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If you’re whipsawed by confusion over the origins of the war in Syria, look no further at this latest report from Newsbud, which does an excellent job of breaking it down, in a way you will never, ever see in the Mainstream News.
This episode of Newsbud’s The Geopolitical Report, narrated by Kurt Nimmo investigates the scene of the historical “flashpoint” of Daraa, a town near the Syria-Jordan border. It reveals that the CIA, in conjunction with the Muslim Brotherhood, attacked police and set the stage for a conflict that has so far claimed the lives of more than 400,000 Syrians.
The report then goes into the decades of behind-the-scene meddling done to Syria by the US Deep State, which has escalated into the current proxy war between US-backed terrorists against the Syrian Army and their allies, the Russians.
The desired outcome for the US’ Deep State is to take down Syria’s secular government and to replace it with an extremist Wahhabi principality, to be controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, a longtime CIA and British intelligence asset.
Many studying the realpolitik of these events believe that this is a pipeline war, with the US intervening in Syria on behalf of a proposed Qatari pipeline through Syria to Europe, which would compete with a Russian pipeline already in place. Others argue that US support for Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in their ill-conceived plan to overthrow the Assad regime was driven by the US Neocons’ policy of permanent war in the Middle East region but more importantly, three Sunni allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar control US access to the key US military bases in the region. The Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department and the Obama White House have been concerned, above all, with protecting the US military positions in the region.
A potential fly in this Neocon ointment occurred on Dcember 29, 2016, when the Syrian government and rebel groups agreed to a nationwide ceasefire that commenced at midnight local time (5:00 p.m. EST), brokered by the Turkish and Russian governments. The US did not play a role in brokering this agreement, however, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said President-elect Donald Trump’s administration would be welcome to join the Syrian peace process once he takes office. | <urn:uuid:b63330a5-aaa8-48f7-a866-e48513040710> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/real-syria-story-no-one-wants-you-to-know/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281353.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00065-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948231 | 487 | 1.8125 | 2 |
The year 2020, for many Americans, can be characterized by the act of protest.
In May, George Floyd was killed by a policeman in Minneapolis, resulting in unprecedented numbers of protest turnout. A poll from Civis Analytics estimated between 15 million and 26 million people participated in the U.S., making these protests potentially the largest movement in the nation’s history. Activists groups in the nation also prepared to take to the streets in the event that Trump had won the election as well.
Between May and October, ACLED recorded more than 10,600 demonstration protests across the U.S. Over 10,100 of these — roughly 95% — involve peaceful protesters, while less than 570 — approximately 5% — involve demonstrators engaged in violence. Over 80% of all demonstrations reported during this period are connected to the Black Lives Matter movement or the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many protests in American society this year have severely disrupted social order and the safety of people’s lives.
Thomas Wright, a longtime democrat and employee at Target, recounted his protest experience. Wright became involved in community work through the proposed propositions P and U, which advocated – in 2008 and 2016, respectively – that the government would amend the housing regulations so that people can afford housing or buy a house. Both failed when they were on the ballots.
“A group of us protested to affect more people. I think people’s needs should be the first consideration for the government,” Wright said. “And then protests are also fighting for fairness and justice for those in need. It’s just my understanding of protest behavior.”
Prior to the election, Wright said that the justice he wanted most was to see Trump lose the election. He added that he was considering participating in protests against Trump’s re-election as president, had he won.
John Smith, an African American student at SF State, said that despite not participating in any protests himself, he encourages others to exercise their First Amendment rights while doing so in a safe way for all.
“We have seen many bad examples before, some of which used George Floyd’s death to protest, and doing illegal acts such as stealing stuff and attacking the police,” Smith said: “If the civil right movement is peaceful like Martin Luther King, we can definitely bring a positive impact to this society.”
Smith added that he believes a common factor among several significant protests in the U.S. are people’s dissatisfaction with the Trump administration. He said the administration is responsible for deaths such as George Floyd, adding that if they were to properly handle police violence, “There would not be so many people who would break out of dissatisfaction with the government and take to the streets to protest.”
“Police killing of George Floyd” caused the biggest protest in the country in 2020. The current U.S. President Trump responded to that: “If states don’t take action, I will deploy military and solve the problem for them.” On another side, many cities in the United States issued curfews, as police responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests to disperse occasionally violent crowds. Many American netizen comments online do not support President Trump’s response and believe that Trump’s response may have exacerbated American society’s unrest.
Martin D. Carcieri, professor of political science at SF State, specializing in Public Law and Political Theory said that the management of the ruling party and social injustice will lead people to protest. Carcieri has won four teaching awards, and his work has been cited in amicus curiae briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in five landmark cases,
“This kind of event has two things in common. The first is that people use their limited citizen right to protest and hope to get the government’s attention,” Carcieri said. “The government can do something. People who protest have nothing to lose engaging their behavior.”
“Second, we can see that the protests this year are all directed at the Trump administration. So many social unrests in less than a year stemmed from people’s dissatisfaction with the Trump administration,” Carcieri said. “And Trump earlier used the national army to fight against citizen protesters. This is unacceptable to me because protest is the fundamental civil right of the American democratic society.” | <urn:uuid:34a508d4-72c0-4c1d-ba86-8441ec4e5b20> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://goldengatexpress.org/95736/uncategorized/2020-the-year-of-the-protest/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572908.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817122626-20220817152626-00071.warc.gz | en | 0.972555 | 917 | 2.703125 | 3 |
BCC (short for "Branch if Carry is Clear") is the mnemonic for a machine language instruction which branches, or "jumps", to the address specified if, and only if the carry flag is clear. If the carry flag is set when the CPU encounters a BCC instruction, the CPU will continue at the instruction following the BCC rather than taking the jump.
BCC in comparisons[edit | edit source]
- Main article: Comparisons in machine language
LDA NumA Read the value "NumA" CMP NumB Compare against "NumB" BCC Less Go to label "Less" if "NumA" < "NumB" ... Execution continues here if "NumA" >= "NumB"
For signed integers, this method fails if NumA and NumB have different arithmetic signs (i.e. one negative, the other positive) — instead, BPL and BMI should be used for greater than/less than-style comparisons of signed bytes.
Addressing mode[edit | edit source]
BCC only supports the Relative addressing mode, as shown in the table at right.
In the assembler formats listed, nn is a one-byte (8-bit) relative address. The relative address is treated as a signed byte; that is, it shifts program execution to a location within a number of bytes ranging from -128 to 127, relative to the address of the instruction following the branch instruction.
The execution time for BCC is not a fixed value, but depends on the circumstances. The listed time is valid only in cases where BCC does not take the branch. If it does take the branch, execution takes one additional clock cycle. Furthermore, if the branching crosses a page boundary, yet another cycle must be added to the execution time listed.
CPU flags[edit | edit source]
BCC does not affect any of the CPU's status flags. | <urn:uuid:52744bdc-bfd1-4ff6-989a-a5378095f6eb> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BCC | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571989.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813232744-20220814022744-00476.warc.gz | en | 0.866797 | 456 | 3.515625 | 4 |
|Budget Amount *help
¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost : ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 1997 : ¥500,000 (Direct Cost : ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 1996 : ¥700,000 (Direct Cost : ¥700,000)
Reserch results in the term of project are as follows.
1. The investigator examined the classifiers and collected those examples in each period, each style genre, each writing-material and so on, as far as time permited. It is the extensive investigation of ancient documents, ancient records, reading-mark materials, Buddhism ritual prayrs, models for a letter, dictionaries, classical and modern literatures and contemporary arithmetic textbooks.
2. The investigator had a historical study about the classifiers of a hawk which had been made good use of hawking since olden times in Japan.
It needs further close consideration to each of fierds, such as a fierd of clothing, a fierd of fishes and shellfishes and others, or to each of the subjects of classifier.
3. It was found out that classifier was indispensable for drawing up documents from the mediaval period to the Edo era especially. It was the essential culture and technique for drafter to master classifier usage precisely.
4. The investigator researched closely ancient wooden-strips from the remains of Dun huang and tombs in China and collected many examples of classifier, namely Liangci.
The investigator is also examining classifier in Thai, Lao, Malay, Khmer, Vietnamese and so on in Southeast Asia.
The investiator is considering the principles which forms the basis of classification.
5. The investigator checked classifier usage in a contemporary newspaper. It is a matter for regret that classifier usage there is too simplified.
6. The investigator researched classifier in Shimane regional dialect. | <urn:uuid:75115edf-979f-4f90-bec1-38beec01f129> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-08610428/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279915.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00280-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922072 | 398 | 2.421875 | 2 |
For the love of you pet: Horses need to see the dentist, too
By John Beck
Aug. 15, 2013 at 3:15 a.m.
Over the last few weeks, I noticed that my horse is dropping feed. What do I need to do?
Dropping feed is a common sign of dental issues. Other things you may notice include weight loss, poor hair coat, difficulty chewing, episodes of colic, bad breath, nasal discharge, facial swelling, wadding up of hay (also known as quidding), stems of hay or whole grain in stools, fighting the bit, resisting training, failure to stop or turn while riding, and/or head tilting while eating.
Injuries to the cheeks, tongue and gums can occur; therefore, oral exams should be performed every six months to one year. Many horses will not show signs of dental issues until the problem is severe; therefore, proper dental care will safeguard that your horse remains healthy and comfortable, as well as ensure good performance.
Horses require a flat grinding surface in order to eat because of the fact that they chew in a circular motion. Misalignments, missing teeth, environmental factors and diet can cause teeth to wear abnormally since horses teeth erupt or grow continuously throughout their life.
Common dental concerns and malocclusions include hooks, ramps, points, waves, diastemas, overbites, underbites and wolf teeth. Hooks predominantly occur on the upper last molar and upper front premolar because of the upper teeth overhanging the lower teeth. This can cause severe bit trouble and trauma to surrounding tissue.
Ramps occur on the lower front premolar and last molar. This can cause the lower jaw to be forced forward and in turn result in jaw pain. Both ramps and hooks prevent the horse from chewing freely.
Enamel points typically occur on the outside up the upper teeth and the inside of the lower teeth. These points can cut the cheeks and tongue causing significant pain. Waves are uneven dental arcades that can occur because of malocclusions, missing teeth, hooks or ramps.This can prevent proper chewing and grinding of feed.
Diastemas are spaces between teeth that can cause feed to get trapped. This can be painful and result in periodontal disease.
Wolf teeth are small teeth found in some horses directly in front of the premolars and are most commonly in the upper jaw. Many times, these teeth are removed during castrations or during the first dental. Some owners find that wolf teeth cause bit discomfort and performance problems.
Proper dental care, for example examinations and teeth floats, can be performed by your veterinarian. A speculum will be used to hold your horse's mouth for a thorough evaluation. Your veterinarian will look for the aforementioned problems as well as assess your horse's mouth for odor, ulceration, gum disease, fractured teeth, foreign bodies, inflammation and lacerations.
A teeth float by either hand or power tools will be performed if deemed necessary. This will create a smooth surface for chewing, which is necessary since chewing requires significant movement.
Filing of teeth does not hurt your horse since there are no nerves in the portion of the tooth that is being corrected. Depending on the condition of the horse's teeth, this procedure should only take around 30 minutes and will make a huge difference for your horse.
Dr. John Beck has a veterinary practice at Hillcrest Animal Hospital in Victoria. Submit questions to Dr. Beck at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:5c6f99cd-5952-4732-93ac-22b875ff874a> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2013/aug/15/yl_john_beck_081113_216708/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719136.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00468-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934771 | 725 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Rogers Dry Lake (also known as Muroc Dry Lake), at Edwards Air Force Base in California, has been used by the U.S. military since 1933 when a small advance party from March Field in Riverside came to design a bombing range for the Army Air Corps. The area proved ideal for flight, with 350 days a year of flying weather and the lake providing a ready-made emergency landing field; four years later the entire Air Corps was performing bombing and gunnery maneuvers here. The south end of the lake was used during World War II for training P-38 Lightning fighter pilots and B-24 Liberator and B-25 Mitchell bomber crews. A realistic 650-foot replica of a Japanese Navy heavy cruiser, dubbed "Muroc-Maru," was used for strafing, identification and skip bombing practices before being removed in 1950.
Col. Benjamin W. Chidlaw and Lt. Col. Ralph P. Swofford chose Muroc Dry Lake in 1942 as the testing location for the then secret Bell-built XP-59A jet airplane. In September, America's first turbojet arrived at Muroc. Since 1942, Edwards Air Force Base (Muroc Air Force Base) and its tenant, the NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility have played a leading role in advancing the capabilities of aerospace technology. Lakebed Runway 18 was typically the landing facility for the X-15, a hypersonic research vehicle that flew for nearly a decade at Edwards. Edwards Air Force Base also served as a support facility for flight operations of the NASA Space Shuttle Orbiter. NASA Space Shuttles, launched from Kennedy Space Center, have utilized Lakebed Runway 23 as a landing strip. Many participants of Edwards Air Force Base's flight testing programs have also played major roles in the American manned spacecraft program, notably NACA-NASA administrator Dr. Walter Williams and test pilot-astronauts Donald Slayton, Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Joseph Engle. Rogers Dry Lake made possible the development and testing of generations of American aircraft, leading to the Space Shuttle.
Visit the National Park Service Travel American Aviation to learn more about Aviation related Historic Sites.
Last updated: August 29, 2017 | <urn:uuid:39b43868-9079-4635-ac38-9d7cf8d945db> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.nps.gov/articles/rogers-dry-lake.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573908.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20220820043108-20220820073108-00264.warc.gz | en | 0.944611 | 451 | 3.46875 | 3 |
The Future of Nuclear Energy
Last March, the world watched closely as Japan struggled to contain a series of equipment failures, hydrogen explosions and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The historic tsunami following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed the reactors’ connection to the power grid, causing them to overheat. Hundreds of people were exposed to increased levels of radiation. Thousands more were evacuated. Although Japanese officials have since declared the plant stable, the cleanup will be expensive and is expected to take decades.
A year later, however, the United States is moving forward with nuclear power. For the first time since 1978, the National Regulatory Commission has approved two new plants. The $14 billion facilities will be built just outside Augusta and operated by Atlanta-based Southern Company. They’re scheduled to be up and running by 2016 and 2017 and should produce about 10 percent of Georgia’s power.
“It’s smart to continue generating nuclear power in the United States,” said Marilyn Brown, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy. “It is a reliable, cost-competitive option that doesn’t contribute to air pollution or contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.” Brown helps shape the nation’s energy policies as a board member of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and chair of the company’s Nuclear Oversight Committee.
Brown said that nuclear power plants are expensive to build, compared to natural gas facilities.
“But they are clearly worth the investment,” she said. “A nuclear plant produces no carbon dioxide emissions and four times the power of a typical natural gas facility. Fourteen billion is a big number, but the plants should stay online for 50 to 70 years.”
Despite the benefits, critics will always point to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. These are the nation’s first approved nuclear facilities since Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Experts contend that modern plant designs are much safer than those built previously.
“The new plant designs are passively safe, so there are far fewer issues to worry about, like those that occurred with the older plants at Fukushima with the loss of off-site power,” said Glenn Sjoden, Georgia Tech professor of nuclear and radiological engineering. “With the new plants, you have a convection cooling loop that uses gravity and runs by itself for days in the event of lost power. There would be no active pumping required. . . . The more modern designs and precautions taken make nuclear the best option to satisfy our energy needs.”
Since last year’s incident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been reviewing existing U.S. plants to ensure that they can withstand earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters and making retrofit upgrades when necessary, Sjoden said.
Critics point to nuclear waste as another challenge with nuclear power. Each of the nation’s 104 plants store the radioactive waste on-site in steel casks protected by concrete and other safety systems. These are safe too, Brown said, because of careful construction and maintenance.
Nuclear waste would be a nonissue if the U.S. reprocessed its spent fuel like other nations such as France, Sjoden said.
“Like most nations, they recycle their used fuel, since 95 percent of the fuel can be recycled back into the reactor and used again, making nuclear power the most ‘green’ energy source out there,” Sjoden said. “Burying the waste, as we do in the United States, is completely wasteful.”
The United States generates almost 20 percent of its energy from nuclear plants, the same amount as natural gas. Coal supplies 50 percent. The remainder is generated from hydropower and other natural sources.
“We must develop more renewables sources, such as wind, solar and biopower,” says Brown. “Industry leaders, business and the general public must also become more energy efficient. That is the key to our future.” | <urn:uuid:32c018a6-7ecd-4ac1-8c1e-266357eca3b7> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | https://eponline.com/articles/2012/03/06/the-future-of-nuclear-energy.aspx?admgarea=ht.nuclearenergy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988717783.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183837-00075-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949877 | 848 | 3.5 | 4 |
The G(irls)20 Summit is just an incredible event, which gathers delegates from each G20 country and one from African Union. This year the discussions will focus on the food security, women's strategic engagement in agriculture and the opportunities lost as a result of violence against women. These problems are really acute nowadays and too complicated to be resolved at once, but they really require urgent steps to be undertaken already now.
This Summit will represent the voices of 21 young ladies and I'm sure that we will manage to elaborate really applicable and relevant proposals on how to tackle these problems. I'm very proud to represent Russian Federation in this Summit in Mexico 2012.
I consider myself to be a confident, energetic, ambitious and socially-active person. I have experience of acting as a leader in groups and projects and taking part in numerous social events and conferences, including international ones. So I'm really happy and excited of being a part of the G(irls)20 Summit 2012, and therefore of having an opportunity to share my views, enthusiasm and some experience with others, and inspire them! Besides, the Summit provides us, participants, with precious skills and knowledge that critically important for women leaders in the modern society. Moreover, sometimes I still can't believe that I'm already here, in Mexico, in the core of its event! I have never met in one place so many ambitious, enthusiastic, smart young ladies and great women that are not indifferent to the wide range of issues on global and local level and who srtrive after making our world better by means of concrete steps but not just some words.
To represent Russia at this Summit is a great honor for me, it requires from me to be well-aware of exact problematic issues of my community and to think of nonconventional approaches to addressing current challenges. In general, the situation in Russia is not so difficult as in some other countries, but at the same tim,e a number of obstacles exist. In Russia, the formal status of women is relatively firm: the Constitution secures egalitarian rights of women and men, and the doors for primary and higher education are open to everyone. But a profound problem in social consciousness and mentality exists, manifesting itself in two extremes. The first extreme is over-burdened women: abandoned wives or those having drunkard-husbands. This problem is especially acute in rural areas, where women, often with children, have to provide for the entire family without any moral or financial support from former husbands and climb step by step by themselves.
The other extreme is the myth that a woman cannot be a high-level successful leader in some spheres of activities. Russian people don't believe that a woman-leader can be accountable, tolerant, stress-resistant, determined and lead a community. In reality, Russian women are limited in realizing their potential in some fields of activities, including politics, innovative technologies, applied informatics, heavy industry, engineering and even sometimes traditional kinds of business. Russia has known only a few successful businesswomen. Russia's president has never been a female. When Russian women look for a new job in these fields, they will definitely come across vacancies open to males only.
I believe the core problem of women's engagement lies in people's mentality. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that all national policies are gender-sensitive and it is indispensable to foster gender sensitivity and break gender-related stereotypes from early childhood among both boys and girls.
The G(irls)20 Summit for me is the most excellent opportunity I could ever imagine in order to accumulate necessary knowledge, acquire special skills in order to start at least some small steps in local scales to start shifting people's mentality and changing the positions of women to the better ones. Moreover, I couldn't even imagine that once I will meet with the distinguished personalities who occuppy the highest positions in their society: the first lady of Mexico Mrs. Margarita Zavala and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico Mrs. Patricia Espinosa. That is why I want to express my greatest appreciation and gratitude to the numerous sponsors of this great event, including Google, Nissan, RIM, Scotia bank. Without them this Summit couldn't be possible. | <urn:uuid:2b7e46e5-c65c-424e-84ba-718c7a1bca9f> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kseniya-sukhotina/girls20-summit_b_1562725.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988720153.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183840-00324-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960078 | 852 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Virginia Aviation Wright Model B, Midland, Va., May 19, 2003–At 8:20 p.m. EDT an airline transport pilot of the homebuilt Wright Model B (N1911K), was seriously injured and the aircraft substantially damaged when it struck trees while maneuvering at Horse Feathers Airport, Midland, Va. The accident occurred in VMC.
N1911K is an exact replica of the original Wright Model B and was undergoing a series of high-speed taxi tests when the pilot, Ken Hyde, experienced “serious” directional stability problems. Hyde told FAA investigators that the airplane suddenly became airborne and he was unsure if he could land in the remaining space. Hyde elected to maneuver for a landing attempt, was unable to control the airplane and hit trees. The wind at the time was reported as calm. | <urn:uuid:cbc71bd1-e39b-47ac-b743-0df659a117bd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/aviation-international-news/2008-07-30/preliminary-report-wright-replica-hits-trees | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284411.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00454-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973407 | 170 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Mindfulness : 25 Ways to Live in the Moment through Art
Üye Girişi yapın, temin süresi ve fiyatını size bildirelim.
Üye Girişi yapın, sizi bu ürün stoklarımıza girdiğinde bilgilendirelim.
Temin süremiz 28 - 42 iş günü
Yayıncı Rider Books ( 11 / 2014 ) ISBN 9781846044632 | 14,81x19,99x2,59 cm. | İngilizce | 304 Sayfa | Türler Yoga, Meditasyon
"Everything about this book is exquisite...I wholeheartedly recommend it." (Mark Williams). Mindfulness Is a uniquely beautiful work. Illustrated in full colour throughout, this bestselling book draws upon art as a source of inspiration. Expert practitioner Christophe Andre invites us to consider paintings while practising mindfulness techniques. With stunning simplicity and clarity, he sets out 25 lessons that could change your life - from understanding what it means to live mindfully, to useful tips for everyday situations. Mindfulness offers an enduring source of quiet contemplation, enabling us to still our minds and become calmly aware of the present moment. From acceptance to freedom, from happiness to love, Mindfulness shows us how to approach our lives as living works of art. | <urn:uuid:fc5db7aa-d253-4e4f-8fb9-f38de0ce956e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.pandora.com.tr/urun/mindfulness-25-ways-to-live-in-the-moment-through-art/473619 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00406-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.692018 | 300 | 2.234375 | 2 |
The Queen Victoria and Prince Albert Sculptures at Frogmore Mausoleum by Baron Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867). Begun soon after the Prince's death in 1861, carried out with the help of William Theed's death-mask of the Prince, and with the advice of his eldest daughter Victoria, and finally installed in the mausoleum in 1868 after the sculptor's own death in the previous year. Marble on an Aberdeen granite block. Windsor. Source: Whates 12. Image download, text, and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the source and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. [Click on the images for larger pictures.]
Prince Albert is shown in his Garter Robes, under which can be glimpsed his military uniform. "The robes demonstrate the Prince's high rank, yet there is a softness, augmented by the ermine mantle on which he is lying, and a sense that the viewer has come across someone asleep" (Marsden 441). The Queen commissioned her own likeness from Marochetti at the same time, as a companion piece (see "Prince Albert"). This of course was not installed until after her death, four decades after her husband's, in 1901. She too seems merely asleep; in a tender touch, the young couple's heads are slightly inclined towards each other.
Marsden, Jonathan, ed. Victoria & Albert: Art & Love. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2010.
"Prince Albert." The Royal Collection. Web. 6 May 2014.
Whates, Harry Richard. The Life and Times of Edward VII. Vol. IV. London: Cassell, 1910. Internet Archive. Uploaded by the University of Toronto, Robarts Library. Web. 6 May 2014.
Last modified 7 May 2014 | <urn:uuid:0d1b9408-5808-42c2-8def-24fe8883185c> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://victorianweb.org/sculpture/marochetti/21.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988718309.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183838-00406-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930603 | 407 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Biomass situation in Catalonia
Tutor / director / avaluadorAntti Oksanen
Tipus de documentProjecte/Treball Final de Carrera
Condicions d'accésAccés restringit per decisió de l'autor
The present thesis gives a wide look at the current situation of biomass as a renewable energy, getting in depth in the particular situation of this energy source in Catalonia, a Spanish region located in the north-east of the country. It is structured so that the first chapters give a broad explanation about what is biomass, in order to clarify the main topic of the thesis to the reader. It is quite common nowadays to hear about renewable energies and therefore about biomass, but it is not always true that everybody knows exactly what this term refers to. In addition to the general description of the energetic source, different classifications are given, as well as the diverse causes why it is considered a renewable energy, and consequently the advantages that is has compared to the fossil resources. After this initial general clarification, the chapters get deeper in the topic. The different technologies which can be used to obtain energy from biomass are enlightened, paying special attention to those technological processes which are mainly used in Catalonia; they are the physicochemical transformations. It includes the conditioning activities which make possible an energetic use of biomass, plus the techniques themselves which convert biomass into energy. Then, the issue converges to Catalonia, beginning with a quick account of the European and Spanish biomass state, referred to the political situation (political plans and actions taken in order to stimulate the use of biomass) and the evolution of biomass use along last years. Next, the detailed view of the situation in Catalonia is given. This is similar to the explanation given about Europe and Spain, but getting further into the circumstances in there. Finally, biomass existences in the Catalan forests, different types of soil found in the region, diverse treatments given to biomass, and the main energetic applications of biomass, such as power plants or domestic hot water grids, are explained.
|Anna Garcia Len ... Situation in Catalonia.pdf||Report||2.362Mb||Accés restringit| | <urn:uuid:6147dd53-ea48-448f-b2a3-5a69dd33f5ca> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2099.1/10665 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280730.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00250-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908834 | 440 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Today, May 12, is Limerick Day, in honor of the birth of Edward Lear, the man who popularized the limerick poem with his own self-illustrated collection, the Book of Nonsense (1846). Limericks for adults are often bawdy verses or songs, but limericks for children are usually just humorous or even outrageous story-poems. There are several teaching resources available on the topic of writing limericks with kids including Poetry-online and Giggle Poetry.
Here are a few, fun original limericks by master punster, J. Patrick Lewis in honor of the day. Enjoy!
Limb-ericks: Hip Verses
All by J. Patrick Lewis (used with permission)
Now a snake who’s about to begin
Climbing out of his ugly old skin
Has the grin of a winner—
It’s “in” to be inner
And out of the outer he’s in.
In the desert a camel was minus
A passenger, His Royal Highness.
The King loved the humps
But the bumpety-bumps
Left him down in the dumps and the dryness.
The bat clings to the ceiling above,
Wrapped in wings like a hand in a glove,
Too afraid to expose
To his neighbors a nose
That only a mother could love.
According to Good Gnus Reporter,
The Giraffe used to be a lot shorter
Till a bird in the trees
Said, “Get up off your knees!”
Said Giraffe, “That’s a very tall order.”
To an Octopus luncheon for nine,
The comrades-in-arms come to dine.
But when hugging each other—
What suckers, oh brother!—
They look like a great ball of twine.
The Moose suffers pain and distress
If a hat is hung on his headdress.
His horns were intended
For something more splendid—
But what it is no one can guess!
Note: The limericks are forthcoming in J. Patrick Lewis's Countdown to Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year, Little, Brown, (Spring 2009). I can’t wait to see this book! I’ve been working on my own project matching poems to events for each day of the year, so this should be a terrific resource. A similar approach is the fantastic, Days to Celebrate: A Full Year of Poetry, People, Holidays, History, Fascinating Facts, and More by Lee Bennett Hopkins (New York: Greenwillow, 2005).
For more limericks, there’s always Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, of course, plus these gems:
Ciardi, John. 1992. The Hopeful Trout and Other Limericks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Kennedy, X.J. 1997. Uncle Switch: Loony Limericks. New York: Margaret K. McElderry.
For a wonderful poem tribute to Lear himself, check out:
Lewis, J. Patrick. 1998. Boshblobberbosh; Runcible Poems for Edward Lear. Mankato: Creative Editions; San Diego: Harcourt.
Picture credit: www.dkimages.com | <urn:uuid:f94086b5-c9bb-4119-8bf8-70b66ddf5ac4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2008/05/happy-limerick-day.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280761.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00092-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.885575 | 712 | 2.640625 | 3 |
If you were tasked with organizing an election that looked democratic, but actually ensured that your side had the upper hand, how would you do it? You would find ways to restrict who could run, who could vote, and what they could vote for.
This week, Hong Kong authorities – having refused for years to budge on the issues of who could vote and what people could vote for in the selection of Hong Kong’s top official, the chief executive – took a massive step backward. They decided to restrict who could run by disqualifying the Demosisto party candidate Agnes Chow and the Community Network Union’s Ventus Lau in the upcoming Legislative Council by-elections.
Three years ago, during the Umbrella Movement, tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong called for universal suffrage in the selection of the chief executive. The Beijing and Hong Kong governments have failed to deliver this promise, guaranteed by the Basic Law. And they have targeted Hong Kong’s semi-democratic Legislative Council (LegCo), an essential, high-profile platform for pro-democracy leaders in a city increasingly gagged by censorship of the media.
Beginning in 2016, authorities have disqualified pro-democracy figures from running for seats on LegCo or unseated them after they were elected.
In 2016, the Hong Kong Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) added a new requirement that all candidates wishing to run for the Legco must fill out a “confirmation form,” in which candidates affirm that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China, a requirement that infringes on the right to peaceful expression. Two pro-democracy candidates – Edward Leung of Hong Kong Indigenous and Andy Chan of the Hong Kong National Party – were disqualified because their pro-independence stances were deemed “incompatible with the Basic Law.”
Following the 2016 LegCo elections, in which a number of outspoken pro-democracy candidates won, Beijing intervened. It issued an “interpretation” of the Basic Law that compelled the Hong Kong courts to disqualify two legislators who explicitly advocated independence for Hong Kong. That court decision later led to the disqualification of four more pro-democracy legislators.
The authorities’ disqualification of Chow is doubly problematic. Not only does it penalize her right to free expression, but it also suggests a harder government line against even those who merely advocate for “self-determination” – the idea that Hong Kong people should make decisions about Hong Kong’s political status and socio-economic developments, a concept that is “completely different from advocating independence,” according to Chow.
The grounds for disqualifying Lau are even more dubious. The EAC told Lau – who publicly advocated independence in 2016 – that he was not “sincere” when he abandoned this stance by December. The officer cited Lau’s three Facebook posts, and alleged that Lau had portrayed himself as a successor to pro-independence figures Edward Leung and Baggio Leung and that Lau had obtained Baggio Leung’s endorsement. To bar anyone from running in elections purely because of their peaceful political views is a violation of their basic human rights to stand for elections, which is guaranteed under the Basic Law.
The EAC is a statutory body whose decisions are required to be “independent, impartial and apolitical.” Yet Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng, a political appointee, has openly acknowledged her personal involvement in the decision regarding Chow’s candidacy. Electoral authorities have given no explanation as to why Chow’s party’s platform is not in line with the Basic Law. And in Lau’s case, it is deeply disturbing that an EAC officer claimed to judge a candidate’s fitness to run not only by his political stance but also by his deemed sincerity. That other pro-democracy candidates who did not sign the “confirmation form” are being allowed to run deepens the arbitrary nature of the Chow and Lau decisions.
It is unclear whether Chow and Lau intend to appeal the decision in the courts, but the court has yet to hand down a decision on challenges filed by Leung and Chan over one year ago. Pro-democracy candidates are wondering where they stand vis-à-vis Beijing and the Hong Kong government’s acceptability barometer, which will likely further chill expression.
Chow’s disqualification also means that not a single member of any of the political groups that grew out of the Umbrella Movement – mostly made up of young people – has been able to stand for LegCo election or represent voters once elected. Hong Kong authorities are not only violating fundamental rights, but they also risk alienating large swathes of the population that support such voices.
Hong Kong authorities have the essential laws to resist being forced to do Beijing’s bidding. That they won’t enforce them to protect Hong Kong people’s rights is an alarming development. | <urn:uuid:38a649c9-c5ad-4ad1-9d45-37785bccb832> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/01/hong-kongs-great-leap-backward-political-rights | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571982.99/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813172349-20220813202349-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.968569 | 1,014 | 2.328125 | 2 |
A giant fossilized claw discovered in Germany belonged to an ancient sea scorpion that wasmuch bigger than the average man, an international team of geologists and archaeologists reported Tuesday.
The 46-centimetre-long claw was discovered by report co-author Markus Poschmann, from Germany, in a quarry near Pruem, a city about 200 kilometres east of Frankfurt.
The researchers said the scorpion lived between 460 and 255 million years ago and would have been among the top predators in its environment, feeding on early vertebrates and smaller arthropods. The report saidthe creature likely only lived in the water because with the construction of its body, "it is hardly imaginable how such a huge arthropod could effectively walk on land."
In a report in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, the team said the claw indicates that sea scorpion Jaekelopterus rhenania was almost 2.5 metres long, making it the largest arthropod — an animal with a segmented body, jointed limbs and a hard exoskeleton — ever found. In the report, the authors said the scorpion exceeds previous size records for arthropods by almost half a metre.
The fossil, found in a 390-million-year-old rock, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the researchers said.
"This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realized, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," said co-author Dr. Simon Braddy from the University of Bristol.
Some geologists believe that the giant arthropod evolved due to high oxygen levels, while others argue that they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their prey, the early armoured fish. | <urn:uuid:2388ae4c-504d-4a92-baec-96e318d8445b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/sea-scorpion-fossil-belonged-to-biggest-bug-ever-scientists-1.630613?ref=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00439-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966242 | 399 | 3.5 | 4 |
A look at the non-experts speaking at Heartland Institute's denialist sideshow
What is to be done when the world’s leading experts in a field come together in the largest, most extensively peer-reviewed inquiry in the history of science and arrive at a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to your own long-held worldview? Most of us would reevaluate our ideas so they actually mesh with reality. That’s called learning.
But if you are the staunchly “free market,” anti-regulation think tank called the Heartland Institute and the conclusion is that humanity must cooperate to get the world out of a worsening climate crisis … well, then what you do is simply manufacture a conclusion that is more to your liking.
Make no mistake, this is what the Heartland Institute‘s “International Conference on Climate Change” is all about. Set to begin Sunday in New York, the gathering’s guest list includes the standard roster of “scientist-denialists” — a large group of “experts” who have never published a single peer-reviewed study in their lives, along with a handful of fringe researchers who do (though rarely) publish in the field of climate science. The conference tagline is: “Global Warming: was it ever really a crisis?” and the conclusion is predetermined. “Was it ever a crisis?” … as if it isn’t right now.
By conception, the Heartland gathering seeks to establish itself as an authoritative gathering of genuine experts in climate science. The claim the Heartland Institute makes is pretty simple: “more than 70 of the world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues” will be there.
So, Heartland says to the unsuspecting, the experts are all coming to this event, and they all say there is nothing to worry about. That actually makes the whole charade pretty easy to unmask.
We don’t have to examine every particular scientific or pseudo-scientific argument that will be advanced during the conference (that’s been done repeatedly), because the whole thrust of this conference is about who is attending, not what they are saying.
Heartland promises the “world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues.” Really? Let’s have a quick look at the top-billed attendees as described by conference’s official agenda:
- American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt.
- William Gray, Colorado State University, leading researcher into tropical weather patterns.
- Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves.
- Stephen McIntyre, primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data.[…]
- Arthur Robinson, curator of a global warming petition.
- Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
- Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
Astronaut? I thought we were talking about climate!
But seriously, who are these people and should we rely on their views?
Jack Schmitt indeed has a Ph.D., but his educational training has nothing to do with climate. After earning his doctorate in geology, Schmitt became an astronaut (he walked on the moon) and later a Republican senator from New Mexico; he teaches engineering physics and promotes the acquisition of lunar resources for the private sector as chairman of Interlune Intermars Initiative Inc.
William Gray is a well-respected scientist in the field of hurricane prediction — but that is weather forecasting, not climate science. He actually compared Al Gore’s belief in global warming to Adolf Hitler’s belief that Jews are subhuman.
Steve McIntyre has studied mathematics and economics and spent 30 years in the Canadian mining industry. He is a well-known face in the climate wars as founder of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to criticizing the work of several prominent climate scientists.
Arthur Robinson is the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a paper-only “institution” with no students and no courses. He himself is a chemist by training; his claim to fame in the realm of climate change skepticism is that he created the “Oregon Petition,” a fraudulent document that pretended to come from the National Academy of Sciences.
Willie Soon is an astrophysicist whose work on solar-based explanations for the current planetary warming is mostly published on the websites of the Marshall Institute, the Fraser Institute and the Science and Public Policy Institute, hardly reputable journals of climate science literature.
These, then, are the “world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues?” Or so the Heartland Institute hopes to trick you into believing.
I have not yet mentioned Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, who, by the way, disagree with Soon, Robinson, Gray and Schmitt. While these two legitimate climate scientists express doubt about the dangers of climate change, they both acknowledge that the world is warming and that it is due to human activity, primarily greenhouse gas emissions. Actually, this puts them at odds with most of their fellow panelists.
Lindzen is a fading star in climate research, as he hitched his wagon to the Iris Hypothesis, a proposed sort of natural thermostat for the earth that would supposedly counter any large, CO2-forced warming. Scientists trying to investigate Lindzen’s theory have reached different conclusions, and Lindzen is no longer very active in publishing peer-reviewed research.
Similarly, Spencer gained notoriety with his analysis of satellite readings of atmospheric temperatures. For some years, this analysis disagreed markedly with what climate models predicted — showing cooling rather than warming in the middle and upper troposphere. However, a few years ago, a series of errors and data problems were uncovered, and his latest work on this topic now shows tropospheric temperatures that are well in agreement with general model expectations — these parts of the atmosphere are indeed warming along with the surface.
Aside from the star billings, who else is attending?
Looking at the listing on Heartland website, we see blogger Anthony Watts, a retired weatherman (meteorology is NOT the same as climatology!). And then there’s Myron Ebell, Marlo Lewis, Fred Smith, Sam Kazman, Steve Milloy, and Chris Horner — all from the extreme free market Competitive Enterprise Institute (the organization that tried to stage a “pro-coal” counter-demonstration early this week in Washington, DC.
Lawrence Solomon, a columnist at the conservative National Post in Canada, is on the list, and British aristocrat-turned-politician-turned-journalist-turned-skeptic Christopher Monckton will be there.
Hardly “the world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues.” In fact, none of these experts is a trained climate scientist. In the community of actual experts, the consensus is:
- The earth is rapidly warming (over .6 degrees celsius in the last century)
- Human activities are the primary cause
- Warming will continue and accelerate if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated
But in the world of political persuasion, where message trumps reality, the Heartland Institute wants you to just gas up your SUV and not worry about a thing. Like damning with faint praise, far from undermining the scientific consensus, this list illustrates just how strong that consensus really is.
Beck is the principal author of the “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic” series.
Get Grist in your inbox | <urn:uuid:405d121b-0b61-4668-89dd-6c582488935e> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://grist.org/article/A-roomful-of-cynics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988721555.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183841-00180-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943938 | 1,599 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, part of an ambitious commercial space venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, crashed during testing Friday and broke into several pieces over the Mojave Desert. One test pilot was killed and another was injured.
"Space is hard and today was a tough day," said George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. “The future rests in many ways on hard, hard days like this. But we believe we owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles … to move forward, which is what we'll do.”
The news of the second catastrophic accident in a week has sent tremors throughout the burgeoning commercial space industry and is sure to create questions about its future.
Two pilots were aboard SpaceShipTwo, company and FAA officials confirmed. According to the California Highway Patrol, one of the pilots was able to eject and parachute out of the aircraft before being airlifted to a hospital. The other pilot was killed in the crash. Their names have not been released.
The WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, which carries the SpaceShipTwo, landed safely. National Transportation Safety Board investigators were on their way to the site, which the Kern County Sheriff said was spread over five debris fields over a two- to three-mile area.
The rocket plane was using a new fuel formulation, said Kevin Mickey, CEO of Scaled Composites, which conducted Friday's test flight.
The new fuel mixture had been “tested and proven on the ground many times,” he said.
Virgin Galactic has engaged in a nearly decade-long endeavor to produce the world's first commercial space liner, which would make several trips a day carrying scores of paying customers into space for a brief journey.
announced an agreement in May with the Federal Aviation Administration that helped clear the path to send paying customers on a suborbital flight by setting parameters for how routine missions to space would take place in national airspace.
Friday's test was the company’s first rocket-powered test flight in nine months. Scaled Composites was conducting the test flight in partnership with Virgin Galactic, and its CEO said the flight was using a new fuel formation that had been tested on the ground. In January, SpaceShipTwo reached 71,000 feet -- its highest altitude so far. Virgin Galactic has done its testing for the spacecraft at Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
On Tuesday night, an unmanned rocket exploded just seconds after liftoff from a Virginia launch pad. The $200-million rocket, owned by Orbital Sciences, was carrying supplies to the space station. No one was injured in that explosion.
Virgin Galactic's plans have been repeatedly delayed. Branson said earlier this month at a celebration in Mojave that it was “on the verge” of going to space, but he did not give a time frame. Branson said on Friday via Twitter that he was on his way to California to be with the Virgin Galactic team.
Stuart Witt, CEO and general manager of Mojave Space and Air Port, said he did not see an explosion after the testing team realized there was an "anomaly" a couple minutes after the spaceship separated from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier.
"From my eyes and ears, I detected nothing that appeared abnormal," he said. "If there was a huge explosion, I didn't hear it." He said a 90-second pause led him to think something had gone wrong.
"It's when I wasn't hearing anything that I became concerned," he said.
Virgin Galactic's reusable SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was designed to fly with the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft to 50,000 feet, where the spaceship separates and blasts off. Virgin Galactic has said that when the rocket motor engages, it will power the spaceship to nearly 2,500 mph and take the pilot -- and up to six passengers -- to the edge of space, or more than 60 miles above the Earth's surface.
Passengers would experience weightlessness at the suborbital altitude and see the curvature of the Earth. The spaceship would reenter the atmosphere and glide back to a runway. The company planned to charge $250,000 for the experience.
NASA sent its condolences to Virgin Galactic on Friday afternoon.
“While not a NASA mission, the pain of this tragedy will be felt by all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploration," a statement said. "Space flight is incredibly difficult, and we commend the passion of all in the space community who take on risk to push the boundaries of human achievement.”
Witt struck a similar note.
“My message to [the industry] is to stay the course. This business is a worthy business. This is not easy. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be interesting to me or any of my colleagues standing with us,” he said.
The idea of Virgin Galactic routinely taking passengers to space this way was developed by retired maverick aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his Mojave company Scaled Composites, which was conducting the test on Friday.
Virgin Galactic said it has accepted more than $80 million in deposits for about 700 reservations made by people who are interested in the ride, including stars such as Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and Leonardo DiCaprio. Ticket holders also include Jim Clash, a writer and resident of New York City. He reserved his ticket four years ago with a 10% deposit and says he won't be swayed.
“It’s rocket science. It’s dangerous, it’s risky, it’s complicated. Most of us who bought tickets know that,” he said. “I expected there to be accidents. ... I’m very sad and shocked that it was in such a spectacular fashion today, but it’s not going to change my view.”
Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at the Teal Group, said that having twin crashes in a week “could have very serious impact” on attracting investors to the industry.
He said that any time a person dies, it sends the message of how dangerous these ventures are. Virgin will now have a harder time attracting customers, he said. Virgin’s space plane had looked safer than a rocket to the public, he said.
“People will now realize this is space travel,” Caceres said, “and you’re getting into a rocket.”
Michael Blades, senior industry analyst of aerospace and defense at Frost & Sullivan, said the timing is especially bad and Virgin’s crash will indefinitely push back its goal of blasting tourists off into space, which has already suffered a number of delays.
“The passenger thing probably won’t happen this decade,” he said.
Friday's accident was not the first for the program. In 2007, during a test of the spaceship's propulsion system, an explosion at the Mojave Desert airport killed three workers and injured three others.
The blast reminded the public of the risks of rocketry, which had long been the domain of powerful governments rather than small business.
Branson has since built a 68,000-square-foot facility at the space port for a joint venture, called Spaceship Co., to mass-produce its rocket ship and carrier aircraft. It was one of the first aircraft assembly plants to be built in the region in decades.
Mojave Air & Space Port's warren of nearly 100 wind-worn hangars sits just off a desolate stretch of California 14, amid the dusty landscape dotted with sage brush and gnarled Joshua trees.
The 3,300-acre site with a two-mile-long runway has been transformed into an energetic commercial space hub, drawing projects bankrolled by Branson, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and other aerospace visionaries. It has been called the Silicon Valley of Space.
There are dozens of companies at Mojave Air & Space Port -- most of them aerospace-related -- bringing about hundreds of jobs, many of them young rocket scientists, aerospace engineers and technicians eager to work in the burgeoning commercial space industry.
Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:70a584e3-34e7-4a9b-b0e5-48449971f613> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-virgin-galactics-spaceship-anomaly-testing-20141031-story.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282202.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00547-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972082 | 1,699 | 2.09375 | 2 |
In the UK, food business operators have a legal requirement under EC Regulation 852 to ensure all food handlers are trained in food safety and hygiene to a level appropriate for their work duties. Having a specific food hygiene certificate isn’t necessary, but you must be able to prove that all staff have received adequate training in food safety, such as by:
You will need to have evidence that these forms of training provide staff with the appropriate knowledge and skills to ensure food safety. This evidence may be requested by an environmental health officer when they visit your business, so it’s very important that you can prove this training was delivered in a sufficient and factually-correct manner.
Many food businesses choose to train staff using accredited online courses, as this ensures they are equipped with the right knowledge and skills for their role, and has the added benefit of being easy to provide evidence to an Environmental Health Officer (EHO).
But with so many different courses available online it can be difficult to determine which one is the one you need. Which course will fulfil the legal requirement for staff training? What level of food hygiene certificate do supervisors need? Do I need a food hygiene certificate if I make and sell food from my home?We have created this handy guide to the three levels of food hygiene certificate to answer the above questions and help you decide which course is right for you or your staff.
This level of food safety and hygiene training is the most basic and gives learners an introduction to the core concepts of food safety including, food safety hazards, cleaning routines, cooking temperatures, cross-contamination, personal hygiene and food storage. Level 1 is suitable for staff who don’t handle food directly, or only handle low-risk or already packaged foods.
Examples of employees who may benefit from Level 1 food safety training include:
The next level of food safety and hygiene training is Level 2, which is necessary for anyone who handles, prepares or cooks food in their role. At this level, training provides an understanding of safe practices and procedures, such as safe cooking temperatures and cleaning schedules. Courses at this level also cover how to control food safety risks through things like controlling contamination, maintaining personal hygiene and storing food correctly.
Level 2 courses can apply in a wide variety of settings. Some examples of employees who might need a level 2 certificate in food safety and hygiene are:
Everyone who works in a role that involves directly handling food has a responsibility to make sure food is safe for consumers to eat.
The final level of food safety and hygiene certificate is targeted towards supervisors, managers and food business owners. Level 3 courses. Any business that has staff who handle food under supervision must have at least one person with a level 3 food hygiene certificate to ensure compliance with EU regulations on the Hygiene of Foodstuffs. This course covers similar content to Level 2, but also includes information and knowledge on how to train staff in food safety and ensure best practices are followed.
Some specific roles that may need a Level 3 certificate are:
Level 3 food hygiene courses should also cover HACCP principles and food safety management systems. There are also separate HACCP courses available.
There is no legal requirement for how often food safety certificates need to be renewed. However, all staff who work with food should have up to date knowledge of best practices in food safety. For example, if there is a change in food safety legislation, or the way the food business is run, employees should receive up to date training. Any additional training should be recorded in case an EHO requests to see it.
Anyone who regularly handles, prepares or cooks food for public consumption must make sure they have adequate food safety and hygiene knowledge in order to protect customers’ health. From home baking businesses to food delivery services, more and more people are running food businesses out of their homes. Like larger businesses, it is not a legal requirement that home cooks have a food hygiene certificate, but they still need to demonstrate high standards of food preparation, handling, storage and serving. An online food safety course can be one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to improve your knowledge and prove due diligence if necessary. Some examples of people who can benefit from food safety training are:
With our online training platform, you can access all three Food Safety and Hygiene courses and more, which will generate a PDF e-certificate on completion and is a great way to make sure you have the right knowledge to run your food business safely and allow you to prove compliance to an EHO. | <urn:uuid:3797316e-d8c0-41f9-92ef-a08a1ef9bab5> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://tayl.net/blog/do-i-need-a-level-1-2-or-3-food-hygiene-certificate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571869.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813021048-20220813051048-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.958414 | 920 | 2.625 | 3 |
Five years ago this week, the United State Supreme Court delivered its most sweeping gay rights decision ever, striking down laws in Texas and other states that had criminalized sex between gays. The court erected a shield of privacy around sexual behavior for all consenting adults, and in doing so paved the way for other milestones in the gay rights legal movement, including judicial victories for gay marriage in Nov. 2003 in Massachusetts and this year in California.
The decision in the Lawrence v. Texas case overturned convictions against two Houston men, whom police had arrested after busting into their home and finding them engaged in sex. And for the first time in their lives, thousands of gay men and women who lived in states where sodomy had been illegal were free to be gay without being criminals. Gay rights groups held spontaneous celebrations in dozens of U.S. cities
But matched against their joy was a storm of protests, beginning from right inside the nation's top courthouse itself. Justice Antonin Scalia read aloud from the bench his withering dissent that morning five years ago. Joined by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia called the decision to strike down laws against sodomy "a massive disruption of the current social order," and predicted that it would lead to the collapse of laws against gay marriage, fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. "This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation."
But in the five years since Lawrence came down, this much is clear: Scalia was not all wrong. Indeed, his central point that the decision would give sustenance to a range of challenges to gay- and sex-related laws has proven prescient.
The legal changes wrought by Lawrence have been considerable. Both the Massachusetts and California marriage cases, for instance, cite Lawrence. So have cases in Alabama involving sex toys and in Florida involving gay adoptions, and just last month, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision cited Lawrence in holding for the first time that the military's exclusion of openly gay members must be based on more than simple moral disapproval of homosexuals. That case has been sent back to lower courts for further proceedings, but is already seen as a major challenge to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Just one day after Lawrence, and in light of the ruling, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered reconsideration of a case involving an 18-year-old who had been sentenced to prison for 17 years for initiating oral sex on a 14-year-old boy. If the younger boy had been a girl, state law would have capped the 17-year-old's sentence to 15 months under the so-called "Romeo and Juliet" provision like the ones found in many states. In 2005, the case reached the Kansas high court, which ruled that the sentence was unconstitutional, and, citing Lawrence, said the statute's protections must be extended to same-sex incidents.
