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Tag: winners
Cynthia Ozick
photo: Ricki Rosen
Cynthia Ozick Biography
Juror Biographies
Bill Abrahams
Shannon Ravanel
Cynthia Ozick Press
Born in New York City, CYNTHIA OZICK is married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, and has one daughter, Rachel.
She earned her BA cum laude in English from New York University in 1949, and an MA from Ohio State University in 1951. She is the author of six books: The Pagan Rabbi and other stories; Bloodshed and Three Novellas; Levitation: Five Fictions; Art & Ardor: Essays;Trust (a novel); and The Cannibal Galaxy (a novel). She is also the author of over 100 poems, essays, articles and reviews and the translator of Yiddish prose and poetry including Leivick, Stuzkever, Tabatchnik, and Glatstein. Her work is translated into Swedish, Dutch, German, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, French, Finnish, Hebrew, and Yugoslavian. She has lectured all over the United States and given readings in Canada, Italy, Israel, Denmark and Sweden. In 1982 she served as Distinguished Artist in Residence at the City University of New York. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including “The New Yorker,” “Harper’s,” “Commentary,” “The New Criterion,” “The New York Review of Books,” “The New York Times Book Review,” and “Partisan Review.”
Some of the prizes and awards she has received include: National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1968); Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Fiction (1972); nominee National Book Award (1972); nominee National Book Critics Circle Award (1982,1983); chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin) (1970, 1976, 1982, 1984); First Prize, Doubleday’s Prize Stories: The O’Henry Awards (1975, 1981, 1984); Guggenheim Fellow (1982); American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Strauss Living Award (1983); Distinguished Service in Jewish Letters Award; Jewish Theological Seminary (1984); Distinguished Alumnus Award, New York University (1984); nominee Pen/Faulkner Award (1984).
She has honorary degrees from Yeshiva University (1984), Hebrew Union College (1984) and delivered the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard (1985). She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, PEN and the Author’s League.
The Rea Award has been established explicitly to honor writers who have made significant contributions to the short story; and implicitly, as a way of emphasizing the distinction of the genre in its own right, rather than as a lesser subdivision under the general heading of fiction. The first writer chosen to receive the Award is Cynthia Ozick, whose collections The Pagan Rabbi and Levitation, and her recent as yet uncollected stories, superbly exemplify those qualities the Award celebrates. “A writer of great intelligence, moral energy, imaginative power, Cynthia Ozick has appreciably widened the range of what the short story is able to be. We can see this best in her now classic story, “The Shawl,” where she has taken upon herself the burden of a story whose source is in the Holocaust. Of that terrible, never-to-be-forgotten evil so much personal and historical evidence has been gathered, written, recorded, transcribed and photographed that a story, a mere story, might seem to count for little measured against so monumental an assemblage. But truth-telling and story-telling are now irreconcilable: in “The Shawl” they are inseparably fused. An inspired writer has conveyed to us in a few pages a moment of life and death, fragments seized from an unspeakable human tragedy and translated into an image that cannot be obliterated. Reading “The Shawl” we are moved past the truth of fact to a deeper, different understanding; we bear witness to the truth of art. Only rarely does this happen, and when it does, it must be celebrated. It is an honor to honor Cynthia Ozick.
Posted on April 25, 2017 January 26, 2018 Tags 1986, Cynthia Ozick, Rea Award, winners
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Henry Kravis
KKR to be opportunistic in debt and aggressive in private equity: Henry Kravis
Everyone expected that the market would turn and these assets would recover but my experience tells me that’s never what really happens Mohit Bhalla&Arijit Barman | ET Bureau | Updated: April 13, 2017, 14:23 IST
File photo: Henry Kravis
Henry Kravis along with his 2 co-founders at KKR have bought and sold some of the biggest companies in the world and have also transformed the way they are run. With over $130 billion in AUM, KKR today is a financial powerhouse diversifying beyond their tradition of leverage buy outs to real estate, hedge funds as well as credit solutions for corporates that were once the exclusive realm of big banks. In an exclusive interview with ET, Kravis, 73, outlines his world view and where India fits in all that. Edited excerpts
What do you make of the pile up in bad loans in India? You have experienced debt-fuelled asset bubbles back home that resulted in a global crisis.
I am a big believer that when you have these problems you have to write them off.
I am a big believer of a good bank and a bad bank. The problem of bad loans will never get smaller. So the more you delay, the hole will just get deeper. It's already late. And you can't wait any longer. I get it that the loans have been made by state owned banks and that the issues that you’re faced with here are complex. The politicians would get a lot of criticism if they made seemingly tough decisions. But what I’m afraid of, and I’ve seen it happen in other parts of the world such as Europe, these problems just get bigger the longer you put off fixing them."
Do you think the problem is deep enough to warrant a comparison with Europe?
You’re certainly not in a crisis. I am not suggesting that but what I fear when I talk to some of the bankers here about whether they should write off or not is that they believe that a lot of these assets are not performing and the borrowers cannot pay the debt but there is replacement value and so they want to avoid a write down. I refer again to Europe. That is a classic example. Everyone expected that the market would turn and these assets would recover but my experience tells me that’s never what really happens.
How do you go about selecting which assets will be placed in a bad bank and which ones will go in a good bank?
You just place a threshold and say across every industry if the loan is sub-standard by a certain value or percentage then it goes into the pool and the government tells the banks that we bridge your equity. But you almost have to be undemocratic about it. You cannot pick industries or promoters.
You’re suggesting that the state-owned banks take a write down. That will impact their net worth. And then we need the Government to recapitalize them. The Government has its own fiscal challenges so what is the solution?
One very simple one. I would say the solution is to start privatizing these banks and the government will play a role. So it can be a public private partnership model with new capital coming in from the private sector.
If the government says we are not concerned about going below 51% equity in the public sector banks then go to the public markets with certain assurances by the government. I would say the solution is to start privatizing these banks and the government will play a role. So it can be a public private partnership model with new capital coming in from the private sector. You can just give a contingent instead of putting actual capital because the government doesn’t have the liberty of a huge treasury. I mean the core issue is that the banks need to get back to lending. That is your main source of capital in this country. You don’t have a vibrant debt market though you have an equity market of sorts.
So basically what you're saying is that take a write down and recapitalize the state owned banks through privatization..
What do you think it will take to develop a vibrant debt capital market here?
You have made the first move which is in the right direction which is to get a bankruptcy code. And you know we were helpful in that. I’m particularly proud. I used to come to India one to three times a year and I used to ask central bankers why don’t you have a deep enough credit market here. You’re credit market is just the banks. And then they explained to me that the real reason they don’t have it is because they don’t have a bankruptcy code here. I was surprised. So I met with Prime Minister Modi on his first trip to the US after the elections and I said you don’t have a bankruptcy code. He was surprised and he said what do you mean? So he asked us to put a paper together. So we put a paper together and sent it over to the Prime Minister’s office and I have never seen a government move so fast... He (Modi) was back in New York 6-9 months later and he told me we're doing it. And now what I hear from the lawyers is that it is a pretty damn good code."
KKR has relied on a hybrid model of investments here. It's been a combination of some private equity investments, but you have loaned money as well through your NBFC arm. What was the thinking behind that?
When we were evaluating an India entry my partner and cousin George Roberts and myself concluded that India was a totally different market. It wasn’t going to be a buyout market for us. There weren’t a lot of companies you could buy because almost 80% of your companies here are family owned and they were not about to sell. But they needed capital and they were happy to have partners. They were happy to sell minority. We looked at that and it suggested it’s a growth market. And then Sanjay (Sanjay Nayar, CEO KKR, India) said there’s a shortage of debt capital here and that’s how we could differentiate ourselves by becoming providers of debt capital to the mid-market enterprises space. So we started the Non Bank Finance Company. It was a very creative idea and all credit to Sanjay for it. This was similar to how our strategy was evolving globally as well at the time. In the aftermath of the financial crisis in the US, it was the growth companies that were struggling to get capital and we realized that it was an opportunity and got in to the lending business. The same strategy has worked here.
How much capital have you deployed here so far?
We have done about nine deals and deployed about $4 billion dollars in private equity. We like to refer to ourselves as the largest private capital player here. We’ve deployed about $4 billion in debt investments.
The first $8 billion was deployed in a combination of investments and a large part of it is debt. What will be the strategy for the next $8 billion that you deploy here?
I would be extremely disappointed if we only deployed another $8 billion (laughs). Well PE is very important. That’s our core business. I don’t want to underplay that. We are going to be out pounding the pavement and probably be more opportunistic on the debt side because you find companies that need it but probably less opportunistic but more on the offense on the private equity side because we will go out and say you have a terrific company and we want to be part of your growth. The most important things we look for is who’s the promoter. I can guarantee you, you could have the best company but trust me you have the wrong partner you’re going to lose money.
Which sectors look attractive to you in India where you believe there is significant value yet to be realized?
Our India strategy regards several key themes, rather than focusing on sectors alone. These include establishing long-term, deep relationships, positioning ourselves as the go-to provider of patient-capital, driving operational value-add in our portfolio, and providing financial solutions to companies across the capital structure. More broadly, we will be looking at investing behind domestic consumption themes, globally competitive export businesses which can benefit from our global network and expertise, and increasingly focus on buyouts and divestures. Debt and providing critical financing to companies is another central component of our India strategy, given the immense need for capital in the market. In the future, you’ll see us extending even more capital to mid-market and small businesses across sectors – we see this as the second phase of our NBFC business and a way to provide even more financial solutions to companies.
How do you see the asset reconstruction business in India?
Look we’re setting up our own ARC. We’re not buying one. We bought a number of assets from banks globally. We believe there are various models to do it. We could set up a separate managed company and we’ll put some of these bad loans in this company and on top of that we’ll put some senior secured loans and bring in some capital so that this company has working capital and then we’re going to work on that company and fix it. The banks don’t have the management bandwidth whereas we do. So we will create equity value by working with the company. That makes an attractive proposition for the banks as well.
What do you make of the several investments in the technology and internet commerce space here? Do you think you have missed out?
I was quite concerned about how technology could disrupt our own company or a company we might buy. So I took a senior guy from within the firm and set up an innovation group. We’re not particularly good at investing in venture capital and start-ups. I do it personally and I don’t know if it’s any better than going to a casino. You’ve seen Flipkart raising a billion dollars here. They do that to give Amazon a run for their money. Jeff (Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder) is a terrific guy and he’s a good friend of mine. But in this business you have to have capital and you have to have staying power. There’s only going to be two survivors. When I look at the valuations in the US and I look at the fact that there are 5 companies, I think it’s impossible, it’s a frenzy. We do such investments through our growth fund. We may look at such investments but I think even at $10 billion for Flipkart the valuations are still high.
Competition in the Indian private equity industry is intense. All your global peers are here and all are India bulls. In such a hyper competitive market, how has valuations and consequently returns got impacted? Are they likely to going forward?
A greater mix of investors is expected in any market experiencing this level of growth, opportunity and maturity. We can only focus on the things that we can control, and with more investors in the market, it’s more important than ever to create operational value, provide innovative financial solutions, assist in accretive M&A and enhance the global focus of our portfolio companies. By demonstrating this, we’re able to create proprietary investment opportunities at attractive valuations. If we are disciplined and do our job well, the returns will follow.
Many of your LPs --- pension funds, SWFs -- are investing on their own in EMs like India. Doesn't that queer the pitch even more?
Generally, it is true that some institutional investors have built up teams and resources to pursue deals directly. We have some great partners who have invested alongside us and we also have great partners who choose to invest through a fund. That’s really a function of how they are structured, their desire to take on that additional exposure of investing direct, etc. None of that changes our approach to partnership with them.
George Roberts and yourself have often stated that you understand business owners and their mindset because you consider yourselves to be in that mould. You have often called KKR a family-run firm. Are you therefore at home in dealing with Indian businesses, a majority of which still continue to be family-run? Do you think levels of governance and compliance at Indian companies, especially those that are family-run up to the mark?
Given George and I are first cousins, KKR is definitely part of the family.
Since we first began investing in India, we’ve seen companies come a long way in terms of corporate governance and the adoption of best global practices. It’s a natural part of their evolution. These family or entrepreneur-led businesses are significant drivers of India’s economy today and as they desire to grow and evolve, they’re taking on more traditional governance seen with companies in a later stage of their development. Corporate governance is an important criteria for us when we select our partners, but helping form a board or develop internal best practices is also something we can support and help them achieve.
Tags : Industry, Henry Kravis, Privatisation, PE, KKR, Interviews
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Perceptions play big role in how residents feel about wind energy
By Mandira Banerjee
Topic: Research, State & Community
When local residents feel the planning process for building wind turbines is fair and open, their perceptions of the often-controversial energy source remain steady or improve with time, according to a University of Michigan study.
In fact, the openness with which the planning process is handled is more important in shaping residents’ perceptions of wind energy than receiving a payment, researchers say.
Read the full study
Likewise, if residents feel that their voices are ignored, their perceptions of wind turbines become less positive and, more importantly, erode over time.
“This finding shows that residents want to be heard,” said lead author Sarah Mills, senior project manager and researcher at the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
“It has lessons not only for local government officials who hold public hearings to approve or deny the project, but also for wind energy companies that are developing these projects.”
For the study, a 2014 survey was sent to 1,000 residents across nine townships in Michigan with wind turbines to gauge their perceptions about impacts of wind energy. The same respondents were surveyed again in 2016 and asked the same questions to see how their perceptions had changed two years later.
Mills and colleagues found that, on average, attitudes stayed roughly the same. Most residents agreed that wind turbines create jobs and provide revenue to landowners, while most disagreed — on both surveys — that wind turbines cause health problems or create noise pollution.
“This averaging, though, masks the shifts in opinion that occur in both directions,” said study co-author Doug Bessette, an assistant professor in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University.
To test it, the researchers broke the data down to see if the payment to the residents had an impact on their perceptions. Similarly, they checked to see if the perceptions of the residents were impacted by how residents felt about the process — whether it was just or unjust. It was here that they found the biggest difference.
According to the study, landowners who felt negatively about the wind-farm planning process perceived far greater negative impacts in 2016 than they did in 2014. This group reported the most dramatic increases in negative perceptions across the study, and across all turbine impacts, including visual and noise problems, reduction of nearby property values, and human health problems.
“This shows that rather than getting used to living with turbines, those residents became increasingly embittered to wind turbines over time,” Bessette said. “It also shows the importance of acknowledging and incorporating community members in the planning process.”
These results diverge from the U-shaped curve reported in previous research that shows that many of the fears resident have before turbines are built fade over time as they accept the turbines.
Mills says this is the first time that researchers in the United States have compared residents’ perceptions of wind turbine impacts at two points post-construction. The study, she says, has policy implications for local governments.
“Actions taken during a wind-project planning process by local governments, planning consultants and wind developers have impacts that extend well beyond the final project approval meeting,” Mills said. “It may even impact any subsequent wind energy projects in the community.”
The study is published in the journal Land Use Policy. It was supported by a U-M Dow Doctoral Sustainability Fellowship and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint.
Hannah Smith of the Ford School is also a co-author on the study.
Tags: wind turbines, wind energy, CLOSUP, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
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Compaq's Earnings Low; Annouces New Deskpros
On the heels of its biggest partner, Microsoft Corp., announcing better-than-expected earnings, Compaq Computer Corp. announced lower-than-expected earnings of $9.4 billion for the first quarter ended in March, an increase of almost 66 percent over the same period last year. Net income for the period was $281 million, or $0.16 per share.
"Despite our overall corporate strength, our first-quarter results are disappointing and unacceptable," says Benjamin Rosen, acting CEO for Compaq. "We will aggressively pursue the actions necessary to realize our enormous potential, achieve our traditional levels of profitable growth and build long-term shareholder value."
Former CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer resigned under board pressure earlier this week along with CFO Earl Mason. Ironically, it was Rosen, a founder of Compaq, who fired Pfeiffer's predecessor Rod Canion in 1981.
Compaq noted the first quarter performance for the commercial PC business at below internal expectations as a reason for the offset of the company's sales performance. Compaq states there was less-than-anticipated market demand, increased competitive pricing and growth below plans, which all contributed to a revenue shortfall for the entire business. The company says it did not achieve the revenue performance needed in the enterprise space to meet its expected levels of product revenue and gross margin for the quarter.
Later the company announced of three new Pentium-based Deskpro systems equipped with Windows 9.x/NT, the highest of which was the Deskpro EN Series Pentium III 500 MHz with 64 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive, a network interface card and 15-inch V500 color monitor priced at $2249.
Total gross margin for the quarter was 24.7 percent versus 18 percent in the same period in 1998. Product sales for the quarter did reach $7.8 billion, an increase of $2.2 billion or approximately 40 percent above the reported first quarter in 1998. -- Brian Ploskina
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Home Physics News
Researchers Develop a New Quantum Error Correcting Code
TOPICS:Cornell UniversityMITQuantum ComputingQuantum PhysicsQubits
By Larry Hardesty, <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/">MIT News</a> May 26, 2015
A team of researchers from MIT, Google, the University of Sydney, and Cornell University present a new quantum error correcting code that requires measurements of only a few quantum bits at a time to ensure consistency between one stage of a computation and the next.
Quantum computers are largely theoretical devices that could perform some computations exponentially faster than conventional computers can. Crucial to most designs for quantum computers is quantum error correction, which helps preserve the fragile quantum states on which quantum computation depends.
The ideal quantum error correction code would correct any errors in quantum data, and it would require measurement of only a few quantum bits, or qubits, at a time. But until now, codes that could make do with limited measurements could correct only a limited number of errors — one roughly equal to the square root of the total number of qubits. So they could correct eight errors in a 64-qubit quantum computer, for instance, but not 10.
In a paper they’re presenting at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Theory of Computing in June, researchers from MIT, Google, the University of Sydney, and Cornell University present a new code that can correct errors afflicting — almost — a specified fraction of a computer’s qubits, not just the square root of their number. And for reasonably sized quantum computers, that fraction can be arbitrarily large — although the larger it is, the more qubits the computer requires.
“There were many, many different proposals, all of which seemed to get stuck at this square-root point,” says Aram Harrow, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, who led the research. “So going above that is one of the reasons we’re excited about this work.”
Like a bit in a conventional computer, a qubit can represent 1 or 0, but it can also inhabit a state known as “quantum superposition,” where it represents 1 and 0 simultaneously. This is the reason for quantum computers’ potential advantages: A string of qubits in superposition could, in some sense, perform a huge number of computations in parallel.
Once you perform a measurement on the qubits, however, the superposition collapses, and the qubits take on definite values. The key to quantum algorithm design is manipulating the quantum state of the qubits so that when the superposition collapses, the result is (with high probability) the solution to a problem.
Baby, bathwater
But the need to preserve superposition makes error correction difficult. “People thought that error correction was impossible in the ’90s,” Harrow explains. “It seemed that to figure out what the error was you had to measure, and measurement destroys your quantum information.”
The first quantum error correction code was invented in 1994 by Peter Shor, now the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, with an office just down the hall from Harrow’s. Shor is also responsible for the theoretical result that put quantum computing on the map, an algorithm that would enable a quantum computer to factor large numbers exponentially faster than a conventional computer can. In fact, his error-correction code was a response to skepticism about the feasibility of implementing his factoring algorithm.
Shor’s insight was that it’s possible to measure relationships between qubits without measuring the values stored by the qubits themselves. A simple error-correcting code could, for instance, instantiate a single qubit of data as three physical qubits. It’s possible to determine whether the first and second qubit have the same value, and whether the second and third qubit have the same value, without determining what that value is. If one of the qubits turns out to disagree with the other two, it can be reset to their value.
In quantum error correction, Harrow explains, “These measurement always have the form ‘Does A disagree with B?’ Except it might be, instead of A and B, A B C D E F G, a whole block of things. Those types of measurements, in a real system, can be very hard to do. That’s why it’s really desirable to reduce the number of qubits you have to measure at once.”
Time embodied
A quantum computation is a succession of states of quantum bits. The bits are in some state; then they’re modified, so that they assume another state; then they’re modified again; and so on. The final state represents the result of the computation.
In their paper, Harrow and his colleagues assign each state of the computation its own bank of qubits; it’s like turning the time dimension of the computation into a spatial dimension. Suppose that the state of qubit 8 at time 5 has implications for the states of both qubit 8 and qubit 11 at time 6. The researchers’ protocol performs one of those agreement measurements on all three qubits, modifying the state of any qubit that’s out of alignment with the other two.
Since the measurement doesn’t reveal the state of any of the qubits, modification of a misaligned qubit could actually introduce an error where none existed previously. But that’s by design: The purpose of the protocol is to ensure that errors spread through the qubits in a lawful way. That way, measurements made on the final state of the qubits are guaranteed to reveal relationships between qubits without revealing their values. If an error is detected, the protocol can trace it back to its origin and correct it.
It may be possible to implement the researchers’ scheme without actually duplicating banks of qubits. But, Harrow says, some redundancy in the hardware will probably be necessary to make the scheme efficient. How much redundancy remains to be seen: Certainly, if each state of a computation required its own bank of qubits, the computer might become so complex as to offset the advantages of good error correction.
But, Harrow says, “Almost all of the sparse schemes started out with not very many logical qubits, and then people figured out how to get a lot more. Usually, it’s been easier to increase the number of logical qubits than to increase the distance — the number of errors you can correct. So we’re hoping that will be the case for ours, too.”
Stephen Bartlett, a physics professor at the University of Sydney who studies quantum computing, doesn’t find the additional qubits required by Harrow and his colleagues’ scheme particularly daunting.
“It looks like a lot,” Bartlett says, “but compared with existing structures, it’s a massive reduction. So one of the highlights of this construction is that they actually got that down a lot.”
“People had all of these examples of codes that were pretty bad, limited by that square root ‘N,’” Bartlett adds. “But people try to put bounds on what may be possible, and those bounds suggested that maybe you could do way better. But we didn’t have constructive examples of getting here. And that’s what’s really got people excited. We know we can get there now, and it’s now a matter of making it a bit more practical.”
PDF Copy of the Study: Sparse Quantum Codes from Quantum Circuits
Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
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Researchers Perform Logic Operation and Error Correction in a Quantum Register
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Science Breakthrough – Researchers Develop World’s First Quantum Metamaterial
Physicists Track Quantum Errors in Real Time
Physicists Show That Precision Atom Qubits Can “Talk” to Each Other
Engineers Develop a Radical New Architecture for Quantum Computing
Quantum Information is Preserved for Longer than a Second at Room Temperature
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PlayStation CEO Says PS4 is Coming to the End of Its Life Cycle
by Tom Chapman
It sounds like Sony is looking to the future, as the company CEO confirms the PlayStation 4 is coming toward the end of its life cycle.
First hitting shelves in 2014, the PS4 sits in the eighth generation of consoles, and has gone on to be one of the biggest success stories for Sony. Showcasing stellar games like Grand Theft Auto V, Uncharted 4, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, players have some fond memories when it comes to the PS4. That being said, as Sony plans to move ahead, efforts will be focused elsewhere.
Related: Limited Edition Spider-Man PS4 Pro Bundle Leaks Online
Reported by Wall Street Journal writer Takashi Mochizuki on Twitter, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO John Kodera is preparing to lower the curtain on the PS4.
Kodera told audiences at Sony's annual Investor Relations Day that he can't expect unit sales to increase year-on-year, so time would be better spent looking at other avenues while also continuing to reap the benefit of services like PS+. With consoles typically running in 7-year cycles, it makes perfect sense that the PS4 has started looking at its endgame. It isn't all doom and gloom though, with Sony still outlining an impressive sales target to shift 16 million consoles in the current fiscal year compared to 19 million from the last. Sadly, the still-growing Sony VR department has failed to live up to market expectations, meaning that the company is reevaluating where its priorities lie there as well. Instead of seeing the negativity in the news, Kodera was likely trying to explain why the PS4 is projecting a drop in sales.
Given that Sony is on for a bumper year with exclusives like God of War and Insomniac's Spider-Man, the immediate future is also pretty rosy thanks to The Last of Us Part II and the long-awaited Death Stranding. Even if the console is heading into its twilight, at least the PS4 will be going out with a bang. Importantly, the news should come as no surprise considering that in 2015, the then-CEO of the PlayStation division already labeled the console as being in its "harvest period," a time when money is cut and a company tries to earn as much revenue as possible.
As for what comes next, gamers are already looking forward to the PlayStation 5. With some interesting hardware leaks suggesting something supercharged to rival Microsoft's next big offering, everyone has already been warned not to expect the next generation of next-gen consoles this side of 2020. There's still life in the old dog yet as the PS4 Pro continues to go head-to-head with rivals the Xbox One X and the Nintendo Switch. No matter what, the PlayStation 4 is set to continue being a staple of the video game market for a few more years to come.
More: PlayStation 5 Progress Update From Likely Chip Manufacturer
Source: Takashi Mochizuki
Tags: playstation
Disney Changed The Lion King In 2002 (But Nobody Noticed)
Star Trek: When Did Picard Take Over From Kirk?
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From: The Socialist issue 404, 11 August 2005: Defend democratic rights
Search site for keywords: Firefighters - Ipswich
Firefighters defend life-saving services
SUFFOLK FIREFIGHTERS turned out in force on the picket lines on 2 and 5 August in their protest against the removal of turntable services from Bury St Edmunds and the loss of 12 frontline jobs.
Roger MacKay, President, Ipswich and District TUC
I went to the main fire station in Ipswich with a trades council message of solidarity. Support for the firefighters was obvious from the numbers of passing cars giving blasts on their horns. I spoke to Simon Roberts, the trades council FBU delegate:
"Fighting cuts to the fire service has become an annual event for us. According to the Audit Commission, Suffolk spends proportionately less on its fire service than any other local authority, so we're already pared down to the bone.
"After the national dispute, they have obviously felt confident enough to go ahead with some of the so-called modernisation programme. But however they disguise it, these are cuts to the frontline service.
"We're already over-stretched and the loss of the Bury St Edmund service will increase response times and inevitably affect the efficiency of the service. Our safety and the safety of the public is at risk.
"We've lobbied the county council extensively over the past few months and recent remarks by their spokeswoman that we haven't spoken to them since calling for action are hardly constructive. We've asked to see the risk assessments that supposedly justify their proposals, but they have refused.
"If they get away with these cuts in Bury St Edmunds, who knows what will go next? We've got 240 firefighters in Suffolk. If they were to make similar cuts in Ipswich, another 12 jobs, that would represent 10% of the workforce. We will continue our action to fight the cuts."
Suffolk FBU have called two further strikes on 8 and 11 August. A march and rally will be held on 11 August, starting from Princes Road Fire Station, Ipswich, at 2pm, with a rally in the town centre.
Any support, trade union banners etc, will be welcomed.
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The Most Influential Architects of the 21st Century – Rem Koolhaas
Industry | 27th February 2018
Architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1944. Described by legendary architect Frank Gehry as “the most comprehensive thinker in the profession today”, Koolhaas is renowned as an innovate and cerebral architect, and is the first entry into our series profiling the most influential architects of the 21st century.
Literary Beginnings
The son of novelist Anton Koolhaas, Rem began his professional life as a writer, working as a journalist for the Haagse Post. After speaking to a group of architecture students at the University of Delft Koolhaas, he discovered his passion for architecture, and packed his bags to study Architecture Association School in London, graduating in 1972.
However, it would be as a writer that Koolhaas would first come to the architecture community, gaining widespread recognition as an eminent urban theorist with the publication of his 1978 work, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Delirious New York looked at the architectural development of Manhattan as an “organic process created through a variety of cultural forces”.
Delirious New York was heralded as classic architectural text and provided the platform and the publicity for Koolhaas to forge his career as an internationally renowned architect.
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture
In 1975, Koolhaas founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) alongside Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorm. The firm has proved to be a breeding ground for some of the most influential architects of the 21st century, including Winy Maas of the Dutch firm MVRDV, Bjarke Ingels of the Copenhagen-based BIG and the late Zaha Hadid who worked for Koolhaas as an intern.
OMA’s earliest work included the 1987 Netherlands Dance Theater, the 1991 Nexus Housing in Fukuoka, Japan and the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam the following year. However, Koolhaas and OMA really came to the forefront at the turn of the century, creating a number of brilliant and daring contemporary buildings, including a string of stores for the fashion designer Prada, the Netherlands embassy in 2003, the spectacular Seattle Public Library in 2004, and, perhaps his most famous design, the trousers-shaped China Central Television building in 2008 (Below).
“A Theorist and Prophet”
Unlike most architects, Koolhaas is not generally associated with a specific school or architectural movement. While he has been called everything from a Structuralist to Deconstructivist, Koolhaas does not strive for a definitive aesthetic style, but rather an architecture that explores the boundaries between humanity and technology, with each design adapted to the needs of the client and the local environment.
In the year 2000, Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Prize, considered the most prestigious award in the field of architecture. The Pritzker jury praised Koolhaas as a rare combination of “visionary and implementer — philosopher and pragmatist—theorist and prophet.”
As is often the case with many revolutionary thinkers and artists, some of Koolhaas’s work has proved divisive, with buildings such as the Seattle Public Library and the China Central Television building (below) praised and derided in almost equal measure. Where some see innovation, and a mastery of structure and form, others see novelty for novelty’s sake or even ugliness.
Designs that make a big impression
Whatever the consensus on the value of Rem Koolhaas’ designs, there is no doubting his continuing influence on the world of architecture, as a theorist, a mentor and as an architect of genius and we are certainly fans here at Selo.
Our love for architecture and design is at the heart of what we do, and working with our clients, we will advise the best solution for your design project.
If you would like to find out more about how we help our clients, call us on 020 3880 0339, or visit us in our new premises in Milton Keynes.
Seattle Central Library Image © Steven Pavlov
SeloBlogInfluential Architects 21st Century Rem Koolhaas
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Home / Fellows / Pálína Björk Matthíasdóttir
Pálína Björk Matthíasdóttir
Pálína Björk Matthíasdóttir, Iceland
Pálína’s interest in development issues was sparked at a young age when she traveled extensively around Asia and Africa. While there, she was taken by the injustice and imbalance of the world, knowing that there must be many possibilities to improve this situation. Due to her interest in the developing world, Pálína lived in China and later did a research internship with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh as a part of her International Business education. In Iceland, Pálína was active in numerous roles within organizations promoting civil society, such as the Icelandic Red Cross Youth movement where she is currently elected President. Most of her work was in the area of youth interests and human rights, especially in relation to immigrants and refugees. Upon completion of the Rotary World Peace program, Pálína will pursue a career within humanitarian and international organizations, where she can work towards social development and poverty reduction in the world.
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Al Spalding
Albert Goodwill Spalding
Born: 9 / 2 / 1850 at Byron, IL (USA)
Died: 9 / 9 / 1915 at San Diego, CA (USA)
This article was written by Bill McMahon
Albert Spalding’s life story could have been written by Horatio Alger. He had three careers – as a baseball pitcher, a club owner, and a sporting-goods tycoon – and was very successful at all of them. A fourth career, in politics, was just getting under way when he died. And despite an initial setback, ultimately he might well have been successful there, too.
The first of three children, Spalding was born on September 2, 1850, in Byron, Illinois, near Rockford, to James and Harriet Spalding. The family was fairly affluent, owning land and horses. However, James Spalding died when Albert was 8 years old, and the family subsequently moved to Rockford. Albert preceded them, living with an aunt, and it is said that he began playing baseball as a defense against loneliness. He became good enough at it to be asked to join the leading amateur team, the Forest Citys.
In 1867 the Chicago Excelsiors sponsored a tournament that featured the Washington Nationals, regarded as the best team in the country. The Nationals routed the Excelsiors, 49-4, but Spalding pitched the Forest Citys to a 29-23 victory over them. He was hired away by the Excelsiors, but soon returned to Rockford, where he worked at various jobs while continuing to pitch. While on tour with Rockford in 1870, Spalding defeated the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings.
Harry Wright, who had managed the Red Stockings, moved to Boston and worked to organize the first professional league, the National Association. He signed players for his own team, the Boston Red Stockings, including Spalding, Ross Barnes, and Fred Cone from Rockford. Wright was an important formative influence on Spalding, imparting organizational skills to the young man.
From the start, Spalding dominated National Association pitching, leading the league in wins for every year of its five-year existence. In 1871 he was 19-10, winning one more than the two second-place pitchers. The following year, Spalding put up a record of 38-8, winning five more than second-place Candy Cummings. He won even more games in 1873 – 41 wins against 14 losses. Increasing his wins total again in 1874, Spalding was 52-16. Remarkably, Spalding appeared in every one of the Red Stockings' games in 1874. The team played in a total of 71 championship games (excluding exhibitions), and Spalding started 69 of them (65 were complete games), while relieving in the other two. His ERA for the season was 1.92; his career ERA is calculated at 2.13. In 1874 he worked an astounding 617? innings, far more than would ever be assigned to any pitcher in a 162-game season.
In 1874 Wright sent Spalding to England to organize the first foreign tour by American baseball players. The participants were players from the Boston and Athletic (Philadelphia) clubs. They departed July 16, arriving at Liverpool on the 27th. In addition to Liverpool they played games at Manchester, London, Sheffield, and Dublin. There were 14 baseball exhibitions, in which Boston won eight, but also seven cricket matches against top British teams. The Americans astonished the locals by winning six and losing none, the other being drawn because of rain. The victors sailed from England on August 27, returning home September 9.
Spalding had a record of 204-53 in five years, topped by a 54-5 record in 1875, when he had 24 consecutive wins. Not only did he lead in wins for every year of the National Association's existence, he also increased the number of wins each year over the year before. Overall, he had 91 percent of Boston’s victories in the Association.
After finishing in second place in 1871, the Red Stockings won the next four pennants. Spalding's performance is described thus by Robert Tiemann: "In the pitcher's box, Spalding was in complete control, using a fine fastball and change of pace. He was a master at keeping hitters off balance, either by quick-pitching or by holding the ball while the batter fidgeted. In addition, he was a good batsman, adept at opposite field hitting, and a savvy fielder who helped perfect the dropped-popup double play."1
In addition to his work on the mound, Spalding also played 64 games in the outfield and 52 at first base. He was a very good hitter, too, with a career batting average of .313. In 411 games, he batted in 338 runs.
Because he disapproved of drinking and gambling, Spalding was sympathetic to William Hulbert's proposal to organize a new league with stricter discipline. Hence Hulbert was able to lure Spalding, as well as other stars, to his Chicago White Stockings. To prevent the Eastern clubs from retaliating, Hulbert formed the new National League; this meant for Spalding a "promotion" to captain/manager. In the National League's inaugural year, 1876, Spalding again led the league in which he pitched with 47 wins, but George Bradley of St. Louis, who had a 5-4 record against Spalding, was probably a shade better. Spalding was 47-12, and Chicago won the pennant. In 1877 Spalding abandoned the mound for first base. Bradley was hired to replace him, but the team dropped from first to fifth place. Spalding gave up the captaincy and played in only one game in 1878; he was through as a ballplayer at age 27. It appears that his other interests had taken precedence over ballplaying.
After retiring as a player, Spalding became secretary of the White Stockings, becoming president when Hulbert died in 1882. Spalding believed in strict separation between players and management, with the latter handling financial matters. He built a team that dominated the early 1880s, as the White Stockings won pennants in 1880, 1881, 1882, 1885, and 1886. He was determined to have a clean game that drew respectable citizens to the ballpark. He was innovative, starting the practice of spring training when the team went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1886, and he sponsored a world tour of players in 1888-89.
Cap Anson chronicled this trip as follows: Spalding organized a round-the-world tour with exhibition games between the Chicagos and a picked team, called the All-Americas, from the rest of the league.2 Among the All-America players were John M. Ward, Ned Hanlon, Fred Carroll, and Egyptian Healy. They left Chicago via the Burlington Railroad on October 20, 1888. For about a month they toured the West, playing in such places as Minneapolis/St. Paul, Des Moines, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. On November 18 the players sailed for Hawaii, arriving a week later. In addition to Honolulu they played in Auckland and a few Australian cities. In January they sailed to Ceylon, where they also played, but they avoided India for health reasons.
