We fast to free ourselves from the slavery of the passions.

Jesus said “Everyone who practices sin is the slave of sin!” (Jn. 8:34). But we know so long as we live, we live only through God’s dynamic, life-sustaining power active in us. Read the transcript HERE.

Andrew says seeking union with anything or anyone outside of God gradually takes away our freedom, takes away our personhood, takes away our ability to be uniquely ourselves. Read the transcript HERE.

Professor Christos Yannaras addresses St. Vladimir's Seminary upon receiving an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.

What does it mean to be mentally healthy?

Fr. Apostolos talks about financial pressures, contentment, and priorities. "As we grow in contentment, and learn to resist the allure of the never-ending parade of consumer goods that we didn't know existed a moment ago, but somehow cannot now possibly live without, a new world of possibilities will emerge for us in the freedom that only Jesus Christ can give."

Fr. Apostolos helps to prepare us for Great Lent with reflections on the humility of the Publican.

Fr. Apostolos Hill delivers a homily at the 200 year anniversary of Greek Independence about the true freedom wrought for us in Christ.

Fr. Apostolos Hill speaks on the difference between Independence and Freedom with a brief history lesson about Independence Day.

What are we free and not free to do as believers in Christ? Dr. Rossi gives some practical examples of freedom used where freedom was not appropriate.

Taking up a passage from the writings of St. Theophan the Recluse, Archimandrite Irenei examines the nature of human freedom, not as a thing good in itself, but which is to be sacrificed as a perfect offering to God.

True freedom is not the ability to choose; it is found through habitual thanksgiving, and it leads to a blessed and transfigured soul.

There is no easy way to eternal life. We are made to know God, to love God, to serve God, and that is hard. Fr. Pat offers reflections on this via three theses.

St. Dionysios of Zakynthos is a powerful example of forgiveness. He shows us how forgiveness can free us to be who God made us to be, rather than trapping us and defining us by our sins and shortcomings.

Kevin's guests are Scripps-Howard columnist and Orthodox Christian Terry Mattingly and Fr. Hans Jacobse of the American Orthodox Institute. They discuss the complex issues surrounding religious freedom as well as the prospects of losing it.

We can be enslaved by a multitude of things, expectations and the evil one himself. Alternatively we can be slaves of Christ and receive the freedom that comes with that. "I call you my friends" He said.

In the round-up: Teams "welcome freedom" of 2026 regulations • Alpine targets Colapinto - reports • Pulling quickest in Formula E test

There has been a set of discussions about lock-in around Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Joe McKendrick and Lori MacVittie in particular bring out some of the real challenges here.

Lori brings out the difference between portability and mobility. While I'm not in 100% agreement with Lori's definitions, there is a key point here: its not just code, its the services that the code relies on that buy lock-in into a cloud.

So for example, if you use Amazon SQS, Force.com Chatter Collaboration, Google App Engine's bigtable data store, all of these tie you into the cloud you are deployed onto. Amazon isn't really a PaaS yet, so the tie-in is minimal, but Google App Engine (GAE) is based on Authentication, Logging, Data, Cache and other core services. Its almost impossible to imagine building an app without these, and they all tie you into GAE. Similarly, VMForce relies on a set of services from force.com.

But its not just about mobility between force.com and Google: between two PaaSes. The typical enterprise needs a private cloud as much as public cloud. So there is a bigger question:

Can you move your application from a private PaaS to a public Paas and back again?

In other words, even if Google and Force got together and defined a mobility layer, can I then take an app I built and run it internally? Neither Google nor Force is offering a private PaaS.

The second key question is this:

How can I leverage standard Enterprise Architecture in a PaaS?

What I'm getting at here is that as the world starts to implement PaaS, does this fit with existing models? Force.com and Google App Engine have effectively designed their own world view. VMForce and the recent Spring/Google App Engine announcement address one aspect of that - what Lori calls portability. By using Spring as an application model, there is at least a passing similarity to current programming models in Enterprises. But Enterprise Architectures are not just about Java code: what about an ESB? What about a Business Process engine (BPMS)? What about a standard XACML-based entitlement engine? So far PaaS has generally only addressed the most basic requirements of Enterprise core services: databases and a identity model.

