appeared as the partisan of denominational self-interest and sectarian political scheming.
The 1850s were for Ryerson among the most satisfying years of his life. He had experienced his share of personal tragedy in the two previous decades with the deaths of his first wife and both their children. By the 1850s, however, he and his second wife had settled in a comfortable house in Toronto, and had two growing children, Charles Egerton and Sophia. Though Charlie was a constant worry to his father because of his lack of earnestness and studiousness, he became a welcome sporting and sailing companion later in Ryerson’s life. Sophie, as Ryerson’s warm and often moving letters to his daughter reveal, was the love of his life, particularly since his relationship with his second wife was somewhat distant and at times strained. The 1850s were also among his most productive years as superintendent. In a sequence of major legislation between 1850 and 1855 he had put the common school system in order, begun the reform of the grammar schools, and played a role in reshaping the provincial university. He was on close terms with most of the influential politicians of the day, and received broad support from both parties and from the provincial press; even the Globe found good things to say about him for much of the decade. He basked in the accolades of Lord Elgin during ceremonies connected with the building of the Normal School in Toronto, and was invited in 1854 to serve as a member of a commission of inquiry into the state of King’s College (University of New Brunswick) in Fredericton, N.B. Among other ornaments of public approbation he accumulated three honorary degrees: a dd from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., in 1842; an ma from the University of Toronto in 1857; and an lld from Victoria College in 1861. His reputation and his public role seemed permanently and securely established.
Towards the end of the decade, however, both his personal and his professional circumstances became more troubled. In the late 1850s his pride was badly wounded by a contretemps with John Langton*, the provincial auditor. Langton, the first to admit that Ryerson was a superb administrator, had written in 1856 that Ryerson had “the genius of order and system,” and that “his accounts and vouchers are a model for all our public departments.” But between 1855 and 1857 Langton also discovered and exposed the fact that Ryerson had personally collected the interest on public funds held in his name. It was not an illegal practice at the time, and Ryerson believed he had ministerial approval for it, but it was also ceasing to be acceptable conduct in the public mind. He promised to pay back the entire amount and a sympathetic government granted him virtually the equivalent sum in back salary. But he was stung by the accusations against his probity and shaken by the way in which those charges remained current long after the issue had been formally settled. Then, in 1862, approaching the age of 60, Ryerson suffered a prolonged and severe illness marked by the recurrence of headaches, dizziness, and coughing. His illness forced him to reduce his traditional schedule of work and as he recovered in the succeeding years he took his first real vacations and embarked on a regimen of vigorous exercise. Among other things he built a skiff, and over the next few years sailed and rowed nine times from Toronto to Long Point, five of these adventures, much to the consternation of friends and family, being undertaken alone. Though he would regain much of his strength by the mid 1860s, he would suffer relapses for the rest of his life and was never again able to carry the burden of work he had once borne.
From the late 1850s onwards, moreover, he discovered that there was a price to be paid for insulating the department from the political process, for he began to have difficulties persuading the politicians to interest themselves in his projects, carry forward his legislation, and defend him when he was under attack. These difficulties, perhaps more than anything else, convinced him by the late 1860s that a ministerial head was essential if the interests of the department and the school system were to be adequately protected. At the same time he began to accumulate a growing number of enemies. His public attack in 1858 on the educational policies of the short-lived coalition between George Brown and the Lower Canadian Reformers marked the reopening of hostilities between Ryerson and Brown which would last until the latter’s death. Along with this incident his role in the university question and his close relations with John A. Macdonald alienated many leading Brownite Liberals. Nor did Ryerson learn prudence from the political controversies in which he found himself involved. When in 1867 the Reform party called for an end to coalitions and a return to party politics, Ryerson replied with a pamphlet entitled The new Canadian dominion: dangers and duties of the people in regard to their government, in which he returned to the themes of 1844, warning against the dangers of partyism – its “intolerance,” its “excesses and oppressions,” and the “unscrupulous partisanship” of “this hermaphrodite spawn of cast-off colonial despotism and selfishness.” All of this controversy contributed to what Oliver Mowat* would describe, in a letter to Ryerson in 1873, as “the antagonism towards you which has so long prevailed in the Liberal party.”
Illness and the frustrations of public life led Ryerson to talk sporadically about retirement throughout the 1860s. At the same time, however, he was anxious to complete his agenda for educational reform. In 1866–67 he made his last educational tour of Europe and America, out of which came two reports, written in 1868: one on the education of the deaf, dumb, and blind, and the other on the state of American and European education along with recommendations for the improvement of the Ontario system. Late in the same year he submitted draft legislation designed to improve the details of school law and to introduce universal free elementary education, compulsory attendance, and a new structure for secondary education.
His initial hopes for quick and easy passage of the school bill were soon dashed. In part this disappointment was due to the constant attacks mounted by the opposition Liberals, many of them directed at Ryerson personally. But it was also due to the emergence of real public debate about a wide variety of educational issues. Differences of opinion in the legislature and the press, along with opposition to parts of the bill from teachers’ organizations and from local opinion expressed during Ryerson’s tour of the province in 1869, led to the temporary withdrawal of the bill and to considerable modification of it. The new School Act, finally passed early in 1871, contained most of Ryerson’s major recommendations in one form or another and remains as one of the great landmarks of his career. But it was passed amidst a degree of political debate and personal bitterness not experienced by Ryerson since the late 1840s.
Ryerson’s last years in office were unhappy ones. Again some of this unhappiness was due to the political and personal antagonisms among Liberals over the previous 30 years – antagonisms that boiled over in 1872 in his bitter and sustained public conflict with Edward Blake*. But it was not merely a matter of personalities and political differences. From the administration of John Sandfield Macdonald* onwards, successive ministries were determined to regularize the procedures of the Education Office and, more importantly, to exercise a firm hand in educational policy-making. In Ryerson’s view this effort was an invasion of his prerogatives as well as a denigration of his own role to that of “a clerk,” and seemed motivated by the most base political partisanship. Each incursion – from the simple attempt by the provincial treasurer in 1868 to impose financial controls on the department to the suspension of his school regulations in 1872 and the plans to modify his book depository – was met with resistance and, too often, with a barrage of invective hurled at those he conceived to be his persecutors. In 1872 Blake seemed to invite conflict; Mowat was far more conciliatory. He sought Ryerson’s advice, allowed him considerable latitude in the administration of the department, and applied liberal amounts of soft sawder when Ryerson’s sensitivities were bruised. But he was no less determined than Blake to be his own master. As Mowat put it on one occasion when a quarrel threatened: “I would much rather cooperate with you . . . but if I must have a fight with the Chief Superintendent . . . instead of his co-operation, as in my position I ought to have, I must still do what I consider to be my duty.”
The conflicts of the years 1872–75 invited either resignation or dismissal. Yet neither option could be exercised. Ryerson repeatedly expressed a wish to resign but he did not have the financial resources to sustain himself independently: for years he had given generously to help finance a variety of Methodist causes including Victoria College, he had a nephew to educate, and he may also have lived somewhat beyond his means. Thus he needed to assure himself of a government pension and could not afford to make any grand gestures over policies with which he disagreed. Either Blake or Mowat would probably have welcomed his resignation but there were political difficulties in providing him with a permanent pension and differences within the Liberal party itself over the kind of reorganization the Education Office should undergo. Dismissal, on the other hand, was out of the question. Ryerson’s reputation remained high in many quarters and he was still, as even the Liberals recognized, a power among Methodist voters. It was not until late 1875 that Mowat finally took the matter in hand, and made the decision to create a ministry of education [see Adam Crooks] and to provide a pension for Ryerson. He formally left office in February 1876, just over a month before his 73rd birthday.
Retirement, however, did not mean a life of leisure. Since the early 1860s Ryerson had devoted his spare moments to what he was convinced was his last “mission” in life – a history of the United Empire Loyalists. In 1876 the project became his full-time occupation and most of that year was spent in England where he put in long hours of research in the British Museum. Over the succeeding five years he finished the two large volumes that make up The loyalists of America and their times. Beyond that he completed a school textbook on political economy and a history of Canadian Methodism. He was working on his autobiography when, in the summer of 1881, his health began to fail. He died on 19 Feb. 1882. Following a large and impressive funeral service he was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto.
Ryerson’s life spans the growth of Upper Canada virtually from first settlement to the social and economic maturity of the 1870s. For most of those years he was a major figure in its history. Particularly before 1850 he played a central part in the institutional growth of Methodism, one of the province’s largest denominations. As well, he helped to articulate and publicize “the grievances of Upper Canada,” and contributed to the debate about the nature of colonial-imperial relations. If most historians now reject an older view that Ryerson determined single-handed the results of the elections of 1836 and 1844, still he remains an influential figure in these events and one of the leading spokesmen for that majority of Upper Canadians who sought some middle way to reconcile self-government and the imperial tie.
But it is his contribution to Canadian education that remains his greatest legacy. He was one of the founders of Victoria College, its first principal, and a generous benefactor through some of its most difficult years. He was a vigorous protagonist of the right of all the denominational colleges to survive and prosper in the province. And he attempted to make the grant-aided schools universal and comprehensive and to create an effective system of public administration at both the local and provincial levels.
Few of his educational ideas were original. John Strachan, for one, had anticipated many of them, while others were the common coinage of an era when school systems were being constructed in many different places. Nor was his vision without flaws. He had an unsure hand when it came to providing for the advanced education of young women. To some of his contemporaries his version of non-denominationalism in education appeared as little more than a disguised and proselytizing form of evangelical Protestantism. And his hopes for social improvement through education were vitiated by a belief, widely shared by his generation, that social and economic inequalities were the unchangeable realities of man’s fallen estate. During his lifetime there were already divergent views about the merits of the school system, and since his death the assessments of his work have been diverse and conflicting. But on one point there has been consensus. More than any other person Ryerson gave the Ontario school system its particular character, one that, because of his enormous influence in his own generation, would become during the later 19th century a model for most of English-speaking Canada.