On February 7, 1889, the players arrived in Egypt, where they had a game in the shadow of the pyramids. From there they proceeded to Naples, Rome (playing before the king of Italy), Florence, and Paris. In the latter city, on May 8, Ned Williamson tore his kneecap in a game, virtually ending his career. They crossed the Channel that evening, playing in London (before Edward, Prince of Wales) and other British cities, as well as Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin. In all there were 28 games abroad, the All-Americas winning 14, the Chicagos 11, with three ties. The weary travelers sailed from Queenstown on March 25, arriving in New York on April 6. Two days later there was a game in Brooklyn followed by a banquet at Delmonico's, at which Chauncey Depew was the speaker, with Mark Twain also in attendance. After further exhibitions at Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Indianapolis, the touring players arrived back in Chicago on April 19 for a banquet at the Palmer House. The final game was played on the 20th at West Side Park, six months after they had started out.
Meanwhile, Spalding had undergone a career change from player to team owner and sporting-goods magnate. In February 1876 he opened a sporting-goods store, in partnership with his brother Walter, at 118 Randolph Street in Chicago. Within a few years they had a four-story building in Chicago, a five-story store in New York, and outlets across the country from Oregon to Rhode Island. Spalding was able to use his influence to supply balls, bats, uniforms, and other equipment to the league. He published semiofficial guides and instruction manuals, carrying this practice over to other sports to promote his merchandise.
Spalding became the National League's most influential owner, promoting the reserve clause and its system of "indentured serfdom," i.e., keeping salaries down and controlling where men could play. He assumed a moral authority over the players, railing against drinking in the pages of his Guide.3 He set up what many consider the second "World Series," against the Association's St. Louis Browns, but Chicago only achieved a tie in 1885 and then lost four of six the following year.4 This induced Spalding to break up his team. First to go were the drinkers. Mike Kelly was sold to Boston for $10,000, and Jim McCormick and George Gore were axed. The following year star pitcher John Clarkson brought another $10,000 from Boston. Thus ended the Chicago dynasty.
By 1890 the players had a union, the Brotherhood, and rebelled, forming a rival league. Spalding led the effort to undermine the Players Association and ultimately turned Organized Baseball into a monopolistic trust. But he began to tire of baseball and turned over the presidency of the Chicago team to James Hart in 1892. According to Francis Richter, who regarded Spalding as "the greatest man the National game has produced," Spalding put the game above selfish interests.5 This caused him to come out of retirement to oppose the syndicate scheme of Andrew Freedman and John T. Brush. He ran for the league presidency against old friend Nicholas Young and actually "won" through a flawed process that was challenged in the courts. When it appeared that he would ultimately lose, he resigned the NL presidency in April 1902.
Spalding then sold out completely and retired to Point Loma, California. He devoted himself to proving baseball a uniquely American game, promoting the myth of its invention by Abner Doubleday.
From a baseball standpoint Spalding’s most significant relationship was that with Adrian "Cap" Anson. They had started out with Rockford, came to Chicago in 1876, and worked to build up the White Stockings. Anson shared Spalding's views and enforced his values on the field. However, Anson and James Hart had differences dating back to the world tour, and when Hart took over the team the friction escalated until Anson was dismissed after the 1897 season. On the one hand, it was time for a change. On the other, Anson felt stabbed in the back by his old friend. Spalding tried to placate Anson with a testimonial said to be worth $50,000 (over $1 million today), but Anson was too proud to accept. In Anson's autobiography the envy is clear: They started out together; Spalding prospered, while all of Anson's investments turned sour.6
Spalding was married twice, first to Josie Keith in 1875; they had a son Keith. Josie died in 1899, and in 1901 Spalding married the widow Elizabeth Mayer Churchill. They had been clandestine lovers for some time and had a son (Spalding Brown Spalding, later changed to Albert Goodwill Jr.) out of wedlock. After marrying Elizabeth, Spalding acknowledged the paternity and also adopted her other son, Durand Churchill. He also took an interest in the career of his nephew Albert Spalding (1889-1953), a world-class violinist. Elizabeth was devoted to theosophy, and the Spaldings moved to Point Loma to be part of the community founded by Katherine Tingley. Spalding had been in the second echelon of Chicago society, but in the San Diego area he was a civic leader. This led to his campaign for the Senate in 1910. Although he was the popular choice, the insiders in the state legislature chose his opponent, John D. Works. Spalding died of a stroke on September 9, 1915, leaving an estate of $600,000 to his wife and three sons. Twenty-five years later, in 1939, he was named to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Old Timers Committee.
This biography is included in "Boston’s First Nine: The 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings" (SABR, 2016), edited by Bob LeMoine and Bill Nowlin.
In addition to the sources in the notes, the author also consulted:
Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1915: 1; September 15, 1915: 13.
Gold, Eddie, and Art Ahrens. The Golden Era Cubs, 1876-1940 (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1985).
Golenbock, Peter. Wrigleyville, a Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs (New York: St. Martin's, 1996).
Levine, Peter. A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball, the Promise of American Sport (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Nemec, David. The Great Encyclopedia of 19th-Century Major League Baseball (New York: Donald Fine Books, 1997).
Nineteenth Century Notes. Newsletter of the Nineteenth Century Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, No. 99 (1999): 2, 2.
Smith, Duane A. "Spalding, Albert Goodwill 'Al.' " Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Baseball. Revised and expanded edition (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2000).
Spalding, Albert G. America's National Game (New York: American Sports, 1911).
Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide. Various editions. (Chicago and New York: A.G. Spalding & Bros.)
1 Quoted in William E. McMahon, "Albert Goodwill Spalding," in Frederick Ivor-Campbell, Robert L. Tiemann, and Mark Rucker, eds., Baseball’s First Stars (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1996), 154.
2 Adrian C. Anson, A Ball Player's Career, Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscences of Adrian Anson (Chicago: Era Pub. Co., 1900), 140-285.
3 Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide (1886), 14-16.
4 The first world's series is now often considered to be the 1884 one between Providence and New York.
5 Francis C. Richter, "Heroic Figure Passes From the Stage," Sporting Life, September 18, 1915: 3, 7.
6 Anson, 306-314.
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Dishonored 2 – Gameplay Trailers and Video
For the first Dishonored 2 Gameplay Trailer, the Brand team wanted to capture the vivid imagery of what we’d done for the Drunken Whaler– and I was tasked with conceptualizing the asset from the ground up. I worked closely with Harvey Smith at Arkane Studios and the Brand team at Bethesda to pinpoint our goals and find a shared vision. Then I narrowed down our options for a cover song, and found the most inspiration from Fleetwood Mac’s Gold Dust Woman. The lyrics fit in an abstract sense that also gave the artistic detail of the game some emotional context.
I worked with Copilot studios again to re-imagine a cover that channeled the familiar eeriness of the Void, while using instrumentation that defined the new setting of the game. We went through many iterations, including different singers, (some more well known than others) until we found the right voice.
I wanted to find the right shots to edit a piece that intrigued people. It’s driven by the song, and I kept much of the cuts off beat and the action on to give the viewers an unsettling feeling, meant to carry their attention. It was particularly challenging at this stage of development, but the game is gorgeous and we received a lot of positive response to both the trailer, and the song.
For the second Dishonored 2 Gameplay Trailer, we always knew it would highlight Corvo. But this time, it made sense to tease more of the story since the game was revealed, rather than just build intrigue with prettiness and a glorious 70s cover. So I scoured the game for the best lines that would build into something of a narrative, and we switch focus to Corvo. I had the privilege of working directly with Daniel Licht to design a original song that would hit certain beats in the trailer and work with the mood and tone. Needless to say, I was pretty thrilled with how it all came together.
Dishonored’s stand along DLC, The Death of the Outsider Launch trailer
I carefully planned and produced a play through of a level to show how the game’s systems allow for non-violent solutions.
A play through of the same level meant to show how destructive and brutal the game allows players to be.
Posted in Video Game TrailersBy salgo
← Fallout 4 Gameplay Trailers
Prey →
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Home » Science Fiction » Philip K Dick » A Scanner Darkly prev book next book
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick
a review by Ant , in the genre(s) Science Fiction , Dystopian . Book published by Gollancz in 1977
A Scanner Darkly is the only Philip K Dick novel that I have been the slightest bit reluctant to read so far - to say I am not a fan of drugs would be a vast understatement and Scanner is PKD's exploration into drugs. My youngest brother has waxed lyrical on a number of occasions about the novel though and as he shares similar views to me about substance abuse it gave me the confidence to pick the book up, I am glad I did. The title itself refers to a passage in the bible, Corinthians I 13 - "For now we see through a glass, darkly".
The book was originally written in 1973 (the year I was born) as a fictional account based on real events that happened after PKD got mixed up with a group of "street people" and for a time became dependent on amphetamines, almost a sort of semi-autobiography of that period.
Set in a relative future California of 1994, the novel follows the protagonist Bob Arctor who lives a double life as a member of a household of drug-users and also an undercover police officer known as "Agent Fred", set to spy on the very same group of people. While he is posing as a drug user he becomes actually addicted to the drug of choice "Substance D" (known as Slow Death or just Death), a very strong psychoactive drug which does permanent damage to the users brain - destroying the link between the two hemispheres. A bit of a reversal of that famous quote by Isaac Asimov "The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them" - the observer here is in fact influenced himself by the events he observes.
PKD's trademark everyday characters are present as ever, wonderfully drawn and nonpareil is their human failings and imperfections, no-one breathes life to ordinary, "un-heroic" characters like PKD does and then watches them react to "heroic" situations. When you first start reading the book you think it's going to be about Arctor uncovering drug dealers however this is pretty much a red herring and we quickly delve into the fragmenting mind of an addict.
As you explore the depths of the story it's almost like the literary equivalent of a serious psychedelic trip. As with many of his novels, apart from the "future" setting there aren't really any tropes of the genre used while the technological descriptions are kept to a bare minimum - evoking a timeless feeling.
The messages at play are of course all about drug use and abuse with the paranoia, psychosis, criminality and damage that results, along with a subtle play on split personality disorders. Look closer though and there is also a very subtle subtext running through the novel that is political in nature where the drug becomes an allegory for society itself - the two sides of the brain opposing political viewpoints and the use of the drug the price of freedom in a dystopia, those that opposite it's use fascists seeking to control the populous.
It's an incredibly moving and powerful piece of literature and PKD really throws everything at the characters which leads to a very dark and brooding atmosphere that yet still manages to maintain that dry wit I have come to expect from the author.
The result is a novel of uncompromising intensity, emotive and reflective, a window into a contradistinct culture and a message that still resonates with the same puissance today as it did 37 years ago.
Written on 28th September 2011 by Ant.
Authors books reviewed
Cantata 140
Counter Clock World
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Flow my tears, the policeman said
Gather Yourselves Together
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
Lies, Inc.
Radio Free Albemuth
Remembering Firebright
The Divine Invasion
The World Jones Made
Time out of Joint
View Authors Bibliography
A Scanner Darkly
In a Right State
Jennifer Government
By the pricking of her thumb
Author: Philip K Dick
Format reviewed: Paperback
Age Range: N/A
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Our Story The Story So Far Elizabeth Braund What's Next
Elizabeth Braund was born in June 1921 into a privileged and intellectual family. Her father was a barrister and her mother a strong supporter of the Arts. She excelled at school but any intention of pursuing a career was thwarted with the outbreak of World War Two when she joined her parents who were then living in Burma and later India.
With no career structure in place, Elizabeth, despite a short period of working for MI9, became frustrated with the social environment in which she lived and perhaps it was with some relief that she returned to England for health reasons.
With no fixed abode, Elizabeth drifted between the hospitality of friends and eventually worked for the BBC, adapting broadcast with great success. It was also at this time that she started to attend Westminster Chapel with a friend and where she heard Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preach.
Her work for the BBC also included some research into “The History of The Bible”. She thoroughly enjoyed this challenge and whilst pursuing this project she recognised what was missing in her life and she
became a Christian.
Her literary skills also extended into becoming editor of “The Evangelical Magazine” and based herself in a disused chapel in Battersea for editorial meetings and it was here that she encountered a community that was being disrupted with new urban social planning. Old houses being pulled down in favour of blocks of flats. Youths were hanging around the streets aimlessly and Elizabeth decided to do something.
With the help of her friend Rosemary Bird, a youth club was started in the chapel. Again urban planning disrupted this project but Elizabeth was able to negotiate for a new youth club to be built. It was called Providence House and still functions today on the Falcon Road next to
Clapham Junction.
Whilst working with these youth groups and devising a fulfilling programme of activity, Elizabeth recognised the limits of living in a city environment and she decided to extend the provision of the youth club by buying East Shallowford Farm on Dartmoor which she described as “a lung for the city”. As with Providence House, the farm still continues to welcome groups to stay.
More detail of Elizabeth’s life and her extraordinary work during her life time can be found in two books –
“The young woman in the shoe” written by Elizabeth and “The seeds of youth” which tells the story of Elizabeth’s early life.
Copies are available from the farm priced £8 which includes P&P
The story so far Get Involved
God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
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In the Land of the Crazy, the Sane Man is Nuts
Last night I wandered down to the New College of California to take in a “moderated panel discussion focusing on ways in which activists with differing tactical approaches can strategically work together to increase the impact of civil disobedience and direct action work.”
The NCC is “an accredited institution of higher learning whose mission is to integrate education with creation of a just, sacred and sustainable world.” (“by ‘sustainable’ we mean we aspire to a world in which all human activity is expressive of an ecological sensitivity that assures the extension of a just and sacred world to all of existence across the dimensions of time and space.”) If you’d like to major in “women’s spirituality,” “poetics,” or “creative inquiry,” NCC is the place to go.
Did I mention that I live in San Francisco?
Anyway, most of the panelists and many of the members of the audience were students in the college’s Activism & Social Change program.
Because I’d been reading a lot lately about how the theory and tactics of direct action in the United States had developed in the pacifist and civil rights movements, I’d forgotten that to today’s activist, particularly to today’s young activist, the phrase “direct action” is more often used to describe violent protest tactics, as in the phrase: “Are we just going to stand around and chant all day or are we going to engage in some direct action?”
So while most of the audience was there expecting to hear bold, romantic tales of bolt cutters, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and battling cops in the streets, I was taken aback at first at the casualness with which the option of violent direct action was being discussed.
A panelist named Starhawk (and before you giggle, realize that in San Francisco even Republicans have names like this) tried to inject some reality. I paraphrase, since my notes are spotty: “I tend toward pacifism myself, although I think pacifism is better practiced than preached. When I hear someone delivering a sermon about pacifism I just want to punch them. [Laughter]. I’m not encouraged by the prospects for violent direct action, and this isn’t because of any moral qualms on my part but simply because let’s face it: we’re vastly, completely, hopelessly outgunned. If we try to win a battle of violence we’re fools.”
Most of the talk on the panel was of an abstract nature like this — not, as advertised “ways in which activists with differing tactical approaches can strategically work together to increase the impact of civil disobedience and direct action work” but “four people’s opinions about direct action and what’s good about it and why it’s important.”
After an hour or so they opened it up to questions from the audience. Questions typically in the form of “here’s something that I think is important or some insight that occurred to me” with “what does the panel think?” tacked onto the end so as to fit the formal definition of a question.
After hearing a couple of these, and in the middle of an especially uninteresting one about activists “acknowledging their race and class privilege” I decided that if I was going to keep this from having been a complete waste of my time I’d have to do something about it myself.
So I stood up to “ask a question,” but instead of asking the panel, I turned to the crowd and asked ’em to raise their hands if they were paying federal income tax. About three quarters of them admitted to it (I would expect no less from folks who can afford $6,676 per semester for a masters in activism). Having started off with a question, I felt free to launch into my speech:
I’d like to suggest that before you can start opposing the government and what it’s doing, you have to stop supporting the government and what it’s doing. Getting below the tax line and stopping your support for the government isn’t all that hard. It takes some commitment and some attention, but so does any conscientious direct action. It may not be as dramatic as bombing the federal building or chaining yourself to a fence, but do you want drama or do you want…
And then the moderator asked “do you have a question for the panel?” And I got suddenly sheepish and said “okay, I’ll end my speech.”
I thought to myself: “It’s finally happened. I’ve become a wingnut. I’m surrounded by people debating armed insurrection at a school that wants to extend a sacred world to all of existence across the dimensions of time and space and they’ve just listened patiently to a pagan named Starhawk talk about leading a group of witches at a protest and now that I’ve gotten up to speak they bring out the hook. Have I become like the guy who always brings every conversation around to his favorite Kennedy Assassination theory?”
But I got a thumbs-up from one audience member on my way back to my seat, and then the more I reviewed what I said the less I thought it was particularly nutty (of course, the wingnut is the last one to know how nutty he sounds). I think I broke two rules — one, rather than “expressing concern” for some abstract issue or other I tried to actually promote a specific direct action tactic, which oddly enough seemed off-topic; two, I addressed the audience directly, rather than pretending to address the panel.
I think it’s the second bit that got me, because future “questioners” got away with wild deviations in subject matter and format — one rambling on for ten minutes about whether or not the Italian government was responsible for the cooption of the Italian autonomist movement of the 1970s by armed revolutionaries, another wondering aloud for a while what we should replace capitalism with should we succeed in overthrowing it.
Addressing a soliloquy to the audience while facing the panel and adding a token question to the end preserved the panel’s authority, while addressing the audience directly challenged that authority.
That’s my theory anyway. I’m keeping “I’m a wingnut” as a backup, though.
Owe millions in back taxes? Don’t let that stop you from becoming a military contractor! Go ahead and do your work confident that the military will pay up in full and on schedule, and will charge some other taxpayer for it.
How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → corporate / municipal / wealthy tax dodgers
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Three criticisms of my tax resistance strategy. Also: how big corporations evade their taxes.
Yesterday I wrote about individual tax denier schemes — today: How do huge, profitable corporations get away with paying nothing or getting refunds? Also: I follow up on earlier stories about Julia “Butterfly” Hill, Thomas Jefferson and about military refuseniks and conscientious objectors.
I’ve completed my initial Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program training, but I note that in a recent audit I.R.S. employees in a similar program filled out only 17% of their returns correctly. Also: San Francisco Municipal Railway tries to cash in on a sneaky tax dodge, but may end up holding the bag.
Nibbles of news and follow-up today concerning the red-tape Republican highway appropriations bill, tax dodging defense contractors, the I.R.S.’s continuing software modernization farce, and the likelihood of new credits or deductions related to health insurance premiums.
The feds have a record-setting tax intake day — no thanks to many federal employees and contractors. Also: what happened when the libertarians and the leftists got together to fight against the Vietnam war?
A group of high school students get more than 80% of their peers on the do-not-recruit list. Also: the media gets all gushy around expensive military hardware, the Florida Democratic Party gets way behind on their taxes, and a film crew gets great shots of students tunneling under the Berlin Wall.
Is tax resistance incompatible with relationships and families? Also: the government is big, but what you see may just be the tip of the iceberg. And: more on anti-abortion tax resister David Little. Also: the wealthy evade more of their taxes than the rest of us (big surprise). And: so you didn’t file your taxes for the last several years? Maybe you have “non-filers syndrome.”
A tax strike by the titans of industry — a la “Atlas Shrugged” — is mostly a thing of fiction, but there have been some exceptions. Here’s an example from 1924.
Tax Day actions across the country; a new tax resistance campaign for D.C. statehood; attempting to make the coercion of taxation more explicit; the government considers refusing to issue passports to people unless they’ve paid all their taxes; the I.R.S. doesn’t get that budget boost they’d been hoping for; war tax resister Don Schrader profiled; and eleven tax resistance tactics for the rich.
A greatest hits video of Greek “Don’t Pay” movement direct action. Also: how the 1% get out of taxes. And: Maia Duerr starts resisting war taxes. Also: a photo from the archives of a 1971 war tax resistance picket.
When corporations rule the earth, the revolutionaries incorporate. This excerpt from the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience covers the various forms of legal and quasi-legal incorporation and how activist groups and cooperatives can use them.
Bookmark roundup: the law of barter, swaps, gifts, and alternative currencies; a Twitter feed about tax resistance tactics; the I.R.S. floundering under budget cuts; the I.R.S. scandal that didn’t make the papers; Dublin water charge strikers fight back by pouring a little concrete; and war tax resister Ed Hedemann appears on the Breaking The Set show.
Parts of the new tax extenders legislation are of potential interest to tax resisters, the I.R.S. is in a world of hurt from budget cuts, and Rebecca refuses to give up the ghost in Wales.
Activists in Spain are trying to let the grassroots use the same sneaky tricks that big business uses to dodge their taxes. Also: in May 1904, one of the auctioneers selling off goods seized from nonconformist tax resisters is also a nonconformist tax resister whose goods are being sold off.
A “Golden Rule Tax Disobedience” campaign launches in the U.K. with some similarities to Spain’s “comprehensive disobedience” movement. Also: news and links about tax resistance from Senegal, Spain, Scotland, Romania, France, Washington D.C., Belgium, Germany, Catalonia, and Quebec.
The latest tax evasion scoops, more about the continuing collapse of the U.S. government, I.R.S follies, and other miscellaneous news of interest to tax resisters.
Chaos at the I.R.S.: increasing responsibilities, budget cuts, blows to employee morale, “profoundly archaic” information technology, a graying workforce that is retiring in droves, a new tax law and radically restructured tax forms, and then the “shutdown” at just the wrong time. It’s a perfect storm.
The wealthy already pay high tax rates! (Sure, on that portion of income they aren’t hiding off-shore.) Also: a new NWTRCC newsletter is out, attacks on traffic-ticket cameras continue, and a look back at war tax redirection from this date in 1973.
Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → the danger of “feel-good” protests → liberals can be infuriating → astrological granola California bullshit
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I learn some useful tidbits at a small business fair in Oakland and then go to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee conference.
When I go to an activist meeting, seminar, or rally here in San Francisco, I almost always come away feeling newly pumped-up and enthused about the possibility of feeding hippies to crocodiles. If only I had listened to William S. Burroughs when he tried to give me some good advice.
Last year I predicted that one day we would start hearing the hawks telling us that Osama did a good thing by launching the 9/11 attacks because this encouraged America to go to war. I was kidding — making a “modest proposal” — but now Christopher Hitchens proves me right. Also: if we can bend spoons with our minds, why can’t our prayers bring peace?
Thoreau writes to Emerson about the peace movement of his day. Also: an envelope full of foot powder, sent to an I.R.S. processing facility from a prison zip code, evacuates the building for the afternoon. And: The Nicomachean Ethics shows the seams from where it has been stitched together from older sources.
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Section 3: The Evolution of American Federalism
[ "article:topic", "cooperative federalism", "dual federalism", "general revenue sharing", "new federalism", "nullification", "showtoc:no" ]
Map: American Government (OpenStax)
Chapter 3: American Federalism
THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN NATIONAL POWER AND STATE POWER
DUAL FEDERALISM
NEW FEDERALISM
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Describe how federalism has evolved in the United States
Compare different conceptions of federalism
The Constitution sketches a federal framework that aims to balance the forces of decentralized and centralized governance in general terms; it does not flesh out standard operating procedures that say precisely how the states and federal governments are to handle all policy contingencies imaginable. Therefore, officials at the state and national levels have had some room to maneuver as they operate within the Constitution’s federal design. This has led to changes in the configuration of federalism over time, changes corresponding to different historical phases that capture distinct balances between state and federal authority.
As George Washington’s secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795, Alexander Hamilton championed legislative efforts to create a publicly chartered bank. For Hamilton, the establishment of the Bank of the United States was fully within Congress’s authority, and he hoped the bank would foster economic development, print and circulate paper money, and provide loans to the government. Although Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s secretary of state, staunchly opposed Hamilton’s plan on the constitutional grounds that the national government had no authority to create such an instrument, Hamilton managed to convince the reluctant president to sign the legislation.
The Lehrman Institute. “The Founding Trio: Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson.” http://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/FoundingTrio.asp
When the bank’s charter expired in 1811, Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans prevailed in blocking its renewal. However, the fiscal hardships that plagued the government during the War of 1812, coupled with the fragility of the country’s financial system, convinced Congress and then-president James Madison to create the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. Many states rejected the Second Bank, arguing that the national government was infringing upon the states’ constitutional jurisdiction.
A political showdown between Maryland and the national government emerged when James McCulloch, an agent for the Baltimore branch of the Second Bank, refused to pay a tax that Maryland had imposed on all out-of-state chartered banks. The standoff raised two constitutional questions: Did Congress have the authority to charter a national bank? Were states allowed to tax federal property? In McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall (Figure) argued that Congress could create a national bank even though the Constitution did not expressly authorize it.
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819).
Under the necessary and proper clause of Article I, Section 8, the Supreme Court asserted that Congress could establish “all means which are appropriate” to fulfill “the legitimate ends” of the Constitution. In other words, the bank was an appropriate instrument that enabled the national government to carry out several of its enumerated powers, such as regulating interstate commerce, collecting taxes, and borrowing money.
Chief Justice John Marshall, shown here in a portrait by Henry Inman, was best known for the principle of judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison (1803), which reinforced the influence and independence of the judiciary branch of the U.S. government.
This ruling established the doctrine of implied powers, granting Congress a vast source of discretionary power to achieve its constitutional responsibilities. The Supreme Court also sided with the federal government on the issue of whether states could tax federal property. Under the supremacy clause of Article VI, legitimate national laws trump conflicting state laws. As the court observed, “the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action and its laws, when made in pursuance of the constitution, form the supreme law of the land.” Maryland’s action violated national supremacy because “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” This second ruling established the principle of national supremacy, which prohibits states from meddling in the lawful activities of the national government.
Defining the scope of national power was the subject of another landmark Supreme Court decision in 1824. In Gibbons v. Ogden, the court had to interpret the commerce clause of Article I, Section 8; specifically, it had to determine whether the federal government had the sole authority to regulate the licensing of steamboats operating between New York and New Jersey.
Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824).
Aaron Ogden, who had obtained an exclusive license from New York State to operate steamboat ferries between New York City and New Jersey, sued Thomas Gibbons, who was operating ferries along the same route under a coasting license issued by the federal government. Gibbons lost in New York state courts and appealed. Chief Justice Marshall delivered a two-part ruling in favor of Gibbons that strengthened the power of the national government. First, interstate commerce was interpreted broadly to mean “commercial intercourse” among states, thus allowing Congress to regulate navigation. Second, because the federal Licensing Act of 1793, which regulated coastal commerce, was a constitutional exercise of Congress’s authority under the commerce clause, federal law trumped the New York State license-monopoly law that had granted Ogden an exclusive steamboat operating license. As Marshall pointed out, “the acts of New York must yield to the law of Congress.”
Various states railed against the nationalization of power that had been going on since the late 1700s. When President John Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798, which made it a crime to speak openly against the government, the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures passed resolutions declaring the act null on the grounds that they retained the discretion to follow national laws. In effect, these resolutions articulated the legal reasoning underpinning the doctrine of nullification—that states had the right to reject national laws they deemed unconstitutional.
W. Kirk Wood. 2008. Nullification, A Constitutional History, 1776–1833. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
A nullification crisis emerged in the 1830s over President Andrew Jackson’s tariff acts of 1828 and 1832. Led by John Calhoun, President Jackson’s vice president, nullifiers argued that high tariffs on imported goods benefited northern manufacturing interests while disadvantaging economies in the South. South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Nullification declaring both tariff acts null and void and threatened to leave the Union. The federal government responded by enacting the Force Bill in 1833, authorizing President Jacksonto use military force against states that challenged federal tariff laws. The prospect of military action coupled with the passage of the Compromise Tariff Act of 1833 (which lowered tariffs over time) led South Carolina to back off, ending the nullification crisis.
The ultimate showdown between national and state authority came during the Civil War. Prior to the conflict, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled that the national government lacked the authority to ban slavery in the territories.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
But the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860 led eleven southern states to secede from the United States because they believed the new president would challenge the institution of slavery. What was initially a conflict to preserve the Union became a conflict to end slavery when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing all slaves in the rebellious states. The defeat of the South had a huge impact on the balance of power between the states and the national government in two important ways. First, the Union victory put an end to the right of states to secede and to challenge legitimate national laws. Second, Congress imposed several conditions for readmitting former Confederate states into the Union; among them was ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In sum, after the Civil War the power balance shifted toward the national government, a movement that had begun several decades before with McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Odgen (1824).
The period between 1819 and the 1860s demonstrated that the national government sought to establish its role within the newly created federal design, which in turn often provoked the states to resist as they sought to protect their interests. With the exception of the Civil War, the Supreme Court settled the power struggles between the states and national government. From a historical perspective, the national supremacy principle introduced during this period did not so much narrow the states’ scope of constitutional authority as restrict their encroachment on national powers.
Joseph R. Marbach, Troy E. Smith, and Ellis Katz. 2005. Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
The late 1870s ushered in a new phase in the evolution of U.S. federalism. Under dual federalism, the states and national government exercise exclusive authority in distinctly delineated spheres of jurisdiction. Like the layers of a cake, the levels of government do not blend with one another but rather are clearly defined. Two factors contributed to the emergence of this conception of federalism. First, several Supreme Court rulings blocked attempts by both state and federal governments to step outside their jurisdictional boundaries. Second, the prevailing economic philosophy at the time loathed government interference in the process of industrial development.
Industrialization changed the socioeconomic landscape of the United States. One of its adverse effects was the concentration of market power. Because there was no national regulatory supervision to ensure fairness in market practices, collusive behavior among powerful firms emerged in several industries.
Marc Allen Eisner. 2014. The American Political Economy: Institutional Evolution of Market and State. New York: Routledge.
To curtail widespread anticompetitive practices in the railroad industry, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, which created the Interstate Commerce Commission. Three years later, national regulatory capacity was broadened by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which made it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize and conspire in restraining commerce (Figure 03_02_Commerce). In the early stages of industrial capitalism, federal regulations were focused for the most part on promoting market competition rather than on addressing the social dislocations resulting from market operations, something the government began to tackle in the 1930s.
Eisner, The American Political Economy; Stephen Skowronek. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Puck, a humor magazine published from 1871 to 1918, satirized political issues of the day such as federal attempts to regulate commerce and prevent monopolies. “‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the spider to the fly” (a) by Udo Keppler depicts a spider labeled “Interstate Commerce Commission” capturing a large fly in a web labeled “The Law” while “Plague take it! Why doesn’t it stay down when I hit it?” (b), also drawn by Keppler, shows President William Howard Taft and his attorney general, George W. Wickersham, trying to beat a “Monopoly” into submission with a stick labeled “Sherman Law.”
The new federal regulatory regime was dealt a legal blow early in its existence. In 1895, in United States v. E. C. Knight, the Supreme Court ruled that the national government lacked the authority to regulate manufacturing.
United States v. E. C. Knight, 156 U.S. 1 (1895).
The case came about when the government, using its regulatory power under the Sherman Act, attempted to override American Sugar’s purchase of four sugar refineries, which would give the company a commanding share of the industry. Distinguishing between commerce among states and the production of goods, the court argued that the national government’s regulatory authority applied only to commercial activities. If manufacturing activities fell within the purview of the commerce clause of the Constitution, then “comparatively little of business operations would be left for state control,” the court argued.
In the late 1800s, some states attempted to regulate working conditions. For example, New York State passed the Bakeshop Act in 1897, which prohibited bakery employees from working more than sixty hours in a week. In Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled this state regulation that capped work hours unconstitutional, on the grounds that it violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
In other words, the right to sell and buy labor is a “liberty of the individual” safeguarded by the Constitution, the court asserted. The federal government also took up the issue of working conditions, but that case resulted in the same outcome as in the Lochner case.
Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918).
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought economic hardships the nation had never witnessed before (Figure). Between 1929 and 1933, the national unemployment rate reached 25 percent, industrial output dropped by half, stock market assets lost more than half their value, thousands of banks went out of business, and the gross domestic product shrunk by one-quarter.
Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon. 2010. “Lessons from the 1930s Great Depression,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 26: 286–287; Gene Smiley. “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Great Depression.” http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/G...epression.html
Given the magnitude of the economic depression, there was pressure on the national government to coordinate a robust national response along with the states.
A line outside a Chicago soup kitchen in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression. The sign above reads “Free Soup, Coffee, and Doughnuts for the Unemployed.”
Cooperative federalism was born of necessity and lasted well into the twentieth century as the national and state governments each found it beneficial. Under this model, both levels of government coordinated their actions to solve national problems, such as the Great Depression and the civil rights struggle of the following decades. In contrast to dual federalism, it erodes the jurisdictional boundaries between the states and national government, leading to a blending of layers as in a marble cake. The era of cooperative federalism contributed to the gradual incursion of national authority into the jurisdictional domain of the states, as well as the expansion of the national government’s power in concurrent policy areas.
Marbach et al, Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia.
The New Deal programs President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed as a means to tackle the Great Depression ran afoul of the dual-federalism mindset of the justices on the Supreme Court in the 1930s. The court struck down key pillars of the New Deal—the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, for example—on the grounds that the federal government was operating in matters that were within the purview of the states. The court’s obstructionist position infuriated Roosevelt, leading him in 1937 to propose a court-packing plan that would add one new justice for each one over the age of seventy, thus allowing the president to make a maximum of six new appointments. Before Congress took action on the proposal, the Supreme Court began leaning in support of the New Deal as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen Roberts changed their view on federalism.
Jeff Shesol. 2010. Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. New York: W. W. Norton.
In National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Jones and Laughlin Steel,
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, 301 U.S. 1 (1937).
for instance, the Supreme Court ruled the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 constitutional, asserting that Congress can use its authority under the commerce clause to regulate both manufacturing activities and labor-management relations. The New Deal changed the relationship Americans had with the national government. Before the Great Depression, the government offered little in terms of financial aid, social benefits, and economic rights. After the New Deal, it provided old-age pensions (Social Security), unemployment insurance, agricultural subsidies, protections for organizing in the workplace, and a variety of other public services created during Roosevelt’s administration.
In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration expanded the national government’s role in society even more. Medicaid (which provides medical assistance to the indigent), Medicare (which provides health insurance to the elderly and disabled), and school nutrition programs were created. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), the Higher Education Act (1965), and the Head Start preschool program (1965) were established to expand educational opportunities and equality (Figure). The Clean Air Act (1965), the Highway Safety Act (1966), and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (1966) promoted environmental and consumer protection. Finally, laws were passed to promote urban renewal, public housing development, and affordable housing. In addition to these Great Society programs, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) gave the federal government effective tools to promote civil rights equality across the country.
Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady, reads to students enrolled in Head Start (a) at the Kemper School in Washington, DC, on March 19, 1966. President Obama visits a Head Start classroom (b) in Lawrence, Kansas, on January 22, 2015.
While the era of cooperative federalism witnessed a broadening of federal powers in concurrent and state policy domains, it is also the era of a deepening coordination between the states and the federal government in Washington. Nowhere is this clearer than with respect to the social welfare and social insurance programs created during the New Deal and Great Society eras, most of which are administered by both state and federal authorities and are jointly funded. The Social Security Act of 1935, which created federal subsidies for state-administered programs for the elderly; people with handicaps; dependent mothers; and children, gave state and local officials wide discretion over eligibility and benefit levels. The unemployment insurance program, also created by the Social Security Act, requires states to provide jobless benefits, but it allows them significant latitude to decide the level of tax to impose on businesses in order to fund the program as well as the duration and replacement rate of unemployment benefits. A similar multilevel division of labor governs Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance.
Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol. 2014. “Progressive Federalism and the Contested Implemented of Obama’s Health Reform,” In The Politics of Major Policy Reform in Postwar America, eds. Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Sidney M. Milkis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Thus, the era of cooperative federalism left two lasting attributes on federalism in the United States. First, a nationalization of politics emerged as a result of federal legislative activism aimed at addressing national problems such as marketplace inefficiencies, social and political inequality, and poverty. The nationalization process expanded the size of the federal administrative apparatus and increased the flow of federal grants to state and local authorities, which have helped offset the financial costs of maintaining a host of New Deal- and Great Society–era programs. The second lasting attribute is the flexibility that states and local authorities were given in the implementation of federal social welfare programs. One consequence of administrative flexibility, however, is that it has led to cross-state differences in the levels of benefits and coverage.
R. Kent Weaver. 2000. Ending Welfare as We Know It. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
During the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon (1969–1974) and Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), attempts were made to reverse the process of nationalization—that is, to restore states’ prominence in policy areas into which the federal government had moved in the past. New federalism is premised on the idea that the decentralization of policies enhances administrative efficiency, reduces overall public spending, and improves policy outcomes. During Nixon’s administration, general revenue sharing programs were created that distributed funds to the state and local governments with minimal restrictions on how the money was spent. The election of Ronald Reagan heralded the advent of a “devolution revolution” in U.S. federalism, in which the president pledged to return authority to the states according to the Constitution. In the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, congressional leaders together with President Reagan consolidated numerous federal grant programs related to social welfare and reformulated them in order to give state and local administrators greater discretion in using federal funds.
Allen Schick. 2007. The Federal Budget, 3rd ed. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
However, Reagan’s track record in promoting new federalism was inconsistent. This was partly due to the fact that the president’s devolution agenda met some opposition from Democrats in Congress, moderate Republicans, and interest groups, preventing him from making further advances on that front. For example, his efforts to completely devolve Aid to Families With Dependent Children (a New Deal-era program) and food stamps (a Great Society-era program) to the states were rejected by members of Congress, who feared states would underfund both programs, and by members of the National Governors’ Association, who believed the proposal would be too costly for states. Reagan terminated general revenue sharing in 1986.
Dilger, “Federal Grants to State and Local Governments,” 30–31.
Several Supreme Court rulings also promoted new federalism by hemming in the scope of the national government’s power, especially under the commerce clause. For example, in United States v. Lopez, the court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which banned gun possession in school zones.
United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995).
It argued that the regulation in question did not “substantively affect interstate commerce.” The ruling ended a nearly sixty-year period in which the court had used a broad interpretation of the commerce clause that by the 1960s allowed it to regulate numerous local commercial activities.
See Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).
However, many would say that the years since the 9/11 attacks have swung the pendulum back in the direction of central federal power. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security federalized disaster response power in Washington, and the Transportation Security Administration was created to federalize airport security. Broad new federal policies and mandates have also been carried out in the form of the Faith-Based Initiative and No Child Left Behind (during the George W. Bush administration) and the Affordable Care Act (during Barack Obama’s administration).
COOPERATIVE FEDERALISM VERSUS NEW FEDERALISM
Morton Grodzins coined the cake analogy of federalism in the 1950s while conducting research on the evolution of American federalism. Until then most scholars had thought of federalism as a layer cake, but according to Grodzins the 1930s ushered in “marble-cake federalism” (Figure): “The American form of government is often, but erroneously, symbolized by a three-layer cake. A far more accurate image is the rainbow or marble cake, characterized by an inseparable mingling of differently colored ingredients, the colors appearing in vertical and diagonal strands and unexpected whirls. As colors are mixed in the marble cake, so functions are mixed in the American federal system.”
Morton Grodzins. 2004. “The Federal System.” In American Government Readings and Cases, ed. P. Woll. New York: Pearson Longman, 74–78.
Morton Grodzins, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, coined the expression “marble-cake federalism” in the 1950s to explain the evolution of federalism in the United States.
Cooperative federalism has several merits:
Because state and local governments have varying fiscal capacities, the national government’s involvement in state activities such as education, health, and social welfare is necessary to ensure some degree of uniformity in the provision of public services to citizens in richer and poorer states.
The problem of collective action, which dissuades state and local authorities from raising regulatory standards for fear they will be disadvantaged as others lower theirs, is resolved by requiring state and local authorities to meet minimum federal standards (e.g., minimum wage and air quality).
Federal assistance is necessary to ensure state and local programs (e.g., water and air pollution controls) that generate positive externalities are maintained. For example, one state’s environmental regulations impose higher fuel prices on its residents, but the externality of the cleaner air they produce benefits neighboring states. Without the federal government’s support, this state and others like it would underfund such programs.
New federalism has advantages as well:
Because there are economic, demographic, social, and geographical differences among states, one-size-fits-all features of federal laws are suboptimal. Decentralization accommodates the diversity that exists across states.
By virtue of being closer to citizens, state and local authorities are better than federal agencies at discerning the public’s needs.
Decentralized federalism fosters a marketplace of innovative policy ideas as states compete against each other to minimize administrative costs and maximize policy output.
Which model of federalism do you think works best for the United States? Why?
The leading international journal devoted to the practical and theoretical study of federalism is called Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Find out where its name comes from.
Federalism in the United States has gone through several phases of evolution during which the relationship between the federal and state governments has varied. In the era of dual federalism, both levels of government stayed within their own jurisdictional spheres. During the era of cooperative federalism, the federal government became active in policy areas previously handled by the states. The 1970s ushered in an era of new federalism and attempts to decentralize policy management.
In McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court invoked which provisions of the constitution?
Tenth Amendment and spending clause
commerce clause and supremacy clause
necessary and proper clause and supremacy clause
taxing power and necessary and proper clause
Which statement about new federalism is not true?
New federalism was launched by President Nixon and continued by President Reagan.
New federalism is based on the idea that decentralization of responsibility enhances administrative efficiency.
United States v. Lopez is a Supreme Court ruling that advanced the logic of new federalism.
President Reagan was able to promote new federalism consistently throughout his administration.
Which is not a merit of cooperative federalism?
Federal cooperation helps mitigate the problem of collective action among states.
Federal assistance encourages state and local governments to generate positive externalities.
Cooperative federalism respects the traditional jurisdictional boundaries between states and federal government.
Federal assistance ensures some degree of uniformity of public services across states.
What are the main differences between cooperative federalism and dual federalism?
What were the implications of McCulloch v. Maryland for federalism?
a style of federalism in which both levels of government coordinate their actions to solve national problems, leading to the blending of layers as in a marble cake
a style of federalism in which the states and national government exercise exclusive authority in distinctly delineated spheres of jurisdiction, creating a layer-cake view of federalism
general revenue sharing
a type of federal grant that places minimal restrictions on how state and local governments spend the money
a style of federalism premised on the idea that the decentralization of policies enhances administrative efficiency, reduces overall public spending, and improves outcomes
nullification
a doctrine promoted by John Calhoun of South Carolina in the 1830s, asserting that if a state deems a federal law unconstitutional, it can nullify it within its borders
Section 2: The Divisions of Power
Section 4: Intergovernmental Relationships
© Copyright 2019 Social Sci LibreTexts
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Posts Tagged 'Veteran'
Interviewing 466 Squadron rear gunner Ern Cutts
Published October 20, 2015 Halifax , IBCC , Other Aircrew 2 Comments
Tags: Bomber Command, Halifax, Interview, Veteran
Ern Cutts was (and still is) the youngest of seven children in his family. One brother was ground staff in the Royal Australian Air Force. Two other brothers were in the AIF. A sister was a RAAF nurse. His other two sisters were married to servicemen. So it was just about inevitable, as soon as he turned 18, that Ern would himself enlist.
There was just one small hurdle to jump first. His father.
Think about it for a second. Four of seven children were already in the services. Two others married to servicemen. Surely that was enough?
Well, maybe. But Ern was made of sterner stuff. There was what he called “trouble” involved, but eventually Ern managed to convince his father to sign his enlistment papers and went off to the recruitment centre in Melbourne. “I wanted to be aircrew”, he said. “And I was!”
Ern had the doubtful honour of being my first victim interview subject for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. My first sight of him was of an older but still fit-looking gent waving his arm at me as, about 10 minutes late, I sailed straight past the entry to his retirement complex on my motorbike. I turned around and rumbled up the path towards him, and he warmly shook my hand, grinning, and led me to the unit where he and his wife Beryl live.
I’ve been visiting veterans much like Ern for a number of years now, but the IBCC project is the first time I’ve done formal, recorded interviews with them. Perhaps I looked a little nervous as I grappled with my recording equipment. “Take your time”, Ern said. It was one of the first beautiful spring days in Melbourne this year and the birds were twittering outside as, opening the front door (“to shed some light on the subject,” he said with a chuckle), with everything ready and Beryl sitting quietly on the other side of the room listening in, we began.
It was a very entertaining interview. Ern is an easy person to talk to, and there were plenty of laughs. I asked him at one point what memories he has of the Fairey Battle. “I don’t want memories of Fairey Battles!” he said of the single-engined aircraft laughably called fighter-bombers at the beginning of the war that were hopelessly outclassed, shot down in large numbers during the Battle of France and eventually relegated to towing targets used for gunnery training, which is where Ern encountered them. “They were bloody hideous things.” Or talking about why he wanted to join the Air Force: “We didn’t have to be super fit like the young infantry blokes because we never walked anywhere – we were always driven!”
Ern was full of praise for the British people he encountered while he was overseas. “We were treated like kings”, he said more than once. He often wondered why, when he was visiting the home of a particular girl he was keen on, he and she would eat very well but the girl’s mother wouldn’t be eating. He asked his girlfriend – who said that his mother was giving up her own rations for Ern. “That’s English people for you”, he said, shaking his head. “Really tops.”
Ern was posted to 466 Squadron, flying in Halifaxes. I asked him if he did any particularly memorable ops. “My first trip”, he said instantly. It was a daylight raid to a synthetic oil plant at Sterkrade in the Ruhr Valley on 6 October 1944. “I never lived this down,” he said:
“I saw all these black puffs in the air, black things, and I said to someone, to the crew – cos everyone was excited, y’know, our first op, it was a daylight op which was good, because they did try to give you a daylight to give you a bit of an idea of what you were going into – and I said, what’s all these black things out there, and everyone started laughing… it was bloody anti-aircraft exploding… that’s how raw [I was]… by the time I got to the 34th op I didn’t need to ask!”
Logbooks are always a favourite thing for me to look at when I’m talking to veteran aircrew because they allow me to put in some sort of context their owner’s service. Most are fairly dry, but others include comments about particularly memorable trips. Ern’s even had a number of pictures stuck to the pages, of aircraft he’d flown in.
And a Messerschmitt 410, a German nightfighter. Part of the IBCC project is to scan original documents for inclusion, along with the interview itself, in the Digital Archive, so I carry a scanner to hook up to my laptop and copy any originals on the spot. At the time I missed the significance of the ME410. But when I was at home later, reviewing the scans, there it was.
7 February 1945. Halifax III. Pilot: Flying Officer McCallum. Operation No. 24: 6:00 to Goch (Army Cooperation Target). FIRST KILL – ME410 FIGHTER CONFIRMED.
Ern actually shot down an enemy aircraft.
This is less common than you might think for a wartime gunner. British bombers at the time were armed with Browning .303 machine guns – with an effective range of some 400 yards. Nightfighters, on the other hand, usually had cannon with a maximum range of about 1,000 yards. The inevitable result was that the favoured method of attack was for a fighter to stand off, undetected, outside the range of the Brownings and fire at leisure. The best chance of escape for the bomber crew was in spotting the fighter before it saw them. Many gunners who survived a tour, then, did so without firing a gun in anger, let alone actually scoring any hits. Having a confirmed kill to his name is actually quite an achievement.
And during our interview, about shooting down a nightfighter he said exactly nothing. He was similarly reticent when I enquired about an immediate DFC awarded to his pilot, the aforementioned F/O A.B. McCallum, after the aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire on a trip to Gelsenkirchen (Ern’s 9th) in November 1944. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, Ern suggested. Otherwise it would be remarked upon in his logbook.
Most likely it’s that legendary modesty often found in veterans of Bomber Command coming through here. They didn’t think they were doing anything special: there was a job to do, and it fell on their shoulders to do it. And so their stories frequently concentrate on the lighter side of life in wartime England.
Finishing his tour in March 1945, Ern was eventually posted to 467 Squadron at Metheringham, preparing to begin training for Tiger Force to continue the war against the Japanese. After the atomic bombs ended the requirement for that he flew a couple of POW repatriation flights, taking part in Operation Spasm to Berlin and Operation Dodge to Bari in Italy in September 1945. Both trips, he told me, were completed with all non-essential equipment stripped from the Lancasters. Including all the guns and all the ammunition.
I had to ask the obvious question. If there were no guns on board, why did they need gunners?
Well, someone had to look after the repatriating POWs, many of whom had never been in an aeroplane before. “Believe it or not”, he said, “we were just air hostesses!”
The tone turned a little more serious, however, when I asked Ern how he thought Bomber Command was remembered. There was a lengthy pause before he answered.
Bomber Command, he said, was until D-Day the only organisation taking the war direct to Germany. For that reason, the English people in particular treated the men of Bomber Command with the same respect and admiration that they had for, say, the French Resistance. “If I go to an RSL,” he said,
“…and a bloke says, what were you in, Ern, were you in the Navy or Army or something, I say, no, I was in Bomber Command, and if he is an English person, ‘oh were you… oh… you blokes, gee… y’know. So it makes you kinda feel very humble, very proud and very humble.”
And that, I thought, was a beautiful way to finish our interview.
Text and colour photo (c) 2015 Adam Purcell. Wartime photo (c) Ern Cutts
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Posted on March 8, 2019 by Richard Detrich
On the Road Scholar program, Panama Canal Adventure: Exploring Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala & Costa Rica, I’ll be talking about something that all Americans together. For all Americans that one thing is gold. It was the insatiable appetite for gold that brought the Spanish explorers and conquistadors, spawned the California Gold Rush, helped create the Panama Railroad, heightened settlement in the Western US territories, and indirectly led to the creation of the Panama Canal.
When Columbus first arrived on what is today the Isthmus of Panama, he went ashore and traded cheap tin bells to the local Indigenous in return for their ornaments of solid gold. It was the search for MORE gold that led Balboa across the Isthmus to, along with Pizarro, beomce the first Europeans to lay eyes on what they called the “South Sea,” later to be renamed “the Pacific” by Magellan. Pizarro would go on to conquer and settle Peru, seizing not just more gold, but incredible amounts of silver, gems, and hardwoods as well.
In 1518 Diego Velázquez, Governor of New Spain, sent Hernan Cortes on an expedition to Mexico. Cortes sailed from Havana and put into the tiny fishing village of Casilda where he recruited troops the conquest of Mexico. Through brute force, along with a healthy dose of deceit, Cortes he managed to defeat the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and in just three year Cortes and his 500 men had conquered Mexico.
The Spanish of course came with three purposes in mind: first, to spread Christianity, even at the point of the sword; and second, to loot as much treasure as possible; and third, to claim everything and anything, seen and unseen for the Spanish Crown. To achieve their goals they were prepared to destroy anything and anyone who stood in their way. The Indigenous people they supposedly came to “save” were not just treated cruelly, but often sadistically. Bartolome de las Casas, was a chaplain to the conquistadors who repented of his actions and became a Dominican friar. He was so appalled by the Spanish cruelty that he wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Sent to Phillip II of Spain 1552. The Apologetica Historia was published in part 40 years after his death and the full text not until 1909.
Antigua, Guatemala was one of the most important cities in the Spanish Empire in the New World in charge of everything from Chiapas, Mexico to Colombia, which of course then included what is today’s Panama. Guatemala had an additional treasure, some of the finest green jade in the world.
The Spanish looked on Costa Rica as a worthless, backwater colony, with no large Indigenous group to enslave, so they focused elsewhere. From Mexico all the way through Central and South America these were highly skilled goldsmiths who created incredible work of art. All the Spanish were interested in was the gold, so all of the Indigenous masterful gold works were melted down to be shipped in ingots to Spain. Some of those that remain are wonderfully preserved and displayed in the Costa Rica National Museum in San Jose. The other great gold display is at the Gold Museum just off Bolivar Square in Cartagena, Colombia.
The greatest cache of Pre-Columbian gold in Panama was discovered when a river changed course and in doing so disturbed a previously unknown Pre-Columbian burial site. Suddenly incredible works of gold art began poking through the river banks. Archeologists from the Peabody Museum of the University of Pennsylvania were called in to excavate what has been dubbed “The River of God.” The incredible gold work has been carbon dated to AD 450–900.
As the Conquest progressed, Spain faced the challenge of taking all that loot back home. Gold, silver and gems from Central America. Peru, and Colombia, made Panama City “the richest city in the world.” From Panama City the loot was taken across the Isthmus by mule trains, sometimes 100-150 animals long, to be stored in Portobelo to await the arrival of the Spanish treasure fleet. It was the inconvenience of this transit that led to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, a/k/a Charles I, King of Spain, in 1534 to send a survey party to design the route for a canal across the Isthmus in order to to provide a more efficient and seamless operation.
Eventually Veracruz, Mexico; Cartagena, Colombia and Isla Margarita, Venezuela (for pearls) would become stops on the route of the Spanish treasure fleet. Naturally the other major world powers of the day, France, Holland, Britain, looked enviously at Spain’s position in the New World, nicknamed “The Spanish Main,” because they wanted a piece of the pie as well. At times there were outright attacks, but much of the time pirates, thieves, and privateers, sanctioned thieves, we used to nip at the Spanish heels. The Spanish Treasure Fleet was a lucrative target for the pirates and privateers. So Havana, Cuba and San Juan, Puerto Rico became vital stopping points for the treasure ships to reprovision before hopping on the Gulf Stream, a kind of 101 freeway back to Spain. So in both Havana and San Juan you have these magnificent El Morro forts designed to provide safe harbor for the Spanish shipping. And Havana, by virtue of its position in the Caribbean, was the “key” to the entire region. One of the symbols on the coat of arms of Havana is an old-fashioned gold key.
I’ll be discussing all this with my small group of Road Scholars on the VEENDAM as we make our way from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale, visiting Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. One of the things I love about this kind of itinerary is the way the histories intertwine with one another and we can talk about how all of this connects together. Here we have an underlying golden thread that binds the history of this entire region together.
Posted in cruising, Cuba, destination lecturer, Panama Canal | Tagged Antigua Guatemala, Cartagena, Chiapas, Colombia, Costa Rica, God Museum Cartagena, Guatemala & Costa Rica, Havana Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Panama Canal, Panama Canal Adventure: Exploring Mexico, Panama City, Richard Detrich, Richard Detrich Destination Lecturer, river of gold, Road Scholar, San Juan Puerto Rico, Spanish Treasure Fleet, travel
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Alex Ortega
Alex Ortega, PhD, is Professor of Health Policy and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at UCLA. He is Director of the UCLA Center for Population Health & Health Disparities and Associate Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. He has also served as Director of the UCLA Institute for Social Research. Prior to his UCLA appointment, he was on the public health faculty at Yale University.
Professor Ortega is an internationally recognized expert on the application of epidemiological methods in health services research, and his work focuses on the physical, medical, and mental health needs of Latino children and their families both in the United States and in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. He has also published health research on the homeless, military veterans, and undocumented immigrants. He is the 2008 recipient of the Distinguished Nationally Known Public Health Professional Award by the Latino Caucus of the American Public Health Association.
Professor of Health Policy and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at UCLA
Areas of expertise: Public Health, Health Disparities, Health Needs of Latino Children and Families, Epidemiology
aortega@ucla.edu (310) 206-0199
Heard on NPR Morning Edition: It Takes More Than A Produce Aisle To Refresh A Food Desert
Heard on Zócalo Public Square: UCLA Epidemiologist Alex Ortega on Whether Menu Labeling Works
Added February 2015
Last Verified: February 2015
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Century Ambulance Receives Excellence Award as Private Ambulance Provider
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center Appoints New Orthopedics Service Line Director
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center Appoints New Administrative Director of Cardiovascular Services
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center Appoints New Chief Operating Officer
Mary Lanham, Academic Medicine Veteran, to Lead UHealth and Miller School Marketing and Communications
Linda Epstein New General Counsel for Broward Health
Holy Cross Medical Group Adds Internist to Pompano Office
William A. Leone, M.D., F.A.C.S. Named Top Orthopedic Surgeon by Castle Connolly Medical for 10th Consecutive Year
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center Volunteer Retires Following 40 years of Service
Holy Cross Hospital, FAU and Christ Church Provide the Homeless with New Shoes and Foot Care
Mary Lanham, a senior professional with more than 20 years’ experience in strategic marketing and communications management in academic medicine, has joined UHealth and the Miller School of Medicine as chief marketing and communications officer.
Lanham comes to the University of Miami from the University of Maryland Medical System, where she was senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer.
Lanham earned an undergraduate degree in communication at Pfeiffer University and a master’s degree in publication design at the University of Baltimore. She began her career at a Washington, DC, public relations firm, later joining the University of Maryland, where she has worked for the past 18 years. Since that time, she has continually advanced to various leadership positions of increasing responsibility and received numerous professional awards.
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How To Tell If Your Air Filter Needs Changing User Manuals
How To Tell If Your Air Filter Needs Changing User Manuals - For the most accurate technical information regarding features, specifications, installation and operation of your LG product, please refer to the Owner's Manual and other documents available for this product.. View and Download LG Optimus L90 user manual online. LG Optimus L90 Cell Phone pdf manual download.. The Android 4.4 KitKat version was recently announced and it is soon to be officially launched by Google when they would be coming up with the next version of Nexus, the Nexus 5 device. But it would always be a guessing game for the users, to see whether the 4.4 update would be coming to their.
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Proto:Sonic Adventure 2 (Dreamcast)
This page details one or more prototype versions of Sonic Adventure 2 (Dreamcast).
Sub-Pages
A demo from late 2000 that was shipped with copies of Phantasy Star Online. Sonic doesn't even have the Soap shoes in this version.
Dated March 18, 2001. This is similar to the Preview build sent to the press. It contains a very incomplete English voice track, among other things.
Trial Version
Dated May 3, 2001. Much closer to the final, but still manages to show some changes.
Dated May 21, 2001 and the only full prototype available. A European version that was sent to the press for reviews.
Retrieved from "https://tcrf.net/index.php?title=Proto:Sonic_Adventure_2_(Dreamcast)&oldid=663298"
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Galloway, Donald Lee
Donald Lee Galloway, 80, passed away on Saturday, October 27, 2018 at his home in Radford, after a long and valiant battle with cancer. Donnie was blessed to have had his family at his side over the recent weeks and passed peacefully away in the arms of his loving wife.
Donnie was a long-time resident of Radford but was a citizen of the world. Whether spending time in the harsh outback of Alaska to the sunny shores of San Diego, Donnie was loved by all. Known for being an extremely talented carpenter and hardworking “jack of all trades” he loved the outdoors and was an avid fisherman. Donnie loved to travel, sightsee, and visit places he had never been. He possessed an adventurous spirit and was up to any challenge the world could throw.
Donnie is survived by his wife of 23 years, Peggy (Pug) Galloway; a daughter, Gina Salcido (Joey) of Norwalk, Calif; son, Patrick McClelland (Cindy) of Boston, Mass.; stepsons, Ricky J. McCraw (Donna) of Lumberton, N.C. and Terry S. McCraw (Kristi) of Radford, Va. He leaves behind a host of grandchildren and great grandchildren who all loved their Papa Don.
The family would like to thank the services of Intrepid Hospice and the VA Hospital Center of Salem for their wonderful care, support and love during this journey and request that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Intrepid Hospice of Radford, Va.
After a small private family memorial, Donnie will be interred at his family home with a clear view of the mountains he loved so much.
The Galloway family is in the care of Mullins Funeral Home & Crematory in Radford. www.mullinsfuneralhome.com
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A feel good story at the top of the news today, illustrating why we all got into this business in the first place and why the RadioDaily podcast is being created! Performers for the iHeartRadio Music Awards have been announced… And stats released yesterday on the prominence, or lack thereof, of women in radio… some of the stats are, well, a bit frustrating. Today, it’s another test of the new podcast serving radio & records, for Thursday February 28th.
Gossip at two iconic New York City radio stations, huge changes in UK Radio and a handful of awards, new jobs, promotions and more. It’s another “Testing, 1, 2, 3” episode of the RadioDaily, as special preview week continues on.
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UGH: Marvel’s Captain America beats up CONSERVATIVES in new comic book series
Oct. 15, 2015 5:30 pm by The Right Scoop • No Comments
Marvel has decided to take a more liberal and partisan slant in its new Captain America comic book series as it has Captain America beating up conservatives who are trying to stop illegal immigrants from coming into the country.
So stopping illegal immigration is now something a right-wing terrorist would do that requires a liberal superhero to fight against? What a load of crap.
This is obviously a response to Donald Trump making illegal immigration a huge issue in this election campaign. Liberals can’t stand the idea of illegals being deported or a big wall being built to keep them from coming in. So they portray conservatives like Trump, Cruz, and others as right-wing terrorists and illegal immigration as something to be defended.
Geez, it’s getting harder and harder to give anything Marvel comics does the time of day. Heck, this season of Agents of Shield has an openly gay character who just finds out he has to go back in the ‘closet’ because of his newfound super powers.
But it’s the same in DC comics, as they are putting more gay openly gay characters in their most of their series like Arrow and Gotham.
The liberal agenda never quits which is why we need candidates who will stand up and strongly defend conservative values in a coherent way.
https://therightscoop.com/ugh-marvels-captain-america-beats-up-conservatives-in-new-comic-book-series/
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Leafs' Jooris hopes that home is sweet to him
Josh Jooris identifies with that old Supertramp song, Take The Long Way Home.
The Burlington product has been through five NHL teams, four different clubs last season alone counting a pair of minor-league demotions, before landing with the Maple Leafs on the opening day of 2018 free agency.
While timing and numbers weren’t in his favour during some previous stops, placed on waivers or traded, Toronto suddenly found itself in need of veteran forwards as James van Riemsdyk, Tyler Bozak, and Leo Komarov signed elsewhere, Matt Martin was traded and there seems little appetite to bring back fourth-line centre Dominic Moore.
General manager Kyle Dubas, an old friend of the Jooris family, extended a one-year, two-way contract for $650,000 US to Josh to try and make Toronto at wing or centre.
“It’s surreal,” Jooris said Tuesday at an informal practice with his new team. “Growing up local … the organization is so historic to be part of, to see some of the greats along the wall (of the dressing room) and especially (joining now).
“They’ve been building for quite some time, with some big acquisitions and young guys who’ve been in the league a couple of years now. You can really start to see them flourish. For them to believe in me and give me an opportunity to help, I won’t take it for granted.”
The undrafted Jooris made it to the NHL on his third try with a third team, the Calgary Flames in 2013. A one-time roommate of Johnny Gaudreau, he was on the main Flames’ roster in 2014-15 with a promising 24 points in 60 games, but his trail meandered to the Rangers, Coyotes and then the Hurricanes at the start of last year. Both Carolina and Pittsburgh, where he was traded to late in the season, assigned him to their minor affiliates for a few games, a real shock to his system.
“It’s not the easiest thing, playing for four different teams and four different groups of guys,” Jooris said. “It’s definitely adversity, bumping around, and it had been quite some time since I was in the minors.
“(But) it was a good experience and coming into this, my fifth year, I’m going to be a confident guy out there. You have a different appreciation for how hard it is to be an NHL player and to stick in this league.
“You can take (demotion) two ways; as a negative, dwell on that you don’t want to be there or that it’s part of the process of your journey. I took positives from it. At the end of the day, I’m playing hockey and that’s what I wanted.”
There aren’t many grinder spots open on the Leafs, who will have names such as Jooris, Josh Leivo, Par Lindholm, Tyler Ennis, Carl Grundstrom and Frederik Gauthier fighting for work on and around the fourth line.
“I’ve come a long way as a player, learning the ins and outs of the game,” countered the 6-foot-1 Jooris. “At this level, you have to change you game and realize where your strengths are.
“I like to be a steady, reliable guy at both ends of the ice, use my speed when I can, get in on the forecheck, just bring an edge to the game. If I can chip in on offence, I like to.”
He was an early arrival for the Leafs’ summer skates.
“It’s been a good transition, the guys are really good to me and you can tell there is excitement for the season.”
Jooris also gets full marks for honesty, proud to be raised in a Red Wings household, despite playing for the Tier II Burlington Cougars and his proximity to Scotiabank Arena and all things blue and white.
“I can’t lie, it’s in the archives,” Jooris said with a laugh. “I’ve been honest before when I was on other teams, saying that I was a Wings’ fan.”
He did list Leafs president Brendan Shanahan as one of his favourite Motown players to soften the blow.
Jooris also hopes to one day finish the nine credits he left on the table as a psychology major at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he played three years for the Dutchmen before trying the NHL.
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US should establish energy strategy council
By Former Senators Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) — 12/11/12 09:00 PM EST
We must build upon this progress and simultaneously address ever-present energy security threats and environmental challenges. Doing so during a time of unsustainable national debt will create difficult but necessary policy choices — choices that are unlikely to be resolved without broad-based bipartisan support and national leadership.
That leadership starts with a reinvigorated approach to developing our national energy policy — an approach that can help overcome the problems that have hampered past efforts and put the country on a more inclusive, balanced, resilient and enduring path. Recently, we released two recommendations to improve energy policy making in the Executive Branch, which we think is critical to building an inclusive, balanced energy policy that addresses both short-term needs and long-term goals. Early next year, we will be releasing our full report that will provide a set of wide-ranging policy recommendations, intended to provide a road map for the Obama administration and the new Congress next year.
Because energy-related responsibilities are dispersed among at least 20 different federal agencies and departments, we recommend creating a National Energy Strategy Council – a “nerve center” of sorts for energy in the Executive Branch. The Council, chaired by the Secretary of Energy should include members of all federal agencies involved in energy and White House policy offices, and should work with Congress, states, tribal nations, industry, and NGOs. The Council will be responsible for developing a much needed National Energy Strategy and for leading, coordinating and overseeing the many executive branch energy-related programs, activities and initiatives.
We also support the development of a companion interagency Quadrennial Energy Review which develops the specific actions needed to implement the National Energy Strategy. This combination of high-level strategy and detailed implementation plan mirrors the approach used to develop national security policy, in which the executive branch prepares a National Security Strategy subject to a Quadrennial Defense Review prepared by the Department of Defense. Our approach looks to ensure the Executive Branch has a consistent framework for developing national energy strategies in response to ever-changing economic, environmental and national security concerns in the years to come.
We believe our recommendations for a National Energy Strategy Council, a National Energy Strategy and a Quadrennial Energy Review will provide a strong framework for developing a more enduring energy policy that can balance the needs for ample energy supplies, reasonable prices, continued environmental improvements, competitiveness and long-term security.
Lott and Dorgan are co-chairmen of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Project.
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The Tulsa Engineering Foundation, Inc.
ARTICLE I – NAME
Section 1: The name of this Foundation shall be TULSA ENGINEERING FOUNDATION, INC.
ARTICLE II – OBJECT
Section 1: The object of TULSA ENGINEERING FOUNDATION, INC. shall be to operate a charitable organization within the meaning of Sections 501(c)(3) and 170(c)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. In order to accomplish that objective, the operation of the corporation shall be subject to the following:
(a) The corporation may receive and maintain a fund or funds of real or personal property, or both, and, subject to the restrictions and limitations hereinafter set forth, to use an apply the whole or any part of the income therefrom and the principal thereof exclusively for charitable purposes, either directly or by contributions to organizations that qualify as exempt organizations under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 and its Regulations as they now exist or as they may hereafter be amended.
(b) No part of the net earnings of the corporation shall inure to the benefit of any member, director, officer of the corporation, or any private individual (except that reasonable compensation may be paid for services rendered to or for the corporation affecting one or more of its purposes), and no member, trustee, officer of the corporation or any private individual shall be entitled to share in the distribution of any of the corporate assets on dissolution of the corporation. No substantial part of the activities of the corporation shall be the carrying on of propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and the corporation shall not participate in or intervene in (including the publication or distribution of statements) any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.
(c) The corporation shall distribute its income for each taxable year at such time and in such manner as not to become subject to the tax on undistributed income imposed by Section 4942 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 or corresponding provisions of any subsequent federal tax laws.
(d) The corporation shall not engage in any act of self-dealing as defined in Section 4941(d) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 or corresponding provisions of any subsequent federal tax laws.
(e) The corporation shall not retain any excess business holdings as defined in Section 4943(c) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 or corresponding provisions of any subsequent federal tax laws.
(f) The corporation shall not make any investments in such manner as to subject it to tax under Section 4944 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 or corresponding provisions of any subsequent federal tax laws.
(g) The corporation shall not make any taxable expenditures as defined in Section 4945 (d) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 or corresponding provisions of any subsequent federal tax laws.
(h) Not withstanding any other provision of these By-Laws or the Articles of Incorporation, the corporation shall not conduct or carry on any activities not permitted to be conducted or carried on an organization exempt under Section 591(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 and its Regulations as they now exist or as they may hereafter be amended or by any organization contributions to which are deductible under Section 170(c)(2) of such Code and Regulations as they now exist or as they may hereafter be amended.
(i) Upon the dissolution of the corporation, the Board of Trustees shall, after paying or making provision for the payment of all the liabilities of the corporation, dispose of all of the assets of the corporation exclusively for the purposes of the corporation in such manner or to such organization or organizations organized and operated exclusively for charitable, educational, religious literary or scientific purposes as shall at the time qualify as an exempt organization or organizations under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Code of 1954, or the corresponding provision of any future United Sates Internal Revenue Law, as the Board of Trustees shall determine. Any such assets not so disposed of by the district court of the county in which the principal office of the corporation is then located, exclusively for such purposes or to such organization or organizations; as said court shall determine, which are organized and operated exclusively for such purposes.
ARTICLE III – MEMBERSHIP
Section 1: The membership of the Tulsa Engineering Foundation shall consist of those groups and classifications, and qualifications listed in Section 2 of this Article.
Section 2: Member groups.
a. Organizational Members. An organizational member shall be a professional association, society, or organization of persons having common interests in science, engineering, and/or technology such as, but not limited to, chemistry, electrical, geology, geophysics, seismology, meteorology, architecture, metallurgy, aeronautics, astronautics, instrumentation, materials testing, and technical research.
b. Consulting Members. From time to time, the Board of Trustees may wish to extend membership to individuals having knowledge or skills of particular benefit to the Corporation.
Section 3: Election of Members. An Organization or an individual shall become a member of the Tulsa Engineering Foundation by submitting an application for membership to the Board. The board will review the application elect or deny the membership by a simple majority vote of those Board members attending the next quarterly meeting, after the application is submitted.
Section 4: The organizational member shall be represented by an individual from that organization, who has the qualifications as listed in paragraph ‘a’ below. This member shall be entitled to all privileges of membership in the Tulsa Engineering Foundation, including the right to hold any elected office and to vote upon all questions affecting the Corporation which are lawfully submitted to its membership for action.
(a) The representative member for a member organization shall be an active member of that organization and be duly elected or appointed by that organization to represent them.
(b) If a Representative Member, while holding any office in the Corporation, is replaced by the Organization Member, the office held by the individual who is replaced will be considered vacant. The vacancy will be filled as provided in Section 2. Article VI of these By-Laws.
Section 3: Dues. The dues, if any, of all Organizational members shall be set annually at the annual meeting of members to be held each year. Consulting members shall not pay dues and shall be ineligible to vote or hold office. These members will be designated Consulting Members and will serve for finite periods of the time to be designated by the Board of Trustees.