So my contention is this: you need a PaaS that supports the same core services that a modern Enterprise architecture has: ESB, BPMS, Authentication/Authorization, Portal, Data, Cache, etc. And you need a PaaS that works inside your organization as well as in a public Cloud. And if you really don't want any lock-in.... hadn't that PaaS better be Open Source as well? And yes, this is a hint of things coming very soon!

I HAD the privilege of attending a lecture by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University at Universiti Malaya in early January this year.

His candid critique of US economic and foreign policies was both striking and inspiring.

Remarkably, his criticisms were delivered without hindrance and were even appreciated.

Our nation’s highest leaders, the prime minister and higher education minister, were present to listen to his insights.

Ironically, in Malaysia, the academic freedom of our local scholars is still curtailed by Act 605.

The developments at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the continued existence of legislation that can be used against critical voices within academia should be taken seriously by the academic community and academic unions nationwide.

We cannot allow academic freedom – a cornerstone of the intellectual tradition – to be so easily stifled.

Academic freedom must be preserved, defended and enshrined in law.

In this context, it is crucial to remember that every Oct 5, Malaysia celebrates Academia Day, an annual reminder to appreciate the contributions and struggles of academics worldwide.

On this significant day, stakeholders such as the government, higher education institutions and academic unions should redouble their efforts to uphold and promote the principle of academic freedom.

Academia Day is not merely a celebration of knowledge but a reminder to ensure that the rights of academics continue to be respected and protected.

As public servants are paid with taxpayers’ money, the views of academics should be publicly accessible to the people.

The public has a right to hear their criticisms, research findings and direct commentaries on policies and decisions that affect the nation.

In today’s post-modern era, social media serves as a platform for both local and international academics to constructively express their views on national policies.

If these voices are silenced, all that remains is content that does not contribute to the nation’s development, such as shallow entertainment or sensational issues of no value.

Academics do not merely engage in idle chatter; they share research findings funded by public grants, using validated research instruments to critique and improve existing systems.

For instance, academics are among the critical voices that are actively voicing concerns about the state of the country’s education system based on the findings of their research, using the CIPP (Context, Input, Process and Product) model of curriculum evaluation.

Academics are specifically trained to think critically and analytically, and they are accountable for whatever they produce as my PhD supervisor once reminded me, “Question everything, even the accepted wisdom.”

If this critical thinking is stifled, it is a waste of public funds that finance the higher education of these scholars.

Returning to Sachs’ lecture, our nation will not be able to produce scholars of his calibre if the mouths and hands of our academics are tied by restrictive laws and regulations.

Therefore, academic freedom should be enshrined in stronger laws, such as amendments to the Universities and University Colleges Act.

Certainly other academics and I welcome the statement by Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir, who supports the amendment of Act 605, and we are aware that this amendment effort has gone through important processes as initiated by former education minister Dr Maszlee Malik. Therefore, it should not take long to implement.

This is important so that there are no more circulars or instructions from higher education institutions that attempt to silence legitimate dissent.

If local academics are prevented from voicing their opinions and criticisms for the good of the nation, then there is no point in talking about efforts to educate the people.

Without academic freedom, we will not be able to produce academic figures of the calibre of Sachs, Professor Joseph Stiglitz or Professor Noam Chomsky, who dare to go against the grain and champion the truth.

Freedom of expression for academics is the cornerstone of a nation’s intellectual and moral development.

If we want this country to produce outstanding scholars, we must loosen the bonds of restrictive regulations.

Only with true academic freedom can we ensure that the nation’s intellectual future continues to grow and be competitive on the international stage.

The writer is a senior lecturer at the Department of Building Surveying, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com

Privacy: Our analog parents had the right to meet whomever they liked, wherever they liked, and discuss whatever they liked, without the government knowing. Our digital children have lost this, just because they use more modern items.