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
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Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
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Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
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New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
The Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP[4]) is a former American prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is found at 2027 Fairmount Avenue between Corinthian Avenue and North 22nd Street in the Fairmount section of the city, and was operational from 1829 until 1971. The penitentiary refined the revolutionary system of separate incarceration first pioneered at the Walnut Street Jail which emphasized principles of reform rather than punishment.[5]
Notorious criminals such as bank robber Willie Sutton and Al Capone were held inside its innovative wagon wheel design. At its completion, the building was the largest and most expensive public structure ever erected, and quickly became a model for more than 300 prisons worldwide.
The prison is currently a U.S. National Historic Landmark,[3] which is open to the public as a museum for tours seven days a week, twelve months a year 10 am to 5 pm.
I used 6 images in photomatix.Photographed with a Canon g2 converted to infrared.
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Everyone is always asking me for this! Here ya go! :)
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Most all of my work is composed and cropped in accordance with the golden ratio! The golden number and divine proportion informs all my logos and clothing designs!
Exalt your photography with Golden Ratio Compositions!
Golden Ratio Compositions & Secret Sacred Geometry for Photography, Fine Art, & Landscape Photographers: How to Exalt Art with Leonardo da Vinci's, Michelangelo's!
Love exalting the Venus Archetype in portrait and model photography! Shoot from thw heart and aim for the soul! Enjoy my Epic Book Exalting the Venus Archetype: Photographing Women Models!
Portrait, Swimsuit, Lingerie, Boudoir, Fine Art, & Fashion Photography Exalting the Venus Goddess Archetype: How to Shoot Epic ...
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Pretty Portraits & Headshots! Beautiful Surf Goddesses! Athletic Action Portraits of Swimsuit Bikini Models! Athena, Artemis, Helen, and Aphrodite! Fitness Model! Pretty Woman! Sexy hot women!
Epic Landscape Photography:
A Simple Guide to the Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography: Master Composition, Lenses, Camera Settings, Aperture, ISO, ... Hero's Odyssey Mythology Photography)
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Enjoy my physics!! Light Time Dimension Theory: The Foundational Physics Unifying Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: A Simple, Illustrated Introduction to the Physical Reality of a Fourth Expanding Dimension: dx4/dt=ic !
Beautiful Surf Goddesses! Athletic Action Portraits of Swimsuit Bikini Models! Athena, Artemis, Helen, and Aphrodite!
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
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Atheist myths debunked.
The development of order.
One of many questions’ atheists are unable to answer is:
Why is there order in the universe?
Order denotes purpose. Purpose requires a purposeful creation, which atheists deny.
There are several laws of nature and principles of science that atheists dearly wish would not exist.
Among these are:
The Law of Cause and Effect, the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Biogenesis.
These laws frustrate all attempts by atheists to replace God with ‘naturalism’ - their extraordinary belief that everything arose from nothing of its own volition, progressively increasing in order and potential, by entirely, natural processes.
Every natural, origin scenario (naturalism) defies explanation of the existence of order in the universe.
The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the building blocks of the universe, matter and energy, cannot be created by natural means.
The Second Law tells us matter/energy does not increase in order and potential. It tells us that, over time, the natural tendency is towards disorder and decreasing potential, from an obvious, original peak. There cannot be any natural, ongoing, development of order. This is an inconvenient fact for all atheist, natural, origin scenarios, which require the exact opposite; a simple, natural origin of matter/energy from nothing, progressively increasing in order and potential.
In addition to this inconvenient truth is the fact that an effect cannot be greater than its cause. A simple, random, chaotic, or disordered origin cannot naturally lead to a complex, ordered result. This causality principle endorses the Second Law.
The Second Law tells us order/complexity/potential does not increase naturally, but tends to decrease, and the Law of Cause and Effect tells us the result of a process cannot be superior to the totality of its original cause or causes. There cannot subsequently be more potential or order in an effect/entity than that which was intrinsic to its origin. Furthermore, the tendency, over time, is for this potential to decrease.
The absolute killer for atheist, origins mythology is that: even if progressively increasing order/potential in the universe was possible, it would still denote purpose.
What inherent principle could support increasing order/improvement as a likely outcome of purely, natural processes?
For example: If, as atheists are compelled to believe, matter/energy automatically progressed, of its own volition, from its origin, to acquire an inherent predisposition for the spontaneous generation of life (so-called abiogenesis), which (incidentally) violates the Law of Biogenesis, they have to explain how such a predisposition/blueprint for life originated in an unconscious, unplanned, purposeless universe?
They may argue that the origin of life is a just a chance event, but the mechanism/constituents of any chance event must have the intrinsic capacity or capability to produce the chance outcome. A random, number generator may generate an unlikely combination of numbers by chance, but it cannot generate any numbers at all unless it is devised/constructed with the ability to do so. An unlikely event may happen by chance, but only if such an event is intrinsically possible. The atheist ploy, of just ignoring laws of nature, spectacularly fails.
How could the potential for constructive improvement develop autonomously in unplanned, unconscious, purposeless, dumb matter, which originated from nothing? The obvious, rational answer is that it couldn’t.
Atheists often employ bizarre arguments to justify their denial of the universality of laws which refute their beliefs. One of these, which has attained common currency among atheists, is the idea that snowflakes and crystals are examples of natural development of order. And that they somehow contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Here is an exchange I had with an atheist which illustrates this:
An atheist (Aimless Alliterations) in answer to part of my original post where I cited the Second Law of Thermodynamics, wrote this:
“Oh, goodness gracious. You tied yourself up in all sorts of knots a while back with this one . You really need to read the science and understand it before making statements like this.
Quoting me:
"The second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the spontaneous generation of life from non-life as a chance event. "
“Really? Where does it state this?”
Quoting me again:
"According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when left to themselves, things naturally become more disordered, rather than more ordered."
“Okay then..............account for snowflakes, rock crystals, the grading of sediment in a river system”.
My reply:
You wrote:
"According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when left to themselves, things naturally become more disordered, rather than more ordered." Okay then..............account for snowflakes, rock crystals, the grading of sediment in a river system."
I am afraid it is you who doesn’t understand the Second Law. What I said is perfectly correct.
There are only 2 ways the effects of entropy can be temporarily decreased, halted or reversed by an input of energy. Either by a directive means or agent guiding the energy input, OR a directive or conversion mechanism possessed by the recipient of the energy to utilise it in a constructive way.
Raw (unguided) energy (such as random heat) tends to increase entropy and time makes it worse.
Snowflakes, rock crystals etc. do not violate the Law of Thermodynamics, although atheists who hate all natural laws that interfere with their ideology dearly wish they did. They act only according to their pre-coded, atomic structure, and furthermore they are formed by the removal of heat, being transferred from them to their surroundings, rather than the opposite, which evolutionists require for abiogenesis.
Regarding the grading of sediment, I am surprised you mention that, because we know that is how most strata are formed, which effectively demolishes the uniformitarian interpretation of the geologic column and the fossil record. In this case, the grading is guided by the physical properties of the particles (size, shape, weight etc.) obeying physical laws. And, it will in time, be eroded and disorganised by the same forces that created it.
Abiogenesis (life arising of its own accord by natural processes from sterile matter) certainly does violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because it requires a reversal of the effects of entropy.
Atheists and evolutionists often argue that abiogenesis doesn’t violate the Second Law because the Earth is an ‘open system’ which allows an input of energy from outside itself, namely the Sun.
They claim that the law of entropy only applies to ‘closed systems. This claim is obviously spurious, because firstly, we can observe entropy happening all around us. We are in the open system of the Earth, and yet we are well aware of entropy. We see that the Sun does not halt or reverse entropy, in fact we see the opposite. The raw energy and heat from the Sun, unless harnessed, does damage, things all around us obey the law - they deteriorate, rot, erode and decay, they do not naturally improve. If you paint your house, the Sun, and the weather effects caused by the Sun, will eventually damage the paintwork, it will crack and peel after a few years. The hotter the Sun (the greater the energy input) the quicker it will happen.
Secondly, even if it were true that in an open system, things can defy the law of entropy, natural laws are laws for the whole universe, and the universe, as a whole, is a closed system.
So, what can we deduce from this?
Can the effects of entropy ever be reversed of halted?
Obviously, when you paint your house, you are reversing the bad effects of entropy for a short period, but you have to keep doing it, it is not permanent. Moreover, the energy you are using to repair and temporarily reverse the effects of entropy, is directed and guided by your skill and intelligence.
So, the atheist argument about the Earth being an open system is clearly not a valid one.
To conclude: We know that the energy input to the so-called Primordial Soup would have been raw, random, unguided energy. So the only other possibility to reverse the effects of entropy is that a directive or conversion mechanism was possessed by the recipient of the energy to utilise it in a constructive way, i.e. that basic matter (chemistry) is somehow inherently predisposed with the potential/blueprint for creating life and the information for life.
Please explain what that directive mechanism for the constructive utilisation of raw energy is - and where that inherent potential for the reversal of entropy and the construction of life comes from?
We certainly don't see abiogenesis happening naturally today, it doesn't even happen artificially in contrived experiments. To claim it happened long ago as a one-off phenomenon in some imagined scenario is not science, it is just pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Atheist reply:
Quoting me:
“Snowflakes, rock crystals etc. do not violate the Law of Thermodynamics, although atheists who hate all natural laws that interfere with their ideology dearly wish they did. They act only according to their pre-coded, atomic structure, and furthermore they are formed by the removal of heat, being transferred from them to their surroundings...”