Section 4: Suspension of Members. Any member in default in payment or dues shall be ipso facto suspended from all privileges of membership, and if, after notice, such default be not cured within a period of 90 days, the membership of such member shall automatically cease and terminate.
Section 5: Removal of Members. Any member may be removed from membership by a majority vote of the members present at any annual meeting or any special meeting of the members called for the purpose or cause.
Section 6: Reinstatement of Members. Any member who has forfeited his/her membership for non-payment of dues may be reinstated by the affirmative vote of two-thirds (2/3) of the trustees upon payment of dues in arrears, which shall be for a period of not more than one year, or the member may re-enter the Foundation as a new member.
ARTICLE IV – OFFICERS
Section 1: President. The president shall be selected by, and from the membership of the Board of Trustees. He shall be the chief executive officer of the corporation. He shall preside over all meetings of the Board and of the members. He shall have general and active management of the business of the corporation and shall see that all orders and resolutions of the Board are carried into effect. He shall be an ex-officio member of all standing committees and shall have the general powers and duties of supervision and management usually vested in the office of president of a corporation.
Section 2: Vice Presidents. At least one vice-president shall be chosen from the membership of the board. Such vice-presidents as are board members, in the order of their seniority, shall perform the duties and exercise the powers of the president during the absence or disability of the president. Vice-presidents shall perform such other duties as may delegated to them by the Board of Trustees, the president or the Executive Committee.
Section 3: Secretary. The secretary shall be selected by the Board of Trustees. The secretary may be a member of the Board, or an individual from without TEF. The secretary shall attend all meetings of the members and the Board of Trustees, and of the executive committee, and shall preserve in books of the corporation true minutes of the proceedings of all such meetings. He shall keep in his custody the seal of the corporation and shall have authority to affix the same to all instruments where its use is required. He shall give notices required by statue, by-law or resolution. He shall perform such other duties as may be delegated to him by the Board of Trustees or by the executive committee.
Section 4: Treasurer. The Treasurer shall be selected by, and from the membership of the Board of Trustees.
(a) The treasurer shall have custody of all corporate funds and securities and shall keep in books belonging to the corporation full and accurate accounts of all receipts and disbursements; he shall deposit all monies, securities and other valuable effects in the name of the corporation in such depositories as may be designated for that purpose by the Board of Trustees. He shall disburse the funds of the corporation as may be ordered by the Board, taking proper vouchers for such disbursements, and shall render to the president and trustees at the regular meetings of the Board, and whenever requested by them, an account of all his transactions as treasurer and of the financial condition of the corporation.
(b) When In the judgment of the Board of Trustees, the custody of corporate funds and securities warrant such action, the treasurer shall be required to make good and sufficient bond in an amount to be set by the Board, the fee for which will be paid by the Foundation.
Section 5: Assistant Secretary and Assistant Treasurer. The Board may appoint an assistant Secretary and/or an assistant Treasurer as they deem necessary. The assistants must meet the same qualifications as the Treasurer. The assistant secretary, in the absence or disability of the secretary, shall perform the duties and exercise the powers of the secretary. The assistant treasurer, in the absence or disability of the treasurer, shall perform the duties and exercise the powers of the treasurer.
ARTICLE V – MEETINGS
Section 1: Place of Meeting. Any or all meetings of the members, and the Board of Trustees of this corporation may be held within or without the State of Oklahoma.
Section 2: Annual Meeting of Members. The annual meeting of the members shall be held in each year in July, one of the purposes of which shall be to fill vacancies on the Board of Trustees.
Section 3: Notice of Annual Meeting of Members. At Least ten (10) days prior to the date fixed by Section 2 of this article or the holding of the annual meeting of members, written notice of the time, place, and purposes of such meeting shall be mailed, as hereinafter provided, to each member entitled to vote at such meeting.
Section 4: Delayed Annual Meeting. If, for any reason, the annual meeting of the members shall not be held on the day herein before designated, such meeting may be called and held as a special meeting, and the same proceedings may be had thereat as at an annual meeting, provided, however, that the notice of such meeting shall be the same herein required for the annual meeting, namely, not less than a 10 day notice.
Section 5: Special Meetings of Members. A special meeting of the members may be called at any time by the president, by a majority of the Board of Trustees, or upon written petition of ten members.
Section 6: Notice of Special Meeting of Members. At least three days prior to the date fixed for the holding of any special meeting of members, written notice of the time, place and purposes of such meeting shall be mailed, as hereinafter provided, to each member entitled to vote at such meeting.
Section 7: Organization Meeting of Board. At the place of holding the annual meeting of members and immediately following the same, the Board of Trustees as constituted upon final adjournment of such annual meeting shall convene for the purpose of electing officers and transacting any other business properly brought before it, provided that the organization meeting in any year may be held at a different time and place than that herein provided, by consent of a majority of the trustees of such new Board.
Section 8: Regular Meeting of Board. Regular meetings of the Board of Trustees shall be held quarterly at such time and place as the Board of Trustees shall from time to time determine. No notice of regular meetings of the Board shall be required.
Section 9: Special Meetings of Board. Special meetings of the Board of Trustees may be called by the president any time by means of such written notice by mail of the time, place and purpose thereof to each trustee as the president in his discretion shall seem sufficient, but action taken at any such meeting shall not be invalidated for want of notice if such notice shall be waived as hereinafter provided.
Section 10: Notices and Mailing. All notices required to be given by any provision of these by-laws shall state the authority pursuant to which they are issued (as, “by order of the president,” or “by order of the Board of Trustees” as the case may be) and shall bear the written, stamped, typewritten or printed signature of the secretary or assistant secretary. Every notice shall be deemed duly served when the same has been deposited in the United States mail, with postage fully prepaid, plainly addressed to the sendee at his, her, or its last address appearing upon the membership record of this corporation.
Section 11: Waiver of Notice. Notice of the time, place, and purpose or any meeting of the members or of the Board of Trustees, may be waived by telegram, radiogram, cablegram, or other writing, either before or after such meeting has been held.
Section 12: Quorum of Members. Presence in person or by proxy of members representing 10 percent (10%) of the voting rights of this corporation shall constitute a quorum at any meeting of the members.
Section 13: Corporate Member. For the purpose of voting, any member entitled to vote is considered to be a corporate member.
ARTICLE VI – BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Section 1: Number and Term of Trustees. The business, property, and affairs of this corporation shall be managed by a Board of Trustees composed of not less than three and not more than 20 elected persons plus one ex-officio trustee per Organizational Member (who shall be the Representative Member) who shall be members of this corporation. Each elected trustee shall hold office for the term of which he is elected and until his successor is elected and qualified. All trustees have the right to vote and hold office.
The term of elected trustee shall be for three years. A trustee may be elected to succeed himself/herself except that after serving any two consecutive elected terms, at least one year must elapse before he/she may again be elected to the Board of Trustee. The term of each ex-officio Trustee shall be designated by his/her Organizational Member.
Section 2: Vacancies. Vacancies in the elected members of the Board of Trustees shall be filled by election made by the members of the Tulsa Engineering Foundation. Each person so elected to fill a vacancy shall remain a trustee for the balance of the unexpired term.
Vacancies in Representative Members serving as Trustee shall be designated by his/her Organization Member.
Section 3: Action by Unanimous Written Consent. If and when the trustee shall collectively consent in writing to any action to be taken by the corporation, such action shall be valid as corporation action as though it had been authorized at a meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Section 4: Power to Make By-laws. The Board of Trustees shall have power to make and alter any by-law or by-laws, including the fixing and altering of the number of trustees, provided that the Board shall not make or alter any by-law or by-laws fixing the qualifications, classifications or term of office of any member or members of the then existing Board.
Section 5: Power to elect Officers. The Board of Trustees shall select a president, one or more vice-presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer.
Section 6: Power to Appoint Other Officers and Agents. The Board of Trustees shall have power to appoint such other officers and agents as the Board may deem necessary for transaction of the business of the corporation.
Section 7: Removal of Officers and Agents. Any officer or agent may be removed by the Board of Trustees whenever in the judgment of a majority of the Board the business interests of the corporation will be served thereby.
Section 8: Power to Fill Vacancies. The Board shall have power to fill any vacancy in any office occurring from any cause whatsoever.
Section 9: Delegation of Powers. For any reason deemed sufficient by the Board of Trustees, whether occasioned by absence or otherwise, the Board may delegate all or any of the powers and duties of any officer to any other office or trustee.
Section 10: Power to Appoint Executive Committee. The Board of Trustees shall have the power to appoint by resolution an executive committee composed of four or more trustees, who, to the extent provided in such resolution, shall have and exercise the authority of the Board of Trustees in the management of the business of the corporation between meetings of the Board.
Section 11: Compensation. The compensation of trustees, officers, and agents if any, may be fixed by the Board, subject to the provisions of ARTICLE II of these By-Laws.
Section 12: Quorum. A majority of the number of the elected trustees shall constitute a quorum.
Section 13: Indemnification. The Corporation shall indemnify an officer or member of the Board of Trustees or former officer or former member of the Board of Trustees against expenses actually and necessarily incurred by him/her in connection with the defense of any action, suit or proceeding to which he or she is made a party by reason of being or having been such officer or member of the Board of Trustees, except in action adjudged to be the result of negligence or misconduct in the performance of duty.
ARTICLE VII – COMMITTEES
Section 1: Executive Committee. An Executive Committee composed of the President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer of the Corporation, and such other members as the Board of Trustees may designate, shall have the authority to conduct the affairs of the Corporation between meetings of the board of trustees within the limits set out by the Board.
Section 2. Finance Committee. A Finance Committee composed of the Treasurer and two other members shall be appointed by the president promptly after each annual meeting. It shall be the duty of this committee to prepare a budget for the fiscal year beginning the first day of July, and to submit it to the Board of Trustees at its next meeting. The finance committee may from time to time submit supplements to the budget for the current fiscal year as directed by the officers or Board of Trustees.
Section 3: Financial Review Committee. A Financial Review Committee of three members shall be appointed by the president at the first regular meeting of the Board of Trustees after the annual meeting. The duty of this committee shall be to review the treasurer’s books and report the results at the next annual meeting. [amended January 14, 2002]
Section 4: Such other committees, standing or special, shall be appointed by the president as the members of the Board of Trustees shall from time to time deem necessary to carry on the work of the Foundation.
Section 5: The president shall be ex-officio a member of all committees.
Section 6: Membership on committees shall be open to all members of the Orgaizational members and the Consulting members, subject to the limitation that they can not hold an elected office.
ARTICLE VIII – VOTING, ELECTIONS, & PROXIES
Section 1: Who Is Entitled to Vote. Except as the articles or an amendment or amendments, thereto otherwise provide, each member of this corporation shall, at every meeting of the members, be entitled to one vote in person or by proxy upon each subject properly submitted to vote.
Section 2: Proxies. No proxy shall be deemed operative unless and until signed by the member and filed with the corporation. In the absence of limitation to the contrary contained in the proxy, the same shall extend to all meetings of the members and shall remain in force three years from its date or until sooner revoked.
ARTICLE IX – EXECUTION OF INSTRUMENTS
Section 1: Checks, etc. All checks, drafts, and orders for payment of money shall be signed in the name of the corporation and shall be countersigned by such officers or agents as the Board of Trustees shall from time to time designate for that purpose.
Section 2: Contracts, Conveyances, etc. When the execution of any contract, conveyance, or other instrument has been authorized without specification or the execution officers, the president or any vice-president, and the secretary or assistant secretary, may execute the same in the name and on behalf of this corporation and may affix the corporation seal thereto. The Board of Trustee shall have power to designate the officers and agents who shall have the authority to execute any instrument in behalf of this corporation.
ARTICLE X – POWER OF BOARD TO BORROW MONEY
The Board of Trustees shall have full power and authority to borrow money whenever in the discretion of the Board the exercise of said power is required in the general interests of this corporation and in such case the Board of Trustees may authorize the proper officers of this corporation to make, execute, and deliver in the name and behalf of this corporation such notes, bonds, and other evidence of indebtedness as said Board shall deem proper, and said Board shall have full power to mortgage the property of this corporation, or any part thereof, as security for such indebtedness, and no action on the part of the membership of this corporation shall be requisite to the validity of any such note, bond, evidence of indebtedness, or mortgage.
ARTICLE XI – PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE
Section 1: Parliamentary Authority. The rules contained in the current edition of ROBERT’S RULES OF ORDER, NEWLY REVISED, shall govern the Foundation in all cases to which they are applicable and in which they are not inconsistent with the ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION or BY-LAWS of this Foundation or with any special rules of order the Foundation may adopt.
ARTICLE XII – AMENDMENT OF BY-LAWS
Section 1: Amendments, How Effected. These by-laws may be amended, altered, changed, added to, or repealed by the affirmative vote of a majority of the members entitled to vote at any regular or special meeting of the members if notice of the proposed amendment, alteration, change, addition, or repeal be contained in the notice of the meeting, or by the affirmative vote of a majority of the Board of Trustees if the amendment, alteration, change, addition or repeal be proposed at a regular or special meeting of the Board and adopted at a subsequent regular meeting; provided, that any by-laws made by the affirmative vote of a majority of the Board of Trustees as provided herein may be amended, altered, changed, added to or repealed by the affirmative vote of a majority of the members entitled to vote at any regular or special meeting of the members; also provided, however, that no change of the date or the annual meeting of members shall be made within thirty days next before the day on which such meeting is to be held, unless consented to in writing, or by resolution adopted at a meeting, by all members entitled to vote at the annual meeting.
ARTICLE XIII – GENDER OF MEMBERS
Section 1: Restrictions. There shall be no restriction to membership in the Foundation based on sex. Whenever the male gender is used in these By-Laws, inclusion of the female gender is also intended.
Article VII, Section 3 amended January 14, 2002
Major revision and rewrite amendment approved at Quarterly Meeting on April 29, 2004
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Museum of Christian Right Passive-Aggression
by Ed Kilgore
If you want to read something off the news cycle but politically relevant, I highly recommend Sarah Posner’s take at TPM on the Bible Museum being built near the National Mall by the Green family, better known as the plaintiffs in the landmark “religious liberty” case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.
Posner gains some insights on the world view the museum is expected to present via her observations about an already existing traveling Bible exhibit called Passages, which offers a sort of preview. There are some problems, she explains, reconciling certain elements of the history of bliblical translation and publishing with the sort of pan-religious united front the Greens are identified with via Hobby Lobby: e.g., paens to Martin Luther, both a biblical pioneer and a raving anti-semite, cheek by jowl with Holocaust reminiscences, or the many references in the museum to English Bible translater William Tyndale, the bitter enemy of St. Thomas More, the Catholic symbol of religious liberty (who sought to burn Tyndale but was himself beheaded first).
But more than its specific content, argues Posner, it’s the museum’s location that’s fascinating, given the Greens’ projected image as humble Christians who just want to practice their own religion without prejudice to anyone else’s views:
The museum, [Hobby Lobby president Steve] Green has promised, is “not about a faith tradition or a church or a denomination. It’s about a book.” While that is superficially true, there is no doubt that the museum, like Passages, will be an homage to a narrative that Christianity is in danger of eradication.
That will be a much harder case to make after the museum has spent hundreds of millions of tax-exempt dollars, underwritten in part by the American public, building a monument rivaling the nation capital’s most iconic structures. Or after the museum opens its doors at the very heart of political power, where the religious practice of the museum’s chief benefactors was given special, careful treatment by the highest court in the land.
There’s a rich resonance here with one of the abiding traits of the Christian Right: a regular alternation between triumphalist Moral Majority claims to represent America and its “real” people against relativist demands from secular-minded minorities–and the self-pitying tone of the fatuous claims of persecution that began with the campaign to protect the tax-exempt status of church-related segregation academies and proceeded through the annual “War on Christmas” hysteria to the more recent “religious liberty” agitprop. You get the distinct sense that we are being told by Green and other Christian Right folk that we must choose between letting them have their own country where they will be free to teach what they want at public expense and discriminate against anyone they wish–or shutting down Christianity altogether. It’s a shame the Bible has been dragged so prominently into this particular phase of the culture wars, though that is entirely consistent with the many scriptural warnings against false prophets.
Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore, a Monthly contributing editor, is a columnist for the Daily Intelligencer, New York magazine’s politics blog, and the managing editor for the Democratic Strategist.
A Texas-Sized Step in the Right Direction
By using endowment money to cover low-income students’ tuition, UT Austin fixes a fundamental flaw.
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Pablo E. Perez | Will County sheriff's office
Motorist Charged With DUI In Fatal Woodridge Crash
December 18, 2018 - 10:16 pm
(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- A man has been charged with DUI for a crash that left another man dead Monday afternoon in west suburban Woodridge.
The crash, which involved a light-duty box truck and two passenger vehicles, happened about 4 p.m. at Joliet and Davey roads in Woodridge, according to a statement from Woodridge police.
The driver of one of the passenger vehicles, 27-year-old Zachary Perry, was killed in the crash, police said. He lived in Addison.
The driver of the other passenger vehicle, 30-year-old Pablo Perez, was taken to a hospital and was later charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, according to police.
Perez was being held at the Will County Adult Detention Facility and was expected to appear in court on Tuesday, according to Will County sheriff’s office records.
The driver of the box truck was not cited, police said. The crash remained under investigation by police and the Felony Investigative Assistance Team.
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Back to the Model 3…we suspect that when the month’s final sales numbers are reported, the Model 3 will have outsold the next closest plug-in electric car by a ratio of well over 2 to 1. Lastly, Tesla.
UPDATE 12/27/10 3:02 p.m. ET: Politico reports that Sarah Palin addressed her now-infamous "refudiate" tweet (see below for the backstory) on Sunday’s episode of "Sarah Palin’s Alaska." She now says i.
Following a long period of turmoil, Nordic states also turned to literacy as a stabilizing force in the late 18 th century. By 1842, Sweden had made education compulsory for both boys and girls. Resea.
And he warns that the car you buy now may well be your last. “This is a global technology disruption. So yes, this applies to Australia,” Seba tells RenewEconomy. and the cost of insurance also one.
From our simulations, we conclude that warming by the middle of the twenty-first century that is stronger than earlier estimates is consistent with recent observed temperature changes and a mid-range.
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BRUSSELS, Sept 21 (Reuters) – The following are mergers under review by. 14/deadline Oct. 19) — Walt Disney Co to buy the bulk of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc’s film and television assets (notified.
Toyota Motors’ Prius hybrid car debuted in 1997, but getting to that rollout required the automobile giant to think differently and create "a car for the 21st century," says the head of the developmen.
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Illini earn huge Big Ten Conference payout – That’s a 21 percent increase over last year’s $6.5 million share from the BTN. Other schools in the conference will receive similar payouts because the Big Ten has a balanced revenue-sharing system. A.
So is Pinker a 21st century version of Dr. Pangloss, the diehard optimist in Voltaire’s Enlightenment novel Candide who claimed that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds"? Not at a.
The video is less than 30 seconds, but the damage is done. The woman, in a white car, makes racist comments about the legal citizenship status of Selina, a woman of Asian descent. The video stats of t.
And so here we are, with uneducated, isolated individuals reading the Bible in always problematic translations, scarily sure it was written with 21 st century Americans in mind, and proclaiming confid.
A driver sits in an Uber self-driving car in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 13, 2016 Evangelists for driverless cars see a bright future coming. Inga Beale, CEO of the Lloyd’s of London insu.
NAGOYA, Japan — Toyota Motor has fully redesigned its Century luxury sedan for the first time since. Legroom in the backseat was expanded by 95 millimeters, and the car is also outfitted with a 20.
List Of Car Insurance Companies In England 4th Jesse is also active in the The New England Electric Auto Association (which has been around since. mating season (when bu. We have launched Land Rover Hell www.LandRoverHell.com as a result of the consistent problems that we have experienced with our Land Rover Discovery since its purchase, almost 3 years ago. Besides all the problems
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Arguably the most infamously named band in the annals of popular music — for years, radio found their moniker unspeakable, and the press deemed it unprintable — Butthole Surfers long reigned among the most twisted and depraved acts ever to bubble up from the American underground. Masters of calculated outrage, the group fused the sicko antics of shock rock with a distinct and chaotic mishmash of avant-garde, hardcore, and Texas psychedelia; sleazy, confrontational, and spiteful, songs like "The Revenge of Anus Presley," "Bar-B-Q Pope," and "The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey Oswald's Grave" seemed destined to guarantee the Buttholes little more than a lifetime of cultdom. Yet, by the mid-'90s, they were left-field Top 40 hitmakers, success perhaps their ultimate subversion of mainstream ideals.
The seeds of their formation dated back to 1977, when future frontman Gibby Haynes, the son of the Dallas-based children's TV host known as "Mr. Peppermint," met guitarist Paul Leary while attending college in San Antonio. Four years later, Haynes — then completing his graduate work in accounting — and Leary formed the Ashtray Baby Heads, later dubbed Nine Foot Worm Makes Home Food; they became Butthole Surfers only after a radio announcer mistakenly took the title of an early song to be the group's name. In 1981, they signed to Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra's label Alternative Tentacles, and two years later issued their hallucinatory eponymous debut, also issued on colored vinyl under the name Brown Reason to Live.
After a number of bassists and drummers, the Surfers' lineup fell into place in 1983 with the addition of drummers King Coffey (formerly of the Hugh Beaumont Experience) and Theresa Nervosa; at the same time, their bizarre live gigs — a traveling freak show combining nude dancers, film clips of sex-change operations, and Haynes' pyromaniacal behavior — began to win a devout cult following, and in 1984 they issued the concert set Live PCPPEP. A move to the Chicago-based indie Touch & Go precipitated a turn toward even greater thematic offensiveness, as evidenced by tracks like "Concubine" and "Lady Sniff" from 1985's Psychic...Powerless...Another Man's Sac.
After the EP Cream Corn From the Socket of Davis, the Buttholes resurfaced in 1986 with Rembrandt Pussyhorse, a twisted trip into neo-psychedelia featuring a brutal deconstruction of the Guess Who's "American Woman," as well as new bassist Jeff "Tooter" Pinkus. The introduction of Haynes' "Gibbytronix" vocal effects unit increased the level of dementia for 1987's Locust Abortion Technician, an extremist fusion of punk, metal, art rock, and worldbeat rhythms. Following 1988's faux-Zeppelin rant Hairway to Steven, the group issued Double Live, a mock bootleg released through their own Latino Bugger Veil imprint; after a pair of EPs, 1989's Widowermaker! and 1990's The Hurdy Gurdy Man, they remained uncharacteristically silent until 1991's uneven Pioughd, recorded for the Rough Trade label.
For many observers, the biggest shock in a career built on outrageous behavior arrived in 1992, when the Buttholes signed with major label Capitol, which promptly reissued Pioughd following the demise of Rough Trade. After entering the studio with producer and former Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones, they emerged in 1993 with the LP Independent Worm Saloon; the first single and video, "Who Was in My Room Last Night?," both garnered a surprising amount of airplay, much to the chagrin of the many media outlets which begrudgingly referred to the group as "BH Surfers." Following a series of side projects — most notoriously Haynes' group P, which also featured movie star Johnny Depp — the band (now a trio consisting of Haynes, Leary, and Coffey) returned in 1996 with Electriclarryland, scoring a major chart hit with the trip-hop-flavored "Pepper." In 1998, they recorded a follow-up, After the Astronaut, but disputes between the Surfers and Capitol prevented the album from being released, though advance copies were sent to reviewers. Three years later, Butthole Surfers emerged with their first for Hollywood/Surfdog Records, Weird Revolution, which recycled some of the songs from After the Astronaut, but in new recordings. ~ Jason Ankeny
Electriclarryland
Who Was In My Room Last Night?
Independent Worm Saloon
Creep In The Cellar
Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Butthole Surfers + PCPpep
The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave
Piouhgd + Widowermaker!
Weird Revolution
Psychic....Powerless....Another Man's Sac
Locust Abortion Technician - EP
Pepper (Karaoke Version)
My Brother's Wife
Tiny Rubberband (Album Version)
Butthole SurfersMoby
Composer, Lyricist, Mixing Engineer
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Timi Hayek studied Fashion Print at Central Saint Martins in London.
During her time at csm, she won the Liberty Art Fabrics Award, where her winning print design was sold at the renowned British department store, Liberty & Co.
Completing a Diploma in Professional studies, Timi worked for Marc Jacobs in Louis Vuitton and Jean-charles de Castelbajac in Paris. She also worked at McQ by Alexander McQueen in London.
After graduating she launched her eponymous label 'Timi Hayek' under the support of The Starch Foundation, while working as a freelance illustrator in Beirut.
She exhibited with Starch at the International Fashion Showcase at the Somerset House in London in 2016, where she came highly commended as best designer.
2017 saw the launch of Starched Boutique in Beirut Souks, a one year pop up shop under the patronage of the Starch Foundation.
In 2018 Timi collaborated with Harvey Nichols HQ and illustrated their window display in London for the launch of Holly Nichols.
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July 12, 1845: Henrik Wergeland dies.
July 12, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
Henrik Arnold Wergeland, variously described as “Norway’s Byron,” “Norway’s Pushkin,” and “Norway’s Victor Hugo,” died 174 years ago today, on July 12, 1845, age 37.
Henrik Wergeland
Despite his brief life, Wergeland was a prolific writer, poet, playwright, polemicist, historian and linguist. Today, however, he is probably best known for his work on behalf of Norway’s Jews.
When Norway’s constitution (the second oldest in the world in continuous force, after America’s) was adopted on May 17, 1814, Clause 2 banned virtually all Jews from entering the country. As an equal opportunity discriminator, the drafters of the Constitution for good measure also banned Jesuits (so much for my Georgetown education!) and all monastic orders. One of the three delegates behind the so-called “Jew clause” was none other than Wergeland’s father, Nicolai Wergeland.
For years Wergeland considered Clause 2 to be a national disgrace, contrary to all the values otherwise contained in the Constitution, and he worked tirelessly for its repeal. In that effort he published two collections of poems, The Jew (1842), the most famous poem of which is “The Army of Truth,” and The Jewess (1844).
Wergeland did not live to see the successful conclusion of his efforts, which occurred on June 13, 1851, six years after his death. In 1849, following his death, but before the repeal of Clause 2, Jews living outside of Norway obtained special permission to enter and erect a monument at Wergeland’s graveside. On it are engraved the following words: “Henrik Wergeland, the indefatigable advocate of freedom and justice for humanity and all citizens.” Wergeland was also one of the moving forces behind the popularization of Syttende Mai, Norway’s Constitution Day, which today always includes a ceremony at his grave site. (During WWII the Nazi’s forbade any celebration of Wergeland. Also during the war Vidkun Quisling ordered the reinstatement of Clause 2.)
May 17 ceremony. Wergeland’s monument is on the right.
One might think the story ends there, but this is Norway, which is a very small country. One of the Wergeland’s strongest literary critic was Johan Sebastian Wellhaven, another giant of Norwegian literature. Wellhaven’s niece was none other than Eva (Sars) Nansen, Odd Nansen’s mother. In addition, Wergeland’s complete works were published in 23 volumes between 1918 and 1940, edited in part by Didrik Arup Seip, Rector of the University of Oslo. Siep was also a fellow prisoner of Odd Nansen’s in Grini and Sachsenhausen. A small world indeed!
“Words? Those sounds the world despises.
Words in poems?
Even more to be disdained!
Ah, how feeble are your powers
to defend
all the truth that man denies!
Forward, though, you feeble lines!
Words are armies!
On this earth your victory
was promised by the Lord, Light’s father,
when you serve
Truth itself, his child, alone.”
From The Army of Truth.
Henrik Wergeland, Norwegian Constitution, Odd Nansen, Sebastian Wellhaven
Fun in Minnesota!
July 6, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
I’ve just recently returned from a five-day sojourn in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” otherwise known as Minnesota (with an emphasis on the third syllable). I had never visited Minnesota before, unless one counts making airline connections at the Minneapolis—St. Paul International Airport. The experience was delightful from beginning to end. Coming home last Saturday night I even saw some of Cincinnati’s fireworks display from 35,000 ft.
I first flew to Duluth (explored by Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, in 1679) at the invitation of Lise Lunge-Larsen of the Nordic Center. Lise, a noted children’s author and storyteller, was a delightful host, showing me about the town. I got an up close and personal view of its watery neighbor—Lake Superior. You probably already knew that Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, and the third largest by volume. If Lake Superior were emptied out, it would cover ALL of North America and ALL of South America to the tune of 12 inches. What you probably didn’t know is that Superior boasts some of the best drinking water anywhere—many breweries and distilleries utilize its pure water for a “superior” taste. In fact, Lise’s daughter and son-in-law founded Vikre Distillery in town, which was voted the Best Craft Specialty Spirits in the country by USA TODAY in 2016. That water must be doing something right!
Nordic Center, Duluth, MN
On June 25 the Nordic Center was packed with an attentive crowd, including several people interestingly enough named Boyce. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any connection to my grandfather Dennis Boyce, who ran away from Donegal, Ireland, as a teenager to come to America in early 1900s. It was a great crowd, and a wonderful evening. We celebrated afterward at Vikre and even got to see Duluth’s famous Aerial Lift Bridge in action— locals who are stuck on either side waiting for the enormous cargo ships to pass through are said to have been “bridged.”
From there I traveled to Minneapolis for a series of talks, the highlight being at the Norway House on June 27. Again, another large audience. While I usually preface my remarks by asking if anyone in the audience has any Norwegian ancestry, here I asked if anyone did not (and there were, but only a handful). As the guest speaker I was treated to some delectable Norwegian desserts from the kaffebar in the lobby.
Norway House, Minneapolis, MN
The Gallery where I spoke was hosting a photographic exhibition by Judy Olausen entitled “Mother: a vision of the Eisenhower-era mother; eager to please, ready to serve, and blissfully sweeping the unmentionable under the rug.” The photos were quirky, zany, tongue-in-cheek send-ups of 1950’s era homemakers. Interesting for their own sake, they provided a unique backdrop to my talk, resulting in some unforgettable juxtapositions. Here’s my favorite:
Is the woman in the photo aghast at the point I’m trying to make? Is something horrible crawling up the back of my shirt? Or is it simply a case of underarm odor?
The only way to know is to visit the exhibit yourself (and don’t forget to try the pastries).
Nordic Center photo courtesy Nordic Center Facebook page; Norway House photos courtesy Mike Wick.
Duluth, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Nordic Center, Norway House, Odd Nansen
Odd Nansen: Dec. 6, 1901–Jun. 27, 1973
June 27, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
Odd Nansen
Odd Nansen died 46 years ago today, on June 27, 1973, age 71.
Each year on his death I like to draw from literature a description that I feel aptly describes some aspect of Nansen’s character (which I’ve done here, here and here).
Last year’s blog made a passing reference to Ernest Hemingway in my tribute to Odd Nansen, so perhaps it is only fitting that this year I draw from Hemingway’s third (of four) wives, Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn was one of the first, and most widely read, female war correspondents of the Twentieth Century. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day, and among the first correspondents to report on the Dachau concentration camp following its liberation by American forces in April 1945.
Gellhorn was a prolific writer, but her greatest novel is A Stricken Field. Based on her own experiences in Prague, Czechoslovakia immediately before the war, A Stricken Field follows the experiences of one Mary Douglas, an American correspondent. We watch Douglas’ frustrating and ultimately futile efforts to help Prague’s refugees (much like Nansen tried to help Prague’s refugees, 1936—39) while she tries to report on a Czechoslovakia that has been callously abandoned by the western Allies as the price for “peace in our time.” Gellhorn quickly wrote her novel at the famous farm she and Hemingway shared in Cuba, Finca Vigia (“Lookout Farm”), and published the work in 1940.
In one of the final scenes of the book, Mary Douglas, in a funk over her bitter experience, nevertheless finds some reasons for hope:
“I’ve seen enough in the last five years, Mary thought, to make anyone despair. But disaster doesn’t harm the really good ones: they carry their goodness through, untouched, and nothing that happens can makes them cowardly or calculating. I’ve seen some fine people in these disaster years. I’ve seen one tonight. There’s that to remember too, when despair sets in.”
I’ve known, indirectly, one such person, who carried his goodness through, untouched, during the disaster years of World War II: Odd Nansen. His example is always worth remembering whenever despair sets in.
Odd Nansen’s grave marker
Martha Gellhorn, Odd Nansen, Prague
A Churchillian Postscript
June 7, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
I am always overjoyed when I receive feedback from my blog subscribers regarding a recent post—especially if they have some personal connection to the story as well (this was a good example).
Last month I published a blog discussing both Churchill and Fridtjof Nansen, and the importance of May 13 in their lives. As part of my blog, I included a photo of Churchill. Just about everybody who knows anything about Churchill has seen it. It has graced the book jackets of more than one Churchill biography. In fact, it has been called one of the most iconic photos ever taken; according to The Economist magazine, it is the “most reproduced portrait in the history of photography.” To many it epitomizes all the characteristics we associate with the man who led the British through World War II: truculence; doggedness; pugnacity; defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.
Well, like all good stories, there is a backstory to this one as well, as I recently learned. The photo was taken by an Armenian-Canadian photographer named Yousuf Karsh. Born Hovsep Karsh in 1908, he and his family escaped the Armenian genocide to Syria in 1922. From there he was sent to Canada by his family, arriving in 1923. He lived in Quebec for five years with an uncle who was a portrait photographer, and who taught him the trade, starting with a Box Brownie camera. From 1929—1931 he apprenticed with another Armenian photographer in Boston, John Garo.
Returning to Canada in 1932, Karsh set up his own studio in Ottawa. He managed to capture the attention of Mackenzie King, Canada’s Prime Minister, who helped arrange portraits of visiting dignitaries.
Yousuf Karsh
On December 30, 1941, one of those visiting dignitaries happened to be Winston Churchill, in town taking a break from the Arcadia Conference talks in DC. Following an address to the Canadian Parliament, Karsh arranged to photograph Churchill. The first shot was quite standard, showing a smiling, jovial Churchill. Prior to the second shot, Karsh snatched the trademark Churchill cigar from him. Churchill was miffed, and showed it. Thus is history made, and thus we remember England’s feisty wartime leader.
Now, how do I know all this? Much of it is available on-line and in various history books. But the person who brought it to my attention was Pamela B. I met Pam while giving the Wallenberg Memorial Address to the Nordic Museum in Seattle last June (here). After my Churchill blog was posted last month, Pam wrote me about Karsh, and revealed that she knew the great Karsh: looking for a summer job following high school graduation in Ottawa, Pam was hired on as the cook and housekeeper. She writes “it was an interesting experience to work for someone so famous with a home full of mementos from his decades of hanging out with luminaries across the US and Europe.” Pam was even interviewed by Karsh’s biographer for any telling insights. She had none to relay, probably because, as she informed me, she was fired within three weeks (whether for deficiencies in housekeeping or cooking is not known).
There is yet another connection. Pam’s husband Gary is the “world’s leading expert in the artistic depiction of facial expression” and writes a blog about such matters, including one on Churchill’s famous scowl (here).
“Wait,” as they say on some TV commercials, “there’s more!”
Yousef had a younger brother Malak who was also a talented photographer. He developed in to a premier landscape photographer (so as not to compete directly with his brother). The Canadian $1 dollar bill (no longer in use) once depicted Queen Elizabeth on one side (photo by Yousuf) and a logjam on the Ottawa River just below Parliament on the obverse (courtesy of Malak). Not too surprising that Pam would know Malak’s story as well—she dated Malak’s son Laurence in high school!
Now, back to Yousuf. By the time he died in 2002, age 93, he was regarded as one of the leading photographers of the Twentieth Century. More than 20 of Yousuf’s photos graced the cover of Life magazine, including the Churchill shot. The picture did not actually appear until May 21, 1945, almost four years after it was taken. That was shortly after VE Day, a victory Churchill did almost as much as anyone to help accomplish.