For a lot of our digital children’s activities, there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, as they naturally take place on the net. For people born 1980 and later, it doesn’t make sense to talk of “offline” or “online” activities. What older people see as “people spending time with their phone or computer”, younger see as socializing using their phone or computer.

This is an important distinction that the older generation tends to not understand.

Perhaps this is best illustrated with an anecdote from the previous generation again: The parents of our parents complained that our parents were talking with the phone, and not to another person using the phone. What our parents saw as socializing (using an old analog landline phone), their parents in turn saw as obsession with a device. There’s nothing new under the sun.

(Note: when I say “digital children” here, I am not referring to children as in young people below majority age; I am referring to the next generation of fully capable adult professionals.)

This digital socializing, however, can be limited, it can be… permissioned. As in, requiring somebody’s permission to socialize in the way you and your friends want, or even to socialize at all. The network effects are strong and create centralizing pressure toward a few platforms where everybody hang out, and as these are private services, they get to set any terms and conditions they like for people assembling and socializing – for the billions of people assembling and socializing there.

Just as one example to illustrate this: Facebook is using American values for socializing, not universal values. Being super-against anything even slightly naked while being comparatively accepting of hate speech is not something inherently global; it is strictly American. If Facebook had been developed in France or Germany instead of the US, any and all nudity would be welcomed as art and free-body culture (Freikörperkultur) and a completely legitimate way of socializing, but the slightest genocide questioning would lead to an insta-kickban and reporting to authorities for criminal prosecution.

Therefore, just using the dominant Facebook as an example, any non-American way of socializing is effectively banned worldwide, and it’s likely that people developing and working with Facebook aren’t even aware of this. But the Freedom of Assembly hasn’t just been limited in the online sphere, but also in the classic analog offline world where our analog parents used to hang out (and still do).

Since people’s locations are tracked, as we saw in the previous post, it is possible to match locations between individuals and figure out who was talking to whom, as well as when and where this happened, even if they were only talking face to face. As I’m looking out my window from the office writing this piece, it just so happens that I’m looking at the old Stasi headquarters across from Alexanderplatz in former East Berlin. It was a little bit like Hotel California; people who checked in there tended to never leave. Stasi also tracked who was talking to whom, but required a ton of people to perform this task manually, just in order to walk behind other people and photograph whom they were talking to — and therefore, there was an economic limit to how many people could be tracked like this at any one time before the national economy couldn’t sustain more surveillance. Today, that limit is completely gone, and everybody is tracked all the time.

Do you really have Freedom of Assembly, when the fact that you’ve associated with a person — indeed, maybe just spent time in their physical proximity — can be held against you?

I’m going to illustrate this with an example. In a major leak recently, it doesn’t matter which one, a distant colleague of mine happened to celebrate a big event with a huge party in near physical proximity to where the documents were being copied at the same time, completely unaware and by sheer coincidence. Months later, this colleague was part of journalistically vetting those leaked documents and verifying their veracity, while at this time still unaware of the source and that they had held a big party very close to the origin of the documents.

The government was very aware of the physical proximity of the leak combined with this person’s journalistic access to the documents, though, and issued not one but two arrest-on-sight warrants for this distant colleague based on that coincidence. They are now living in exile outside of Sweden, and don’t expect to be able to return home anytime soon.

Privacy, including Privacy of Location, remains your own responsibility.

Our Bro & team rider Miguel Franzem Has destroyed his knee last winter, at the Simple Session ,so he was forced to put his BMX aside for a while. freedombmx has asked Miguel about his BMX break. You will find the interview here: LINK

Robin Kachfi & Jan Mihaly taking home the 2nd Place at the Soshurbanmotion Contest 2017

Robin Kachfi and Jan Mihaly just taking home silver at the Soshurbanmotion maincontest. Freedombmx did an Interview with the guys to explane their success. You'll find all Infos about their paris trip on Freedombmx . Congrats Boys!!!