“So in other words they become MORE ordered despite become cooler? So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated because there is a REDUCTION in entropy? According to you this should be impossible.
You certainly don't understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics......or maybe you do but are simply lying about it to justify your absurd claims?”
My reply:
“You wrote:
"So in other words they become MORE ordered despite become cooler? So, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated because there is a REDUCTION in entropy? According to you this should be impossible.
You certainly don't understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics......or maybe you do but are simply lying about it to justify your absurd claims?"
Oh, for goodness sake! I warned you about scouring the internet searching for answers from quack, atheist websites. They are presented by people as clueless and gullible as the people they are trying to convince, or by people who are deliberately trying to deceive the public for ideological reasons.
Atheists should know that snowflakes, crystals etc. are not examples of the development of order. By regularly presenting them as such, they reveal either their deceitfulness or their complete misunderstanding of science.
There is NO reduction in entropy, the Second Law is NOT, and CANNOT be, violated, as you claim. If you knew even the basics of the Second Law, you would not make a fool of yourself by saying it is.
Snowflakes have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the increase in complexity/order required for the origin of life.
Snowflakes, crystals etc. are simply reverting to the natural state dictated by their atomic structure as they cool. If you knew anything about the Second Law you would know that the natural, intrinsic order of matter is highest at lower temperatures. You would know that the application of raw (undirected) heat/energy increases entropy.
The natural, intrinsic order of substances is greatest at absolute zero.
That does not mean cooling causes a decrease in entropy overall, the heat/energy is transferred from one substance to its surroundings and the entropy is increased in the surroundings.
Snowflakes have absolutely no relevance to abiogenesis, because there is no increase in order above or beyond that which is intrinsic to the inherent, atomic properties of water. By lowering the temperature, the apparent increase in order is not an actual increase in, or the development of order, but simply a restoration at the atomic level to the original, natural, ordered state of water at the lower temperature.
If a rubber ball is squashed (made asymmetrical) by applying a heavy weight to it, would it be classed as an increase in order when the weight is removed, and it returns to its original, symmetrical shape?
According to the ridiculous, atheist analogy of snowflakes and crystals it would be. It only goes to show that atheists will clutch at any straw, however silly, to justify their ideology. They have the audacity to challenge and attempt to undermine natural laws with their nonsense and then accuse those who uphold them of being unscientific and ignorant. Their barefaced cheek never ceases to amaze me.
I repeat my question, which you have failed to answer:
We know that the energy input to the so-called Primordial Soup would have been raw, random, unguided energy. So the only other possibility to reverse the effects of entropy is that a directive or conversion mechanism was possessed by the recipient of the energy to utilise it in a constructive way, i.e. that basic matter (chemistry) is somehow inherently predisposed with the potential/blueprint for creating life and the information for life. Please explain what that directive mechanism for the constructive utilisation of raw energy is - and where that inherent potential for the reversal of entropy and the construction of life comes from?
The basic, inherent, atomic structure of water, and of all matter, along with natural law, is part of the initial order of the universe which became present at the moment of its creation. It is not developing order, such as that which would be required for abiogenesis or cosmic and biological evolution.”
Atheist reply:
“You really, really don't understand The Second Law of Thermodynamics and you shouldn't write any further drivel which relies on this.
Let's look at you original claim: The second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the spontaneous generation of life from non-life as a chance event. Fail - The Second Law of Thermodynamics is nothing to do with chance.
But I'll tell you what .........rather than carry on with this nonsense I'll refer you to a very useful site that you (and anyone else) can access and it'll tell you what entropy is and how it relates to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn't talk about origin of life or anything like that. It uses quite simple language and you need to read it and UNDERSTAND it.
entropysimple.oxy.edu/”
My reply:
You wrote:
"You asked for references to self-replicating information. There are many to choose from but here you go. Enjoy the bed-time reading."
There you go again - giving me links to internet sites, which I am quite capable of accessing myself. I am well aware of how to Google endless points of view on virtually every subject under the Sun. So please stop insulting my intelligence, I have seen all this stuff before. I asked you to give me examples yourself, a simple enough request. I don't want links to internet sites (or long copy and pasted tracts) which can be found on the internet to justify virtually anything. What is your problem with actually answering questions yourself?
You wrote:
"You really, really don't understand The Second Law of Thermodynamics and you shouldn't write any further drivel which relies on this.
Let's look at you original claim: The second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the spontaneous generation of life from non-life as a chance event. Fail - The Second Law of Thermodynamics is nothing to do with chance."
You accuse me of not knowing anything about the Second Law, after your astonishing, earlier statement:
"So in other words they become MORE ordered despite become cooler? So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated because there is a REDUCTION in entropy? According to you this should be impossible."
You, who wants to claim that (what Einstein called the premier law in science) can be violated have the audacity to accuse me of not knowing anything about the Second Law. Unbelievable!
The reason I used the word 'chance' is perfectly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the subject, which obviously doesn't include you.
Only DIRECTED energy can enable a temporary decrease in entropy, it does NOT HAPPEN by CHANCE. There has to be a guiding principle or agent either: 1) acting directly on the energy source - or: 2) a directive or conversion mechanism possessed by the recipient of the energy. A decrease in entropy doesn't happen randomly or as a 'chance' event.
You believe the atheist nonsense that snowflakes/crystals are an example of an increase in order, which demonstrates your dire knowledge of the subject.
If you knew anything about the Second Law you would not have cited such a spurious example, apparently you are willing to believe anything you read on atheist/evolutionist websites as though it is gospel.
Perhaps you can address the question I asked in my last post: If a rubber ball is squashed (made asymmetrical) by applying a heavy weight to it, would it be classed as an increase in order when the weight is removed and it returns to its original, symmetrical shape? But I doubt it, answering questions is not exactly your forte. You would rather nit pick about the qualifications of anyone who disagrees with atheist pseudoscience.
Atheist reply:
Quoting me:
“There you go again - giving me links to internet sites, which I am quite capable of accessing myself. I am well aware of how to Google endless points of view on virtually every subject under the Sun."
“Well you asked for examples and I provided these for you. These are references to well-respected research which provides evidence which you appear to be either too lazy or unwilling to research for yourself.
If you were aware of such research would you have written the nonsense you pour forth? ............Probably.
You also appear to have some sort of cognitive dissonance as far as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy. I provide you with an excellent resource and you fail to take advantage of it to understand the subject matter properly.
That really is astonishing!
All your rubber ball example does is illustrate the law of conservation of energy.”
My reply:
You wrote:
"Well you asked for examples and I provided these for you. These are references to well-respected research which provides evidence which you appear to be either too lazy or unwilling to research for yourself."
No! You are either too lazy to answer any questions yourself, or you are unable to. I suspect it is the latter, because you have already demonstrated from previous remarks that your knowledge of the subject is absolutely dire. Yet you insist on continuing to try to bluff it out, by either copying or pasting other people's work or posting links to anything you think supports your argument.
I'm afraid you have been sussed.
You have already put your foot in it - big time, by citing snowflakes and crystals as an example of developing order.
You mistakenly thought all you had to do to win an argument was to parrot stuff direct from an atheist/evolutionist website. When, in fact, parroting the sort of pseudoscientific rubbish that atheist/evolutionist websites are filled with, is a sure way of making yourself look extremely foolish.
You wrote:
"All your rubber ball example does is illustrate the law of conservation of energy"
What sort of damn-fool answer is that?
I asked: "If a rubber ball is squashed (made asymmetrical) by applying a heavy weight to it, would it be classed as an increase in order when the weight is removed and it returns to its original, symmetrical shape?"
IS IT AN INCREASE IN ORDER OR NOT?
Please answer the question.
Because if it isn't an increase in order, it completely demolishes both your snowflake/crystal argument and the credibility of atheist/evolutionist so-called 'science'.
No wonder you don't want to answer.
**************************************************
Four and a half years later.
I am still waiting for any atheist to answer the rubber ball question?
The full debate can be seen here:
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/16208667768
___________________________________
Another argument employed by atheists to justify their denial of the Law of Cause and Effect is ‘quantum mechanics’.
Their claim being; because quantum effects appear to behave randomly, they could also be uncaused.
This is complete nonsense, quantum effects may appear random and uncaused, but they are definitely not uncaused. Even if their direct cause is difficult to determine, they are part of a CAUSED, physical universe.
The idea that anything within a CAUSED universe can be causeless is ridiculous, because whatever caused the whole universe, is the original cause of everything within it.
Furthermore, just because directly traceable causes cannot be determined, doesn’t mean a direct cause doesn’t exist.
For example:
It can be compared to the randomness of a number coming up from throwing a dice. It may appear random and without a direct cause, but it isn’t. Because if we knew all the complicated and variable factors involved – such as the exact orientation of the dice as it leaves the hand, the velocity of the throw and the amount of spin etc., we could predict the number in advance.
So, just because, in some instances, direct causes are too incredibly complex to accurately predict the result, doesn’t mean there is no cause.
Quantum effects - The smoke and mirrors trick.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/35908166441
Evolution, multi-million year timescale refured.
Rapid strata formation - field evidence.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/albums/72157635944...
Dr James Tour - 'The Origin of Life' - Abiogenesis decisively refuted.
youtu.be/B1E4QMn2mxk
Armed with a deputy sheriff sized Slurpee, it's time to fight some crime in Johnson County.
The mission of the JCSO is to serve the people of Johnson County with the foundational principles of service, justice and fundamental fairness.