Are there any other connections we can pack into this blog? Well, my May 13 blog spoke about both Churchill and Fridtjof Nansen. The Armenians (which Yousuf always thought of himself) still revere Fridtjof Nansen for all the work he did following World War I to assist them. Every April 24, the date commemorating the start of the Armenian Genocide, they have a ceremony at Fridtjof’s gravesite in Lysaker, Norway. In 2011 the Armenian Government flew Nansen’s granddaughter (and my dear friend) Marit (Nansen) Greve to Yerevan, their capital city, so she could witness the unveiling of a new memorial to Fridtjof.
Flowers on Fridtjof Nansen’s grave, April 24, 2019. Courtesy Anne Greve.
It’s amazing what one little blog can unleash! I hope some future subject causes you to reach out to me as well with your story!
Fridtjof Nansen, Winston Churchill, Yousuf Karsh
A Memorial Day Remembrance
May 27, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
Capt. Robert M. Losey
I don’t generally recycle old blogs I’ve previously written, but in some cases I will make an exception. Two years ago on Memorial Day I wrote about Capt. Robert M. Losey, the first U.S. serviceman to be killed in World War II—it happened in Norway. The full story can be found here.
Dombas, Memorial Day, Norway, Robert Losey, WWII
Syttende Mai (May 17)
Syttende Mai Celebration*
Syttende Mai, or May 17, is Norway’s Constitution Day, and its most important national holiday. Norwegians everywhere celebrate the signing of the Norwegian Constitution on May 17, 1814, by the Norwegian Constituent Assembly in Eidsvoll, Norway. The Norwegian Constitution is now the second oldest in continuous force (after the United States).
I can’t think of a better way to observe the day than to quote Odd Nansen’s own words written 77 years ago:
It’s best to forget the 17th of May when you are a Norwegian shut up in a German concentration camp and struggling to make the time vanish, so that it may be the 18th as quickly as possible. So in a way it was no bad thing to have a working day today. But work as I might, and struggle as I might to get the time, the confounded time, to pass, it wasn’t possible to forget that it was May 17th. It was in the air, the clear, fresh spring air blowing from the southwest. The sun shone from early morning; the birds were singing, the birches sprouting so that one could absolutely stand and watch how their pale green tops became denser and more copious hour by hour. They flamed against the dark wood behind, which hasn’t rightly awakened yet.
Southward the landscape opens out; there is no dark, grave forest barrier. The sallows too are beginning to dress for the party, as they stand by the spring becks winding down between the fields toward the sea—far, far out yonder. I truly believe we can make out a streak of that too, a silver streak just under the light blue ridge on the horizon. And the mind goes on to seek the glittering fjord, with its islands one behind another, right out to the last skerries and then still farther out, to the open sea.
And behind rises the blue landscape, up from the ocean and from ridge to ridge with green floes in among them, and with dark and light brown fields like patchwork between the copses and rocky outcrops, and at the back of all, the mountains stand against the spring sky, pale blue with shining flecks of white. It is as though the eye were following the mind upon its free journey. And one sails on along the coast, gazing in rapture at the wonderland within. A rush of warmth goes through one. This is all Norway. . . .
That is the content of the 17th of May; so it has always been, and so it will always be. No one can change it, least of all these Germans, who have no conception of it.
And no one can deprive me of today’s tour of Norway; I’ve been round the whole country and absorbed it with the spring air. I saw it bathed in spring sunshine, beautiful as never before. No, I take it back that one should forget the 17th of May because one’s in a German concentration camp. On the contrary, one should remember it and keep it more intensely and fervently than ever.”
Skål, Norway!
*By evelinagustafsson@live.se – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10407995
Norway, Odd Nansen, Syttende Mai
May 13: Winston Churchill and Fridtjof Nansen
I don’t know if Winston Churchill and Fridtjof Nansen (about whom I’ve written before here and here) ever knew each other or knew of each other. I’ve never yet come across a reference to the other in either of their writings. But then again, I’ve only scratched the surface of their respective output—both left prodigious written records.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that they were not at least aware of each other, if not personally acquainted. They both loomed so large over their respective stages in Europe that it’s almost impossible to think they hadn’t somehow crossed paths.
While Churchill may have missed the 1897 lecture Nansen (thirteen years his senior) gave to the Royal Geographical Society following his attempt at the North Pole (Winston was serving with the British Army in India at the time), they were both in London in 1906, when Fridtjof Nansen was appointed newly-independent Norway’s first ambassador to Great Britain and Churchill was re-elected to Parliament. Both men were active during World War I; Nansen negotiating with the Wilson Administration for liberalized food trade; Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty
After World War I ended, Fridtjof Nansen was one of the most prominent figures in the newly created League of Nations, an organization strongly supported by Churchill. With the approach of World War II, Churchill participated in the Focus Group, a loosely-allied group of British politicians alive to the threat of fascist Germany. Philip Noel-Baker, an old League friend of Fridtjof’s, was part of this select group.
Whether or not the two were acquainted, personally or by reputation, May 13th was a critical anniversary in both their lives.
On May 13, 1930, Fridtjof Nansen passed away, age 68. As I have explained in an earlier post, while the medical report may have listed the cause of death as heart failure, in reality I believe it was simply a case of his having done more work than most ten men. If there was one word that encapsulated his personality, it was forward (in Norwegian the word is fram which happened to be the name of the ship he built for his expedition to the North Pole). As he once explained, there should be no thought or plan of retreat: “Then one loses no time in looking behind, when one should have quite enough to do in looking ahead—then there is no chance for you or your men but forward. You have to do or die!”
Exactly 10 years later, on May 13, 1940, that same philosophy inspired Churchill’s famous “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech to the House of Commons. At the time of the speech, Churchill had been Prime Minister for all of three days, assuming the position “on the eve of the gravest crisis which any British Government ever faced,” in the words of one historian. Austria had been annexed; Czechoslovakia occupied; Poland crushed; Denmark overrun; Holland would capitulate 2 days later; Belgium in 18 more; France was slightly more than a month away from surrendering; Norway was fighting gallantly against impossible odds. Many in Great Britain advocated negotiating with Hitler.
Nevertheless, Churchill marked out his own position unmistakably. After informing his countrymen that he had nothing to offer them but blood, toil, tears and sweat, Churchill continued:
“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
As one historian described Churchill’s spellbinding speech, and its effect on both his country and the worldwide audience that it was also intended for: “If this was Britain’s ‘finest hour,’ it was also Winston’s.”
No doubt if Fridtjof Nansen were still alive, he would have wholeheartedly agreed.
Fridtjof Nansen, Winston Churchill
May 2: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day)
May 9, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
Last week, while on a book tour through CT and NY, I was privileged to spend May 2—Yom HaShoah—at my high school alma mater, Notre Dame of West Haven, CT. In the morning I taught 23 Seniors in the school’s Holocaust class. Notre Dame, a boys school run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross, has had a Holocaust course as part of its curriculum for over 30 years. The teacher, Matt Milano, had his students read selected diary entries from Odd Nansen’s From Day to Day, choose the most powerful sentence in the excerpt, and then come up with three questions based on his reading. I enjoyed spending time, however brief, discussing Nansen’s diary with the young scholars.
Addressing the Seniors and Juniors
I then addressed the entire Junior and Senior classes. I drew a comparison between Anne Frank and Thomas Buergenthal, two children caught in the vortex of the Holocaust. Both arrived in Auschwitz at roughly the same time (August 1944). They never met so far as we know, which is not surprising considering that Auschwitz’s population at that point exceeded 60,000, or more than the entire population of West Haven, CT.
Anne was soon sent on the Bergen-Belsen, where she died in early 1945. Tommy was later evacuated to Sachsenhausen, where he survived through the intervention of Odd Nansen. I compared the “what might have been” of Anne’s life—a gifted writer whose diary, composed when she was younger than many in the audience, has sold millions of copies and been translated into 60 languages, with the reality of Tom’s life and career—a distinguished career dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of human rights everywhere.
I challenged the students to follow Nansen’s example, and change a life for the better. I reminded them that Notre Dame’s motto is “Character, Confidence,” and most importantly, “Compassion.”
Evening Presentation
Later in the evening I addressed parents, alumni (including some old classmates from ND ’72) and interested third parties. The evening began with a welcome by school President Robert Curis, and a prayer by Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus of Congregation Or Shalom. Along with my many memories of that special day, I will cherish the yahrzeit candle that was lit for the duration of my talk.
yahrzeit candle
Auschwitz, Notre Dame High School, Odd Nansen, Yom HaShoah
April: Anniversaries and a Reckoning
April 25, 2019 Written by Timothy Boyce
The revised hardcover edition of From Day to Day was re-published exactly three years ago this week. I don’t think I ever realized the significance of this week in any of my previous reflections. Monday, April 22, represented the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Sachsenhausen, and with it, freedom after almost six years for Thomas Buergenthal. Similarly, April 27-28, 1945 represents the final entry in Nansen’s diary. Nansen’s agonized, brutally honest words from that entry, when he is on the cusp of freedom, are worth repeating:
“What on earth am I to write? It’s as impossible today as on all the other days that have passed in one long whirl of unreality and fairy tale. . .. The day before yesterday I was to scribble a message to Kari, only a hurried greeting, a few words on a scrap of paper, with the mudguard of a truck to write on. . .. But no, it seemed to me impossible, insuperable! . . . I felt like crying with despair and rage. . .. Dear, darling Kari! .. . . I don’t know what more I got down. I had to write something, couldn’t say I found it impossible. Only a little message—I’ll be soon be home! Surely I could write that much! And so I wrote that. . .. And here I am, as bankrupt, as confused, and as stupefied as ever, out of contact with reality, because it is in fact unbelievable.”
Anniversaries are also a time for stock-taking. Here are some of the highlights of my three-year journey (cumulative through 12/31/18):
Miles traveled: 51,807
Website visitors: 7,301
Presentation audiences: 5,000+
Presentations made: 137
Blogs written: 105
Speaking of blogs, several friends have wondered at the recent dearth of blogs from me. I can only plead a busy travel schedule, which has prevented me from collecting all my thoughts. But the travels have certainly been worthwhile. The following represents just a few of the highlights in the first quarter of 2019, (but which nevertheless are emblematic of the entire experience with this book since the start):
Before speaking at the Providence Athenaeum in February I was shown the library’s rare book collection, which is rare indeed: a first edition, signed copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a first edition Moby Dick, and a library charge-out book signed by library patron “E.A. Poe.”
In Barrington, RI, an audience member that his own grandfather had spent time in Grini, the Norwegian camp where Nansen spent almost 18 months.
In Baltimore, I met a 92 year-old patron named Joel. Joel returned to the room where I had spoken just as I was packing up to leave. He told me that my recitation of Nansen’s dairy entry for August 27, 1944, wherein he relates that his love for Kari is of eternity, and will never die “even though we should never meet again,” had struck a nerve with him. Joel explained that he fought in the Italian campaign during WWII, and had lost a brother in the Battle of the Bulge, and had another brother injured in the same battle. With tears in his eyes, he confessed that while fighting in Italy he never thought he would make it home alive himself. Joel then confessed that, until that very day, he had never mentioned this crippling fear to anyone else in his entire life.
In York, PA, I learned about the famed “Four Chaplains,” sometimes also known as the “Dorchester Chaplains.” Four chaplains (Alexander Goode, a rabbi; John Washington, a Catholic priest; George Fox, a Methodist minister; and Clark Poling, a Reformed Church minister) were sailing with the troop transport SS Dorchester when it was torpedoed on February 3, 1943. When the supply of life jackets ran out, each of the chaplains gave his away, and remained with those unable to escape the sinking ship. The Dorchester sank in 27 minutes, with 672 men still on board. The four chaplains were last seen on deck, arms linked, praying together. The town of York, where Alexander Goode once served as a rabbi and scout leader, commemorates the memory of the Four Chaplains with a prayer breakfast annually around mid-May, close to Rabbi Goode’s birthday of May 10.
In Milwaukee, a guest brought with her a framed photo from Life Magazine showing the liberation of Dachau [which incidentally occurred April 29, 1945–another April anniversary]. The photo shows four GIs at Dachau’s gate. The one with the cigarette in his mouth was her brother.
Dachau liberated
In Lincolnwood, IL, I met a relative of Michael Bornstein, probably the youngest survivor of Auschwitz, and I learned about his moving memoir, Survivor’s Club—I highly recommend it.
Finally, in Lisle, IL, I met Margaret Roth, a survivor of a different sort. She was born in Germany in 1938 and grew up in the shadow of the war, emigrating to the U.S. in 1968. She inscribed her family memoir, An Ordinary Family in Extraordinary Times, to me as follows: “To Timothy Boyce/For a wonderful talk that showed that human love and compassion can overcome the greatest evil.”
On that positive note, I am excited to begin the fourth year of From Day to Day’s new lease on life, and see what fresh developments and experiences the next 12 months will bring.
Bornstein, Dachau, Four Chaplains, Grini, Nansen, Providence Athenaeum
The Katyn Massacre: A Mystery within a Riddle
From Odd Nansen’s dairy, Thursday, July 9, 1942:
“At dinnertime I was called down for questioning in the Vermittlung [registration office]. It was Herold who did the questioning. My entire life was unrolled, from the cradle to the present day. . . . Clearly the point was just to get a résumé of my whole career and make it look—in its entirety—like a menace to the Third Reich. I was confronted with a good-sized collection of “anti-German” remarks I’ve made throughout the years in lectures and articles on the refugee question. . . . I felt positively flattered by so much attention.
He confronted me with things I was supposed to have said to one of the drivers at Grini. [For example, that] I didn’t believe in the Russian atrocities they were using as publicity. Katyn, etc.”
That single word, “Katyn,” is the subject of today’s blog.
On this date 76 years ago, the Nazis stunned the world with a major propaganda coup. Official Nazi radio announced on April 13, 1943 that the remains of thousands of Polish prisoners had been found, all shot in the back of the head, and buried neatly in mass graves in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk.
Katyn Forest
German forces quickly overran Smolensk following the start of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. Eventually, news of the massacre reached German occupation forces in the area, leading to the discovery and exhumation of the graves.
Despite clear and convincing proof of Soviet culpability (Stalin was intent on destroying anyone who might resist Soviet efforts to control Poland after the war), Moscow actually blamed the Germans for the massacre, a position they staunchly maintained throughout the war. The Polish Government-in-Exile, which had earlier agreed to ally with the Soviets (despite their invasion of Poland in September 1939) in a common struggle against Germany, now demanded an impartial investigation by the International Red Cross. Stalin refused to allow the Red Cross to investigate, and broke off relations with the Polish government.
This left the United States and Great Britain on the horns of a dilemma. While it was quickly apparent to all that the Germans were entirely correct—the massacre had been perpetrated by Soviet forces, the Soviet Union was also clearly bearing the brunt of the Allied fighting against the Wehrmacht; the opening of the so-called Second Front (i.e., D-Day) was still over a year away. So the Allies deferred to Realpolitik, and kept their well-founded suspicions to themselves, an awkward silence that the Nazi propaganda machine tried to take full advantage of.
Nazi Poster
The official Soviet position remained one of steadfast denial for 50 years after the fact. With glasnost ushering in a new policy of transparency, the Soviet Government under Mikhail Gorbachev finally acknowledged what had been an open secret for decades. On April 13, 1990, it officially admitted to the murder of thousands of Polish officers and others, all at the express order of Stalin. It is believed that almost 22,000 Polish nationals, primarily army officers but also including doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers, were killed at Katyn and similar execution sites.*
Mystery solved.
But here’s the riddle: Although there were rumors of Soviet atrocities circulating in the Katyn region soon after the murders took place in April 1940—it’s awfully hard to shoot thousands of prisoners and bury them, even in a remote forest, without the locals knowing something about it—almost all the accounts of the event maintain that German authorities only learned of the massacre in late 1942 or early 1943. Senior German officials only heard the news in March or April 1943.
And yet.
From Nansen’s diary, it is clear that he was sufficiently knowledgeable about the event to discuss it openly with a German soldier working at the Grini camp in Oslo in July 1942. How did Nansen come across this intelligence, fully nine months prior to the German radio broadcast in April 1943? In occupied Norway at the time, the Nazis controlled the airwaves. The news could not have come from the BBC (or, as Nansen refers to it in his diary, the “west wind”) as they, too, were unaware of the story, and in any event buried almost all mention of it even after April 1943 lest they antagonize their ally.
So, while the mystery of the real perpetrators of the Katyn massacre has now long since been put to rest (despite some deniers in Russia today), the riddle of Odd Nansen’s awareness of this key episode of World War II, so many months prior to its public dissemination, remains an enduring riddle which we may never be able to unravel. But at the least, subsequent histories of Katyn may need to revise their timeline to account for an earlier public awareness of the event than traditionally has been the case. Yet another reason why Odd Nansen’s diary is such an important historical document.
[* The Katyn tragedy claimed yet more victims in 2010. On April 10 of that year, an airplane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and 87 other Polish politicians and military officers crashed just outside the Smolensk airport, killing all on board. The purpose of the trip was to attend a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the massacre.]
Barbarossa, Katyn, Odd Nansen, Smolensk, WWII
“A fantastic guest speaker and literary researcher.”
- Dirk Hansen, President
Sons of Norway Southern Star Lodge
July 12, 1845: Henrik Wergeland dies. July 12, 2019
Fun in Minnesota! July 6, 2019
Odd Nansen: Dec. 6, 1901–Jun. 27, 1973 June 27, 2019
A Churchillian Postscript June 7, 2019
A Memorial Day Remembrance May 27, 2019
Syttende Mai (May 17) May 17, 2019
May 13: Winston Churchill and Fridtjof Nansen May 13, 2019
May 2: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) May 9, 2019
April: Anniversaries and a Reckoning April 25, 2019
The Katyn Massacre: A Mystery within a Riddle April 13, 2019
Remembering Pilot Michel Bacos, Hero of the Entebbe Hijacking March 30, 2019
March 24, 1944: The Great Escape March 24, 2019
Beware the Ides of January! January 14, 2019
New Year’s Resolutions January 6, 2019
A Feel-Good Story December 28, 2018
Third Royalty Checks Go Out December 12, 2018
Odd Nansen’s Birthday (12/6/01) December 6, 2018
Longing: The Story of the Bracelet December 2, 2018
MHQ Publishes Article on Nansen Passport November 23, 2018
A Special Visit to Norway November 18, 2018
Another Astonishing WWII Holocaust Diary Surfaces November 8, 2018
Pittsburgh 2018; London 1942 November 2, 2018
Joachim Ronneberg (1919–2018) October 23, 2018
October 10, 1861: Fridtjof Nansen is Born October 10, 2018
Odd Nansen’s Postscript October 6, 2018
For more posts please see our archives.
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War in Venezuela
Orlando Wilson May 7, 2019 May 9, 2019 Hostile Environments, Politics & Bullshit
On the morning of April 30th, 2019 Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó seemed to attempt a coup d’état against the communist government of Nicolás Maduro. I use the word seemed as what occurred can be best described as a publicity stunt more than an actual coup d’état. For the remainder of the day, even those that thought they knew what was going on in Venezuela had no idea what was going on. While the social media and the news channels were touting a revolution in Caracas life went on as normal on the military bases and for the rest of Venezuela. Guaidó’s attempted coup d’état was mostly just another demonstration that is all too common in Caracas…
One the day of Guaidó’s publicity stunt Nicolás Maduro was strangely absent until late in the day. Rumors were swirling that he had left or was leaving the country. Did his Cuban bodyguards take Guaidó’s actions seriously and isolate Maduro until the all-clear was given? Maybe… I am sure the Caucasian-looking Russian speakers on the streets of Caracas wearing Venezuelan National Guard uniforms were keeping Maduro’s security team and others informed on all the developments with Guaidó’s fiasco.
If Nicolás Maduro had planned to leave Venezuela is a matter for debate and only a select few know the facts. Maybe some of the passengers on the Bombardier Global Express that landed at 8 pm that evening at the airport in Maiquetía after a direct flight from Moscow would know the answer. Did the passengers of that plane meet with Maduro and clarify to him that he was not leaving the country, again, who knows. But Maduro is still in power and in the following days was seen dancing with his supporters and parading with the military.
For the past few months, there have been rumors and news reports about an imminent invasion of Venezuela by U.S. forces and its allies. Even Eric Prince the former owner of the now-defunct Blackwater got in on the action apparently stating with 5000 mercenaries he could take the country from Maduro… All this sounds cool and is good for publicity, ratings and “Likes” on social media but, is it feasible in reality or a complete fantasy? I lean towards the latter…
The Ground
Venezuela, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, etc. is a hilly and heavily vegetated country with limited roads in many parts. To comprehend Venezuela’s terrain from a military point of view you want to think Vietnam, not Iraq. Venezuela’s terrain is ideal for guerrilla warfare as heavily equipped conventional troops and security forces will be channeled for ambushes on limited routes and the abundant vegetation will provide ample cover for attackers. The Colombian military and security forces have been trying for years to control their borders with Venezuela but still today most of those areas are lawless badlands controlled by narcos, guerrillas and gangsters.
As for the cities such as Caracas… To clear and control Caracas militarily would be a huge challenge due to its terrain, limited main roads and its abundance of favelas/barrios. Most of the favelas/barrios are controlled by their own well-armed gangs and any outsiders entering the maze of alleyways are targeted. For the issues of operating in such environments take a look at how the Brazilian security forces work in the favelas of Rio and Sao Paulo. Troops that are not trained specifically to operate in that environment, are not fit enough and don’t know their way around, would be chewed up and if lucky, spat out…
The Population
Do most Venezuelans support the opposition? Well, I think that like everyone else, they would support someone who would give them a better quality of life, but are Venezuelans willing to fight for it… I think not… Yes, they will turn up to rallies, wave their flags and share their photos and videos on social media but, when the evening comes, and it starts to get dark they go home… Their priorities, like most people in the Caribbean and Latin America, are earning enough money to live, drink, f#ck and party. What else do you need in life…?
From a military and cultural perspective, one of the huge differences between the wars in the Middle East and a potential war in Venezuela is the religion of the populations. While most in the U.S. and Europe have little cultural connection with the Muslims killed and suffering in the Middle Eastern wars, I think there would be a lot more public outrage if Hispanic Catholics were being shot, bombed, killed and classed as collateral damage.
Juan Guaidó seems to have the support of the U.S. and their allies but not that of the Venezuelan people. Guaidó and his people all seem to be photogenic, wealthy and educated individuals whereas Nicolás Maduro was a bus driver and the former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a career soldier, both from humble backgrounds and I don’t think either of them would ever make the front cover of Vogue Magazine…
I don’t think it’s difficult to see why most Venezuelans can relate more to Maduro and his predecessor Chávez than they can to Guaidó. I think Guaidó’s opposition is more in tune with drumming up donations from Miami’s, Washington DC’s and New York’s socialites than fighting what would be a very dirty war.
Blackwater’s 5000
If anyone with any military experience or knowledge can seriously think they could take control of a country like Venezuela with only 5000 well trained and equipped troops I would say they must be delusional. If anyone was to think, these days, that they could raise a 5000 strong mercenary force to take control of a country like Venezuela, I would say they must be smoking crack.
The now-defunct Blackwater was a security company that supplied guards to the U.S. Department of Defense etc., they were not a mercenary force. They operated within U.S. guidelines for the U.S. government.
Blackwater did not engage in offensive front-line operations; they were a security company.
Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was reportedly in charge of running the training for the U.S.’s counternarcotics program in Afghanistan. Their achievements are questionable as we all know opium production in Afghanistan is booming…
Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was connected with supplying troops for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. That war is not going the way the Saudis and their allies intended even with all the money they are spending.
To arm and equip a large mercenary force without government backing would require violating numerous international laws including arms trafficking to start with.
Security companies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. have had protection – to some degree – from prosecution for any shootings, etc. they have been involved in, but guards have been held accountable and jailed for using what has been deemed as excessive force. Anyone that follows military events and news will know that there are regular soldiers from the U.S. and U.K. being charged or are in jail for incidents that took place while on active duty. So, let’s say hypothetically a mercenary force is involved in offensive operations where there are civilians killed; just your regular collateral damage which is to be expected in a war. These days do you think for a second that no-one will try to prosecute these mercenaries for using excessive force, human rights violations, etc. etc. And when they do return to their countries and have to face the legal ramifications of their actions do you think the company that hired them will be paying their legal bills? I think we all know the answer to that one…
On a basic level, when security companies are working in Iraq and Afghanistan on government contracts, they have access to medical and life insurance programs for their guards, not so with mercenary operations. Trying to get decent insurance for armed international close protection work is extremely expensive if not impossible to get, so how will anyone insure a mercenary operation that will undoubtedly be suffering casualties. Insurance for decent medical and aftercare for those wounded would also be extremely expensive if any insurance companies would write the policy… Repatriating bodies takes a lot of logistics and is expensive, from a business perspective it’s far better to bury in place… I strongly suggest you check the fine print and validity of any medical or life insurance policies if you decide to partake in such mercenary adventures!
I have already heard that security companies are recruiting for operations in Venezuela; sure, this makes good bar talk over a few beers but anything more than that I would say find yourself something constructive to focus on…
Armed Groups
In addition to the Venezuelan police, army, national guard and intelligence services there are an array of foreign forces who have been training there for years. The Russians have been highlighted recently, but also the Chinese, North Koreans and Hezbollah are active within the country. There are numerous photos online of South East Asians in Venezuelan military and their own national military uniforms. Will these foreign soldiers fight for Venezuela in the event of an invasion? Well, I think it’s in their interest to do so.
There are many videos poking fun online at the Venezuelan Militias but in a guerrilla war in the tight alleys of the favelas, anyone putting lead in your general direction can cause casualties. At the other extreme, within the Venezuelan Armed forces there are well trained, equipped and motivated troops that have been preparing for a foreign invasion for a long time.
I recently wrote an article about the threats some of the main narco and terrorist organizations within Venezuela pose, and there are more that I will be writing about in the future.
Within Venezuela, as within all narco-states, parts of the country are controlled by armed gangs of terrorists, criminals or as they are locally known “Colectivos” who to some extent are operating with the government’s consent. In many places, these armed gangs outnumber and are better armed and paid than the local police and military forces.
This is where from a strategic perspective, credit needs to be given to the former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez because by arming, funding and facilitating these armed gangs he essentially bought the government an unofficial army. These gangs are well organized, can operate independently and are embedded within their communities. What they are lacking in conventional military discipline and skills they compensate for with brutality and violence.
Venezuela is a very violent country where death and killing is a way of life for many. Those within the gangs and colectivos are accustomed to taking risks, fighting and killing. They have an operational command structure and are controlled by their bosses in the Venezuelan prison system or their friends in the intelligence services. For a very dirty guerrilla war these rapists, kidnappers and murderers would be very effective tools.
Hopefully, you can see from this article the potential issues for an invasion of Venezuela. A war within Venezuela would be a very dirty fight, and most armies these days, by my observations, are not trained for it. And, they would not be able to operate effectively due to oversight and supervision by politically correct bureaucrats and politicians.
With elections in the U.S. coming up in November 2020 and the Western European political scene in chaos, will the powers that be commit to a war in Venezuela? A war whose cost would be many lives from all the sides directly involved; I don’t think so, but I could be very wrong…
Could there be a military solution to removing the communist government of Venezuela, sure but people need to decide if they really want it to happen or just use the vision of an invasion to promote themselves on social media.
An active measure to start with could be positioning a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the Southern Caribbean and every night when the narco flights start coming and going from Venezuela to send up their fighter jets to blow them out the sky. This might have a much more serious effect on Venezuela’s economy than all the official sanctions, but I am sure it would adversely affect the U.S. economy as well….
Orlando W.
Blackwater in Venezuela, Invading Venezuela, Invasion of Venezuela, Russians in Venezuela, Venezuela drug cartels, Venezuela narco trafficking, Venezuela terrorism, Violence in Venezuela, War in Venezuela, War Venezuela
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Rafael martin says:
Orlando!
As a Venezuelan emigrant, as an ex law enforcement and an ex military operator must say that has explained the actual situation in there more precised and detailed way than any useless politician or peace activist.
I’m agreed with you, as you mention in your analysis, during day March and else but night at home drinking, partying and fu..ng.., For decades the Venezuelans have been used to live like monarchy and that hasn’t change at all yet why?, because the still alive connections between a highly influential social sector there and government, apart of political differences always has been like that and I don’t think this will change for now. The 21 century is an economical and techonological age that will force to change many of the old social and political ideas or dogmas everywhere in the world, Venezuela will be affected as well as many others countries but nobody knows when this will happen!.
Keep doing this things and count on me for developing something related to you and I like and know to do, as a bridge here in Spain.
boondock says:
Rather than speak of BW, rather compare the situation to EO in Sierra Leone.
Orlando Wilson says:
If Eeban Barlow was in the game I would take it very seriously… I don’t think he would be broadcasting his intentions on social media though…
gatofuego says:
LOL. Precisely
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Category Archives: Writing as Business
“E vs. P”: the Reason for the Vitriol
Fair Warning: this blog is not for the ADD or those who can’t take the time to read and think about the issues involved. The word count is 3720, more or less. Yes, I am indeed asking you to buy a pig in a poke by reading further; yes, I am arrogant enough to think most of you, even if you disagree with me, will continue reading.
Recently I read a post by M.J. Rose regarding the level of emotion involved in the debate between digital and print publishers. Here’s further evidence of my arrogance: you can read her post at http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/05/the-objects-of-our-obsession-on-the-e-vs-p-debate/. This is arrogant because I am inviting you to stop reading what I’ve written, read something else by another writer, and return.
Is it actually arrogance, though, to assume the same interest on your part as on mine? Maybe; you tell me by continuing to read, or not.
Ms. Rose brings up some interesting points, but by and large I’m not sure I agree with her assessment of why there is so much “vitriol” in what she describes as the “e-vs-p” (electronic, i.e., digital, versus print) debate. In fact, on rereading, it almost seems that she is describing hate directed at digital books replacing our precious printed-paper books. I don’t know of anyone taking that position, however, and on my initial reading I concluded Ms. Rose was directing her article at calming the waters between authors seeking to publish digitally and those still pursuing the print alternative.
I am, in fact, going to give my take on the nature of the “vitriol” and why there’s so much of it being exchanged between the writers who will take every advantage of a changing business model and the in-place print medium and its business model. Ms. Rose offers some interesting insight on how the print model developed and if only for that reason her post is well worth reading.
On the other hand I think she misses the gravamen of the “e-vs.-p” conflict, which is really pretty simple.
“Vitriol” is a wonderful word one doesn’t see often anymore – kudos to Ms. Rose for even using it! – and is particularly apt in this situation. In its literal sense “vitriol” was the medieval term for sulfuric acid, but eventually came to its more poetic usage as “cruel and bitter criticism.”
A lot of people on the print side express surprise at the fact that so many writers are rushing into digital, independent, self-publishing venues. This includes writers – even published writers – as well as agents, editors and traditional publishers. As Ms. Rose rightly points out in her post, it’s been done this way for a long time.
Which may be the point. It has been a long time, maybe too long, long enough for “business model” to acquire the trappings of “tradition” which is only one step removed from “natural law” and/or “the way it’s always been,” i.e., since the burning bush on Mt. Sinai. There’s a certain implicit sense of entitlement that goes along with that territory.
When the book-printing business got started it was still hard enough to print books (as opposed, say, to hiring a battalion of monks to create an illuminated manuscript, one copy at a time) that only those ideas that seemed highly important at the time stood a chance of being printed. An interesting footnote to this is that Ben Caxton, the first printer in England, after he printed a copy of the Bible, was approached to print Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the legend of King Arthur. But other than the Bible, my impression is that most books printed prior to the 19th Century were non-fiction, printed to inform (or sometimes misinform, or even disinform) people about the New World literally unfolding before their eyes. To be printed in those days it had to be important, new knowledge, understood as such by people to whom knowledge and new ideas were important and worth preserving.
I mean, come on. Fiction might be about ideas but when I write a story it isn’t about a new method for the determination of longitude, or my personal observations of the curious habits of the natives of Patagonia. Fiction is mostly about entertainment. Entertainment requires two things: the reader has to have the leisure time to read, and the reader has to be able to afford what he or she reads.
The “vitriol” Ms. Rose quite rightly refers to, the “cruel and bitter criticism,” seems a bit excessive for an argument over a business model, doesn’t it? Business is just business, isn’t that what we’ve always heard? “It’s just business; nothing personal.” However, isn’t it odd that for something that’s just “business as usual” we seem to be looking at a phenomenon which, in terms of engaging the passions, seems to rival, oh, I don’t know, politics or religion? It therefore seems relevant to ask why emotions and tempers seem to be so engaged in this matter.
Is it as simple as conflicting business models? Established publishing methods versus digital publishing and delivery? I’ll point out that, historically, all such “old guard vs. new guard” conflicts engender quite a bit of vitriol. Perhaps, however, in this particular case, there’s something more involved.
That “something more” is a group of persnickety, high-strung, grandiose-depressive creative types otherwise known as “writers.”
Let’s get one fact straight: if there weren’t hordes of people convinced of their talent to the point that they actually sit down and write something, and finish what they write, and then actually have the chutzpah to believe other people might want to pay to read it, the fiction publishing business would not exist. It’s only with the availability of leisure time in which to read for entertainment as well as being an affordable medium of entertainment that the fiction publishing industry became established as well as profitable.
Remember that phrase “affordable medium of entertainment” – I’ll have occasion to refer to it below.
Now for a little personal history. Over the last five years I’ve rededicated myself to being a published writer. I won’t say that I’m doing it for the money, although heck yeah, if I could make a living sitting here pounding the keyboard all day, I’d quit my day job in a heartbeat. So being the sort of person I am I started researching that traditionally thorny question, How do I break into print?
Have you ever looked at the magazine section at your local book store and counted how many publications there are dedicated to just that question? When I started all this it never occurred to me to think about one very salient fact literally staring me in the face: for all those magazines to make a profit, or even to simply break even, there had to be an awful lot of writers out there looking for ways to do just exactly what I wanted to do, and a whole industry dedicated to making money off those wanna-be-think-I-can writers.
At first I treated all those magazines as gospel and thought hard about how I’d implement all those strategies put forward for being noticed, “getting out of the slush pile,” or “landing an agent,” etc. In time here’s what I figured out: there wasn’t a hell of a lot of really specific information in those articles. Lots of generalities, but nothing specific. Even writing-related articles on the subject, say, of “make your characters interesting” were sort of vague. That was a tendency prevalent enough that I could feel that tickle of unease in the back of my mind, but I kept reading. Surely, I thought, somewhere in all of this is the key, the answer, the one thing I can use to reach my goal.
The straw that broke the camel’s back and brought enlightenment was an article from an agent about query letters. By that time I was part of a writers group and “query letters” was a hot topic for us. Let me summarize the discussion, which was fairly heated and lasted for two or three meetings: (a) the agent dealt mostly with romance novelists, and none of us (at the time, we were all males in the group) wrote in the romance genre; (b) the tone of the letters was almost uniformly what we ended up describing as “cutesy” and “flirty”; (c) there was no discussion by the agent writing the article concerning query letters in general, although that subject was implied by the title of the article, almost as if, as far as the agent was concerned, there wasn’t anything in publishing outside of the romance genre (which may have had some truth to it at the time she wrote the article).
I’m not sure I could write a cute, flirty query letter if I tried. At the time I was heavily engaged in the first draft of a novel about fighter pilots in the New Guinea jungle in 1942. I couldn’t see much cute and flirty about that.
Two conclusions eventually emerged for me in all of this. First, most of what I was writing would probably be considered “unpublishable” by the traditional print publishers whatever its literary merits. Second, the people writing those articles, in general, were pretty well wrapped up in their own little world. Articles like the one above I came to see were like those scientific papers where the list of authors or contributors is longer than the paper itself; advertising for the agent or editor as much as anything. Which is fine; we’re talking business, after all, but there’s a subtle point here that’s easy to miss.