All the best, Your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Interview: Markus Wilke

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Sven Avemaria - One Dude Two Days x Freedombmx

Our allrounder Sven Avemaria was last summer with Freedombmx on the streets of stuttgart, to film a new episode of "One Dude Two Days", which u shouldn't miss! Enjoy the video, Your kunstform BMX Shop.

Video: Freedombmx



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Our Bro & team rider Felix Prangenberg has injured his knee last august so badly, that he will be back on his bike in a few months. Freedombmx has asked Felix about his Injury for a little interview which you'll find right here: LINK
Get well soon Felix!

Freedombmx - HOW TO Nollie Barspin with Miguel Smajli

Our bro Miguel Smajli has filmed in cooperation with Freedombmx a short HOW TO video, in which Miguel will teach you the Nollie Barspin ! Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Video: Freedombmx

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kunstform Stock Session Video 2017 | freedombmx

The Stock Session 2017 went finally online, which you can watch right now on Freedombmx! On the 2nd of december 2017, our stock session took place again and it was absolutely amazing to met all the homies again. We had also run a BMX Flatland contest in our Stock room during the others went for a skatepark session to the Pragfriedhof, where you had the chance to win some vouchers for tricks. After the pre-session, the main contest started, in which different groups had the chance to show their skills on the different obstacles we had built up. Even though the ceiling was kissed many times, it was a great end to 2017. You'll find all photos and results on freedombmx. Thanks to everyone for coming down and for the amazing time!

Hopefully see you next year, your kunstform BMX shop team!

Rankings:

Pro Street:
1. Felix Donat
2. Robin Kachfi
3. Aaron Paffenholz
4. Georg Senger

Pro Flatland:
1. Wolfgang Sauter
2. Kevin Nikulski
3. Markus Schwital
4. John Krämer

Amateur Street:
1. Artur Meister
2. Lukas Schmidt
3. Benedikt Krug
4. Timo Schmidt
5. Fridolin Ewald

Amateur Flatland:
1. Benny Hill
2. Malte Orth
3. Mike Speer
4. Thomas Vucic

Kids Street:
1. Nikola Drugčević
2. Moritz Kuhn
3. Louis Trieb
4. Mika Köhler
5. Rico Fioralba

Video: Freedombmx

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We're really stoked that our team riders Felix Prangenberg, Robin Kachfi, Kevin Nikulski and also our own shop got nominated for the Freedombmx Awards 2017, thanks to everyone for voting our team riders and for us! If you haven't voted yet, click: VOTING
Vote for your favorite german Street,Park,Flatland oder Dirtfahrer, you can also vote for germanys best skatepark, germanys best webvideo 2017, best company and last but not least best international rider.

More infos here: Freedombmx.de

Best Lines 2017 | freedombmx

Freedombmx made a "Best lines of 2017" Video, in which our team riders Miguel Smajli and Felix Donat have some clips. Check the official "BEST OF 2017" Video from Freedombmx HERE

Enjoy the video,

your kunstform BMX Shop Team!


Video: Robin Kachfi

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freedombmx - kunstform BMX Shop Check
The freedombmx BMX Magazine visited us at the BMX Shop in Stuttgart. Daniel Fuhrmann takes them on a little tour of the sales room, the workshop, the office and the storerooms.

If you want to visit us in Stuttgart, to get up on new parts, to repair your bike or just to hang out and drive the little streeto obstacles in our Stock Room, then you will find us in the Rotebühlstraße 63 in Stuttgart, directly at the S-Bahn station "Feuersee".

We would like to take this opportunity to thank freedombmx again for the visit and the opportunity. Check out the latest BMX Scene News on www.freedombmx.com .

We hope you enjoy the tour.

Full Article

Kevin Nikulski - Freedombmx Bikecheck 2018

Our Bro Kevin Nikulski was voted as germanys best BMX Flatlander by the BMX-Community for the third time in a row, but unfortunately Kevin couldn't come to Munich for the awards, because the release party for his new signature frame took place in Berlin on the same day. The freedombmx BMX Magazine has asked Kevin for some details on his new Bike, which you can check out right here!