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The Alexander Hamilton Custom House is one of New York's finest examples of Beaux Arts architecture, incorporating City Beautiful Movement planning principles with architecture, engineering, and fine arts. The seven story structure with 450,000 square feet sits on three city block in Bowling Green.
Is is here, at the southern terminus of the old Algonquin trade route, Wiechquaekeck Trail, that Peter Minuet purchased the island of Manhattes for trinkets valued at 60 guilders, or about $24, from the Lenape Indians in 1626. Soon thereafter the Dutch West India Company built Fort Amsterdam on this site, which came to be the nucleus for the New Amsterdam settlement. After the American Revolution the fort was replaced by the brick Government House, which was intended to be but never used as a residence for the President. Instead it became the residence of New York Governors DeWitt Clinton and John Jay. The building served briefly as the Custom House from 1799 and 1815 before being torn down and replaced with rowhouses.
Before a federal income tax was imposed in 1916, a primary source of revenue for the federal government was custom duty. New York City, as the country's most active port, has had a Custom House since the country's founding in in 1781. In 1899, the United States Department of the Treasury acquired the Bowling Green property and sponsored a competition to build a new U.S. Custom House. Minnesotan Cass Gilbert, who later designed the Woolworth Building, won the competition by designing a building that was not just a functional building for commerce, but exuded a palatial grandeur. Construction began in 1900 and completed in 1907.
The interior of the building is dominated by the huge rotunda, which survives as one of the largest public spaces in New York. Commissioned In 1936 as part of the Treasury Relief Art Project, Reginald Marsh was commissioned to paint the elliptical space around the 140-ton skylight with sixteen frescoes. The larger sections portray eight successive stages of the arrival of an ocean liner in the harbor. Eight smaller panels, painted in grisaille to simulate statuary, depict famous explorers like Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Giovanni da Verrazano and Henry Hudson.
Above the main cornice on the sixth story are standing sculptures representing the great commercial sea-faring nations, from the Phoenicians to the Americans.
Central to Gilbert's design of the Custom House were four separate sculptures to be placed at the front entrance of the Custom House, representing four continents (from left to right) - Asia, America, Europe and Africa. Gilbert asked both Daniel Chester French and August Saint-Gaudens both to submit designs for the sculptures. Saint-Gaudens declined the invitation, citing other work he was occupied with, so French received the commission. French began designing the sculptures of "Continents" in 1903 and they were completed and installed in 1907. Art scholars consider French's "Continents" to be perhaps the best examples of architecture sculpture in the United States. Each of the four "Continents" represent a view of the continents through French's early 20th century lens: Asia and Africa are still cloaked in mystery, Europe is in the waning years of its colonial conquests, and America is emerging as a new, vibrant society.
The building was subsequently abandoned in the 1970's and was scheduled for demolition before being saved and restored in the early 1980's. In 1987, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York occupied the building and in 1994, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian took over two floors of the Old Custom House.
The United States Custom House was designated a landmark by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. Its interior was designated separately in 1979.
National Historic Register #72000889
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
The Epic Seascape! Malibu Sea Caves!
Landscape photography is not only about traveling through space, but it is also about traveling through time. One may return to the same beach time and again throughout the seasons to find a million different universes, changing in an infinitude of manners with each passing wave.
Not only do we voyage outwardly to get the shot, but we travel even further inwardly. While I spend my year trekking along the John Muir Trail, and on through Zion, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and the Colorado Plateau, my heart always finds its home in these Malibu sea caves, where I have stood in awe during all hours of the day and night.
Included within are a few shots that only I have so far captured, including a miraculous winter solstice sunrise.
Best wishes throughout the coming year!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto by architects Pedro Ramalho and Luis Ramalho. Porto - Portugal
bi-cam using pinhole side + Kodak Ultra 400 (expired January 2007)
The foundation of British policing was greatly influenced by some-time Home Secretary and Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert was born in Bury, which is now policed by Greater Manchester Police.
Born at Chamber Hall in Bury, he was the eldest son of the Lancashire magnate Sir Robert Peel, senior. The young Robert Peel was educated by James Hargreaves who was the curate of Bury Parish Church. Peel completed his education at Harrow and Oxford.
Between 1822 and 1830 he was Home Secretary. He abolished the death penalty on over one hundred offences. He organised the inspection of large prisons, abolished gaolers' fees and employed the first female prison warders.
But he is most remembered for the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act, which established a single, full-time and professional police force for London (with the exception of the City of London), which acted as a model for later police forces throughout the country.
It was Peel who insisted that the police service should be civil, rather than military in nature and who decided that the uniform of the first police officers should resemble civilian clothing, rather than military attire, in order to stress that the “New Police” had evolved directly from the system of locally appointed, civilian Parish and Town Constables that carried out policing duties prior to 1829.
The now famous 9 Peel Principles were drawn from his ideas about how the police should operate:
1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.
3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.
7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.
These principles were adopted by police forces across the world and are still at the heat of the modern police service.
Sir Robert later went on to become Prime Minister twice, his second ministry lasting from 1841 to 1846. He died on 2nd July 1850. As well as the legacy of the police service, Sir Robert Peel's name introduced two new words into the English language: "Peelers" and "Bobbies".
To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit www.gmp.police.uk
You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.
Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.
You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
Everything you can imagine is real.
~ Pablo Picasso
I wasn't sure whether to put up this shot or not. But then I did, hope you all enjoy this one. This is a 3 shot HDR with a bit of other post processing =)
Explored #346 - Aug 15th, 2008 =) ...Thank u so much guys; u r the stars here... hugs n kisses for u all.. =)
Origins of a 14 Trillion Dollar Defecit
Project for the New American CenturyFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Project for the New American Century
Formation 1997
Extinction 2006
Public policy think tank
Location Washington, D.C.
Website newamericancentury.org
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from 1997 to 2006. It was co-founded as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership."[1] Fundamental to the PNAC were the view that "American leadership is both good for America and good for the world" and support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."[2] The PNAC exerted influence on high-level U.S. government officials in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush and affected the Bush Administration's development of military and foreign policies, especially involving national security and the Iraq War.[3][4]
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Statement of Principles
1.2 Calls for regime change in Iraq during Clinton years
1.3 Rebuilding America's Defenses
1.4 Post-9/11 call for regime change in Iraq
1.5 Human Rights and the EU Arms Embargo
1.6 End of the organization
2 Controversy
2.1 US world dominance
2.2 Excessive focus on military strategies, neglect of diplomatic strategies
2.3 "New Pearl Harbor"
2.4 Inexperienced in realities of war
2.5 PNAC role in promoting invasion of Iraq
2.6 PNAC role in promoting genetically operating racist bioweapons
3 Persons associated with the PNAC
3.1 Project directors
3.2 Project staff
3.3 Former directors and staff
3.4 Signatories to Statement of Principles
3.5 Signatories or contributors to other significant letters or reports[15]
3.6 Associations with Bush administration
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
6.1 External links
6.2 Further reading and media programs: Analysis and criticism
History Statement of PrinciplesPNAC's first public act was releasing a "Statement of Principles" on June 3, 1997, which was signed by both its members and a variety of other notable conservative politicians and journalists (see Signatories to Statement of Principles). The statement began by framing a series of questions, which the rest of the document proposes to answer:
As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?[5]
In response to these questions, the PNAC states its aim to "remind America" of "lessons" learned from American history, drawing the following "four consequences" for America in 1997:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; [and]
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
While "Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today," the "Statement of Principles" concludes, "it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."[5]
[edit] Calls for regime change in Iraq during Clinton yearsThe goal of regime change in Iraq remained the consistent position of PNAC throughout the 1997-2000 Iraq disarmament crisis.[6][7]
Richard Perle, who later became a core member of PNAC, was involved in similar activities to those pursued by PNAC after its formal organization. For instance, in 1996 Perle composed a report that proposed regime changes in order to restructure power in the Middle East. The report was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm and called for removing Saddam Hussein from power, as well as other ideas to bring change to the region. The report was delivered to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[8] Two years later, in 1998, Perle and other core members of the PNAC - Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, and John Bolton - "were among the signatories of a letter to President Clinton calling for the removal of Hussein."[8] Clinton did seek regime change in Iraq, and this position was sanctioned by the United Nations. These UN sanctions were considered ineffective by the neoconservative forces driving the PNAC.
The PNAC core members followed up these early efforts with a letter to Republican members of the U.S. Congress Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott,[9] urging Congress to act. The PNAC also supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (H.R.4655), which President Clinton had signed into law.[10]
On January 16, 1998, following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, members of the PNAC, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Zoellick drafted an open letter to President Bill Clinton, posted on its website, urging President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power using U.S. diplomatic, political, and military power. The signers argue that Saddam would pose a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, if he succeeded in maintaining what they asserted was a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction. They also state: "we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections" and "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council." They argue that an Iraq war would be justified by Hussein's defiance of UN "containment" policy and his persistent threat to U.S. interests.[11]
On November 16, 1998, citing Iraq's demand for the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors and the removal of Richard Butler as head of the inspections regime, Kristol called again for regime change in an editorial in his online magazine, The Weekly Standard: "...any sustained bombing and missile campaign against Iraq should be part of any overall political-military strategy aimed at removing Saddam from power."[12] Kristol states that Paul Wolfowitz and others believed that the goal was to create "a 'liberated zone' in southern Iraq that would provide a safe haven where opponents of Saddam could rally and organize a credible alternative to the present regime ... The liberated zone would have to be protected by U.S. military might, both from the air and, if necessary, on the ground."