If your article in a trade journal is really advertising for the service you provide, and it appears under the guise of “I’m trying to help you,” well, what’s the word for that? I won’t say it’s outright deception; deception implies intent to deceive, and I can’t honestly say the intent is there. But it does seem to me that “self-serving” might be an applicable phrase. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. The implicit subtext, though, is like this: “I’m trying to help you (so I can make scads of money off you).”
Once I understood that I began to see a lot of things about the publishing industry. Not all at once, but over time.
One thing that publishers know is this: there’s always going to be a lot of people who believe that they can write fiction and are willing to put up with endless B.S. to have their fiction published. If you’re a new writer there’s no way to distinguish you from all those faces in that endless sea of unpublished writers.
Here’s something else a perusal of the writing magazines will teach you, and it’s something their publishers (and their advertisers – look how much those Creative Writing MFA programs cost!) would probably prefer you didn’t figure out: there is no one path to success. Something catches the eye of an editor or an agent, and that something is different for each and every editor or agent, and isn’t always the same for any given editor or agent at any given time. So the conclusion I draw is simple: you can follow all the advice in all those writer’s magazines and whether you succeed or not is still a matter of luck. People will tell you hard work and persistence pays off, and they are absolutely right, but the same thing can be said about playing the lottery: sooner or later, if you keep buying tickets, you’ll draw a winner. It might be a couple of bucks, or it might be the jackpot, but if you don’t keep buying tickets you can’t win either way. As for the hard work, well, you have to have the dollar to buy the ticket in the first place, right? You sure aren’t getting it from your writing, however hard you work at that. As for us writers, our lottery ticket is a finished manuscript, and in terms of time and emotion the investment can’t even be measured in dollars.
So there’s the fan dance done by agents and editors alike: they want you to believe that there is some standard, some set of rules, a sure path through their door that writers can follow. But why do the fan dance at all? What’s the point to it?
The point is that agents and editors want you to believe they have standards and rules because they have no other way to establish authority over you, the writer. Think very carefully about this: I used the word “authority” very deliberately, with purpose and intent. If they don’t have some standard of behavior that you, the writer, is supposed to conform to in order to succeed – i.e., to be published – then why would you listen to them at all?
Herein lies the first part of why there is so much vitriol and acrimony involved in the “e-vs.-p” debate: Agents and editors want to have authority, a very parental, paternal sort of authority – sort of like the Pope being infallible when he speaks ex cathedra – so that you, the writer, when and if you are admitted through the pearly gates into the hallowed realm of publication (this isn’t merely sarcasm here, that’s my impression of how they think of it), you will never question why they do things.
They don’t want any questions because if you start asking too many questions you’ll realize they have little more clue than you do about what a good story is or why one story sells better than another. There’s really only one definition of a good story in the marketplace: a good story is what a reader will pay money to read.
Most readers don’t care about grammar or spelling or sentence/paragraph construction beyond a certain point. The truth is that most people don’t use it while telling stories in their daily lives. I suspect only English professors are going to make a fuss about it anyway. I’m not saying you can write at the level of a first-grader and expect to be successful, but in a population whose average reading skills are at the junior-high level, perhaps we could concede that meaning can be conveyed without slavish attention to grammatical niceties.
So if those things aren’t the point, what is?
Story. It’s that simple. Tell a good story, and the rest is window dressing. How much of Mark Twain’s work, for example, is grammatical? Ah, but I hear you saying, you have to know the rules before you can break them! Maybe so, but I’m pretty sure Sam Clemens wrote like he heard people talking. It’s called authenticity. People like authenticity when you’re telling a story. Here’s a rule for you rule-driven people: if you sound too much like your high-school English teacher, it’s going to turn a lot of readers off, since most people don’t talk that way, do they? How many of us liked our high school English teachers? (I remember two that I liked in high school, and none of my English professors in college.) I don’t say that’s a rule, it’s just something to think about.
Wait a minute, though…don’t editors and agents fulfill the useful function of helping you polish your story, bring out the best in your characters, transform a soso story into literary genius? That is the party line they preach, isn’t it? To do that, though, might it not be relevant to inquire as to the track record of editors and agents in picking out the “good” stories from the “bad” ones?
The track record just doesn’t seem to be there. Research it for yourself. Given my definition of a “good” story, however, you’d think that the first editor who had Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone cross his or her desk would have snapped it up at once. Of course that’s being wise after the fact – but a good story is a good story, isn’t it? Contrarily, almost everyone knows that J.K. Rowling was turned down by I don’t know how many publishers before landing a deal with Scholastic. The conclusion to draw here is that editors and agents may or may not know a good story. Supposedly, however, it’s their job, even their profession, to know; it’s how editors justify their six-figure salaries and how agents justify that 15% of your royalties as a writer, if you get that far, that they require from you for their services.
We might ask, though, if that Emperor is actually wearing any clothes.
Yet, as writers, we are constantly bombarded with what amounts to a party line as thoroughly authoritarian and inviolable as any Stalinist or Nazi party proclamation of the way, the truth and the light: that publishers and editors and agents, most of whom aren’t writers (fiction writers, anyway, but I guess there’s always expense accounts) and haven’t paid their dues as writers (whatever that actually means) but nonetheless profess to know everything there is to know about writing and that we, the writers, should listen to them.
If there are no clear standards of good vs. bad art, other than what the public will buy, which is utterly unpredictable, and if anyone who’s been in publishing for any length of time knows that the reading public will buy a good story, but that that “good story” is an unpredictable quantity, then why are publishers/agents/editors so adamant that they have all the answers?
Again: so we, the writers, will believe they do and not question them when we receive those rejection slips, or the paltry royalties, or the bad marketing, or the condescension, etc.
On that basis something that might be understood a little better in this whole print vs. digital controversy, and why passions and tempers are so high, is that, in my opinion, a lot of it is less about how you want your stories delivered than by the way publishers, editors and agents have treated writers for the last fifty years or so. (Probably longer – but let’s go with fifty years.)
Anyone who has read Alice Miller’s ground-breaking work The Drama of the Gifted Child will understand the pattern. The publishers, editors and agents take the role of the abusive, narcissistic parent, while forcing the writers into the role of the abused child. The gift Dr. Miller refers to is the empathic ability of a very young child to interpret the emotional needs of the parent. This is a survival skill. Interpreting the rage of an abusive parent so as to supply that parent what they need emotionally (conforming, submissive behavior by the child — cloaking growing rage) is unfortunately a necessity for many children. Also, like such parents, the publishers/editors/agents know that writers, like children, have nowhere else to go. It isn’t about money, or efficient delivery of a business service; it’s about relative power, its use and abuse.
From that it’s easy to see that the driving energy behind the controversy, at least on the writer’s side, is pent-up rage. Psychologists have known for decades that we learn as children to hide our anger from our parents because we sense it threatens our lives. But the truth is that writers are angry, and have been for a long time. We are passionate people, we care about what we do. We care enough to put up with a lot of bullshit from people who aren’t writers so we can tell our stories. If we don’t get published, the unspoken party line among publishers is, well, sonny, you just aren’t good enough, are you? (pat on the head) But keep trying, keep polishing, and maybe someday, if you try ever so hard, we’ll publish something of yours. If we feel like it.
I’m not saying that, at least in my own writing, that there’s no room for improvement. There’s always room for improvement. But when you see talentless schlock published and pushed when writers with ten times the talent languish on a back shelf, what conclusion is one to reach about the competency level of publishers, agents and editors within the field they profess to be experts in?
Writers – at least, this writer – are sick and tired of being made to feel incompetent and unprofessional by people whose only contribution seems to be to take their money and give nothing in return, while asking you to believe that they stand one step below the throne of the Almighty. When I say nothing in return, I mean just that. I hear over and over and ad nauseam over again how much editors give you in terms of polishing your work and making it more literary and readable. Maybe there’s some truth in that, but when you hear it so often you sooner or later ought to ask yourself if someone keeps saying it so no one will question whether or not it’s true. It’s a propaganda technique known as the “Big Lie.”
Writers have been made to feel like bastard step-children by the very people who depend upon them for their economic existence, because those same people are dependent upon writers, and they know it. The publishers are acting like parents surprised by a child’s accusations of abuse: but we love you! It was all for your own good anyway! Come back and behave and everything will be JUST the way it used to be!
Once a child understands that it isn’t love but abuse, one typical reaction is rage and the destruction of trust. That’s exactly what we see here, in this so-called “e v. p” conflict. It has a lot less to do with the way stories are delivered than it does the way writers have been treated by publishers. New York City publishing has sown; now let it reap.
That brings us right back to the phrase I asked you to remember, the “affordable medium of entertainment.” Hardcover fiction is pushing $30/book nowadays. That’s pretty close to double the cost of a month’s worth of internet access and about what a month of cable TV would cost. Even an $8/copy paperback is starting to push that envelope – buy three or four paperbacks at normal retail and there you are.
I submit that on this basis print isn’t affordable as entertainment.
Digital print media, however, is affordable, given prices ranging from $0.99 to $4.99 per download.
On that basis some of the vitriol from the print side (“You’re cheating!”) becomes comprehensible.
Filed under fiction, Writing, Writing as Business
Tagged as affordable entertainment, cost of fiction, ishing;, M.J. Rose, vitriol
On the “Rules” of Writing: “Know Your Audience” and “Conflict”
On the “Rules” of Writing: “Know Your Audience” and “Conflict”.
Filed under Tom Learns His Craft, Writing, Writing as Business
The Aviation Story in Fiction and Nonfiction
The Aviation Story in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Filed under Aviation, aviation fiction, Writing, Writing as Business
When I began writing this post it was about the elements of a good aviation story, and in the middle of that I had some insight into one of the things one sees put forward as one of the “rules” of successful commercial writing, usually rendered as “know your audience.” As it progressed I found I was also thinking about “conflict” and how it is usually (i.e., conventionally) approached.
I’m going to keep this in the theme I originally wrote about, i.e., the aviation story. I know a little bit about aviation, so this comes under the heading of the “rule” regarding “write about what you know.” (I’ve always wondered just exactly how that was supposed to apply to science fiction, but that’s another post, maybe.)
What, exactly, is conflict in the dramatic sense? Most of us have an instinctive feeling for this. As kids we know when trouble is brewing on the playground between two rivals. Maybe that’s as good a source as any. And of course there’s the best known conflict of all: “good” versus “evil.” In time of war the propaganda battle between the two sides revolves around efforts to cast the opposite side as “evil.” Oddly, it seems that one’s own side is good mostly by contrast. Most people have a pretty good idea of what constitutes “evil” – but by contrast very few people can say what they mean by “good.” “Us, not them” is an interesting definition of good vs. evil; reminds me that for most small tribes, the name of the tribe usually is the name for “people”; that is to say, “us, not them.” In his excellent and informative study of the factors motivating killing in combat, Col. Dave Grossman, PhD, identifies dehumanization (“WE are people; THEY are NOT”) as one of the enabling factors.
Sorry, I’m a philosopher at heart. But perhaps, dear reader, you might pause and reflect upon this simplistic notion of conflict. Granted that it’s a venerable storytelling device; going back as far, or farther, than the origin of the Hero Tale; but I might submit that to be the point. The Hero overcomes some obstacle, and that victorious struggle enables the tribe to survive. In other words, WE have triumphed; THEY have NOT. I don’t object to this as a literary device, I simply urge a little more sophistication and awareness upon us as writers.
A conflict in a story might be nothing more than a problem, seemingly insurmountable, that the protagonists must solve in order to attain their desires. Nevil Shute, in his novel The Far Country, uses this device. In The Far Country Jennifer Morton, visiting relatives in Australia, falls in love with the émigré Carl Zlinter. Their problem, in one sense, is simple economics; Carl was a doctor in the German Army during World War II, but cannot be one in Australia unless he wants to redo his medical training, which is expensive. Jennifer, the daughter of an English doctor, loves Carl and Australia after being exposed to both, but refuses to marry Carl because he is a very good doctor, and if she marries him before he can manage to get back in practice, he will never be able to do so. This generates the conflict between them, and it is well and gently and elegantly done.
In essence it’s Romeo and Juliet, but without the bloodthirsty Capulets and the equally sanguine Montagues. The conflict in that play is simply that which lies in a name.
Conflict, then, is as simple as what the protagonists want, and the obstacles existing to the attainment of that desire. The action of the story is overcoming the obstacles. One problem with the G vs. E conflict is that we’ve seen it so very, very, very often that for “good” to triumph in any credible manner, the poor beaten-up hero has to endure trials that would bring Superman to his knees. Think of any of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” movies and you’ll see what I mean. If it strains credulity, then it also strains that “willing suspension of disbelief” that we as writers strive so hard to attain.
This is, however, a good segue into the “Know Your Audience” element.
As I have heard over and over and over and ad-nauseam over again from all sorts of writing coaches, publishers, editors and agents, a writer who hopes to be published has to know the audience he or she is targeting. But push most of them to answer the simple, logical question, “Well, how do I do that?” and you get some such answer as “picture the person you want to read your book.” OK, and I’m willing to admit I’m dense and maybe even a little literal-minded, but I don’t see that as anything other than a rephrasing of “know your audience.”
Perhaps we could just admit that this “rule” is more something that has crept in from the marketing department of the major publishers – you know, the ones who would rather you do their work for them, so that your book will fit their marketing research – rather than anything that has something concrete to do with actually telling a story. It’s a hoary aphorism in marketing to define your “target market” and tailor your advertising accordingly. Please don’t tell me I’m the only one to see the rather suspicious similarity to the “rule” requiring a writer to “know your audience.”
Look at it this way. There’s another aspect to “know your audience” which I have never – and I mean not ever, not once in forty-odd years – heard anyone mention: its fine to know your audience, but a good story is a good story is a crossover story that transcends genre and target markets. What about J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series? They might be targeted for the Young Adult market, but it was the cross-market appeal that made them runaway best sellers. A good and well-told story will eventually find an audience.
Look at it this way: whether expressed as “target marketing” or “know your audience,” the principle translates into expectations of behavior based on assessments of a sample population whose completeness we cannot know, not with any certainty. Recall how many publishers turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone before Scholastic picked it up; this was a good story well told; so my suspicion is that turning down the story was based on it not fitting any of the marketing research done at the time. “Know your audience” is an aphorism for making some rule-of-thumb assumptions that sometimes work extraordinarily well and sometimes fall flat as a cow patty.
That being said, maybe we could think of the relationship between “genre” and “know your audience.” Genres exist in the first place because a significant number of people – which is, ahem, nothing more than the sample population listed above – like that genre. “Romance” novels are a great example, if only because as a genre label “romance” is almost useless nowadays without a qualifier, such as “paranormal romance” or “historical romance.” How these sub-genres emerged in their own right involved the discovery that significant numbers of readers liked stories written in that vein, which only goes to prove my point.
Since all I know about the romance genre is what I’ve learned from my significant other, I’m going to look at the audience that might read an aviation story.
In one sense you can think of aviation stories as techno-thrillers, and I’ve read novels that were pretty much that. Dale Brown’s Flight of the Old Dog is one such, and almost any military aviation novel with any pretense to accuracy and realism written since 1984, when Tom Clancy essentially defined the techno-thriller genre with The Hunt for Red October, has to adhere to those standards. Being military or ex-military gives one a real edge in that sort of writing – unless, like Clancy, you’ve studied the subject for years.
But let’s consider aviation stories that are concerned a little less with the gadgets and a little more with the people involved. Essentially, any flying story set between 1914 and 1954 could qualify. Nonetheless when I write an aviation story, I’d be well advised of two things that concern my potential audience: first, anyone with any aviation background whatsoever is going to be hypercritical of the technical aspects of what I write, and second, the overwhelming majority of the population isn’t going to have a clue to what I’m talking about in a technical sense. Writing to either audience in this case means the same thing: write accurately and knowledgeably and incorporate technical details into the course of the story, informing without necessarily teaching, just like in hard science fiction. Almost invariably when pilots talk about aviation fiction, its quality is judged less by story than technical content. Contrarily, non-pilots will be more interested in the story, but also want technical content that “puts them in the cockpit” without bogging the story down. So there’s a constant tension between the two that the aviation fiction writer must be aware of – and this is part of “knowing your audience.”
Aviation stories are about pilots flying airplanes that take those pilots to the very limit of what those pilots can bring to the airplane in terms of skill, knowledge and courage. In an aviation story, quite often, the only conflict is within the pilot himself. In a movie, we might see the beads of sweat on the pilot’s face, or his face contorted with fear, or the grunts of effort as he strives to haul back on the stick – but the challenge for the writer as storyteller in this genre probably goes back further than the Epic of Gilgamesh: whether a man strives within himself to bring out the will that means victory or survival, or strives with another, the challenge for the writer is to show a victory that does not seem foreordained, i.e., a mere decision by the storyteller that the Hero Shall Prevail. We live in an uncertain world. I once had a flight instructor who told me he’d rather be lucky than skilful, since luck can save you when skill will not; but in a story this comes under the category of “coincidence” which tends to appear suspicious in the eyes of our readers unless done (ahem) with skill.
Then there’s another problem: for those of us who are already in aviation, “love” is almost invariably a part of the process. Sometimes that love goes so far back that one might wonder if there’s something genetic about it. My parents, for example, argued about whether or not my first word was “airplane” or “light” – but both agreed that at the time I spoke my first word I was pointing my chubby little baby finger at an airplane’s running lights in the night sky.
I am not alone in this, by the way, but as a writer it brings up another problem: you can talk to those who share your love, and achieve comprehension among them in a few dozen words of matters of surprising technical complexity. But what about people who know nothing about aviation?
I’ll give you an example. I’ve worked as a tour guide in at least three different museums in the course of my life. Two were aviation museums. It is unusual, but not unknown, for adults to look at an airplane and say something on the order of: “Now…that long thing coming out of the thing in the middle…ah…is that the wing?”
It’s extraordinarily difficult for me to realize it’s possible not to know something so wholly fundamental and elementary. But therein lies a caution on writing the aviation story: even someone who has wings in their heart begins without any other knowledge. I have seen the knowledge of that love dawn in a child’s eyes, looking at a particular airplane, and I have told their parents, be careful, because airplanes are like malaria, the disease might go into remission but it never, ever leaves you. And I have seen people who look at an airplane, from something as beautiful as a Supermarine Spitfire or as historically significant as a Douglas DC-3, and scratch their heads, and visibly if nonverbally wonder what the hell the fuss is all about.
Someone at that level of ignorance is probably not going to be your audience, but you can never know that. But this goes back to the tension raised by level of detail in your story. In an aviation story, “level of detail” might be directly proportional to the level of the reader’s own knowledge. The experienced fighter pilot, reading my account of a fictional air battle, might scoff at me for the detail I leave out, where the average reader who just likes airplanes would be thrilled. So a happy medium may not be available, but therein lies the tension of the question for the writer.
So my conclusion is relatively simple. In knowing your audience, be very careful to distinguish between the “genre” aspect and the “marketing” aspect of the term. If you write within a genre you’ve defined your audience, but it may be that that is only the first step. As illustrated above, each genre has its own audience at varying levels of sophistication, which in itself may raise difficulties for the writer. As writers we are better able to solve those problems if we know about them.
Tagged as audience, Aviation, conflict, genre, Hero Tale, techno-thriller
Business Decisions and the French Revolution
I’ve never published before. I have a novel, Boxcar Red Leader, that’s in what I call “draft 3 alpha” stage – gone through some critiquing by my writers group and trusted others for draft 2, then rewritten for, hopefully, the majority of typos, grammar errors, plot deficiencies, relevant and egregious historical inaccuracies, etc. When I finish Draft 3 Alpha I’ll have it reviewed again and depending on comments, it will go to Draft 3 Beta to correct anything my reviewers find. And then, with fear and trembling, off into the world it will go.
With the approach of this happy event, then, the current debate about different publishing methods has assumed increasing importance for me. Last year, as I developed draft 2, I hadn’t really heard about indie publishing and the advantages offered by eBooks. As I recall in the first part of that year my writers group still pretty much thought that we’d have to endure the traditional publishing paradigm. We studied comments by various agents and others regarding good query letters, what’s hot in publishing, how to write a good pitch, plus all that other stuff that the how-to magazines sell to aspiring writers, because, well, if you’re selling regularly you don’t need any of that stuff, do you? And then, of course, there was that one agent whose advice to writers was “don’t quit your day job, it keeps you real.” It was the middle of summer and I work construction. The tone of that article was so patronizing and paternal that if I could have found that agent I would have made her pour concrete for a couple of hours at a humitemp of 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
So when we became aware of it, digital publishing as a venue seemed like the Holy Grail found. No need to pay agents, no need to pay a publisher; you keep the lion’s share of the sale price; no stupid query letters or synopses. Of course, there are those niggling little problems of marketing and editing, but we figured that the quality of editing in the fiction that we read was visibly in decline (down-sizing your editorial departments will have that result) and if we got a contract with one of the Big 6 we’d end up doing most of the marketing anyway.
The point is that, with digital publishing, we could get our books out there and have a potential audience as large as everyone with an internet connection. Maybe we could even get paid for what we’d written! And we wouldn’t have to write a single quirky, fun or flirty query letter to do it.
Are we critical of the traditional publishers? You bet, and how, absolutely! And if you want to know why this debate between the indies and the trads is becoming vitriolic, polemic, and almost ideological in nature, that’s easy. It’s because writers, especially unpublished, talented, determined writers, have been treated like dirt – no, permit me to rephrase that; have been treated like French peasants before the French Revolution. What we are looking at in the indie vs. traditionalist “feud” bears, in my opinion, considerable resemblance to that situation, at least with regard to attitudes and motivation on the part of either side. But here’s the thing: even in the digital age what writers have to offer hasn’t changed. Like the peasants of France, we offer what we have always offered: the fruit of our labor. The publishers have been able to pick and choose among those fruits, and in the process, as far as writers are concerned, they’ve built up some pretty bad karma. Writers perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they have been poorly and even abusively treated by publishers, at least in the contractual sense. To the publishers, though, it’s just business. Big business, which always has been and probably always will be fairly brutal and Darwinian in the worst sense of the word.
I can understand business decisions. I’ve been subjected to them all my life. If the company isn’t making any money they can’t afford to pay you, anyway, so why should you kick if you get laid off? If the company isn’t making enough profit, would you rather lose your job, or give up your benefits and take a cut in pay to keep it? But that’s not a business decision for your employer alone, it’s a business decision you, the employee, have to make as well. Is it in your best interest to go and seek employment elsewhere, or stay and hope things don’t get any worse?
Choosing which stories will sell, and which will not, is a marketing judgment. It isn’t necessarily a commentary on a given writer’s skill or talent. I once got a rejection letter for a short story that said, “This is a great story that deserves to be told. Unfortunately, we don’t publish this kind of story anymore.”
Well…gosh. See what I mean? Marketing. It sucks, but I get it.
But therein lies another question: in one sense having “the publishers” to demonize (“no one understands my work”) kept a lot of writers from having to face, directly, either the realities of the marketplace or their own deficiencies as writers. Nowadays, though, you can publish anything you like whenever you want. But you may have to face the reality, as a writer, that you aren’t selling because no one wants to read what you write, and that may be because you haven’t sufficiently developed your craft, or your subject has no niche, or maybe even just bad timing. Then there’s no one to blame but yourself. I mean, how many rejection slips are we likely to collect from Smashwords or Amazon?
Of course if you’re in the blame game maybe you should reconsider being a writer. Blaming other people for your failures is a good way to go nowhere.
In the indie age, you can publish, and if you have the talent to tell a good story, you may even sell. But the second you publish, you have to put on another hat, your three-piece-pinstripe-suit hat, that’s right, your business person hat. And you will have to make business decisions, and it doesn’t get much more personal than asking, what’s best for me?
And ultimately all the debate comes down to that. In the wicked world before the Dawn of this Golden Digital Age, publishers made all those business decisions about what would sell and what wouldn’t. We can criticize their choices all we like; there’s plenty to criticize, after all, in a system that had 8 books fail out of 9 launches. Also, I think the publishing industry pretty much got aristocratic in its notions. They got a sense of entitlement; they were entitled to take the lion’s share of profit, they were entitled to treat writers as if they were peasants, they were entitled to have this system go on in perpetuity. All of that is going to go the way the French aristocracy went, under the marketplace equivalent of the guillotine.
There were, however, French aristocrats who embraced the Revolution – such as the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought in our own revolution here in America. And I am very curious indeed to see what those intelligent, adaptable publishing aristocrats make of this brave new digital world, because as one of my favorite writers was fond of saying, there’s nothing like a professional in any line of work. And those folks have a lot of training and experience to bring to the table.
It will be a lot easier for such surviving traditional publishers to sign up writers and determine what stories will sell – now that those writers have become successful as independents, selling stories an earlier generation of aristocrats would have (or even did) reject out of hand, building up “brand” and “platform” and name recognition in the process, without the traditional publishers needing to spend a dime. The business question for both sides will then become, what will the publishers offer those writers that the writers can’t get on their own? Because the truth is that publishers need writers, and nowadays writers don’t necessarily need publishers.
However it turns out that’s in the future. I’m not waiting for them before I publish Boxcar Red Leader. That’s a business decision.
Filed under Writing, Writing as Business
Tagged as agents, eBooks, indie publishing, indie publishing as a business decision, Writing
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Home » Posts tagged 'moneypenny'
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Review of 2012 Part Five – Great Expectations III: The Name’s, Well, You Know (Or Do You?)
December 24, 2012 10:54 am / 6 Comments on Review of 2012 Part Five – Great Expectations III: The Name’s, Well, You Know (Or Do You?)
The penultimate hugely anticipated film of 2012 was the 23rd instalment in the world’s longest running film series, reaching a triumphant 50th year of James Bond, 007. Skyfall carried not only the expectations of being a major blockbuster, and a franchise instalment, but it was also a landmark film which had to both honour what had come before and show the old dog had enough life for another 50 years.
There are several ways in which Skyfall met this challenge. One of the most celebrated aspects of the film was its director, Sam Mendes. The first Oscar winner to direct a James Bond film, Mendes brought a particular set of baggage with him. Most successful with intimate personal dramas such as American Beauty, Revolutionary Road and Away We Go, Mendes’ forays into larger scale stories, such as Road to Perdition and Jarhead, were mediocre at best. Skyfall would be his first franchise film and his first action film. Despite Mendes’ prestige, the pedigree for a director like him was not promising, as Marc Foster is a director also known for more sedate fair than Bond, such as Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland. Quantum of Solace was generally regarded as a failure, and the pressure was on for the 23rd film to return to the quality established in Casino Royale.
This quality brought with it further expectations, as Daniel Craig was being spoken of as the best Bond, even before the release of Skyfall. After his lean, intense yet vulnerable turn gave Martin Campbell’s 2006 reboot something different, fresh and exciting, the failure of Quantum of Solace seemed something of an aberration. Surely something had gone wrong and a Bond film featuring Craig should somehow be better. I think Craig makes a very fine Bond, and the problems with Quantum of Solace mostly relate to the director. Foster fails to give the film any suspense, as scenes go from a standstill to a breakneck pace, not allowing for build-up. Foster’s skills are ill-suited to directing action sequences which, as I have written before, require tension that needs to be built up. To have everyone suddenly burst out of their chairs and running like mad is too sudden a transition to allow any tension.
As an example, the first post-title sequence of Casino Royale is efficiently built up as Bond and his fellow agent Carter (Joseph Millson) watch their target in Madagascar, then move in towards him which increases the tension. Then the scene accelerates into a chase with Bond heading after Mollaka (Sebastien Foucan) through all manner of obstacles, the famous free-running through a construction site, fighting on top of a very high crane and culminating in a running gun battle through an embassy. This scene increases the stakes and in doing so raises the tension, whereas Bond chasing after Mitchell (Glenn Foster) in Quantum of Solace comes out of nowhere and, after the initial shock, the viewer is left disorientated and disengaged.
Mendes said in interviews that he was especially concerned about making the opening sequence memorable, as Bond has a distinguished history of opening sequences that grab the viewer’s attention. Skyfall pulls this off impressively, as we begin in Istanbul with Bond slowly pursuing a stolen hard drive, then missing a shadowy figure in the corridor. He meets with his fellow agent Eve (Naomie Harris) and there is a brief car chase culminating in a marketplace, which is followed by a motorcycle chase over the city rooftops. From there the chase progresses onto a train, with Bond making use of a convenient earthmover and gets wounded, then the chase moves through the train itself and eventually on top of it, before Eve is ordered to “take the bloody shot!” This line is significant, as it is the culmination of this sequence that is intercut with a parallel scene in London in which M (Judi Dench) barks instructions. The intercutting between the chase and the supervision heightens the tension by raising the stakes, and the finale of the chase creates further anticipation for the rest of the film.
Even at this early stage, Skyfall is playing to the audience’s expectations, and throughout displays an acknowledgement of what the viewer wants to and also expects to see. No viewer would believe that Bond is actually killed at the start of the film, and Skyfall understands the audience’s position as Bond’s re-appearance is hardly a revelation. Rather, we get to enjoy Bond’s hedonistic retirement in a tropical paradise, and his shadowy re-introduction at M’s home. Skyfall acknowledges the viewer’s expectations – this is a Bond film so he will come back at his own instigation – but also exceeds the expectation through the inclusion of Bond “enjoying death”, as well as the continued lively relationship he shares with M.
This is but one of many expectations that are rewarded, exceeded, and acknowledged. Many moments in the film refer to Bond’s history, much as The World is Not Enough did with lines such as “I never joke about my work, 007” and the reappearance of gadgets from previous films. Similar gags appear in Skyfall, such as Bond receiving his new gun, a Walther PPK, just as he was issued with in Dr No. Similarly, in a moment that might as well have featured a wink direct to camera, Bond reveals his Aston Martin DB5, made famous in Goldfinger. No explanation is given for him having this remarkable vehicle, which possesses a few modifications, and this is part of the fun – the film and the viewer share a smirk at the inclusion of this piece of nostalgia. Even Bond’s early “death” echoes You Only Live Twice, the viewer well aware that Bond cannot be killed at the start of the film, if indeed at all.
However, Skyfall retreats from excessive technology, at least as relates to Bond himself. When issued with his gun, another smirk is shared between viewer and film as Q (Ben Wishaw) admonishes: “What did you expect? An exploding pen?” This is both contemporary and nostalgic, as over the years, Bond’s gadgets became increasingly outlandish, culminating in the invisible car of Die Another Day. Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007 serves as a watershed in the franchise’s history, with the reboot Casino Royale acting as a return to a more gritty, “realistic” spy thriller. Quantum of Solace continued the emphasis on physicality, and Skyfall develops this conceit further, continuing the trend for physicality and reliance upon one’s own wits and abilities. Computer hacking gives way to machine guns and helicopters, then to jerry-rigged mines and pistols, and eventually to knives and unarmed combat. A disdain for sophisticated technology is demonstrated in a repeated gag about the “latest in communications technology: a radio transmitter”. At key moments, both Bond and his nemesis Silva (Javier Bardem) make reference to radio transmission, as if slapping the face of the computer boffin Q and his ilk. When Q inadvertently plays into Silva’s hands through his expert hacking, Silva admonishes the younger man with the message “Not such a clever boy”, before all hell breaks loose.
Not that Silva is above using technology: his nefarious schemes necessitate a global reach that is facilitated through him being an expert hacker as well, allowing him to destabilise governments and attack MI6 headquarters. But whereas previous Bond villains established their bases in volcano craters (You Only Live Twice, Goldeneye), undersea complexes (The Spy Who Loved Me) and even space stations (Moonraker), Silva’s lair is eerily simple: an abandoned city on an isolated island in the South China Sea, a ghost town that reinforces the almost supernatural influence that Silva enacts over the world. The scene that introduces Silva is a master-class in minimalism, as the mise-en-scene is a crumbling building reminiscent of a church, filled with computer base units and a few screens. This serves as a contrast to the steel and glass MI6 headquarters, a symbol of power that Silva easily infiltrates through his technological skills. Visually, Silva’s introduction is stunning, as he emerges at the end of the long hall and steadily walks towards the camera in a continuous shot. This long take further exacerbates the viewer’s anticipation for Silva to reach the foreground, while his silken tones echo through the cavernous space, emphasising our awareness as well as Bond’s that this is Silva’s domain.
Silva himself is a remarkable and impressive feature of Skyfall. The most effective Bond villains have been those that serve as a dark reflection of Bond himself, such as Grant (Robert Shaw) in From Russia With Love and Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) in Goldeneye. With Silva the reflection is multi-faceted, as he is not only a (former) successful MI6 agent, who like Bond has officially “died”, his relationship with M is a twisted version of the one she has with Bond. As in No Country For Old Men, Bardem delivers a thoroughly chilling performance of a genuine psychopath (despite a bizarre haircut): quiet, poised but with an evident relish, like a cobra that will smile as it strikes. Also, he demonstrates a remarkable ability to get under Bond’s skin, as evidenced in the homoerotic encounter between the two as Silva unbuttons Bond’s shirt in a seductive manner.
Craig’s films have downplayed Bond’s seductive powers, which became tedious and even painful during the Moore years. None of the last three films have ended with Bond in the arms of a lady lovely, and in Skyfall there are only a couple of such scenes. This emphasises a different relationship that is central to the film, between Bond and M, as well as Silva. Serving as the dark reflection of Bond, Silva is also coded as the bad son to Bond’s good son. Bond’s bristly but ultimately devoted relationship with M provides the emotional core to Skyfall, personal dramas adding to the plot developments.
As mentioned earlier, MI6 contrasts with Silva’s dilapidated headquarters, but there are different locations used by MI6. After the grand offices on the Thames are attacked, they move underground into a back-up HQ built out of Churchill’s WWII bunker. Thus begins the film’s concern with “Britishness”. Curiously for the British Mendes, Skyfall was his first foray into presenting something British, and nationality remains prominent throughout Skyfall. A key trope of the Bond franchise is exotic locations, which do appear including Istanbul, Bond’s “retirement” in the tropics and part of his mission that takes him to Shanghai and Macau, and from there to Silva’s island. But afterwards, the film takes place entirely within Britain, and uses its locations to interesting effect. Churchill’s bunker brings with it connotations of Britain under fire, and a chase takes place through the London Underground and into Westminster, with Silva disguised as a British copper. The film’s final act involves going “back in time”, travelling into the highlands of Scotland to a stately home. Both for Bond and for the film as a whole, the final act is a return to the past and to homeground, defending Britain against invasion.
Other tropes of “Britishness” appear: M has a china bulldog, decorated with a Union Jack, that becomes a talisman for Bond despite his dislike of it; Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), initially presented as an interfering Whitehall bureaucrat, is revealed to have a military history serving in Northern Ireland; Bond’s mission to Macau carries postcolonial connotations, the British agent exploring a former colony. The past haunts Skyfall, both in its narrative and our understanding of it. The past of the franchise itself explicitly returns when Bond enters M’s office, which is identical to the office of years gone by, visited by Sean Connery since 1962. I always remembered the door with leather padding, and seeing it behind Daniel Craig was an interesting blend of the old and the new. Clearly the blend of elements in Skyfall worked, as it has now become the highest grossing film ever at the British box office.