Check freedom BMX Magazine for daily BMX News www.freedombmx.de.



All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Felix Prangenberg just built up a new WeThePeople Pathfinder setup. This time with a new colorway, which will be available in a few months. By the way, Felix got a couple of other prototypes on his current Bike, which you can check out in his latest Bike Check below.

Click here for the Bike Check.

All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!



Interview: Freedombmx

Fotos: Merlin Czarnulla

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After the last two freedombmx awards could only take place online due to COVID, this year's edition will again feature beer showers in real life... namely on November 19, 2022 in the Skatehalle Berlin. YIH-YIIIH...
The Skatehalle Berlin opens its doors from 1:00 p.m. and during the afternoon there will be relaxed sessions on the street course and in the new bowl, as well as the one or the other best trick contest, where our MCs Hemmelmeister and Flocksn will give away non-cash prizes from many great sponsors.

When:
Saturday, November 19th, 2022(from 1 p.m.): Open BMX Session in the Skatehalle Berlin (free entry for BMXers)
Where: Skatehalle Berlin, Revaler Straße 99, 10245 Berlin

Supported by: kunstform BMX Shop, VANS, Odyssey BMX, Demolition Parts, Tempered Goods, TSG, All In, Cult Crew, éclat, Shadow Riding Gear, Mankind Bike Company, Mongoose, KHEBikes, Fitbikeco., Flybikes and United Bike Co.

freedombmx Awards:

As soon as everyone has escalated on the photo wall and will have a drink in hand, there will be shown two brand new videos the freedombmx magazine has filmed last summer with the street and transition factions of SIBMX. Epic edits and a bonus surprise will await you... so stay tuned. After the videos, the freedombmx magazine will then continue with honoring the best german riders of 2022 in the following categories:

Street driver:in of the year
Driver of the Year
Park Driver:in of the Year
Trail Rider:in of the Year
Flatlander:in of the year
Driver:in of the year international
Video of the year national
Newcomer:in of the year

To warm up your anticipation, we have a video of an kunstform session in the Skatehalle Berlin below.

Have fun with it and see you on November 19, 2022 in Berlin!



All the best

Your kunstform BMX Shop Team

Jason carried $100,000 of debt and felt as though he could barely breathe. That's when he followed a life-changing principle that led to a debt-free life and financial freedom. You can be free too!

Rhonda Bell dreamt of a better financial future. She felt stuck working two jobs with irregular hours. “And I had to do both jobs even to have just enough. I remember one time when I out of work; I just dug around my house for change ended, and I up finding like, in change, $13.76. I was able to buy groceries; I had no food. I just really wanted a career. I wanted the Lord to bless me with something stable.” When friends encouraged Rhonda to go into healthcare, she prayed about it. She believed...

Children's Geographies; 10/01/2024
(AN 180134753); ISSN: 14733285
Academic Search Premier

Abstract This paper proposes a method of evaluating elections in terms of freedom of choice. It evaluates voting institutions in terms of their allocation of control. Formally, the paper develops the symmetric power order, a measure of voting power for multicandidate elections. The measure generalizes standard pivotality-based voting power measures for binary elections, such as […]

The post Freedom and voting power was curated by information for practice.

An attorney dedicated to upholding religious freedom stated that he is “greatly disturbed” to see what Michigan has become, warning of a “growing hostility” in the state toward the exercise of religion in the public square. 

It's not often I am surprised by comments that are generated by my columns in The Christian Post. So imagine my surprise at being taken aback by some comments generated by my July 4th column.

[Politics] :
Anchor: South Korea, the United States and Japan are conducting their second trilateral multidomain exercise in international waters south of South Korea’s Jeju Island. The U.S. Navy’s USS George Washington aircraft carrier, South Korea’s ROKS Seoae Ryu Seong-ryong destroyer and Japan’s JS Haguro ...

[more...]