Not all of the cases citing Lawrence have been decided in favor of gay-rights plaintiffs. Florida's ban on adoption by gay couples, for instance, has stood. But the impact of Lawrence v. Texas will likely only grow, say the lawyers involved in the arguments five years ago. "What Lawrence really means is that it is no longer enough to simply disapprove of conduct for the majority to make it a crime," says Paul Smith, the attorney who had argued before the court urging it to strike down the sodomy statutes.
"Was Scalia right? Well, it depends on how you read what he said," Smith says. "If you think he meant that the decision would upend the way the law treats homosexuals, then I think he was right. But he also warned that the decision would lead to a massive social upheaval. And just like we found in Massachusetts after the gay marriage ruling, that hasn't happened at all. These laws haven't changed the way anybody else lives their life." He adds, "I didn't spend a lot of time listening to what Justice Scalia was saying. And I wasn't really focused on what the implications of the case would in the future. Just knowing what we had accomplished at the moment [the striking down of the sodomy laws] was tremendous."
Scalia was indeed apocalyptic back in 2005. "It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed," he wrote. "Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive."
Those views are changing, and fairly quickly. But the lasting impact of Lawrence will likely be that no matter what the majority of Americans think about gays in the future, lawmakers and courts alike will find it nearly impossible to justify criminal sanctions just as Scalia warned. Of course, Scalia's wasn't the only one who spoke about gays that day. "The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government." And despite the loud fulminations of Scalia's minority opinion, it is Kennedy's words that count. | <urn:uuid:35495d3d-235d-4183-8e69-844323a87fae> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1818504,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281353.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00063-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979085 | 1,128 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Our future relies on regenerative practices. But small-scale farmers need help.
Industrial agriculture and food production are major contributors to climate change. Small-scale farmers do a lot for the environment — not to mention that they feed the majority of the developing world.
However, these farmers experience increasing pest pressure, decreasing yields, and challenges from a quickly changing landscape. These issues threaten their livelihoods and have serious implications for those who depend on their crops.
Scaling and spreading agroecological strategies for combating climate change and feeding hungry communities must be a global priority. Despite the serious threat that climate change poses to humanity, and to small-scale farmers in particular, proven solutions like planting in agroforestry systems and using cover crops and compost to boost soil organic matter and fertility receive little government or market support.
Why Small-Scale Farmers?
380 million smallholder farming families in the Global South produce over 70% of food (as measured by total calories) for the Global South and at least half, by the same measurement, consumed globally.
Small-scale farmers are among the most affected by climate change even though they don’t produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.
Small-scale farmers practicing regenerative organic agriculture can drawdown greenhouse gas emissions and help mitigate global climate change.
Small-scale farmers receive little government or market support and safeguards and are vulnerable to increasing pest pressure, decreasing yields, and climate extremes.
Working Towards a Sustainable Future
Agroforestry is a system of planting crops and trees together to improve social, economic, and environmental benefits. Planting in agroforestry systems allows farmers to restore water and nutrients to their soil, increase the production of food, and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Small Farmers Cool the Planet
Industrial agriculture drives 30–50% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The list of culprits from big farms includes:
- chemical fertilizers
- heavy machinery
- land change
The result? A food system that creates emissions and global climate changes.
However, studies show that small-scale farmers are experts at doing more with less. They feed the majority of the world with a quarter of all farmland. And they even manage to reduce emissions along the way.
Though small farms are more productive and have ample potential to contribute to climate resiliency, they're fading fast. By switching to organic management practices like agroforestry, they can continue to reduce GHGs while upping production.
Support a Campaign
Our campaigns raise money for projects that are completely designed, implemented, and managed by community cooperatives. This is a radical shift in community development, placing trust in local knowledge and expertise. As a result, communities have more sovereignty over their food supplies and resources to spread knowledge on sustaining their communities and their lands.
Campaign Goal: $60,000
Grow Ahead has teamed up with Communal Assets of the Lacandona Zone (BCZL) to support traditional Mayan agroforestry to boost biodiversity, support soil health and restore freshwater in the lagoons, rivers and springs of the Lacandona Jungle.
Campaign Goal: $65,000
Grow Ahead has teamed up with Assembly of the Poor (AOP) to support a project to enhance agroforestry and community food-forests for food sovereignty in Thailand.
Campaign Goal: $50,000
Grow Ahead has teamed up with Association for Agricultural Cooperation, Education and the Environment of the state of Pernambuco (ACAEMPE) to support the planting of 80,000 trees and promotion of an environmental education program in Pernambuco, Brazil. | <urn:uuid:0cf800fd-e83e-420b-83dc-972ecafd9097> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://growahead.org/learn/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572021.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814083156-20220814113156-00070.warc.gz | en | 0.919924 | 795 | 3.734375 | 4 |
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. ― Tim O’Brien
In the summer we’d race up the stairs, taking them two by two. Back then we were fearless; we never held on to the railing and our feet rarely touched the ground. They called us sisters, told me always that I was a photocopy of you — down to the bone-white skin and the thicket that was your hair. When we cried, which was never, our lips paled down to blue. When we shouted, which was often, our face was flush and hot. I wrote my first poem, a haiku, when I was seven, and in it I likened your voice to thunder. Women on the verge, we colored outside the lines, ripped up the book and made new ones. We were of the difficult variety, our stock and trade were words and how we could use them. Who needed a scalpel? Give us a book and we’d carve out your still-beating heart. Deliver us a pencil and we’d burn your house to the ground. You spoke, I wrote, we ruined.
They tell us we’re strong. Our words made us a fortress and we spent the great part of our lives in construction for we had a lot to protect. But in the end it was me who realized that while we conquered and vanquished, while we were women people always remembered because we shone perhaps too bright, we were always alone. And what we carried was the massacre that we’d left behind. Dragging the carcasses of our former lives behind us. Bearing the burden of those we tried to love on our backs.
Sometimes I want to go back. All the way. Back to when my knees knocked and I wrote about a sky that would never be blue.
Fast forward to another sun, another beach, another year in passing. A storm threatened, and the sun plunged into the waves which had begun to blacken. You asked me if I wanted to leave, to go back inside, into the hotel, back to New York and I said, not yet. In a small voice I wondered why we were always in the business of leaving. In my head I wondered if I drank too much. A week later you drove cross-country and years later you became a woman who impressively lunched, while I gave up the sauce, preferring the desert. We’re from the desert, you see. We like the heat. We carried the memories of all that had come before. The bricks of our fortress encased our ankles like shackles.
Sometimes I wonder if you think about going back. Or whether you regret any of it. Do you think about it at all? Or is the weight of what you’d done too much to bear?
Years later in Malibu we sped through all the flashing lights because the power had gone out. I took a photo of you standing on a pile of wet rocks and you asked that I delete it because you lead an edited life. You asked me what I wanted to do next — because you can do anything, that’s the strange thing about you — and I said I didn’t know. Both of us carried the weight of our options.
This time it’s winter. The bone-white skin becomes a body chilled down to bone. In front of a fire we speak in half sentences, knowing that the other could easily fill in the blanks. You tell me that we’re going to have a time. Quietly I laugh and consider the word time, how it’s something that we never gain, only lose, and I think to myself that we had our time. Both of us now have to carry the weight of the hours that follow.
Today, I sit in Frankie’s 457, quietly savoring a lunch alone. I wonder if you could see me now. If you could see how I’m using words to build a kingdom where everyone could gather. And all we’d care about is the here, the now, and the love behind the words we share. And the fact that the only weight is from one another as we buoy ourselves up, carry us to our new home, our new life.
bottom image credit | <urn:uuid:55cb0172-eb02-412d-9e1a-6d4f817ced9e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://lovelifeeat.com/2013/01/26/the-gathering-kind-part-5-the-things-we-carry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560285289.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095125-00151-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981451 | 992 | 2.265625 | 2 |
20 Reasons, 1 Cause:
10 Action Strategies for Eliminating NCLB
Hold a public forum in your community to explore and explain these points.
Organize community and neighborhood potluck dinners with teachers and parents to talk together about how NCLB is affecting children and school.
Persuade your organizations to pass resolutions calling for the repeal of NCLB based on these points.
Collect signatures on a Petition to Eliminate NCLB based on these 20 points. Publicize your results in the local media and send copies of resolutions and petitions to your local and federal elected officials.
Write letters-to-the-editor and op-ed pieces for your local and regional newspapers, making these points.
Get your local school board to pass a resolution or hold a community forum about eliminating NCLB.
Contact your U.S. senators and representatives about eliminating NCLB: Call them, write or email them (send these points and other information), and set up meetings with them in your district (bring a group of children).
Contact your state legislators to enlist them in the effort to eliminate NCLB; get state legislatures to pass resolutions.
Parents: Join the NCLB-mandated Parents Advisory Board at your child’s school. Bring the 20 Reasons to Eliminate NCLB to begin a dialogue.
Organize a public protest or march on test days or days given over to test preparation.
NCLB is emblematic of the current administration it tries to fix something by making it worse. It doesn’t encourage learning or critical reasoning, it encourages rote memorization and teach to the test. Something has to be done. Here are some sugestions | <urn:uuid:518914b1-9d35-41d2-b645-f54f17dc558b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.tmttlt.com/archives/4733 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560285001.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095125-00310-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917759 | 350 | 2.78125 | 3 |
60 Jahre Österreichische Gesellschaft für Ernährung
ÖGE Jahrestagung 2011
AKTUELLES ZUR GESUNDHEITSFÖRDERUNG UND ERNÄHRUNGSTHERAPIE
NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES, GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS
NCDs – PATHOGENESIS AND NUTRITION THERAPY
PREVENTION OF MICRONUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES
STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE DIET QUALITY
Dear colleagues and friends,
it is a great pleasure to invite you to participate in the Austrian Nutrition Society Annual Meeting 2011 that will be held in the Festsaal / Ceremonial Hall of the Federal Ministry of Health in Vienna from October 19th to the 21st, 2011. This year is a very special event as the Austrian Nutrition Society celebrates its 60th anniversary.
The aim of this anniversary meeting is to discuss in a global context with international top experts current health policy issues focusing on major nutrition related diseases. The scientific programme includes important key topics such as Pathogenesis and Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases, WHO strategy and selected according National Action Plans, and the Prevention of Micronutrient Defi ciencies as well as Strategies to improve Diet Quality. Discussions will encourage an open, collaborative dialogue with participants. A poster session with submissions by graduate students and postdocs will complement the presented scientifi c theme blocks. On 20th of October, all attendees are invited to intensify their discussions directly following the day’s scientifi c sessions at the exclusive dinner in the Museum of Natural History Vienna.
Univ.Prof. Dr. I. Elmadfa | <urn:uuid:0577e633-c35b-40be-8276-123370a7687c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fgoe.org/veranstaltungen/externe-veranstaltungen/archiv/nutrition-in-health-promotion-and-desease-prevention | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280825.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00203-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.84559 | 372 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Most people visit Kerala with the desire of experiencing the relaxed ayurvedic massages. Kerala is famous for its Ayurveda centers and the treatments they offer are sure to get you back on your feet. The science of Ayurveda is an ancient one, which is being revived again in the contemporary world due to its highly effective qualities. There are many resorts and health centres that provide services of Ayurveda in Kerala to locals as well as just about anyone who are interested in living, instead of merely surviving. The word Ayurveda is derived from two words, Ayur (life) and Veda (knowledge). So it basically means the science or knowledge of life.
The science of Ayurveda aims at complete treatment of the body in the
most natural way possible. It is an indispensable part of medicine today
and many people are resorting to Ayurveda to regain vigor and vitality
and lead a stress-free life. In Kerala, Ayurveda is almost synonymous
with healthy living. While in Kerala, Ayurvedic treatment for oneself is
a great way to unwind and relax in the lap of nature. The treatment
varies from person to person and the duration also varies from treatment
to treatment. Usually, the minimum duration is around 7 days and it can
go upto 21 days or more. The cost also varies depending on different
treatments and duration.
The ideal time to go for an ayurvedic treatment is during the monsoons.
This is because during monsoons, our body has less heat and the pores
are open to the maximum level. Thus, the body is most receptive to
Ayurvedic treatment during this time. The main aim of Ayurveda is to
promote healthy living among humans. They say nature is the best healer
and that is what the ayurvedic resorts in Kerala try to do. They provide
treatments derived from nature itself. Kerala's ayurvedic resorts
provide treatment for ailments like paralysis, cataract, arthritis,
stress, injuries, etc.
So get ready to surrender yourself to the relaxing world of Ayurveda
and experience true bliss in your life. You will find peace and tranquil
in one of the many ayurvedic resorts in Kerala. Also, check out our
related sections that talk about the different ayurvedic treatments like
Panchakarma, Massages, the benefits of Yoga and Meditation. The health
and fitness programs provided here will take care of each and every
problem of yours. Come to Kerala to be born again! | <urn:uuid:6a4f6375-20b6-4fbd-b73e-7a3b917e1b69> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.bharatonline.com/kerala/ayurveda-in-kerala/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281226.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00382-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954609 | 549 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Have you ever wanted to speak up about an important topic during a meeting, but different pressures or time constraints didn’t allow you to do so? Do you wish brainstorming sessions weren’t inhibited by groupthink? Would you want to enable a large group of people to make a difference? Do you often get sidetracked during meetings or find it difficult to stay on task when more become participants involved?
Through the Group Decision Center’s facilitated virtual meetings, everyone’s opinions and ideas can be voiced by anonymously and simultaneously sharing ideas. Every comment is recorded for future reference and analysis. Quantitative data can be gathered through opinion polls and voting throughout the session. Community and strategic planning sessions are enabled greatly through this format, and organizations have utilized the GDC in many ways!
The GDC provides your organization with fully facilitated meeting services, including:
- Pre-planning session
- Trained facilitator to lead the session
- A complete electronic report of all ideas and decisions
5 Benefits of Using Virtual Meetings:
Eliminates outside influences such as status, fear of criticism, jealousy, or personality
- Simultaneous participation
Participants do not need to “wait their turn”, so results are gathered and recorded more quickly with accurately directed discussion.
No only can each participant equally contribute, participate, and interact, but the GDC also serves as an interactive platform to answer questions, conduct polls, or vote.
Facilitators quickly direct discussions to one or more topics of greater interest to stay on track and ensure interaction.
- Efficient and effective use of time and resources
Each session provides in-depth analysis, thorough discussion, and greater solutions that maximize return on investment.
Confidentiality Statement – All meetings and surveys are the property of the meeting/survey owners. If you have any request for meeting information please contact the meeting/survey owners directly. | <urn:uuid:7377886d-1bc7-498f-a2bc-306ced4e1a17> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.ndsu.edu/gdc/?page_id=154 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280835.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00044-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922749 | 394 | 1.695313 | 2 |
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
-H. L. Mencken
Recently, The U.S. Treasury ramped up war games via financial sanctions aimed at Russia. The EU is part and parcel to the operation. These interventions are a continuation of the age old warfare referred to as the “currency wars”. Jim Rickards’ recent book on the topic chronicles the use of this tactic.
In many ways, the U.S. Federal Reserve was spawned in the spirit of interference and intervention before and during World War I.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Technology has made large financial trusts both more efficient and more fragile. However, electronic security infrastructure has never been tested in true world sovereign crisis.
And we know that there is a massive lack of redundancy underlying the systems that fuel our just in time “modern” existence. From basic price discovery in securities of all types to the card machines that run fuel pumps and the credit lines that pay the tankers
We are indeed skating over the thin ice.
Of course, lurking further below the surface is the ability and willingness - from academia across the political spectrum - to print what it takes to keep the banks alive - in the spirit of the domestic popular good.
At a certain point war creates enough anxiety that panic becomes part of the narrative. Many believe that can't happen because the system has become too adept at protecting the true hidden story, the real interests. Or that the rules can be changed - perpetually.
Think about the events leading up to Lehman...
Pick any bank today, apply true GAAP, or real life accounting standards...and you get another Lehman moment.
The financial elite, the media, and a large portion of the political class truly believe that we can print whatever and whenever we want without consequence. And that we should always do more?
Hence the direct printing trial balloons released last week by "Foreign Affairs"; to wit:
To some extent, low inflation reflects intense competition in an increasingly globalized economy. But it also occurs when people and businesses are too hesitant to spend their money, which keeps unemployment high and wage growth low. In the eurozone, inflation has recently dropped perilously close to zero. And some countries, such as Portugal and Spain, may already be experiencing deflation. At best, the current policies are not working; at worst, they will lead to further instability and prolonged stagnation.
Governments must do better. Rather than trying to spur private-sector spending through asset purchases or interest-rate changes, central banks, such as the Fed, should hand consumers cash directly. In practice, this policy could take the form of giving central banks the ability to hand their countries’ tax-paying households a certain amount of money.
The government could distribute cash equally to all households or, even better, aim for the bottom 80 percent of households in terms of income. Targeting those who earn the least would have two primary benefits. For one thing, lower-income households are more prone to consume, so they would provide a greater boost to spending. For another, the policy would offset rising income inequality.
The powers that be have all the bullets anyway. And our collective intelligence has been dummied down through the years of easy money and free comforts.
We need war to, politically and literally (in terms of Treasury note collateral), justify more printing.
With the real economy on life support, it is just a matter of time.
When the bond market begins to roll over, to the financial mainstream's shock and horror, institutions will finally begin the desperate hunt and return to non-paper safe haven collateral.
This is where paper ’securities’ are replaced with physical. The intangible will be squeezed into to the tangible.
The biggest banks are well positioned to take advantage of a massive move higher in either metal. Ownership of secured metal unencumbered is tiny. It is worse than unpopular. Eventually, some one has to be willing to sell for all the dollars.
Maybe you get an influx of new investors initially; those who hang on the desperate belief that this time will be different.
But most of the influx of new investment demand will be of the pure safe haven variety. It will come out of fear - fast and furious.
At what price will the largest holders - the very institutions that hold or control the most - be willing to sell?
Following that, it is most likely a moot point. The metals go 'no bid' as a matter of domestic or international security.
Simultaneously, the greatest wealth transfer will occur not by the confiscation (not of precious metals) but the trillions of dollars of low hanging fruit in the form of pensions, retirement accounts, money market funds, and certificates of deposit.
Maybe they give the illusion of a choice, as a way you can support the next war effort to fight the financial terrorist from the Far or Middle East.
There isn't enough out there to call in any official capacity.
Precious metals will merely be at the top of the pyramid, above the myriad of whatever is physical and isn't tied down.
The flipside to infinite dollars will be the endless search for something to trade them for. Ultimately, the dollar loses purchasing power because a credit freeze (eventual reality) will force a flood of government spending to keep the masses quiet.
Helicopter euphemisms were created intentionally.
The Treasury and Fed are so enmeshed that we are politically beyond the point of nationalizing. You can be sure that the main issues will be shrouded by the drums of war, if not actual bombing, and a cascade of false - one great giant false flag.
That is the great tragedy. The ultimate paradox.
We have access and the wherewithal to accomplish and achieve, to expand upon the luck of the previous two centuries and to expand the moral circle without desperate and reactive intervention.
What we have now, in large part the result of the great consolidation of power by the few via the abuse of yet another fiat reserve currency, is a massive ponzi giving rise to false flags everywhere you look, from disease, to technology, government and, especially, a bought and paid for political system.
Prices will go up when they are called in to make the transition. Nothing can be done about it. The damage will not be reflatable. We will come out on the other side unguided.
It is just a matter of time and a matter of how imaginative an individual can be about preparing or envisioning the way this breakdown would likely manifest. | <urn:uuid:41403e56-559c-4167-9fad-973afb12ead8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.silver-coin-investor.com/One-Giant-Cluster-Ponzi.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281069.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00273-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943183 | 1,392 | 1.703125 | 2 |
So far, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms has fought off a bill before the New York State Assembly that would allow casinos to loan money to customers to gamble away when they have exhausted their funds. The bill would also allow casinos to cash customer checks – but only if the money will be spent gambling.
Les Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling says he’s familiar with the practice.
“This is literally the prime example of how much of our system is rigged against everyday people,” Bernal tells OneNewsNow. “And it’s absolutely an outrageous practice endorsed by state governments – not just in New York, but really in many states across the country.”
It’s essentially a matter of extracting wealth from people for the benefit of wealthy casino owners, he says, also arguing that the objective of legislators considering the proposals isn’t to improve the lives of its residents.
“The legislators that promote and endorse casinos are working for these very powerful gambling interests against the common good,” he further says. “And it can cross all parties. These legislators come from both parties who are pushing this. It is a symbol of how some of these guys are really working against the best interests of the people.”
Bernal’s experience tells him that people can make a difference by opposing it, being engaged, and working against the transfer of wealth from people to the casino corporate elite.
This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com | <urn:uuid:699d66b9-5237-4a3d-b066-1e6ae32ba5a0> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://illinoisfamily.org/gambling/ny-casinos-want-loan-money-gamblers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572304.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20220816120802-20220816150802-00472.warc.gz | en | 0.971866 | 310 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Drawing Baby Animals
|Series title:||Learn to Draw Ser.|
|Publication Date:||Aug 2013|
| Publisher:||Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP|
| Book Format:||Paperback|
|List Price:||USD $63.00|
| Book Description: |
Everyone agrees: Fuzzy chicks, playful puppies, and clumsy foals are super cute, Readers will love not only drawing these adorable animals, but also learning all about how they grow, play, and act with their mothers. Detailed directions will help readers complete colorful drawings step-by-step, while facts about each animal complement each section. Readers will be introduced to basic art concepts such as shading and highlighting as they enjoy learning about baby animals. | <urn:uuid:b0535857-2929-4db7-be65-dabec350babb> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.bookwire.com/book/Drawing-Baby-Animals-9781433995262-Eason-Sarah-45130277 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719465.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00095-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.829696 | 158 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Aschau near Kirchberg - Geographical hub of the Kitzbüheler Alpen
Since the beginning of summer 2013 the newly set-up 'Aschau – Geographical hub of the Kitzbüheler Alpen' information facility has been accessible to everyone. 'Die Kitzbüheler Alpen', a large-format coffee-table book which has around 300 pages, by local photographer Markus Mitterer has made the public aware of Aschau's special location (the district of Kirchberg in Tirol). Subsequently the Kitzbüheler Alpen – Brixental tourism association, in co-operation with Markus Mitterer, have established an area worthy of note, with marking stones and boards as well as stones from all sections of the Kitzbüheler Alpen, close to Aschau's Kneipp facilities. The impressive landmark, a five tonne specimen, has been relocated from the 1600 metre Schöntalalm into the valley – a genuine 'Rettenstein', so to speak. The three metre wide board shows a fascinating satellite image of the Kitzbüheler Alpen and was specially put together by the Deutschen Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum (DLR), especially for Markus Mitterer's coffee-table book, and it is made up of lots of individual images. | <urn:uuid:fcab358c-feb6-46d0-9d17-b64464610106> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.kitzbueheler-alpen.com/en/kirchberg/summer/aschau-bei-kirchberg-geografischer-mittelpunkt-der-kitzbueheler-alpen.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281151.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00113-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904237 | 287 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Last Updated: May 30, 2014
Precautions and facts regarding toxic algae at Nebraska Lakes
A Joint Publication from the
Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and the
Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality
What is a toxic blue-green algae Health Alert?
The Health Alert designation means that the state believes that the level of toxins in the water make it potentially unsafe for full-body recreational activities, such as swimming. The toxin being measured is microcystin, which is generated from certain strains of blue-green algae.
What is toxic blue-green algae?
During a Health Alert at a public lake, signs will be posted advising the public to use caution. Affected swimming beaches will be closed. Boating and other recreational activities will be allowed, but the public will be advised to use caution and avoid prolonged exposure to the water, particularly avoiding any activity that could lead to swallowing the water.
The level to trigger a Health Alert declaration is 20 parts per billion of the toxin microcystin. Lakes under Health Alert will be sampled weekly, and the Health Alert will stay in effect until the level stays below 20 parts per billion for two consecutive weeks.
Although it technically is not a true algae, what is commonly referred to as toxic blue-green algae refers to certain strains of cyanobacteria that produce toxins. These toxins were found in a number of Nebraska lakes in 2004 through 2013.
What should I look for to avoid toxic algae?
Toxic blue-green algae can dominate the algal populations of a lake under the right combinations of water temperature, low water depths, and nutrients (such as, high nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations from wastewater discharges and runoff from agricultural land and communities).
The toxic strains of blue-green algae usually have heavy surface growths of pea-green colored clumps, scum or streaks, with a disagreeable odor. It can have a thickness similar to motor oil and often looks like thick paint in the water. Algae blooms usually accumulate near the shoreline where pets and toddlers have easy access and the water is shallow and more stagnant. It is important to keep a watchful eye on children and pets so that they do not enter the water. Aspects to watch out for include:
What are the risks and symptoms?
- Water that has a neon green, pea green, blue-green or reddish-brown color.
- Water that has a bad odor.
- Foam, scum or a thick paint-like appearance on the water surface.
- Green or blue-green streaks on the surface, or accumulations in bays and along shorelines.
Pets and farm animals have died from drinking water containing toxic blue-green algae (or licking their wet hair/fur/paws after they have been in the water). Blue-green algae toxins have been known to persist in water for several weeks after the bloom has disappeared.
Are some people more at risk?
The risks to humans come from external exposure (prolonged contact with skin) and from swallowing the water. Symptoms from external exposure are skin rashes, lesions and blisters. More severe cases can include mouth ulcers, ulcers inside the nose, eye and/or ear irritation and blistering of the lips. Symptoms from ingestion can include headaches, nausea, muscular pains, central abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting. Severe cases could include seizures, liver failure, respiratory arrest – even death, although this is rare. The severity of the illness is related to the amount of water ingested, and the concentrations of the toxins.
Yes. Some people will be at greater risk from toxic blue-green algae than the general population. Those at greater risk include:
Here are some tips on what you can do, and things to avoid:
- Children. Toddlers tend to explore the shoreline of a lake, causing greater opportunity for exposure. Based on body weight, children tend to swallow a higher volume of water than adults, and therefore could be at greater risk.
- People with liver disease or kidney damage and those with weakened immune systems.
Is it safe to eat fish from lakes that are under a Health Alert?
- Be aware of areas with thick clumps of algae and keep animals and children away from the water.
- Don’t wade or swim in water containing visible algae. Avoid direct contact with algae.
- Make sure children are supervised at all times when they are near water. Drowning, not exposure to algae, remains the greatest hazard of water recreation.
- If you do come in contact with the algae, rinse off with fresh water as soon as possible.
- Don’t boat or water ski through algae blooms.
- Don’t drink the water, and avoid any situation that could lead to swallowing the water.
Although research is limited, most information to date indicates that toxins do not accumulate significantly in fish tissue, which is the meat that most people eat. At this time, fishing is permitted at lakes that are under a Health Alert. This issue is continuing to be studied, and this web site will be updated if more conclusive information becomes available.
Where can I find out more information about lake sampling for toxic algae?
The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (NDEQ) is conducting weekly and twice-monthly sampling at select public lakes that are either popular recreational lakes, or have historically had toxic algae problems. For more information, go to Environmental Alerts.
If I think a public lake has a toxic algae bloom, who do I call?
Please contact NDEQ’s Surface Water Unit at (402) 471-0096, or (402) 471-2186.
If I am experiencing health symptoms, who do I call?
If you experience health symptoms, notify your physician, and also report it to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services at (402) 471-8880. You can also contact the Nebraska Regional Poison Center at 800-222-1222 for more information.
Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality
1200 "N" Street, Suite 400
P.O. Box 98922
Lincoln, Nebraska 68509 | <urn:uuid:68d75980-dc47-411f-938a-9547a61a7847> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.deq.state.ne.us/press.nsf/pages/ENV042607 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280730.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00255-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943468 | 1,274 | 3.328125 | 3 |
|Birth Name:||Richard Starkey|
|Net Worth:||$350 million|
English drummer, singer, songwriter, and actor, Ringo Starr is widely known in the music industry for being the drummer of the band Beatles which has garnered huge fame back in the 90s. Ringo Starr net worth is known to have been amassed from his remarkable career as a solo artist and also the band member of the Beatles. Ringo Starr songs have also amassed wide recognition and appreciation over the years of his career.
Ringo Starr is a well-known English musician known best for his remarkable work as the band member of the Beatles. Ringo Starr net worth is known to be high and sourced from his music as well as film career. Ringo Starr songs like With a Little Help from My Friend, Yellow Submarine, and more with the Beatles has given him a huge name.
Ringo Starr was born Richard Starkey 7 July 1940 in Dingle, Liverpool, England. Ringo Starr was born to Elsie and Richard Starkey. Both his parents were confectioners and loved singing and dancing. Ringo Starr grew up in the Dingle, 10 Admiral Grove to cut costs after his father spent most on drinking. Ringo’s parents had a divorce after which he lost touch with his father. Ringo Starr had to go to the coma when he developed an appendicitis which contracted peritonitis.
Ringo Starr was not good in academics since he was ill from childhood. He also had tuberculosis in 1953. At the time in the hospital to relieve patients of boredom, the hospital staff asked them to join the hospital band which Ringo did. Ringo Starr received his education from St Silas, a Church of England primary school and Dingle Vale Secondary modern school. Ringo Starr‘s mother got married to Harry Graves who introduced Ringo to various music.
Ringo Starr began working as a waiter and did several such jobs before she finally formed a band named Eddie Miles Band along with his neighborhood boys. He received his first drum kit from his stepfather. He then joined the skiffle group named Texans. At this time he adopted the name, Ringo Starr. Eventually, their band went on to join with the Beatles in 1960.
Ringo Starr went on to quit Rory Storm and Hurricane and joined the Beatles as their drummer. His first performance with the Beatles was in 1962 at Port Sunlight. He first recorded with the Beatles in 1962. Ringo Starr songs with the Beatles included Please Please Me, Love Me Do, With a Little Help from My Friends, Yellow Submarine, Good Night, and many others with went on to receive huge appreciation over time.
After the Beatles broke up Ringo Starr went on to release his very own album titled Sentimental Journey. It was not a commercial success at the time. In the same year, he released Beaucoups of Blue. Three years later he released the album named Ringo.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, Ringo Starr went on to release many albums titled Ringo the 4th, Bad Boy, Old Wave, and more. While some reached the charts others were a commercial failure. Ringo Starr released albums like Time Takes Time, Vertical Man, and I Wanna Be Santa Claus in 1990s. In the 2000s and onwards, Ringo went on to release albums titled Ringo Rama, Liverpool 8, Ringo 2012, Postcards from Paradise, and more. More recently, Ringo Starr has released an album titled Give More Love in 2017.
Ringo Starr has not only been proficient with drums but has also equal talents in vocals. He also sang songs like Yellow Submarine, Don’t Pass Me By, I Wanna Be Your Man, and more singly or with his band. Ringo Starr has also written many songs with the Beatles. He has co-written songs like Octopus’s Garden, Don’t Pass Me By, Dig It, What Goes On, Christmas Tree, and more.
Ringo Starr has not only had a successful musical career but also has had an amazing film career. Ringo Starr has appeared in many movies since the 1960s. He is known particularly for his role in The Magic Christian, Blindman, and Candy, Caveman, 200 Motels, The Last Waltz, and more. Ringo Starr also appeared in The Price and the Pauper, and The Kids Are Alright.
Ringo Starr was previously married to his first wife Maureen Cox. Maureen was a hairdresser based in England who died of Leukemia. Ringo and Cox got married in 1965 with the Beatles manager, Ringo’s stepfather and Beatle’s Harrison as witnesses. Together, the couple went on to have three children named Zak Starkey, Jason Starkey, and Lee. Ringo went on to have many affairs during their marriage which is why Maureen divorced him in 1975.
Ringo Starr met actress Barbara Bach on the set of a caveman. The couple went on to get married in April 1981. He had already become a grandfather in 1985. At present Ringo Starr are the grandfather of seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Bach and Starr have been together since their marriage. Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach spent time with each other back and forth from London to Los Angeles.
Ringo Starr age at present is 77 years. Ringo Starr stands tall at the height of 5 feet 6 inches. He weighs 70 kgs. Ringo Starr has maintained his health and his charming personality even at this age.
Ringo Starr net worth is estimated to be $ 350 million from his remarkable career as a solo artist and with the Beatles. Ringo Starr net worth was estimated to be 150 million pounds in 2011 and thus was numbered at 56 in the UK by the Sunday Times Rich List 2011. A year later Ringo Starr net worth made him the richest drummer in the world. Ringo Starr net worth has been allocated to his 200 acres Surrey estate at Rydinghurst, property in Chelsea and more. Through an auction of Bach and Starr’s personal items, the couple raised over $ 9 million for their Lotus Foundation.
Ringo Starr has received many awards along with the Beatles. The Beatles were nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer in 1964. The Beatles have won 11 Grammy Awards, 4 Brit Awards, 3 World Music Awards, and more. All in all, the Beatles have won 84 awards till date. Alone, Ringo Starr has won honors like being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack award, World Music Awards Diamond Award, and more. He has also been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award. Ringo Starr was appointed the Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 Birthday Honours for Queen Elizabeth II. Also, he has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of fame.
Apart from his music career, Ringo Star art is also quite famous. Ringo Star art from the computer has been selling out to his loyal fans. His computer art was put on display in 2012. Ringo Starr is particularly famous on twitter with 1.67 million followers keeping track of his personal and professional life. Ringo Starr bio can be found on numerous social media sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
ringostarrmusichttps://t.co/R2FhbRAeAx— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) September 11, 2017 | <urn:uuid:f650ceac-6c19-4788-b5f7-42be1d85cebd> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | http://superbhub.com/biography/ringo-starr-net-worth-age-art-songs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572833.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817001643-20220817031643-00270.warc.gz | en | 0.984478 | 1,569 | 1.765625 | 2 |
In every crisis
situation, children are the greatest victims. Physically weak, they are often the first to succumb to hunger, disease, and dehydration. Innocent to the workings and failings of the world, they are unable to understand why there is danger, why there are people who want to hurt them, or why they must leave, perhaps
quite suddenly, and abandon their schools, their friends, and their home.In this companion series to Exodus, Sebastiao Salgado presents 90 portraits of the youngest exiles, migrants, and refugees. His subjects are from different countries, victims to different crises, but they are all on the move, and all under the age of 15. Through
his extensive refugee reportage, what struck Salgado about these boys and girls was not only the implicit innocence in their suffering but also their radiant reserves of energy and enthusiasm, even in the most miserable of circumstances. From roadside refuges in Angola and Burundi to city slums in Brazil
and sprawling camps in Lebanon and Iraq, the children remained children: they were quick to laugh as much as to cry, they played soccer, splashed in dirty water, got up to mischief with friends, and were typically ecstatic at the prospect of being photographed. | <urn:uuid:972c46ce-f4ec-4d18-b369-97e502122740> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.bibliophoto.ru/books/138164246.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573540.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819005802-20220819035802-00469.warc.gz | en | 0.979492 | 252 | 2.265625 | 2 |
American Journal of BioMedicine Volume 2, Issue 6
1515 Holcombe Blvd.
Unit Number: 1202
Houston, TX 77030
Room Number: ACB P1.2864
Radioimmunotherapy (RIT) uses an antibody labeled with a radionuclide to deliver cytotoxic radiation to a target cell. By its nature, RIT requires a tumor cell to express an antigen that is unique to the neoplasm or is not accessible in normal cells. 2002 FDA approved Ibritumomab tiuxetan (Zevalin) as RIT in treatment of refractory non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Further, in June 14, 2014 FDA restricted approval Zevalin in MD Anderson center as treatment of aging inoperable and non-responsiveness bladder cancer to usual chemo-radiotherapy. The purpose of this study is to comparative RIT aspects as first line treatment in the aging group bladder cancer to traditional chemotherapy or radiotherapy regimen. A non-randomized, prospective, comparative, single-study conducted included all old patients with refractory bladder cancer. Of the 51 patients enrolled, median age was 79.7 years and overall response rate was 75% vs. 23% , 25% in 2nd dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy respectively. All patient with RIT were CR, further, patients who had received one prior chemotherapeutic regimens had a higher response than those who had received more than two prior regimens (67% vs. 11%, P<0.001).
Keywords: Radioimmunotherapy; Ibritumomab; A non-randomized; Refractory bladder cancer
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13. Chen M, Hildebrandt MA, Clague J, Kamat AM, Picornell A, et al. Genetic variations in the sonic hedgehog pathway affect clinical outcomes in non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Cancer Prev Res (Phila) 2010; 3: 1235–1245. [PubMed]
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19. Fu YP, Kohaar I, Rothman N, Earl J, Figueroa JD, et al. Common genetic variants in the PSCA gene influence gene expression and bladder cancer risk. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2012; 109: 4974–4979. [PubMed]
20. Cortessis VK, Yuan JM, Van Den Berg D, Jiang X, Gago-Dominguez M, et al. Risk of urinary bladder cancer is associated with 8q24 variant rs9642880[T] in multiple racial/ethnic groups: results from the Los Angeles-Shanghai case-control study. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2010;19: 3150–3156. [PubMed]
21. Babjuk M, Burger M, Zigeuner R, Shariat SF, van Rhijn BW, et al. EAU Guidelines on Non-Muscle-invasive Urothelial Carcinoma of the Bladder: Update 2013. Eur Urol 2013; 64: 639–653. [PubMed] | <urn:uuid:222a5fb8-bc8b-40bf-9659-024294313b8f> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://ajbm.net/radioimmunotherapy-bladder-cancer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572033.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814113403-20220814143403-00278.warc.gz | en | 0.730696 | 1,699 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Is it that the communication of joy has no survival value for us, while the communication of distress has?
The survival value of the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium could have played no part.
In other words, education must prove to be of survival value.
Looked at from the standpoint of natural selection, this would come about as a mere matter of survival value.
For instance, she is concerned with color and form only so far as they have survival value.
There may be several different criteria of survival value, not comparable in any quantitative way among themselves.
Things always prove their survival value, that is to say the real things last, while the shams are sooner or later extinguished.
The maintenance of a home range is of survival value to the cottontail.
It has a high 'survival value' in the struggle for existence by heightening individual power in conflict.
survival value indeed, as applied to men in groups, is not a very clear concept. | <urn:uuid:0cc721e1-6ac3-48c8-a84d-371b05a9dcc8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.dictionary.com/browse/survival-value | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280504.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00139-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946902 | 208 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Bob and Tim have had a big day at work — it’s 3:30 in the afternoon, and they are done for the day. They’re having coffee at a local restaurant, talking about their careers when Tim asked a question, “What is a ton of refrigeration, and why is it called a ton?”
Bob and Tim were on their way to a no heating call. When they arrived, they looked at the house and saw that it had a package unit. They talked to the housewife and she told them that the unit stopped running sometime in the middle of the night last night.
Bob and Tim were checking a customer's air conditioner and initially thought the unit must be out of refrigerant or very low on refrigerant. But after adding some refrigerant, the suction pressure did not rise at all. Bob then determined they should look for restrictions in the liquid line or the suction line.
Bob and Tim were at a customer’s house doing a seasonal checkup on a condensing gas furnace. This was routine service carried out every year on this customer’s equipment per a service agreement. But when they tried to operate the furnace, the burner would not light.
A customer was explaining what was going on with his air conditioning system. His old system had stopped working and he was told that it needed to be replaced. Money was tight and a cousin had a system removed from a rental property. So they replaced the original 3-ton package unit with a 4-ton package unit.
Bob and Tim had just arrived at a service call, the first one for the day. The complaint was that the homeowner’s air conditioning had stopped sometime in the night and the residence was hot. After their initial checks, they suspected a low charge.
Bob and Tim were on their last service call for the day. It was an apartment house with a heat pump and the weather was warm during the day and cool at night. The tenant had just moved into this apartment and was trying to get the air conditioning to operate to her satisfaction and she said it was too breezy.
Bob and Tim were at the house of a customer who said that her air conditioning unit did not cool well in the hot weather three days ago. She said the unit actually froze up and had ice on the outdoor portion of the unit on the big line. She shut the unit off and called for service.
Bob and Tim had just arrived at the house of a new customer who explained that the air conditioning system was not working. The homeowner said that they had just had a warm day and the air conditioning system did not come on when they tried to cool the house down yesterday.
Bob and Tim had just finished a routine service call on a house with a gas furnace for the heating system. They were talking to the housewife when she asked: “Our house is very dry in the winter time, and the humidity must be very low. How can we put a system in this house to keep the whole house at a higher humidity level?” | <urn:uuid:d20ff31d-5ecb-453b-a2af-15bfe8cfb89c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.achrnews.com/authors/2082-bill-johnson/articles | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279915.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00278-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992306 | 629 | 1.796875 | 2 |
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The military tribunals held at this isolated U.S. outpost have been lambasted as kangaroo courts, heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution. But most of the convictions so far have led to lighter than expected sentences.
Legal experts note, with some caveats, that all but one of the seven convictions at what are known as military commissions, including a plea bargain finalized Wednesday for a former Maryland man, have resulted in lower sentences than those routinely handed out in U.S. civilian courts for similar offenses.
"There is no evidence, zero, none, zip, that the justice delivered in military commissions is harsher than the justice delivered in federal court," said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow and terrorism specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"And there is a fair bit of evidence, based admittedly on a very limited universe of military commissions cases to date, that the quality of justice is more lenient," said Wittes, one of the founders of the influential Lawfare blog.
Some critics challenge the whole concept of the military trials and note that a majority of the 171 prisoners never will be charged with a crime, let alone face trial, despite the fact that most were captured more than a decade ago.
"The federal courts offer something the military commissions do not: true due process," said Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, who was observing the hearing at which Majid Khan, a graduate of a suburban Baltimore high school, pleaded guilty to plotting attacks with al-Qaida.
The majority of the men are being held either because they are considered too dangerous to release or because the U.S. authorities say they cannot find an acceptable place to transfer them.
About 80 percent of the inmates are now held in a communal camp where improved conditions, including access to classes and 24 satellite TV channels, have resulted in fewer assaults on guards and less tension, according to officials who led reporters on a tour of the prison last week.
Officials have said that about 35 prisoners at Guantanamo could eventually be tried in the first U.S. war crimes tribunals since the World War II era. That group includes five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks who are expected to be arraigned later this year on charges that carry a potential death penalty. It also includes a Saudi accused of helping set up the deadly bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in another capital case.
But lower-level figures so far have appeared to fare better. Khan pleaded guilty to charges that included murder, attempted murder and spying for helping al-Qaida plot attacks in the U.S. and delivering money for a deadly hotel bombing in Indonesia. He will receive a sentence that cannot exceed 19 years, if he helps prosecute other prisoners, and could end up receiving less.
Omar Khadr pleaded guilty to throwing a grenade that mortally wounded an American soldier and received a sentence capped at eight years. He is to be sent back soon to his native Canada, where some expect he will be quickly released. The Toronto-born Khadr was 15 when captured, and his advocates say he was abused early in his captivity. Still, he could have received a life sentence at the commission, and a civilian U.S. court would likely have given him one.
Two other men who pleaded guilty to aiding al-Qaida also secured deals that will get them home in the next several years. Salim Hamdan, who was convicted by a military jury of aiding terrorism in his work as a driver for Osama bin Laden, was sentenced to 5 1/2 years, including time served, and is back home in Yemen, reportedly working as a taxi driver.
Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in March 2007 for attending an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist camp. He served a nine-month sentence in his native country after spending five years at Guantanamo, and has since been released.
The exception has been Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who helped al-Qaida produce propaganda and handled media relations for bin Laden and refused to participate in his trial. He was convicted in November 2008 of multiple counts of conspiracy, solicitation to commit murder and providing material support for terrorism, and is serving a life sentence at Guantanamo.
But experts note that in general the men convicted so far seem to be faring better than detainees charged with terrorism in civilian courts.
"Military commissions have produced sentences or plea deals that are lighter than those typically coming out of federal courts, where terrorism-related sentences are often very severe," said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former senior Pentagon adviser on detention issues.
It's hard to generalize about the reasons for the lighter-than-expected sentences since the facts in each case are so different, though clearly at least three of the plea bargains could produce significant assistance prosecuting more major figures.
The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, declined to spell out any kind of prosecution strategy or to say which cases he might pursue next. But he could be securing the convictions of relatively minor figures in order to build cases against prisoners such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and more than two dozen other plots, and Hambali, the Indonesian terrorist leader.
In Khan's case, his lawyers said he was remorseful and wanted to cooperate.
"His decision to plead guilty and to cooperate was not an easy decision for him, particularly after everything that happened to him prior to his transfer to Guantanamo," said Wells Dixon, one of his civilian attorneys, who has said his client was tortured while in CIA custody before he was transferred to the U.S. base in Cuba.
The military tribunals have long been criticized as overly favoring the prosecution. They were first reformed by Congress and President George W. Bush in 2006, then again under President Barack Obama in 2009. Martins said they now prohibit prosecutors from using evidence gained through torture, but lawyers and human rights say the changes have not gone far enough.
Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for the British civil rights group Reprieve who has represented many Guantanamo prisoners, said the relatively short sentences have gone to men so desperate for freedom that they agreed to plea bargains and don't make up for harsh treatment suffered in the past.
"There are still so many negatives," he said, "that to rehabilitate Guantanamo Bay's reputation in world opinion would be harder than rehabilitating Osama Bin Laden's, to tell the sorry truth."
Copyright 2017, Deseret News Publishing Company | <urn:uuid:515d66d2-1919-4880-8b46-cb7db6afed15> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.deseretnews.com/article/print/765556723/Guantanamo-sentences-lighter-than-expected-so-far.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281574.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00018-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979095 | 1,344 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Matt Riggs - Francis Tuttle Technology Center
THEN: Playing with LEGO toy blocks and Lincoln Logs to build towers and spaceships. Matt was always interested in engineering and eager to challenge himself. After seeing his older brother thrive in the Pre-Engineering Academy at FTTC, Matt enrolled and
- Acquired leadership and time management skills.
- Learned to study to fully understand the material and learned the importance of proper preparation.
- Studied trigonometry, chemistry, calculus, physics, engineering design, bridge design and architecture.
NOW: A first cadet at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point majoring in civil engineering, Matt will become a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army after graduating. He hopes to branch into the engineer regiment, become a leader for a construction platoon and, upon attaining the rank of captain, pursue a career with the Army Corps of Engineers. | <urn:uuid:46586f8c-6fa2-48ce-bf7c-c59284aa9708> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.okcareertech.org/news/careertech-champions/issue-22/matt-riggs-francis-tuttle-technology-center | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281419.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00485-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966755 | 187 | 1.875 | 2 |
This week in web news, Facebook is giving a thumbs-up to empathy, and a sad face emoji to the highly demanded dislike button. Apple's iOS 9 users have been quick to block unwanted content with ad blocker apps… and another sad face emoji for publishers and advertisers. Electric and hybrid Ford drivers can use their smartwatches to connect with their cars. And if you think 2-day shipping is quick and convenient, then check out Amazon’s Prime Now, expanding and delivering at warp speed. Also, Spotify is helping runners who use Android to keep up in the race with iOS users. Last, you can turn all your speakers into streaming players with a new Chromecast dongle.
No thumbs down on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that a response to the often requested, and even petitioned for, ‘dislike’ button is finally on the way. Many jumped to the conclusion that this meant there would be a simple thumbs-down option. People seemed either excited about the option to dislike, or distressed about the negativity and bullying that thumb wars could cultivate. As it turns out, Facebook will be more complex and empathetic than that. The yet unseen alternative to ‘liking’ a post will allow people to “express that they understand and that they relate to you.” One idea about what this could look like is a small group of emojis showing a range of feelings, similar to Path. In 2013, Facebook patented a bar of emoji reaction buttons to accompany status updates, which might be a clue to what is coming. So, when you do not want to ‘like’ that your friend’s cat has cancer and do not wish to take the time to acknowledge it with a heartfelt comment either; Facebook will soon provide you a new way to express your empathy.
To block or not to block?
Apple's iOS 9 is the first mobile operating system that gives you the choice to block ads, scripts, trackers, and other junk that slows down your browsing. These annoyances waste your data and reduce your battery life. Content blocking is not built-in to iOS 9, but you can download apps, such as AdBlock Plus, Crystal, Purify, and Blockr. After the app is downloaded and installed, you must go into iOS settings and enable the blocker. iOS 9 has been out for only a few days, and content blockers have rocketed to the top of many categories of popular apps, indicating that users are eager and happy to have this feature. While it may feel like a win for us as users of the internet, it is a major blow to publishers and advertisers, and to rival Google who gets 90% of their funds from online advertising. Ads fund nearly all the content that we do want to access. If we don't want to pay subscription fees, then publishers have to pay their bills through ads. A leading ad blocker, Peace, was even removed from the Apple Store by its creator, who decided it was unfair to independent publishers. Online advertising will evolve and find new ways to reach us, but in the meantime, will you block content to make your experience faster and more pleasant? Or will you pay for your content by putting up with the ads and trackers?
Forgot where you parked?
Ford unveiled a smartwatch app for use with their hybrid and electric vehicles. The MyFord app, available for Apple Watch and Android Wear, enables you to lock and unlock you car doors, remotely start your climate control, and look at mileage and battery charge status from the comfort of your wrist. It will also evaluate your driving efficiency by calculating your miles per gallon, and giving you a grade on how efficiently you accelerate and decelerate. And if your brain does not retain where you last left your vehicle, the app will guide you back to your car. Now if my car could just tell me where I left my smartwatch…
I need that prime now.