In January 1999, the PNAC circulated a memo that criticized the December 1998 bombing of Iraq in Operation Desert Fox as ineffective, questioned the viability of Iraqi democratic opposition which the U.S. was supporting through the Iraq Liberation Act, and referred to any "containment" policy as an illusion.[13]
[edit] Rebuilding America's DefensesIn September 2000, the PNAC published a controversial 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. The report, which lists as Project Chairmen Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt and as Principal Authors. Thomas Donnelly, quotes from the PNAC's June 1997 "Statement of Principles" and proceeds "from the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces."[14][15]
The report argues:
The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable, and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself.[14]
After its title page, the report features a page entitled "About the Project for the New American Century", quoting key passages from its 1997 "Statement of Principles":
“ [What we require is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership of the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of the past century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.[14]
”
In its "Preface", in highlighted boxes, Rebuilding America's Defenses states that it aims to:
ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for the U.S. military:
defend the American homeland;
fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs”;
and that
To carry out these core missions, we need to provide sufficient force and budgetary allocations. In particular, the United States must:
MAINTAIN NUCLEAR STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY, basing the U.S. deterrent upon a global, nuclear net assessment that weighs the full range of current and emerging threats, not merely the U.S.-Russia balance.
RESTORE THE PERSONNEL STRENGTH of today’s force to roughly the levels anticipated in the “Base Force” outlined by the Bush Administration, an increase in active-duty strength from 1.4 million to 1.6 million.
REPOSITION U.S. FORCES to respond to 21st century strategic realities by shifting permanently-based forces to Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia, and by changing naval deployment patterns to reflect growing U.S. strategic concerns in East Asia. (iv)
It specifies the following goals:
MODERNIZE CURRENT U.S. FORCES SELECTIVELY, proceeding with the F-22 program while increasing purchases of lift, electronic support and other aircraft; expanding submarine and surface combatant fleets; purchasing Comanche helicopters and medium-weight ground vehicles for the Army, and the V-22 Osprey “tilt-rotor” aircraft for the Marine Corps.
CANCEL “ROADBLOCK” PROGRAMS such as the Joint Strike Fighter, CVX aircraft carrier,[16] and Crusader howitzer system that would absorb exorbitant amounts of Pentagon funding while providing limited improvements to current capabilities. Savings from these canceled programs should be used to spur the process of military transformation.
DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world.[17]
CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service – U.S. Space Forces – with the mission of space control.
EXPLOIT THE “REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS” to insure the long-term superiority of U.S. conventional forces. Establish a two-stage transformation process which
• maximizes the value of current weapons systems through the application of advanced technologies, and,
• produces more profound improvements in military capabilities, encourages competition between single services and joint-service experimentation efforts.
INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually. (v)
The report emphasizes:
Fulfilling these requirements is essential if America is to retain its militarily dominant status for the coming decades. Conversely, the failure to meet any of these needs must result in some form of strategic retreat. At current levels of defense spending, the only option is to try ineffectually to “manage” increasingly large risks: paying for today’s needs by shortchanging tomorrow’s; withdrawing from constabulary missions to retain strength for large-scale wars; “choosing” between presence in Europe or presence in Asia; and so on. These are bad choices. They are also false economies. The “savings” from withdrawing from the Balkans, for example, will not free up anywhere near the magnitude of funds needed for military modernization or transformation. But these are false economies in other, more profound ways as well. The true cost of not meeting our defense requirements will be a lessened capacity for American global leadership and, ultimately, the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity. (v-vi)
In relation to the Persian Gulf, citing particularly Iraq and Iran, Rebuilding America's Defenses states that "while the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides the immediate justification [for U.S. military presence], the need for a substantial American force presence in the [Persian] Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" and "Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the [Persian] Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region."[14]
One of the core missions outlined in the 2000 report Rebuilding America's Defenses is "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars."[4][18]
[edit] Post-9/11 call for regime change in IraqOn September 20, 2001 (nine days after the September 11, 2001 attacks), the PNAC sent a letter to President George W. Bush, advocating "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," or regime change:
...even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.[4][19]
From 2001 through 2002, the co-founders and other members of the PNAC published articles supporting the United States' invasion of Iraq.[20] On its website, the PNAC promoted its point of view that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would be "surrender to terrorism."[21][22][23][24]
In 2003, during the period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the PNAC had seven full-time staff members in addition to its board of directors.[1]
[edit] Human Rights and the EU Arms EmbargoIn 2005, the European Union considered lifting the arms embargo placed on Beijing. The embargo was put in place after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The PNAC, along with other concerned countries, composed a letter to Javier Solana, asking that the EU not lift the embargo until three conditions were met:
A general amnesty of all prisoners of conscience, including those imprisoned in connection to peaceful protest in 1989, and public trials by independent court for those charged with ‘criminal’ acts.
A reversal of the official verdict on the 1989 movement as a ‘counter-revolution riot,’ allowing an independent ‘truth commission’ to investigate and provide a comprehensive account of the killings, torture, and arbitrary detention, and bringing to justice those responsible for the violations of human rights involved.
Adoption and implementation of the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights, taking concrete actions to enforce other international human rights conventions and treaties that China has joined.
The justification for these conditions was explained as follows:
“Doing away with this sanction without corresponding improvements in human rights... would send the wrong signal to the Chinese people, including especially those of us who lost loved ones, who are persecuted, and for all Chinese who continue to struggle for the ideal that inspired the 1989 movement.”[25]
[edit] End of the organizationBy the end of 2006, PNAC was "reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website", with "a single employee" "left to wrap things up", according to the BBC News.[26] According to Tom Barry, "The glory days of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) quickly passed."[27] In 2006, Gary Schmitt, former executive director of the PNAC, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of its program in Advanced Strategic Studies, stated that PNAC had come to a natural end:
When the project started, it was not intended to go forever. That is why we are shutting it down. We would have had to spend too much time raising money for it and it has already done its job. We felt at the time that there were flaws in American foreign policy, that it was neo-isolationist. We tried to resurrect a Reaganite policy. Our view has been adopted. Even during the Clinton administration we had an effect, with Madeleine Albright [then secretary of state] saying that the United States was 'the indispensable nation'. But our ideas have not necessarily dominated. We did not have anyone sitting on Bush's shoulder. So the work now is to see how they are implemented.[26]
PNAC's successor organization is the Foreign Policy Initiative.[28][29]
[edit] Controversy[edit] US world dominanceAccording to critics, including Paul Reynolds, PNAC promoted American "hegemony" and "full-spectrum" dominance in its publications.[30][31][32][33]
Ebrahim Afsah, in "Creed, Cabal, or Conspiracy – The Origins of the Current Neo-Conservative Revolution in US Strategic Thinking", published in the German Law Journal, cited Jochen Bölsche's view that the goal of the PNAC was world dominance or global hegemony by the United States.[34][35] According to Bölsche, Rebuilding America's Defenses "was developed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby, and is devoted to matters of 'maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests.'"[34][35]
George Monbiot, a political activist from the United Kingdom, stated: "...to pretend that this battle begins and ends in Iraq requires a willful denial of the context in which it occurs. That context is a blunt attempt by the superpower to reshape the world to suit itself."[36]
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan countered such criticism in his statement during a debate on whether or not "The United States Is, and Should Be, an Empire":
"There is a vital distinction between being powerful--even most powerful in the world--and being an empire. Economic expansion does not equal imperialism, and there is no such thing as "cultural imperialism". If America is an empire, then why was it unable to mobilize its subjects to support the war against Saddam Hussein? America is not an empire, and its power stems from voluntary associations and alliances. American hegemony is relatively well accepted because people all over the world know that U.S. forces will eventually withdraw from the occupied territories. The effect of declaring that the United States is an empire would not only be factually wrong, but strategically catastrophic. Contrary to the exploitative purposes of the British, the American intentions of spreading democracy and individual rights are incompatible with the notion of an empire. The genius of American power is expressed in the movie The Godfather II, where, like Hyman Roth, the United States has always made money for its partners. America has not turned countries in which it intervened into deserts; it enriched them. Even the Russians knew they could surrender after the Cold War without being subjected to occupation."[37]
[edit] Excessive focus on military strategies, neglect of diplomatic strategiesJeffrey Record, of the Strategic Studies Institute, in his monograph Bounding the Global War on Terrorism, Gabriel Kolko, research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, and author of Another Century of War? (The New Press, 2002), in his article published in CounterPunch, and William Rivers Pitt, in Truthout, respectively, argued that the PNAC's goals of military hegemony exaggerated what the military can accomplish, that they failed to recognize "the limits of US power", and that favoring pre-emptive exercise of military might over diplomatic strategies could have "adverse side effects."[38][39][40] (Paul Reynolds and Max Boot have made similar observations.[30][31])
The Sydney Morning Herald published an English translation of an article published in German in Der Spiegel summarizing former President Jimmy Carter's position and stating that President Carter:
judges the PNAC agenda in the same way. At first, argues Carter, Bush responded to the challenge of September 11 in an effective and intelligent way, "but in the meantime a group of conservatives worked to get approval for their long held ambitions under the mantle of 'the war on terror'." The restrictions on civil rights in the US and at Guantanamo, cancellation of international accords, "contempt for the rest of the world", and finally an attack on Iraq "although there is no threat to the US from Baghdad" - all these things will have devastating consequences, according to Carter. "This entire unilateralism", warns the ex-President, "will increasingly isolate the US from those nations that we need in order to do battle with terrorism".[34]
[edit] "New Pearl Harbor"Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor" (51).[14]
Though not arguing that Bush administration PNAC members were complicit in those attacks, other social critics such as commentator Manuel Valenzuela and journalist Mark Danner,[41][42][43] investigative journalist John Pilger, in New Statesman,[44] and former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle Bernard Weiner, in CounterPunch,[45] all argue that PNAC members used the events of 9/11 as the "Pearl Harbor" that they needed––that is, as an "opportunity" to "capitalize on" (in Pilger's words), in order to enact long-desired plans.