Inter-Textuality
The history of Bond was not the only reference I found in Skyfall. In my last post on Looper, I commented on the inter-textual connections found in Rian Johnson’s film, as a central element in science fiction. For all its elaborate technology, the Bond franchise is not science fiction, but it also reminded me of other films. The Jason Bourne trilogy is an apparent influence on the reboot of James Bond, with a grittier approach and Daniel Craig constituting a more realistic and vulnerable spy protagonist in the mould of Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin. Specifically, Skyfall’s opening chase through Istanbul is reminiscent of The Bourne Ultimatum’s frantic dash through Tangiers, including our hero riding a motorcycle up a flight of stairs. Bourne is not the only secret agent inspired by Bond and echoed in Skyfall, as a scene in which Bond moves through the London Underground, in constant communication with Q in a high-tech hub, is reminiscent of 24. When Silva is brought into custody, he taunts Bond and M much like the Joker does Commissioner Gordon and Batman in The Dark Knight, and like the Joker, Silva is both psychotic and physically deformed, as revealed when he extracts a prosthetic mouthpiece to reveal his true features in Skyfall’s most gruesome moment. Silva’s taunting of M also echoes The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps very deliberately. As in The Dark Knight and also The Avengers, Silva’s imprisonment is a ruse and all part of his master plan, a narrative trope that may well continue. John McClane has been described as a blue collar James Bond, and the final attack on Bond’s family home, Skyfall, features a highly organised assault team against a resourceful individual who uses his surroundings to his advantage, much like in Die Hard. To take it even further, Bond defends his home using homemade devices, not unlike Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – not a comparison I ever thought I’d make!
One aspect of Skyfall troubles me: the reassertion of classic Bond tropes brings with it some disturbing gender politics. Since Goldeneye, the Bond franchise has taken some steps to distance itself from Bond being “a sexist misogynist dinosaur”, as M argued in Brosnan’s first outing. Tougher Bond girls have made appearances, such as Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) in Tomorrow Never Dies, Jinx (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day and Camille (Olga Kurylenko) in Quantum of Solace. Skyfall features Eve, who is Bond’s fellow agent in Istanbul and Macau, and with whom he appears to have a romantic liaison (though we’re spared the details). Eve is a competent field agent, but come the final scene, she is relegated to a secretary and revealed to be M’s eternal assistant, Moneypenny. This is another wink to the Bond fan, but also implies that secretary is the correct role for a woman. M’s fate implies this further, and the final occupant of the office seems a reassertion of patriarchy, as though the franchise has returned to where it belongs with men in the positions of power and agency. This is a disturbing element in a film aware of its legacy, especially in light of the potentially progressive amendments taken since 1995. Skyfall’s conclusion appears to suggest that the Bond franchise is not a place for women except in traditional roles.
Best Ever?
Despite this disconcerting reassertion of patriarchy, I enjoyed Skyfall immensely. It was gripping and thrilling, well-plotted with detailed characters, exercised a knowing acknowledgement with the viewer to just the right extent, therefore avoiding being too clever-clever, and looked stunning. Some have described Skyfall as the best Bond ever, and while I think it is too early to say, it is certainly the most beautiful, as Roger Deakins’ digital cinematography looked deep and rich enough to swim in. Digital filming has been growing steadily in recent years, and Skyfall is a film that makes full use of its possibilities. There were points during the film when I wanted shots to linger on the myriad of colours captured in the frame, especially during a sequence in Shanghai. This sequence features one of the strangest fight scenes I have seen in a film, as Bond and his opponent move with a fluid grace within the shimmering beauty of the digital image. Alternately silhouetted and illuminated by shifting light patterns, the hand-to-hand combat becomes an almost dream-like dance, perhaps a microcosm of the dance of light and shadow that is cinema itself. This level of visual invention permeates the film, especially apparent in the climax, when the Scottish moors are illuminated by a deep red, casting an almost hellish yet still beautiful hue over the film’s finale.
Silva sends M a message that reads “Think on your sins”, and the themes of atonement and redemption reach fullest expression during the final sequence on the moors. Not only is the scene bathed in hellish red light, it also features Bond struggling with an opponent beneath the ice of a frozen loch, sinking deeper out of sight. Bond’s emergence from the water adds to the sense of a lone warrior battling the legions of hell, while in a church M awaits her fate. Her fate genuinely surprised and moved me, and I was left wondering whether M achieved redemption or damnation in the end. Much like Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Skyfall does not end triumphantly for our hero. It does conclude with Bond ready to get back to work, but it also possesses a profound ambiguity and sober ambivalence. For a Bond film to offer such ambiguity is genuinely surprising and impressive, enabling Skyfall to excel not only as a Bond film, but as a film in general, one of the most satisfying of 2012. I have previously written about expectations and how they influence our responses: with Skyfall I expected a good Bond film, but not a film that worked on so many levels and exceeded my expectations narratively, aesthetically and thematically. The blend of familiarity and innovation in Skyfall surpassed the (expected) pleasures of The Avengers, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and Looper, providing one of the most satisfying cinema experiences I had in the past twelve months.
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Honoring veterans is a civilian duty
More than 1.4 million servicemen and women are active duty, and 1.1 million are serving in the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Jessica Phillips
According to defense.gov, “The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.”
Nearly 4,500 United States soldiers and military personnel have died doing just that since 2003 in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to icasualties.org.
According to militaryfactory.com, almost 522,000 were killed in World War I and II combined. The total casualties from war is never a good number to hear. What is noble is that these men and women died in honor, fighting for their country. Fighting for something they believed in. Fighting to protect their home.
U.S. military members sacrificed their time and lives. Their families and friends sacrificed precious memories that could have been made and said goodbye to lives that could have been lived longer, all for a greater cause. Soldiers, veterans and their families are heroes.
Veterans Day is a time to remember and honor those who have fought for our country. RSC will honor veterans with the Celebrate Veterans Luncheon at 11 a.m. Nov. 11 in the Main Dining Room. On Nov. 18, the Veterans Small Business Conference will be held in the Professional Training Center; it is open to veterans and business owners.
RSC welcomes veterans and military personnel. The college was named a 2015 Military Friendly® School by Victory Media in September. Veteran Student Services exists to help veteran students succeed; the office is located in Student Services, Rooms 100S and 100T.
Veterans Day is not the only appropriate time to honor veterans. On Oct. 7, 82 veterans of WWII and the Korean War were recognized at the Oklahoma Honor Flights ceremony in the Performing Arts Theatre. The Honor Flights take veterans to Washington, D.C., for a day; this flight was taken on Oct. 8.
Navy veteran Edward Davis, who took the flight, said, “I think it’s great. … (I) appreciate what (the Honor Flights) did for WWII veterans and I’m glad they’re doing it for Korean veterans.”
To the veterans of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, Operation Iraqi Freedom and all other wars that have been fought, thank you for your service. May you be honored always. The respect of this country is forever yours.
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Ronda Municipality in Málaga Province Andalucia
Ronda is a unique city. Built on a 100 metres high buttress of rock emerging from the high plains 40 kilometres north west of Marbella the old and new towns are deeply divided by a canyon spanned by a bridge that took twenty nine years to build. At a height of 750 metres above sea level Ronda has snow in winter and is scorchingly hot in summer. Spring and autumn are the best times to visit.
A Tale of Three Bridges
Most people will have seen a picture of the ‘new’ bridge across the ravine, El Tajo Canyon, that divides Ronda in two. It was built because the other two, lower, bridges had a habit of being washed away when the river flooded.
The lower bridge is known as the Moorish Bridge although very little of it is actually Moorish since it has been repaired many times over the centuries due to damage caused by flooding. It probably sits on the same site as a Roman bridge since this is the only access to the town from the north.
The centre bridge is called the Old Bridge. Not because it is the oldest bridge in Ronda, that honour falls on the Moorish Bridge, but because it is just a little older than the New Bridge. The Old Bridge was built in the 16th Century and links the old Moorish settlement and the new urban area growing up around the Small Marketplace, El Mercadillo.
Permission was granted for the building of a new bridge in 1542. It was completed in 1733. You think you have problems getting your villa finished? The bridge lasted six years before a design defect was discovered and it collapsed. In 1758 the bridge you see now was started and took twenty nine years to complete. A visit to the bridge museum costs 2 Euros and is worth every centimo.
A Water Mine and Mills
Beneath the bridge and built into the side of the gorge is a water mine and garden. Access to the pools 100 metres below is through the Casa del Rey Moro and a steep set of steps in a tunnel. Carrying water up must have been a hard task, I counted over 300 steps before I lost count.
Just within the gorge and spreading out onto the flatter land to the west there are a number of, now ruined, water mills. These date back to the Moorish period (711 – 1485). You will also see the remains of the 13th and 14th Century Arab baths.
Brief History of Ronda
The outcrop of rock on which Ronda sits has been occupied since Roman times but it was the Moors that established Ronda as a town and it became one of the capitals of the five coras of Al Andalus. Their architectural influence is very obvious in the old part of the town. In 1485 the town was taken by the Christian kings and the Andalucian character took over. Immigrants to the town wanting to start a business found the taxes and customs duties a little onerous so they established their own town on the other side of the gorge. The open-air free market became El Mercadillo and soon attracted permanent residences built in a unique style called ‘Enlightenment’. This tradition of free markets lives on in Andalucia, as does the tax avoidance ethos.
Culture in Ronda
On a more cultural note Ronda has a number of fine museums, two in the old part of town are well worth a visit. The Municipal museum is in the Mondragon Palace. The building itself is a wonderful example of Moorish architecture and costs 2 Euros to enter. The second is Museo Tematico Lara, again in the old town. This houses an eclectic private collection of cultural exhibits said to be the most important in Spain.
Nearby is the Museo de Bandolero, the Bandit Museum. This could only exist here, basically it is a celebration of the lives of various highwaymen, smugglers, thieves and vagabonds who lived in the area from the 16th Century right through to the mid 20th Century. The museum manages to portray these rogues as a romantic, chivalrous cross between Robin Hood and Al Capone. The museums’ serious message is reserved for two small rooms right at the back. Here there is a brief history, almost a footnote, of the Guardia who were originally established to wipe out these bandits. And they did. Or did they? Maybe the survivors just moved to the Costa del Sol.
Although bullfighting is now pretty much non pc throughout Spain Ronda is still proud of its heritage. The museum within the bullring is well worth a visit if only to view the elaborate, ornate, richly decorated and impossible tight costumes worn by the matadors. The art of bullfighting in Ronda originated in an unusual manner. In 1572, Philip II founded the Real Maestranza de Caballeria de Ronda. Its purpose was to provide horsemen for the defence of the area. Part of the training involved pitting bulls against horsemen. The training also provided entertainment for the local population.
What has this untypical history done to the inhabitants of Ronda? Well they are perhaps the most friendly, welcoming people in Andalucia. Visit the tourist information office opposite the bullring. Here a charming young lady with perfect English will give you maps, itineraries and tips on places to see. Also in El Mercadillo are dozens of restaurants and tapas bars that all welcome you. Ronda is famous for its Rabo de Torro(Oxtail Stew), on the menu everywhere. It is also famous for its range of tapas. Many places offer you a selection for a fixed price but the more adventurous can just choose what they want from the bar itself. For the best value go in the places crowded with Spanish. Hnos. Macias on the street opposite the bullring is recommended. Either way you will not go hungry or break the bank.
At the turn of the 19th century a British Company built the Algeciras to Ronda train line. In 1906 the Reina Victoria Hotel was built to welcome the officers, gentlemen and their ladies who travelled to Ronda from Gibraltar. The hotel is still thriving today. Although refurbished in 2012 it still manages to retain much of the colonial atmosphere of the original. Sadly the polished oak balustrade that swept down the grand staircase is now no more.
Approved Comments
Submitted by Daveigh on 28 Mar 2017
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The Bandits of the Sierra de Ronda
Acinipo - a Roman town
Bullfighting Museum
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Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/2002/08/women-taking-their-place-in-african-immigration/)
Women Taking Their Place in African Immigration
By: Marieme Daff | August 4, 2002
NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)–Khadija Sow is in the kitchen of her six-table restaurant in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The smell of simmering vegetables fills the air as she prepares Thiebu Djeun, a rich fish stew cooked with rice that is the national dish of Senegal. Her busy and successful restaurant, with a large carry-out business, is one of many examples of transplanted Senegalese women creating independent lives here.
Sow left Senegal nearly a decade ago to join her husband in New York. With the freedom and opportunity available in her new home, she quickly found a job as a cook and was able to open her own restaurant in three years.
Women like her are significantly changing the face of African immigration in the United Sates.
Other West Africans, such as Nigerians, Liberians and Ghanaians, have been coming to America since the 1970s, while their counterparts in French-speaking countries on the continent went to France. Language and historical ties with their former colonizer were the main reason for the choice of French destination. But when France tightened its immigration policies, making it harder for foreigners to go there, French-speaking West Africans began to turn to the United States.
They come from Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast. But for the most part they come from Senegal. And they are now female as well as male.
Many Women Have Little Choice But to Strike Out on Their Own
Over the last 10 years, more and more West African women decided to stop waiting for their men to mail checks home from the United States and to join them and earn their own income. Others have been coming alone, leaving husbands and children behind. The switch is a dramatic departure from the region’s strong gender roles.
"It was women’s traditional role to stay at home and patiently wait for men to send money to feed the family," said Sylviane Diouf, a writer and researcher at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. But in January 1994, when 14 countries in Africa’s "Franc Zone" saw their common currency, the CFA franc, lose 50 percent of its value, the region’s people were forced to look for economic opportunity elsewhere. By then, many of the male earners had left the drought-stricken region for Europe or the United States.
"The devaluation gave women no choice but go out and make money on their own," Diouf said.
The Senegalese, though not the only group of Francophone West African immigrants in America, comprise the largest and the oldest. Because many of them are still undocumented aliens, it is virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of their numbers in the U.S., but officials agree that the population has reached into the thousands. New York-based Senegalese journalist Dame Babou, who has extensively researched the community, claims that at least 30,000 of his compatriots live in the city alone, though the Department of City Planning estimates only about 2,000.
Although some have settled in the Midwest–in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois–where employment opportunities seemed to be better, New York is the main destination, housing probably two-thirds of the U.S. population, says Yaya Ly, president of the Association of Senegalese in America.
Enterprising Senegalese Women Exploit Their Culture’s Biases
When women first arrive here, their main focus is to find a job and make an income of their own. And like Sow, it is generally in African-owned restaurants that they have the best chance of being hired.
"Our traditional cuisine is in high demand among single African males who were brought up with the idea that a man’s place is not in a kitchen. They don’t even know how to cook an egg, and therefore order daily from places like mine," Sow said, adding that her clientele is 70 percent male.
Others find work in hair-braiding salons. Braids have become very popular among African Americans since the 1980s and Senegalese are known as the experts in this art.
Aminata Dia was taught how to make braids when she was a little girl–a skill she used to her advantage when she left the Senegalese capital of Dakar in 1993 to come to New York. She was single and lucky enough to obtain an entry visa to the United States.
"Twenty years ago, this would have been a major scandal," said Consul Tinder Bocoum, the Consulate-general of New York for the Republic of Senegal.
In Senegal, Mali and Guinea, where more than 90 percent of the populations are Muslim, society does not approve of unmarried women wandering alone in foreign lands, Bocoum said. "But in time of economic crisis, nobody cares whether it’s a man or a woman who brings money home," he added.
"Men venture to different parts of the globe all the time," said Dia, now 34 and a mother of three. "There was no reason why I couldn’t do it, too." And many more single women followed the same path, gradually gaining the community’s approval to become the breadwinner for their extended families.
Dia quickly found a job in a hair salon in Harlem and worked there for about a year, thinking all along about opening her own place. In 1994, she joined a group of self-employed African women who had launched their own business. With an average price of $100 per hairdo, a salon’s annual profit can reach $150,000. Depending on their experience, some employees make up to $20,000 a year–a huge sum compared to what they would earn in Senegal.
African Women a Strong Market for Travel Industry
With their new economic power, African women have become a valuable clientele for many businesses, such as the travel industry. "They represent about 40 percent of my customers," said Habi Bah, a Malian travel agent in New York. These women are extremely mobile, both on a national and international level, she says.
"They fly to places like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans and California, where they sell African arts and crafts during seasonal fairs or they travel back to Africa for vacations–or sometimes business," Bah said.
Bah, who came to New York in 1989 with a degree in English from the University of Reims in France, witnessed the changes in her fellow female immigrants and praises them for what they have achieved here. Although she primarily came to New York to pursue her education, she experienced many of the same difficulties, working full time for a fabric retailer and attending one of the city’s public colleges as a part-time student.
She earned an undergraduate degree in communication and took post-graduate courses in travel and tourism. Today, Bah’s diplomas and graduation pictures proudly hang on the walls of her Midtown office. She opened her agency, Abby Travel, in 1999.
Women Immigrants Quickly Learn How to Dial 911
The economic independence of African women has reverberated throughout the Senegalese communities within the U.S. with varying results.
While Bah, Dia and Sow say they are happily married, some believe the independence is dramatically altering family relations within the communities. According to Mamadou Kane, a leading figure in the Senegalese community in New York and the host of the tri-state area’s weekly radio program "Voice of Africa," women’s financial independence–as well as American laws–has changed the dynamic in Senegalese households.
"Physical abuse on women and children is a common thing in our societies. But here, these women are not willing to accept it anymore," Kane said. "They know that with a simple 911 call they could have their husband arrested for domestic violence–and men know that too."
Women are not afraid anymore to ask for a divorce if they are unhappy in their marriage, Kane says. They can financially support themselves–and, he adds–candidates for a second marriage are usually fighting on their doorstep.
In most African-immigrant homes here, children are absent. Discouraged by the high cost of child care in the United States, as well as by difficult work schedules, many parents send their infants back home to be raised by relatives.
"And we believe it is also a much healthier environment for children to grow up in," said 32-year-old Fatou Diallo, who sent her first-born to Dakar when he was 6 months old. "My mom and sisters will take good care of him and, when he’s old enough, I’ll send for him."
Men React to Women’s Newfound Independence in Myriad Ways
Frightened by such tales of women speaking their own minds and making their own decisions, some men, who had arranged for their young wives to join them in America, decided not to take a chance.
"We’ve had accounts of men who wouldn’t let their wives get jobs for fear that they might take a liking in this newly found independence and possibly leave them," Diouf said. "Some even go as far as locking them in when they leave for work every day."
But that experience is not universal. Kane said many men have accepted the changes with grace, even though the women "often make more than their husbands." He added that he believed women’s economic independence has benefited Senegalese, who tend to think conservatively about women’s place in society.
"Some men have overcome some strong taboos, like cooking and cleaning, for example," Kane said. "They seem to have acquired common sense and realized that they can’t expect their wife to come home after 12 or 14 hours of work and then cook dinner. So they have learned to take their part in the daily chores."
Marieme Daff is a Women’s eNews summer intern.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture:
http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html
The Voices of New York:
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/blake.map2001/senegal.html
The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies:
http://www.balchinstitute.org
Senegalese Rapper Uses Powerful Voice to Fight FGM
By: Anne K. Ream | June 7, 2014
Sister Fa was cut at the age of 3 in a public ceremony, a moment that changed the course of her life. Now she uses her music and star power to bring attention to the procedure, says Anne K. Ream in this excerpt from “Lived Through This.”
Senegal Program Eradicating FGM
By: Ginger Adams Otis | December 7, 2003
Some 2 million women around the world are subject to female genital mutilation every year. Now, a program is set to eradicate the custom in Senegal and is likely to be replicated elsewhere in Africa.
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Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/2008/10/less-globalization-might-help-micro-depositors/)
Less Globalization Might Help Micro-Depositors
By: Susan Feiner | October 3, 2008
(WOMENSENEWS)–Women, while bearing precious little blame for the disaster underway in global financial markets, are sure to bear a disproportionate amount of the brunt.
Over the past weeks Women’s eNews’ coverage has consistently explained why. Most fundamentally: women’s lower salaries and scantier savings mean an economic downturn can take more away.
But one group of women–micro-depositors and borrowers at the very bottom of the global credit ladder in less-industrialized countries–might actually benefit.
Their rupees, takas, riels, renminbis and bhats–scraped together by the toil of running near-subsistence farms and selling their cooking and handicrafts on the street–have helped create significant capital pools.
Almost 45 percent of all savings accounts in East Asia and the Pacific (including China) are held in microfinance institutions, according to a recent World Bank report. Nearly 30 percent of total bank assets in East Asia and the Pacific (an amount equal to $649 million in U.S. currency) are in savings banks. Of these fully one-third are held in “alternative financial institutions” designed to provide banking services for people–most of them women–who otherwise have no access to financial institutions.
Deposits Flow Up and Away
Such savings pools have created opportunities for rural banks to join the flow of global capital. Their managers–in search of security–have transferred depositors’ savings to city and national banks that pay interest on the deposits of the smaller banks. Directors of the larger banking firms have to do something with these funds. Money stored in vaults doesn’t earn interest (note to readers, these are “sterile reserves!”)
Bank managers–seeking the highest possible rates of return–use depositors’ money to buy into the multi-billion-dollar market in mortgages and mortgage back securities. Precisely the financial instruments at the root of the Wall Street credit debacle.
The result of this complex financial layering: the earnings of hard-working women climb up the credit chain. Very little trickles down, while the rewards have piled up for the richest at the top, helping them earn those stratospheric salaries that on Monday helped prove catastrophic for the $700 billion bailout vote in Congress.
But as Wall Street and Main Street face dire prospects as a result of the intensifying credit crunch the women at the furthest reaches of the world financial network may actually benefit.
Why? Because more of their savings may stay close to home where the funds can be put to work in their communities.
In recent years that hasn’t been happening. Look at India. Over the last decade households have dramatically increased their savings, but that pool of money has mainly been loaned to local businesses. The most successful local businesses have been able to tap foreign markets for major new projects in power generation, telecommunication, petroleum exploration, ports, airports and roads.
Opportunity to Exert Influence
This may have improved some women’s standard of living, but because these projects rarely employ women, they haven’t given many women a direct stake in the economic expansion. But if international capital stalls, Indian women may be able to assert more influence over national spending priorities.
The country hosts a new national Women’s Party and boasts a sizable number of female political leaders. But, as of the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index last November, India had one of the world’s 10-most gender-biased economies, with women’s participation in the paid work force at 36 percent. If female leaders could get their hands on some of the credit that’s been flowing up and away from female workers, the country’s gender-gap ranking might just have a chance to close.
Women’s lives could also be improved by the effects of slower global capital inflows, or globalization, which has been associated with accelerating internal migrations that break up families and declining levels of girls’ education, which undermine women’s overall advancement. Women are the majority of the world’s farmers. But agricultural changes brought about by major corporations have reduced subsistence crops, increased cash crops and caused more widespread hunger even as more edibles are produced.
Globalization, in general, has diverted resources from human needs to corporate needs. Wood, water, minerals and fuel are necessities, but as their prices rise, people suffer. Given women’s roles in maintaining daily life, price movements generated by global integration makes their lives harder.
Of course slower global economic growth will undoubtedly have negative effects, particularly on employment in East Asia. As U.S. demand for clothes, shoes and other small-ticket consumer goods declines, sweatshops–which employ large numbers of women–will close. Those who lose their jobs have no social protections like unemployment compensation.
But today, 10 years after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, the World Bank reports that the region is far wealthier, has fewer poor people and people’s incomes are well beyond where they were before the crisis. The current slowdown in the developing world will not be the result of an indigenous financial crisis, so the downturn is not likely to be as severe or last as long.
Draining Pool of Aid
Slower economic growth in the United States and elsewhere will inevitably reduce the flows of foreign aid, both public and philanthropic, and that has many people worried about the fate of girls and women.
But–as I am certainly not the first to argue–much of this money gets diverted to the private accounts of corrupt officials. Increased flows of aid monies to sub-Saharan Africa have been linked to declining political participation, which often means that women who are already marginalized wind up even more excluded from political decision-making.
There is significant evidence from around the world that when donors increase their investments in social services that most help women–like health and education–government accountability declines as outsiders are blamed for project inadequacies.
Add to all this the fact that U.N. funding goals for programs serving women and girls are way off target, the problems caused by lower aid flows may be outweighed by the benefits of less globalization.
Declining foreign aid, combined with a reduced pace of global integration, just might create some breathing space for low-income women. Certainly the micro-entrepreneurs and micro-borrowers can be expected to keep getting their tiny outlays. With a stellar repayment rate of around 95 percent, these women are some of the best credit risks in the world.
In the 1930s, when the United States and Europe were mired in the Great Depression and focused on fascism, colonial powers paid less attention to Africa, South America and Asia. Mass political mobilization strengthened pressure for economic development aimed at national improvements. In South Asia especially, pioneering efforts to direct national resources to domestic economic development became a model for the rest of the world.
These are different times, but less meddling by the richer powers in the affairs of their poorer neighbors might once again produce social benefits.
As the latest and worst U.S. financial bubble bursts women in the developing world might be on the right side of the seesaw. As the pace of globalization slows their lives just might improve. Let’s hope so.
Susan F. Feiner is professor of economics and professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine. Her blog, www.economics-she-wrote.org welcomes questions from readers about the sorry state of the world’s financial system.
Philadelphia Shows the Way to Slow Foreclosures
By: Sharon Johnson (WeNews senior correspondent) | January 18, 2009
Programs to curb foreclosures could have a disproportionate benefit for female homeowners. A Chicago Reporter gender analysis of mortgage data conducted for Women’s eNews finds female borrowers almost twice as likely to hold subprime loans.
Single-Payer Health Push Rallies Behind Conyers
By: Molly M. Ginty | January 11, 2009
As Obama prepares to take office, many women’s advocates are backing a single-payer health insurance reform championed by Rep. John Conyers Jr. With so many Americans uninsured and underinsured, it’s “past time for change” says Conyers.
Journalist of the Month
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Earvin "Magic" Johnson Jr. is Born
Earvin Johnson Jr. was born to Earvin Sr., a General Motors assembly worker, and Christine, a school custodian.
Johnson grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and came to love basketball as a youngster, idolizing players such as Earl Monroe and Marques Haynes, and practicing "all day".
Johnson was first dubbed "Magic" as a 15-year-old sophomore playing for Lansing's Everett High School, when he recorded a triple-double of 36 points, 18 rebounds and 16 assists. After the game, Fred Stabley Jr., a sports writer for the Lansing State Journal, gave him the moniker despite the belief of Johnson's mother, a Christian, that the name was sacrilegious. In his final high school season, Johnson led Lansing Everett to a 27–1 win–loss record while averaging 28.8 points and 16.8 rebounds per game, and took his team to an overtime victory in the state championship game.
Source: Wikipedia Added by: Kevin Rogers
Earvin Johnson, Jr., grew up with nine siblings, but Junior was the one who usually slept with his basketball. He dribbled it on errands to the store, and developed into a real player. A local sportswriter dubbed him "Magic" after watching Johnson dominate a high school game. His mother disapproved, thinking the nickname sounded blasphemous. Johnson had an uncanny ability to see plays before they developed, passing the ball cross-court to players who weren't there yet, but would be by the time the ball arrived. The term "triple double" (for a player whose points, rebounds, and assists reach double digits in a single game) was coined largely for Magic Johnson, who did it routinely. He played guard, center, and forward.
Source: NNDB Added by: Kevin Rogers
Earvin Johnson Jr. was born on August 14, 1959, in Lansing, Michigan, the fourth of Earvin and Christine Johnson's seven children. His father worked at an auto factory during the day and hauled trash at night to make extra money. Earvin Jr. worked at several jobs, including helping his father, but his first love was basketball. In 1977 Johnson and his Everett High School team won the state championship. His passing and ball-handling skills won him the nickname "Magic." He then attended Michigan State University. In his second year, Michigan State won the national college basketball championship by defeating Indiana State University, a team led by future Boston Celtics star Larry Bird (1956–). Johnson scored twenty-four points and was chosen Most Valuable Player (MVP).
Source: Notable Biographies Added by: Kevin Rogers
View other events that happened on August 14
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Private jet is the best new way for VIPs to travel south: Casa Marina, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, now offers direct seaplane air service with Key West Seaplanes from Florida airports to the property’s private beach pier. Slightly farther north on Key Largo, Playa Largo Resort & Spa debuted last summer with signature Sunshine State coral reefs and sea glass, plus 144 rooms and suites, 10 secluded bungalows and a standalone luxury guesthouse.
Following World War I, the United States found itself swamped with aviators. Many decided to take their war-surplus aircraft on barnstorming campaigns, performing aerobatic maneuvers to woo crowds. In 1918, the United States Postal Service won the financial backing of Congress to begin experimenting with air mail service, initially using Curtiss Jenny[26] aircraft that had been procured by the United States Army Air Service. Private operators were the first to fly the mail but due to numerous accidents the US Army was tasked with mail delivery. During the Army's involvement they proved to be too unreliable and lost their air mail duties.[27] By the mid-1920s, the Postal Service had developed its own air mail network, based on a transcontinental backbone between New York City and San Francisco.[28] To supplement this service, they offered twelve contracts for spur routes to independent bidders. Some of the carriers that won these routes would, through time and mergers, evolve into Pan Am, Delta Air Lines, Braniff Airways, American Airlines, United Airlines (originally a division of Boeing), Trans World Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and Eastern Air Lines.
Barbados is one of the most multifaceted Caribbean islands, offering a wide range of accommodations and activities. It has places to stay for visitors of every budget, and a diversity of landscapes and cultural activities. Visitors especially enjoy visiting the lively city of Bridgetown, which dates back to the 17th century. One of the island’s most spectacular attractions is Harrison’s Cave, an amazing formation that can be seen on a tramway.
Hi dave – very cool and informative site! We’re a family of 6 (all adults) traveling to Greece for the first time…and most likely the last time. We’d like to visit some historic sites, but more interested in experiencing Greek life in small towns. Beaches and nightlife are not important. I’m looking to put together a balanced itinerary covering 10 days (11 nights) and had the following in mind:
Holding the largest number of overwater bungalow resorts in the world (more than 75 and counting), the Maldives understands its best asset is the gin-clear, abundant waters of the Indian Ocean. When you’re not snorkeling, diving, or gazing at the rich marine life through the floor windows of your water-top villa, continue enjoying the underwater display while dining at 5.8 Undersea Restaurant, or even while getting pampered in Huvafen Fushi’s submerged spa.
Lefkada is an island, but is connected to the mainland by a causeway at the northern tip and its access airport is on the mainland at Aktio (Preveza). It is an island popular with Greeks and mainly European visitors. Italians and Brits predominate. It is green, verdant, has good beaches and facilities and is compact enough to get around easily. Tourism is centred on the east coast around the port village of Nydri. It is low-key accommodation with villas and small family-run hotels predominating. Off-shore from Nydri are a couple of islands worth visiting on excursions: the sizeable Meganisi (car ferries run to and fro’) and the private Skorpios Island which belong to the Onassis family. On your own hired motor boat, you can heave-to on just one private beach on the north side of the island and swim and claim boasting rights to having swum on Aristotle Onassis’ private piece of Greece.
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Man dies in Hagerman after being pinned under truck
By Journal Staff Report
Saturday, January 14th, 2017 at 9:10pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — State Police say an elderly man in southeastern New Mexico was killed after being trapped under a truck on Saturday.
Police were called to the scene at 413 Stephens Road in Hagerman, located in Chaves County, around noon and learned that 96-year-old Lecil L. Warren had become trapped under a pickup truck and was unconscious, according to a news release.
Crash-scene evidence showed that Warren had gotten out of the vehicle and failed to put into park. “The vehicle began to move in reverse and Mr. Warren was struck by the vehicle and became trapped underneath,” police said.
Emergency responders extricated Warren from under the vehicle, but were unable to resuscitate him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
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Find Your Associate Degree
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December 15, 2018 | Cégep de Lévis-Lauzon
Industrial maintenance technologists have only one goal: that the equipment works at its best. They work upstream, that is to say that they intervene to prevent problems by setting up maintenance and ... [+]
Industrial maintenance technologists have only one goal: that the equipment works at its best. They work upstream, that is to say that they intervene to prevent problems by setting up maintenance and control guides, they help to train other employees, they are valuable assets during the training. design and installation of equipment and are always looking for opportunities to improve material performance. [-]
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Universities in South Africa
latitude="-29" longitude ="25" :zoom="5" :providerlocations="1" 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Action International
AC Plus การประหยัดพลังงาน
NEO โลชั่นผม
Beta C เพื่อสุขภาพและความงาม
AC Plus energy saving
Pradu (Rose Wood)
Neo Hair Lotion
Beta C dietary supplement
Fat is good!
There are several types of fats.
Saturated fat.
Unsaturated fats: Polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fats
Trans fats.
"The hypothesis that saturated fat is a major cause of these diseases has had a perpetual life, now for more than 100 years, while ignoring evidence to the contrary." - Dr. T. Colin Campbell.
"I would go so far as to say the change in dietary advice in 1977 to restrict the amount of fat we were eating helped to fuel the obesity epidemic unfolding today." - Dr. Aseem Malhotra, cardiologist.
"The science for over a hundred years were showing very consistently that if you wanna loose weight, if you wanna stop being obese: Cut your carbohydrates and eat as much fat and proteins as you want." - Dr. David Diamond.
David Diamond, Ph.D., of the University of South Florida College of Arts and Sciences shares his personal story about his battle with obesity.
Clinical study: "Long term effects of ketogenic diet in obese subjects with high cholesterol level."
A ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet. The study was carried out at the Academic Department of Surgery, Consultation and Training Centre, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait University, Kuwait.
The study included 83 obese subjects (39 men and 44 women). The mean age, initial height, weight and BMI for all patients are given in Table 1. Fasting blood tests were carried out for all of the subjects. Thereafter, fasting blood samples were tested for total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, urea and creatinine levels at the 8th, 16th and 24th week. In addition, weight and height measurements, and blood pressure were monitored at each visit.
All 83 subjects received a ketogenic diet consisting of 20 g to 30 g of carbohydrate in the form of green vegetables and salad, and 80 g to 100 g of protein in the form of meat, fish, fowl, eggs, shellfish and cheese. Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats were also included in the diet. Twelve weeks later, an additional 20 g of carbohydrate were added to the meal of the subjects to total 40 g to 50 g of carbohydrate. Micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) were given to each subject in the form of one capsule per day.
The weight decreased (Figure 1).
Total cholesterol decreased (Figure 2).
HDL cholesterol increased (Figure 3).
LDL cholesterol decreased (Figure 4).
Triglycerides decreased (Figure 5).
Table 1: Initial data for the patients.
Figure 1: Weight loss after 8, 16 and 24 weeks.
Figure 2: Total cholesterol levels after 8, 16 and 24 weeks.
Figure 3: HDL cholesterol after 8, 16 and 24 weeks.
Figure 4: LDL cholesterol after 8, 16 and 24 weeks.
Figure 5: Triglycerides after 8, 16 and 24 weeks.
Time Magazine 1984
- Dr. Steven Masley and Dr. Jonny Bowden: "Smart fat", ISBN 978-0-06-239229-9.
- Dr. Robert Lustig: "Fat chance".
- Nina Teicholz: "The big fat surprise", ISBN 978-1-4516-2442-7.
- Tom Naughton: "Big fat lies" video.
- Dr. T. Colin Campbell: "A fallacious, faulty and foolish discussion about saturated fat".
- Raymond Reiser: "Saturated fat in the diet and serum cholesterol concentration: a critical examination of the literature"
- Ron Schmid: "Cholesterol, Animal Fats and Heart Disease: A Modern Myth? Framingham and Ancel Keys."
- Dr. Aseem Malhotra: "The truth about fat and sugar".
- Dr. David Diamond: "How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic".
- Clinical study: "Long term effects of ketogenic diet in obese subjects with high cholesterol level"
Action International Trading Co., Ltd.
Telephone +66 2-043-5292
Email office@action-inter.net
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Drowned father, daughter left humble origins in El Salvador
By: MARCOS ALEMÁN and CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN, Associated Press
SAN MARTIN, EL Salvador (AP) - Julia Pérez makes a living selling pupusas, traditional Salvadoran stuffed pastries, to residents of the Altavista neighborhood who rise before dawn and rush to buses bound for their jobs in the capital about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.