Amazon’s Prime Now service is going well enough that they expanded into their 13th location this week. For an additional $99 per year, Los Angeles and Orange County Amazon Prime members can have their online purchases delivered to their doorsteps in 2 hours with no additional delivery fee, or within 1 hour for an extra $7.99. Amazon offers tens of thousands of products through this service, including perishable and frozen groceries, household goods, gifts, and electronics. They are also offering delivery of goods from local businesses, such as Sprouts Farmers Markets, Sprinkles Cupcakes, and 99 Ranch Market. Delivery progress can even be tracked via GPS on the Prime Now app. If Amazon makes good on these delivery times, and reviews do seem to be positive so far, and then the value and speed are impressive. It would be a challenge for many people to make it to the grocery or electronics store and back in under an hour. And it could be an amazing convenience for customers who are permanently or temporarily homebound. Imagine the possibilities when combined with the Amazon Dash button… that toilet paper re-order button could be mounted next to the commode, and if you completely ran out, you would only have to sit and wait for an hour!
Android runners matter.
Get ready to run to the beat of your own drum. Released on iOS earlier this year, Spotify Running was finally released for Android this week. From the Spotify app, start the running mode feature and start running. The app will detect your pace using your phone’s motion sensors, and play music with a tempo to match it. Songs are chosen based on your listening history and playlists. Original running mix compositions are available that automatically adjust to your speed, in themes like Burn, Epic, and Blissed Out. Or, there are curated running playlists of various moods and genres for which the beats per minutes can be manually adjusted to your goal pace. Run free! It is free, with advertisements for non-subscribers.
Streaming your house in sync.
Google is getting ready to reveal new hardware at the end of this month, and one of the rumored new products is a Chromecast dongle made to wi-fi enable your speakers. Designed specifically for streaming music, it has been dubbed the “Hendrix” or Chromecast Audio. The device will connect to speakers using a standard 3.5mm audio cable plugged into a headphone socket. It will have multi-room support, meaning you will be able to hook-up more than one Chromecast Audio unit to speakers throughout your home or office, and music will play in sync throughout your space. Streaming services compatible with the new device will include Google Play Music, Rdio, Pandora, and Spotify. The device is very similar to Motorola’s Bluetooth Moto Stream released last year.
Any other interesting news we might have missed? Let us know in the comments below! | <urn:uuid:cae0e745-d74e-4e12-9b28-b05806656e8e> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://getlevelten.com/blog/felipa-villegas/week-web-sept-14-20-2015 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573118.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817213446-20220818003446-00676.warc.gz | en | 0.955258 | 1,405 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Teachers Say Hunger Hurts Learning, School Breakfast Is Vital; "The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won't get lunch"
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As students across the country prepare to go back to school this fall, millions of American families are still feeling the sting of unemployment, rising food and fuel prices and a sluggish economic recovery. Teachers are first-hand witnesses to the toll hunger takes on America's students. According to a new survey released today by Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign, teachers are worried that hunger is stunting the learning process. They also point to a healthy school breakfast as key to a good education.
The survey, "Hunger In Our Schools: Share Our Strength's Teachers Report 2012," was conducted among more than 1,000 K-8 public school teachers nationwide. Three out of five teachers surveyed report that they see students regularly come to school hungry because they're not getting enough to eat at home. A majority of these teachers who witness hunger say the problem is getting worse.
"I have had students who have come to school with lunch the previous day having been their last meal," one elementary teacher from the Northeast reported. Another teacher from the Midwest said, "The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won't get lunch."
Overwhelmingly, teachers say students have trouble learning when they're focused on their empty stomachs. Hungry students, they say, lack concentration and struggle with poor academic performance, behavior problems and health issues.
"When students are hungry and distracted, they're not learning," said U.S. Secretary of the Department of Education Arne Duncan who joined Share Our Strength at a panel discussion in Hyattsville, Md. to release the survey findings. "To set kids up for academic success, we must make sure they're getting the healthy food they need at breakfast and lunch so they can concentrate in the classroom throughout the day."
School meals play an important role in making sure that, even in tough times, kids still get the healthy food they need. Nine out of 10 teachers agree that school breakfast is especially important for academic achievement. Teachers credit breakfast with increased concentration (95%), better academic performance (89%) and better behavior in the classroom (73%). Health is also a major factor, with four in five saying breakfast prevents head and stomachaches, leading to healthier students. Teachers also say that students who eat breakfast are less likely to be tardy or absent (56%).
"No child's health should be compromised because they haven't had enough to eat," said U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Janey Thornton. "USDA school nutrition programs – such as the school breakfast and school lunch programs – help ensure our children start their day with a nutritious meal, so they can learn, grow, and reach their full potential. This year, I am proud to announce that school meals are even healthier thanks to historic improvements made through the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act."
Yet too many eligible kids are missing out on school breakfast. Of the 20 million low-income students who ate a free or reduced-price lunch last year, fewer than half also ate school breakfast. The No Kid Hungry campaign helps get nutritious food to kids in need, working with schools and communities to increase participation in the national School Breakfast Program.
"Access to healthy food is the number one school supply students need to succeed in the classroom this fall," said Tom Nelson, President of Share Our Strength. "Kids can't concentrate on reading and math when they're focused on their growling stomachs. If we want our youngest generation to grow up smarter, healthier and stronger, we need to make sure they get the healthy food they need every day."
"Hunger In Our Schools: Share Our Strength's Teachers Report 2012" was made possible by C&S Wholesale Grocers. "Stories from teachers across the country about kids experiencing hunger are real, compelling and are all-too commonplace. The third edition of this report provides important data behind the anecdotes," said Gina Goff from C&S Wholesale Grocers. "We know that the report is a key part of the No Kid Hungry campaign and that it will jumpstart conversations about solutions to ending childhood hunger."
Key findings from the research include the following:
- Childhood Hunger Remains A Serious Issue. Three out of five teachers say kids in their classrooms regularly come to school hungry. Among those teachers, 80% say these kids come to school hungry at least once a week. Three out of four teachers (77%) say addressing childhood hunger must be a national priority.
- The Problem Is Growing. A majority of teachers (56%) who witness childhood hunger say the problem is getting worse.
- School Meals Are A Critical Safety Net. In the survey, a majority of teachers (56%) say "a lot" or "most" of their students rely on school meals as their primary source of nutrition.
- Teachers Are Taking Action. Most commonly, teachers assist families in enrolling in school meal programs (71%), refer families to resources in the school (54%) and spend money out of their own pockets to buy food for hungry students (53%). On average, teachers who buy food for hungry kids in their classrooms spend on average $26 a month.
- Teachers Say: Breakfast Works. Nine out of 10 teachers say breakfast is very important for academic achievement. Teachers credit breakfast with increased concentration (95%), better academic performance (89%) and better behavior in the classroom (73%). Health is also a major factor, with eight in ten saying breakfast prevents head and stomachaches, leading to healthier students. Teachers also say that, thanks to breakfast, students are less likely to be tardy or absent (56%).
- Too Many Kids Miss Out On Breakfast: Teachers site timing and stigma as two barriers to participation. Some kids miss out on the meals because of they get to school too late to eat (74%). Others are embarrassed and don't want to be singled out as the low-income kids eating in the cafeteria (33%). Teachers say that sometimes the problem simply is that parents aren't aware the program exists (35%).
- Childhood Hunger Is Solvable: The most popular solution was to increase communication with parents about the school meals that are available (75%). Other ideas include reducing the red tape that limits participation (61%) and decreasing stigma by making free breakfast available to all students, not just those with low incomes (58%).
The survey is available at www.NoKidHungry.org/teachers.
Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry Campaign
More than 16 million children in America struggle with hunger. Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry® campaign is ending childhood hunger by connecting kids to the healthy food they need, every day. No Kid Hungry helps get nutritious food to kids in need and teaches families how to cook healthy, affordable meals. The campaign brings together governors, mayors, businesses, chefs, federal and state agencies, educators and community leaders to connect children at risk of hunger with food and nutrition programs where they live, learn and play. No Kid Hungry also teaches families how to cook healthy, affordable meals through Cooking Matters® and invests in community organizations that fight hunger. Get involved at NoKidHungry.org.
Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign is nationally supported by Share Our Strength's Core Partners: the ConAgra Foods Foundation, Food Network and Walmart, and by our No Kid Hungry Partners: American Express, Arby's Foundation, Birds Eye, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Cavit, CGI Group Inc., Corner Bakery Cafe, Deloitte LLP, Denny's, Domino Sugar and C&H Sugar, Duncan Hines, Family Circle, Fleischmann's Yeast, Hickory Farms, Hillshire Farm, jcpenney, Jimmy Dean, Joe's Crab Shack, Karo, The Land of Nod, Le Creuset, National Restaurant Association, NBA Cares, ONEHOPE Wine, OpenTable, Romano's Macaroni Grill, SCA, Sodexo Foundation, Stephen Joseph, Sysco, Tastefully Simple, Ted's Montana Grill, Weight Watchers, Whole Foods Market and Williams-Sonoma.
C&S Wholesale Grocers
C&S community involvement programs support initiatives to stop hunger and to promote the health and enrichment of communities that are homes to the company's employees and facilities. C&S Wholesale Grocers of Keene, N.H. is the largest food wholesaler and according to Forbes magazine, the 9th largest privately held company in the United States. The company distributes food to supermarkets, retail stores and military bases across the country. Currently, C&S serves about 3,900 stores from more than 50 locations in 12 states. Among our customers are many of America's best known companies, including Stop & Shop, Giant of Carlisle, Giant of Landover, Shaw's, Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. (A&P), Ralphs, Safeway and Target.
Contact: Christy Felling | Phone: 202.320.4483 | Email: email@example.com
SOURCE Share Our Strength | <urn:uuid:e0a4b32f-cd6b-4fd3-b8c7-a030257c787b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-three-out-of-five-us-teachers-see-hunger-in-classroom-167172965.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279169.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00213-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960576 | 1,916 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Über das besondere Verhältnis von Elvis zu seiner früh verstorbenen Mutter Gladys Love Presley ist schon viel geschrieben worden, ein Aspekt blieb dabei bislang allerdings weitgehend außen vor: Inwieweit gibt es Songinterpretationen, die Elvis seiner geliebten Mutter gewidmet hat? Dieser spannenden Frage geht der englische Journalist und Autor Paul Simpson in seinem englischsprachigen Gastbeitrag für The Memphis Flash nach.
A song for Gladys by Paul Simpson
Written by his friend Red West, Elvis’s criminally underrated ballad That’s Someone You Never Forget sounds like a haunting ode to his much mourned mother. In the spring of 1961, Elvis Presley asked his friend Red West: “How about coming up with a song with the title of That’s Someone You Never Forget?”
West sat down at the piano and did just that. He worked out the melody first and then penned lyrics that, as Peter Guralnick noted in Careless Love, the second volume of his Elvis biography, “contained sentiments that under ordinary circumstances would have been assumed to be about an ex-lover, but in this case it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Elvis might be singing of his mother.”
Red was desperate to succeed as a songwriter – Presley had already mentioned his friend’s ambitions to publisher Freddie Bienstock. Knowing how mercurial Elvis could be, West took the song to Gold Star Recording in Hollywood and made a demo that Presley promised to record. | <urn:uuid:b5e64e1d-e64e-42c6-8a2f-233a68d89460> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.memphisflash.de/2015/04/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572833.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817032054-20220817062054-00478.warc.gz | en | 0.773651 | 381 | 1.804688 | 2 |
The increasing vulnerability of populations and the growing magnitude of emergencies mean that OCHA’s global presence must be flexible and adaptable to the ever-changing demands on the humanitarian system. To coordinate, lead and improve humanitarian action, OCHA must operate where natural disasters and conflicts occur. It has to respond quickly and effectively and then depart as the affected country moves from crisis to recovery.
OCHA has planned for field operations in 47 countries in 2011, subject to evolving global humanitarian needs. At the start of 2011, this number will include 22 country offices, five regional offices, three sub-regional offices, three liaison offices and 14 humanitarian support units. Country offices in Iraq, Kenya and Uganda are expected to transition to support units during 2011. This represents a year-on-year decrease in OCHA’s field presence since 2008 (see related chart). OCHA formally reviews its field presence at least twice a year and makes adjustments accordingly.
OCHA country offices will continue to be located in the world’s least developed countries, as ranked by the UNDP 2010 Human Development Index (HDI). All country offices are located in countries in the bottom half of the HDI; five country offices are in the bottom 10 (see graph). OCHA has offices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger and Zimbabwe, all of which are ranked lowest on the HDI due to a combination of factors such as life expectancy and adult literacy, and daily caloric intake and access to health services. Due to insufficient data, no HDI figures exist in four places where OCHA has country offices: Eritrea, Iraq, the occupied Palestinian territory and Somalia.
In 2010, OCHA brought consistency to its global presence by defining roles and responsibilities for its field operations. A framework now exists to govern OCHA operations before, during and after an emergency. Guidance has been issued on the role of regional offices and country offices, and on OCHA’s role in preparedness and transition.
The breakdown of OCHA’s response in any given emergency is as follows: in a new emergency, regional offices are the first line of response. If a country becomes locked in a protracted crisis, OCHA will establish a longer-term presence. OCHA will only phase out when conditions improve to the extent that the immediate threat of crisis is gone, leaving the affected population and Government better equipped to face the next emergency.
Regional offices are located strategically in areas of humanitarian significance. They have become increasingly vital in countries with no OCHA country office. Regional offices typically focus on preparedness, support to emergency response and the development of regional coordination networks. Sub-regional offices allow regional offices to extend their coverage to areas with concentrated humanitarian needs.
Country offices support the Humanitarian Coordinator in leading the response to a humanitarian crisis, with sub-offices located in the vicinity of populations of concern. Country offices have five operational priorities: building a shared situational awareness; building a common approach; building a common strategy and implementation plan; facilitating implementation and monitoring; and developing shared lessons learned.
Humanitarian support units exist in places where a fully fledged country office is not justified, but where there are risks of relapsing into crisis. OCHA’s policy on transition has resulted in a more predictable and better-
managed process to phase down OCHA operations from country offices to support units, in consultation with partners.
In 2011, OCHA faces the challenge of adapting its field operations to growing needs in a global context where the resources available to the humanitarian system are already stretched, and where humanitarian access is shrinking due to security and bureaucratic constraints. Country offices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan will remain OCHA’s largest operations, followed by Afghanistan and Haiti.
OCHA will continue to fulfill its mandate by seeking to put in place an enabling and effective humanitarian coordination system that addresses evolving challenges. It will focus on strengthened humanitarian leadership, more accountable humanitarian country teams, more effective cluster coordination, and quicker and more predictable funding tools tied to need.
At the regional and country level, OCHA will find new ways of working with partners, particularly governments and development actors, to tackle chronic vulnerability and save lives. OCHA staff in the field will be working to ensure that humanitarian responses are not a collection of disjointed efforts, but are context specific, integrated and needs based in support of action by national governments. | <urn:uuid:0d501db1-5863-42a6-9fdb-570898e7f1df> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.unocha.org/ochain/2011/field/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988717954.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183837-00508-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942574 | 897 | 2.5 | 2 |
ERIC Number: ED022969
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1968-Mar
Reference Count: N/A
National Leadership Development Seminar for State Directors of Vocational Education. Final Report.
Allen, Mary P.
Thirty-four State Directors of Vocational Education or their designated representatives attended a 1-week leadership development seminar for the purposes of developing skills in problem identification and solution, developing interpersonal competencies, assisting in group formation, and beginning a process or developing a model for future action. The seminar consisted of three major presentations by Felix Robb, Curtis Aller, and Roy Dugger, generally dealing with the current status and trends in vocational education. The remainder of the seminar was conducted on a small group discussion basis. A paper on the problem-solving process and three background papers from State Directors are also included. Specific plans emerged for: (1) a four-state study, involving members, on how to more effectively utilize staff of state departments, (2) a task force group to continue to study the scope of vocational education, and (3) a change in the structure of national meetings held by State Directors of Vocational Education to "problem-solving" as opposed to the traditional "speech making." (MM)
Publication Type: N/A
Education Level: N/A
Sponsor: Office of Education (DHEW), Washington, DC.
Authoring Institution: American Vocational Association, Inc., Washington, DC. | <urn:uuid:1d4a71d3-ea8c-49bf-b919-8cfce98fea0c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED022969 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280128.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00383-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921854 | 305 | 1.914063 | 2 |
ANKARA- After years of tough sanctions over Iran's nuclear program, many in the country now say they want the government to make compromises that could satisfy world powers and allow a semblance of prosperity to return.
Although many Iranians still fervently believe in their country's right to all aspects of a civilian nuclear program, including those regarded with suspicion in the West, they are increasingly tired of the high economic price.
"I love my country but I love my family more, and for years I have worked hard to cope with the rising prices," said Ali Mirzai, a father of three in the northern city of Rasht.
"I am tired of this nuclear dispute. For years we feared further economic pressure and possible military action. A nuclear deal is our only chance to live in peace," said interior designer Mastaneh Alavi in the northwestern city of Tabriz.
But many Iranians still argued for a "balanced" nuclear deal, saying it would be unfair to deny their country a technology possessed by Pakistan, India and Israel. | <urn:uuid:a3f1be19-2d47-429e-af65-277b1ac6d256> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://nation.com.pk/national/05-Jun-2014/iranians-can-t-live-without-a-nuclear-technology-possessed-by-pakistan-india-and-israel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280128.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00384-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965909 | 209 | 1.59375 | 2 |
South-east of a line from Portland Bill to Flamborough Head, there are no significant areas of reasonably hard rock outcrop in England. In this area, sand and gravel are the only local source of aggregate, but although they can often make good concrete, are not generally as versatile as rock. However, south-east England has the highest demand for quality aggregate, not only because it is one of the most densely populated part of Britain, but also because it contains fast growing areas around the Thames estuary, Ashford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge.
By far the largest areas of hard rock are the Carboniferous Limestone outcrops of Mendip and the Bristol region. The darker, less pure Carboniferous limestones, such as the Black Rock Limestone with 6 to 7% silica, are best suited for use as aggregates. In contrast, some of the lighter oolitic limestones, such as the Burrington Oolite, are extremely chemically pure, with 99% calcium carbonate, and are used in the chemical and steel industries.
These Carboniferous limestones make up the majority of the Mendip Hills. Today, aggregate extraction is concentrated at the eastern end of Mendips in part because this is closest to the large markets of south-east England. In addition, the quarries can also be readily hidden in the low 'plateau' topography, and avoid both the highly valued landscapes and water supply areas to the west. For this reason, two of the largest limestone quarries in Europe are located here. Smaller quarries occur further west around Cheddar, but these supply mostly local markets.
Other hard rocks occur, particularly the Silurian andesite lavas around Beacon Hill. These have similar properties to some Leicestershire igneous rocks and can be used for skid-resistant road surfacing. However, their outcrop is restricted to a small area at Moon's Hill, Stoke St Michael. The Devonian Portishead Formation is generally too friable and inconsistent to be used as aggregates. The younger Jurassic limestones are highly variable in terms of chemical and physical quality and usually occur as very thin beds, interleaved with sandy or clayey material and as such are not well suited to modern quarrying or aggregate and industrial requirements. However when worked selectively in certain areas, the limestones of the Inferior Oolite (Middle Jurassic), notably at Doulting, are sufficiently consistent and attractive to have been used as a fine building or decorative stone.
© British Geological Survey, NERC 2016. This site is hosted by the British Geological Survey but responsibility for the content of the site lies with Foundations of the Mendips website not with the British Geological Survey. Questions, suggestions or comments regarding the contents of this site should be directed to Dr Andrew Farrant. | <urn:uuid:7d2bda41-eb8e-4529-b006-788fef7d549a> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mendips/Aggregates/stone_resource/resources.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719843.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00293-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961425 | 580 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Since the 1920s, Wakefield Council Museum Service has acquired over 120,000 historic objects and works of art on behalf of Wakefield District's residents and visitors.
Identifications and offers of donation
Our Collections Team are happy to identify items or consider new donations for our museum collections. This service is available on our Meet the Curator afternoons at Wakefield Museum (Meet the Curator), Pontefract Museum (Meet the Curator) and Castleford Museum (Meet the Curator), or by e-mailing email@example.com to make an appointment with one of our curators.
Our Museum Service is guided by an Acquisition and Disposal Policy and the museum service will make a decision whether to accept your donation based on our existing collections, our collecting priorities, current legislation and Council policy.
A more specialist identification for archaeological finds can be provided at Pontefract Museum and Wakefield Museum by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). Dates of these sessions will be advertised here when available.
Wakefield Council Museum Service cannot provide valuations for items brought in by the public. For valuations, please contact an auction house or antiques dealer.
At any one time we are only able to display a small percentage of the objects at our three museums and two castles across Wakefield District. The online catalogues below are a way for you to see those objects that may not be on display. We hope you enjoy searching the collections. | <urn:uuid:ae46743e-90c1-49dd-b007-7dfcba1902cd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.wakefield.gov.uk/residents/events-and-culture/museums/museum-collections | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280504.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00136-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.889867 | 302 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Plastic surgeons are focused on reconstructive procedures. They can see patients who have conditions like birth disorders, injuries, illnesses, or burns.
Many plastic surgeons choose to become cosmetic surgeons and do procedures to change a patient’s appearance or aesthetic. But not all plastic surgeons are also cosmetic surgeons.
Education and Training
Plastic surgery is one of the most competitive routes in the medical field. The training can take more than a decade. After medical school or osteopathic medical school,, prospective plastic surgeons can take one of two paths:
- A 6-year residency program that combines general surgery and plastic surgery
- A 5-year surgery residency and then a 3-year plastic surgery residency
Candidates then take an exam to practice plastic surgery in their state.
They can continue their education with a 1- or 2-year fellowship in areas like:
- Breasts. Plastic surgeons who specialize in breast surgeries can do them to change appearance, to reduce the size of the breasts, or rebuild them after surgery to treat a tumor.
- Aesthetics. This is what most people think of when they think of plastic surgeries. They do surgery to change a person’s appearance.
- Craniofacial surgery. The craniofacial subspecialty is focused on the skull, face, ears, nose, and parts of the mouth. These surgeons often work on cleft palates , facial deformities, or missing noses or ears.
- General reconstructive surgery. These surgeons often work on wound healing, scar reparation, and scar revisions.
- Hands. Hand specialists treat injuries or ongoing conditions on the hand.
- Scars or burns. These specialists often repair burns or scars.
What Does a Plastic Surgeon Do?
Plastic surgeons can repair or reconstruct any part of the body except the central nervous system. Some of the procedures they do are:
- Breast reconstruction
- Burn repair
- Lower extremity reconstruction
- Hand surgery
- Scar revision
- Migraine relief
- Jaw straightening
- Corrective surgeries for genetic problems
Plastic surgeons see patients on a daily basis to discuss and diagnose issues. They perform any necessary operations and monitor their patients afterward. They usually work in clinics, offices, or hospitals.
Reasons to See a Plastic Surgeon
You may need to see a plastic surgeon about a physical problem. Your primary care physician will probably refer you to them.
If you want to change something about the way you look, see a cosmetic surgeon. Any licensed physician is legally allowed to do cosmetic surgery. Make sure you find one who has the right training and licensing. | <urn:uuid:4072215c-bd77-40be-91b5-79c176ef38e4> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-a-plastic-surgeon | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571993.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814022847-20220814052847-00675.warc.gz | en | 0.941043 | 541 | 2.765625 | 3 |
A. K. Gopalan
Indian politicianDied when: 72 years 172 days (869 months)
Star Sign: Libra
Ayillyath Kuttiari Gopalan (1 October 1904 – 22 March 1977), popularly known as A.K.Gopalan or AKG, was an Indian communist politician.He was one of 16 Communist Party of India members elected to the first Lok Sabha in 1952.
Later he became one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). | <urn:uuid:419c1e08-c86a-4656-8cac-e9d2c4f5fa79> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.outlived.org/person/a-k-gopalan-53625 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570765.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808031623-20220808061623-00270.warc.gz | en | 0.965215 | 108 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Based on 16 income tax records
How much do Scientists make?
The average total salary for a Scientist is $68,500 per year. This is based on data from 16 TurboTax users who reported their occupation as Scientist and includes taxable wages, tips, bonuses, and more. Scientist salary can vary between $43,000 to $223,000 depending on factors including education, skills, experience, employer & location. | <urn:uuid:05b69f1f-91d6-42bb-a1df-4264b84e1e6a> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://mint.intuit.com/salary/scientist/anchorage-metro-area-ak | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572215.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815235954-20220816025954-00678.warc.gz | en | 0.966778 | 95 | 2.34375 | 2 |
How to Do Nothing: Break Time at Your Breaking Point
Ever feel like your skull is completely trampled from work? Think of the times when you get irrationally grouchy at nothing (we all do sometimes); think of the times when the thousand-yard stare sets in and someone has to "wake" you; think of the times when you're so fried you can't form sentences (or even certain words) properly. Hopefully you’ve learned that, once you reach that point, it’s not effective to drink another cup of coffee and keep going. “Dragging yourself by the bootstraps” doesn’t always work; even bootstraps eventually break.
At times like these, what should you do?
In a word: nothing. You should do nothing. You’d think this is obvious, but it’s not. Whether you’re talking to someone at a fledgling business, someone driving aggressively to promotion, or just a bona fide workaholic, they have surprising difficulty peeling themselves away from their desks. They feel guilty for not being productive, but they’re exhausted by working more—a dilemma in the truest sense of the word. What they need is a solution to that dilemma, which we suggest is as follows: if you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, don’t. You save effort that way.
Sometimes, as we've written, productive procrastination is a good idea. Other times—just don’t. For those times in particular, we give you our guide to doing nothing. The harder this article is to follow, the worse you need it.
What NOT to Do
Don’t do any more work. Seriously. This should be obvious, but lots of people bait themselves with “well, just five more minutes” or “I’ll just finish this one—“ But that’s how you get trapped. If you pull the whole “five more minutes” thing, first you need to pack your s#!t, set a timer, and then stand up and walk out when it goes off. Willpower, people—if you can’t use it to save yourself at the simplest opportunities, what good is it to you?
Don’t pick up the phone—unless you’re calling for take-out. Don’t check the mailbox, unless you’re expecting that thing you ordered. Definitely don’t answer another email. And, as much as it pains us to say it, you probably shouldn’t pick up a notebook or pen; unless you feel unadulterated joy when you open your Code&Quill notebook (in which case, please let us know at email@example.com—later), we acknowledge that they are thinking and working tools, which is the opposite of what you need.
Don’t stay where you work. Likely that means leaving the office, library, studio, lab, or dungeon where you work; if you work at home, it might mean sitting in another room, or a different part of the room.
If you’re extraverted, you probably shouldn’t go somewhere by yourself; just be sure you’re surrounding yourself with people whom you actually like. If you’re introverted, you probably shouldn’t go somewhere crowded or try to do something with your friends; you don’t have the energy, and it’ll just sap you further.
What to Do (to the extent you must)
Let’s start with the suggestion nearest nothing: sleep. People with burnout don’t usually get eight hours a night—or anywhere close. You’re probably behind; catch yourself up. If it’s nighttime, just go to bed early, and skip the alarm if you can help it. If it’s the middle of the afternoon, take a nap. But if you take a nap, let it be one of those good naps, the kind where you drool on your pillow for three hours, then wake up and have to remember where you are.
Not tired? Try bathing. Take a long, hot shower with the lights off. Take a candlelit bath with some eucalyptus suds—a $10 bottle lasts forever (and guys, it’s not too feminine-smelling). Bring along some relaxing music, an adult beverage, and a glass of ice water; you may have forgotten how relaxing “doing nothing” can be when done right.
If you need something semi-active, go for a walk. Forrest Gump-style, just pick a direction and start walking. If that seems boring, bring your headphones (but put your phone on Airplane Mode first). If that still seems boring, go for a drive instead; hopefully it’s warm out so you can roll down the windows and blast some music. You don’t need to go Forrest’s distance—15 minutes might be enough—but this is the old mantra of solvitur ambulando, to solve it by walking.
The reason that walking “solves” anything is that it helps empty your mind. It’s a form of forced meditation. And on the topic of meditation, remember that meditation is not “thinking about nothing” so much as it is “thinking about nothing in particular and being at peace with each thought.” Annie Dillard once compared the mind to a muddy river, where the wildlife and the garbage belong equally. Sometimes, rather than wade in it and try to clean it out, you just have to stand to the side and watch.
Be a Kid Again
Fred Rogers once noted (to paraphrase) that play is the work of children. But playtime isn’t just for kids; it’s an important activity for the human psyche. It’s why the gods of Hinduism and Greek mythology were sometimes defined by their joke-telling, dancing, or even pranking. In our own time, research suggests that video games help people with depression. So if you’re approaching burnout, you are probably in desperate need of some playtime.
If you’ve already got a game in mind, go for it. Otherwise, pull out an old favorite—something you haven’t touched in a few years. If you’re not big on games, think of a movie or TV show instead—something you’ve been looking forward to watching, or an old favorite you haven’t seen in a while. (Oscars or not, we don’t recommend The Revenant; it’s not exactly “fun” to watch.)
Like any other time, a little self-knowledge goes a long way. Maybe, in “kid mode,” you enjoy puzzles or watercolors or Play-Doh. Even if you subscribe to Paul’s teaching, about growing up as “putting away childish things,” there’s one semantic distinction you shouldn’t forget, and that’s the difference between childish (immature) and childlike (innocent and joyous). Be childlike for a little while; it makes “adulting” hurt less. Have a cookie, for goodness' sake.
Burnout is gradual, something that happens slowly and quietly to the people it afflicts. You might realize it one morning and start to wonder why you’re so stressed, but you don't fully exhaust yourself in a day or a week. It happens over the course of multiple weeks, months, or even years. And this is why “unplugging” in this way—allowing yourself a complete mental break from all things work—is important sometimes. Frankly, we just can’t afford to do this all the time—but at the same time, we can’t afford not to do it every now and again.
Remember, too, that these empty spaces are part of any creative process. By removing our conscious minds from the thinking, we allow the deeper parts of our brains to work their magic. Take a break, take a bath, play a game, chill out for once, AND make real progress on your creative works? Sounds like a good deal to us.
Next week on Ampersand, the Code&Quill blog, we'll be giving an introduction to typography. (Last week, we wrote the second half of our discussion of continuous improvement, so click here to take a look if you missed it.) If you’d like highlights from the blog, plus brand-new info about upcoming products and promotions, feel free to join our email newsletter here. | <urn:uuid:8675adf3-ddac-4505-b118-a05410deff6e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.codeandquill.com/blogs/ampersand/126474375-how-to-do-nothing-break-time-at-your-breaking-point | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00411-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936861 | 1,850 | 1.945313 | 2 |
Certification to NFPA 1006
Confined Space, Rope and Structural Collapse Rescue
110 HRS / ELEVEN 10-HOUR DAYS
QUALIFIES FOR 15 CME HOURS
This comprehensive course provides training for tactical personnel to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to safely conduct operations in confined spaces and elevated locations as well as structural collapse environments. | <urn:uuid:ea1bbc8f-aad0-4c1b-8de6-2508ce7bd46f> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.rocorescue.com/courses/combat-technical-rescue/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571472.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811133823-20220811163823-00675.warc.gz | en | 0.844876 | 86 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Barboursville Plantation ruins built 1814-1822 located Barboursville, Virginia
As a tour guide at Homewood house circa 1801 the guides would go on excursions to other Historic sights.Today we will be touring the famous Barboursville ruins located Barboursville, Virginia. Barboursville was one of the largest and finest residences in the region. The only building in Orange County known to have been designed by Thomas Jefferson, Barboursville was constructed between 1814 and 1822 in the late Federal style for Jefferson's friend James Barbour, Governor of Virginia (1812-1814), U.S. Senator, Secretary of War, and Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
Jefferson's drawings called for a dwelling with a recessed portico on the north front and a three-part bay sheltered by a portico on the south front, with dome above--a scheme resembling Jefferson's own home Monticello. The dome, however, was not built. Even in its ruinous state, the house presents a romantic image of the Jeffersonian ideal, a compact but architecturally sophisticated classical villa in a carefully contrived landscape setting. The great oval in front of the house was originally a racetrack. The stabilized ruins are now the centerpiece of one of Virginia's first large-scale wineries. They also serve as an exceptional background for the Four County Players' presentations of "Shakespeare at the Ruins" on August weekends.
The scale of this house is quite large and grand.
Jefferson’s design embodied a number of his renowned signatures -- the integration of the structure into an elevated knoll, the dome (not erected), and an octagonal room at the focal point of the wings of the house. Here, the octagon forms a core for the three stories of the house; from the main level it rises as one room, 2 stories high. The grandeur of this room, projecting from the south facade, lends such power and elegance to this monumental house
Approximately 8 miles south of James Madison’s Montpelier and 20 miles north of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the same Southwest Mountain chain, parallelling the Blue Ridge, Barboursville was settled as a substantial plantation by Thomas Barbour, in the mid-1700s, occupying somewhat more than 5 times the estate’s present size of 900-plus acres.
The career of Barbour’s fourth son, James, cemented the rapport between these three leading families of the Virginia Piedmont -- as gentry and political allies in the nascent Republican Party, which Jefferson and Madison would lead into the White House, and James Barbour into the Virginia Governor’s Mansion, the U.S. Senate, and important Cabinet and diplomatic positions thereafter.
It was as President of the Albemarle Agricultural Society, as each man was in his time, that their character as farmers achieved even greater influence. But it was in their character as friends and neighbors, that the lives of these men are so palpable at Barboursville Vineyards, the remaining one of these 3 estates to sustain their leadership in agriculture, in a viticultural dimension which Jefferson foresaw and pursued with passion.
Though large in scale, the house contained only eight principal rooms, the hall, drawing room, and dining room being two-story chambers. The entrance façade featured a projecting Roman Doric tetrastyle portico which covered the recessed front wall of the entrance hall. On the garden front the walls of the octagonal drawing room projected into a similar portico, as at Monticello. The octagonal dome which Jefferson proposed in his drawing was omitted during construction; it is uncertain whether the Chinese latticework railing which appeared in Jefferson's drawing around the base of the roof was ever installed. Although the dining room had no chamber over it, Jefferson indicated a faux window on the second floor level in order to keep the garden front symmetrical. This feature was omitted and consequently gave that side of the house an unbalanced appearance. There is little evidence as to the appearance of the original interior architectural trim.
You can see the outline of where a mantel once stood
A brick Flemish-bond mansion with a hipped roof, Barboursville stood two stories high over an English basement. After the fire, the family renovated a pair of brick dependencies to the west of the mansion. Today the estate is run as a vineyard.
Note the Flemish bond brick work used in the building, also known as Dutch bond, has throughout history been considered the most decorative bond and expensive brick work, and for this reason was used extensively for dwellings until the adoption of the cavity wall. It is created by alternately laying headers and stretchers in a single course. The next course is laid so that a header lies in the middle of the stretcher in the course below. This bond is two bricks thick. It is quite difficult to lay Flemish bond properly, since for best effect all the perpendiculars (vertical mortar joints) need to be vertically aligned. If only one face of a Flemish bond wall is exposed, one-third of the bricks are not visible, and hence may be of low visual quality. This is a better ratio than for English bond, Flemish bond's main rival for load-bearing walls.
Me and my friend Rosalie standing under 200 year old twenty feet plus high boxwood's
Me and my friend Catherine standing under 200 year old twenty feet plus high boxwood's
Barbour's estate has been known for its unusually large and fine boxwood, which flourish on the grounds immediately surrounding the main house. A portion of the gardens were once surrounded by a serpentine wall similar to those designed by Thomas Jefferson for the gardens at the University of Virginia. | <urn:uuid:13c466ce-935d-4640-b0f8-311cd620f8a0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://andrewhopkinsart.blogspot.com/2012/04/barboursville-plantation-ruins-1814.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560285001.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095125-00309-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965335 | 1,197 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Half-Manticores are the offspring of manticores and their mortal mates. These hybrid are purposely bred by Manticores so that their kind could walk amongst humans. The females usually kill their mates after conception or after the child is born. It was stated that they are not inherently evil, and are born with a human form aside from a snake-like tongue.
A mortal named Derek was once the mate of a Female Manticore, and experimented with potions to try to gain enough power to save his son from growing up with his mother, who took him to the Underworld. He succeeded in saving his son with the help of the Charmed Ones, who offered to bind Derek's son's powers, but Derek declined the offer and left to raise him up as normally as possible.
Powers and AbilitiesEdit
- Active Powers
- Shimmering: The ability to teleport from one place to another through shimmering.
- Sonic Scream: The ability to unleash a high-pitch sonic scream. Manticores use this ability as a form of communications.
- Elasticity: The ability to stretch certain parts of the body. Half-Manticores possess an elastic tongue.
- Sensing: The ability to sense the location of other beings.
Half-Manticores appeared in a total of 1 episode over the course of the series.
- Season 6
- Little Monsters | <urn:uuid:9c94b2d4-7d50-4e65-bbc8-8248cf99744b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://charmed.wikia.com/wiki/Half-Manticore | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00493-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956223 | 286 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The MassCUE Datapalooza is a new event that focuses on educators sharing best practices for using data in the classroom, school, or district. The event will start with a morning keynote followed by a series of presentations (55 minutes long) throughout the day. We are encouraging educators to attend this event in teams that consist of school and district administrators, technology directors, technology integration specialists, and classroom teachers or specialists. Presentations will demonstrate on how schools and/or districts effectively use data to improve teaching and learning.
(Link to handouts will be added to the schedule of presentations)
Follow this amazing event on Twitter #masscuedata18
Regular Registration: $65
Limit: 90 educators.
Sold out – waiting list only
This event will be held at:
St. Peter-Marian Junior-Senior High School
Dr. Damian Bebell, Keynote
Drinking from the Fire Hose: Leveraging Data in the 21st Century School
Over the past few years some truly exciting opportunities have emerged for educators and schools seeking to better leverage educational data. Learn how schools across the globe are leveraging everything from simple student survey reflections to predictive learning analytics to support opportunities for educators and schools to better define, measure and communicate what they find valuable and important.
Dr. Damian Bebell is a well-established leader in the design and implementation of research and evaluation studies in technology rich educational environments. Damian holds a position of Assistant Research Professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy. In 2011, Damian co-founded the www.purposeofschool.com website, dedicated to strengthening strategic vision in education and assessment. Currently, Damian is Research Director for the International Research Collaborative , a longitudinal research collaboration between data scientists, educational researchers, and schools around the world.
Call for Proposals Now Closed
Congratulations to our presenters !
Presentations will include (but are not limited to):
· Setting up and maintaining a data warehouse · Mining data effectively · Using data to narrow the achievement gap · Sharing effective ways to deal with data phobia · Considering data from a variety of sources · Using data to communicate with colleagues across grade levels and district · Collecting, analyzing and presenting/sharing data both informally and formally · Sharing how leadership teams promote and guide the use of data within their districts
|Early Bird Registration (ends January 5, 2018)||$45.00 (fee includes lunch)|
|Regular Registration (after January 5, 2018)||$65.00 (fee includes lunch)|
|Date and Time||January 25, 2018 (snow date: January 26, 2018)|
|Location||St. Peter-Marian Junior-Senior High School|
|Audience||Teachers and Administrators|
Session Schedule
7:30 am- Registration opens (light breakfast will be served)
8:30 am – 9:15 am – Morning Keynote
9:30 am to 10:15 am – Concurrent Session #1
10:30 am to 11:15 am – Concurrent Session #2
11:30 am – Visit with Vendor sponsors (Media Center)
12:00 -12:25 pm – DataSlam (Media Center)
12:30 – 1:00 – Lunch (Cafeteria)
1:15 pm to 2:00 pm – Concurrent Session #3
2:15 pm to 3:00 pm – Concurrent Session #4
. | <urn:uuid:a2dd9a70-8557-4e2b-945f-efd63fc0c7d6> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.masscue.org/event/masscue-datapalooza-2018-2/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570913.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20220809064307-20220809094307-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.899963 | 772 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Middle children are underachievers, overshadowed and overlooked, right? Wrong.
Combining research in evolutionary biology, psychology and sociology with real-life stories, psychologist Catherine Salmon, Ph.D., and journalist Katrin Schumann reveal what it really means to grow up in between, including how:
• Middles receive less financial and emotional support from their parents, but become remarkably successful and innovative adults • Middles can be stubbornly independent as teens, but are extraordinary team players later in life • Middles are often seen as outcasts, but are actually far less likely to get divorced or be in therapy than their siblings.
With surprising insights into how our birth order affects us, as well as constructive advice on how to maximize advantages and overcome drawbacks, The Secret Power of Middle Children shows middleborns at any age (and their parents) how to use what seems to be a disadvantage as a strategy for personal and professional success.
About The Secret Power of Middle Children
This myth-busting book shows how “forgotten” middle children can-and do-rule the world.
In this counterintuitive book, psychologist Catherine Salmon and journalist Katrin Schumann combine science, history, and real-life stories to reveal for the first time that our perception of middle children is dead wrong.
Using unpublished and little-known research from evolutionary psychology, sociology, and communications, The Secret Power of Middle Children illustrates how adaptive strategies middleborns develop during childhood translate into stronger friendships, lasting marriages, successful careers, and effective parenting.
Over seventy million adult Americans are middle children, and forty percent of young American families have middle children. With constructive advice on how to maximize the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of being a middle child, Salmon and Schumann help middle children at any age (and their parents) use birth order as a strategy for success.
Get the news you want from Penguin Random House
“Powerful advice … anchored in hard science and illuminated by vivid case examples.” — David M. Buss, author of Evolutionary Psychology
“Entertaining and provocative.” — Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel
Published by Plume Jul 31, 2012| 304 Pages| 5-5/16 x 8| ISBN 9780452297937
Published by Plume Aug 04, 2011| 304 Pages| ISBN 9781101543429 | <urn:uuid:511a0ddf-edce-402b-bec3-3ff0f3a26e7f> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/308404/the-secret-power-of-middle-children-by-catherine-salmon/9781101543429?sym=REV | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719453.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00229-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915702 | 487 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Thomas Watson of Georgia began his political career in the late nineteenth century as a Populist champion of small farmers and opponent of powerful railroad companies. As a congressman, he was instrumental in implementing Rural Free Delivery by the postal service.
By the early twentieth century, however, Watson was lending his voice to prejudice rather than reform with his virulent denunciations of Catholics, blacks, and Jews. His condemnations of northern and Jewish influence in the wake of Leo Frank’s 1913 trial for the murder of Mary Phagan contributed to the anti-Semitic feeling against Frank that resulted in his August 1915 lynching.
There’s a statue of Watson on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol, but as of this month it’s slated to be moved across the street to make way for a renovation project. The statue’s removal apparently has nothing to do with Watson’s bigotry and everything to do with the prohibitive cost of moving it back once the renovations are done, but it’s prompted an interesting discussion about historical memory and one political figure’s very mixed and quite troubling legacy. | <urn:uuid:84d55e6c-80b6-4eef-9ad3-5c1a561b6dce> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | https://pastinthepresent.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/uproar-over-a-statue-and-this-time-its-not-a-confederate/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988718866.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183838-00003-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968655 | 228 | 2.984375 | 3 |
World leaders have gathered in Russia for the G20 summit, with discussions about the Syrian crisis expected to dominate talks behind the scenes.
Vladimir Putin greeted dignitaries, including Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, as they arrived in St Petersburg for the start of the annual meeting of the world's leading economies.
Mr Putin and US president Barack Obama exchanged a warm greeting for the cameras amid sharp divisions between their two countries over Syria.
No bilateral meeting is scheduled between the pair but officials have left the door open to a less formal exchange.
Rows over the conflict in Syria, Russia's awarding of asylum to US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden and tough laws passed by the Russian parliament have all caused deep tensions.
The summit's focus is of an economic nature, with talks expected to cover the closure of global tax loopholes and havens.
However, the impasse over Syria is expected to dominate informal meetings.
Australia's UN ambassador and current Security Council president Gary Quinlan has said he hopes leaders will use the summit to break the Syrian stalemate.
— Gary Quinlan (@AustraliaUN) September 5, 2013
Speaking at the opening plenary session of the summit, Mr Putin suggested the topic be on the agenda over dinner.
"Some participants have asked me to give the time and possibility to discuss other... very acute topics of international politics, in particular the situation around Syria," he said.
"I suggest we do this during dinner so that we... in the first part can discuss the (economic) problems we had gathered here for and are key for the G20."
EU urges diplomatic efforts on Syria and 'no military solution'
Ahead of the summit Europe's top officials warned against a military response in Syria, aligning themselves more closely with Mr Putin than Mr Obama in how best to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
While describing the August 21 attack near Damascus, in which an estimated 1,400 people died, as "abhorrent" and a crime against humanity, European Council president Herman Van Rompuy said a military strike would not help resolve the crisis.
"There is no military solution to the Syrian conflict," Mr Van Rompuy told reporters.
"Only a political solution can end the terrible bloodshed, grave violations of human rights and the far-reaching destruction of Syria.
"While respecting the recent calls for action, we underscore at the same time the need to move forward with addressing the Syrian crisis through the UN process."
His position, supported by European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, would appear to set the European Union at odds with the US, since Mr Obama has said he is prepared to launch military strikes once he has approval from Congress, where votes are expected next week.
It also suggests internal divisions within the EU. France, which with Britain is the most influential of the EU's 28 member states on foreign policy, has said it will support any military action taken by Washington.
British prime minister David Cameron was also keen to support military intervention, but he lost a parliamentary vote on the issue last week and Britain will not take part. | <urn:uuid:8d3a1fd4-732e-4922-8e2a-ba995fc3b144> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-06/world-leaders-all-smiles-ahead-of-g20-summit/4939622?pfm=sm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719286.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00497-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956234 | 634 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Washington: According to a recent study, spending some quality time enjoying nature helps in boosting the learning abilities of children. The results of the study were published in the journal 'Frontiers in Psychology'.
The researchers found that nature boosts learning in eight distinct ways. They found strong evidence that time in nature has a rejuvenating effect on attention, relieving stress, boosting self-discipline, increasing physical activity and fitness, and promoting self-motivation to students, enjoyment, and engagement and all of these have been showed to improve learning.
Ming Kuo, the lead author of the study explained, “It is time to take nature seriously as a resource for learning, in fact, the trend of increasing indoor instruction in hopes of maximizing standardized test performance may be doing more harm than good."
While none of these effects is entirely new, the analysis represents the first time all of the lines of evidence have been pulled together. Collectively, the findings make a much stronger case for the importance of time in nature. They also provide an explanation for something that has been puzzling scientists in the field - why even small doses of nature sometimes have surprisingly large effects.
The researchers said that the key is to see how these effects work together, in individual students and in classrooms. If something not only makes a student more attentive but also less stressed and more interested, then we can see how it could have had a large effect on their learning. Furthermore, if we put a bunch of kids in a classroom and they're all attentive, absorbed, and interested, that sounds like a different classroom than one where they're all stressed, agitated, not getting along.
These effects extend beyond academic achievement, according to the study. Time in nature appears to foster personal skills and qualities important for future success and may play a critical role in helping children grow up to be environmental stewards.
"Reports from independent observers as well as participants themselves - indicate beneficial shifts in perseverance, problem-solving, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, and resilience. All of these line up with skills we know are important for kids' ability to thrive in the 21st century," said Catherine Jordan, the co-author on the study.
The analysis also suggested multiple benefits of greening schoolyards and incorporating nature-based instruction in schools. "Even small exposures to nature are beneficial. If you're indoors, having a view of your yard as opposed to facing the wall, that makes a difference. At the same time, more is better. That's one of the things that gives us more confidence that we're seeing a real cause-and-effect relationship," Kuo said.
"The bigger the dose of nature we give a person, the bigger the effect we see in them," Kuo added. Nature creates a calmer, quieter, and safer setting for learning, fosters warmer, more cooperative relations among students and promotes more creative and more exploratory forms of playing and learning simultaneously. | <urn:uuid:1cbfc2c1-aeee-4f54-9cf3-7680b0ce1d9c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.asianage.com/amp/life/health/130319/nature-plays-an-important-role-in-childs-learning-ability-study.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572286.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20220816090541-20220816120541-00273.warc.gz | en | 0.965733 | 601 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Contact Reference Services for more information.
This small collection of papers of Cuban born sculptor and painter Tomás Oliva measure 0.2 linear feet and date from circa 1969-1996. Found among the papers are a chronology; life documents; exhibition catalogs, including one from the 1993 exhibition of three of the original Los Once Cuban artist's group forty years after their first exhibition in Havana; one letter from Cyndee Levy-Angulo; notes and poetry; a photograph of Oliva with José Antonio Díaz Peláez; photographs of sculpture, two sketchbooks; and loose sketches and doodles.
Tomás Oliva papers, circa 1969-1996. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Tomás Oliva (1930-1996) was a Cuban born sculptor, painter, and printmaker who worked in Havana up to the mid or late 1970s before relocating to Miami, Florida.
Portions of the papers are in Spanish.
The Tomás Oliva papers were donated to the Archives of American Art by Xiomara Almaguer-Levy in 1998.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 750 9th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20001 | <urn:uuid:590d6ede-da68-40b1-ae70-076b2b47e3eb> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://collections.si.edu/search/record/AAADCD_coll_216397 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719908.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00157-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920065 | 275 | 1.929688 | 2 |
AMBIT ENERGY COMPANY
Written By: Betty Stephens of Quest Media
Ambit Energy is a United States multilevel marketing retail electricity and natural gas provider that serves residential and commercial customers in states where energy has been deregulated. Corporate headquarters are located in Dallas, Texas, and operations/call center headquarters are located in Plano, Texas. Ambit Energy was founded in 2006 in Addison, Texas by Jere Thompson Jr. and Chris Chambless.
Electric and natural gas Customers throughout California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C. are choosing Ambit Energy as their choice in energy today. Ambit has grown to serve over 1 million Customers in only six years. And, it is said that those who make the switch often stay with Ambit for the signature perks they offer. They offer free energy when a customer refers 15 new Customers, or the customer may choose Travel Rewards for trips and cruises. They have created one of the most attractive Customer rewards programs in the industry. Once the customer signs up, they can begin the benefits of being an Ambit Energy Customer right away.
Ambit also offers an app for convenience in the palm of the customer’s hand. Depending on service territory, customers can enjoy freedom to pay bills, view usage and update account details from any web-enabled device.
Ambit Energy obtains customers through a network of independent consultants who work directly with the customers. Ambit Energy uses direct selling and is a member of the Direct Selling Association of America. Direct selling is the marketing and selling of products directly to consumers away from a fixed retail location.