[edit] Inexperienced in realities of warFormer US Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin and UK Labour MP and Father of the House of Commons, Tam Dalyell, criticized PNAC members for promoting policies which support an idealized version of war, even though only a handful of PNAC members have served in the military or, if they served, never seen combat.[46]
As quoted in Paul Reynolds' BBC News report, David Rothkopf stated:
Their [The Project for the New American Century's] signal enterprise was the invasion of Iraq and their failure to produce results is clear. Precisely the opposite has happened. The US use of force has been seen as doing wrong and as inflaming a region that has been less than susceptible to democracy. Their plan has fallen on hard times. There were flaws in the conception and horrendously bad execution. The neo-cons have been undone by their own ideas and the incompetence of the Bush administration.[26]
In discussing the PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000), Neil MacKay, investigations editor for the Scottish Sunday Herald, quoted Tam Dalyell: "'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war. These are the thought processes of fanaticist Americans who want to control the world.'"[47]
Eliot A. Cohen, a signatory to the PNAC "Statement of Principles", responded in The Washington Post: "There is no evidence that generals as a class make wiser national security policymakers than civilians. George C. Marshall, our greatest soldier statesman after George Washington, opposed shipping arms to Britain in 1940. His boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with nary a day in uniform, thought otherwise. Whose judgment looks better?"[48]
[edit] PNAC role in promoting invasion of IraqCommentators from divergent parts of the political spectrum––such as Democracy Now! and American Free Press, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams and former Republican Congressmen Pete McCloskey and Paul Findley––voiced their concerns about the influence of the PNAC on the decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.[49][50] Some have regarded the PNAC's January 16, 1998 letter to President Clinton, which urged him to embrace a plan for "the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,"[11] and the large number of members of PNAC appointed to the Bush administration as evidence that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion.[42][51]
The television program Frontline, broadcast on PBS, presented the PNAC's letter to President Clinton as a notable event in the leadup to the Iraq war.[52]
Media commentators have found it significant that signatories to the PNAC's January 16, 1998 letter to President Clinton (and some of its other position papers, letters, and reports) included such later Bush administration officials as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams.[30][38][41][52]
[edit] PNAC role in promoting genetically operating racist bioweapons"And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool"(60). [14] This quote shows PNAC thoughts about genetically operating racist bioweapons and mentions them as "a politically useful tool".
[edit] Persons associated with the PNAC[edit] Project directors[as listed on the PNAC website:]
William Kristol, Co-founder and Chairman[1]
Robert Kagan, Co-founder[1]
Bruce P. Jackson[1]
Mark Gerson[1]
Randy Scheunemann[1]
[edit] Project staffEllen Bork, Deputy Director[1]
Gary Schmitt, Senior Fellow[1][53]
Thomas Donnelly, Senior Fellow[1]
Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow[1]
Mitch Jackson, Senior Fellow
Timothy Lehmann, Assistant Director[1]
Michael Goldfarb, Research Associate[1]
[edit] Former directors and staffDaniel McKivergan, Deputy Director[54]
[edit] Signatories to Statement of PrinciplesElliott Abrams[5]
Gary Bauer[5]
William J. Bennett[5]
John Ellis "Jeb" Bush[5]
Richard B. Cheney[5]
Eliot A. Cohen[5]
Midge Decter[5]
Paula Dobriansky[5]
Steve Forbes[5]
Aaron Friedberg[5]
Francis Fukuyama[5]
Frank Gaffney[5]
Fred C. Ikle[5]
Donald Kagan[5]
Zalmay Khalilzad[5]
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby[5]
Norman Podhoretz[5]
J. Danforth Quayle[5]
Peter W. Rodman[5]
Stephen P. Rosen[5]
Henry S. Rowen[5]
Donald Rumsfeld[5]
Vin Weber[5]
George Weigel[5]
Paul Wolfowitz[5]
[edit] Signatories or contributors to other significant letters or reports[15]Elliott Abrams[9][11]
Kenneth Adelman[55]
Richard V. Allen[19]
Richard L. Armitage[11]
Gary Bauer[19][55]
Jeffrey Bell[19][55]
William J. Bennett[9][11][19][55]
Jeffrey Bergner[9][11][19]
John Bolton[9][11]
Ellen Bork[55]
Rudy Boschwitz[19]
Linda Chavez[55]
Eliot Cohen[14][19][55]
Seth Cropsey[19]
Midge Decter[19][55]
Paula Dobriansky[9][11]
Thomas Donnelly[14][19][55]
Nicholas Eberstadt,[19][55][56]
Hillel Fradkin[19][55][57]
Aaron Friedberg[19]
Francis Fukuyama[9][11][19]
Frank Gaffney[19][55]
Jeffrey Gedmin[19][55]
Reuel Marc Gerecht[19][55]
Charles Hill[19][55]
Bruce P. Jackson[19][55]
Eli S. Jacobs[19]
Michael Joyce[19]
Donald Kagan[14][19][55]
Robert Kagan[9][11][14][19][55]
Stephen Kantany
Zalmay Khalilzad[9][11]
Jeane Kirkpatrick[19]
Charles Krauthammer[19]
William Kristol[9][11][14][19]
John Lehman[19][55]
I. Lewis Libby[14]
Tod Lindberg[55][58]
Rich Lowry[55]
Clifford May[19][55]
John McCain[59]
Joshua Muravchik[55]
Michael O'Hanlon [60][61]
Martin Peretz[19][55]
Richard Perle[9][11][19][55]
Daniel Pipes[55]
Norman Podhoretz[19][55]
Peter W. Rodman[9][11][19]
Stephen P. Rosen[14][19][55]
Donald Rumsfeld[9][11]
Randy Scheunemann[19][55]
Gary Schmitt[14][19][53][55]
William Schneider, Jr.[9][11][19][55]
Richard H. Shultz[19][62]
Henry Sokolski[19]
Stephen J. Solarz[19]
Vin Weber[9][11][19]
Leon Wieseltier[19]
Marshall Wittmann[19][55]
Paul Wolfowitz[9][11][14]
R. James Woolsey[9][11][55]
Dov Zakheim[14][63]
Robert B. Zoellick[9][11]
[edit] Associations with Bush administrationAfter the election of George W. Bush in 2000, a number of PNAC's members or signatories were appointed to key positions within the President's administration:
Name Position(s) held
Elliott Abrams Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations (2001–2002), Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs (2002–2005), Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy (2005–2009) (all within the National Security Council)
Richard Armitage Deputy Secretary of State (2001–2005)
John R. Bolton Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs (2001–2005), U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2005–2006)
Dick Cheney Vice President (2001–2009)
Eliot A. Cohen Member of the Defense Policy Advisory Board (2007–2009)[64]
Seth Cropsey Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau (12/2002-12/2004)
Paula Dobriansky Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs (2001–2007)
Aaron Friedberg Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning, Office of the Vice President (2003–2005)
Francis Fukuyama Member of The President's Council on Bioethics (2001–2005)
Zalmay Khalilzad U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (11/2003 - 6/2005), U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (6/2005 - 3/2007) U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2007–2009)
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States (2001–2005)
Richard Perle Chairman of the Board, Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (2001–2003)
Peter W. Rodman Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security (2001–2007)
Donald Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense (2001–2006)
Randy Scheunemann Member of the U.S. Committee on NATO, Project on Transitional Democracies, International Republican Institute
Paul Wolfowitz Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001–2005) 10th President of the World Bank (2005-2007)
Dov S. Zakheim Department of Defense Comptroller (2001–2004)
Robert B. Zoellick Office of the United States Trade Representative (2001–2005), Deputy Secretary of State (2005–2006), 11th President of the World Bank (2007–Present)
[edit] See alsoCenter for a New American Security
American Century
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Office of Special Plans
The New American
[edit] Notes^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "About PNAC", newamericancentury.org, n.d., accessed May 30, 2007: "Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project's chairman is William Kristol and its president is Gary Schmitt."
^ Home page of the Project for the New American Century, accessed May 30, 2007.
^ "Empire builders - Neoconservatives and their blueprint for US power", The Christian Science Monitor (Copyright © 2004), accessed May 22, 2007.
^ a b c The PNAC was often identified as a "neo-con" or "right-wing think tank" in profiles featured on the websites of "left-wing" and "progressive" "policy institute" and "media watchdog" organizations, which were critical of it; see, e.g., "Profile: Project for the New American Century", Right Web (International Relations Center), November 22, 2003, accessed June 1, 2007.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Elliott Abrams, et al., "Statement of Principles", June 3, 1997, newamericancentury.org, accessed May 28, 2007.
^ Kristol, William; Kagan, Robert (January 30, 1998). "Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough". The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/1998/01/30/opinion/bombing-iraq-isn-t-eno...
^ Kristol, William; Kagan, Robert (February 26, 1998). "A 'Great Victory' for Iraq". The Washington Post. www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-022698.htm
^ a b Wedel, Janine (2009). Shadow Elite. New York: Basic Books. p. 170.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Elliott Abrams, et al.,Letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, May 28, 1998, newamericancentury.org, accessed May 30, 2007.
^ "ENR H.R. 4655: Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)", 105th Congress of the United States, thomas.loc.gov (THOMAS online database at the Library of Congress), January 27, 1998, accessed June 1, 2007.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t "Open Letter to President Bill Clinton", January 16, 1998, accessed May 28, 2007.
