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Friday, November 24, 2023

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed "life-saving measures" before the inmate, who it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation. read more


See the title. Video by the Lumire brothers.


Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) and lawyers for a defendant in the Georgia racketeering case involving former President Trump will face off in court Tuesday as the state's top prosecutor seeks to revoke Harrison Floyd's bond over incendiary social media posts. Floyd, a leader of Black Voices for Trump who was charged alongside the former president, could see his pretrial freedom revoked over social media posts that prosecutors have portrayed as an attempt to obstruct justice by intimidating future witnesses and communicating "directly and indirectly" with co-defendants in the case.


Sunday, November 19, 2023

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers -- until they're not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians... . "To me a big part of the allure of math is when you arrive at the same destination by different paths and it seems like something miraculous or deep is going on," Propp said. "The cool thing about these sequences is there are various points of view that explain why you get integers. There are hidden depths there." read more


Friday, November 17, 2023

An Appellate judge that cited free speech concerns, lifted the gag order preventing Donald Trump maligning court staff. The gag order had been ordered by the trial judge in Trump's fraud hearing. read more


Comments

#9 | POSTED BY DOC_SARVIS

Doc: Here's what I read.

Winnifred Crane Wygal
US social service organization official, 1884-1972

Oh, God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.

The Woman's Press, Mar. 1933.

This is the "Serenity Prayer," the most famous and beloved prayer of modern times. It is most commonly quoted as, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." There has been considerable controversy and misinformation about this prayer's origins, and it has usually been attributed to the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The first edition of the New Yale Book of Quotations listed Niebuhr as the author, but a new interpretation by William FitzGerald in a forthcoming book (based on discoveries made by the New Yale Book of Quotations editor) argues for Wygal as author. It is not unusual for important quotations by obscure women to be ascribed to prominent men.

The March 1933 sentence above, the beginning of an article by Wygal, is the earliest known occurrence of the Serenity Prayer. The other oldest versions all appeared in contexts related to the Young Women's Christian Association, of which Wygal was a longtime staff member, and all followed Wygal's wording very closely. No attributions of the prayer to Niebuhr by others have been found from before 1937, and no one has ever definitively documented any pre-1950 uses by Niebuhr himself. In a book devoted to the Serenity Prayer, Niebuhr's daughter Elisabeth Sifton repeatedly told a story about his composition of it, with a firmly asserted dating of 1943. Niebuhr believed he was the author, although his statements on the origination were vague. It may be that his role in 1943 was that of popularizer (shared with Alcoholics Anonymous) or editor.

Wygal was an associate of Niebuhr, and in her diary entry for 31 Oct. 1932 she quoted him as follows: "The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered." That sentence featured some of the elements of the Serenity Prayer yet lacked the key "insight" or "wisdom" element, and it was not a prayer. In 1940, in her book We Plan Our Own Worship Services, Wygal herself linked "O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other" with Reinhold Niebuhr's name; however, she may have been crediting only that particular wording to him. The answer to the issue of provenance is not certain, but the demonstrable evidence points to Winnifred Wygal as the coiner who combined pieces apparently drawn from Niebuhr with important other pieces of her own devising to create a most memorable prayer.

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