• Ambit Energy was named 2010’s Fastest Growing Privately Held Company by Inc. 500 and placed 390 in 2011.
• Ambit Energy placed 15th on the Direct Selling News Global 100 List in 2011 and 14th in 2012.
Ambit Energy Customers in Texas receive transmission and distribution services from the following energy companies:
1. AEP Texas provides electricity to residents throughout southern and western Texas.
2. CenterPoint Energy provides electricity to the 5,000 square mile footprint of the Houston metropolitan area.
3. Oncor provides electricity to residents of northern, western and central Texas.
4. TNMP provides electricity for western and northern central Texas, as well as areas of the Gulf Coast region.
Ambit has been criticized for its direct sales model, and for being a multi-level marketing company. In May 2011, Ambit was sued by a consultant, who alleged that Ambit’s structure is a pyramid scheme. By August 2012, after several amendments and alterations to the original complaints including the removal of all allegations of fraud, a judge dismissed the case.
Ambit’s sales representatives have also been accused of overstating the benefits of participation, and of being overly aggressive in marketing to vulnerable customers such as the elderly, and non-English speakers, who might not fully understand the complexities of energy pricing. | <urn:uuid:fa98d828-929a-4846-94ca-e2ace40349c6> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://allthingshvac.com/tag/ambit-energy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571989.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813232744-20220814022744-00479.warc.gz | en | 0.950692 | 626 | 1.515625 | 2 |
India (42891)Посмотреть архив целиком
South Ural State University
The country`s history
This work contents the material about India. It`s not so big country, but India the second largest country in the world populationwide. India presents an interest for tourists. There are: nice geographical situation, good climate for the rest, interesting traditions. There are many sightseeing: Agra, Taj Mahal, Jaipur and many others.
The country`s history
The roots of Indian civilisation stretch back in time to pre-recorded history. The earliest human activity in the Indian sub-continent can be traced back to the Early, Middle and Late Stone Ages (400, 000-200, 000 BC). Implements from all three periods have been found from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar, parts of what is now Pakistan and the southern most tip of the Indian Peninsula.
These Paleolithic people were semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers for many millennia. Five main races of people were in existence when the move to an agricultural lifestyle took place, in the middle of the 9th millennium BC. These were the Negrito race, the Proto-Australoid; the Mediterranean race, the Mongloids and the Alpine people.
The first evidence of agricultural settlements on the western plains of the Indus is roughly contemporaneous with similar developments in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. These settlements gradually grew and the inhabitants started to use copper and bronze, domesticated animals, made pottery and began trade activities.
India, the second largest country in he world populationwide and seventh territorywide, is north of the equator, between 8 4` to 37 6` north latitude and 68 7` to 97 27` east longitude. The country`s land surface is flanked by the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian sea, along the south-east and along the south-west respectively. On the western border is situated Pakistan and in the east, Bangladesh and Burma. Along her northern boundary are Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet and Sinkiang region of China. The Gulf of Mannar and Palk Straits separate India at its southern end, from Sri Lanka.
From north to south, India veasures about 3, 214 km and, from east to west, about 2, 933 km. The total land area is 32, 68, 090 sq km. Its land –fontier is 15, 200 km and coastline 6, 103 km.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Laksha – dweep in the Arabian Sea are parts of India are: the great and the Deccan Plateau and Peninsula.
The Himalayan ranges are interspersed wit wide plateaus and valleys like Kashmir and Kulu. Some of the world`s highest peaks are in the Himalayas.
The near-level Indo-Gangetic Plains, among the greatest stretches of the flat alluvium in the world, are formed by the basins of three distinct river system: the Sind, the Ganga, and the Brahmaputra
The desert regions are: the «Great desert» extending from the edge of the Rann of Kutch beyond the Luni river northward, embracing the whole the Rajastan – Sind frontier, and the «Little Desert » extending from the Luni river between Jodhpur up to the northern wastes.
The Deccan Plateau and Peninsula, extending south of the Vindhya mountains, are geologically the oldest portion of the Indian land, perhaps once of huge continent.
India`s National Flag
The Indian flag was designed as a symbol of freedom. The late Prime Minister Nehru called it a flag not only of freedom for ourselves, but a symbol of freedom to all people
The flag is a horizontal tricolour in equal proportion of deep saffron on the top, white in the middle and dark green at the bottom. The ratio of the width to the length of the flag is two is to three. In the centre of the white band, there is a wheel in navy blue to indicate the Dharma Chakra, the wheel of law in the Sarnath Lion Capital. Its diameter approximates the width of the white band and it has 24 spokes. The saffron stands for courage, sacrifice and the spirit of renunciation; the white, for purity and truth; the green for faith and fertility.
The Indian climate is a cycle of six seasons. There are areas where the distinctness of a season can be felt, but generully the six season overlap each other.
The approximately equivalent of the Indian seasons in the Christian will be: Vasanta or Spring – mid February to April; Grishma or Summer – May and June; Varshaor or Monsoon – July to September; Sharada or Autumn – September to mid-November; Hemanta or pre-Winter – mid-November to mid-December; Shita or Winter – mid-December to mid-February.
However, the three major seasons are the winter, summer and the monsoon.
The winter (November-March) is more or less pleasant throughout the country, marked by bright sunny days. In the northern plains the temperature at times drops steeply; there is snowfall in the hills. In the western, southern and eastern India the winter is pleasantly cool.
The summer (April-June) is hot in the greater part of India. But the country has her charming hill resorts to provide cool retreats for the tourists.
The south-west monsoon begins on the west coast in early June and speards to other parts. In most of India it rains during June to September. But the south-eastern region experiences the greater rainfall of the year during November to January to the advent of the north-east monsoon.
India, a union of States, is a Sovereign Democratic Republic, governed by a constitution which came into force on January 1950.
The constitution, federal in structure with unitary features defines the powers exercised by the States and the Union. The President of India is the constitutional head of the executive of the Union. He acts according to the advice of the Council of Ministers with Prime Minister at the head – real custodian of the executive power – which is responsible to the Parliament consisting of to Houses, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.
Population and Religions
The population of India is 683, 81 million (1981 census).
Hindus formed 82, 72 percent, Muslims 11, 20 percent, Christians 2, 60 percent, Sikhs 1, 89 percent, Buddhists 0, 71 percent and Jains 0, 48 percent of the population, according to the 1971 census. India is a secular country.
India, according to a recent census, has 1, 652 dialects. Needless to say most of them are only spoken dialects.
The principal languages with rich literary heritage are (in alphabetic order): Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
India is the seventh largest and second most populous country in the world. A new spirit of economic freedom is now stirring in the country, bringing sweeping changes in its wake. A series of ambitious economic reforms aimed at deregulating the country and stimulating foreign investment has moved India firmly into the front ranks of the rapidly growing Asia Pacific region and unleashed the latent strengths of a complex and rapidly changing nation.
India's process of economic reform is firmly rooted in a political consensus that spans her diverse political parties. India's democracy is a known and stable factor, which has taken deep roots over nearly half a century. Importantly, India has no fundamental conflict between its political and economic systems. Its political institutions have fostered an open society with strong collective and individual rights and an environment supportive of free economic enterprise.
India's time tested institutions offer foreign investors a transparent environment that guarantees the security of their long term investments. These include a free and vibrant press, a judiciary which can and does overrule the government, a sophisticated legal and accounting system and a user friendly intellectual infrastructure. India's dynamic and highly competitive private sector has long been the backbone of its economic activity. It accounts for over 75% of its Gross Domestic Product and offers considerable scope for joint ventures and collaborations.
Today, India is one of the most exciting emerging markets in the world. Skilled managerial and technical manpower that match the best available in the world and a middle class whose size exceeds the population of the USA or the European Union, provide India with a distinct cutting edge in global competition.
Tourism has emerged as in important economic activity in South Asia. From the so called hippies of the 1960s, in search of music fulfillment to the luxury package tourists of the 1980s, the subcontinent has come to exert a magnetic hold over people from many other parts of the world, the West in particular. The Taj Mahal, Rajasthani palaces, the imperial splendors of Delhi, Kashmir with its houseboats and waterlilies and the palm – fringed beaches of Sri-Lanka are among the main places on wich tourists in their thousands now descend. The cooler part of the year from October to March is the favorite time for visiting much of the region, although altitude reduces temperatures in the mountains during the hotter months. Many wealthier South Asians living in the plains or on the coast migrate to hill stations to avoid the heat of the summer. Srinigar (Kashmir) and Murree (Pakistan) have become popular destinations for local honeymooning couples, as has Goa, another center much loved by overseas visitors.
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Это можно сделать совершенно бесплатно. Читайте подробности тут. | <urn:uuid:4e39dd31-fc6d-48cb-a660-7621666c7529> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://baumanki.net/show-document/1-24564/6b106616976b4ab68f6f0833c6f7f0ba/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560285315.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095125-00568-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93125 | 2,176 | 2.828125 | 3 |
In this paper, we discuss the field testing of a Departure Flow Management (DFM) capability that has been developed by the FAA to reduce manual airport Call For Release (CFR) coordination requirements and workload, while increasing airport departure throughput and reducing delays. This field test consisted of shadow and operational phases and utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods. This study took place February and March 2008 at the Los Angeles (ZLA) Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and Burbank (BUR), Las Vegas (LAS), Los Angeles (LAX), Ontario (ONT), and San Diego (SAN) airports. This test provided insights into how this tool changes roles and responsibilities, and how specific design features and functionality influenced the performance of the human operators. Human factors design improvements are discussed, along with the broader implications of the results of this case study for the introduction of new tools and automation into a distributed work environment.
& Smith, P. J.
(2009). Airport Departure Flow Management (DFM): Findings from Field Trial Testing. 2009 International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, 623-628. | <urn:uuid:5da27d9e-fd2b-4979-80da-dcd8710b20c8> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/isap_2009/12/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571097.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810010059-20220810040059-00278.warc.gz | en | 0.877864 | 291 | 1.835938 | 2 |
HIMSS recently released the results of the 2015 HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey. This study, which surveyed 297 individuals with cybersecurity responsibilities at healthcare organizations, gauged healthcare organizations’ awareness of and readiness for cybersecurity incidents in an “era where significant security incidents are a regular occurrence.”
The study revealed increased attention to cybersecurity issues among healthcare organizations. Eighty-seven percent of respondents said that information security had increased as a priority at their organizations, and more than half of the respondents’ organizations had allocated full-time resources to cybersecurity.
Additionally, many respondents’ organizations – 68 percent of those surveyed – had experienced security incidents. Eighty-one percent agreed that there is a need for “more innovative and advanced security tools” to protect organizations against future security threats.
It is crucial for businesses of any kind to understand the importance of cybersecurity and protecting organizational, employee, customer and patient data. Securing the Internet is our shared responsibility, and businesses play a big role in making online activity safer and more secure for all digital citizens. For tips and resources on cybersecurity at your organization, see the RE: Cyber pages.
NCSA worked with HIMSS on an infographic last fall on keeping healthcare organizations’ information safe and secure; you can view it here. Check out the infographic below for more highlights from 2015 HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey. You can view the whole survey here.
- Choosing your Cybersecurity Career Path
- Help! My IT Employee Went Rogue
- Child Identity Theft
- #ChatSTC Twitter Chat: May the Cyber Force Be With You
- #ChatSTC Twitter Chat: Now Matters – How Are You Fighting Cyber Threats?
- #ChatSTC Twitter Chat: Protect Your Identity With a Digital Spring Cleaning
- Data Privacy Is Crucial for the LGBT Community
- Laugh and Learn: A More Private Tomorrow, Tomorrow
- #ChatSTC Twitter Chat: Promote a Better Internet This Safer Internet Day
- Sharing While Caring – Protecting Your Digital Self | <urn:uuid:19b31b62-0a47-40a6-b7a2-83642eacce8c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://stopthinkconnect.org/blog/pulse-of-healthcare-organizations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571472.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811133823-20220811163823-00676.warc.gz | en | 0.923378 | 419 | 2.09375 | 2 |
The asset of a lock is that it completes the notion of security. When one has a properly installed locking system in his or her house and car, he or she feels safe and secure, however when one does not have a properly installed locking system in his or her home and vehicle, he or she is always concerned about losing his or her valuable belongings.
But what exactly are locksmiths?
Locksmiths are craftsmen who are qualified and licensed to repair, manufacture, and install locks on doors to houses, workplaces, and automobiles, among other things. Home and commercial locksmiths provide a variety of services such as car alarm security, vehicle servicing, residential lockouts, and business locking services.
The following are short descriptions of the locksmith services described above:
Car Alarm Security System
This is the most effective method of assuring the safety of a vehicle on the road. The alarm is installed inside the vehicle in such a manner that anytime somebody approaches within a certain distance of the vehicle, the alarm emits a loud buzzing sound, alerting everyone to the fact that someone is tampering with the vehicle. As a result, even the most cunning of criminals would have to touch the vehicle in order to unlock it in order to steal it, and the buzzer would prevent him from doing so, it is a very effective technique for auto theft protection.
A residential locksmith may replace any kind of defective lock in the house, including those in the garage, using this service. It goes so far as to add door bolts, which serve as effective locking devices. After obtaining locksmith services, one does not have to be concerned about the security of his or her property.
The Locksmith in Dallas is quite capable of dealing with any locking situation.
In addition to the aforementioned services, locksmiths may also supply duplicate keys, transponder keys, and keyless remotes for automobiles, allowing one to keep his or her vehicle safe from theft or misapplication. Additionally, if a car owner accidentally locks himself out of his vehicle, the locksmiths will arrive at the location in a short period of time and will get the vehicle unlocked in minutes.
Obviously, one’s business shop and office must be kept under strict security at all times. Locksmiths can help with this by providing excellent security systems such as CCTVs and other gadgets. As a result, one can keep track of everything that takes place in and around the workplace space, as well as maintain his office or business secure from any kind of assault.
A person in need of a Locksmith in Dallas service may do a search on the Internet for different locksmith firms by entering basic keywords such as “locksmith in Cleveland Ohio” and then selecting the most appropriate locksmith from the results provided and according to his or her requirements.
The key is to choose the most dependable locksmith service possible since once money has been spent, it cannot be refunded. Check if the locksmiths are completely insured and licensed, whether they provide emergency services or not, whether they have industry-wide certification or not, and whether they are within one’s financial limits or not when hiring locksmiths. | <urn:uuid:e58a07cb-32e7-4916-94fe-ff26c2ed0cb5> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://dirtyoilsands.org/maintain-the-security-of-your-home-and-vehicle-with-the-help-of-reputable-locksmith-in-dallas/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570651.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20220807150925-20220807180925-00473.warc.gz | en | 0.9715 | 663 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Varieties of Democracy Project to Receive $ 5.8 Million
Elizabeth Rankin • October 31, 2013
An ambitious international research effort to illuminate why democracies around the world succeed or fail has been awarded approximately $5.8 million (37.5 million SEK) over six years by the Swedish foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ).
The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), based in the US at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies and in Europe at the University of Gothenberg’s Varieties of Democracy Institute, promises to make entirely new kinds of democracy research and policy assessment possible by quantifying democracy in all countries from 1900 to the present.
The effort is led by Notre Dame political scientist Michael Coppedge, John Gerring of Boston University, and in Sweden, Staffan I. Lindberg of the University of Gothenburg and Jan Teorell of Lund University. Their team includes 18 researchers at 13 universities in the US, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the input of nearly 2000 country experts around the world.
“V-Dem has amassed a database of 11 million data points, and by the time this grant starts, we will be nearly finished with data collection,” says Coppedge. “This grant will make it possible to immediately dive into analysis of key questions: What are the main dimensions of democracy? What are the internal and external drivers of regime changes toward or away from democracy?”
The RJ funding will allow the research team to aggregate and simplify vast quantities of data on 329 aspects of democracy as well as to identify much more precisely than has previously been possible the sequencing of various stages of democratization and the processes by which democracy spreads from one country to another.
“The V-Dem approach stands out as a large global collaboration among scholars with diverse areas of expertise and as the first project attempting to explain different varieties of democracy,” says Coppedge. “Thanks to the highly disaggregated V-Dem data, it is also the first project to explore causal mechanisms linking different aspects of democracy together.”
V-Dem researchers plan to produce a working paper series, at least one edited volume, and many journal articles over the time period of the grant, Coppedge says.
In mid-2014, the data will be made freely available to anyone interested in democracy.
“V-Dem data will be used not only by researchers who want to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of democratization but also by governments and international organizations that need to assess the effectiveness of their democracy-promotion programs, students and journalists tracking progress toward democracy, and local NGOs that need reliable evidence to hold their own governments accountable,” says Coppedge.
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) is an independent Swedish foundation that promotes research in the humanities and social sciences.
Contact: Michael Coppedge at 574-631-7036 or firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:c465be23-627c-4dc5-80ef-1159b1ee8aa5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://kellogg.nd.edu/faculty/news/vdem3.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281574.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00023-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94097 | 633 | 1.875 | 2 |
Photoelectric sensor is made to detect objects, surface conditions, or environmental conditions between two objects.
Now it has become one of the most used sensor in product automation systems.
Working Principle of Photoelectric Sensors
A Photoelectric sensor consist of two elements, which is the emitter and the receiver. So, there is a continues light beam toward the receiver. Once the light beam is interrupted, the receiver receive less or no light. Therefore the sensor can detects that there is something in between the emitter and receiver.
Classification of Photoelectric Sensors by Sensing Principle
By considering the sensing principle of photoelectric sensors, we can divide photoelectric sensors into major categories. Sensing principal is how the light is emitted and received on the sensor.
Retro Reflective Sensors
Diffuse Reflective Sensors
Other Classifications for Photoelectric Sensors
In practical usage, we meet four type of photoelectric sensors. Those are,
- Sub-mnature Photoelectric Sensors
- Miniatue Photoelectric Sensors
- Compact Photo Electric Sensors
- Long Distance Photo Electric Sensors
Features of Photoelectric Sensors
Long Distance Range
Photoelectric Sensors have a higher sensing range compared to other sensors. Even from photoelectric sensors, Thru-beam sensors have the highest range which is 50m or more.
Since light beam is used, there is no physical touch on the product. So the sensor is more durable and doesn’t make any harm on the products.
Short Response Time
Photoelectric sensors have short response time compared to other sensoring methods like magnetic, ultrasonic, microwave, motion, position, etc. Therefore it’s much more helpful in quick indentation of products in automation processes.
Color indentation is a special feature which only some special photoelectric sensors have. Even it also uses light to detect colors, the working principle is comparatively complex.
These specific type of sensors uses the reflection and absorption characteristics of light to detect colors.
There are advanced photoelectric sensors which the sensing accuracy is less than few micro meters.
Photoelectric sensors can be used for almost all product types. Because it can be used on any product that can block a light beam.
Downsides of Photoelectric Sensors
There few main downsides when using photoelectric sensors. Those are as follows.
- When the lenses of the sensor get microbial contamination, it’s really difficult to clean in some conditions.
- When the lenses covered with dirt or dust, someone have to clean them manually. Otherwise, the dirt block the light beam and give incorrect indentation.
- When working with cold environments, the sensor get covered with water droplets. Therefore, the sensor detect incorrect indentations.
Applications of Photoelectric Sensors
Photoelectric sensors have wide range of applications such as,
- To detect item sizes and spot errors
- To detect seals on instillation bags
- To check the height of the object
- To detect whether transparent bottles are filled or not
- To detect automobiles in parking lots | <urn:uuid:8cceb5f1-8d9f-4082-a9dc-1fbde8400800> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://mechcollege.com/photoelectric-sensors/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572870.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817062258-20220817092258-00678.warc.gz | en | 0.881117 | 652 | 3.5 | 4 |
Thirty years after the classrooms at Anatola Elementary School were last painted, the Van Nuys Rotary Club figured it was time to step in.
So the 50-member chapter "adopted" the Van Nuys school, using the skills of each member to benefit Anatola.
The roofer plans to fix the school's roof. The accountants and lawyers will attend Career Day. And between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, everyone will paint.
"We've done this two or three times before," said Rotarian Rocky Star. "And the first time we painted a month ago, it took like four coats to cover the walls because they sucked all the paint right up."
During the Anatola-Rotary work party Saturday, club members will not only paint an abandoned classroom for conversion into a computer lab, they will wire the computers and install security to protect them.
Individual members of the Rotary Club have donated or upgraded between five and 10 computers for Anatola and expect to do more in the coming years, Star explained, including re-creating a garden space for the 400-pupil school.
"There are so many projects the school has, we don't know where to start," Star said.
It's not that Anatola is the neediest school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, he said. Anatola, which is designated as a LEARN and Los Angeles Systemic Initiative school, is relatively well off. But all schools need at least a little help, Star said.
"LAUSD just doesn't have the money" for some maintenance and upkeep, he said.
Star's wife, Annette, an Anatola teacher, said every effort helps the school modernize and grow. The paint and computers "are just better for the kids."
For information, call the Van Nuys Rotary Club at (818) 888-0880. | <urn:uuid:19e47be5-bd22-48f5-a1fb-30be4b43bc97> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://articles.latimes.com/1996-01-08/local/me-22274_1_van-nuys-rotary-club | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279189.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00057-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972116 | 396 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Maharashtra on Thursday, April 9, reported twenty-five more deaths from the novel coronavirus, in the sharpest spike since the beginning of the pandemic, taking the total toll in the state to 97. After 229 more positive cases were reported, the total number of cases in the state rose to 1,364; highest in the country. Meanwhile, 125 people have recovered fro the deadly virus in the state.
Mumbai is the worst-affected with 876 cases and 54 deaths. In the last 24-hours, the city reported 162 new cases and nine deaths. Meanwhile, Pune recorded 14 new deaths.
With the rise in the number of cases, 381 areas in Mumbai have been declared as containment zones, which follows strict curfew measures. The number of containment zones in the city saw a dramatic rise from just 146 till March 31. Various containment zones include Worli's Koliwada, a fisherfolk village, and some pockets of Dharavi.
In addition, the city is preparing a mega quarantine centre at the NSCI Dome, an indoor stadium. It will have 500 beds with scope for further expansion.
According to NDTV, while an extension of the lockdown is being considered in Mumbai and Pune, non-affected areas may see some relaxations. However, the final decision will come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's video-conference with Chief Ministers on Friday.
Authorities said that the first cases in Mumbai were those with a travel history to affected countries or who came in contact with those with travel history.
India at present has reported 6,725 cases of COVID-19. Of this, there are 5,863 active cases. While 635 have recovered from the infection, 227 have died.
Also Read: Corona Warrior: This 26-Yr-Old And His Team Is Feeding Hungry, Homeless Amid Lockdown In Tamil Nadu | <urn:uuid:3688679c-614a-4e45-a17d-2c26fda2af91> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://thelogicalindian.com/news/coronavirus-outbreak-maharashtra-deaths-20542 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570879.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808213349-20220809003349-00467.warc.gz | en | 0.951996 | 386 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Creating engineering design challenges is never easy. For seasoned engineers in academia, creating real-world context and content rich problems is difficult. For K-12 teachers, this task is even more challenging given their limited experience with engineering. However, initiatives such as the NGSS depend on teacher's ability to create and integrate engineering design as a topic. This Work in Progress paper evaluates engineering design challenges created by secondary biology teachers during a summer modeling based workshop. During the summer workshop, secondary school teachers assumed the role of students and learned about engineering design by direct instruction in order to create engineering design challenges based in the life sciences. Teams of 3-5 teachers representing a variety of schools created the challenges and posted videos of their plans on an online web-based platform (Edthena,
|Original language||English (US)|
|Journal||ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings|
|State||Published - Jun 24 2017|
|Event||124th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition - Columbus, United States|
Duration: Jun 25 2017 → Jun 28 2017
Bibliographical noteFunding Information:
Karen E. Irving is an Associate Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry at Bucknell University and Ph.D. in Science Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Irving was co-principal investigator on the Connected Classrooms in Promoting Achievement in Mathematics and Science project supported by the Institute of Education Sciences and an NSF funded Track 2: GK-12, Optimization and Institutionalization of the Science Fellows Supporting Teachers (SFST) Program. She is former chair of the Chair of the Columbus Section of The American Chemical Society and is a member of NARST, ASTE, ACS and NSTA. Current projects include being principal investigator on the ENABLE STEM NSF Noyce grant and two ITQ funded Engineering is Elementary projects, as well as work on effective and appropriate use of modeling in middle and secondary school classrooms.
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2017. | <urn:uuid:e717f8ef-c311-44c9-8549-55ed2ba9bcd0> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/work-in-progress-engineering-design-in-secondary-biology | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572221.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20220816060335-20220816090335-00069.warc.gz | en | 0.945678 | 450 | 2.71875 | 3 |
1. Cook your meals.
Before you say "ugh" under your breath, hear me out. Gut health is extremely important to your overall wellbeing. Try a few new recipes. Who knows what you'll find you like! Taking a bit more control of what you eat will have a great impact on how you feel. Going off of that, if you're working or super busy this summer, try meal prepping. This just means either half or fully prepping/cooking a few of your meals for the week ahead of time. It doesn't take long, but can save you time, effort, and money throughout the week!
2. Decompress and get some sleep!
Everyone knows that sleep is important, but do we really listen? No. Make it a goal to get more sleep this summer. During the school year, my sleep schedule is all over the place, and I usually find myself paying for it the next day. Now, I have to wake up at 6 a.m., so going to bed at 2 a.m. is not an option. Every day I take 10 minutes to decompress from anything work or technology related. I'll either just sit in peace or even try to meditate. I find it much easier to sleep after, and I notice higher energy levels the next day when I get to sleep earlier.
3. Do a mini declutter!
If you're like me, then you love to keep things. The number of shirts I have in my closet that I said "I'll probably wear that" and kept knowing very well I wouldn't is ridiculous. Try a little declutter in your life. I always pick my closet because I have things that I don't need but many other people could use. I try to find a few pieces that I don't need anymore and donate them. This not only helps my closet space but someone in need too. But, this doesn't just have to be your closet, it could be anything. Maybe those knick-knacks in the back of your closet could be recycled! Getting rid of old things can be therapeutic and help your head (and personal) space.
4. Write your thoughts down.
This is a weird thing to people. Learning what your appreciative of, what makes you smile, what upsets you, etc. can help you better understand "you." I try to write a piece of my thoughts down on paper every day. It helps me reflect on the day and understand why I had a good day or bad day. Furthermore, it shows whether my mood had something to do with what happened in the day. This is good to know in bettering yourself. And, if you don't want to write it down, then just take a second to think about it.
5. Have fun and get uncomfortable!
My absolute favorite. No matter what type of mood I'm in, I can count on this to make it better. Blast your music, sing at the top of your lungs, do weird dance moves, and throw a mini-concert in your room. I don't care, but be goofy and let yourself do the things that would usually make you uncomfortable. Why do I love driving alone? I can sing. I don't mean sing along to the music. I mean full-on belt the lyrics so that I can't even hear the music anymore. It's kinda stupid, I'm aware, but it is a game changer. It's a quick and easy pick-me-up, but over time it becomes something I look forward to each day.
These aren't the most outragest changes or tips you can try, but they can help you become a happier and healthier you. I truly believe life is about the little things, so why not focus on making a few little changes? You'd be surprised what those changes can do for you! | <urn:uuid:4a349cf5-d76a-472b-a73d-a030920307fc> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.theodysseyonline.com/summer-self-care-tips-2638797598 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571150.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810070501-20220810100501-00671.warc.gz | en | 0.9778 | 794 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Tensions mounted in Haiti in recent weeks as the current government and the international community seemed poised to push forward with fraudulent elections on Sunday, January 24. Suddenly on Friday, January 22, election officials announced that the elections were postponed. Many in Haiti and abroad are celebrating this victory for democracy.
Part of the article is below. Click HERE for the full text.
Haiti elections scheduled for Sunday have been canceled
Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald
January 22, 2016
Haitian elections officials Friday afternoon abruptly canceled Sunday’s planned elections amid escalating protests and violence around the country.
Moments earlier, the officials had halted the distribution of voting materials and began recovery of those that had already gone out.
Elections officials said at a news conference that safety could not be guaranteed for voters or poll workers.
The cancellation is “a victory for all of the democratic sector,” said Jude Célestin, the main opposition candidate in Sunday’s election.
“This isn’t just about me. It’s also about all the people who supported me and who fought for us to arrive here,” he told the Miami Herald.
The electoral commission’s about-face came after the international community said it is leaving the door open for Haitians to find a political consensus that could lead to the postponement of Sunday’s partial legislative and presidential runoff.
Click HERE for the full text. | <urn:uuid:22ceeda8-8222-442a-9a44-120b913e7a20> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ijdh.org/2016/01/topics/politics-democracy/haiti-elections-scheduled-for-sunday-have-been-canceled/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280900.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00001-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965997 | 300 | 1.953125 | 2 |
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Access to encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. Titles can be searched alone, by subject, or all titles can be searched together.
A Dictionary of Psychology (3e ed.) by
Publication Date: 2009-04-01
With over 11,000 authoritative and up to date entries, this dictionary covers all branches of psychology, including psychoanalysis, psychiatry, criminology, neuroscience, and statistics.
APA Style Simplified by
Publication Date: 2012-05-15
This is a compact but comprehensive guide to writing clearly and effectively in APA style. Demonstrates how to write objective scientific research papers using interesting prose Incorporates guidelines from the 6th edition of the APA publication manual Explores how to develop ideas, connect them to what others have written, and express them clearly Discusses the differences between written, oral, and poster presentations and offers instructions for applying APA style to each
Interpersonal Relationships by
Publication Date: 2000-06-07
Considers friendship and more intimate relationships including theories of why we need them, how they are formed, what we get out of them and the stages through which they go. Social and cultural variations are discussed as well as the effects of relationships on our well-being and happiness.
Social Thinking and Interpersonal Behavior by
Publication Date: 2012-05-04
The connection between mental and social life remains one of the most intriguing topics in all of psychology. This book reviews some of the most recent advances in research exploring the links between how people think and behave in interpersonal situations. The chapters represent a variety of theoretical orientations, ranging from evolutionary approaches through cognitive and affective theories, all the way to considering social and cultural influences on the relationship between social cognition and interpersonal behavior.
Doing Social Psychology Research by
Call Number: Online in Wiley Online Library
Publication Date: 2004-02-13
This practical text introduces students to all the principal data collection methods and data analyses used in social psychology. Describes the principal research methods and shows how they can be applied to particular research questions.
Theories in Social Psychology by
Call Number: HM1033 .T434 2011
Publication Date: 2011-02-23
Theories in Social Psychology is an edited volume that identifies and discusses in-depth the important theoretical perspectives and theories that underlie the discipline of social psychology. Critically discusses important perspectives and theories in the discipline allowing a deeper understanding of the theoretical framework
Personality and Social Behavior by
Call Number: BF698 .P47 2008
Publication Date: 2008-02-19
The study of the relationship between the person and the situation has had a long history in psychology. Many theories of personality are set on an interpersonal stage and many social phenomena are played out differently as the cast of characters change.
The Ethics of Interpersonal Relationships by
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
This work is an attempt to explain the source of destructive behaviour and how it manifests itself in personal relationships between men, women, couples, and families, and in the social arena.
Understanding Research in Personal Relationships by
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
A comprehensive introduction to the key readings on human and close relationships. Organized into twelve thematic chapters with editorial commentary throughout, the Editors offer a critical reading of the major research articles in the field of relationship studies published in the last few years. Scholarly papers, two per chapter, are presented in an abridged form and critiqued in a carefully structured way that instructs students on the way to read research, and to critically evaluate research in this field.
Subjects: African American Studies
, American Studies
, Art History
, Creative Writing
, English 101 & 100
, English Literature | <urn:uuid:6bb9447d-ba24-4bfd-9f15-77cff852acc7> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://infoguides.pepperdine.edu/c.php?g=365278&p=2467660 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572212.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815205848-20220815235848-00467.warc.gz | en | 0.870312 | 988 | 2.25 | 2 |
Mexico City is built over the ruins of a great Aztec city, Tenochtitlán
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (at modern Mexico City) was founded in 1325 on a muddy island in the lake that at that time filled the Basin of Mexico.
Between 1519 and 1521, Tenochtitlan was besieged several times by the Spaniards under Hernán Cortés.
To create space for their cavalry to maneuver, the invaders pulled down most of the city’s buildings, later constructing colonial Mexico City on the same spot.
Because of these activities and the expansion of the modern city, few Aztec buildings can be seen today. The site of the Templo Mayor (Great Temple) was found in 1978, however, and excavation has revealed more remains than expected. | <urn:uuid:579b5a34-6daf-46f7-a70b-73a15ab532fb> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.vallartadaily.com/47-things-know-mexico/15/?amp=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571284.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811103305-20220811133305-00475.warc.gz | en | 0.962656 | 170 | 3.875 | 4 |
Lack of Self-Confidence
We examined lack of self-confidence as a possible reason for women leaving computer science. Based on the interviews, we found that lower self-confidence among females in computer science is a very real, serious and relevant issue, as supported by a study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley.
One female lecturer suggested that graduate study is harder for women because she senses more honesty and insecurity among females. She gives the following examples: if one asks all students how prepared they are for an exam, it is more likely that a woman will admit that she does not feel prepared enough; similarly, if a male and female student were sick during an exam, the female would take it as a personal failing whereas the male would just shrug it off. Another female Masters student agreed, What I see is that women are not nearly as confident or aggressive in pursuing opportunities. Finally, another female Masters student claims that her lack of self-confidence is the most difficult challenge she faces in her pursuit of graduate study in computer science.
A study, titled "Ph.D. Student Attrition in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley" and conducted by female graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, found that women view the entire graduate school experience as a cause for lost confidence. Fifty-six percent of the women they interviewed cited did not have enough confidence as a major or secondary factor in their decision to leave their graduate program in computer science. The study found that women tend to have more problems with self-confidence than men, even when their academic performance and preparation are comparable to, or better than, mens. Another study by Strenta et al. found that women in the sciences were significantly less confident and more depressed about their academic progress than their male peers, even when their grades were the same as the mens.
Lack of self-confidence is a serious issue causing women to leave their program of study in computer science. It must be dealt with quickly by the department offering more positive feedback (to all students) and by affording more support networks for females. | <urn:uuid:eed53d52-1404-4dde-bb1b-6de99d34423b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/women-faculty/confidence.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281069.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00267-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983819 | 429 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Bipolar Disorder Medication Spotlight: Risperdal (Risperidone)
With this post, we continue our biweekly series on medications used to treat bipolar disorder and related symptoms. Last week, we started our coverage of the atypical antipsychotics with one of the more popular and controversial medications in the group – Zyprexa (Onanzapine). Because that post contains a great deal of information that applies to the atypical antipsychotics as a group, we encourage you to read it first.
Like Zyprexa and the other atypical antipsychotics, Risperdal was developed primarily to treat schizophrenia and psychosis but is approved to treat acute bipolar mania and mixed episodes (mania and depression). Risperdal can improve symptoms of schizophrenia and psychotic breaks that may occur in bipolar, including the following:
- Hallucinations (audio and visual)
- Disorganized thinking
It may also improve conditions such as social isolation, limited motivation, and reduced speech activity for some people.
Risperdal can also improve symptoms related specifically to mania, including the following:
- Elevated mood
- Racing thoughts
- Inflated self esteem
- Decreased need for sleep
Like other medications in this class, Risperdal can help in the treatment of bipolar in two ways – by treating the mania and by reducing cycling (the switch from baseline mood into either mania or depression).
Although Risperdal has not been approved specifically to treat childhood bipolar, it has been approved to treat children and adolescents for irritability related to autistic disorders – temper tantrums, rapidly changing moods, aggressive behavior, and self-injury. It’s also been used to help treat Tourette’s syndrome.
This class of medications (the atypical antipsychotics as a group) has come to be used broadly to address issues of severe mood regulation deficits including uncontrollable tantrums and rages in both children and adults, even without a clear diagnosis of one of the FDA approved indications for using Risperdal: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism. I often describe it to my patients as a powerful “engine coolant” that helps to tone down highly aroused emotions and the behaviors associated with those emotions.
Caution: Especially in child psychiatry, we must carefully weigh the risks of these medications with their potential benefits. The metabolic issues with weight, insulin, and lipid changes can cause significant life problems for individuals on Risperdal. If someone is diagnosed with schizophrenia, they will have to take something in this family and manage the risks. In bipolar disorder there may be other medications that will work as well, but often this family of medicine becomes essential to managing the illness.
In children with autism we try to use alternative interventions as much as possible before going to these medications because of the risks. Unfortunately it has become a little too easy for us to prescribe these it seems, and a recent study indicated that Risperdal was being used for indications such as ADHD, which do not warrant such high risk medications.
Risperdal is a very important tool in my therapeutic toolbox. I have found it to be a typically reliable method of helping in situations of severe mood and behavioral dysregulation and bipolar disorder and aggression and irritability in autism. It even has use in some of the more severe anxiety disorders, including OCS. However, it also reliably causes weight gain, and this must be discussed openly and monitored carefully whenever this medication is used.
Like other atypical antipsychotics, Risperdal has the potential of producing negative side effects, including the following:
- Weight gain is the most prominent and unpleasant side effect.
- Increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes) and diabetes and problems with sugar metabolism.
- Increased cholesterol and other changes in fat and lipid metabolism.
- Movement problems like Parkinson’s disease (tremors and stiffness) (lower risk than older medications).
- Irreversible uncontrolled movements called tardive dyskinesia – facial twitches or uncontrolled movements of the tongue, lips, arms, or other body parts (lower risk than older medications).
- Akathisia – a feeling of extreme restlessness commonly described as the overwhelming desire to “jump out of your skin.”
- Changes in cardiac rhythms.
- Increases in the levels of the hormone prolactin – sometimes causing breast enlargement in men and lactation or menstrual problems in women.
If you’ve taken any form of Risperdal for bipolar disorder or are a doctor who has prescribed it, please share your experiences, insights, and observations.
Fink, C. (2008). Bipolar Disorder Medication Spotlight: Risperdal (Risperidone). Psych Central. Retrieved on January 18, 2017, from http://blogs.psychcentral.com/bipolar/2008/11/bipolar-disorder-medication-spotlight-risperdal-risperidone/ | <urn:uuid:d6507943-65ea-40f4-a676-7b77820f4396> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://blogs.psychcentral.com/bipolar/2008/11/bipolar-disorder-medication-spotlight-risperdal-risperidone/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280292.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00338-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937838 | 1,041 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Dear Dr. Shore,
My fifth-grade daughter is usually home alone after school because of my work schedule. What can I do to make sure shes safe and to give me peace of mind?
Here are some tips to help lessen the anxiety for both you and your daughter:
Set out clear rules for your daughter. Those might include coming home right after school, locking the door, not allowing strangers into the house, not using the stove or sharp knives, and not telling callers that she is home alone. (Instead, have your child say that you can't come to the phone.) Post the rules in a prominent place, and go over them with her periodically. Also, be clear about your policy about having friends over to your house after school and about her going to a friend's house.
Have your child keep her house key hidden from view. Wearing a key around her neck invites trouble by communicating her home-alone status. If your daughter puts the key in her backpack, have her attach it to something thats easy to find, such as a shoe lace. You might also want to hide a key outside the house, or give one to a neighbor in case she loses her key.
Have your child call you when she gets home. Leave instructions for your co-workers to put your child through or, if needed, to track you down. If you are unavailable and your child needs to speak with an adult, make sure she has a familiar adult she can call. Some communities provide telephone services (often called "phone friends" or "warm lines") for children who are staying alone and need to speak with an adult.
Make after-school arrangements for your child on occasion. You might arrange for her to go to a friend's house or participate in a community or extracurricular activity one or two afternoons a week to help break up the monotony of self-care. On days your child is home, consider assigning her chores or set out games or projects for her to do when she gets home.
Be home when your child expects you. She will likely worry if youre late. If you are delayed, call her to let her know when you will be home. | <urn:uuid:1e720429-f805-43ce-89ce-58909ae14335> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/shore/shore110.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280872.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00318-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972258 | 451 | 2.296875 | 2 |
SENDIASSAbout SENDIASS The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Information Advice and Support Services offer information, advice and support for parents and carers of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). This service is also offered directly to young people. The service is free, impartial and confidential. KIDS SENDIASS have developed resources providing information and advice for parents, carers, professionals and young people. It is a legal requirement that all local authorities have a SENDIASS service and KIDS provide a number of these services across the country. Each KIDS SENDIASS service has a local page with their contact details, local information and local resources. Find your local SENDIASS service My SENDIASS My SENDIASS is for young people aged 16-25 with special educational needs or disabilities. Useful links SENDIASS minimum standards KIDS policies Latest Covid-19 updates Covid-19 resources Partnerships We are part of the Information, Advice & Support Services Network for SEND. London Stockport Yorkshire & Humber Warwickshire Wiltshire My SENDIASS Case Studies & News About us Our services Information, Advice & Family support My SENDIASS Are you under 25 years old? Do you need extra help with learning or do you have a disability? SENDIASS may be able to help you. . This video will tell you more about the SENDIASS service . SENDIASS means: . A SENDIASS service can help you understand what support you should be getting and tell you how you can ask for more support with learning in school or college. The service does not cost any money The people you speak to will not tell other people what you have said, unless you have agreed that they can or you are at risk of being hurt. The people you speak to won’t take anyone’s side but will help you make your own decisions. . You can use the service on your own or with your parents or carers. . We need your help - Please give us feedback about our website. There is a SENDIASS in your area. You can find out how to contact the service in your area by clicking here . You can get in touch with SENDIASS by: phone email on Facebook . Here are some guides on common questions that you may find useful: Education, Health and Care Plans (Easy Read) Education, Health and Care Plans (Visual) Support for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in School (Visual) Preparing for Adulthood (Visual) . Here is a website containing more information about SENDIASS and what the service can help with Contact have webinars on benefits for young people aged 16 and above, you can watch the webinar here. | <urn:uuid:822f8c18-7a9a-4206-be0f-52603c887256> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.kids.org.uk/my-sendiass | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570741.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808001418-20220808031418-00076.warc.gz | en | 0.933948 | 575 | 2.25 | 2 |
Educating students in excellence & integrity, to lead and impact society by fulfilling their destiny for the glory of God.
What is the Southlands difference?
At Southlands Christian Schools we believe a well-rounded educational experience gives our students the foundation they need to lead the life God has destined for them. Through academic excellence, spiritual development, moral and ethical awareness, athletics, fine arts, and social events, we are developing tomorrow’s leaders.
Established in 1979, SCS has become one of Southern California’s most respected private schools. Fully accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, we are a non-profit organization. Our college prep, co-educational school is comprised of Preschool, Elementary, Middle and High Schools, as well as a Private Satellite Program.
Southlands Christian Schools exists to educate students in excellence and integrity; to lead and impact society by fulfilling their destinies for the glory of God.
It is Southlands Christian Schools’ primary task to touch the hearts of children with the reality of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
We believe that God is the Eternal King. He is an infinite, unchangeable Spirit; perfect in holiness, wisdom, goodness, justice, power, and love.
*Stats are based on secondary school numbers.
Get a glimpse of what is happening at Southlands!
Southlands is committed to 21st Century Learning
iPads are available for our students in our 1-6 grade classrooms. Mobile computer labs are available for technology integration in the classroom.
Each classroom is equipped with a digital projector or TV and an ELMO presentation device.
Our computer lab, laptops, and iPads are used to teach Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Software, with a focus on digital design and video editing.
Schoology is an online software solution that allows our teachers to provide online quizzes, homework upload capability, and alternate classroom materials access.
Parents are able to check grades and track their students’ progress on PowersSchool online.
We provide Southlands email accounts for all of our students to foster instructional communication.
We provide both hardware and software filtering protection to ensure that our students can continue to safely access the extensive educational material at their disposal.
Southlands Christian prepares their students for college from preschool-12th grade!
Want your child to receive a top notch education with a Christian influence? Look no further and enroll today. | <urn:uuid:e7376a12-e276-400e-b635-0ce78f432e71> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.southlandscs.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280504.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00137-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940099 | 504 | 1.539063 | 2 |
You may have seen educators or other learners use the term 'MOOC' in discussions on or about FutureLearn. Now find out exactly what it means.
What is a MOOC?
MOOC stands for ‘massive open online course’. The term originated in the US in 2008 to describe free, easily accessible, completely online courses. MOOCs give you the chance to study with top universities around the world.
MOOCs don’t always lead to formal qualifications, but they do mean you can gain knowledge in all sorts of areas. You might use a MOOC to develop career skills, prepare for other education, or explore a new interest.
There are usually no entry requirements for MOOCs. You can take part regardless of where you live or your financial circumstances. Because they take place online, MOOCs can grow very big. You might find yourself learning with thousands of other people – they don’t call them massive for nothing.
How does a MOOC work?
MOOCs usually have a specific start and finish date, they run a couple of times a year, and last for weeks rather than the months or years that traditional university courses do.
During a MOOC, you’ll use a wide range of online media and interactive tools to interact with university educators and other learners. This might include video lectures, articles, discussions, assignments and social networking.
Due to the large number of people taking MOOCs, you’ll usually get support from the community of other learners, as well as educators. And your progress on a course might be assessed through peer-reviewed written assignments or computer-marked tests, rather than by tutors.
In short, MOOCs are free courses for lots of learners that take place completely online.
Now you know what MOOCs are, find out why FutureLearn is different to other MOOC providers. | <urn:uuid:a9b54681-432e-4ca0-8076-9a6053206b9f> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.futurelearn.com/info/blog/what-is-a-mooc-futurelearn | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573118.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817213446-20220818003446-00670.warc.gz | en | 0.943519 | 391 | 3.53125 | 4 |
"They would talk about stories of how they would go into stores and shop owners would follow them around, and the students would say, 'They only do that because I'm black.' Then they would look at me and ask, 'Mr. Cherng, do you have any stories like this?' " said Cherng, who is now an assistant professor of international education at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
"I thought about it, and ... I do have stories," he said.
Though he hasn't been followed in a store, Cherng, who is of Taiwanese-Chinese descent, told his students about how often people would ask him, "Where are you from?"
Even when he would answer that he is from Maryland, they would not seem satisfied and would ask again; it was as if they refused to believe that he was from the United States.
After Cherng opened up about these experiences with his students, they were able to comfortably discuss race in the classroom and build a bond, he said.
"Middle school ... is a time when almost all youth are forming and trying out new identities," Cherng said.
"Minority teachers, by virtue of their experiences negotiating the United States with identities that fall outside of the mainstream, can likely understand their students' struggles," he said. "This is certainly not to say that white teachers cannot do the same -- some of my mentors when I taught were white men and women that formed incredible bonds with their students -- but minority teachers draw from different experiences."
It turns out that students of all races seem to have more favorable perceptions of their teachers of color than their white teachers, according to a new study by Cherng and Peter Halpin, assistant professor of applied statistics at New York University, published in the journal Educational Researcher
The impact of teacher diversity
The study included data on 1,680 teachers in 200 schools and about 50,000 students in sixth- through ninth-grade classrooms from six large metropolitan areas across the country.
The data were collected during the academic years of 2009-10 as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project
, which used in-depth surveys to measure how students perceived their teachers.
Cherng and Halpin analyzed the data to see whether any trends based on race emerged. They focused on black, white and Latino teachers since there were not enough Asian-American teachers or teachers of other races included in the data to draw conclusions for those demographics, Cherng said.
After accounting for student performance, teacher working conditions and other factors, the researchers found that, overall, students had more favorable perceptions of their black and Latino teachers than white teachers.
For instance, the students reported that their black and Latino teachers were "clearer" or easier to understand than their white teachers.
The students also felt more motivated and supported by their black and Latino teachers, according to the data.
Additionally, the researchers discovered that students' perceptions did not correlate with having a teacher of the same race as them.
"It was not always the case that minority students rated minority teachers particularly high. For example, the relationship between white students and Latino teachers was the same as the relationship between Latino students and Latino teachers," Cherng said. "White students had more favorable perceptions of Latino teachers on almost all measures."
The data revealed that black and Asian-American students had particularly favorable perceptions of black teachers.
However, more research is needed to build a dataset that can be statistically generalized to all students in the United States and can distinguish between individuals of Afro-Latino and non-Afro-Latino descent, Cherng said.
'Educators who reflect ... our nation'
What do other experts think of the new study? "The design of the study and methods used provide robust answers and insights into student preferences for teachers. The qualitative data from the study allow readers to hear the voices of participants in the study," said Rich Milner, a professor of education and director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh.
He added that the study results "are not surprising to me."
"Not to stereotype or generalize, research has shown that teachers of color tend to empathize with their students, relate to their inside and outside of school realities, teach to the multiple learning styles of students, develop instructional practices that are responsive to students and give students' multiple opportunities for success," Milner said.
However, there is a need for a more diverse pool of teachers in the United States, said Shaun Harper, a University of Pennsylvania professor and executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education.
Despite the increasing ethnic diversity of the nation's school-age children, a whopping 83% of all elementary and secondary teachers are white, according to the Department of Education
"Perhaps students have a greater appreciation for faculty members of color because they see so few of them throughout their K-12 schooling experiences. It is also possible that kids, especially students of color, recognize the demographic mismatch between their peers and teachers. Hence, they appreciate exposure to educators who reflect the racial makeup of their classrooms and our nation," Harper said.
"Findings in this study show the appreciation that young Americans have for racial diversity, which is inspiring," he added. "Too bad their schools often fall short of satisfying students' appetites for teacher diversity and the integration of diverse perspectives in the curriculum."
Though it's vital to have more minority teachers, Cherng said, he doesn't think a drastic shift in teacher demographics will happen anytime soon.
Rather, "my experience working with and teaching educators from all different racial and ethnic backgrounds has convinced me that whatever it is that Latino and black teachers are doing in their classrooms can and must be understood better and taught," he said. | <urn:uuid:a3e94d94-281d-4107-a2e9-ac285034a0ba> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/14/health/teacher-diversity-student-preferences/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280364.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00027-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982026 | 1,191 | 2.90625 | 3 |
QUROTA AYUNI M, RIFDA (2010) A STUDY ON FORMATIVE TESTS USED BY THE TEACHER IN ASSESSING STUDENTS’ READING SKILLAT SMAN 1 GONDANG WETAN PASURUAN. Other thesis, University of Muhammadiyah Malang.