^ William Kristol, "How to Attack Iraq", The Weekly Standard, November 16, 1998, editorial, online posting, newamericancentury.org, web.archive.org, accessed May 30,
A lovely charm bracelet for 13 Broken Teacups. Features (of course) 13 pieces of broken vintage china/porcelain and lots of other sparkly beaded goodies. Brass chains... to die for and IMPOSSIBLE to photograph, sorry!
Hand typeset in Folio Extra Bold and Stempel Helvetica and letterpress printed by Typoretum onto 350gsm Colorplan Natural card stock.
Design © Taxi Studio 2013
Sketchnote of the four key design principles from Robin Williams' excellent book "The Non-Designer's Design Book". I applied these four principles to sketchnotes, layouts and the organization of content in particular.
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
Listed 9/3/2019
Millbrook, New York
Reference number: 100004333
Innisfree is a public garden of approximately 200 acres, blending Japanese, Chinese, Modern, and ecological design principles in Millbrook, a rural area roughly in the center of Dutchess County, New York. Innisfree’s distinctive sloping, rocky landscape, which forms the literal and visual foundation for the garden, is set within a natural bowl wrapping around the 40-acre Tyrrel Lake. This bowl, with no other signs of human intervention visible beyond the garden, creates a profound sense of intimacy and privacy at Innisfree that is one of its defining characteristics. A product of postwar ideas in American landscape architecture, Innisfree merges the essence of Modernist and Romantic ideas with traditional Chinese and Japanese garden design principles in a form that evolved through subtle, sculptural handling of the site and slow, science-based manipulation of its ecology. The result is a distinctly American stroll garden organized around placemaking techniques used in ancient Chinese villa gardens and described as “cup gardens.”
Innisfree, one of the largest intact modern designed landscapes in America, is the masterwork of Lester Collins (1914-1993), a seminal figure in American twentieth century landscape architecture. Lester Collins, fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, was one of the most sought-after designers and influential educators of his generation. Innisfree’s design reflects the philosophies and practices that guided Collins’s approach throughout his career, integrates innovative, sometimes truly groundbreaking horticultural and environmental engineering practices, and embodies the distinctive characteristics of postwar Modernist landscape architecture.
Innisfree began as the private estate of Walter and Marion Beck, who started initial work on the garden during the early 1930s. Starting in 1938, they continued its development in collaboration with and under the direction of Lester Collins. In 1960, following the deaths of the Becks and pursuant to their wishes, Collins transformed Innisfree from a private estate garden into a substantially larger, more nuanced public garden. He ran the public
garden while continuing to gradually develop and transform the landscape until his death in 1993.
Innisfree demonstrates Collins’s focus on the experience of people in the landscape; his ability to respond adroitly to the particularities of site and program; his approach and aesthetics as a Modernist; his scholarly understanding of landscape history, particularly of Romantic, Chinese, and Japanese gardens; and his innovative use of scientific and engineering principles to develop an environmentally and economically sustainable landscape. Innisfree has long been a mecca for designers from all over the world and it is now attracting similar attention from the global horticultural
community.
The primary features of Innisfree’s design are its principal cup gardens (loosely understood as garden rooms), Tyrrel Lake, and the Lake Path. Collins used the unifying features of the lake and lake path to integrate the many cup gardens into one dynamic experience in the natural landscape. The cup gardens vary in form, scale, and materials. One is an organically shaped meadow bisected by a wildly meandering stream and dotted with sculptural rocks and specimen trees. Another is a bog garden that has been carefully but lightly managed so that a new plant community emerged to play a particular aesthetic role. One more still is an elaborate complex of rock terraces stepping down a slope, each with its own vocabulary of design, materials, and mood.
Throughout the garden, there are themes and motifs that recur in varied forms. There is a dynamic tension between what appears to be natural and what appears to be cultivated. At a macro scale, this is evidenced by the entirety of the garden itself emerging from apparent wooded wilderness. Undulating, almost surreal natural topography is echoed in the rounded forms of clipped trees and constructed berms. Tall, straight pine trunks are mirrored in a 60’ high fountain jet. Naturalistic bogs are discreetly cultivated while areas that look like traditional planted beds are allowed to evolve and change like native plant communities.
While there are some exceptional horticultural specimens at Innisfree, the vast majority of the plants are native or naturalized. Instead of labor-intensive maintenance to strictly adhere to a fixed planting plan, plants are encouraged to find locations where they thrive just as they do in the wild and then gently edited for aesthetics. Sometimes this is achieved simply by allowing plants to self-sow; sometimes by sowing seed or moving plants in from elsewhere on site to increase a successful population; sometimes by limited hybridization to develop strains that are more ideally suited to specific local conditions. As a result, the overall plantings at Innisfree have an unstudied visual character punctuated by a handful of carefully placed, carefully sculpted trees.
There is also a deliberate choreographing of human perceptual experiences throughout Innisfree. Collins paid particular attention to these ideas. Scale ranges from massive to intimate. Spaces are open and bright, or tight and shadowy. Surfaces vary in material, texture, slope, and sound. Water changes form, scale, and sound. Design and planting details are dense or spare.
Another important motif at Innisfree is sculptural landforms. Collins began to clear trees to reveal the undulating glacial landforms. Collins felt that “land shapes, both natural and man-made…separate but also knit together sequences of cup gardens. Just like the sculptural rocks, these land forms are permanent design features in the garden, for they do not grow and their health is not subject to vagaries.” In the 1970s and early 1980s, Collins created dramatic berms in the garden to echo and emphasize the natural landforms.
In the nearly 70 years since Innisfree opened to the public, the garden has delighted and captured the imagination of experts and non-experts alike. Garden lovers, landscape writers and critics have sought to capture the unique aesthetic qualities and unusual design sophistication of Innisfree in various descriptive terms.
National Register of Historic Places Homepage
New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!
www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
facebook.com/mcgucken
Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!
More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio
instagram.com/goldennumberratio
Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken
Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)
Titles include:
The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!
The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography
facebook.com/goldennumberratio
And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!
Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)
I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:
www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...
Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?
I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!
www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/
Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.
Follow me on instagram!
Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!
Every once in a while I have to remind myself to re-focus on how I can get work done effectively and efficiently...
This has been engineered in the most simple of design principles. It simply hauls stuff and is powered by man.
I picked this dress up in the Debenhams sale a few weeks ago and this was the first chance to wear it. I'm really pleased with it and how it hangs (it is a fluid silky jersey type fabric with mesh sleeves) and also was a bargain (just £16.50 from £55!)
Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Clarice Starling: He kills women...
Hannibal Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?
Clarice Starling: Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir...
Hannibal Lecter: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.
Clarice Starling: No. We just...
Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?
"It is just preposterous the idea that if a party comes third in the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10..."
Nick Clegg
Getting Things Done - Basic Principles summarized.
Currently, I'm yet to practice GTD but that's a start.
Update: I *AM* practicing GTD, since the 23rd of May.
The Hermetic philosophy says that " The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding ". For millennia the esoteric circles have been marked in this teaching to disseminate their information. Teachings were passed from master to disciple, disguised in various rituals and symbols. In this way, a certain book stands out for its teachings, which form the basis of all magic, the whole universe perceptible and imperceptible to our senses: The Kybalion . Written by one who calls himself The three started , it is a compilation of the teachings that (supposedly) came from ancient Egypt, by Hermes Trismegistus, who is perhaps the first of Avatars contribute to this planet.
Transcribe the text of the book itself the presentation of Hermes:
"Among the great Masters of Ancient Egypt, there was one that they hailed as the Master of Masters. This man, if indeed he was a man, lived in Egypt in ancient times. He was known under the name of Hermes Trismegistus. He was the father of the Occult, the founder of Astrology, the discoverer of Alchemy. The details of his life were lost due to the immense amount of time, which is thousands of years, and despite many ancient countries compete among themselves the honor of having been his home. The date of his sojourn in Egypt, in his last incarnation on this planet, is not now known, but it was fixed at the early days of the oldest dynasties of Egypt, very before the time of Moses. The best authorities regard him as a contemporary of Abraham, and some Jewish traditions say clearly that Abraham acquired a portion of his mystic knowledge from Hermes himself. Having spent many years of his passing from this plane of existence ( tradition states that he lived three hundred years), the Egyptians deified Hermes, and made him one of their gods, under the name of Thoth. Years later, the people of Ancient Greece also deified by the name of Hermes, the God of Wisdom . The Egyptians revered for many centuries his memory, calling it the messenger of the Gods, and bestowing upon him, distinctively, his ancient title Trismegistus , which means three times great, great among the greats.
In the early days, there was a compilation of certain Basic Hermetic Doctrines, passed on from master to disciple, which was known under the name of The Kybalion , whose exact meaning is lost for several centuries. This teaching, however, is known by several men who were passed from lip to ear, since many centuries. These precepts have never been written or printed, so far as we know. They were simply a collection of maxims, axioms, and precepts not understandable to outsiders, but were readily understood by students and, moreover, were then explained and exemplified by the Hermetic Initiates to their Neophytes. "
A Master is not measured by the number of followers, or who speak it, but what he says and does. In the case of Hermes, all we have is the Kybalion, but this "little book" of 56 pages is of such depth and grandeur that I shudder to write about it. The book deals with the seven hermetic principles, stated in The Kybalion as initiates comment on them.
The Principles of Truth are Seven; one who knows perfectly possesses the Magic Key, with which all the doors of the Temple fly open.