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Test is an integral part of a teaching model. It enables the teacher to discover or ascertain whether the objectives have been accomplished within the learning process. Through the test the teacher can evaluate the effectiveness of a new teaching method, of a different approach, or of new materials. Formative test is one of types of test which is used by the teacher when she/ he attempts to gather the data about students’ progress while teaching and learning process are still going. In this research, the researcher had the following questions: 1) how the teacher construct reading formative tests instrument for assessing the tenth grade students’ reading skill at SMAN 1 Gondangwetan Pasuruan? 2) What are the materials tested in reading formative tests used by the teacher in assessing the tenth grade students’ reading skill? 3) How does the teacher score the tests result for assessing the tenth grade students reading skill. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The subject of the research was the English teacher of the tenth grade at SMAN 1 Gondangwetan Pasuruan. The researcher used structured interview and document as the instrument to gather the data about the teacher’s test construction, reading tests materials, and the scoring method used by the teacher. The findings of the research showed that in constructing reading test materials, the teacher selected the texts which were familiar to the students and had easy vocabularies and grammatical structure. The teacher provided various types of questions, arranged the test items from the easiest to the most difficult one, gave clear instruction, and provide sufficient time for the students to do the test. The teacher also provided test materials which were different for each test and appropriate with the subject of each test. In scoring the students’ test result, the teacher used simple method. He gave the same score for each question by assigning 10 points for each correct answer and assigned 0 point for incorrect answer or when the students gave no responds. Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that the way how the teacher constructed the test instrument was good. He also provided test materials which met with the students’ ability or competency in reading skill. Thus, the test materials provided could be used as a tool to measure the tenth grade students’ reading skill. However, the way of how the teacher scored the test result still need more improvement, because he only scored the test items by assigning the same score without considering the quality of the questions and the answer needed.
|Item Type:||Thesis (Other)|
|Subjects:||L Education > L Education (General)|
|Divisions:||Faculty of Teacher Training and Education > Department of English|
|Depositing User:||Rayi Tegar Pamungkas|
|Date Deposited:||23 May 2012 02:54|
|Last Modified:||23 May 2012 02:54|
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THE NOBEL PEACE (PISS?) PRIZE – ALFRED NOBEL EXPOSED
Before we leave the history of gunpowder, we need to also follow the advances of urine-based SaltPeter, Sulphur, and Charcoal manufacturing to the present day. We need to shine the light of truth on one Mr. Alfred Nobel – the inventor and patent-holder of DYNAMITE – i.e. smokeless powder – with much more destructive power than simple gunpowder – and much CLEANER. Here is the “Story Behind the Story” of Mr. Nobel.
Alfred Nobel was the son of Immanuel Nobel and Russian-Khazarian Heiress Andriette Ahlsell. Though Nobel was publicly a “Lutheran” by religious affiliation, Alfred Nobel – thanks to his Yiddish mother – is today considered to be a bloodline Khazarian “Jew” – at least according to a display exhibit in the “Holocaust” Museum in Berlin.
From the official Nobel Prize info websight we read: “He (Alfred’s father Immanuel) started a mechanical workshop which provided equipment for the Russian army and he also convinced the Tsar and his generals that naval mines could be used to block enemy naval ships from threatening the city. —— The naval mines designed by Immanuel Nobel were simple devices consisting of submerged wooden casks filled with gunpowder. Anchored below the surface of the Gulf of Finland, they effectively deterred the British Royal Navy from moving into firing range of St. Petersburg during the Crimean war (1853-1856). Immanuel Nobel was also a pioneer in arms manufacturing.”
It appears that the first use of “mines” in warfare can thus be traced to the father of Alfred Nobel. From the web-sight we also learn more about exactly how Mr. Alfred Nobel accumulated his vast fortune: “During a two year period Alfred Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. In Paris, the city he came to like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T. J. Pelouze, a famous chemist. There he met the young Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who, three years earlier, had invented nitroglycerine, a highly explosive liquid. Nitroglycerine was produced by mixing glycerine with sulfuric and nitric acid. It was considered too dangerous to be of any practical use. Although its explosive power greatly exceeded that of gunpowder, the liquid would explode in a very unpredictable manner if subjected to heat and pressure. Alfred Nobel became very interested in nitroglycerine and how it could be put to practical use. — In 1852 Alfred Nobel was asked to come back and work in the family enterprise which was booming because of its deliveries to the Russian army. Together with his father he performed experiments to develop nitroglycerine as a commercially and technically useful explosive.”
“After his return to Sweden in 1863, Alfred Nobel concentrated on developing nitroglycerine as an explosive. Several explosions, including one (1864) in which his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous. They forbade further experimentation with nitroglycerine within the Stockholm city limits and Alfred Nobel had to move his experimentation to a barge anchored on Lake Mälaren. Alfred was not discouraged and in 1864 he was able to start mass production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer Alfred Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with kieselguhr would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In 1867 he patented this material under the name of dynamite.”
In 1888, Alfred Nobel developed “smokeless gunpowder” and named it Ballistite. By that time, his explosives were being produced worldwide. The Nobel websight explains: “Over the years he founded factories and laboratories in some 90 different places in more than 20 countries. Although he lived in Paris much of his life he was constantly traveling. Victor Hugo at one time described him as “Europe’s richest vagabond”. When he was not traveling or engaging in business activities Nobel himself worked intensively in his various laboratories, first in Stockholm and later in Hamburg (Germany), Ardeer (Scotland), Paris and Sevran (France), Karlskoga (Sweden) and San Remo (Italy). He focused on the development of explosives technology. By the time of his death in 1896 he had 355 patents.”
Clearly, Nobel’s brilliant synthesis of “dynamite” into much more explosive “ballistite” allowed for the development of much more effectively accurate, “high velocity” bullet “cartridges” and with this, rapid-firing new “repeating” rifles became the norm. Next came the “Gatling gun” and then “machine guns” were manufactured for use in the “Great War” – aka WW I. Nobel’s Khazarian “brethren” wasted little time in precipitating a new “arms race” worldwide – and Nobel became exceedingly wealthy in the process. All of this simply means that Khazarian-induced WARS also became exponentially more deadly to the soldiers fighting them.
Alfred Nobel owned and developed his Swedish company AB Bofors into the leading manufacturer of mines, bomb explosives, cannons, howitzers, mortars, and heavy artillery in the world. During WWII, AB Bofors and affiliates such as I.G. Farben was supplying anti-aircraft guns, tank cannonry, and heavy artillery to both sides – the Axis powers as well as the Allies. This little fact is never mentioned by apologists of Mr. Alfred Nobel for some strange reason.
However, in defense of Alfred Nobel, in the later years of his life, he apparently suffered a strong twinge of conscious and regret. In 1888, 8 years before his own demise, Alfred’s Oil-Baron brother Ludvig died. A French newspaper mistakenly ran an obituary for Alfred, instead of Ludvig, which called Alfred the “merchant of death” and memorialized the development of dynamite and ballistite into vastly more destructive weapons of war – and worse, gave scathing details as to how Nobel had actually reaped his enormous fortune. Not wanting to be memorialized solely as the “merchant of death” (though true enough), Nobel immediately created a will that established a “Foundation” to provide cash awards to top-echelon scientists and individuals who sought world peace in the hope that his true “legacy” would be glossed over. Thus the “Nobel Prizes” were born. I would submit that the millions of dollars awarded are mere tokens of the TRILLIONS of dollars earned by the Khazarian-dominated world arms dealers thanks in no small measure to the inventions and factories of one Alfred Nobel – aka the “Merchant of Death”.
THE ORIGINS OF THE CHAZAR (Khazar) KINGDOM – THE “HOLY” ROMAN EMPIRE
Earlier in this document it was proven from the words of the Holy Bible’s Old Testament, as well as the words of Jesus of Nazareth, the truth that the biblical “tribe” of Israel is indeed the Anglo-Saxon race of Ang-land (England) and the Scandinavian countries such as Dan-mark (Denmark – the tribe of Dan) and Norway. Thanks to honest scholars like Koestler, remember that the evidence is clear also that modern “Jewry” is primarily composed of descendents of the “Chazars” (Khazars) of Eastern Europe. Khazars are clearly NOT the biblical Israel. Who then, are the “Chazars”, Babylonians, and “Catholics”? The historical evidences of the answer to this question are very clear. They are the literal descendants of the biblical Esau, and are in reality known as “Edomites”. Once this is clearly understood, the events of today suddenly make total sense. Here then, are the primary historical proofs of this fact.
The story begins with Chapter 25 of the biblical book of Genesis. Here we read that Isaac, the son of Abraham, marries Rebekah and she becomes pregnant with twins. These twins are the direct covenant sons of the Abrahamic covenant and promises made with God – so this story is extremely pivotal to understand. Simply stated, the BIRTHRIGHT BLESSING FROM GOD was that “all the nations of the earth” would be blessed in every possible way. We read in verse 22 that these two unborn infant sons actually fought each other while still in the womb of Rebekah. When she “enquired of the Lord” about this unusual event (imagine unborn fetuses fighting away in the womb), Rebekah was told: “Two NATIONS are in thy womb, and TWO MANNER OF PEOPLE shall be separated from thy bowels; and THE ONE people shall be stronger than the other people; AND THE ELDER SHALL SERVE THE YOUNGER.” The “firstborn” twin was born “RED ALL OVER” and covered completely with hair – and they called his name “Esau”. Then Jacob emerged from the womb with white skin, “normal” in every way, and immediately the newborn babe grabbed the HEEL of Esau. As the boys grew up, their personalities were diametrically different – Esau was a “cunning hunter” – a “man of the field” while Jacob was a “plain man” who dwelt “in tents” not in the wild fields as the beasts did.
We then read in v. 28 that there was more going on than just an intense case of sibling rivalry. Isaac favored Esau primarily because Esau knew how to make a “sweetmeat” dish of wild venison for Isaac (Esau knew the way to his father’s heart was apparently through his stomach) while Rebekah deeply loved and favored Jacob because of his gentlemanly nature. Jacob, thanks to his mother’s teachings, knew the incredible value of the birthright blessings of Abraham. We then learn that Esau came in from the field on one occasion, famished and starving nearly to death. At this point, Esau lusted mightily for his brother Jacob’s dish of RED POTTAGE (a savory vegetable dish of RED LENTIL BEANS). Esau was so famished, he offered Jacob anything for a big bowl of the good RED dish. Jacob’s price was very steep – it was simply: “Sell me this day thy birthright”. (Verse 31). Esau reasoned that since he was nearly dead from starvation, what good would this “birthright” be if he was dead? So, the deal was made, and Esau “swore an oath” to Jacob and thus “sold his birthright” to his twin brother Jacob. The contract was concluded. Jacob held up his end – as he “gave Esau bread and POTTAGE OF LENTILS.” Esau ate and drank, was refreshed, and went back to his hunting pursuits. Thereafter, Esau was called EDOM (which is literally the word for RED.)
What a clearly one-sided contract!! Esau “swore an oath” giving up his rights as “firstborn” for a measly “mess of pottage” – a bowl of red lentil beans. Since that day, armies refer to their food as “mess”. Since that day, Edomite “holy men” (aka “Rabbis”) yet teach the descendants of Edom to refrain from “taking oaths” of any kind. To this very day, because of their “father” Esau’s (RED Edom’s) foolish “oath”, any oaths the Edomites may enter into with the “gentile” descendants of Jacob (Israel) are deemed to be null and void. (The Kol Nidre vows.) Now you know where all of this first originated in the “Babylonian Talmud”. The “genesis” of the “Kol Nidre” is Genesis Chapter 25!
Though the book of Genesis does not specifically allude to this, I submit that this “oath” Esau/Edom made to Jacob didn’t mean all that much to Esau. The IMPORTANT thing, in Esau’s mind, was receiving the final BLESSING from father. This was the final determining factor – the binding “WILL and final TESTAMENT” from their blessed father Isaac. Esau knew he was Isaac’s favorite son. Esau knew that he was the “firstborn” and despite any “oaths” – Isaac would recognize this at the end. This was his proverbial “ace in the hole” for Esau. He also knew how much Isaac loved his sweet venison dish. He was confident that even though he had sworn a sacred promise to his brother, that his “birthright” would be secured by Isaac’s “blessing” on his head. Unfortunately for Esau, his mother Rebekah knew all of this also. Rebekah then laid out a cunning plan to secure the “blessing” of Isaac on Jacob. Chapter 27 lays out the details of this shrewd plan.
Isaac was old, and knew his time on earth was short. Isaac’s eyes “were dim, so he could not see.” He called his favorite son Esau to him and asked him to “take thy quiver and thy bow” and “take me some venison – and make me the savoury meat.” Isaac promised Esau that if he performed this final act, that “my soul may bless thee before I die.” What a promise – and what excitement and satisfaction Esau felt – simple thing to make his oath to Jacob null and void – just go shoot a deer and make Isaac his favorite food – and my birthright is secure after all. There was just one problem – Rebekah was eavesdropping and heard the whole conversation.
Rebekah knew what to do immediately. She took two young kid goats which would provide the tenderest meat – and which of course was very similar to venison. She then made the dish of “savoury meat”. She skinned the goats and put the hairy pelts on Jacob’s neck and hands. Isaac was fooled – even though he knew both Esau and Jacob’s voices, the hairy skin and the wonderful dish of savoury meat sealed the deal. Jacob received the incredible birthright blessing of the Firstborn: “Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let PEOPLE SERVE THEE: be Lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: CURSED be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.” Keep in mind that Isaac had been promised by God that his blessing would be honored in every way – for all time. This blessing really lacked nothing – it gave the fullness of the earth to Jacob’s lineage.
Genesis Chapter 27 then records what happened next. Esau comes to Isaac with his savoury venison, all prepared for his inheritance. He then finds out that Isaac has already bestowed the first-born blessing on Jacob. Oh my – what a scene that was! Esau “cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry.” Then weeping, he asked Isaac for any blessing at all. All that Isaac could give him was the promise: “AND BY THY SWORD SHALT THOU LIVE,” and shalt serve thy brother; AND IT SHALL COME TO PASS WHEN THOU SHALL HAVE THE DOMINION, THAT THOU SHALT BREAK HIS (JACOB’S) YOKE FROM OFF THY NECK!” (Verse 40.) This is important to understand, for it explains perfectly what has happened in the world during the last century. Edom has successfully usurped “the dominion” – the monetary wealth of the earth – from Jacob (Israel) and the majority of “Christians” actually have been duped to believe that the Edomites are in fact “Israel”. The blessing of Isaac to his son Esau has literally been fulfilled!! The “yoke” has been broken – (but only temporarily, you see.)
But we are jumping ahead of the story a bit. At the conclusion of that blessing, Esau truly “saw RED”! He developed an intensely deep-seated, soul-searing, generation-spanning hatred for his brother Jacob that has never been equaled. He then swore another sacred oath – to hunt and eventually slay Jacob, and his children, and children’s children. Think the “Hatfield and McCoy” feud was bad? There has been nothing like the millennia-old war of attrition between Esau (Edom) and Jacob, who, according to Genesis 35:10 was given a “new name” by God – and was thereafter known as “Israel” – the covenant people of God the Creator.
Genesis, Chapter 36 then gives us the “generations of Esau, who is EDOM” (meaning red). Esau took his multiple wives from the “forbidden” gene pool of Canaan – the Hittites and Horites, and established his home in the RED CLIFFS of Mount Seir and there established his empire. His “battle Crest” ensign was the RED DRAGON – the sworn enemy of the God of Israel His home base became the city of Petra – the Rock. His quest to subdue the entire earth and thereby break the “yoke” of Jacob/Israel by capturing the gold and silver of the earth began. “Thus dwelt Esau in mount Seir: – ESAU IS EDOM.” (Genesis 36:8)
WHO ARE THE FORBIDDEN CANAANITES – HITTITES AND HORITES et. al.?
This is where I am bound to lose many so-called “Christians” who believe the Old Testament is a completely infallible and 100% complete historical text from Day One of Planet Earth. These good people ignore such texts as the Book of Jasher and the historical texts of such historians as Josephus’ “The Antiquities of the Jews” a text abhorred and hated by the Edomites to this day. They fail to realize that while the Holy Bible contains many wonderful truths concerning the prophecies of Christ’s advent – there are indeed many “gaps” to be filled in the history of Adam and his posterities (plural). One such gap is the incredible story of Adam’s “first wife” – named “Lilith”. Just because Lilith is not specifically mentioned in Genesis, doesn’t mean she didn’t exist – and that she is not honored and worshiped by the Edomites and the mystery school adepts to this very day. Moreover, because her reptilian “children” dwelled historically in deep, subterranean, complex cave systems, and only on rare occasions came to the earth’s surface, they likely survived the flood of Noah which “destroyed all human flesh ON the earth’s surface”. The children of Lilith (not Eve’s) became the wives of Edom. Furthermore, Lilith is clearly the patron “goddess” of the Edomites – known at various times as “Ashtoreth” the “Moon Goddess”.
Clearly, Michelangelo understood the significance of the half-reptilian enchantress Lilith, for he painted her in all her scaly splendor on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of all places. (More on that later when the true origins of “Catholicism” are exposed.)
So, Esau took the “daughters of Canaan (Cain – from Lilith’s loins)” to be his wives. How fitting! Cain – cursed to live forever and to be “fugitive and a vagabond IN THE EARTH” combining with Esau – “blessed” by Isaac to likewise “dwell in the FATNESS (the interior) of the earth. This is the source of the Babylonian empire, and EDOM immediately developed a most STRATEGIC ALLIANCE with Babylon against Jacob/ISRAEL. This is why the teaching of the Rabbis is yet today titled “The BABYLONIAN Talmud, and is the core reason why they seek to yet covertly conquer and kill Christians!”
I understand this part of the saga concerning the seed and bloodline of Lilith through Cain is difficult to immediately accept, because it is such a deeply guarded secret of the “Rabbis”. Keep in mind that the ancient library at Alexandria, Egypt undoubtedly contained massive volumes of texts detailing this largely unknown and untold story. There was a reason that this incredible collection of the true and complete “HISTORY OF THE WORLD” – over 70,000 priceless papyrus, historical scrolls were destroyed by fire by Julius Caesar in the year 48 B.C. If one wants to effectively rewrite history then it is critically important to destroy all genuine historical archives, I would submit!! Below is a Roman tablet, circa 79 A.D. that describes the incredible “Bibleographica” of the massive library – now just ashes and “dust in the wind.”
Yet, there are indeed other priceless historical texts that did survive the Roman purges. Jesus Christ gave clues in the New Testament gospels when he told the Pharisees they were a “generation of Vipers” and literally “serpents”. He never used “slang” vernacular. His declarations are literal in every way. You see, Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, KNEW the true history and KNEW who had slain His prophets. THIS is why the Pharisees and Sanhedrin hated and yet feared Jesus Christ so deeply, and why the Talmud is yet today so full of hate of Him and His Christian Nation, the TRUE ISRAELITES. You see, they KNOW the prophecies. They KNOW Christ and His Christians ultimately win in the end, where they as a tribe and their demonic agenda is destroyed. They have GOOD REASON to Fear and hate the TRUTH!
Consider the Biblical prophecies found in Isaiah 34: 5-6 and the entire short and sweet text of Obadiah concerning the final fate of EDOM! During the “2nd Coming” of Christ, justice will prevail in the end: “For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: Behold it shall come down upon Idumea, (the spiritual filth and lies of Edomites from ancient Petra to the modern-day “Babylon” the USA), and UPON THE PEOPLE OF MY CURSE (EDOMITES THEMSELVES) to judgment!!” Obadiah declares it even more graphically: “And the House of Jacob shall be a FIRE, and the House of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau FOR STUBBLE, and they shall kindle in them, and devour them; and there shall not be ANY remaining of the house of Esau; for the Lord hath spoken it.” Wow – talk about a “holocaust” – there it is in the words of the Prophets of God! (Put THAT in your various “Holocaust Museums” Edomites!)
Edomites, those who say you are “Jews” but are not, but are of the Synagogue of Satan – you know this is true – and as you have sown over the centuries, and have spilled so much RIGHTEOUS BLOOD, truly as you sow shall you reap. This is what Christ was referring to in His parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Both Israel (wheat) and Edom (tares) would grow together in the field – but at the time of harvest – the good seed would be gathered, and the tares – the STUBBLE as Obadiah saw in vision would be burned in everlasting flames of fire.
Now we need to understand the Book of Jubilees – a critically important text for Christians to know and understand. “Christians” have probably never heard of the “Book of Jubilees” – because this text has been suppressed and burned by Roman Catholic “inquisitors” since the days of Constantine. Wikipedia informs us: The book of Jubilees was evidently held in high regard, and sometimes quoted, by the Early Church Fathers. In the 4th century, after Bishops had been appointed by the Roman Emperor Constantine, they rejected many of the books, including Jubilees, that later were also absent the Masoretic version. The Oriental Orthodox Churches have continued to consider Jubilees an important book of the Bible and older than Genesis. It is only because of its canonical status in the Oriental Orthodox Churches that the book in its entirety has managed to survive at all.
Isn’t that interesting?? Why do you suppose the “Book of Jubilees” is missing from modern “Bibles” today? It’s quite simple, really. It’s all about the demise of and deceptions of Esau/Edom from the days of Constantine!!! It details exactly how Edom would eventually break the historical yoke of Jacob/Israel just as Isaac declared in his blessing to Esau – and that Edom would seek to even be called ISRAEL in the latter-days. This BLASPHEMY and STRONG DELUSION is described in Jubilee Chapter 26:35 as a grievous “sin unto death, and ALL THY SEED shall be rooted out from under heaven!” Falsely claiming their lost blessing is one thing, but masquerading as Israel is a capital crime, it is their literal death sentence, according to the Book of Jubilees. Imagine the PROBLEM this “sacred text” creates for the diabolically deceptive Edomites!!! When the “Dead Sea Scrolls” were discovered, and then cataloged and translated, the CATHOLIC AND JEWISH SCHOLARS faced a real dilemma – for there in the sealed jars of antiquity were the ORIGINAL TEXTS OF THE BOOK OF JUBILEES!!! The literal chronicles of the “Division” of the tribes of Esau and Jacob!!! Oops! No wonder so many of the honest Dead Sea Scroll translators “apostatized” from their respective religious “orders” after the Church “authorities” ordered these texts to remain hidden. | <urn:uuid:a31289a2-4a87-4188-afce-8d5d4ae13458> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://atrueott.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/righteous-blood-part-iv/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279224.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00483-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96857 | 5,853 | 3.09375 | 3 |
This publication is no longer produced, for CURFs released after and including 2009-10 refer to the Microdata: Family Characteristics, CURF, Australia (cat. no. 4442.0.55.001) for supporting information.
This publication provides information about the data available from the 2006-07 Family Characteristics and Transitions Survey, in the form of an expanded Confidentialised Unit Record File (CURF). The statistics available on this expanded CURF were compiled from the Family Characteristics and Family Transitions and History topics in the Multi-Purpose Household Survey (MPHS), which was conducted as a supplement to the ABS Monthly Population Survey (MPS), from July 2006 to June 2007.
This publication explains data content, technical details and conditions of use for the expanded CURF and is available on the ABS web site and via the 'Information by' link on the RADL home page.
Previously known as: 'Family Characteristics Survey, Expanded Confidentialised Unit Record File, Technical Paper'. | <urn:uuid:9a0f08a8-5dd0-4a76-a7be-e513110d3d69> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/productsbyCatalogue/98E5D9F7D6508DDDCA2570B600126000?OpenDocument | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284352.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00193-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925353 | 213 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Labradors, or Labrador retrievers as they are normally called, are wonderful, intelligent, gentle, beautiful, and thoughtful dogs. They are one of the record touristy breeds in the United States, and so in more another countries too, because of their well behaved outlook and their docile way near offspring and separate animals. These are frequently particularly great traits in a family unit pet, and the biggest prudence when families are choosing a pet. A unit or party may face for a dog to sheer their family, or to convey them comradeship. Some of the material possession that should be taken into planning are what nature of living accommodations the creature lives in, how considerably example will be unclaimed to dedicate to the pet, and what could be the overall reimbursement of the pet when it comes to food, doc care, and otherwise overheads. There is never a countersign that a pet will not become scrofulous and ask unnecessary expenses, but researching fleshly breeds will support to establish which one is best overall for the human being and his or her environment. But when it comes to dogs, the Labrador is one of the most select for some individuals and families.
Labradors Are Large Dogs
Although Labradors are enlarged dogs, they are not tight or mordacious at all, and in cruelty of their size, they formulate extreme house pets. They are robust and they are elegant and are terrifically fanatical to their owners. But their volume does pose numerous hitches. In fact, group who unrecorded in apartments or those who do not have either a larger patio or a situate to wander their dog power not privation to get a jumbo dog, simply because of their extent and joie de vivre height. For others that have more than space, however, a Labrador is a cracking evaluation. They worship to run and comedy and, although not aim by nature, they label apposite sentinel dogs. Although any dog can bite, Labradors are not familiar to show rough behavior, and they are collectively thoroughly unhurt to have circa the house, even when there are itty-bitty children involved, as the dogs are highly long-suffering and fond.Post ads:
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A High Energy Dog
Labradors are amazingly cherubic and piece of their entice is that they have a lot of energy, but if a new controller has not through with their research, and is not expecting this, it could be a poverty-stricken light. Because if they get one lacking kind how vigorous and rollicking these dogs are, specially as puppies, they can be perturb by the amount of practise that must go into the increasing of the Labrador. A Labrador can likewise show a withering quality if it isn't fixed plenty concentration. Raised fit and provided beside legroom to run the Labrador is a favourable species that will provide a ancestral or an man-to-man many an age of company and love, and this is generally what is furthermost central for group who deprivation pets.Post ads:
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By Uncle Bill
’Tis a glorious, florious flag-waving day
To remember our heroes who’ve gone by the way.
Memorial, Veterans and Patriot’s Day, too
Armed Forces, Independence, just to name one or two.
We conquered the Indians and Spanish Grandees
Brought all who opposed us down to their knees.
Tojo, Mussolini, Noriega, as well
Saddam and Bin Laden? We sent them to Hell!
Ho Chi Minh, Aguinaldo, Che Guevara are gone.
Red Cloud and Tecumseh…we met them head-on.
We’ve invaded or sent troops all over the world.
Only three have ne’er seen Old Glory unfurled!
Liechtenstein, Andorra, Bhutan are the three
Why we’ve left them alone is a mystery to me!
If America’s really the cops of the Earth,
I think we should invade them, for what it is worth.
To the poor of the earth, we’ve brought freedom and joy
We’ve fought 22 wars since I was a boy.
Bombs, guns, tanks and planes and religion we’re giving
To help to maintain our standard of living.
All over the globe, peace and love, we have sown.
Making sure others’ values coincide with our own.
So to all our brave soldiers let’s raise a salute
On this glorious day, for our soldiers let’s root!
We need lots more days where we wave flags and shout
“We’re the great Ubermensch.” That’s what it’s all about!
By Uncle Bill—former staff sergeant USMC, humanitarian and acknowledged hypocrite. | <urn:uuid:66fa86c3-0086-40f2-a208-867d3b3f9a5c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://fresnoalliance.com/hooray-for-us/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571993.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814022847-20220814052847-00668.warc.gz | en | 0.820132 | 397 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Throughout my training period with Conquer Termites Northside I have been grateful in receiving a thorough understanding of a “secretive society”. “What is he talking about” I hear you ask… Termites, of course. I have not only been astounded to discover the sneaky concealed entry points of the termites operations in Queensland homes but of the amount of significant structural damage they can cause in short periods of time and of course the importance of termite treatments and application of preventive measures to be had. Originating from a building background myself I have found these little guys to be innovators in building and design and couldn’t help but share a comparison. Below are two examples of modern technology, ancient wisdom and inspiration from nature.
Termite workings and structure
An astonishing structure in size and complexity, through a network of tunnels and shafts termites are able to maintain the core temperature inside a mound at a constant 32º C. An organic temperature control system.
Inspired by Natures Design
“The Eastgate Centre, largely made of concrete, has a ventilation system which operates in a similar way. Outside air that is drawn in is either warmed or cooled by the building mass depending on which is hotter, the building concrete or the air. It is then vented into the building’s floors and offices before exiting via chimneys at the top. The complex also consists of two buildings side by side that are separated by an open space that is covered by glass and open to the local breezes."
Termites are masterminds, they find access into homes in places where you can not fathom. It’s really important to get the upper hand with these guys, so give Conquer Termites a call to show you how you can solve these common questions: I’ve found termites in my garden, what should I do? What can I do if I find flying termites in my house? How do you treat termites? and many more.
Our friendly staff will most likely give you the answers and can schedule one of our knowledgeable techs to come out and check the problem for you. Call us on 1300 417 007 or email: email@example.com | <urn:uuid:43787065-6002-4c62-be67-2e74892d7faa> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.conquertermites.com.au/articles/discover-how-termites-are-influencing-modern-design/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571758.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812200804-20220812230804-00671.warc.gz | en | 0.948746 | 457 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Invaders of Pennsylvania
For a peaceful state, Pennsylvania has suffered many invasions. It's all been one-way; Pennsylvania has never invaded anyone else.
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800
The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
History: Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies
Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies
Causes of the American Revolution
On the timescale from 1492 to the present, 1776 lies about half way. Somewhere along that timescale, in the two decades after the French and Indian War, the British North American colonies woke up to their emerging destiny of eventually becoming larger and stronger than the home country. In itself, that was no reason to break apart, and the middle, or Quaker, colonies did largely adopt an "If it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude.
New England felt it had more serious maritime and manufacturing grievances however, and the Old Dominion of Virginia was agitated by land speculators who chafed to put stakes in Ohio land, on the far side of the Proclamation Line of 1763. It was probably only a matter of time before the Yankees and the Cavaliers had a collision with a rather obtuse and arrogant monarchy in London. Although they could scarcely be expected to recognize it fully, Britain/Pennsylvania relations after 1755 were a contest of possibilities.
The British government would surely become more enlightened about its colonies if the middle (Quaker) colonies just continued to remain placid. But very likely, immigration of non-Quakers and non-Englishmen might make the Quaker colonies less loyal and more combative, tempted to join with neighboring colonies in a unified rebellion. It was the task of the hotly beleaguered New Englanders to win over the Quakers quickly, while Burke and other Whigs in Parliament tried to win the ministry before a show-down was forced. Hotheads, however, won the race.
But the hotheads had some help from general historical circumstance. New England and Virginia had experienced comparatively little threat from the French, the Spanish or the Indians in the Eighteenth century; Pennsylvania got it worst, so it valued protection more. Add to that the pacifist Quaker influence, and the result was Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware were least ready to abandon British protection but were so economically important that revolt was impossible without them.
Enlisting the Quakers and the religious Germans into starting a war was a near-impossibility. The Scotch-Irish and others under the political leadership of Benjamin Franklin were more instinctively combative, but Franklin their leader was staunchly pro-British right up to a few months before the Declaration of Independence. It took the arrogance of a few swaggerers in the British government to humiliate Franklin in public, but that proved enough to do it. Everybody was telling Franklin he was the most wonderful genius alive; one can scarcely blame him for believing it a little. Forty minutes of vitriolic, witty, malicious public snottiness in front of Burke, Voltaire and the assembled aristocracy was just about too much for the fat old, gouty old -- most remarkable man then alive.
After that, it was going to be war.
John Dickinson (1732-1808) would probably be better known if his abilities were less complex and numerous. It would have been particularly helpful if he had consistently remained on only one side of the important issues of his day. Born in a Quaker family and buried in a Quaker graveyard, he was for years a notable Episcopalian and soldier. He outwitted John Penn, the Pennsylvania Proprietor who was trying to keep Pennsylvania from sending representatives to the Continental Congress, by having the Pennsylvania representatives hold a meeting in the same small room of Carpenters Hall at the same time as the Congress. But he ultimately refused to sign the Declaration of Independence. Although he was the main author of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution which replaced it would not have been ratified without his idea of a bicameral Congress. Although he was Governor of Pennsylvania, he was also Governor of Delaware, having been the central figure in the separation of the two states. In fact, for fifteen years he was a member of the Legislature of both states. Dickinson seems in retrospect to have been on every side of every argument, but he was immensely respected in his time.
Two events seem to have been central in the organization of his life. The first was his education as a lawyer. At that time and for a century afterward, lawyers were trained by apprenticeship. Dickinson, however, studied in London at the Inns of Court for four years, and was by far the most distinguished lawyer in North America for the rest of his life. Furthermore, he absorbed the principles of the Magna Carta and the approaches of Francis Bacon so thoroughly that he never quite got over his pride in his English heritage. Throughout his leadership of the colonial rebellion he acted as a better Englishman than the English themselves. His demand was for American representation in the British Parliament, not independence from England. It would not be hard to imagine Dickinson standing before a firing squad, gritting the words of St. Paul, Civis Romani Sum.
His other pivotal experience was the Battle of Brandywine. Dickinson had been the organizer or chairman of the two main Pennsylvania military organizations, the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety and Defense, and the so-called Associators (today's 111th Infantry, the first battalion of troops in Philadelphia). Both of these peculiar names were a characteristic gesture to conciliating pacifist Quaker feelings. Nevertheless, when Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration, he did temporarily become so unpopular he resigned his military commands. A few months later, when General Howe landed at Elkton at the narrow neck of the Delmarva peninsula, Dickinson enlisted as a common soldier to defend the southern perimeter of the defense line Washington had hastily thrown up to defend Philadelphia. Shortly afterward, Dickinson's friend and neighbor Caesar Rodney made him a Brigadier General in charge of the garrison around Elizabeth New Jersey, but the Battle of Brandywine taught an important lesson. Little states like Delaware and Maryland could not possibly defend themselves without alliance and coordination with the larger states. Delaware was later very active in persuading the other small states to surrender sovereignty in the Constitutional Convention, to be the first to ratify the Constitution, and eventually in the Civil War to remain within the Union in spite of being a slave state.
Going back to the Battle of the Brandywine, the lesson was permanently and indelibly taught that a foreign army in Elkton, could gobble up Dover or Baltimore within a week. And that, too, is part of an overarching theme of Dickinson's life which makes many inconsistencies consistent. He devoutly believed in peace and order within a large nation. If it could not be within the British Empire, at least it had to be more than just a little state consisting of a few counties. Once he finally accepted the idea of separation from England, he devoted his life to achieving a voluntary union of formerly sovereign states, on terms acceptable to each other. Central to this mission was resistance to the idea of a unicameral national Legislature, with representation based on population. From his position, the larger states would then always dominate the smaller ones, and residents of the smaller states could never achieve national prominence. Although Benjamin Franklin proposed the compromise of the bicameral Legislature with one body selected by state rather than population, Franklin and Dickinson had been lifetime collaborators in assembling a national Union, and Franklin was surely intervening on behalf of his friend and colleague. Many large nations have been unified by armed force; ours was and continues to be the only one to do it voluntarily. Dickinson and Franklin were central to the concept of honest negotiation and necessary compromise, which even today continues to escape the United Nations and the European Union. In fact, the need for a bicameral Legislature in this sort of Union is now so well accepted, that opposition to bicameral is mostly a sly method to oppose the Union without confessing your true position.
John Dickinson was known as the "Penman of the Revolution" in his day because of his persuasive arguments, but the hotheads refused to grasp his wise advice that the King would be more persuaded by economic pressures on his merchants than by Colonials shooting his Redcoats. The Tories and the proprietors, on the other side, never forgave him for denouncing their own abuses of power. Super-patriots distrusted him once more, after he refused to sign the Declaration, while those who were bankrupted by the Revolution resented that at some times, by some definitions, he remained the richest man in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the really serious Quakers would never forgive any member who organized, led and fought as a soldier, no matter what else he might have done. To a person of his sophistication however, none of these resentments really proved he was being inconsistent.
Perhaps some understanding of Dickinson can be gleaned from the 1779 summary of him in the Diary of John Adams:
"He [Chevalier de la Luzerne] inquired after Mr. Dickinson, and the reason why he disappeared. I explained, as well as I could in French, the inconsistency of the Farmer's Letters, and his perseverance in that inconsistency in Congress, Mr. Dickinson's opposition to the Declaration of Independency. I ventured, as modestly as I could, to let him know that I had the honor to be the principal disputant in Congress against Mr. Dickinson upon that great question; that Mr. Dickinson had the eloquence, the learning, and the ingenuity, on his side of the question; but that I had the hearts of the Americans on mine; and, therefore, my side of the question prevailed. That Mr. Dickinson had a good heart, and an amiable character; but that his opposition to independency had lost him the confidence of the people, who suspected him of timidity and avarice, and that his opposition sprung from those passions; but that he had since turned out with the militia against the British troops, and, I doubted not, might in time regain the confidence of the people."
This statement of John Adams' respect for the Declaration continues his insistence that the critical moment was when Congress decided to act on his proposal, not when Jefferson penned some propaganda for it. The point for Dickinson over Adams is best summarized: Adams felt the point of no return had been reached long before July 4, 1776, whereas Dickinson felt it had not been reached even then. Dickinson was entirely right that the artificial fuss over the Tea Act was no reason to go to war. Adams was right that public hysteria had surged to a point where further resisting the public would cost you your ability to lead it. It was the Quaker in Dickinson coming out; he was "morbidly principled". Only when the Redcoats were actually marching across the neck of Delaware, would he concede that events had overtaken logic.
Robert Morris was no Quaker, but he joined his friend John Dickinson in the Quaker position of refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence. Both men eventually joined the revolution, but largely out of allegiance to their fellow Americans. History has vindicated that position, to the extent that the decisive defeat of the British at Saratoga brought their most ardent adversary himself to agree with them. Lord North of all people, then offered the colonists the compromise of an American parliament within a commonwealth of parliaments, independent except that trading relationships with Great Britain would be maintained. Gouvernor Morris was selected to answer the British. Without a military defeat, the British might not have made the offer, but Gouvernor Morris' rejecting Lord North's offer for the expedient reasons earlier expressed by John Adams could be described as making the war last six years longer than it needed to, in order to remain in charge of it.
As a footnote, it can probably be surmised from Franklin's life that he was in total agreement with Morris and Dickinson's assessment, except for the comparatively brief period when the British aristocracy had publicly humiliated the most accomplished man on earth in the cockpit at Whitehall. That does leave one other persuasive theory of the Revolutionary War. The Americans first joined with the British in 1754 to drive out the French from America. And then a few years later in 1778, the Americans joined with the French to drive the British out. According to this mostly Canadian description, what New Englanders had wanted all along, was to dominate the continent.
|Spirit of 76'|
The American colonies were growing too big, too fast, and the British Empire had too many international distractions, to have smooth relationships across three thousand miles of ocean, using uncertain communications available in the late Eighteenth century. Friction and misunderstanding were inevitable without far more statesmanship than either side thought was necessary. So, when the Continental Congress dispatched George Washington to Boston with troops to defend rebellious Massachusetts at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, it was hard for the British to believe the colonists were merely helping out one of their distressed neighbors. It seemed in London that the thirteen colonies had united, formed not only an army but a government, and gone to war. In December 1775 England passed the Prohibitory Act, essentially declaring war, and organized a huge invasion fleet to put down the rebellion. It now seems hard to understand the first notice the Americans had of this huge over-reaction was a private letter to Robert Morris from one of his agents in March 1776; no warnings, no negotiations, no attempt to investigate problems and correct them. The British just sent a fleet to settle this problem, whatever it was. It's all very well to say the Americans should have known they were playing with fire. They didn't see it that way; they were being self-reliant, responding to attack. In June, 1776 British patrol frigates were skirmishing in the Delaware River; late in the month British troops landed on Staten Island. The American reaction to all this was a muddle of confusion. A few were delighted, most of the rest were amazed or appalled.
Although the deeper strategic origins of the American Revolution are subtle, complex, and controversial, there is far less muddle about what happened on July 2, 1776, publicly proclaimed two days later. Adopting a resolution written by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, the Thirteen Colonies stated they had now clarified their goals in the controversy with the British monarchy. For a year before that, the Continental Congress had been corresponding with each other and meeting in Carpenters Hall with the goal of achieving representation in the British parliament -- "No taxation without representation". The model for most of them was based on the Whig agitation for Ireland -- for a local parliament within a larger commonwealth. But the massing of the British Navy in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then the actual appearance of seven hundred British warships in American waters showed that not only was Parliamentary representation out of the question, but King George III was going to play rough with upstarts. The new goal was no longer just representation, it was independence. If we were going to resist a military occupation at the risk of being hanged as traitors, we might as well do it for something substantial. The meeting had a number of Scotch-Irish Princeton graduates, whose basic loyalty to England had long been divided. Pacifist Pennsylvania, chief among the wavering hold-outs, was mostly won over by its own Benjamin Franklin, who was optimistic the French would help us. Even so, both Robert Morris and John Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration; Franklin persuaded both to abstain by absence, which created a majority of the Pennsylvania delegation in favor. That's a pretty slim majority for a crucial decision. Franklin was soon dispatched back to Paris to make an alliance; Washington was dispatched to hold off that British army in the meantime. Jefferson was designated to write a proclamation, which even after editing is still pretty unreadable beyond the first couple of sentences. Meeting adjourned. This brief account may not qualify as a serious examination of the causes of the American Revolution, but it comes close to the way it seemed to the colonist in the street.
The rebels then spent eight years convincing the British they were serious, and have been independent ever since. But, just a minute, here. Reflect on the fact that fighting had been going on for a year in Massachusetts, and that Lord Howe's fleet had set sail a month before the Declaration, actually landing on Staten Island at just about the same time as the Fourth of July. Add the fact that only John Hancock actually signed the document on July 4th, and some of the signers even waited until September. You can sort of see why John Adams never got over the idea that Thomas Jefferson had a big nerve implying the whole Revolution was his idea. What's more, there's a viewpoint that New England subsequently had to endure a President from Virginia for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the new nation because loud talk from New England still made the rest of the country nervous. Philadelphia may have been the cradle of Independence, but that was not because it was a colony hot for war, dragging others along with it. Rather, it was the largest city in the colonies, centrally located. It had a strong pacifist tradition, and it had the most to lose from a pillaging enemy war machine. When Independence was finally declared the goal, many of Philadelphia's leading citizens moved to Canada.
New England had started hostilities, and was about to be subdued by overwhelming force. The Canadians were not going to come to their aid, because they were French, and Catholic, and enough said. What New England and the Scotch-Irish needed were WASP allies, stretching for two thousand miles to the South. By far the largest colony was Virginia, which included what is now Kentucky and West Virginia; it even had some legal claims for vastly larger territory. Virginia was incensed about its powerlessness against British mercantilism, especially the tobacco trade. The rest of the English colonies had plenty of assorted grievances against George III, and almost all of them could see that America was rapidly outgrowing dependency on the British homeland, without sign that Parliament was ever going to surrender home rule to them. It was perhaps unfortunate New Englanders were so impulsive, but it looked as though a military confrontation with the Crown was inevitably coming. Without support, New England was likely to be torched, as Rome once subdued Carthage.
And the last hope for an alternative of flattery and diplomacy, for guile and subtlety, had stepped off the boat a year earlier. Benjamin Franklin, our fabulous man in London, arrived with the news he had finally had it "up to here" with the British ministry. He was a man who quietly made things happen, carefully selecting his arguments from amongst many he had in mind. In retrospect, we can see that he held the idea of Anglo-Saxon world domination as far back as the Albany Conference of 1745, and could even look forward to America outgrowing England in the 19th Century. His behavior at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 strongly suggests he never completely gave up that long-term dream. Just as Edmund Burke never gave up the idea of Reconciliation with the Colonies, Benjamin Franklin never quite gave up the idea of Reconciliation with England. While John Dickinson and Robert Morris resisted the idea of Independence down to the last moment, Franklin took a much longer view. For the time being, it was necessary to defeat the British, and for that we needed the help of the French. In 1750, America joined with the British to toss out the French. And then in 1776, we joined the French to toss out the British. Franklin didn't always get his way. But Franklin was always steering the ship.
Several distinguished biographies of Benjamin Franklin have recently skirted his January 1774 confrontation with the British government in the "Cockpit" of Whitehall. Presumably the exquisite details are too fancy and complicated for easy description, or possibly the cardinal significance of this intellectual duel is underestimated. It seems possible the American Revolution was declared by one man's making up his mind. A mind made up in one particular hour in one particular room, irrevocably, in front of the whole British Establishment.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was there, and so were Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley. So were all the Privy Council, and most of British high society, giggling and hissing at his discomfort. Poor Richard stood there silent and impassive. The Enlightenment thought they were deciding his fate, but he was deciding theirs.
|Lord Alexander Wedderburn|
Franklin had published some letters he had promised not to publish, but they showed the British government in a very bad light. Alexander Wedderburn the Solicitor-General had deliberately orchestrated the meeting to shift the emphasis to Franklin's broken promise and away from British provocation of it. The room had been packed with highbrows promised a delicious treat, and Wedderburn's speech was meticulously planned as an entertainment for the intelligentsia. The man who discovered electricity was mocked as "conducting" the letters. And a famous man of letters was reminded that the ancient Athenians would brand three letters on the back of the hand of a thief: FUR, the name for thief, an elaborate 18th Century pun making reference to fur hats and collars, which were the traditional symbol of printers. Wedderburn roused himself to the climactic announcement that the famous Roman, Plautus, had invented the famous derivative epithet, "Homo, triumph literarum," portentously meaning a three-letter man. The galleries of Whitehall tittered and applauded this thrilling attack. Franklin continued to stand, his face perfectly inscrutable to the end.
|Deplessis Portrait of Benjamin Franklin|
In his report back to the Massachusetts Legislature, Franklin used dismissive understatement to show he had not been asleep while he was impassive. He had been, he said, "the butt of his invective ribaldry for nearly an hour." After that, Poor Richard seemed to disappear from British society for nine months, seeing only close friends in his house, and then he sailed home to America, becoming a member of the Continental Congress the day he stepped off the boat. Meanwhile, he had arranged to have his portrait painted by Duplessis, the most distinguished painter in France, eventually to have it hang next to a painting by the same artist, of the King of France. To the original sketch for the portrait had been added a fur collar, traditional emblem of the printer's guild. At the bottom, where a motto ordinarily would be found, was the single, three-letter Latin word, "VIR," or man, which would today be equivalent to he man. And just so everyone would get the point, Franklin sent an otherwise anonymous letter to the newspapers, signed "Homo Triumph Literarum" in which he taunted that the friends of Mr. Franklin would have to agree he was a thief, as in the famous line of poetry that "He stole the lightning from the skies." But old Ben wasn't just bragging. Anticipating the baseball player Dizzy Dean by two hundred years, he was in effect saying "It ain't braggin' if you really done it."
On Feb. 6, 1778 he and Silas Deane went over to the French palace to sign the Treaty of Alliance with the King of France. Instead of his usual brown suit, Franklin was wearing a faded blue one, and Deane questioned why he wore old clothes to such an important ceremony. "To give it a little revenge," was the answer. "I wore this suit on the day Wedderburn abused me at Whitehall." The true depth of Franklin's feelings would never have been known if Deane had not asked.
As a reminder, the Treaty they were signing said, "The essential and direct end of the present defensive alliance is to maintain effectually the liberty, sovereignty and independence of the said United States. . . ." All in all, not a bad academic performance for a man who never went past the second grade in school.
|The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution,and The Birth of America, Steven Johnson ISBN: 978-1-59448-852-8||Amazon|
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was born of Quaker parents, which makes him a "birthright" Quaker. Children born into Quaker families are accustomed to the subtleties of speech and behavior of that religious sect, ultimately growing up to be the main nucleus of tradition. Knowing what they are getting into, however, they are more likely to rebel against it than others who, coming to the religion by choice rather than by birthright, are commonly described as "Convinced Friends."
These stereotypes may or may not explain some of Tom Paine's paradoxes. He certainly was not a pacifist, a quietest, or a plain person. He was an important historical figure; Walter A. McDougall, the famous University of Pennsylvania historian, feels the American colonists might have sputtered and complained about Royal rule for decades, except for Paine. The American Revolution happened when it happened, because Tom Paine stirred up a storm.
According to the traditional way of telling his story, Tom Paine was a ne'er do well failure in London. He ran into Benjamin Franklin, who advised him to emigrate to America in 1775, and within a year his pamphlet called ""Common Sense"" had sold 150,000 copies (some even claim 500,000), galvanizing the public and the Continental Congress into action on July 4, 1776. George Washington read Paine's writings to his troops on the eve of the Battle of Trenton. After that, Paine got mixed up with the French Revolution, and apparently became a severe alcoholic, proclaiming atheism all the way. Although Thomas Jefferson remained friendly to the end, Benjamin Franklin essentially told him to go leave him alone, and Washington would cross the street to avoid him. According to the usual line, Tom Paine was a big-mouthed rabble-rouser and a drunk, who traveled the world looking to stir up revolutions.
However, that cannot possibly be a fair recounting of the whole story. Thomas Alva Edison, whose opinion certainly counts for something, regarded Tom Paine as one of the greatest American inventors, creating the first steel bridge, the first hollow candle, and the principle of central drought in heating. Paine early became a close friend of the Hicks family, the central figures in modern Quakerism; it seems a little unclear how much Tom Paine was reflecting the views of Elias Hicks, and how much Hick site Quakerism can be said to have originated in the thinking of Thomas Paine. Paine was very far from being an atheist. In fact, both he and Hicks believed so fervently in the universality of God that both of them scorned the rituals, paraphernalia, and transparent superstitions of -- religion.
Furthermore, Paine was able to reach the rationalists of The Enlightenment with arguments which cut to the heart of Royalist loyalties. America was too big and too remote to be ruled by a king, particularly one who abused his privileges behind a claim of divine right. William the Conqueror, for example, never denied he was a usurper. One way or another, every king must earn his throne. So, as for feudalism and hereditary aristocracy, what was King George doing with all those German mercenaries? After two centuries of democracy, most Americans are too far from feudalism to appreciate the legitimacy of military meritocracy. Whatever King George was up to, he didn't stand for empowerment of the best and the brightest Englishmen, who in fact might well be opposed to him. If you wanted to get to Virginia aristocrats, Boston sea captains, and Kentucky backwoodsmen, that was exactly the line to take in Common Sense.
Unfortunately, Citizen Tom Paine was a freethinker and couldn't be quiet about it in his later books. He didn't like the way the Old Testament Hebrews hungered for a king. He didn't like the way the New Testament sprinkled miracles on top of unassailable moral principles, and he particularly didn't like the claim that God got an unmarried girl pregnant. He antagonized almost every established religion by proclaiming that no one should make a living from religion. He wrote a book called Age of Reason proclaiming all these freethinking ideas, which struck Ben Franklin as such a stupid thing to do that he would not discuss it, beyond saying that even if he should succeed in convincing people to abandon religion, just imagine how much worse they would probably behave without it. George Washington, who hadn't a trace of intellectualism about him, more accurately portrayed the typical American revulsion at anyone who was so unprincipled as to say such unorthodox things in public. Jefferson distanced himself for political reasons rather than intellectual ones. Franklin thought Paine was a fool. Washington, and the rest of the country, thought he was a viper.
It would have to be conceded -- by anyone -- that Tom Paine was self-destructive, even sassing Robespierre while in a French prison. How is it such a loose cannon could get the American public off dead center and make the Continental Congress grasp the nettle of revolution, in less than a year? Let's go back to how he came to America in the first place. Franklin sent him.
Then he promptly got a job as editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which Franklin had owned for thirty years. And then, in an era when the largest city in America had a population of twenty five thousand, and the printing presses of the day were able to turn out three or four pages a minute, he sold 150,000 copies of the fifty-page "Common Sense." Who but Franklin, in private partnerships with sixty printers, could have possibly authorized, financed, and printed 150,000 copies of a colonial pamphlet? In order to find that much printing capacity in colonial America, a great deal of other printing had to lose its place in the queue.
Even today, a best-seller is defined as a book that sells 50,000 copies, and it generally takes three years to get it done. In the Eighteenth Century, for an unknown alcoholic to get off the boat and find a publisher for a best seller in a few weeks is hard even to imagine. Unless he had important help.
If you have a quarter minted in 1999, you can see a depiction of Caesar Rodney riding through the rain, mud and heat, all night, to cast his July 2 vote for independence at the 1776 Continental Congress. There are no known painted portraits of Rodney, probably because his face was badly mutilated by the cancer which ultimately killed him.
On July 1, Thomas McKean and George Read had split Delaware's votes in a tie, and McKean had urgently sent word to Rodney, the absent third vote, that he must come to Philadelphia quickly. Admiral Howe
was already starting to land his seven hundred ships at Staten Island and Perth Amboy, where it would not be difficult for him to travel a hundred miles across New Jersey to Trenton and down the Delaware River -- to hang them all as rebels. Only if they could establish the notion that they were an independent country could they hope to shelter themselves in the rules of war. (Even so, most of them found it prudent to wait a few weeks before signing Jefferson's somewhat specious arguments.) In the background, of course, Benjamin Franklin had a shrewder assessment or possibly even overt threat: the King of France wasn't going to help them unless they severed their allegiance with England.
Schoolchildren in Delaware can be forgiven for asking why Rodney wasn't in Philadelphia for the vote without being sent for. And we don't really know. Rodney certainly had plenty of other things competing for his attention, like being a Supreme Court Justice, the Speaker of the Delaware Assembly and the de facto Governor of the State, as well as being a Brigadier General in the Militia (he later was made Major General in charge of the garrison at Trenton). One has to suspect, however, that he had not expected George Read to vote against independence. Read, after all, had married the widowed sister of George Ross, who did sign the Declaration.
Asthma, a notoriously intermittent condition, may have been a worse impediment to Caesar Rodney's ride than his cancer. Although he was badly disfigured, the cancer did not kill him until 1784. The prospect of riding eighty miles in the rain with asthma may well have been the reason Rodney held off until he was absolutely certain his vote was needed. The esteem and affection that Delaware holds for this farmer from Dover can be gauged by the fact that he remained the elected speaker until the day he died, and during his last three months, the legislature held its meetings in his house so he could be present.
|Spirit of '76|
Although the origins of the American Revolution are subtle and complex, even historically controversial, we have more or less united in the idea that we "declared" our independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. We then spent eight years convincing the British we were serious, and have been independent ever since. Reflect, however, on the fact that fighting had been going on for a year in Massachusetts, and that Lord Howe's fleet had set sail a month before the Declaration, actually landing on Staten Island at just about the same time as the Fourth of July. Add to that the fact that only John Hancock actually signed the document on July 4th, and some of the signers waited until September. You can sort of see why John Adams never got over the idea that Thomas Jefferson had quite a nerve implying the whole thing was his idea. What's more, New England subsequently had to live with a President from Virginia for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the new nation. Philadelphia may have been the cradle of Independence, but that was not because it was a colony hot for war, dragging the others along with it. It was the largest city in the colonies, centrally located. It had a strong pacifist tradition, and it had the most to lose from a pillaging enemy war machine.
New England was in the position of having started hostilities, and about to be subdued by overwhelming force. The Canadians were not going to come to their aid, because they were French, and Catholic, and enough said. What the New Englanders wanted was WASP allies, stretching for two thousand miles to the South. By far the largest colony was Virginia, which included what is now Kentucky and West Virginia; it even had some legal claims for vastly larger territory. The rest of the English colonies had plenty of assorted grievances against George III, and almost all of them could see that America was rapidly outgrowing the dependency on the British homeland, without any sign that Parliament was ever going to surrender home rule to them. Perhaps it was unfortunate that New Englanders were so impulsive, but it looked as though a confrontation with the Crown was inevitably coming, and without support, New England was likely to be subdued like Carthage.
And then, the last hope for flattery and diplomacy, for guile and subtlety, stepped off the boat. Benjamin Franklin, our fabulous man in London, had it "up to here" with the British ministry. He finally was saying what others had been thinking. It was now, or never.
The Father of Monetarism
Milton Friedman won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics (more accurately, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel), for generating controversial ideas made even more annoying to his professional adversaries by his matchless knack for attaching memorable slogans to them. A phrase in question is that "Inflation, always and everywhere, is a monetary phenomenon." Turned around, the converse emerges that the great deflation and depression of the 1930s was caused by a global monetary shortage. Then, to extend the same idea to the American Revolution, it could fairly be argued that inept British contraction of colonial coinage had a lot to do with provoking us to seek independence.
|French & Indian War|
Following the French and Indian War, the colonies experienced a major commodity depression which seems to have been caused by wartime shortages followed by post-war surpluses (associated with failure to adjust to the resulting financial confusion). In Milton Friedman's theory, it is the task of any government to maintain stable prices by balancing the amount of currency in circulation with the size of the gross national product. In 1770, the British Exchequer would thus have had to expand and contract the amount of currency in circulation pretty rapidly to maintain economic stability in the bumpy Colonial economy. Essentially, they had to ride a bucking broncho three thousand miles away. In the Eighteenth Century there was no trace of understanding of the issues involved. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was only published in the fateful year of 1776, for example. Even if the techniques for maintaining stable prices had been crystal clear, there was a thirty-day lag in communication across the Ocean, and comparable lags between the colonies, where different imports and exports were affected at varying times. So it is a little harsh to blame the British for the chaotic result, except to notice that strongly centralized, trans-Atlantic government was by nature unsuitable for managing rapidly-changing problems, currency and otherwise. The British government had more than a century of experience that should have made that clear. That's what the colonists said, in effect, and their solution for it was Independence.
If you believe Friedman, a shortage of coinage causes a fall in prices, or deflation. To correct that, you need a central banker constantly fine-tuning the currency. But banking in the colonies was too rudimentary to consider such a thing. If you needed a mortgage, you went to a prosperous neighbor and borrowed directly from him. That was fine, because prosperous colonists had limited opportunities to invest their money conveniently, except by loaning money to their neighbors. Indeed, local communities were knit together socially by the mutual assistance of successful farmers directly assisting their less fortunate neighbors. However, pioneer farming
|Depression-era Farm Family|
communities are far too unsophisticated to remain tranquil when problems arise out of abstractions. Suddenly and without apparent explanation, in 1770 there was no money for anybody to use, and the fellow with a mortgage on his farm couldn't make his payments even though he was otherwise entirely successful. His creditor himself then couldn't pay his own bills, and eventually even the kindliest ones were driven to foreclose the mortgage. It was said to be common for a farm worth $5000 to be sold to satisfy a mortgage of $100. And in this way, many honest and once-prospering farmers were forced to walk past their old home, now owned and occupied by a formerly friendly neighbor. It all seemed bitterly unfair, no one understood what was happening, evil motives were readily suspected, and old religious and personal grievances were heightened. When the British finally imposed a total ban on paper money as well as a prohibition of the export of British coinage outside the United Kingdom, things became almost impossible to manage. Almost no one knew exactly what was going on, but everyone could see it was bad. The colonies rapidly deteriorated toward class warfare, which is what the division between Tories and Rebels was soon to become, with both sides quite rightly asserting they were not responsible, and quite wrongly asserting the other must be.
From a far distance, it can be readily perceived the primitive banking and transportation systems of that time were inadequate to respond to the rapidly changing financial problems of a global empire; and it can be readily surmised that many other non-financial issues of governance were similarly hampered by attempting to centralize control over vast distances. In that sense, the colonists were approximately correct in directing their indignation to the person of King George III, whose mother was constantly nagging him to "be a real King". He had the particular misfortune to be dealing with Englishmen, deeply aware of the hidden political agenda made possible in the 13th Century by the Magna Charta and made explicit in 1307, when Edward I agreed not to collect certain taxes without consent of the realm. Essentially, Parliament placed taxation in the hands of the people, who consistently withheld consent until the king gave them just a little more liberty. This was the reason irksome micromanagement of the distant colonies was immediately countered with the cry of "No taxation without Representation", since membership in the House of Commons was a traditional and historically effective means to the end. But it was getting late for this solution. Maritime New England now wanted to go further than that in order to dominate Western Atlantic trade. Virginia and the rest of the South wanted to go all the way to Independence in order to exploit the vast empty interior wilderness of Ohio and beyond. But the Quaker colonies in the middle felt quite sympathetic with John Dickinson's advice to remain part of the Empire and make a stand for representation in Parliament. When the Lord Howe's British fleet appeared in lower New York harbor an immediate choice had to be made, and ultimately the Quaker colonies were swayed by Benjamin Franklin's embittered report of his mistreatment in Parliament, and his assessment that he could persuade the French to help us. However reluctant they were to resort to force, the Quaker colonies had to choose, and choose immediately: either flee as Tories to Canada, or stand and fight.
A reader of Philadelphia Reflections feels that a balanced appraisal of the slavery issue should include mention of the Quakers who were determined in their opposition to abolition. After all, it took eighty years for the original concern of the Germantown meeting to be fully adopted by the Philadelphia Yearly meeting as a formal minute under the prodding of John Woolman. Since the minute gives permission for particularly concerned Friends to go speak with slave-holding Quakers, it is clear that even some Philadelphia Quakers held slaves and were reluctant to release them.
|Abraham Redwood 1709-1788|
Newport, Rhode Island, was an even more awkward case. In colonial times, and even today to some degree, individual Yearly meetings were cordial, but under no formal obligation to respond to each other's decisions. The English seaport of Bristol had developed a sugar trade with the West Indies, and a number of Bristol Quakers moved to Newport. Acquiring very large sugar plantations in the Indies, they shipped molasses to rum distilleries in Newport or else directly back to Bristol where a candy industry had been established. The next step was the shipment of rum and/or trading trinkets to Africa, to be exchanged for slaves, who were taken to the Caribbean and exchanged for a cargo of molasses. Molasses then went to Newport, in a triangular trade pattern which admittedly avoided bringing slave cargo to Rhode Island, but whose principle purpose was taking advantage of the prevailing Atlantic trade winds while maintaining a full cargo over the whole distance. The largest partnership in this trade belonged to four Newport Quakers, one of whom was Abraham Redwood.
Redwood owned 230 slaves in Antigua and was among the richest men in America at the time. It is rather troubling to learn that the average "turnover" of slaves on Antigua was seven years, and that slave rebellions were fairly common. Redwood donated five hundred pounds to the Newport Philosophical Society for the purchase of 1300 books, thereby establishing the Redwood Library in 1747, one of the oldest in the country, although the Library Company of Philadelphia was established in 1731. By almost any standard, Redwood was nevertheless a "weighty" Quaker. When he resolutely refused to sell his slaves, he was "read out" of the meeting.
Details of the discussions which were conducted are no longer readily available, but it is obvious that collision of these two equally stubborn viewpoints was particularly awkward when it led to the banishment of the main employer of the town, and its most important local benefactor. Furthermore, those who worked harmlessly in the rum industry in Newport, or the candy industry in England, were called upon to reflect deeply on the unfortunate slave dealings in which they were, perhaps unknowingly, implicated.
Somehow all of this was accomplished without a total rupture, because thirteen years later Abraham Redwood donated another five hundred pounds to the Quaker Meeting, for the establishment of a school.
DURING the century which elapsed after Charles II gave away Pennsylvania to William Penn, several hundred thousand people moved in and changed the place. Transformation of the wilderness explains why the terms of the grant seemed logical at one time, but proved almost impossible to manage at the time of the Revolution. The Penns with thirty million acres were the largest landholders in America but, in fact, by 1776 only five million acres had been sold in a century. The land they held was simply too much for one family to handle without an army, and although the original settlers were pacifists, the later ones were combative.
Charles II had written in the Charter that the Penns could have the land if they could maintain order there, retaining the legal right for the King to recover the land if they didn't. This fall-back provision certainly reflects some doubt about the ability of pacifists to shoot the necessary number of Indians, Frenchmen and Spaniards. On the other hand, the motive for a King delegating away his authority in the first place became clearer when the Penns experienced severe financial strain defending the Northeast corner of the state against the Connecticut invaders. It furthermore helps us understand why Benjamin Franklin received such a cold reception when he was sent to London by the colonists to request the crown to reassert civil authority over the state. That did not necessarily imply stripping the Penns of their land; by this time, it was clear that the Penn Proprietors were mainly interested in selling it to someone. The charter of the King's grant included the offer to make William Penn a King; and although the offer was declined, the Penn Proprietors retained some degree of legal power to govern the territory. Franklin for all his persuasive power was unfortunately the one man Thomas Penn didn't want to see, because of the threat he had posed by raising a militia in King George's War, and later his expansiveness at the Albany Conference. And Thomas was a good friend of the King. The King didn't want these problems, and particularly didn't want the expense. Ambiguities were of course shared all around. William Penn had quite shrewdly seen it was more sensible to treat the Indians decently than to fight with them, and cheaper too; the lesson was not lost on the British crown. But the French Kings posed a much larger world-wide threat to the British colony, finding for their part, it was rather economical to supply munitions to the Indians on the frontier and stir them up emotionally. The French and Indian War was a small component of the Seven Years War, which proved to be a costly adventure for both sides. Its local cost certainly overwhelmed the ability of one family to underwrite local governance in a large wartime colony, and it jeopardized the finances of the British Monarch to carry the rest. The resulting need to tax the colonies for their defense sent things downhill, eventually to the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, and the Tea Tax. Everyone made lots of mistakes as the whole structure underwent revision, just as pacifists are certain will happen in any war. But when a pacifist utopian colony was prospering while successfully dealing with the Indians, it's all sort of a big pity.
With much to lose, the Penn family did pretty well with the resources at hand. By the time of the Revolution, three generations of Penns had divided up ownership shares of the Proprietorship. When French and Spanish ships were marauding the Delaware River, Benjamin Franklin the local printer took it on himself to organize a militia which persists today as the Pennsylvania National Guard, the Twenty-eighth Division. Franklin was suddenly a local hero to everyone, except to one man, Thomas Penn. Thomas was the dominant figure in the Penn family for many years, and worried deeply about Franklin, a man who could stir up ten thousand armed volunteers with a poster proclamation. Such a man could mean trouble, as indeed events later proved to be the case.
John Penn was the Governor of the state, residing in his mansion on the Schuylkill called Lansdowne, doing his best to ingratiate the locals. He struggled to be diplomatic when arguing for the decisions actually made by his Uncle Thomas in London. Thomas Penn, on the other hand, was an important friend of the British Ministry, and a notable person in aristocratic England. As the Revolutionary War approached, the problem transformed into how to hold on to 25 million unsold acres, while remaining unsure who was going to win the impending war.
The strategy the Penns adopted was to get out of the business of running local government, as Franklin had proposed but in a different way. John Penn the Governor became a private citizen, just a local real estate agent. He took an oath of allegiance to the Revolutionary government, which in the chaos of the time was equivalent to becoming an American citizen. Meanwhile, other members of the family remained in England, ready to revise the arrangement if the British won the war. It was all fairly transparent straddling of the issues, which was only even remotely likely to be effective because of the enormous store of Penn goodwill built up over a century. In 1789 revolutionary France, for example, such sentimentality would not have delayed the tumbrels to the guillotine for five minutes.
Meanwhile, an unexpected difficulty was created. By withdrawing from control of the local government, the Penn family also withdrew from the defense of state borders against neighboring colonies. Under the circumstances, the Penns were afraid to appeal to the King, while the new government of Pennsylvania found the Articles of Confederation were merely a wartime tribal compact. The Articles stabilized boundaries mainly for the purpose of conducting a united war, and did not seriously contemplate a continuing judicial role for disputes between colonies. When the Revolution was finally over, the Penn Proprietors were not left with much of a bargaining position. The new State of Pennsylvania offered, and they accepted, about fifteen cents an acre to surrender their claims. In Delaware, they got essentially nothing for those three counties. Only in New Jersey did the Proprietors' claims remain durable after the new nation was established. The Proprietorship of East Jersey survived into the late 20th century, and the Proprietorship of West Jersey continues to return a small profit even today. The New Jersey curiosity is treated in a separate essay.
That's pretty conjectural, but it is certainly true that his mother egged him on to be a real king, a real force reversing that steady decline in the Monarchy's personal power which began with the Magna Carta. By the time in question, however, so much power had already gravitated into the hands of Parliament that the King could not act in any major way without their consent. Even today, Cabinet Ministers are spoken of as King's ministers, but are in fact appointed by leaders of the majority party in Parliament. Some in Parliament, like Edmund Burke, were almost persuasive in resisting the Ministry, urging colleagues to seek reconciliation with the colonies. George III did still retain power to appoint his favorites to important positions, and used this patronage extensively to control the country. Political party chieftains, on the other hand, retained and retain today the power to nominate the party candidate for Parliament in any particular district. The leadership thus selects the members of Parliament, who can in turn overturn the leadership only if they dare. Real decisions were largely in the hands of party chieftains, but perhaps to some extent the Crown, depending on the Monarch's shrewdness in distributing patronage among the party chieftains.
Across thousands of miles of dangerous ocean, the English colonies had changed from weedy wilderness in the Sixteenth century, into thriving and prosperous small civilizations in the early Eighteenth. Transatlantic communication did not substantially improve in that interval, but colonial population grew to over a million, many of them native-born in the colonies, with increasingly large numbers of immigrants from other nations. Loyalty to the Monarch inevitably declined. True, they spoke English, revered England, but many urgent local issues were difficult to administer at such a distance, encouraging a mentality of self-governance. France, by now at war with England on the Continent, operated on a grand plan of interior encirclement, from Quebec and and Great Lakes, down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The English coastal settlers needed peace with the Indians of the interior;
the French did not scruple to stir up massacres and Indian warfare. All wars are expensive, the French and Indian war particularly so. After defeating the French, the British were put to the protracted expense of building frontier defenses. Although the British were anxious to attract English-speaking colonists who would defend America for England, it was obvious some of the settlers were becoming very rich. Surely these people could not object to paying taxes for their own defense. In retrospect, it seems remarkably naive of the British to think it was that easy. Americans did not want to pay taxes because they did not want to pay taxes. They settled on the stance of "No taxation without representation" and like Franklin and the Penn family many really believed in it. That slogan was particularly effective after it became apparent that Parliament wasn't about to give remote colonists reciprocal power in Parliament to interfere with affairs in the British Isles. With Parliament adamantly refusing to dilute its own power, "No taxation without representation" was a neat rhetorical box which meant, "No taxation." Contemporary English historians now throw up their hands in despair that so few members of George III's government had Burke's vision or even the normal wiles of diplomacy. But that understates the hidden political agenda. Parliament just pushed ahead with fairly nominal taxes, but they did so to curtail the independence of colonial legislatures.
The Stamp Act of 1764. It could be argued that Navigation Acts nothing new; earlier versions were first passed in 1651, intended to thwart Dutch trading. They prohibited foreign trade with the British home islands. After fifty years in 1703 similar restraints were extended to trade with the colonies, particularly molasses in the Caribbean area. No outcry was made as these restraints, aimed at retaining the Britishness of British colonies, were occasionally modified and extended over the next sixty years.
After a century in 1764, however, the Stamp Act was passed, producing modest revenue but imposing a crippling set of headaches by requiring special papers to transact private business. The uproar was enormous and legitimate, focused mostly on the tangle of red tape needlessly imposed. By shifting taxation from trade to paperwork transactions, suspicions were plausible that the Ministry was scheming something obscure. The Stamp Act was hastily repealed, even before Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Penn recognized its unpopularity, and were still to some extent defending it in 1766. Franklin apparently saw the Stamp Act as an opportunity to appoint his friends as stamp agents. Local uproar in Pennsylvania was apparently orchestrated by William Bradford, who in addition to having been Franklin's former competitor in the printing business, was the owner of the London Coffee House at Front and Market. No other prominent colonial leader seems to have been involved in the agitation, and it is remotely conceivable that uproar originated with Bradford alone. More likely, Bradford was merely an opportunist in a genuinely popular uprising. With the familiar maneuvering characteristic of politicians, Franklin took popular credit for defeating the Stamp Act with some skillful criticism of it, while John Penn gained credit with the King for representing Pennsylvania's relative calm about it, compared with other colonies. In Pennsylvania at least, the uproar quickly subsided after repeal of the Act.
The Townshend Navigation Acts of 1768.In 1766 the Grenville Ministry was replaced by that of Rockingham, then soon by Pitt, who were anxious to disavow the unpopular Stamp Act, but nevertheless needed colonial revenue, and needed a few unpleasant laws to prove that Parliament could not be intimidated by colonial squawking.
Charles Townshend, the brilliant, vindictive, Chancellor of the Exchequer then proposed taxes on glass, painter's lead, paper, painter's colors, and tea. The underlying political purpose of these taxes was to provide revenue for paying British colonial administrators directly, rather than depend on the Colonial legislatures to pay them. The Legislatures had long played a game of withholding payments, sometimes even the salaries of Judges and Royal Governors, when they disapproved of projects devised in London. The very predictable uproar provoked by the Townshend Acts propelled John Dickinson into prominence with a pamphlet called Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer, which popularized the idea of "nonimportation", essentially a boycott of British products. Unintentional nonimportation was in fact the effect of the laws, clogging the ports with paralyzed trade goods. Rather than Dickinson's lofty principles, a little-noticed act of 1764, prohibiting the printing of paper money, paralyzed trade. There simply was not enough available coinage to pay these taxes, which finally pushed the primitive transaction system beyond its capabilities. From the viewpoint of modern economics, a heavy unbalance between imports and exports could not be rebalanced by flows of capital. The disastrous Townshend Acts were mostly repealed in 1770, but the British government was getting in deeper and deeper, discrediting itself at every turn. To retreat but still save face, they repealed all the taxes except the one on tea.
The Tea Act of 1772. To a certain degree, the uproar over the face-saving tax modifications on tea was a pretext for confused but radical colonists who were spoiling for a fight about difficulties they tended to personalize. The act actually lowered the effective taxes on tea, and at first Whig radicals were hard put to find a reason for outrage about lowering the price of tea. However, Bradford and his London Coffee House cronies (Mifflin, Thomson) were imaginative, and soon stampeded a mob scene in Philadelphia, where for a time the populace had seen nothing to get worked up over. Rush and Dickinson joined the chorus; public feeling was stirred to a frenzy not easily reversed.
The really substantive issues involved were created by several years of Townshend Duties and other forms of import restriction. Laws to ensure the Britishness of British colonies created pleasant opportunities for colonial artisans and craftsmen, difficult hardships for importers. But these dislocations, whether welcome or unwelcome, firmly exposed the underlying truth that they caused all colonists to pay higher prices for goods. Adam Smith was not to publish his Wealth of Nations until 1776, so in this case the proof preceded the theory. The colonists were effectively asked to pay higher prices for everything, in order to increase Britishness and to billet soldiers they could not command. Once that cat was out of the bag, attitudes could never be the same. On the English side of the ocean, the question was framed as colonist unwillingness to contribute to the cost of their own defenses. The two slanted perceptions hardened to the point where arrogance confronted defiance, suggesting combat to both of them.
In the case of tea, taxes and import restrictions were intended to promote English tea over Dutch tea; in fact, they stimulated smuggling. Smuggling grew to a point that vast quantities of tea were stranded in the warehouses of the British East India Company, and trade balances of the British Empire were undermined. By reducing taxes, Parliament made East India tea cheaper than smuggled tea. Going perhaps one step too far, middle-men in the tea import business were cut out of the loop by appointing favored direct agents. In Philadelphia, those were Henry Drinker and Thomas Wharton. Bradford and his group immediately set about intimidating these merchants with threats to burn them out, and the sea captains who worked for them, with threats of tar and feathers. The age of Reason was leaving Reason behind.
|King George III|
Combatants in a war often personalize the enemy in a single person. In 1776 the American colonists blamed it all on King George III. The British might have picked Sam Adams or Thomas Paine. Things are of course always vastly complicated in the affairs of great nations. Economics and national power are strong forces, as are culture, religion, and the accidents of geography and history. But when matters teeter on the edge of a cliff, insignificant pests can occasionally start an avalanche.
Consider first Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of England's exchequer in 1768. Townshend didn't particularly want the job, hoping instead for the Admiralty. None of the political power brokers particularly wanted to give him the job, ultimately regarding it as the place he could do least harm. He might have had no less an advisor than Adam Smith, who was the tutor of his son, but Smith's letters to him are so servile that it seems unlikely he would urge free trade to such a headstrong merchantilist employer. It is intiguing to speculate this strange association might have sharpened Smith's opinions in the Wealth of Nations which app
Townshend had been a problem all his life. His mother was brilliant, and notoriously promiscuous. He and his father exchanged 2000-word letters explaining to each other how the other was completely wrong. Charles was witty, eloquent and charming when he wanted to be, and he married an enormously wealthy woman. After that, his family had no hold on him, and they rarely spoke to each other. The same charm and arrogance can be perversely effective in politics, so other politicians often just had to put up with him. But as politicians do, they roasted him in their letters and private conversations. His political opponent, Edmund Burke, was perhaps the most gentle critic when he observed, "His actions... seem never to have been influenced by his most wonderful abilities." Opponents, of course, welcome deficiencies in their enemies, while exasperated political allies can be the most scathing about team members who injure the party with misbehavior. Adam Smith referred to his employer as someone "who passes for the cleverest fellow in England." Chase Price described him as "utterly unhinged". Horace Walpole: "nothing is luminous compared with Charles Townshend: he drops down dead in a fit, has a resurrection, thunders in the Capitol, confounds the Treasury bench, laughs at his own party, is laid up the next day, and overwhelms the Duchess [of Argyll, his mother-in-law] and the good women that go to nurse him!" The final assessment of his biographer Sir Lewis Namier was "...illustrations of Charles Townshend's character can be picked out anywhere during his adult life. He did not change or mellow; nor did he learn by experience; there was something ageless about him; never young, he remained immature to the end."
What matters for contemporary American readers is Townshend's 14-year grievance against American legislatures which seem to have originated when he discovered the New York Legislature in 1754 up to its old tricks of refusing to provide funds for Royal initiatives it did not like. At the time, he was in his first public office, the Board of Trade and Plantations, and had written some highly arrogant orders to New York, making many high-handed and disdainful public asides to his friends, including his wish to have the Assembly cut out of appropriations except for token approval of them. He was young, so his wiser party colleagues simply deflected him. But by 1767 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, a brilliant speaker, and no doubt had collected many political chits to be cashed in. The Townshend Taxes were enacted, his underlying personal grievances were well known, the colonial assemblies could see it meant big trouble.
Although almost no one could match Townshend for bizarre behavior, in Philadelphia at Front and Market Streets, there was another difficult personality, named William Bradford. As a printer and newspaper publisher, Bradford must have been a person of some note in a town of thirty thousand, but it is difficult to find a portrayal of him, and notes about his personal life are comparatively skimpy. We do know that he was a member of a family of newspaper printers, including grandfather, uncle, and son, all of whom had experienced official prosecution for defiance of government. His grandfather, also named William Bradford, is said to have had Quaker affiliation, but it is not particularly prominent in accounts of him, while almost no mention of Quaker affiliation is made of the rest of the family. Grandfather William had a notable apprentice named John Peter Zenger, who was prosecuted for libel against the Royal Governor of New York, defended in a famous trial by the Philadelphia Lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who established the principle that the truth is not a libel. We can rather safely presume that the younger William Bradford had grown up in an environment of hostility to authority, aggravated but not necessarily caused by some rather plain persecutions by authority. It may even have been specific hostility to British authority, since in 1754 young Bradford began publication of a specifically anti-British paper, The Weekly Advertiser. It is interesting to note that its principle competitor was a pro-British paper printed by Ben Franklin. Somewhere along the line, Bradford became head of the Sons of Liberty, clearly marking him as strongly anti-British, probably well before the Townshend Acts.
Bradford established the London Coffee House at Front and Market Streets in Philadelphia. That might seem a strange sideline for a printer, until you reflect that the location was right beside the waterfront, especially the Arch Street warf. Newspapers in those days almost never had professional reporters, depending for their content on gossip from visiting ships. A coffee shop near the waterfront would be an excellent place to hear the maritime news of the world, and possibly hear it sooner than competitors. The London Coffee House provided a place for bargaining and trade; the Maritime Exchange got its start there. It may or may not be significant that a main activity of the Exchange was to buy and sell slaves. It is sure that the Navigation Acts and the Townshend taxes on various imports were a central topic of angry discussion in a waterfront Coffee House from 1768 to 1776. Thus it is possible that Bradford was caught up in the excited opinions of his customers, but plenty of evidence of anti-British sentiment exists in his background to suppose he nursed a long-standing prejudice against the British government. Our most authoritative account of the events appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet of January 3, 1774, but the beginnings of the story were better related in the Pennsylvania Mercury of October 1, 1791, shortly after Bradford's death.
"After the Tax on Tea imported into America was reduced to 3d. per pound by the British Parliament, there appeared to be a general disposition in the colonies to pay it. In this critical situation of the Liberties of America, Mr. Bradford stopped two or three citizens of Philadelphia, who happened to be walking by the door of his house on Front-street, and stated to them the danger to which our country was exposed, by receiving, and paying the tax on, the tea. Many difficulties stared the gentlemen, to whom he spoke, in the face...; and it was particularly mentioned that the citizens of Philadelphia were tired out with town and committee meetings, and that it would be impossible to collect a sufficient number of them together, to make an opposition to the tea respectable and formidable. 'Leave that business to me(said Mr. Bradford),--I'll collect a town meeting for you--Prepare some resolves;--and,--they shall be executed.' The next evening he collected a few of such citizens who were heartily opposed to the usurpations of the British Parliament, who drew up some spirited resolutions to reject the dutied tea, and to send back the tea ship. These resolutions were adopted the Saturday following (October 16, 1773), by a large and respectable town meeting at which the late Dr. Thomas Cadwalader (a decided Whig) presided. The same resolutions were immediately afterwards (November 5, 1773) adopted, nearly word for word, by a town meeting in Boston, where a disposition to receive the tea had become general, from an idea that opposition to it would not be seconded or supported by any of the other colonies. The events (December 16, 1773) which followed the adoption of these resolutions in the town of Boston are well known. However great the merit and sufferings of that town were in the beginning of the war, it is a singular fact, and well worthy of record in the history of the events which produced the American Revolution, the First act in that great business originated in Philadelphia, and that the First scene in it originated with Mr. William Bradford."
Written within a few days of the events, the January 3, 1774 Pennsylvania Packet is more detailed. In particular, the grievance is stated to be "...the pernicious project of the East India Company, in sending Tea to America, while it remains subject to a duty, and the Americans at the same time confined by the strongest prohibitory laws to import it only from Great Britain." While it is not easy to find a quotation capsulizing the British response, it would be something to the effect that the Tea Act was in fact a face-saving gesture which reduced the price of tea for the colonists, and was received as such by most of them, until smugglers of Dutch tea now faced the same surplus of unsold tea which had nearly bankrupted the East India Company after the colonies resorted to non-importation. Both arguments contain a certain amount of spin, but side-by-side, they contained sufficient reasonableness to permit peaceful resolution. To go on with the details:
"Upon the first advice of this measure, a general dissatisfaction was expressed, that, at a time when we were struggling with this oppressive act, and an agreement subsisting not to import Tea while subject to the duty, our subjects in England should form a measure so directly tending to enforce the act and again embroil us with our parent state. When it was also considered that the proposed mode of disposing of the Tea tended to a monopoly, ever odious in a free country, a universal disapprobation showed itself throughout the city. A public meeting of the inhabitants was held at the State-House on the th October, at which great numbers attended, and the sense of the city was expressed in [the following] eight resolves:"
which we will divide into three sections for commentary. Resolves 1,2, and 5 can be said to be a protest against the Tea Act. While the language is a little high-flown, such a protest would be considered a normal exercise of free speech:
"1. That the disposal of their own property is the inherent right of freemen;that there can be no property in that which another man can, of right, take from us without our consent: that the claim of Parliament to tax America is, in other words, a claim of right to levy contributions on us at pleasure. "2. That the duty imposed by Parliament upon Tea landed in America is a tax on the Americans, or levying contributions upon them without their consent. "5. That the resolution lately enered into by the East India Company to send out their Tea to America , subject the payment of duties on its being landed here, is an open attempt to inforce this ministerial plan, and a violent attack upon the liberties of America. "
Resolutions 3. and 4. are accusations of a deeper plot. The colonists do not want to be taxed by the British Government directly, but prefer to tax themselves so that final payment to colonial officials must pass through colonial control. Unspoken, of course, is the creation of an ability to thwart implementation of unwelcome directives from London:
"3. That the express purpose for which the tax is levyed on the Americans, namely for the support of government, administration of justice, and defence of his Majesty's dominions in America, has a direct tendency to render Assemblies useless, and to introduce arbitrary government and slavery. "4. That a virtuous and steady opposition to this ministerial plan of governing America is absolutely necessary to preserve even the shadow of liberty, and is a duty which every freeman in America owes to his country, to himself, and to his posterity".
Finally, in the tradition of the writing of resolutions, come the so-called Resolves, the solution to the problem which you wish your audience to agree to. These concrete actions are found in resolutions 6, 7, and 8. The British could be expected to be offended, since the Resolves do not acknowledge the right of Parliament to impose the tax, or humbly petition that they reconsider. Rather, they assume the role of sovereign government themselves, effectively declaring the colonies would punish anyone who obeyed the Law, would coerce those who are charged by Parliament to implement the Law, and would cause those appointed by Parliament to do this work, to resign or else the peace would be disturbed by colonial enforcement of these 'suggestions':
"6. That it is the duty of every American to oppose this attempt. "7. That whoever shall, directly or indirectly, countenance this attempt, or in any wise aid or abet in the unloading,receiving and vending the Tea sent, or to be sent out by the East India Company, while it remains subject to the payment of the duty here, is an enemy to his country. "8. That a Committee be immediately chosen to wait on these gentlemen, who, it is reported , are appointed by the East India Company to receive and sell said Tea, and request them, from a regard to their own character, and the peace and good order of the city and province, immediately to resign their appointment."
The thinly-veiled threats contained in these resolutions against anyone who disagreed were soon made more explicit when the tea ship actually arrived at the mouth of the Delaware around December 23, 1773, by public posters to the Delaware River pilots and Captain Ayers of the incoming Tea ship, signed by THE COMMITTEE FOR TARRING AND FEATHERING. Cards were printed up for the public to distribute around the premises of James and Drinker, telling them to resign as sales agents for the Tea by writing a note, to be delivered to the London Coffee House -- William Bradford's place of business. A few shouts and the waving of a few torches would have been sufficient to indicate that the alternative was arson.
A month elapsed between the proclamation of the Philadelphia resolutions and the actual arrival of Captain Ayers in our harbor. Another tea ship had arrived at Boston in the meantime on December 16,1773. The Boston citizens had dressed themselves as Indians, and dumped the Boston Tea consignment into the harbor, proclaiming the same eight Philadelphia-written resolutions. But in Philadelphia, violence proved unnecessary. James and Drinker resigned their appointments as sales agents, the pilots were ready enough to impede passage, and Captain Ayers on December 27, 1773 meekly sailed his cargo of Tea back where it came from.
TWO things about George Washington continue to puzzle us. Why would the rich, aristocratic Virginia gentleman become a revolutionary? And, how could he or his backwoodsmen soldiers even imagine they could defeat the British, the greatest military force in the world? The following letter, written to his mother after the defeat of Braddock's army, shows his viewpoint at the age of 23, putting the British regular army in a very bad light, indeed.
"HONORED MADAM: As I doubt not but you have heard of our defeat, and, perhaps, had it represented in a worse light, if possible, than it deserves, I have taken this earliest opportunity to give you some account of the engagement as it happened, within ten miles of the French fort, on Wednesday the 9th instant.
"We marched to that place, without any considerable loss, having only now and then a straggler picked up by the French and scouting Indians. When we came there, we were attacked by a party of French and Indians, whose number, I am persuaded, did not exceed three hundred men; while ours consisted of about one thousand three hundred well-armed troops, chiefly regular soldiers, who were struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive. The officers behaved gallantly, in order to encourage their men, for which they suffered greatly, there being near sixty killed and wounded; a large proportion of the number we had.
"The Virginia troops showed a good deal of bravery, and were nearly all killed; for I believe, out of three companies that were there, scarcely thirty men are left alive. Captain Peyrouny, and all his officers down to a corporal, were killed. Captain Polson had nearly as hard a fate, for only one of his was left. In short, the dastardly behavior of those they call regulars exposed all others, that were inclined to do their duty, to almost certain death; and, at last, in despite of all the efforts of the officers to the contrary, they ran, as sheep pursued by dogs, and it was impossible to rally them.
"The General was wounded, of which he died three days after. Sir Peter Halket was killed in the field, where died many other brave officers. I luckily escaped without a wound, though I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me. Captains Orme and Morris, two of the aids-de-camp, were wounded early in the engagement, which rendered the duty harder upon me, as I was the only person then left to distribute the General's orders, which I was scarcely able to do, as I was not half recovered from a violent illness, that had confined me to my bed and a wagon for above ten days. I am still in a weak and feeble condition, which induces me to halt here two or three days in the hope of recovering a little strength, to enable me to proceed homewards; from whence, I fear, I shall not be able to stir till toward September; so that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you till then, unless it be in Fairfax... I am, honored Madam, your most dutiful son."
Two troubling questions persist long after the American Revolution has mostly faded into the past: Why was New England so much more rebellious than the rest of the colonies? And, whatever was George III thinking when he blundered into losing an empire? No doubt, he would have answered in a different, unreflective tone in 1776, but the following is what he had to say about it after the war was lost. He seems to emerge as a far more literate and reflective person than the colonists believed of him.
"America is lost! Must we fall beneath the blow? Or have we resources that may repair the mischief? What are those resources? Should they be sought in distant Regions held by precarious Tenure, or shall we seek them at home in the exertions of a new policy?
"The situation of the Kingdom is novel, the policy that is to govern it must be novel likewise, or neither adapted to the real evils of the present moment, or the dreaded ones of the future.
"For a Century past the Colonial Scheme has been the system that has guided the Administration of the British Government. It was thoroughly known that from every Country there always exists an active emigration of unsettled, discontented, or unfortunate People, who failing in their endeavours to live at home, hope to succeed better where there is more employment suitable to their poverty. The establishment of Colonies in America might probably increase the number of this class, but did not create it; in times anterior to that great speculation, Poland contained near 10,000 Scotch Pedlars; within the last thirty years not above 100, occasioned by America offering a more advantageous asylum for them.
"A people spread over an immense tract of fertile land, industrious because free, and rich because industrious, presently became a market for the Manufactures and Commerce of the Mother Country. An importance was soon generated, which from its origin to the late conflict was mischievous to Britain, because it created an expense of blood and treasure worth more at this instant, if it could be at our command, than all we ever received from America. The wars of 1744, of 1756, and 1775, were all entered into from the encouragements given to the speculations of settling the wilds of North America.
"It is to be hoped that by degrees it will be admitted that the Northern Colonies, that is those North of Tobacco, were in reality our very successful rivals in two Articles, the carrying freight trade, and the Newfoundland fishery. While the Sugar Colonies added above three millions a year to the wealth of Britain, the Rice Colonies near a million, and the Tobacco ones almost as much; those more to the north, so far from adding anything to our wealth as Colonies, were trading, fishing, farming Countries, that rivalled us in many branches of our industry, and had actually deprived us of no inconsiderable share of the wealth we reaped by means of the others. This compartative view of our former territories in America is not stated with any idea of lessening the consequence of a future friendship and connection with them; on the contrary it is to be hoped we shall reap more advantages from their trade as friends than ever we could derive from them as Colonies; for there is reason to suppose we actually gained more by them while in actual rebellion, and the common open connection cut off, than when they were in obedience to the Crown; the Newfoundland fishery taken into the Account, there is little doubt of it.
"The East and West Indies are conceived to be the great commercial supports of the Empire; as to the Newfoundland fishery time must tell us what share we shall reserve of it. But there is one observation which is applicable to all three; they depend on very distant territorial possessions, which we have little or no hopes of retaining from their internal strength, we can keep them only by means of a superior Navy. If our marine force sinks, or if in consequence of wars, debts, and taxes, we should in future find ourselves so debilitated as to be involved in a new War, without the means of carrying it on with vigour, in these cases, all distant possessions must fall, let them be as valuable as their warmest panegyrists contend.
"It evidently appears from this slight review of our most important dependencies, that on them we are not to exert that new policy which alone can be the preservation of the British power and consequence. The more important they are already, the less are they fit instruments in that work. No man can be hardy enough to deny that they are insecure; to add therefore to their value by exertions of policy which shall have the effect of directing any stream of capital, industry, or population into those channels, would be to add to a disproportion already an evil. The more we are convinced of the vast importance of those territories, the more we must feel the insecurity of our power; our view therefore ought not to be to increase but preserve them."
In short, King George III of England sounds like a thoughtful, insightful man. Not a heedless, vindictive power freak as portrayed by frenzied revolutionaries, the King expressed a pretty reasonable assessment of his colonies. What he most lacked was recognition that centralized if not one-man rule blocked growing expectations of greater self-rule; expectations propelled by an even bigger revolution, the Industrial Revolution. A Machiavelli or a Bismarck would have seen that Virginia mostly wanted access to Ohio land, while New England wanted maritime dominance; the Quaker colonies were quite satisfied with what they had. It would have been comparatively simple to play one region against another, giving each a little of what it wanted while encouraging cultural diversities which kept them jealous and separate. But His Majesty, yielding to the financial strains of the Seven Year War, and the urgings of his Teutonic mother, united thirteen of his colonies in common rebellion against taxes, military occupation, and high-handedness. The colonies did not want to unite; George III united them. Without unity, their rebellion had no chance.
Joseph Priestly became a close friend of Benjamin Franklin almost as soon as they met. Priestly was an Anglican clergyman who broke loose and formed the Unitarian Church, and meanwhile his scientific discoveries also entitle him to be called the Father of Chemistry. Franklin of course was the discoverer of electricity; it would be hard to be sure which of the two was more brilliant. In July, 1775, Franklin wrote the following letter to Priestly, which makes a trenchant case that the American colonies should, and would, break away from England. Since some legal authorities, following Lincoln's lead, maintain that Jefferson's manifesto "informs" the United States Constitution, it might be well to begin referring to this letter as an even clearer statement of the mind set of America's founding leaders.
|General Thomas Gage|
" Dear Friend (wrote Franklin),
"The Congress met at a time when all minds were so exasperated by the perfidy of General Gage, and his attack on the country people (i.e. Of Lexington and Concord), that propositions of attempting an accommodation were not much relished; and it has been with difficulty that we have carried another humble petition to the crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies; which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace, and so I conclude she has lost them for ever.
"She has begun to burn our seaport towns; secure, I suppose, that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind. She may doubtless destroy them all; but if she wishes to recover our commerce, are these the probable means? She must certainly be distracted; for no tradesman out of Bedlam ever thought of encreasing the number of his customers by knocking them on the head; or of enabling them to pay their debts by burning their houses.
"If she wishes to have us subjects and that we should submit to her as our compound sovereign, she is now giving us such miserable specimens of her government, that we shall ever detest and avoid it, as a complication of robbery, murder, famine, fire and pestilence.
"You will have heard before this reaches you, of the treacherous conduct to the remaining people in Boston, in detaining their goods, after stipulating to let them go out with their effects; on pretence that merchants goods were not effects; -- the defeat of a great body of his troops by the country people at Lexington; some other small advantages gained in skirmishes with their troops; and the action at Bunker's-hill, in which they were twice repulsed, and the third time gained a dear victory. Enough has happened, one would think, to convince your ministers that the Americans will fight, and that this is a harder nut to crack than they imagined.
"We have not yet applied to any foreign power for assistance; nor offered our commerce for their friendship. Perhaps we never may: Yet it is natural to think of it if we are pressed.
"We have now an army on our establishment which still holds yours besieged.
"My time was never more fully employed. In the morning at 6, I am at the committee of safety, appointed by the assembly to put the province in a state of defence; which committee holds till near 9, when I am at the congress, and that sits till after 4 in the afternoon. Both these bodies proceed with the greatest unanimity, and their meetings are well attended. It will scarce be credited in Britain that men can be as diligent with us from zeal for the public good, as with you for thousands per annum. -- Such is the difference between uncorrupted new states, and corrupted old ones.
"Great frugality and great industry are now become fashionable here: Gentlemen who used to entertain with two or three courses, pride themselves now in treating with simple beef and pudding. By these means, and the stoppage of our consumptive trade with Britain, we shall be better able to pay our voluntary taxes for the support of our troops. Our savings in the article of trade amount to near five million sterling per annum.
"I shall communicate your letter to Mr. Winthrop, but the camp is at Cambridge, and he has as little leisure for philosophy as myself. * * * Believe me ever, with sincere esteem, my dear friend, Yours most affectionately."
[Philadelphia, 7th July, 1775.]
|The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution,and The Birth of America, Steven Johnson ISBN: 978-1-59448-852-8||Amazon|
The Industrial Revolution had a lot to do with manufacturing cotton cloth by religious dissenters in the neighborhood of Manchester, England in the Eighteenth Century. What needs more emphasis is the remarkable fact that Quakerism and the Industrial Revolution both originated about the same time, in about the same place. True, the industrializing transformation can be seen in England as early as 1650 and as late as 1880. The Industrial Revolution thus extended before Quakerism was even founded, as well as long after most Quakers had migrated to America. No Quaker names are much mentioned except perhaps for Barclay and Lloyd in banking and insurance, and Cadbury in candy. As far as local history in England's industrial midlands is concerned, the name mentioned most is Richard Arkwright, whose behavior, demeanor and beliefs were anything but Quaker.
It is instructive, however, to examine the nature of Arkwright's achievement.
He seems to have invented nothing, stealing the patents and ideas of others freely, while disgustingly boasting about his rise from rags to riches. Some would say his skill was in organization, others would say he imposed an industrial dictatorship on a reluctant agricultural community. He grew rich by coercing orphans, convicts and others he obviously disdained into long, unpleasant, boring and unwelcome labor that largely benefited him, not them. In the course of his strivings he probably forced Communism to be invented. It is no accident that Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto while in Manchester visiting his friend Friedrich Engels, representing reasonably well the probable attitudes of Arkwright's employees. What Arkwright recognized and focused on was that enormous profits could flow from bringing piecework weaving into factories where machines could do most of the work. Until his time, clothing was mostly made by piecework at home, with middlemen bringing it all together. The trick was to make clothing cheaper by making a lot of it, and making a bigger profit from a lot of small profits. Since the main problem was that peasants intensely disliked indoor confinement around dangerous machines, the industrial revolution in the eyes of Arkwright and his ilk translated into devising ways to tame such semi-wild animals into submission. For their own good.
Distinctive among the numerous religious dissenters in the region, the Quakers taught that it was an enjoyable experience to sit indoors in quiet contemplation. Their children were taught to submit to it at an early age, and their elders frequently exclaimed that it was a blessing when everyone remained quiet, enjoying the silence. Out of the multitude of religious dissenters in the first half of the Seventeenth century, three main groups eventually emerged, the Quakers, the Presbyterians, and the Baptists. Only the Quakers taught that silence was productive and enjoyable; the Calvinist sects leaned toward the idea that sitting on hard English oak was good for the soul, training and discipline was what kept 'em in line.
The Quaker idea of fun through day dreaming was peculiarly suitable for the other important feature of the Industrial Revolution that Arkwright and his type were too money-centered to perceive. If workers in a factory were accustomed to sit for hours, thinking about their situation, someone among them was bound to imagine some small improvement to make life more bearable. If such a person was encouraged by example to stand up and announce his insight, eventually the better insights would be adopted for the benefit of all. Two centuries later, the Japanese would call this process one of continuous quality improvement from within the Virtuous Circle. In other cultures, academics now win professional esteem by discovering "win-win behavior", which displaces the zero sum, or win/lose route to success. The novel insight here was that it has become demonstrably possible to prosper without diminishing the prosperity of others. In addition, it was particularly fortunate that many Quaker inhabitants of the Manchester region happened to be watch makers, or artisans of similar trades that easily evolved into the central facilitators of the new revolution -- becoming inventors, machine makers and engineers.