(The Kybalion)
These are the Principle of Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect and Gender. Take the first transcribed the book:
I. The Principle of Mentalism
THE ALL is MIND, the Universe is Mental
(The Kybalion)
This Principle explains that everything is mental , that THE ALL is Spirit , is unknowable and indefinable in itself, but may be considered as a living mind infinite and universal . Also teaches that all the phenomenal world or universe is simply a Mental Creation of THE ALL, subject to the Laws of Created Things, and that the universe as a whole in its parts or units, has its existence in the Mind of THE ALL, in which Mind we live and move and have our being. This Principle, by establishing the Mental Nature of the Universe, it explains the mental and psychic phenomena that occupy much of public attention, and that without such an explanation would be unintelligible and defy scientific examination.
This Principle explains the true nature of force, Energy and Matter, how and why they are all subordinate to the Mastery of Mind. An old Hermetic Masters wrote, long ago: "He who understands the truth of the Mental Nature of the Universe is well advanced on the Path to Mastery.
_____________________
We see here a correspondence with one of the basic principles of quantum physics, the coherent superposition . But what is it?
When an electron (or any other particle) is observed, it presents with well-defined physical properties: it is located at a precise point in space at a given time, and their attributes can be measured (within certain limits set by the principle Heisenberg's uncertainty). Before the measurement is made, however, these properties and attributes do not exist. What exists is only the probability that the electron present such and such characteristics as well as other characteristics that are opposite. That is, the electron can either be at point x and at y or at the point z, and so on for each of your attributes (speed, angular momentum, spin, etc.).. Before we measure the electrons, all these attributes are interwoven, and it is this intermingling that produces waves of probability. Physicists call this the wave function or coherent superposition , because in this state, the odds of the electron overlap each other. During the act of measuring the entanglement vanishes and, among all possible sets of attributes to the electron, only one becomes "real." This time the superposition of waves vanishes is called the collapse of the wave function . While the electron is not measured, it has no specific characteristics. It is the measure that creates the characteristics of the electron, and thus in a sense, it is my observation that creates the electron. In other words, the reality I perceive is created by my perception. ( source )
A particle, something we think is solid, there is overlap in what we call, sparking a wave of possible locations, all at the same time. And when you look, it is now possible in only one of the positions. That is, things only become constants when you look at them. When it did not look like a wave, when we look at is as a particle.
The overlap means that a particle can be in two or more places at once.
It's a very bizarre concept, but it is a cornerstone of quantum physics. This finding made the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking asked: The distinction (between the real and imaginary) is only in our minds?
Article in The Quantum Revolution and High Energy Physics , Roberto Claudio, we see that in reality, science can not prove that a subatomic particle exists to detect it before, not knowing where it will come, but to say that there is a probability it exists and to appear at a particular location. Four hypotheses try to explain this "measurement problem":
The Copenhagen interpretation says that this probability is all we can and what there is to know, is something totally random to know where the particle appears (the theory advocated by Niels Bohr and Werner Eisenberg),
The hidden variable theory says that quantum events do not are purely random, but that particles arise in a particular place for reasons that we have yet to discover hidden (advocated by Einstein, David Bohm and others),
The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that when a particle appears in one location, all other probabilities of occurrences happen in other universes entirely different. This hypothesis, although fantastic, was developed a very sophisticated mathematical style (proposed by Everett, Wheeler and Graham);
The connection Matter / Mind says it's possible that the very mind of the observer in the act of measurement, influence the manifestation of the event; the mind would be the factor that would interfere with the onset of the appearance and location of subatomic particles or even create (backed up by Eugene Paul Wigner, Jack Sarfatti, and Walker Muses).
Einstein, who favored the second theory, on the first screamed, " God does not play dice with the universe! ". The unpredictability of quantum was too much for him to accept, although Bohr and others, using their own theories of Einstein, explain all your objections. The dispute between the first two theories meant to prove that quantum mechanics was unpredictable or determined, and the last two betrayed that if the first were true, my mind would be able to choose my destiny, of all existing probabilities ( free will). So far science has been proving (successfully) the first theory.
Everything we call real is made of things that can not be considered real
(Niels Bohr)
In the movie What the bleep do we know we see the physicist Amit Goswami explain: " The world has many potential forms of reality, to choose from. But as an object can have two states at once? Instead of thinking about things like possibilities, we have the habit of thinking that things around us are objects that already exist without my input, without my choice. You need to ban this form of thinking, has to recognize that even the material world around us - chairs , tables, rooms, rugs - are nothing but possible movements of consciousness, all the time and I am choosing these movements moments to express my current experience.
It's something we need to understand that radical, but it is very difficult, because we think the world exists independent of my experience. Not so, and quantum physics is clear. The very Eisenberg , after the discovery of quantum physics, said that atoms are not objects, are trends. Instead of thinking about objects, you should think in possibilities.
Everything possible is subconsciously " .
But speaking of particles does little to explain the consequences of quantum physics, so let's find a more easy-going, I found an article of Scientifc American: get a playing card with a perfectly sharp edge and try to balance it over the edge on a table. According to classical physics, the letter will remain, in principle, balanced forever. However, according to quantum physics (Schrödinger's wave function), the card will fall in a few seconds, even if you do your best to balance it - and both fall for the two sides , right and left. When it puts into practice this experiment with an actual card, it is concluded that classical physics is wrong: even if the letter falls. But what we see is that it falls to the right or left, seemingly at random, and never to the right and left at the same time as the Schrodinger equation would have us believe. This contradiction goes to the very heart of one of the most original and enduring mysteries of quantum mechanics.
Many Worlds
In the mid-50, U.S. Hugh Everett III, then a student at Princeton University, decided to review the collapse postulate in his doctoral thesis. He took the idea to the quantum limit, with the following question: "What would happen if the time evolution of the entire universe is always unitary?" In this scenario, the wave function evolves in a deterministic way, leaving no room for the mysterious collapse of non-unitary or God playing dice. In this case, our quantum card would really be in two places at once. Moreover, a person who was looking at the card would enter a superposition of two different mental states, each one seeing the results. If you bet money on the hunch that the letter would fall face up, a superposition would smile and frown, because the bet to win and lose simultaneously. Everett's brilliant insight that the observers in such a deterministic (but schizophrenic) quantum world could perceive the plain old reality with which we are familiar. More importantly, they perceive an apparent randomness, obeying the correct probability rules. The view became known as the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, because each component of which is a superposition observer recognizes or perceives its own world . When removing the collapse postulate, this viewpoint simplifies the underlying theory. But the price one pays for this simplicity is the conclusion that these parallel perceptions of reality are equally real.
Everett's work was ignored for nearly two decades. Many physicists were confident that would appear to show a fundamental theory that the world was, after all, classic in some sense, no weirdness like "a body being in two places at once." But a whole series of new experiments would put an end to that expectation. The experiment of "delayed choice", proposed by Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler, showing another feature of the quantum world that defies classical description: not only one photon can be in two places at once, but the experimenter can choose after the event, if the photon was in two places or just one. In short, the verdict of experience is: the weirdness of the quantum world is real, like it or not.
Even in the movie What the bleep ... , see Jeffrey Satinover talking about it: "Now you can see in many U.S. laboratories by objects that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye and are in two places simultaneously. You can even take a picture of it! I suppose if you showed this picture, people would say ' Great, I can see the colored light, a little there, a bit ... here is a picture of two dots, which is too much? I see two things. " No, It's one thing in two places at once. I think people do not impress, because I think they do not believe. Not to say that I am a liar, or that scientists are confused. I think it's not so mysterious you can understand how amazing it is.'ve all seen Star Trek and the teleportation, then ask, ' But who cares, what does that mean? " But we have to stop and think about what that really means. It's the same object and it is in two places at once! "
Returning to the Article of Scientific American , we see that the work of Everett left a crucial question: if the real world is so bizarre macroscopic superpositions, why do not we perceive them? The answer came in 1970 through an article by Heinz Dieter Zeh of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He showed that the Schrödinger equation gives rise to the effect of decoherence . Our letter overthrow quantum is always receiving the impact of busybody photons and air molecules, which can prove whether the letter fell to the right or left, thereby destroying the superposition and making it unobservable.
That is, the world is always contributing to remain in the illusion that things are "normal", ie, that the letter will fall to only one side up, more or less as agents of the Matrix ensure that human remain in ignorance (as at the end of the episode haunted house in the Animatrix ). Any resemblance to the Buddhist theory of Maya is not a coincidence.
It is as if the environment play the role of observer, collapsing the wave function (a simple molecule of air is enough). For all practical purposes, this tiny interaction changes the superposition to a classical situation in the twinkling of an eye. But as a photon can play the role of "observer"? It requires a "conscience", a "trial" to interfere with reality? Then the photon is also part of consciousness?! And here we go back to Buddhism, where everything, absolutely everything is alive and has consciousness .
The general notions about human understanding (...) illustrated by the discoveries of atomic physics are far from being something entirely unknown, unheard, again. These notions have a history in our own culture, enjoying a more prominent and central position in Hindu or Buddhist thought. What we face is just an illustration of an encouragement and a refinement of old wisdom.
(Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb)
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, based on experience, which refuses dogmatism. If there is any religion that could cope with scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.
(Albert Einstein)
The theory of decoherence explains why do not routinely see quantum superpositions in the world around. Not because quantum mechanics intrinsically stops working for objects larger than a certain size magic. In fact, it is virtually impossible to macroscopic objects like cats and playing cards, isolated from a distance that prevents non-coherence. Microscopic objects, by contrast, are more easily separable from its environment and thus retain their quantum behavior.
If we seek a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory, we must turn to those kinds of epistemological problems with which we faced in the past, thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu, in his attempt to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.
(Niels Bohr, father of quantum mechanics)
Reference: 100 years of quantum mysteries ; Experience "Schrödinger cat" ; Samba crazy physicist , Amit Goswami interview the Roda Viva program
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