The power of this whole process was relentless, far from limited to cotton weaving. When Charles Babbage sufficiently contemplated the punched-cards carrying the simple instructions of the knitting machines, he made an intellectual leap to the underlying concept of the tabulating machine. Using what were later called IBM cards, he had the forerunner of the stored-program computer. There were plenty of Arkwrights getting rich in the meantime, and plenty of Marxists stirring up rebellion with the slogan that behind every great fortune is a great crime. But the quiet folk were steadily pushing ahead, relentlessly refining the industrial process through a belief in welcoming the suggestions of everyone.
|American Philosophical Society|
Jay Robert Stiefel of of the Friends Advisory Board to the Library of the American Philosophical Society entertained the Right Angle Club at lunch recently, and among other things managed a brilliant demonstration of what real scholarship can accomplish. It's hard to imagine why the Vaux family, who lived on the grounds of what is now the Chestnut Hill Hospital and occasionally rode in Bentleys to the local train station, would keep a book of receipts of their cabinet maker ancestor for nearly three hundred years. But they did, and it's even harder to see why Jay Stiefel would devote long hours to puzzling over the receipts and payments for cabinets and clock cases of a 1720 joiner. Somehow he recognized that the shop activities of a wilderness village of 5000 residents encoded an important story of the Industrial Revolution, the economic difficulties of colonies, and the foundations of modern commerce. Just as the Rosetta stone told a story for thousands of years that no one troubled to read, John Head's account book told another one that sat unnoticed on that library shelf for six generations.
The first story is an obvious one. Money in colonial days was mainly an entry in everybody's account book; today it is mainly an entry in computers. In the intervening three centuries coins and currency made an appearance, flourished for a while as the tangible symbol of money, and then declined. Although Great Britain did not totally prohibit paper money in the colonies until 1775, in John Head's day, from 1718 to 1754, paper money was scarce and coins hard to come by. Because it was so easy to counterfeit paper money on the crude printing presses of the day, paper money was always questionable. Meanwhile, the balance of trade was so heavily in the direction of the colonies that the balance of payments was toward England. What few coins there were, quickly disappeared back to England, while local colonial commerce nearly strangled. The Quakers of Philadelphia all maintained careful books of account, and when it seemed a transaction was completed, the individual account books of buyer and seller were "squared". The credit default swap "crisis" of 2008 could be said to be a sharp reminder that we have returned to bookeeping entries, but have badly neglected the Quaker process of squaring accounts. As the general public slowly acquires computer power of its own, it is slowly recognizing how far the banks, telephone companies and department stores have wandered from routine mutual account reconciliation.
|John Head's Account Book|
From John Head's careful notations we learn it was routine for payment to be stretched out for months, but no interest was charged for late payment and no discounts were offered for ready money. It would be another century before it became routinely apparent that interest was the rent charged for money and the risk of intervening inflation, before final payment. In this way, artisans learned to be bankers.
And artisans learned to be merchants, too. In the little village of Philadelphia, chairs became part of the monetary system. In bartering cabinets for money, John Head did not make chairs in his shop at 3rd and Mulberry (Arch Street) but would take them in partial payment for a cabinet, and then sell the chairs for money. Many artisans made single components but nearly everyone was forced into bartering general furniture. Nobody was paid a salary. Indentured servants, apprenticeships trading labor for training, and even slavery benignly conducted, can be partially seen as efforts to construct an industrial society without payrolls. Everybody was in daily commerce with everybody else. Out of this constant trading came the efficiency step for which Quakers are famous: one price, no haggling.
One other thing jumps out at the modern reader from this book of account. No taxes. When taxes came, we had a revolution.
|Mercantilism to Americans|
Whatever mercantilism was supposed to mean can be debated by captive college students; mercantilism to Americans is and was just a bad thing having to do with economics, mentioned only when the speaker is searching for an epithet. Our present understanding of the mercantilist term is that brutal government action, even war, was employed to benefit favored citizen merchants, while the economics of a whole nation of consumers was subverted toward enhancing state power. All of this rapacity was for the betterment of one nation at the expense of its neighbors, and at the expense of its colonies. The surprisingly vague but more modern term of fascism is often substituted, to denote evil uses of government to promote the interest of a combined military and industrial elite, to the general disadvantage of everyone else. Because so many opponents of mercantilism were upset about specific forms of mercantilist activity, Adam Smith is associated with the idea that mercantilism was the opposite of international free trade, and the American founding father are associated with the idea that mercantilism embodied everything we disliked about colonialism. Some prominent 18th Century leaders constructed a body of theory to defend mercantilism, and firmly established the idea that the whole approach was founded on long discredited sophistry. In recent times, the only reputable economist to defend parts of mercantilism was John Maynard Keynes, who approved of the idea of emphasizing third-world exports in order to assist developing countries into a modern economy. Whatever is the underlying idea behind this mercantilist idea that has caused so much trouble, and includes so many disconnected features?
Allow an amateur theory. In my view the fundamental misconception underlying mercantilism was the idea that economic relations between individuals and nations are a zero-sum game; what I gain must be at the expense of someone else's loss. Almost every child believes that, many or even most everyday transactions seem to confirm it, and vast multitudes of mankind believe it to the end of their days. But as part of the Industrial Revolution the counter-intuitive realization began to spread that cooperative behavior, within limits, could sometimes result in all participants becoming better off, harming no one. Perhaps it was even a universal idea. Adam Smith popularized the idea that when two parties freely participate in the free trade of a marketplace, each one can come away from the trade feeling better off; one party would rather have the goods, the other party would rather have the money, and they trade. Multiplied millions of times, the expansion of free trade would enrich whole nations, even the whole world. George Washington may not have understood all that, but he did know that England was injuring him with rules about insisting British subjects must conduct all foreign trade in British sailing vessels, must not manufacture locally, must do this, must not do that.
|John Maynard Keynes|
Exporting was good, importing was bad, manufacturing was to be concentrated in the mother country, consuming was to be discouraged -- what was the unifying theory behind all this? It would seem to have been the gold standard. Gold was durable, and its supply was limited. It had certain undeniable advantages, but its overall effect was to restrain industrial progress. If the economy is constantly expanding, but the supply of gold is relatively limited, the price or value of everything will go steadily down over time. In George Washington's time that was particularly irksome with regard to the value of his plantation, and his vast land holdings of Ohio land. It was also true of everything else that was reasonably durable. If everything is measured in gold, and gold is limited, then the accumulation of gold is ultimately the only way to accumulate wealth. The English nobility who were profiting from the system might not perceive it, but the colonists could perceive it in their bones. Small wonder that modern banking, economics and innovative finance took root in the American colonies. If not first, at least most vigorously. Small wonder we had a revolution men would die for, while the British were merely annoyed and mystified.
Vast areas of Asia, Africa and the Middle East are still committed to the idea that the only way to get rich is to steal from others; since everyone wants to get rich, everyone steals. Someone has reduced this idea to a simple game theory called the Prisoner's Choice. If two prisoners tattle on each other, both will be severely punished. If both prisoners refuse to testify, both will go free. If one tattles and the other remains mum, the tattler will go free and the loyal comrade will get hanged. Reduced to its simplest level in a series of repeated games, the theory states that it's better for everybody to cooperate most of the time, but you must be willing to play tit for tat if the other party cheats. Be cooperative as much as you can, but never forget to wallop a cheater, and then forgive him later so he can have a chance to play nice. Lots of people will think you are a sucker if you play nice, so unfortunately it is necessary to retaliate -- swiftly and painfully -- when someone cheats. Centuries of American history are explainable with this simple game theory.
And not just with tribesmen and Nazis. When Winston Churchill finally realized that the Bretton Woods Conference was going to mean the end of the British Empire, he was almost tearfully plaintive with his friend Frank Roosevelt, but he said he understood.
And six years later, when Churchill's protege Anthony Eden invaded Egypt over the Suez Canal, Dwight Eisenhower the hero of the Normandy Invasion that saved England, suddenly turned nasty. England would immediately abandon that invasion, or Eisenhower would foreclose on British debts and ruin them.
That was the end of British colonialism, and in a sense it was the final end of the Revolutionary War.
|Captain Parker, minuteman|
American schoolchildren today, and maybe a majority of Americans even at that time, have found it bewildering that we declared independence fifteen months after the battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, well after George Washington besieged the British in Boston, or Benedict Arnold dragged the captured cannons of Ticonderoga over the mountains to save the day. Just who started our Revolution, and why; and for that matter, when, have been at issue for a long time.
|Adams and Jefferson|
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged hot correspondence for fifty years along these lines. Adams was miffed that Jefferson claimed all the credit for a defiant public resolution they both had a hand in writing, when real men in Boston had been getting shot and killed for Liberty years earlier, and Admiral Howe's fleet had even set sail for Staten Island long before that Declaration was printed. To which scolding, might well be added that Abraham Lincoln reached back to "all men are created equal" when he wanted to find Constitutional justification for what was only 3/5 true in 1787, and not true at all on Virginia plantations in 1776. And, of course, was a phrase not echoed in the Constitution. Yes, John Adams had a point, and Thomas Jefferson had other points. But weren't they both in Philadelphia at the same time, working on the same document? Jefferson and Adams were rather probably raking over the coals of the bitter 1800 election, where Jefferson turned Adams out of the White House, and Adams wouldn't even stay around for appearance sake to attend the inauguration of his successor. On another level, they were both likely thinking about the Constitution more than the Declaration of Independence, anyway. Jefferson never liked the Constitution, had been in France when it was written, and preferred to submerge its precedence to a level of temporary revisions to the Declaration of Independence, which stressed unalienable human rights rather than a strengthened central government. It seems unfortunately true that politicians were introducing what is now called "spin". To the extent debate was heated rather than analytical, it could easily become immaterial whether 1774 was before or after 1776.
New England eased into rebellion with the Crown without a great deal of documentation of serious grievances; they must mostly be supposed. The fact that resentments were wide-spread lends substance to the idea that subjects of a remote monarchy had grown a little presumptuous, just as unsupervised Governors dispatched to rule them may have strutted authority unwisely. Successive generations of native-born colonists can be expected to have decreasing allegiance to the mother country, particularly after the need for protection from the French subsided, but irritation at quartering British troops persisted. Mercantilism is not intended to be fair; when imposed on foreigners there is more danger of provoking war, when imposed on colonists, appeals to patriotism are mocked as self-serving. Unfortunately, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, the two main leaders of Massachusetts dissension, were not terribly clear about economics, and Hancock was definitely involved in some smuggling. Doctor Joseph Warren was more precise, but unfortunately died rather early. We assume competition in fishing off Newfoundland, and dominance in West Atlantic maritime trade seemed paramount to a region somewhat unsuited to agriculture. The English civil war left vivid memories of how quarrels could get out of hand. More than anything else, it would seem likely the British ministry decided to become more authoritarian, at a time when the colonists were drifting toward feeling more independent. They tested each other, and matters got out of hand.
The Old Dominion of Virginia had an established landed aristocracy, better able than in Massachusetts to say what the ruling class wanted, and what the state was going to do. Tobacco had started to wear out the Virginia soil, and people like Washington were anxious to acquire land in Ohio. This was blocked by a British prohibition of white men settling to the west of the Proclamation Line of 1763 along the Appalachian watershed, a separation intended to reduce friction with the Indians, concentrate English settlements along the seaboard for mercantile reasons, and direct further English immigration to Florida and Canada to hold back Catholic influences. The effect of the Proclamation on Virginians was varied, amounting at the least to feeling they might just as well have lost the French and Indian War. The southern colonies were not in competition with England on manufacturing, but as agricultural exporters, were in frequent conflict with English merchants and bankers. Power and wealth were concentrated in fewer hands in the South, so personalities played a larger role in pubic policy.
|Benjamin Franklin in the Cockpit|
The colonies were all growing rapidly, with a general sense that governance was getting cumbersome across a wide ocean. Benjamin Franklin was particularly ambitious for more level American versions of the United Kingdom, with Englishmen in the colonies of equal stature in Parliament and elsewhere. With skill, this could be the richest and most powerful nation on earth. As early as the Congress of Albany in 1754, Franklin was proposing a union of the colonies as a step toward full partnership with the British Isles in a transatlantic nation. He continued to pursue that sort of goal for twenty years. Variations of this idea were heard in Parliament. As a mechanism for riding the crest of the Industrial Revolution, this would have been a powerful arrangement for world domination, possibly but not necessarily including visions of world peace. In the Quaker colonies before 1774, Independence from England held little attraction, and merger with New England had less. After all, New England squabbles with Old England about Atlantic maritime trade brought attention to what most of it consisted of: rum and slaves. Philadelphia Quakers had rallied around John Woolman to see the evil of slavery, and had largely succeeded in abolishing it locally. And Philadelphia Quakers were well aware that Quaker Abraham Redwood of Newport, Rhode Island had devised the famous triangular trade of slaves, molasses and rum. Pressure had built up within Quakerism to expel Redwood when he refused to free his slaves, no matter that he was probably the largest philanthropist of the colonies. Before that, relations between the Puritans and Quakers had often been difficult. Quakers believed in freedom of religion for everybody; the Puritans hanged Quakers. The Congregationalists of Connecticut had actually invaded the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, three different times, the last of which was when Washington's army was wintering in Valley Forge. Furthermore, if we must attribute everything to economics, there was no land hunger in Pennsylvania. The Penn family, almost exclusively devoted to selling land, owned thirty million acres; by the time of the Revolution, they had only sold five million. The Penn family got along just fine with the Monarchy. The grievances up in New England were not entirely clear. Perhaps the Puritans should learn how to settle their differences in a more peaceful, and effective, way.
|Admiral Howe's Fleet|
And then, Admiral Howe with a huge fleet of warships, and his brother General Howe with a huge army, appeared at the beaches of New Jersey. They had orders to impose disciplined governance on every one of the colonies, right away.
|Grand Union Flag|
THERE are a number of supermarkets in Philadelphia called Grand Union Stores, but the grocery conglomerate was founded in 1872. That Union was the Northern side in The American Civil War, and it is reported that life-sized replicas of Abraham Lincoln were once a common feature in the stores. Much earlier than that, the Grand Union was a term that meant the first American national flag, adopted in 1775, and created by a Philadelphia milliner, Margaret Manny. It was, however, quite similar to the flag of the British East India Company, and the Grand Union they were both talking about was the Union of England and Scotland of 1707. The jack of the Grand Union flag, soon to be replaced with a ring of thirteen stars, represented the crosses of England and Scotland, superimposed. When Northern Ireland joined the United Kingdom, the cross of Ireland was superimposed, to give the present form of the Union Jack. In 1775, considerable colonial sentiment still hoped that hostilities would achieve a status for America along the lines of the other members of the United Kingdom.
|"Betsy Ross" Flag|
Although the number of stripes in the national flag briefly increased to fifteen at the time of admission of Kentucky and Vermont, stripes soon reverted to thirteen to symbolize the original thirteen states. After that single exception, only the stars in the jack increased to match the number of current states.
The early use of the Grand Union Flag is in some dispute, but it may possibly have been used by George Washington in the various battles around Boston and Charlestown. It was most certainly flown by John Paul Jones on his ship the Alfred . Because of its resemblance to the flag of the nation we were fighting to overthrow, it is understandable that there would soon be a desire to change it. That is what happened in 1777, although just who first had the idea is still open to dispute and myth making.
America has had three flag acts:
|After Vt, Ky, 15 Stars, 15 Stripes|
The Flag Act of June 14, 1777 was passed by the Second Continental Congress (under the Articles of Confederation, of course. June 14 is now called Flag Day.) "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation."
The Flag Act of January 13, 1794 (1 Stat. 341) An Act making an alteration in the Flag of the United States. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, That from and after the first day of May, Anno Domini, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-five, the flag of the United States, be fifteen stripes alternate red and white. That the Union be fifteen stars, white in a blue field.
The Flag Act of April 4, 1818 (3 Stat. 415) An Act to establish the flag of the United States. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress Assembled, That from and after the fourth day of July next, the flag of the United States be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white: that the union be twenty stars, white in a blue field. And be it further enacted, That on the admission of every new state into the Union, one star be added to the union of the flag; and that such addition shall take effect of the fourth day of July then next succeeding such admission.
|Proprietors of West Jersey|
In 1976, the bicentennial birthday celebration of the Declaration of Independence contained two major exhibits of its conceptual origins. Mr. H. Ross Perot of Texas loaned his copy of the 1215 Magna Carta, and the Proprietors of West Jersey loaned their 1677 original of William Penn's Concessions and Agreements to the colonists of New Jersey. The purpose of the exhibit was to emphasize the historical origins of the concepts within the Declaration, but even the language of the Concessions is remarkably similar, quite evidently lifted by Jefferson when he was writing. On one point, Penn had the better of Jefferson; he correctly wrote about inalienable rights, while somehow Jefferson gave us unalienable ones.
The matter came up recently at a Socrates meeting of the Right Angle Club, where at least one member felt there was no such thing as a natural right, while others wavered. In discussing the rights which the Creator, William Penn and/or Thomas Jefferson may have given us, the various contexts must be held in mind. At the time of declaring our intention to sever relations with Britain's King, there was no Constitution to refer to as a source, and it was impolitic to assert the rights had been given by English kings, like King John. Therefore, the language cleverly short-cuts around the divine right of kings to make a direct connection between the Creator and the colonists. William Penn on the other hand, was a real estate promoter, offering enticements and assurances to prospective colonists who were naturally fearful of risking their lives in sailboats, only to face the possible tyranny of a vassal king who might be even worse than the anointed one. Not only did Penn renounce any suggestion of a Royal role for himself, but went to considerable length describing the legally binding concessions and agreements he was offering. The right of trial by jury, for example, became a right to be punished only by a jury of twelve of one's neighbors. He wasn't talking to lawyers, he was making important distinctions very clear to laymen. These were not rights given by a Divinity who could be trusted, nor something which grew out of Mother Nature. They were the personal promises of William Penn, in personal legal jeopardy of the English courts if he reneged on them. He even had a ready answer for those who discovered religious language in legal documents -- the Quaker belief that, occasional appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, There is That of God, in every man.
|H. Ross Perot|
As a small side light of the Concessions document, it had long been housed in the little brick hut on Main Street in Burlington NJ, where the Proprietors of West Jersey keep their treasures. The obscurity of these papers was probably their best protection, but the risk of displaying them in Philadelphia at the centennial brought out the need to insure them, hence to appraise their value. The figure of four million dollars was kicked around. Ross Perot might have felt comfortable with this sort of expense as the natural cost of being a rare book collector, but it seemed highly unnatural to Quakers. Sometime afterward, the Surveyor General, William Taylor, was awakened by a call from Burlington neighbors that someone was trying to break in the roof to steal contents of the Proprietorship building. The burglars were unaware that underneath the shingles, the roof was actually made of concrete a foot thick. So the perps were frustrated in their aims, but Bill Taylor was greatly troubled by the implications, actually unable to sleep at night worrying about what was in his custody. So, in time the State of New Jersey constructed a suitable archives building, and the valuable documents were transferred up to Trenton. Time will tell what the Soprano State does with such a valuable possession, but at least the Quakers can now sleep at night.
|Tea Party Sticker|
The rise of the Tea Party movement in 2010 reopens a lifetime question in my mind. What was the American Revolutionary War all about; surely, a tax on tea isn't outrageous enough to go to war over, is it? It only aggravates curiosity to learn this particular law passed by the British Parliament, actually lowered the price of tea.
A somewhat different importance for the 21st Century is, of all the dozens or even hundreds of little civil wars that have popped up in the past two centuries, this American one seems to have had the biggest impact on the thoughts and behavior of the civilized world. The French Revolution comes close, but we meant to speak of persuasive influence on serious minds, not merely bloodiness and lasting grievance. Here are three suggestions, maybe four.
In retrospect, we can see the outlines of three major revolutions, coming together at the end of the 18th Century. The first is the Industrial Revolution, which had its beginnings in England around the city of Manchester. That was a region of major Quaker concentration, many of whom migrated to William Penn's social experiment in seeing what peace could do. The Industrial Revolution flourished in Great Britain far more readily than in France, and in a sense more than in America. But of the three major countries, America had the largest amount of unsettled land, and the greatest natural resources of the three major countries. America was able to think bigger and broader, necessarily requiring broad support from an immigrant population. Diversity was often later to prove a mixed blessing, but in the Industrial Revolution it was vital.
|Dissent, French Style|
The second major revolution taking place at that time concerned the place of property in the life of every citizen. Up until that time, the King owned all the land and could redistribute it to suit his political needs. What critically mattered was not who formerly owned the land, but rather what was the latest King's latest word on who owned it right now. The American system gravitated to the notion that when the King or any other owner sold the land, it was no longer his; we now think that's quite self-evident. Each successive owner can sell it to his neighbor or bequeath it to his heirs, and at that moment it is no longer his, either. This idea of private property spread throughout the world, but in America it was a clean sweep. Adopting the rather brutal rough justice of the frontier, the Indian prior ownership just didn't count. They had sided with the British in our revolution, and were insistently resistant to assimilation. And anyway, Pope Nicholas in the 13th Century had established the notion of first discovery, which applied to Christians, only, and so Indians didn't count. Fair or unfair, this was going to be the way it was, from that point forward from 1787 when the Constitution was enacted. The longer the situation lasted, the more unlikely it became that it would ever change. America had so much land and so little coinage, that land itself became a sort of monetary standard. The particular American advantage was there was so much land that early settlers and landed gentry could not monopolize it; from meaning land at first, property soon meant any valuable possession. No King, particularly not George III, was going to take this away from the whole population on this side of the Atlantic. England could do as it pleased with its land and its King. If we needed Independence to preserve a general right to hold private property, plenty of men were willing to die to achieve it. And the whole Western world soon followed our example.
The third revolution was the one you read about, Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and the Tea Act. That whole chain of events chronicles how America came to be Independent, but somehow fails to explain why we wanted Independence. The Industrial and the Property revolutions explain it better, but such theorizing would certainly mystify the Revolutionaries themselves.
And finally, one begins to wonder if we aren't toying with a reversion to the ideas underlying monarchy when we examine some currently widespread views. There's a notion going about that everybody owns everything, which if carried to an extreme means no one owns anything. When you can notice people who live on the 70th floor of a Manhattan apartment building, proclaiming a right to tell Alaskans whether or not they can drill for oil, you behold this monarchy of the many. And when you see prosperous educated adults shouting at rallies, you can see Alaskans for example want to tell New Yorkers to mind their own business. This land, they seem to say, isn't everybody's at all, it is mine.
It never really was entirely the King's, either. The King was a single person, sometimes a rather brutal one who wasn't likely to tolerate advice from his subjects. At times of crisis, somebody has to make a decision, any decision, and act on it. But most of the time, kings seemed to be in the position of that Czar. The one who said, "I don't rule Russia. Ten thousand clerks rule Russia."
|William Penn Holding his Charter|
William Penn was the largest private landowner in America, maybe the whole world. He owned all of Pennsylvania, with the states of Delaware and New Jersey sort of thrown in. Although he and his descendants tried actively to sell off his real estate from 1684 to 1783, they still held an unsold three fifths of it at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, which they were forced to sell to the state for about fifteen cents per acre. This bit of history partly explains both the strong feeling this is private, not communal, land despite the existence of 2.3 million acres of state forest system, which is affirmed right alongside the rather inconsistent feeling that raw land is somehow inexhaustible. Early settlers regarded the center of the state as poor farm land, particularly when compared with soil found in Lancaster and Dauphin Counties, or anticipated by settlers going to Ohio and Southern Illinois. A complimentary description is that glaciers descended to about the middle of Pennsylvania, denuding the northern half of topsoil which was then dumped on the southern part as the glaciers receded. Even today, farmers tend to avoid the northern region if they can, reciting the ancient advice from their fathers that "Only a Mennonite can make a go of it, around there."
So, lumbering had a century-long flurry in Central Pennsylvania, exhausting the trees and moving on. But that only related to the top layer of soil; beneath it lay anthracite in the East, and bituminous coal in Western Pennsylvania, supporting the steel industries of the two ends of the state with exuberant railroad development. Even today worldwide, hauling coal is the chief money-maker for railroads. The resulting availability of rail transport promotes the location of heavy industry near coal regions; the 20th Century decline of coal demand ultimately hurried the decline of heavy industry in the state by impairing the railroads.
Beneath all this lie the aquifers, porous caverns of fresh water. And beneath that, largely unsuspected for two centuries, lie the sedementary deposits of a huge inland sea, compressed into petroleum which evaporates into natural gas. All of this is held by huge deposits of semi-porous shale rock, now mostly 8000 feet deep, stretching from Canada to Texas and called the Marcellus shale formation. If it can be economically recovered, there is more natural gas than in Arabia, and there is a similar formation along the near side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, stretching up to the Athabasca tar sands in Canada. There is another similar formation in France underneath Paris. No doubt, we will find the whole world has similar huge deposits for which the main problem has always been: how do you get it out?
There's another question, of course, of who owns it. Those who clearly do not own it maintain that everyone owns it. In the western world, most particularly in America, it is our firm belief that if you live on top of it, you own it. Since it is expensive to extract, quarrels like this are usually settled by purchasing mineral rights from the surface owner, who generally could not possibly extract it by himself. Those who assert they have a conflicting right to it because it belongs to everyone, can expect belligerent resistance. At the present time when America faces a critical fifteen year period of dwindling oil supply, ultimately relieved by perfecting alternative energy sources, there is too little time to achieve consensus for any other governance theory. The problem which could possibly gain enough traction to interfere, is the issue of potential damage to others which might result from the extraction of this subsurface treasure. Because of the apparent urgency of decision to extract or go elsewhere to extract, the best we can hope for is some fairly rough justice.
Generally speaking, creditors hate inflation and favor a gold standard because they fear debtors -- who outnumber them at the polls -- will dishonor their debts by inflating the currency. And debtors generally are rather serene about the risk of inflation, for the same reason in reverse. Since governments are almost invariably debtors, the combination of government and debtors on the side of promoting inflation represents a dishearteningly strong force for creditors to combat. It is plain for everyone to see that inflation has been steadily moving ahead. But it is something for everyone to ponder that leaving creditors with only one recourse is almost certain to translate that particular recourse into action. Creditors will raise interest rates in anticipation of inflation, and the economy will suffer for debtors as well as everyone else.
So, hard-money advocates like the Paul family of Texas have been rather nonplussed to discover that Federal Judges have handed them in 2010 a very effective weapon they had long overlooked. It should be no surprise that it came from that direction; judges are long accustomed to looking backward to the historical origins of the laws they are charged with interpreting. In this case, the defining statement is found in the Declaration of Independence.
Parenthetically, conservatives are reluctant to include the Declaration in an explanation of the Constitution, since it is plainly true the Constitution was written to correct the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, which was much more closely defined by the circumstances of the Declaration. The almost immediate response to any such logical jump over the Constitution, particularly those of Abraham Lincoln, is to thump the maxim that The Declaration of Independence is not Law. And it isn't; it's just in this case it makes a concise statement of a major reason we were offended by the King of England:
"He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries."
Note the operative phrase dependent on his will alone , which takes us back to the Magna Carta, where even the King must obey the Law. If judges are the umpires, it isn't in accord with deeply felt British culture that the King could force the umpires to favor his wishes in their official decisions, by threatening punishment on their persons. No, a thousand times no. Anyone can see that.
Furthermore, the determination of underlying intent is so difficult to prove, and so easy to deny, that it is scarcely mentioned in debate. If two motives seem possible, the other party will assert the high-sounding one and deny the ulterior one. The offended party will instinctively suspect the reverse, and will brush aside any protestations to the contrary. Since that is bound to happen, please skip the preliminaries and get on with the evidence. So it is in this case; any reduction in judge's salary is treated like an attempt to influence official decisions. The Administration maintains a reduction of Federal judge salaries is necessary for budgetary reasons. Please don't insult my intelligence that way. You aren't allowed to reduce the salaries of judges for any reason.
From this rather easy position to take, it is only a short step to say that refusing to raise judge salaries during an inflation is a reduction of salary in real terms, after adjusting for inflation. Your paper money is phoney; I want to preserve my purchasing power. Your refusal to adjust for inflation is even more clearly a salary reduction, since the link to gold was severed during the Nixon and Johnson administrations. We are not on anything remotely resembling a gold standard; we are on a monetary standard which is by law adjusted to inflation, and just about nothing else. Hubert Humphrey may have thought he was creating a loophole by mandating concern with unemployment, but just try to convince the judges of the Supreme Court of that one.
And so, it seems predictable that Judge Beer of the Eastern District of Louisiana, and his fellow judges, will achieve an effective gold standard for Federal Judges if they have the fortitude to tough it out. After that it gets harder, Congressman Paul. You have to push the concept that what is fair for Federal Judges is fair for everyone else. You should assume that judges will vote in their own favor, and therefore reasonably assume that the public will vote in its own favor, too. If that be treason, said Patrick Henry, make the most of it.
"We have just received the copy of an Act of the British Parliament passed in the present session whereby the town of Boston is treated in a manner the most ignominious, cruel, and unjust. The Parliament have taken upon them, from the representations of our governor and other persons inimical to and deeply prejudiced against the inhabitants, to try, condemn, and by an Act to punish them, unheard; which would have been in violation of natural justice even if they had an acknowledged jurisdiction. They have ordered our port to be entirely shut up, leaving us barely so much of the means of subsistence as to keep us from perishing with cold and hunger; and it is said that [a] fleet of British ships of war is to block up our harbour until we shall make restitution to the East India Company for the loss of their tea, which was destroyed therein the winter past, obedience is paid to the laws and authority of Great Britain, and the revenue is duly collected. This Act fills the inhabitants with indignation. The more thinking part of those who have hitherto been in favour of the measures of the British government look upon it as not to have been expected even from a barbarous state. This attack, though made immediately upon us, is doubtless designed for every other colony who will not surrender their sacred rights and liberties into the hands of an infamous ministry. Now therefore is the time when all should be united in opposition to this violation of the liberties of all. Their grand object is to divide the colonies. We are well informed that another bill is to be brought into Parliament to distinguish this from the other colonies by repealing some of the Acts which have been complained of and ease the American trade; but be assured, you will be called upon to surrender your rights if ever they should succeed in their attempts to suppress the spirit of liberty here. The single question then is, whether you consider Boston as now suffering in the common cause, and sensibly feel and resent the injury and affront offered to here. If you do (and we cannot believe otherwise), may we not from your approbation of our former conduct in defense of American liberty, rely on your suspending your trade with Great Britain at least, which it is acknowledged, will be a great but necessary sacrifice to the cause of liberty and will effectually defeat the design of this act of revenge. If this should be done, you will please to consider it will be, though a voluntary suffering, greatly short of what we are called to endure under the immediate hand of tyranny.
"We desire your answer by the bearer; and after assuring you that, not in the least intimidated by this inhumane treatment, we are still determined to maintain to the utmost of our abilities the rights of America, we are, gentlemen,
"Your friends and fellow countrymen."
|Paul Revere & The World He Lived In||Amazon|
Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer under King George III in 1766-67, had a reputation for abrasively witty behavior, in addition to which he did carry a grudge against American colonial legislatures for circumventing his directives when earlier he had been in charge of Colonial Affairs. His most despised action against the Colonies, the Stamp Act, seems to have been only a small part of a political maneuver to frustrate an opposition vote of no confidence. The vote had taken the form of lowering the homeland land tax from four to three shillings (an action understood to be a vote of no confidence because it unbalanced the budget, which he then re-balanced by raising the money in the colonies.) The novelist Tobias Smollett, subsequently produced a scathing depiction of Townshend's heedless arrogance in Humphry Clinker, but at least in the case of the Stamp Act, its sting was more in its heedlessness of the colonies than vengeance against them. One can easily imagine the loathing this rich dandy would inspire in sobersides like George Washington and John Adams. After Townshend was elevated in the British cabinet, almost anything became a possibility, but it was a fair guess he might continue to satisfy old scores with the colonies. When King George's mother began urging the young monarch to act like a real king, Townshend was available to help. On the other hand the Whig party in Parliament had significant sympathy with the colonial position, as a spill-over from their main uproar about John Wilkes which need not concern us here. Vengefulness against the colonies was not widespread in the British government at the time, but colonists could easily believe any Ministry which appointed the likes of Townshend might well abuse power in other ways, before such time as the King or a more civilized Ministry could arrive on the scene to set things right. It was vexing that a man so heedless as Townshend could also carry so many grudges. Things did ease when Townshend suddenly died of an "untended fever", in 1767.
Whatever the intent of those Townshend Acts, one clear message did stand out: paper money was forbidden in the colonies. Virginia cavaliers might be more upset by the 1763 restraints on moving into the Ohio territories, and New England shippers might be most irritated by limits on manufactures in the colonies. But prohibiting paper money seriously damaged all colonial trade. Some merchants protested vigorously, some resorted to smuggling, and others, chiefly Robert Morris, devised clever work-arounds for the problems which had been created. Paper currency might be vexingly easy to counterfeit, but it was safer to ship than gold coins. In dangerous ocean voyages the underlying gold (which the paper money represents) remains in the vaults of the issuer even if the paper representing it is lost at sea. Theft becomes more complicated when money is transported by remittances or promissory notes, so a merchant like Morris would quickly recognize debt paper (essentially, remittance contracts acknowledging the existence of debt) as a way to circumvent such inconveniences. In a few months we would be at war with England, where adversaries blocking each other's currency would be routine. By that time, Morris had perfected other systems of coping with the money problem. In simplified form, a shipload of flour would be sent abroad and sold, the proceeds of which were then used to buy gunpowder for a return voyage; as long as the two transactions were combined, actual paper money was not needed. Another feature is more sophisticated; by keeping this trade going, short-term loans for one leg of the trip could be transformed into long-term loans for many voyages. Long-term loans pay higher rates of interest than short-term loans; it would nowadays be referred to as "riding the yield curve." This system is currently in wide use for globalized trade, and Lehman Brothers was the main banker for it in 2008. And as a final strategy, having half the round-trip voyage transport innocent cargoes, the merchant could increase personal profits legitimately, while cloaking the existence of the underlying gun running on the opposite leg of the voyage. If the ship is sunk, it can then be difficult to say whether the loss of such a ship was military or commercial, insurable or uninsurable. In the case of a tobacco cargo, the value at the time of departure might well be different from the value later. Robert Morris became known as a genius in this sort of trade manipulation, and later his enemies were never able to prove it was illegal. Ultimately, a ship captain always has the option of moving his cargo to a different port.
Other colonists surely responded to a shortage of currency in similar resourceful ways, including barter and the Quaker system of maintaining individual account books on both sides of the transaction, and "squaring up" the balances later but eliminating many transaction steps. Wooden chairs were also a common substitute as a medium of exchange. But "Old Square-toes," Thomas Willing, experienced in currency difficulties, and his bold, reckless younger partner Morris displayed the greatest readiness to respond to opportunity. Credit and short-term paper were fundamentally promises to repay at a certain time, commonly with a front-end discount taking the place of interest payment. The amount of discount varied with the risk, both of disruption by the authorities, and the risk of default by the debtor. This discount system was rough and approximate, but it served. Quite accustomed to borrowing through an intermediary, who would then be directed to repay some foreign creditor, Morris and Willing added the innovation of issuing promissory notes and selling the contract itself to the public at a profit. Thus, written contracts would effectively serve as money. A cargo of flour or tobacco represented value, but that value need only be transformed into cash when it was safe and convenient to do so.
The Morris-Willing team had already displayed its inventiveness by starting a maritime insurance company, thereby adding to their reputation for meeting extensive obligations; they established an outstanding credit rating. Although primarily in the shipping trade, the firm was also involved in trade with the Indians. There, they invented the entirely novel idea of selling their notes to the public, essentially becoming underwriters for the risk of the notes, quite like the way insurance underwriters assumed the risk of a ship sinking. Their reputation for ingenuity in working around obstacles was growing, as well as their credibility for prompt and reliable repayment. In modern parlance, they established an enviable "track record." A creditor is only interested in whether he will be repaid; satisfied of that, he doesn't care how rich or how poor you are. The profits from complex trading were regularly plowed back into the business; one observer estimated Robert Morris's cash assets at the start of the Revolution were no greater than those of a prosperous blacksmith. It didn't matter; he had credit.
In the event, this prohibition of colonial paper money did not last very long, so profits from it were not immense. But ideas had been tested which seemed to work. Today, transactions devised at Willing and Morris are variously known as commercial credit, financial underwriting, and casualty insurance. In 1776, Robert Morris would be 42 years old.
|Battle of Lexington|
In April, 1775, colonial militia were shooting it out with British soldiers at Bunker Hill and Lexington/Concord. If you include the December 16, 1773 Boston Tea Party, Massachusetts had been fighting the British for almost three years before July 4, 1776. It had never been absolutely clear to Pennsylvanians just what they were fighting about in New England, beyond the fact that a considerable store of gunpowder was hidden in Lexington and Concord and British soldiers had been sent to confiscate it, along with those two trouble-makers, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The militiamen behind the trees were just as British as the soldiers were, and their short slogan of fair treatment was to elect representatives to any Parliament which claimed a right to tax them. Snubbed by a high-handed King, they got his attention by shooting back when the King tried to enforce laws they had not had a chance to vote on. Seeing your neighbors shot soon soon clarifies your options. Other colonies, especially Pennsylvania, Delaware and South Carolina, were slower to anger about either taxation or representation, worrying more about the motives of unstable leaders in Massachusetts like Samuel Adams, and content to stall while British Whigs led by Edmund Burke and the Marquess of Rockingham tried to civilize the king's ministry. Besides, the British were not attacking Pennsylvania.
To be fair to the hot-headed New Englanders who were apparently stirring up so much unprovoked trouble, a better case could have been made against the heedless British ministry, and New England lawyers should have made it. Following the Boston Massacre, there was genuine alarm among lawyers like John Adams that King George was eroding historic legal rights achieved over several centuries, indeed, preferentially undermining them more for mere colonists than for U.K. citizens with a vote. The Navigation Acts of the British government in particular were offensive to American colonists; randomly chosen representatives on juries proceded to render them unenforceable with a wide-spread refusal to convict. They were employing William Penn's strategy of "Jury Nullification", and better acknowledgment of its legal history was sure to make a favorable impact on Philadelphia minds. Somehow, the Boston legal community felt this line of argument was too specialized to be effective, or else shared the alarm of their enemy the British Ministry that Jury Nullification in the hands of public could be too hard to control. John Adams had made a particularly famous defense of John Hancock who was being punished with confiscation of his ship and a fine of triple the cargo's value. Adams was later singled out as the only named American rebel the British refused to exempt from hanging if they caught him. As everyone knows, Hancock was the first to step up and sign the Declaration of Independence, because by 1776 there was also widespread colonial outrage over the British strategem of transferring cases to the (non-jury) Admiralty Court. Many colonists who privately regarded Hancock as a smuggler were roused to rebellion by the British government thus denying a defendant his right to a jury trial, especially by a jury almost certain not to convict him. To taxation without representation was added the obscenity of enforcement without due process. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the newly created United States, ruled in 1794 that "The Jury has the right to determine the law as well as the facts." And Thomas Jefferson built a whole political party on the right of common people to overturn their government, somewhat softening it is true when he saw where the French Revolution was going. Jury Nullification then lay fairly dormant for fifty years. But since the founding of the Republic and the reputation of many of the most prominent founders was based on it, there may have seemed little need for emphasis of an argument any modern politician would seize with glee.
At that time, only a third of colonists were in favor of fighting about it, and a third were entirely opposed. Samuel Adams himself had written his supporters that it would be best to hold back until greater revolutionary support could be gathered. Unfortunately, in the minds of the British ministry, hostility had already escalated irrevocably when the Continental Congress in June 1775 created the Continental Army and dispatched George Washington to Boston to join the fight. This was probably the moment when war became inevitable in the collective mind of the British Parliament; a full year had passed since then. Regardless of Bunker Hill, the British were incensed by the creation of the Continental Army, and passed the Prohibitory Act, which declared that all thirteen colonies (belonging to the Congress) were renegades, their decision to raise armies placing them "outside the protection of the king". All American shipping was now subject to seizure, not just that of Massachusetts, as were foreign vessels engaged in American trade. News of this Parliamentary thunderbolt first came to Robert Morris through one of his ships, accompanied by news that 26,000 troops had been raised for an invasion of American ports. The British position was that all thirteen colonies had gratuitously formed a government and an army, and needed to be punished for such treason. Pennsylvania was no exception; the offending Continental Congress had met there, and Benjamin Franklin had represented both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania before Parliament. Confirmation of that particular British attitude toward them greeted Pennsylvanians when British warships promptly appeared in May 1776, to patrol the mouth of the Delaware. Three cruisers exploring up the river were attacked by American galleys. In response, the cruisers sailed directly at Philadelphia until they were finally beaten back by citizen flotillas, supervised by Robert Morris and the Committee on Safety. Morris wrote to Silas Deane in Paris that war was probably inevitable. Far less tentatively, the British felt it had already been in progress for a year.
The British Ministry had probably been unreasonably hostile, but they were not unanimous and they were not fools. In response to colonial unrest up until these almost irretrievable events, the British were concentrating on depriving the colonists of arms and gunpowder, mostly avoiding direct violence; it seemed an effective strategy. During the Boston Tea Party, for example, British warships in Boston harbor merely stood by and watched the fun. Although gunpowder was a simple chemical, comparatively easy to make, it was less likely to blow up in your face if finely ground and milled in a major factory; for a real Colonial war it had to be imported. The British strategy had been: Take away their weapons, and they will capitulate. Unfortunately that was not the response at all, since even loyal colonists felt they needed good gunpowder for hunting and self-protection. Gunpowder blockades and confiscations were going to be bitterly resented. Nevertheless, British patience with the colonists was probably only irretrievably exhausted in June, 1775, when the Continental Congress formed its own army and Washington marched them to Boston. If Pennsylvania became convinced of that inevitability, the war was certainly on. After the naval battles right here on the Delaware, what really became hard to believe was that -- only a week earlier -- Pennsylvania's moderate voters had soundly defeated the revolutionary radicals in an Assembly election.
Pennsylvania had indeed been far less eager to fight than Massachusetts and Virginia, but the more belligerent colonies felt they needed allies in order to prevail. In the Continental Congress Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted against rebellion in the Spring of 1776; and in the May 1776 election where independence was the main issue, the Pennsylvania voters elected an Assembly 70% opposed to rebellion, including that eminent merchant Robert Morris. Some of the determined Massachusetts efforts to persuade the Mid-Atlantic colonies bordered on subversion, but Pennsylvania remained unmoved. Nevertheless, they could see a real danger of war, and had approved Secret Committees to be prepared if it came. Robert Morris was ideal for covert activity and could be expected to keep the activity under control, along with Benjamin Franklin and several prominent merchants. Morris made no secret of his affection for England the country of his birth, or of his membership in the John Dickinson group which hoped economic pressures would suffice. When the Secret Committee chairman suddenly died of smallpox, Morris was then appointed chairman. His personal integrity was widely respected; in several hotly contested elections, he was nominated by both the radicals and the conservatives.
It seems absolutely necessary to prepare a vigorous defense, since every account we receive from England threatens nothing but destruction.
|Robert Morris: December 1775.|
The Secret Committee was charged with smuggling in some gunpowder, just in case. Several of the members agreed to ship arms and gunpowder in their own ships; there was no one else to do it. The decision to engage in treasonous gunrunning was greatly assisted by the unexpected appearance of two Frenchmen with aristocratic accents in a boat loaded with gunpowder, who proposed themselves as French counterparties in a major gunpowder and weapons smuggling network which did actually materialize. Just who sent them has never been made entirely clear, but later events make the playwright Beaumarchais a reasonable guess, acting as a secret agent of the French King. Beaumarchais the famous playwright had been caught in a police trap, and forced to act as a government spy; just whose agent he was is a little murky. The American merchants on the Secret Committee knew gun running was expensive for them; they all expected to be paid for dangerous work, so it was also profitable. And treasonous. If caught, there was every possibility of being hanged. Initially, the Americans all imagined the Frenchmen were simply in it for the money, and that is possible. Surprisingly, no one seems even to have speculated they were agents of the French government on a mission to stir up trouble against the English. Spies had surely informed the French King of approaching war, at least six months before the Americans knew of it. Since these two foreign shippers (giving their names as Pierre Penet and Emmanuel de Pliarne, and surely sent to spy) demanded to be paid in hard currency, Morris did send one ship with hard money to pay for munitions to be carried in its hold on the return voyage. But he soon devised safer payment approaches.
For my part I abhor the name & idea of a rebel, I neither want or wish a change of King or Constitution & do not conceive myself to act against either when I join America in defense of Constitutional Liberty.
|Robert Morris: December 1775|
Since he had agents and offices in most major foreign ports, Morris could arrange for the money to arrive independently of the cargo ships. Or better yet, send ordinary commodities on the outward journey and make a private profit on that, returning with munitions paid for by the "remittances" -- revenue from the other cargo. Money was also sent on other circuitous journeys and through other channels, particularly the discounted debt system he had earlier perfected when paper currency had been prohibited. There was thus less incriminating evidence on the ship, and even if the ship burned or everyone got hanged, the money was at least out of the hands of the enemy. Secrecy was of course essential, this activity could be called treasonous, and it was most assuredly smuggling. When neutral countries were found supporting gunrunning, that assistance might well be called an act of war, so all nations prohibited it. In spite of his earlier reluctance about independence, Morris could easily see that gunrunning by the privateers of a recognized nation might be better protected by the conventions of war than exactly the same activity conducted by, say, brigands, profiteers or pirates.
Gunrunning was always seriously dangerous; Morris soon lost four ships, one by a mutiny of secretly loyalist sailors, and two were captured by unscrupulous American privateers. There would be some protection from hanging for gun runners as authorized combatants of a recognized nation. In retrospect we can now surmise that Franklin was committed to independence, and was probably nudging his friend on the Secret Committee. John Adams could barely contain himself, openly and repeatedly. Washington was already outside Boston leading an army. Commitment had many levels.
In July, 1776 Morris was called on to vote in Congress for the independence he always said he opposed. Caesar Rodney rode in from Delaware to deliver his state for Independence; now, Pennsylvania alone stood in the way. When the moment came, on the advice of Franklin, Robert Morris and John Dickinson left the room to allow other Pennsylvania delegates to constitute a Pennsylvania majority, casting the state's vote for the war. Commitment to the war had many variants, even after the war began.
A KING who conquers a new country theoretically gains the chance to revise all its laws. However thousands of years of experience demonstrate that those who are good at wielding the sword seldom have much interest in, or aptitude for, devising a legal code. Napoleon seems to have been an exception, and Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle, but most conquerers have been illiterate in the law. Therefore, earlier conquerors merely extended their native laws into additional territory, or else left the whole business to a permanent priesthood of judges. In this way, an independent judiciary could survive unless, like Thomas a Becket or Thomas More, it grew stubborn about thwarting the wishes of the King. The concept of citizen rights more or less defined feasible limits to what the King was allowed to do. British law went still further, distinguishing between rights of the people and rights of the sovereign. It identified those few things even a King was not allowed to do, as well as those many things he alone must be able to do in order to govern. The latter were collectively called the King's Prerogative. Today, we would call it a job description.
Along those lines, the English Civil War had been fought, briefly transferring the power of Prerogative to Parliament, and incidentally clarifying some disadvantages of doing so. Americans, after fighting an eight-year Revolutionary War to be rid of a particular king, had developed a sentiment for eliminating all kings entirely. However, the memory of the English Civil War and subsequent abuses by the Cromwell Parliament restrained that impulse. The alternative idea grew of transferring sovereignty to the people, to be translated into action by their elected representatives in the Legislative branch. Although such sovereignty would be unlimited, the intermediate steps taken by the Legislature could be deliberately slowed down, and particularly worrisome actions might be tangled up in complicated steps of legal process by a vocal minority. Such a complicated system required an umpire, which Chief Justice John Marshall eventually positioned the Supreme Court to be. Conducting elections every two years was a simple way to allow the people to restrain its agents from misbehavior of a more general sort. Since George Washington was confidently expected to be the first President, it was left to him to devise protections against presidential abuse, since he had notoriously and repeatedly expressed his intense dislike of kings. In modern times this system of checks and balances has only been severely tested once, in 1937. Immediately after winning a landslide re-election in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt nevertheless was slapped down hard by public outcry forcing Congress to thwart his Supreme Court-packing scheme.
|Sir Francis Bacon|
Such subtle, complicated ideas cannot be implemented by writing 6000 words on a piece of paper, and they certainly cannot withstand two hundred fifty years of subsequent nit-picking by dissenters, no matter how carefully crafted the 6000 words may have been. The complexity of the political system it describes would long ago have fallen apart without a million little accommodations and revisions, just as every other nation's constitution has done during that same period of time. And that fine-tuning process was made possible by starting with a more or less blank slate, with thousands of lawyers and legislators debating every particle of common law for more than a century. In 1787 it was decided to adopt English common law as a default position, and to invite a host of legislative bodies to debate and replace any part of it with a "statute". It was a laborious process. Measured by pages of law books, the volume of statutes only grew to equal the volume of common law by the time of the Civil War. The English common law was certainly a good place to start, having been created by Sir Francis Bacon two hundred years earlier as the legal equivalent of the Scientific Method; based on real, adversarily contested case decisions, a hypothesis was created, then tested, revised, and tested again. By actual count, one state legislature only enacted three statutes in the year before the Constitution was ratified; all its other activity was concerned with adjudicating disputes within the boundaries of existing common law. But when the Constitution suddenly rearranged the balances of power in 1787, almost every sentence of common law had to be regarded as potentially requiring modification to reflect the new Constitutional rearrangements. During the first half century there existed great enthusiasm for almost all of the new Constitution except those parts which affected slavery, the fine-tuning was almost universally intended to strengthen it or repair some oversight. If it failed in some way, adversaries were quick to point out the flaws. In short, every lawyer in the nation was involved to some degree for a century in the process of re-writing the English common law for American purposes, in American circumstances, for the grander purpose of strengthening the American commonwealth.
And everyone knows what happened next. The state legislatures who considered it normal to pass fewer than a dozen laws in a year, started passing fifteen hundred in a year, and kept it up for many years. Today, almost every state legislature considers more than a thousand bills, and passes two or three hundred. Since the colonial legislatures passed few laws and spent most of its time adjudicating disputes about existing law, the character of the law changed as it gradually gave up adjudicating, stopped being like a court. The tendency of early law was to state principles to guide the judges. In recent times, our over-lawyered system specifies all imaginable conditions and exceptions in excruciating detail, so that our laws tend less and less to speak of "reasonable amounts" and more and more to define drunken driving, for example, in milligrams per deciliter of the defendant's blood. We have better measuring devices, so we measure. But who can deny that a legislature accustomed to making judgments itself, will more confidently rely upon the good judgment of courts, than a legislature which spends its time going to committee meetings to consider the testimony of experts, often never visiting a courtroom?
Our lawyers, who once enlisted the efforts of the entire profession for a century into refining the English common law into the American statutory law, are to be encouraged to extend equal effort into the process of turning off the faucet. Or possibly, having done such a good job at this assignment, seek another line of work?
Richard Romm, a rising historical scholar with special interest in early Philadelphia, recently educated the Right Angle Club in the history of the Schuylkill Fishing Club in the State in Schuylkill, and was immediately accepted into membership. Of the Right Angle, that is, which is an old club by some standards, but scarcely a hundred years old in the eyes of the really old, old clubs.
The State in Schuylkill is an eating club, originally a fishing and eating club, apparently organized around the annual shad run up the river. The clubhouse, or Castle, was moved several times, in response to damming of the river, and is now located on the grounds of, or adjoining the edge of, Nicholas Biddle's estate on the Delaware River called Andalusia. One by one, the Atlantic Ocean rivers of America have been dammed and their annual shad migrations brought to an end, except through the city of Richmond, Va, so there was little point in moving The Castle to follow the fish. It remains, overlooking the Delaware in spite of its name.
There seem to have been several name changes, the most important of which was to change the Colony of Schuylkill to State of Schuylkill for obvious reasons. Originally, the Castle was roughly opposite the falls of Fairmount on the West Bank of the Schuylkill at about Girard Avenue; thus, from 1732 to 1822 located on Baron Warner's property called Eaglesfield. In 1822 it moved to Rambo's Rock (the Rambo family is said to be the oldest European settler family in Pennsylvania) opposite Bartram's Gardens, then finally in 1887 to Andalusia, Nicholas Biddle's country estate. The club was founded in 1732, and dates of movings are possibly hazy, possibly somewhat because of the reluctance of club officers to return the calls of inquiring historians. The State in Schuylkill claims to be the oldest organized men's club in the world, an honor contested by White's in London. The roots of this argument are found tangled in the vital issue of whether their age should be based on the formal organization of the clubs, or on the establishment of the coffee houses which housed the original clubs. Four books are said to have been written about club history, but we depend here on Mr. Romm.
There is also an unclear relationship with Chief Tammenend, possibly traceable to the shad run, but in any event to the Indian chief depicted with William Penn in the paintings by Benjamin West and Edward Hicks. May 1 is St. Tammany's day, growing into the fancy that he was the "Patron Saint of America", before a branch of the nation-wide Tammany association opened in New York and sort of tarnished up the name. Other traditions of the Fishing club have to do with wearing Mandarin hats, possibly having to do with the export of gensing which was once abundant in our colonial suburbs, with a return cargo of Chinese dishware. All of the cooking is done by official citizens of the club. The quantities of food are remarkable; one 19th Century menu listed eleven pounds of meat per member. The club drink is a punch, the famous Fishhouse Punch, widely recognized to be rather strong. Its inventor is reputed to be Edward Shippen Willing, on the occasion of the first visit to the clubhouse by women guests. The quantity of alcoholic beverage at these events is especially remarkable in view of the Quaker origins of many original members of the club, but not necessarily of the guests. Among the various guests were Generals Grant, Meade and McClellan. Dinner begins with two traditional toasts: to George Washington, and to Captain Sam Morris. Washington was appropriate enough, having a history of drinking a bottle of Madeira every day at lunch. But Sam? Captain Sam the Quaker?
|Free Quaker Meetinghouse, Fifth and Arch Streets|
Somewhere in this tradition are allusions to the Free Quakers, Quakers who abandoned the peace testimony to fight the British. There is also the tradition of hostility to British rule which antedates the Revolution, and may have some connection to the fanciful contention that their little state was not really part of Penn's colony. Captain (of the City Troop) Sam was a stalwart, possibly the sole founder, of the Gloucester (N.J.) Fox-hunting club. The history is passed down that 22 of the original 26 members of the First City Troop were members of the fox-hunting club, and many if not most were Quakers. The first "Governor" of the State in Schuylkill was Thomas Stretch, but the second Governor, from 1766 until his death, was Captain Sam. He was repeatedly referred to as the life of the club, and held in the highest esteem by all. He was "read out" of the main Quaker Meeting, not so much for his drinking as for his flouting of Quaker belief in pacifism. He reputedly led a sabre charge at the Battle of Trenton, and was a leader of the City Troop in that revolution within a revolution at James Wilson's house, which rescued at least four future signers of the Constitution from a mob of militia which momentarily turned Jacobin.
Naturally, descendants of Quakers on both side of this uproar have been reluctant to say much about it. But somewhere within the history of Samuel Morris must be some important clues about the 18th Century splits within the Quaker Church, to say nothing of the revolt of the three Quaker colonies against British rule.
ALMOST alone among the British colonies in America, Pennsylvania's western border was specified in the King's charter of the colony. It was "five degrees longitude west of the point where the eastern boundary crosses the Delaware" [River]; however, its actual location on the ground was not actually marked until 1784. It's a few miles west of the present city of Pittsburgh, located at the forks of the Ohio River, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join. However, until 1784 it was not a certainty that this complex was within Pennsylvania instead of Virginia. The origin of the Ohio is at the only major water gap in the North-South mountains, and the tributary rivers are fairly large. The three merging rivers thus form a nearly continuous water route along the base of the mountain range, from the Great Lakes south to Pittsburgh, or from the Chesapeake Bay north to Pittsburgh, and then to the Mississippi, going past the best topsoil farming land in the world. The forks of the Ohio were the great prize of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the place where young George Washington himself started the French and Indian War. To include these treasures, it seems vaguely possible that William Penn insisted on having the border of his state safely include the water gap at the beginning of the Ohio. Perhaps not, of course, perhaps it was just a sense of tidiness on the part of the ministers of Charles II. The original document stated that the border was a hundred miles east of there, to match where Maryland ended. When the document was returned to Penn by the King's ministers, however, it had the new language.
The existence of this north-south termination of Pennsylvania began to take on a new significance when other states made claims for their land grant to extend to the Pacific Ocean, and the extensions collided with each other. Virginia then developed its territory to include modern Kentucky and West Virginia. That resulted in Virginia's land aspirations veering northward, to include the Ohio Territory west of Pennsylvania's fixed boundary. By the legal standards of the day, Virginia had a fairly good claim to all of the Indian territories, not merely to the west of Pennsylvania, but extending at least to the Great Lakes, perhaps farther. Maryland, Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts had conflicting claims from infinite extension of their western boundaries. As a consequence, it was impossible to achieve ratification of the Articles of Confederation for five years. The various states involved were fearful the creation of a combined political entity might result in a court which would be enabled to rule against their individual aspirations. The stakes were high; the land mass involved would be several times as large as England.
The person who finally broke this deadlock might well have been Robert Morris, who was disturbed that this inter-state dissention was injuring his ability to borrow foreign funds for the Revolutionary War. The internal negotiations took place under wartime conditions, and are poorly researched. No doubt some person deserves credit for bringing this wrangle to a close. Virginia had the strongest claim, New York the weakest. New York gave up its claim first, Maryland was the last, and Virginia the most disappointed. Pennsylvania, unable to make a claim, took the position that the land belonged to everyone, and eventually was mollified by getting a small notch of land extending to the Great Lakes at Erie. It must be noticed in passing that final resolution of the land claims came at the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin, soon to become President of Pennsylvania, was the negotiator of the treaty which reflected Pennsylvania's position that the land belonged to all of us, right?
Even without these western land claims, Virginia was the largest and richest of the colonies, and rather easily adopted the attitude that Virginia would be the leader of the new United States. From their viewpoint, the preservation of states rights would enhance Virginia's leading the country. More or less immediately, the attitude of small states like Delaware hardened into resistance that this must not happen. Much otherwise inexplicable behavior also begins to make a sort of sense: the perverse behavior of the Lee family in the Continental Congress, the quarrels within George Washington's cabinet, the re-location of the capital and the dreams of the Potomac as the nation's main portal of transportation, the rise of Jefferson's political party, the obstructionist behavior of Patrick Henry, the Virginia domination of the Presidency for decades, and countless less famous episodes of history -- make more sense as residuals of Virginia's early land aspirations, than as defenses of slavery or philosophical convictions that states were somehow superior to nations. These suspicions are difficult to clarify and impossible to prove. The best way to see some substance to them is to imagine yourself in the Virginia House of Burgesses, politically connected and vigorous, able to imagine your descendants all inheriting a county or two of rich land as a remote consequence of a few glamorous deeds by their Cavalier ancestor.
Whereas, since the close of the last war, the British Parliament, claiming a power of right to bind the people of America, by statute, all cases whatsoever, hath in some acts expressly imposed taxes on them and in others, under various pretenses, but in fact for the purpose raising a revenue, hath imposed rates and duties payable in these colonies established a board of commissioners, with unconstitutional powers, and extended the jurisdiction of courts of admiralty, not only for collecting the said duties, but for the trial of causes merely arising within the body of a county.
And whereas, in consequence of other statutes, judges, who before held only estates at will in their offices, have been made dependent on the Crown alone for their salaries, and standing armies kept in time of peace:
And whereas, it has lately been resolved in Parliament, that by force of a statute, made in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of Henry the Eighth, colonists may be transported to England, and tried there upon accusations for treasons, and misprisions, or concealments of treasons committed in the colonies, and by a late statute, such trials have been directed in cases therein mentioned.
And whereas, in the last session of Parliament, three statutes were made; one, entitled "An act to discontinue, in such manner and for such time as are therein mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading, or shipping of goods, wares and merchandise, at the town, and within the harbor of Boston, in the province of Massachusetts Bay, in North America"; and another, entitled "An act for the better regulating the government of the province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England"; and another, entitled "An act for the impartial administration of justice, in the cases of persons questioned for any act done by them in the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and tumults in the province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England." And another statute was then made, "for making more effectual provision for the government of the province of Quebec, etc." All which statutes are impolitic, unjust and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American rights.
And whereas, assemblies have been frequently dissolved, contrary to the rights of the people, when they attempted to deliberate on grievances; and their dutiful, humble, loyal, and reasonable petitions to the Crown for redress, have been repeatedly treated with contempt by His Majesty's ministers of state:
The good people of the several colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Castle, Kent and Sussex on Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, justly alarmed at these arbitrary proceedings of Parliament and administration, have severally elected, constituted, and appointed deputies to meet and sit in general congress, in the city of Philadelphia, in order to obtain such establishment, as that their religion, laws, and liberties may not be subverted.
Whereupon the deputies so appointed being now assembled, in a full and free representation of these colonies, taking into their most serious consideration, the best means of attaining the ends aforesaid, do, in the first place, as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties, declare, That the inhabitants of the English colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English Constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following rights:
Resolved, N. C. D. [Nemine contradicente, no person disagreeing]1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent
Resolved, N. C. D. 2. That our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, were at the time of their emigration from the mother country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects, within the realm of England.
Resolved, N. C. D. 3. That by such emigration they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights, but that they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them, to exercise and enjoy.
Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances, can not properly be represented in the British Parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislatures, where their right of representation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation and internal polity, subject only to the negative of their sovereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accustomed. But, from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of the British Parliament, as are bona fide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce, for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole empire to the mother country, and the commercial benefits of its respective members; excluding every idea of taxation, internal or eternal, for raising a revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent.
Resolved, N. C. D. 5. That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law.
Resolved, N. C. D. 6. That they are entitled to the benefit of such of the English statutes as existed at the time of their colonization; and which they have, by experience, respectively found to be applicable to their several local and other circumstances.
Resolved, N. C. D. 7. That these, His Majesty's colonies, are likewise entitled to all the immunities and privileges granted and confirmed to them by royal charters, or secured by their several codes of provincial laws.
Resolved, N. C. D. 8. That they have a right peaceably to assemble, consider of their grievances, and petition the King; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory proclamations, and commitment for the same, are illegal.
Resolved, N. C. D. 9. That the keeping a standing army in these colonies, in times of peace, without the consent of the legislature of that colony, in which such army is kept, is against law.
Resolved, N. C. D. 10. It is indispensably necessary to good government, and rendered essential by the English constitution, that the constituent branches of the legislature be independent of each other; that, therefore, the exercise of legislative power in several colonies, by a council appointed, during pleasure by the Crown, is unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the freedom of American legislation.
All and each of which the aforesaid deputies, in behalf of themselves and their constituents, do claim, demand, and insist on, as their indubitable rights and liberties; which cannot be legally taken from them, altered or abridged by any power whatever, without their own consent, by their representatives in their several provincial legislatures.
[Author: John Sulllivan, Delegate and later Governor, New Hampshire]
|A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States: Containing a Brief Commentary on Every Clause, Explaining the True Nature, Reasons, and ... Designed for the Use of School Libraries and General Readers; Joseph Story: ISBN-13: 978-1886363717||Amazon|
One of the great books about Benjamin Franklin has just emerged, and it has an interesting current Philadelphia connection. Benjamin Franklin in London fills in the eighteen years Franklin spent in Europe, with many details and insights not possible to have with three thousand miles of ocean separating his activities from his home base. In fact, it raises the question of what was really his home in his own mind. Boston claims him because he was born there, but it takes a London writer to tell us he moved to Philadelphia because of disputes over vaccination for the small pox epidemic, between his publisher brother and Cotton Mather. XX Goodwin, writer in residence at the Craven Street Ben Franklin Museum, will forever change our views about his subject. We hope he produces much more.
A word about the museum. The Craven Street house is the only Franklin residence still standing, restored with funds from Countess XX, Anthony Biddle's XXX, who unfortunately died this year. Her daughter, Charlotte Petropolis has an apartment in Philadelphia and regularly attends meetings of the Shakspere Society at the Philadelphia Club, which is itself the oldest club in America, and second oldest in the world, according to Matt Dupee, one of the local authorities on such matters, himself a member of a great many clubs around the world. To return to the original point, Goodwin is the beneficiary of this important interest by prominent Philadelphia families in our Founding Father.
|Revolutionary Boston Reconsidered|
One gathers from the book that Franklin had considered himself a lifelong British subject, and from the Albany Conference of 17XX to his abject public humiliation in the "Cockpit" of Whitehall in 1775, nursed the hope that Great Britain and America would join in an empire as equals. He foresaw the growth of America, and expected the capital of the joint empire to move to America. After he returned to America, of course, the gauntlet had been thrown down, and he made it his task to enlist France on our side, bankrupting France and thus eventually provoking not one, but two national Revolutions. The French stilll think of him as their darling, but the lessons of the French Revolution taught Franklin some things he needed to know at the American Constitutional Convention of 1789. Letting others like Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris do the talking, his influence at dinners and private meetings put a stop to egalitarian babble, and established a firmly Federalist nation. His activity in London would have won him a Nobel prize instead of fairy tales about kites and keys, he was friends with Mozart and Beethoven, plus about five kings. You don't humiliate a man like that without living to regret it, and King George III certainly regretted it in his saner moments.
Which, after three paragraphs, brings us back to the Stamp Tax of 17XX. To begin with, it isn't enough to want to do something, you must figure out a way to get it done. The early 18th Century colonists had learned that smuggling and counterfeiting would frustrate any tax plan for colonies so far away with diversified economies. The oceans were filled with pirates, sometimes described as privateers, and the American coastline was thousands of miles long. Furthermore, maintaining a large British navy from the Spanish Armada to the War of the Austrian Succession required thousands of British sailors, and the Navy had been stripped down to spare expense. So naturally the idea came up to have the colonies pay for their own defense at least, but how were you going to do it, in a way you could afford to continue?
A little digging in history would probably reveal the main author of the Stamp Tax Act, but such things are often the product of staff rather than the parliamentary member who introduced them. But it ingeniously solved the empire taxation problem. You just printed up the stamps and sold them, then required the objects of taxation to have a stamp pasted somewhere on them. You still would have to worry about smuggling and counterfeiting, but the whole thing was an inexpensive way of collecting the money, and enforcing the tax. It even provided some nice patronage jobs for loyal stamp sellers.
Apparently, it was much too clever by half, since the colonists could immediately see what might be ahead of them. An uproar ensued, leading ultimately to repeal of the tax, except for a token tax on tea in order to preserve the principle. But the principle was exactly what bothered the colonists, and a tea tax wouldn't do, either. The rest is history, except I don't happen to know whose idea it really was. But I do know that Franklin was in London at the time, and Franklin's inclinations were strongly in favor of a combined British Empire. Franklin almost lost his job in this uproar, and some of his fellow colonists may have suspected his person position on it.
|Posted by: can we fix it | Dec 7, 2010 7:11 PM|
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John Dickinson, Quaker Hamlet
John Dickinson was the most respected lawyer and politician of his time. He had a lot to do with writing the Declaration of Independence, but refused to sign it.
What Happened in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776?
There were about 30,000 residents, just a small town, but it was the second largest city in the English-speaking world. Aside from wagons, there were thirty wheeled vehicles. But this is the town where decisions were made.
Poor Richard Plays Hardball
While aristocratic England gave him a public drubbing, Franklin stood silently before them and thought it all over. At that moment, the American decision was made to declare independence.
Tom Paine: Rabble-Rousing Quaker?
Tom Paine is the one who mainly set the fires of revolution burning, and Franklin sent him here, got him a job, circulated his pamphlets. In spite of Franklin's sponsorship, Washington would cross the street to avoid Paine, and fellow Quakers would have no part of his violence. His later life showed him to be a rebel without a cause.
Caesar Rodney Rides Through the Rain
When it looked as though Delaware was wavering on the Declaration of Independence, Caesar Rodney was summoned to ride through the rain to cast a deciding vote, in spite of advanced cancer.
Philadelphia in '76
There were about 30,000 residents, the size of a small town, but it was the second largest city in the English-speaking world. Aside from wagons, there were thirty wheeled vehicles.
Monetary Causes of the American Revolutionary War
For the only time in our history, the government didn't print enough money, The British found that was just as bad as printing too much,
Difference of Opinion
Some Quakers refused to go along with abolition of slavery. That was particularly true in Newport, RI, the North American point of the triangular slave trade.
Addressing The Proprietors' Dilemma
King Charles II gave Pennsylvania to William Penn on condition he defend the place and fuss with neighboring states about its boundaries. A century later, it proved more than a private citizen could handle.
Parliament Provokes a Revolution
King George III personifies what angered the American colonists, but his Ministries acting through Parliament took the actual steps to agitate matters.
Two Hotheads May Have Destroyed an Empire
Charles Townshend and William Bradford were separated by an ocean, and surely never met. But if any two people can be said to have deliberately provoked the American Revolution, these two must be considered.
George Washington's View of the British Army
Washington's escape from Braddock's defeat may help us understand his future low opinion of the British Army, and possibly suggests a reason for his hating them.
Whatever Was George III Thinking?
After the loss of his American colonies, George III wrote some rueful but valuable insights.
Franklin Declares Independence a Year Early
Franklin made no secret of his goal of national independence, at least a year before the Continental Congress voted and Thomas Jefferson composed his rather rambling declaration.
Quakerism and the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution extended over two centuries and was more important than all the wars, governments, and agitations of its time. Quakerism began at the same time, in the same place. Was that only coincidence?.
John Head, His Book of Account, 1718-1753
The equivalent of the rosetta stone for colonial commerce had been sitting on George Vaux's shelf for six generations.
Mercantilism Dies Hard
Diplomacy has been described as war by other means. It's possible to regard both war and diplomacy as economics by other means, a general attitude called mercantilism.
Lexington, Concord, and All That
What was the point of declaring independence, when the colonies had already been at war with England for over a year?
Thirteen stars and stripes became the National Flag in 1777, but a rather similar flag was the National flag from 1775-1777. It was also designed by a Philadelphia milliner, Margaret Manny.
Unalienable Rights Before 1776
Lawyers commonly say the Declaration of Independence "informs" the Constitution. But prior informing was performed by William Penn, the Roman Empire, and Hammurabi.
Three Revolutions at Once, Maybe Four
Asking the cause of the American Revolutionary War may be a little simplistic; civil wars pop up, all over the place, all the time. The more important question to ask, is why did this American Revolution have such a dramatic effect on the whole world?
Pennsylvania Likes Private Property Private
The King used to own the whole country. William Penn got us used to the idea that my property is mine, not the King's.
Restoring the Gold Standard by Levering Judges' Salaries
Advocates of a gold standard may just have found an effective "gotcha".
Circular Letter: Boston Committee of Correspondance, May 1774
Paul Revere hand delivered a circular letter from Boston appealing for Philadelphia participation in a boycott of British goods. This letter had a significant effect on Philadelphia opinion..
Foreground: Parliament Irks the Colonial Merchants
The Townshend Acts, upsetting trade and hated by Americans, bordered on economic warfare. The British tested tea, stamps and manufactures, but the most effective economic pressure points proved to be paper money and gunpowder. The Americans reacted to all this as second-class citizenship.
Pennsylvania: Browbeaten Into Joining a War
America declared Independence on July 4, 1776, but England had decided a year earlier to suppress the rebellion by overwhelming force, and announced it six months later. France was then smuggling in gunpowder and guns. But Pacifist Pennsylvania held out until there was a British naval attack in the Delaware River, in May, 1776, and a huge army had arrived at New Brunswick in June. The British wanted to confront us with a choice of surrender or subjugation. We picked a third choice the British never considered, to resist until they treated us better.
Reconsidering All Our Laws
The legislatures of America were handed a clean slate for statutes by the 1787 Constitution, and thus given the opportunity to review the entire legal system. It took nearly a century to accomplish, and is still proceeding.
State in Schuylkill Fishing Club
Unless you listen to some quibbles from White's in London, the Schuylkill Fishing Club of the State in Schuylkill is the oldest organized men's club in the world. And even if that exception is admitted, it's the oldest mens club in America. It's not secret, but it's very private.
The Origin of States Rights, a Rumination
The clamor for States Rights probably began with Virginia's claims for western territories. | <urn:uuid:20dbebf5-55b9-4c0b-9866-b7f1ceaa0c74> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/70.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280587.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00568-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978524 | 39,204 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Delegates from around 140 countries have agreed to adopt a treaty limiting the use of hazardous mercury.
The world's first legally-binding treaty on mercury, reached Saturday after a week of talks in Geneva, Switzerland, aims to reduce global emission levels of the toxic heavy metal, which pose risks to human health and the environment.
In a new report, the U.N. Environment Program found that worldwide, nearly 2,000 tons of mercury are emitted into the air from human activities every year. Much of this toxic substance eventually becomes deposited on vegetation, in the soil, and in oceans, lakes and rivers.
The deputy head of UNEP's Chemical Branch said this week that much human exposure to mercury is through the consumption of contaminated fish.
Mercury affects the brain and nervous system and can cause physical and mental development problems in children. Pregnant women who ingest mercury can pass the toxic effects to their unborn children.
The U.N. Environment Program finds the global demand for mercury is decreasing somewhat, with many developed countries taking measures to reduce mercury use. But it notes mercury use is increasing in developing countries. | <urn:uuid:116b26ea-5341-456d-b57a-77f9b35e5769> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.voanews.com/a/global-treaty-reached-on-cutting-mercury-emissions/1586990.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280825.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00207-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947135 | 227 | 3.65625 | 4 |
‘That England’s gonna throw it away, Gonna blow it away, But I know they can play, ‘Cause I remember, Three Lions on a shirt.”
Ah, how those lyrics get us right in the belly every time.
For anyone out there feeling the heart-sinking feeling of last night’s Euros result, we hear you, we see you, we feel you.
No matter how many times we remind ourselves ‘it’s just a game’, for a moment the magic of hope united our country and made us forget our troubles.
But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and England bowed out to Italy after nerve-shredding penalties.
If, like us, you’re feeling deflated today, or have partners or kids struggling to come to terms with the result, then we’ve got some top tips to help cope with feelings of deep disappointment.
First and foremost, Dr Marianne Trent, a clinical psychologist at Good Thinking Psychological Services, wants to remind us to stay kind to ourselves and Gareth Southgate’s team, while explaining why we experience emotions that might seem irrational.
Dr Trent said: “When things matter, and they don’t work out, then disappointment is an understandable and incredibly human reaction.
“When we watch team sport, our physiology mirrors the people we are watching and so our disappointment was actually the same disappointment as that of the England team.
“It’s hard to sustain the biology behind all the suspense and nail-biting moments over such a prolonged period of full time, extra time and penalties.”
She added: “We are always going to have a post-match slump and may feel a bit jittery as a result and disappointment makes it feel all the worse.
“Stay kind to yourself. Stay kind to the team. Remain united. Remain human. It’s okay to have big feelings, just keep them kind.”
Meanwhile, Andy Chambers at mental health consultancy specialists Born Human, echoed the sentiments, and encouraged people to reflect on the positives.
Andy said: “The sense of disappointment many people will feel waking up this morning is not what we may have hoped for, but as we have all come to appreciate in the past 18 months, we have to take the positives from every situation, regardless how challenging.
“We have the choice to acknowledge and build on our achievements and focus on the incredible feeling it is to overcome tough milestones in life.”
He continued: “Our football team have set a great example of how great things can be achieved with the right attitude and commitment.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day is too much of a delicate analogy, but you get my point.”
Those of us old enough to remember might recall the Samaritans setting up a telephone helpline to offer counselling to fans when Take That split up in 1996.
Coincidentally, the same year that England lost their Euros semi-final match to Germany when Southgate missed the infamous penalty.
In light of this, Helen Llewellyn, Director of therapy organisation Infinity Wellbeing, says that if emotions become too much bear then it might be time to reach out for professional help.
Helen said: “If you have feelings of depression that last more than a few hours after a disappointing result of a football match, you should talk to a therapist or counsellor.
“If you are employed, ask your manager for details of the employee wellbeing provider if you don’t already have them.”
Similarly, Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah, Director at Inclusion Psychologists Limited, said it’s crucial to express how we feel rather than squash it all down.
Dr M’gadzah said: “There are going to be some sad and depressed people today enduring this week and this will weigh heavy as the whole nation feels it.
“It’s important to express our feelings of disappointment and loss, talk about how you are feeling and help others to do the same, especially children.”
She continued: “It’s also important that people find a way of lifting their spirits and not dwell on what could’ve been. We need to focus on what we achieved in getting so far.
“Send out positive messages and focus attention on the players, helping them recover and this will also help us recover and move on until next time.
“We will regroup and have another opportunity to bring it home.”
Indeed, she might be right…
With the World Cup taking place next year, can it come home from Qatar in 2022!? | <urn:uuid:42b9eee0-aab3-4faa-b6d6-9b76983c1417> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://uspirelife.wordpress.com/2021/07/12/euros-2020-final-england-italy-2021-result-help/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572215.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815235954-20220816025954-00668.warc.gz | en | 0.938628 | 1,000 | 1.5 | 2 |
The Steps for Publishing a Book Are Easier Than You’d Think
Many new authors assume that one of the most difficult aspects of writing their story is publishing a book. But in our modern realm of self-publishing options, ample traditional publishing companies, and independent publishing, it’s easier than ever to learn how to publish your book. However, there are a few steps for publishing a book that new authors can follow to ensure that the process is as streamlined and simplified as possible.
Read on to uncover a step by step guide on publishing that will hopefully get your story in the right hands quickly.
The two main types of publishing routes for authors are traditional publishing houses and self-publishing. But there are also in-between options to explore, such as “partner publishers,” who will help with the technical aspects of the publishing process, such as formatting, cover design and printing.
As such, when you finish writing your book, you’ll want to determine the “type” of publishing you’ll want to pursue early on. This is because each distinct method requires different criteria to move forward.
Determining your preferred publishing method is a solid first step for any author who is ready to share their book, and will help define the next steps to come.
Whether you use a traditional publishing house or go it alone, editing is an essential step in the publishing process! Book editors are often discouraged by submitted manuscripts that have too many spelling or grammar errors. In the same vein, readers may be distracted if they have to trip over too any mistakes in a self-published book.
So review your book over and over, and be sure and ask friends and colleagues to take a look as well! A second, third, or even fourth pair of eyes is helpful in catching any mistakes you may have missed along the way.
You should also ask your proofreaders and reviewers to keep an eye out for “big picture” issues. These might be plot points that need a little work, or a character that could use some extra development. When you’re writing, and you know your story from start to finish, it can be easy to miss some big-picture issues. But a new reader who is unfamiliar with your story will be able to catch them.
A great title and an eye-catching cover design can make the difference between a book that is an international bestseller, and a book that lingers on the shelves. Come up with a few designs and title ideas, and ask your friends or fans for feedback in choosing the best one.
When it comes to the cover, new authors may find that they need a hand with the design process. Luckily, there are a number of freelance graphic designers on job search sites like Indeed or Upwork. They can help you come up with a stunning design at a price that’s attractive to you, and suits your budget.
If you are using a traditional publishing house or a partner publisher, then your editor and / or your publisher will do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to formatting.
If you are publishing your book on your own, you’ll find that there are a number of online tools that can tackle the little formatting details – like page numbers, margins, and chapter titles.
Check out popular book editing services for formatting assistance, like the online Reedsy Book Editor. Or you can hire a freelance copyeditor, graphic designer, and / or book editor to ensure your eventual book is as polished and aesthetically enticing as possible.
Once of the great aspects of the internet age for new authors is that it’s easy to craft a marketing campaign that is both far-reaching and budget friendly.
Start by creating social media pages dedicated solely to your book on common sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can even build a standalone website for your book through easy website builder platforms in a quick Google search. (Popular website builders include Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and GoDaddy.)
Do you intend to self-publish and sell your book directly to your audience? Then you’ll want to make sure that your fans have a way to purchase your book through your site, too, through a PayPal link or other shopping platform.
Finally, start crafting your marketing message! You’ll want to write a small but enticing blurb that explains what your book is all about, and why your audience will want to read it. Think about the “blurbs” you’ve read on the back covers of books that grabbed your attention. That is the style you’ll want to follow, with an emphasis on peaking a potential reader’s interest quickly!
In the days and hours leading up to your official launch, be sure and create some buzz, especially if you are self-publishing!
Submit a press release to local newspapers or applicable publications, start creating hype on your personal and professional social media pages. This way, you get a head start on spreading the word that your book will soon be on the virtual or literal shelves!
A little anticipation goes a long way in creating stellar book sales right off the bat, and it’s imperative to get the excitement about your new book rolling as soon as possible.
The publishing process may seem a little overwhelming at first, but the process will be well worth it for the rewards you can reap. With a host of traditional or partner publishing houses that are happy to connect with new authors, or publishing a book yourself, you’ll quickly discover that it isn’t as daunting as it seems.
Take your time, plan your book launch carefully, and do your research on your best options. In doing so, you’ll discover that your book can be shared and enjoyed with readers from all around the world.
The Book Bound experience is back, virtually, so join us online January 21-22 of 2021.
Register here to start on your book even quicker and let publishing a book bring you new success in 2021! | <urn:uuid:2c4aa772-a2c5-4e30-84fa-b4d8c1acd9aa> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.michelleprince.com/the-steps-for-publishing-a-book-are-easier-than-youd-think/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573197.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20220818124424-20220818154424-00671.warc.gz | en | 0.947534 | 1,249 | 1.84375 | 2 |
It is not uncommon that the apostles are simply
as Peter and "his companions" or "the apostles."
... they asked
and the other apostles, "What are
we to do, my brothers?"
and his companions had been overcome by
and the apostles said in reply, "We must
obey God rather than men." | <urn:uuid:d11d9406-ce2f-4c08-ba27-221bb634ad63> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.catholicapologetics.org/Slides/Truth%20Handling%20and%20Authority_files/slide0009.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284405.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00034-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924419 | 70 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The emergency budget laid out by the Chancellor to cut the UK’s £154.7bn deficit down to size has left industry thankful that the promised pain has largely failed to materialise. Much of the burden to cut the UK’s debt mountain has fallen on consumers, with a rise in VAT sales tax and swingeing cuts to public sector workers in the pipeline. ‘We were quite relieved that we didn’t get hit harder – I suppose we could have been,’ says Alan Eastwood, an economist at the Chemical Industries Association. ‘It’s a brave move by the government to hit individuals rather than business for once, because on energy, for example, they have definitely been targeting industry.’
The emergency budget, given by George Osborne on 22 June 2010, offered industry a number of reasons to be cheerful. Corporation tax is to be cut by 1%/year for the next four years, falling to 24% in 2014. This gives the UK the fifth lowest business tax rate in the G20. Eastwood says that this is a way of showing the world that the UK is open for business and demonstrates that the coalition government backs business and industry in general.
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) welcomed the decision to retain the ‘patent box’. The patent box, which was proposed by the Office for Life Sciences, would mean that companies pay only 10% tax on any income from activity based on patents, rather than the current 28%. Richard Barker, director general of the ABPI, says that the patent box would ‘make a significant contribution to the UK’s ability to retain its worldleading position in an increasingly competitive global environment’. Discussions on IP protection and R&D tax credits are still ongoing. The BioIndustry Association, however, said the budget ‘falls short of helping to develop an economy based on innovative business’. It singled out the increase in capital gains for criticism and says it will be a disincentive to invest in start ups.
‘Green’ industries and renewables also did not get the budget they were hoping for. The promised green investment bank, unveiled by the previous government, is in a hiatus, with bank loans for promising low carbon technologies unlikely to be doled out until 2011 at the earliest. A baseline level for pricing carbon emissions and a carbon tax did not emerge either. ‘The Chancellor could have killed two birds with one stone with a green deal for small and medium sized enterprises as well as for households,’ says Richard Gledhill, partner, sustainability and climate change at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). ‘If we are going to meet our carbon reduction targets, we need SMEs to embrace the low carbon agenda just as much as big companies.’
Eastwood says that the one thing that was really missing from the budget, from the chemical industry’s point of view, were policies to cut the Gordian knot of climate legislation in the UK. He adds that legislative overlap between all the different schemes, such as the Climate Change Levy, the EU’s Emission Trading System and the CRC Energy Efficiency scheme, has become a burden on business that needs to be addressed. A poll by PwC of 50 UK companies found that two-thirds felt the country’s environmental policies were unclear.
The upshot of the budget is that by 2014-15 it will have cost the UK economy £113bn in tax rises and cuts to public spending. How these cuts will shape research science in the coming years is still unclear with little in the way of concrete plans announced on how basic research or universities will be affected.
Some government departments have been told their budgets may be slashed by 40% – something likely to affect universities (C&I 2010, 11, 5). ‘Further cuts would be hugely damaging, threatening the UK’s status as home to worldleading universities,’ says Wendy Piatt, director of the Russell Group, which represents the UK’s top universities. Making the case for protecting university funding, Piat says, ‘Russell Group institutions have an annual economic output of £23.5bn, supporting 237,000 jobs, and bring in £3bn of overseas investment each year.’ | <urn:uuid:ff5b2191-c5c7-4fa8-8b3f-a51bd13be087> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.sci-uat.cammy.dnsalias.com/chemistry-and-industry/cni-data/2010/13/austerity-budget-good-for-business | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571198.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810161541-20220810191541-00269.warc.gz | en | 0.964031 | 886 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Up to 700 people - possibly more - may have died in the latest wreck of a migrants' ship in the straits between Libya and Italy. Words and consternation are no longer enough, says international agency Oxfam.
On April 7th, 2015 the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) revoked the licenses of 13 Money Remittance Providers (MRPs) based in Nairobi, in an effort to curb the financing of terrorism.
Increasingly, development money is being channelled through third parties such as banks or private equity funds. This report tells the human story behind the high finance and statistics.
Total aid pledged at the Third International Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria, in Kuwait City, Kuwait, is less than half the amount needed this year to help people in desperate humanitarian need.
A joint call from the leaders of ActionAid, AWID, Civicus, Greenpeace and Oxfam on the eve of the World Social Forum in Tunis.
"The new restrictions on entry for Syrians into Lebanon are part of a worrying, wider trend reflecting quite simply less and less opportunities for Syrians to escape conflict inside Syria," said Camilla Jelbart Mosse, Oxfam's Syria Campaign Manager.
Yesterday, 28 UN Special Rapporteurs, sent a letter to World Bank President Jim Kim on the first draft of the new social and environmental safeguards, raising their great concerns with the new draf
In response to WFP food cuts for Syrian refugees, Andy Baker who heads up Oxfam's response to the Syria crisis said: "Millions of Syrians have left their country to flee war, death and destruction. It is unthinkable to leave them hungry. Rich countries must step up and support the World Food Program."
Oxfam welcomes the importance placed in Berlin on assisting neighbouring countries, but words alone are not enough. | <urn:uuid:5103a9fc-7f41-4ba7-814e-e00833447b77> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/category/oxfam-general/human-rights?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281649.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00439-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933538 | 376 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Egypt officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Covering an area of about 1,010,000 square kilometers (390,000 sq mi), Egypt is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west.
Egypt is one of the most populous countries in Africa and the Middle East. The great majority of its over 82.2 million people live near the banks of the Nile River, in an area of about 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 sq mi), where the only arable land is found. The large areas of the Sahara Desert are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypt's residents live in urban areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria and other major cities in the Nile Delta.
Monuments in Egypt such as the Giza pyramid complex and its Great Sphinx were constructed by its ancient civilization. Its ancient ruins, such as those of Memphis, Thebes, and Karnak and the Valley of the Kings outside Luxor, are a significant focus of archaeological study. The tourism industry and the Red Sea Riviera employ about 12% of Egypt's workforce.
The economy of Egypt is one of the most diversified in the Middle East, with sectors such as tourism, agriculture, industry and service at almost equal production levels | <urn:uuid:c872ad7b-55be-4e0b-81b5-2d8743fa615c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://traveltill.com/destination/Egypt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571745.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812170436-20220812200436-00466.warc.gz | en | 0.947288 | 327 | 2.703125 | 3 |
TAMPA - Hillsborough prosecutors know there are racial disparities in the criminal justice system but they don't think they can do much about them.
They believe that going after some crimes, like driving with a suspended license, is a waste of time and resources and does little to improve public safety.
They don't know how their bosses evaluate their performance, and some believe promotions are based on internal politics rather than experience or talent.
Those are some of the takeaways in a recently released report that gauges the opinions of prosecutors in four cities, including the office of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren. The report is part of a two-year, $1.7 million research project by Florida International University and Loyola University-Chicago, which seeks to use data to measure and improve prosecutorial performance and fairness.
"The idea is to collect data on a quarterly basis to track change," said Besiki Luka Kutateladze, the FIU criminology professor who is leading the project. "The big part of this is to get a sense from the line prosecutors of what will be a meaningful measure of prosecutorial success."
Jacksonville, Chicago, and Milwaukee are the other participating offices. All four have elected prosecutors whom the authors describe as "forward-thinking." Warren, a Democrat, vowed to seek criminal justice reforms when he campaigned for the office in 2016.
"For a generation, if not longer, our system has lacked effective methods to evaluate prosecutorial performance," Warren said in a statement. "This partnership will redefine the ways in which we measure success."
The first part of the report analyzes the way prosecutors think about their jobs. It includes responses from 22 line prosecutors in Hillsborough who were interviewed this summer about the office's priorities, community engagement, incarceration, racial disparities and how to define success. It also includes results of an online survey taken by 84 Hillsborough prosecutors. The study is funded through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Among the findings for Hillsborough:
* Racial minorities are over-represented in the criminal justice system, but Hillsborough prosecutors don't think they contribute to the disparities. Some say the issue stems more from the concentration of poverty in some communities, which leads to a heavier law enforcement presence. Some prosecutors are uncomfortable even talking about the issue.
"I know there is a disparity and it sucks because I sit in court and I see it," one prosecutor said.
"What are we supposed to do?" said another prosecutor. "If I can prove the case and it is a lawful arrest, am I supposed to let them go because it's fairer? It's not my place to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute."
* The office does not have a formal process for evaluating prosecutors. Some attorneys said promotions occur based on internal politics and longevity.
"How people are promoted and evaluated is political," one prosecutor said. "In the administration, once they form an opinion about you they don't change. We are supposed to give people due process in court and we don't get that in the office."
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* Some prosecutors believe community engagement could help build trust among people who don't hold positive views of the State Attorney's Office, but most are skeptical.
"Our job is always going to be to enforce the law," said one prosecutor. "So there will inevitably be parts of the community where we aren't well-received. The public defender's office can go and be perceived as helping, and we go to the same place and are perceived as putting people down."
* The prosecutors believe the office seeks jail and prison time appropriately, but certain laws carry punishments that are too harsh or restrictive. They also say some offenses are a waste of time.
"The Legislature is a mess," one prosecutor said. "Sometimes they tie our hands with mandatory minimums and sometimes it would help to have options."
"Driving on a suspended (license) is just a stupid crime," said another. "If a person comes in with a valid license, drop the case. There's no point."
* The survey data indicates that most Hillsborough prosecutors consider lowering crime rates and recidivism and maintaining positive relationships with law enforcement as among the most important objectives of their jobs. They were divided on whether aggressive prosecution could better control crime. Most disagreed that the court system is too lenient on defendants.
A second installment, which will focus on racial disparities, is expected next summer. The final portion, due a year from now, will look at performance metrics.
A link to the full report is available online at www.caj.fiu.edu.
Contact Dan Sullivan at email@example.com or (813) 226-3386. Follow @TimesDan. | <urn:uuid:f713fbae-cd3a-4278-a33e-125cf238346d> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/hillsborough-prosecutors-dish-on-racial-disparities-fairness-for-fiu-study-20181218/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571869.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813021048-20220813051048-00068.warc.gz | en | 0.966694 | 1,033 | 1.679688 | 2 |
JOPLIN, Mo. — A national fast food chain is doing its part to help local young people prepare for the future.
The Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Missouri is the recipient of an $11,800 grant from the Taco Bell Foundation. It’s part of the restaurant chain’s efforts to help young people become the next generation of leaders in their community. The money is used to send young men and women on college tours, like the one Samuel Lee just went on.
“The Boys & Girls Club helps set the career paths for the children after they leave the Boys & Girls Club. So when they give us these options, the people that don’t know what to do after high school, they have an easier chance of getting their career and what they want to do and what they’re going to set their life based around,” said Samuel Lee.
Lee went on a trip to Springfield recently and visited three campuses. He plans on starting his education at Ozark Technical College. | <urn:uuid:b381f5a7-ad91-460f-891e-8568ddd3232b> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.fourstateshomepage.com/news/joplin-news/taco-bell-grant-benefits-boys-girls-club-of-swmo/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572163.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815085006-20220815115006-00678.warc.gz | en | 0.971809 | 210 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Womelsdorf in Berks County, Pennsylvania — The American Northeast (Mid-Atlantic)
Erected 1947 by Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission.
Location. 40° 21.951′ N, 76° 10.796′ W. Marker is in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, in Berks County. Marker is at the intersection of Conrad Weiser Pkwy. (US422) and North Water Street on Conrad Weiser Pkwy. (US422). Click for map. Marker is in this post office area: Womelsdorf PA 19567, United States of America.
Other nearby markers. At least 8 other markers are within 3 miles of this marker, measured as the crow flies. Conrad Weiser (approx. 0.6 miles away); Home and Grave of Conrad Weiser (approx. 0.6 miles away); Tulpehocken Path (approx. 0.6 miles away); Home of Conrad Weiser, 1729-1760 (approx. 0.7 miles away); Is this Weiser's House? (approx. 0.7 miles away); Fort Zeller (approx. 2.7 miles away); Marion Township Veterans Memorial (approx. 2.9 miles away); Robesonia Furnace (approx. 2.9 miles away). Click for a list of all markers in Womelsdorf.
Categories. • Colonial Era • Industry & Commerce • War, US Revolutionary •
Credits. This page originally submitted on , by Don Morfe of Baltimore, Md 21234. This page has been viewed 326 times since then and 16 times this year. Photos: 1, 2. submitted on , by Don Morfe of Baltimore, Md 21234. • Bill Pfingsten was the editor who published this page. This page was last revised on June 16, 2016. | <urn:uuid:d0abc82a-2939-44b1-adb3-9907c0a69f50> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=84522 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282140.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00127-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.886681 | 387 | 2.1875 | 2 |
A monument commemorating Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman of color elected to the nation’s second-highest office was installed in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., earlier this week.
The portrait, which measures 6-by-6 feet and weighs 350 pounds, is made from a sheet of cracked glass meant to symbolize how Harris shattered the glass ceiling, according to The Associated Press.
— Isabel Lara (@isalara) February 5, 2021
This will just be a wonderful visual emblem of this moment in time and hopefully people will reflect a little bit on all the barriers that have been broken by her election,” said Holly Hotchner, president and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum, a group that co-sponsored the display.
Lindsay Kaplan, a co-founder of Chief, which is a networking organization for female executives that also co-sponsored the portrait, said, “I think what makes it so moving to me is to see the tiny cracks, to see those fissures and everything they represent.”
The piece, which was commissioned by creative agency BBH New York, was fashioned by glass artist Simon Berger. Using a hammer, Berger broke a piece of laminated glass until it resembled a photograph of Harris taken by Celeste Sloman. “I hit the glass directly with the hammer, so that cracks and impacts occur,” he said. “Hard hits create abstraction and I ‘paint’ with targeted fine hits.”
The project took about a day to complete in Berger’s Swiss studio, after which it was carefully shipped to New York.
“We wanted it to really be like a show-stopping piece that people are going to see and interact with and really celebrate her in the way that she should be,” said Liz Loudy, who is a creative director at BBH New York.
The daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, Harris was the first black senator from California and was also the first woman and person of color to be the state’s attorney general.
“When our very democracy was on the ballot this election, with the very soul of America at stake,” Harris said during a victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware, in November. “You ushered in a new day for America.”
“For four years, you marched and organized for equality and justice. And then you voted. And you delivered a clear message. You chose hope and unity, decency, science and yes, truth,” Harris continued. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
The portrait is slated to remain at the Lincoln Memorial until 9 p.m. on Saturday night, after which it will go to the Chief office in New York and be displayed publicly somewhere else yet to be announced.
Author : Jon Brown | <urn:uuid:fc6d9ab5-cca0-4742-9ab1-a8df29b76b8a> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://realnewsrealpatriots.com/wonderful-visual-emblem-glass-monument-to-kamala-harris-erected-in-front-of-lincoln-memorial/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573667.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819100644-20220819130644-00067.warc.gz | en | 0.970525 | 622 | 2.46875 | 2 |
A Conversation for Beers of Germany
Researcher 173499 Started conversation May 12, 2001
"Helles" means bright, not light, because of the color.
Scotedog Posted Oct 8, 2002
When referring to colour, Helles does mean Light. When referring to something like the sky (or perhaps something even more nebulous), helles can mean bright.
In terms of beer, helles definitely means Lights as in the colour, in conparison to dunkles, which is dark
luckyjoker1 Posted Sep 23, 2005
That´s true. The German adjective "hell" means "lightly coloured" and is the opposite of dark ("dunkel"). As you see, when translated as "light", one might think of "light-weight", but that, in German, is "leicht". I guess most beers weigh about the same, so the ability of a Bavarian waitress to hold 6 or even more 1-litre-glasses in each hand is as impressive as if she carried any other sort of beer than Helles.
Key: Complain about this post | <urn:uuid:3e298a21-1201-4d65-81a7-5f041c147b84> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A319871/conversation/view/F39764/T111867 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570868.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808152744-20220808182744-00071.warc.gz | en | 0.942539 | 240 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Giambattista Piazzetta played a leading role in 18th-century Venetian painting, which was mainly oriented towards bright, luminous tones and a joy of representation which originated mainly from the works of the great Veronese. It was he who, more than anyone, took up the heritage of the 17th century, adopting its use of strong contrasts of light, with brownish tones flushing his scenes — mostly of a religious nature — with dramatic impetuosity.
This fine image of Christ crucified between the two robbers is an excellent example of his work. It became part of the Venetian museum’s collection in 1905, when it was purchased from Sebastiano Candiani, the antique dealer. The Rubens model on which the representation is based has been transformed into complacent virtuosity in the twisting bodies, rendered with particular care for the description of each individual element of Giambattista’s habitual anatomies. Overall, it is an image of overpowering dramatic intensity, enhanced by a powerfully contrasted play of light and shadow which is intensely felt in the youthful work of Piazzetta. This is why the painting is normally dated around 1710. The imagery of the painting is particularly interesting, both in terms of the figures of the robbers, which inspired Tiepolo when he painted his Crucifixion in 1723–25 for the church of San Martino in Burano, and in terms of the Christ, portrayed with his arms held up in the Northern tradition. This was taken up again in Venice by the 17th-century Langetti in his canvas for the church of the Terese, now in Ca’ Rezzonico. | <urn:uuid:6dbdecfb-4a0f-4c3b-8fc0-348d48d75394> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://nga.gov.au/theitalians/Detail.cfm?IRN=161308&ViewID=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280221.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00237-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976959 | 351 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Bacterial and fungal infections continue to pose a major clinical challenge in patients with prolonged severe neutropenia after chemotherapy or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). With the advent of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) to mobilize neutrophils in healthy donors, granulocyte transfusions have been broadly used to prevent and/or treat life-threatening infections in patients with severe febrile neutropenia and/or neutrophil dysfunction. Although the results of randomized controlled trials are inconclusive, there are suggestions from pilot and retrospective studies that granulocyte transfusions may benefit selected categories of patients. We will critically appraise the evidence related to the use of therapeutic granulocyte transfusions in children and adults, highlighting current controversies in the field and discussing complementary approaches to modulate phagocyte function in the host.
- Febrile neutropenia
- Granulocyte transfusion
- Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all) | <urn:uuid:135da6ef-0fcc-4ec5-bd57-c89c8657a2c5> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://moh-it.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/granulocyte-transfusions-in-children-and-adults-with-hematologica | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572021.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814083156-20220814113156-00067.warc.gz | en | 0.813146 | 256 | 2.765625 | 3 |
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