One of her regulars was Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, who would arrive on his motorcycle with his toddler daughter, Valeria, to grab a quick bite or pick up the savory treats to go.
That is until they drowned this week in each other's arms while trying to cross the Rio Grande into Texas, a tragedy captured in a heartbreaking photograph that has prompted an outpouring of grief from around the globe.
"It shocked me. I broke out in tears when I found out," Pérez said. "I saw the images and I didn't know it was them, how sad to see that. Later I learned it was little Oscar and Valeria."
The neighborhood left behind by Martínez and his family is a humble bedroom community where many people commute to nearby San Salvador, leaving behind only the elderly and the very young during the day. The notorious 18th Street gang is present there, though residents say violence and extortion has eased.
But there's still poverty and a lack of jobs, and a local priest estimates that a third his parishioners have left the country since 2015, risking the dangerous trek north toward the United States.
"This reality of migration is not an unknown thing to us in Altavista," the Rev. Manuel Lozano said. "We all have lots of people who have left. ... We would rather that nobody put themselves in danger, but people continue to tell us, 'I have to leave, I have to go.'"
"I have seen entire families leave," Lozano said. "The most recent was 14 people, a single family, that emigrated to the United States, and then the young people, many are leaving and the great majority exposing themselves to danger."
Altavista is home to an estimated 130,000 people and sprawls across three municipalities, including San Martin. Most people live in low-rise, two-bedroom homes with a combination kitchen-living room-dining room, worth about $10,000-$15,000 each.
At first light people can be seen walking briskly on the streets so as not to be late for jobs elsewhere, some of them holding the hands of children on their way to school.
"Here in Altavista, as I think in the rest of El Salvador, live hard-working people, people with dreams, people who are mostly workers. ... People who like almost all Salvadorans live with a bit of paranoia, concerned by insecurity," Lozano said.
El Salvador is one of the deadliest countries on the planet. Homicides have fallen by about half, from over 100 per 100,000 inhabitants just a few years ago, but remain high at some 50 per 100,000 inhabitants last year. That's more than nine murders a day for the country of about 6 million.
But in Altavista things have been relatively quiet of late. Several people confirmed that gangsters are around, but residents largely feel free to go about their lives and business untroubled.
José Ovidio Lara, 23, who each day parks his bike at a corner with a basket of French bread for sale, said he's never been bothered, not even for the "protection" fees gangs commonly demand from business owners upon threat of death.
"No, they've never asked me," Ovidio said, "and nor do I have anything to give them."
"This place was terrible before, but today one lives at peace," agreed Pérez, who has run her pupusa business for 15 years, opening at 5 a.m. and closing at 11 p.m. "I would be lying if I told you the gangs mess with me. No, they don't charge me rent."
Even if things were calm, Martínez, 25, and his 21-year-old wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos, who had been living with his mother, apparently felt that on their salaries working at a pizza parlor and as a restaurant cashier they would never be able to own one of those modest homes.
It was that dream, to save up money for a home, that led the family to set out April 3 bound for the United States, according to Martínez's mother, Rosa Ramírez.
The young family arrived at the Mexican border city of Matamoros over the weekend and went to the downtown bridge that leads to Brownsville, Texas.
There, Xiomara Mejia, a migrant from Honduras, explained that the newcomers would not be able to add their names to the long list of families waiting to apply for asylum in the United States until Monday.
"I noticed they were really nervous, scared. There was panic on their faces," said Mejia, who arrived with her husband and three children on May 8 and was still waiting to file an asylum application with the U.S. government.
"They said to me, 'You haven't tried to cross the river?'" Mejia said. "We said to them, 'No,' because of the children more than anything. I don't know how to swim and my kids do, but either way I'm not going to risk it."
After chatting, Martínez and Ávalos said they would come back Monday.
"I didn't think they were going to decide to cross the river," Mejia said.
But on Sunday, not far downriver from that bridge, the family crossed a popular bike and jogging path and walked down a slope through the brush to the edge of the Rio Grande.
The river does not appear wide there, maybe 20 to 30 yards, but that short distance obscures the dangers posed by the swift-moving current.
Martínez made the crossing first with Valeria, then left her on the riverbank while he returned for his wife. But the frightened little girl plunged into the river after him and as he struggled to save her, they both were carried away by the fast-moving waters.
Their bodies were recovered early Monday and were expected to be returned to El Salvador accompanied by Ávalos.
Migration activists worry people may be driven to more risky measures by recent U.S. policies, including "metering" that dramatically reduces the numbers allowed to apply for refuge, and others that send asylum-seekers back to Mexico to wait as their cases linger for months or even longer through a backlogged U.S. immigration court system.
Mexico has also stepped up immigration enforcement under pressure from Washington.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday that Mexico had a three-month deadline to get the flow of Central American migrants under control and that the country is making progress.
"We think we are going to be able to moderate the migratory phenomenon. We have to," López Obrador said. "We have a deadline, which is three months, ending Sept. 10, but we are doing well."
Sherman reported from Matamoros, Mexico. Associated Press writers Mark Stevenson and Peter Orsi in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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One of two crashed planes in Hastings was from local flight school
Giant jellyfish the size of a man caught on camera off English coast
Millions spent to tear down structures in Downtown Jacksonville
IAAF claims Olympic champion Semenya is 'biologically male'
By: GERALD IMRAY, AP Sports Writer
LAUSANNE, Switzerland - The governing body of track argued in court that Olympic champion Caster Semenya is "biologically male" and that is the reason she should reduce her natural testosterone to be allowed to compete in female competitions, according to documents released publicly for the first time on Tuesday and which provide new insight into a bitter legal battle.
The documents released by sport's highest court show that Semenya responded by telling the judges that being described as biologically male "hurts more than I can put in words." The 28-year-old South African runner said she was unable to express how insulted she felt at the IAAF "telling me that I am not a woman."
The IAAF's stance on Semenya and other female athletes affected by its new testosterone regulations - and Semenya's outrage at the biological male claim - was revealed in a 163-page decision published by the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport. It details parts of the courtroom exchanges that were held behind closed doors when Semenya challenged the IAAF over the highly contentious hormone rules in a five-day hearing in February. CAS had previously released only short excerpts of the final verdict when it was announced last month.
Tuesday's fuller court records, which were still redacted, show the IAAF referred to the two-time Olympic and three-time world champion as one of a number of "biologically male athletes with female gender identities."
Arguing that Semenya and others like her should be subject to its hormone limits to ensure fairness in female competitions, the IAAF stated: "There are some contexts where biology has to trump identity."
Semenya vs. the IAAF is one of the most difficult issues sport has faced.
Semenya was legally identified as female at birth and has identified as female her whole life. But the IAAF says she is one of a number of female runners in elite athletics who have medical conditions known as "differences of sex development" and who were born with the typical male XY chromosome pattern. That gives them some male biological characteristics, male levels of the hormone testosterone after puberty, and an unfair athletic advantage over other female athletes, the IAAF says.
Semenya, who has been fighting the IAAF ever since she was embroiled in a gender verification test at the world championships 10 years ago, says the rules should be discarded and she should be allowed to run in her natural form. She disputes that she has a significant performance advantage.
The IAAF won the recent case at CAS by a 2-1 majority of the panel of judges, allowing it to implement the testosterone limits.
But in the latest legal twist, Semenya appealed the CAS verdict to Switzerland's supreme court on human rights grounds. She won an interim ruling to temporarily suspend the hormone regulations and the Swiss supreme court will hear her full appeal.
The rules only apply to certain races, from 400 meters to one mile, but they include Semenya's specialist two-lap event.
To be allowed to compete under the rules, Semenya and other affected athletes must medically reduce their testosterone to below a specific threshold set by the IAAF. The IAAF gives three options to do that: A daily contraceptive pill, a monthly hormone-blocking injection, or surgery.
The medical process has been criticized as unethical by experts and Semenya has refused to take medication to alter what she calls her genetic gifts. At least two other runners, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya, who are both Olympic medalists, say they are also affected by the rules. They have also railed against the regulations and criticized the IAAF.
Tuesday's CAS documents shone a light on some of the details of the battle between Semenya and the IAAF over the last decade, much of which Semenya hadn't publicly spoken about despite her story making headline news across the world.
Semenya said in witness statements to the CAS that she had been subjected to gender verification tests that included an intrusive physical examination ordered by South African track authorities in the buildup to the 2009 world championships without being told or understanding the nature of the tests. She was 18 at the time.
Then, after her breakthrough victory at those championships in Berlin, Germany, Semenya said she was taken to a hospital where the IAAF conducted another test on her. Semenya said the IAAF did not ask her if she wanted to undergo the test.
"It was an order by the IAAF which I had no choice but to comply with," Semenya said.
She described the world championships and the public speculation that erupted over her gender as "the most profound and humiliating experience of my life."
Semenya also described a five-year period from 2010-15 where she reluctantly agreed to take testosterone-suppressing oral contraceptives recommended by the IAAF so she could continue running.
They caused significant weight gain, made her constantly feel sick, led to regular fevers and internal abdominal pain, she said.
She said the IAAF had used her as a "lab rat" as it experimented with a medical process it would later introduce as part of its testosterone rules.
In a statement released later Tuesday, Semenya said: "I will not allow the IAAF to use me and my body again."
More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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Maryland weighing impact of ‘fiscal cliff’ deal
Categories: Retirees
With Maryland home to nearly 300,000 federal employees, state officials had worried that the automatic reductions in projected spending increases that would have been triggered without the deal would have meant the loss of more than 15,000 jobs. But sequestration was delayed for two months to give Congress additional time to work out the reductions.
“We don’t know at the moment,” said Steven D. McCulloch, a budget analyst with the Maryland Office of Legislative Services, on the financial impact to the state from the deal to avert the fiscal cliff. State revenue analysts were still reviewing the federal legislation to calculate the impact on Maryland, he said. That work should be finished soon.
At the Board of Public Works meeting Wednesday, state Comptroller Peter V. R. Franchot (D) criticized the partisan wrangling that resulted in the fiscal cliff crisis.
“This has been an object lesson in political dysfunction,” Franchot said. “I hope they’ll grow up and get their acts together.”
A lot of the state’s budget decisions are dependent upon what the federal government does, said Takirra Winfield, press secretary for Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).
The deal to avert the fiscal cliff did not resolve the automatic reductions from sequestration, only delayed them for two months, and those talks will occur at the same time as Congress faces another limit on the federal debt ceiling, Winfield said.
“It’s a very fluid situation and it’s hard to predict but we’re monitoring what happens in D.C.,” she said.
In Maryland, every congressional Democrat voted for the deal while the two Republicans, including outgoing U.S. Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Dist. 6) of Buckeystown, opposed it.
U.S. Rep. Andrew P. Harris (R-Dist. 1) of Cockeysville criticized the bipartisan agreement, signed Wednesday by President Barack Obama, because it “increases taxes by $40 for every $1 in spending cuts.”
“This bill is business as usual in Washington and does nothing to deal with the real fiscal cliff — our $16.4 trillion deficit,” Harris said.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen Jr. (D-Dist. 8) of Kensington said he voted for the agreement even though he did not like all of the provisions in it, including a compromise on the federal estate tax that he proposed should be higher because it amounts to an average tax break of more than $1 million for the 7,000 richest estates in the country.
“On balance, this legislation will help working families, boost our economy, and ensure that the top 1 percent share greater responsibility for reducing our deficits,” Van Hollen said. “Any agreement required compromise, and I believe this is a fair deal for the American people.”
U.S. Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Dist. 2) of Cockeysville praised the Democrats and Republicans who compromised to reach a deal on the fiscal issues.
“The real winners tonight are the American people, who always wanted Congress to work together for the best interest of the nation,” Ruppersberger said. “Finally — in one of our last acts of this session — we showed that we can, in fact, compromise. This bipartisan bill is an important step in preventing what many economists believed would throw our country back into recession. We were able to permanently extend tax cuts to the middle class and avoid the fiscal cliff.”
Federal workers have worried that Congress would seek to reduce spending by targeting the federal work force.
U.S. Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Dist. 4) of Fort Washington said the deal provides federal workers with a “long-overdue cost-of-living increase.”
“Compromise is not a four-letter word,” she said. “It is time to continue to compromise, not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans, to do what our constituents sent us here to do.”
The American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents federal workers throughout Maryland, said that before the federal government imposes any unpaid furloughs on federal workers, they should first target high salaries paid to the executives with government contractors.
“While we are glad to see a bill that requires the wealthiest Americans begin to pay a fairer share of taxes, AFGE members are very concerned about the use of additional agency funding cuts in order to pay for the delay of the sequester,” said AFGE President J. David Cox Sr.
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VA expected to announce stand-alone Aurora hospital
The announcement is considered a major victory for Colorado lawmakers, who have lobbied vociferously for the stand-alone hospital, which will serve veterans in eight states.
The project was initially estimated to cost $1.1 billion, but Congress has authorized only about half of that. It's unclear whether tomorrow's announcement by VA Secretary Eric Shinseki will include a commitment by the Obama administration to push for more money — or whether planners have decided to scale down the project.
Officials say that a significant drop in construction costs over the last several months may make it possible to build the facility at a significantly lower cost than originally planned.
U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Golden Democrat, in whose district the hospital will be located, met with Shinseki within the last several weeks and personally lobbied for the project. Several other lawmakers have made repeated contacts with both the Bush and Obama administrations to push for a final decision and the beginning of construction — eight years after the hospital was first approved.
Colorado Veterans Affairs director Bill Conroy was among those invited to a Washington, D.C., briefing with Shinseki tomorrow morning.
"Hopefully, it's good news," he said. "The current VA facility is very old. It was one of the main VA hospitals in the country that was in need of replacement."
The existing veterans hospital, at East Ninth Avenue and Clermont Street in Denver, opened in 1950. It was built at a cost of $10 million and, at the time, employed 600 people.
Veterans officials have asked for a new hospital with 1.4 million square feet of space and 76 inpatient beds, along with 32 intensive-care and 56 mental-health treatment beds.
The VA Rocky Mountain Network, which helped design the new hospital, is planning a press conference tomorrow in Denver.
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Airport information and maps for Kenosha Regional Airport:
ENW Airport Information:
IATA / ICAO Codes: ENW / KENW
Airport Name: Kenosha Regional Airport
Location: Kenosha, Wisconsin, United States
Area Served: Kenosha, Wisconsin
Operator/Owner: City of Kenosha
View all routes: Routes from ENW
Facts about ENW
Map of Nearest Airports to ENW
List of Nearest Airports to ENW
Map of Furthest Airports from ENW
List of Furthest Airports from ENW
Facts about Kenosha Regional Airport (ENW):
The closest airport to Kenosha Regional Airport (ENW) is Waukegan National Airport (UGN), which is located only 12 miles (20 kilometers) SSE of ENW.
Because of Kenosha Regional Airport's relatively low elevation of 742 feet, planes can take off or land at Kenosha Regional Airport at a lower air speed than at airports located at a higher elevation. This is because the air density is higher closer to sea level than it would otherwise be at higher elevations.
Kenosha Regional Airport covers an area of 959 acres at an elevation of 742 feet above mean sea level.
The furthest airport from Kenosha Regional Airport (ENW) is Margaret River Airport (MGV), which is located 11,057 miles (17,795 kilometers) away in Margaret River, Western Australia, Australia.
Kenosha Regional Airport (ENW) has 3 runways.
Map of Nearest Airports from Kenosha Regional Airport:
List of Nearest Airports from Kenosha Regional Airport:
1 12.36 miles (19.89 km) SSE Waukegan National Airport (UGN) Chicago / Waukegan, Illinois, United States
2 12.75 miles (20.52 km) NNE John H. Batten Airport (RAC) Racine, Wisconsin, United States
3 24.35 miles (39.19 km) N General Mitchell International AirportMitchell Field (MKE) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
4 33.29 miles (53.57 km) S Chicago Executive Airport (PWK) Chicago/Prospect Heights/Wheeling, Illinois, United States
5 34.54 miles (55.59 km) NNW Waukesha County Airport (UES) Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States
6 35.97 miles (57.89 km) N Lawrence J. Timmerman Airport (MWC) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
7 42.64 miles (68.63 km) S Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD) Chicago, Illinois, United States
8 50.32 miles (80.99 km) SSW DuPage Airport (DPA) West Chicago, Illinois, United States
9 56.64 miles (91.16 km) S Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW) Chicago, Illinois, United States
10 56.67 miles (91.20 km) W Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport (JVL) Janesville, Wisconsin, United States
11 58.00 miles (93.35 km) N West Bend Municipal Airport (ETB) West Bend, Wisconsin, United States
12 63.44 miles (102.10 km) SSW Chicago/Aurora Municipal Airport (AUZ) Aurora, Illinois, United States
13 65.77 miles (105.84 km) WSW Chicago Rockford International Airport (RFD) Rockford, Illinois, United States
14 68.83 miles (110.77 km) S Lewis University Airport (LOT) Chicago / Romeoville, Illinois, United States
15 69.52 miles (111.88 km) NW Dodge County Airport (UNU) Juneau, Wisconsin, United States
Map of Furthest Airports from Kenosha Regional Airport:
List of Furthest Airports from Kenosha Regional Airport:
6 10,960.13 miles (17,638.57 km) WSW Albany Airport (ALH) Albany, Western Australia, Australia
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Dozens held in French suburb raids
Police detain at least 33 people suspected of organising riots in Paris last year.
Police say they detained 33 of the 38 people
on their target list [AFP]
Target suspects
"I have never seen a police operation of this scope," Marie-Therese de Givry, a local prosecutor said at a news conference.
"I hope that the inhabitants will understand that we are there to re-establish order and peace," she said.
However Segolene Royal, the socialist candidate who lost out to Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election last year, criticised the raids as a "police operation for the media".
Most of those detained are aged between 19 and 31, and have been known for previous violence, according to police.
Members of the Raid special police force, led the operation on about 10 apartment blocks in Villiers-le-Bel which was the focus of the unrest last November.
The area is populated largely by families of immigrant backgrounds.
Entrance buildings were guarded and groups of 30 police raided each apartment, according to the AFP news agency.
Police say they were looking for two gang leaders in particular who they believe organised attacks on police officers.
In one raid, about 100 police officers surrounded one building near a library and nursery that were burned down by rioters.
Suburb riots
Last year's violence erupted after two teenage boys were killed in a motorbike crash with a police car.
Police and local officials said it was an accident, but many residents were unconvinced.
Some officers were hit by gunfire and the clashes left 119 police officers injured, five seriously, according to justice ministry figures.
Tensions have run high in France's high-immigration suburbs since the country's worst civil unrest in decades in 2005.
Sarkozy this month launched an aid programme for France's poor suburbs, which has a high proportion of African immigrants and where youth unemployment is about 40 per cent.
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Israeli firms back Palestinian city
Settlers criticise companies for agreeing to developer's demand to avoid settlement products.
by Bilal Randeree
Some 300,000 Israelis live in more than 120 illegal settlements across the West Bank [GALLO/GETTY]
About 20 Israeli suppliers are helping to build the first modern Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank, but only after agreeing not to use products or services from Israeli settlements.
The announcement of involvement by Israeli firms has angered Jewish settlers, who accused the suppliers of caving in to an international boycott of settlement goods and businesses.
Bashar Masri, the project's developer, refused to identify any of the Israeli companies which are supplying the project with construction materials, but their contracts were reported by Israel's Army Radio on Tuesday.
The West Bank city of Rawabi, being built 30km north of Jerusalem, is a key part of a plan by Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, to lay the groundwork for a future Palestinian state, regardless of progress in peace talks.
Masri said that he tries to use Palestinian suppliers if possible, but when necessary turns to Israeli firms on condition that products and services from territories Israel occupied after the 1967 war - the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights - are not used.
"Settlements are diabolical. They steal Palestinian land and are an obstacle to an independent Palestinian state, and it's time for us to put an end to that harm," he was quoted by the AP news agency as saying.
The participation of Israeli companies in the construction of Rawabi is both an ironic twist on the use of Palestinian labourers in building illegal Jewish settlements, as well as a reminder of how much the 43 years of Israeli occupation has made the Palestinian economy dependent on Israel.
'Capitulation'
Dani Dayan, a settler leader, said that Israeli companies agreeing to the Palestinian conditions are "a capitulation to the boycott".
Palestinian activists and their supporters have launched a global boycott campaign to persuade investors to divest Israeli holdings and boycott Israeli companies over the illegal occupation.
The economic impact has been negligible, but for Israel the negative publicity has been unwelcome.
Israel accuses boycott advocates of trying to delegitimise it and argues that many foreign companies with ties to authoritarian regimes are not similarly targeted.
Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad has publicly advocated the boycott of settlement goods in the West Bank and, earlier this year, his government passed a law imposing heavy penalties and jail time on Palestinians who work in settlements.
But there have been few alternative sources of employment for the estimated 21,000 Palestinians who work in settlement construction, agriculture or industry. As a consequence, the law is reportedly not being enforced.
Construction criticised
Some 300,000 Israelis live in more than 120 illegal settlements across the West Bank - almost a threefold increase since the two sides launched their first round of peace talks 17 years ago.
An additional 180,000 live in occupied East Jerusalem, the section of the holy city claimed by the Palestinians as a future capital.
Meanwhile, Rawabi, which will have tall apartment blocks, shaded pedestrian walkways, a concentric road network and abundant trees, has come under criticism for being too similar in appearance to Israeli settlements.
Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American freelance journalist, said that when he first heard about the Rawabi plan, he was "repulsed".
In an article for the Mondoweiss website, he described it as "something so clearly alien, something so obviously conceived in an alien mind, masquerading as Palestinian".
'Their own land'
Moor also took exception to the fact that the Jewish National Fund (JNF), established by the Zionist Congress in 1901 to acquire land for Jewish settlement, had donated thousands of trees to be planted in Rawabi.
He said that while "Palestinians can barely secure permits to build on their own land", a forest on the edges of the new city was being funded by a Zionist organisation.
After this was brought to public attention by a story in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, Jewish and Zionist organisations criticised the move, arguing that JNF should be dealing soley with the advancement of Israeli projects.
Alon Badihi, an executive director of JNF, was subsequently quoted by The Jerusalem Post as saying: "The JNF was mandated by the Israeli government as the national forest service for the Land of Israel. This project was carried out under that mandate."
Financed with money from the Qatari government, Rawabi is eventually intended to house 40,000 people and to create 5,000 permanent jobs.
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Tag: robert chambers
Yesterday, I wrote about money and how it is worth nothing until you exchange it for something else. Today, I want to look at some of the people who didn’t get round to spending what they had while they were alive. Writers have long been fascinated by misers. Aesop, writing in the seventh or sixth century BC, tells us a story of a miser who buried his gold. But he came back to look at it every day and someone saw him, dug up the gold and stole it. The miser was distraught at the loss of his wealth. His neighbour consoled him by telling him that he might just as well bury a stone instead, or even just come back each day and look at the empty hole. Because he wasn’t using his gold, it would really be exactly the same thing. Buried gold is as useless as stone or an hole in the ground.
There are loads of examples of misers in literature, in theatre and in art, but there are also plenty of real life hoarders. I’ve mentioned a couple of them over the past year, and I have found that they are not necessarily greedy people, but they are not well people and are often profoundly eccentric. A true miser will live in apparent penury, in detriment to their comfort and their health so, often, their wealth is only discovered posthumously. Some, although they inherited huge sums, were assumed by the casual observer to be beggars. But some of them actually were beggars. Certainly, their accumulated riches were not as vast as those of John Camden Neild or John Elwes but were, nonetheless, remarkable. Robert Chambers, in his entry for July 17th, mentions Mary Wilkinson, who he describes as a ‘beggar and bone grubber’, who had £300 sewn into her ragged clothing. He also mentions Frances Beet who was found to have hidden £800 in her bed and rickety furniture and a character called ‘Poor Joe All Alone’ who had made his living selling matches and ballads and performing magic tricks yet he managed to amass a fortune of £3,000 by the time he died in 1767. Joe left the money he had saved to help support widows and orphans.
Both Robert and I have a particular reason for telling you about rich beggars today, because July 17th is the anniversary of the death of William Stevenson, who died at Kilmarnock in 1817. I have no idea when he was born, possibly some time around 1730. Stevenson was trained as a mason, but spent the greater part of his life begging. Up until his last illness, the only thing we know about him was that he and his wife had separated. They must had hated each other a lot, because they had made an agreement that if one of them ever proposed they got back together, they would pay the other £100. As far as we know, they never saw each other again.
Stevenson fell ill at the age of eighty-five and was confined to bed. His chief concern was that what little money he had scraped together would not last. But it did. When he knew he was close to death, he began to make arrangements for a grand send off. He sent for a baker and ordered twelve dozen funeral cakes and a great quantity of sugar biscuits. He ordered wine and liquor in correspondingly large amounts and said that more of both should be purchased if that proved to be insufficient. Next, he sent for a joiner and ordered himself an expensive coffin. Then the gravedigger, and asked for a roomy grave in a dry and comfortable corner. He told an old lady who had been looking after him where she might find £9 hidden in his home to pay for all the expenses, and assured her that she had been remembered in his will. He died shortly afterwards and, when his room was searched they found a bag of silver pieces, more coins hidden in a heap of old rags and £300 hidden in a trunk. They also found bonds and securities. His fortune amounted to around £900. To the old lady, he left £20, which may not sound like much but, in today’s money, that’s close to £1,800.
William Stevenson lay in state for four days while his distant relatives were gathered to attend his funeral. But it was not a sombre affair. It was a party. Whole families were invited. He was visited by the young and the old, by beggars and poor tradesmen. The older attendees found they had each been left sixpence, the younger ones, threepence. After the burial, everyone repaired to a barn, where most of them got so drunk that they had to be helped home. Some did not make it home at all, but fell asleep on a pile of corn sacks. The only account I could find of William’s funeral was by someone who clearly didn’t approve of it. It uses words like ‘wicked’, ‘careless’ and ‘waste’. It also goes on to say that those who missed the celebrations threatened to dig up his body so that they could give him another send off. They left him where he was, but apparently, the party continued for several weeks. That doesn’t sound like a waste to me. I think when a funeral is such fun that you want to do it all over again – that’s a pretty good funeral.
Posted on July 17, 2016 July 17, 2016 Categories brilliant eccentrics, british and brilliant, dead brilliantTags british isles, burial, funeral, kilmarnock, miser, robert chambers, scotland, william stevensonLeave a comment on Beggars Banquet
Today, I am celebrating the birthday of Robert Chambers who was born in Peebles in the Scottish Borders in 1802. He and his brother William founded W & R Chambers Publishing, who eventually produced Chambers Dictionary. That’s my favourite dictionary, but that’s not why I wanted to tell you about him. I discovered Robert a year ago when I was writing on Tumblr and he has been with me almost every day since. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Both Robert and his brother were born with six fingers and six toes. Both had undergone surgery to remove the extra digits but one of Robert’s operations had left him lame. So he was not an active child, but became instead a great devourer of knowledge. When he found a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica in his father’s attic, it kept him entertained for years. His brother later said of him: “the acquisition of knowledge was with him the highest of earthly enjoyments.” I have learned so many interesting things whilst researching this blog that I’m inclined to agree.
The family moved to Edinburgh in 1813 and when Robert was sixteen he began to run a second hand book stall on Leith Walk. When his brother William bought a printing press, they began to publish magazines together, with Robert providing the content. In 1832 they began to produce a weekly magazine called ‘The Edinburgh Journal’. It cost one penny and included articles about history, religion, language, and science.
In 1844 he produced a book called ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’. It began by explaining the formation of the solar system, continued with the geology of the earth and followed the pattern of increasingly complex lifeforms right the way up to humans. He talked about how one species of creature may have arisen from another. He would have referred to it as the transmutation of species, we would now call it evolution. This was all very controversial and ungodly at the time and Robert went to great lengths to conceal his authorship. He dictated it to his wife, so the manuscript would be in her handwriting and then sent it to a different publisher. It brings together a lot of ideas that were around at the time regarding how our world came to be as it is. Some of the experiments he cites are questionable, such as one which suggests insects can be made to arise spontaneously from electricity. But his examination of fossil records, which points out that fossils of simpler organisms are found in older rocks, is good.
Vestiges quickly became a bestseller. The first edition sold out in only a few days. Over ten years, it sold over 20,000 copies. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln was also impressed by it. Others were not so keen. Such a theory rather cut God out of the equation, which was a pretty shocking claim. Roberts book received a lot of scathing reviews. At least one of his critics thought it was such awful nonsense that it must have been written by a woman. Some of the theories in the book were similar to those being pursued by Charles Darwin. Darwin found some of his explanations a little clunky. He didn’t feel that the, then anonymous, author of Vestiges had really described the environments that caused animals such as a woodpecker to develop in the way it had. But for many years, Vestiges was the only book available in English the explained the theory of evolution. Its reception by its critics may also have been what put Darwin off publishing his ‘Origin of Species’, which appeared fifteen years later. Robert’s authorship of Vestiges was not revealed until 1884, thirteen years after his death.
Robert Chambers’ last work was ‘Chambers Book of Days’ published in 1864. It was subtitled: ‘A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character’. It’s a massive work that runs to two volumes each with more than 840 pages. It contains, for each day of the year, a list of the births and deaths of notable people and a list of the saints associated with that day. Then underneath are a number of short essays about the some of the people, or the events that happened on that date. When I discovered Robert, I was happy to have found a kindred spirit. His undertaking was much larger than my meagre effort. He wrote around two thousand essays for his ‘Book of Days’ and he didn’t even have the internet to help him. It seems his family all thought the huge amount of work he put into his book contributed to his early death in 1871. Despite this warning from history, I have pressed on with my project and now have only twelve days to go.
Robert has helped me out of many a hole in this last year. When Wikipedia failed me, I turned to him. Sometimes, I’ve felt he was up against the same problems as me when seeking something interesting to say about a particular date. But he has also introduced me to some wonderful characters. Without him, I would not know so much about mountebanks, eighteenth century bets and weird burials. You can find Chambers Book of Days, in a searchable format here. If you want to know what he has to say about today, I recommend you scroll to the bottom and read ‘Child Suckled by Goat.’
Posted on July 10, 2016 July 10, 2016 Categories brilliant writers, british and brilliantTags book of days, edinburgh, evolution, robert chambers, scotland1 Comment on Kindred Spirit
Sepulchral Vagaries
Today is the anniversary of the death of Captain Thomas Backhouse who died on this day in 1800. In life, he was a soldier who served in Europe, India and the Philippines. But today’s post is not about his life. Today I am looking at unusual burials, and Captain Backhouse is my first example.
When Thomas Backhouse retired to Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, he declared that he would “have nothing to do with the church or the churchyard”. Instead, he began to build himself a tomb. It was around eleven feet square, built of flint and bricks. The walls tapered to a pyramid and were finished at the top with a flat stone about three feet square. I assume that the tomb is now long gone, as this is the only picture of it that I could find. “Bury me there,” he said, “in my own wood on the hill, and my sword with me, and I’ll defy all the evil spirits in existence to injure me.” When the captain died, his body was placed in a coffin, along with his sword and stood on end in a niche in the wall. Presumably so the evil spirits didn’t catch him lying down. Then, the niche was bricked up. His body remained there, standing to attention, for seven years, until one of his sons returned from India and had his body removed to the churchyard.
This gave rise to a tale among the villagers that the old man’s body was guarding the property until his son came to take possession of it, and also that his ghost still haunted the mausoleum. There is a splendid tale about some boys who were out in the woods when they came upon the tomb. One said to another : “Jack, I’ll lay you a penny you dursn’t put your head into that window, and shout out, Old Backhouse.” The boy took the challenge. He thrust his head through the window and yelled “Old….” That was as far as he got. The boys outside heard the screams, they saw him kick and struggle, they saw that something had a hold of him and that he couldn’t get away. They all ran away, terrified.
This is what really happened. When Jack put his head in at the window, his first shout had roused an owl that had taken up residence there. The owl was also frightened, and it’s first instinct was to make for the only exit – the window. Jack, seeing it’s great pale face hurtling towards him, thought it really was the ghost of Old Backhouse. The window was of a Gothic design, pointed at the top. He had jerked up his head to get away and it had become lodged in the top of the window. So Jack was stuck in the window and the owl inside was flying round screeching and making occasional lunges at his face. Luckily, some men, working in a nearby field, heard the frightened yells of his friends and went to help him. They pulled him out. He was unconscious and had to be carried home. Luckily he made a full recovery, although for several days there was concern that: “his intellect was impaired”. Though he certainly never stuck his head in Backhouse’s tomb again, so maybe his intellect was improved if anything.
The other really weird burial I want to tell you about today is that of Reverend Langton Freeman of Whilton, Northamptonshire. He died on October 9th 1784 and, as this year long project of mine will be up in just over a month, I won’t be here to tell you about it then. So let’s look at him now. In fact, I can let him speak for himself about how he wanted his body disposed of. The following is an extract from his will:
“…first, for four or five days after my decease, and until my body grows offensive, I would not be removed out of the place or bed I shall die on. And then I would be carried or laid in the same bed, decently and privately, in the summer house now erected in the garden belonging to the dwelling house, where I now inhabit in Whilton aforesaid, and to be laid in the same bed there, with all the appurtenances thereto belonging; and to be wrapped in a strong, double winding sheet, and in all other respects to be interred as near as may be to the description we receive in Holy Scripture of our Saviour’s burial. The doors and windows to be locked up and bolted, and to be kept as near in the same manner and state they shall be in at the time of my decease. And I desire that the building, or summer house, shall be planted around with evergreen plants, and fenced off with iron or oak pales, and painted of a dark blue colour; and for the due performance of this, in manner aforesaid, and for keeping the building ever the same, with the evergreen plants and rails in proper and decent repair,”
All this seems to have gone ahead as he requested. I have this story, and the other from Robert Chambers ‘Book of Days’ which was published in 1864. He tells us that until relatively recently, the summerhouse was still surrounded by trees, but they had now been cut down. There was a hole in the roof and, two years before he was writing his book, some men had climbed in to have a look round. His body was still there and still intact.
I have stolen my title for today’s post from Robert Chambers. He has quite a lot to say on the subject. If you want to read about more unusual burials, you can visit Robert here. He will tell you about a farmer, named Trigg, who had his body encased in lead and set into one of the roof beams in his barn. Or Geoffrey de Manville, the 1st Earl of Essex, who could not be buried because he had been excommunicated. His body was taken by the Knights Templar. They put it in a lead coffin and hung it in a tree in their garden until they had received permission from the Pope to bury it. They buried it at a new church they had built themselves in the City of London. A cursory search of the internet tells me that he died in 1144, but the new church was not consecrated until 1185, so he was in that tree for a really long time. I don’t have a picture of the tree, but here is the church, which is still standing…
Posted on June 21, 2016 July 10, 2016 Categories brilliant eccentrics, british and brilliant, dead brilliantTags british isles, captain thomas backhouse, eccentric, geoffrey de manville, great missenden, knights templar, london, reverend langton freeman, robert chambers, trigg, unusual burials, whiltonLeave a comment on Sepulchral Vagaries
Away with the Showfolk
As I hinted the other day, I am still separated from all my notes for this blog because I recklessly tried to upgrade my laptop to windows 10 and it didn’t like it. I know I had something planned for today, but can’t for the life of me remember what it was. So I had a look at what Robert Chambers had to say about April 14th, back in 1864, in his ‘Book Of Days’.
Robert tells us that, on this day in 1684, a notice was published suppressing all ballad singers, rope dancers and mountebanks who did not have a licence to perform from the Master of Revels. At that time the Master of Revels was Thomas Killigrew, who I feel certain I’ve mentioned before. A rope dancer, I discovered, is a tightrope walker. Robert has quite a lot to say about mountebanks. I knew the term referred to some sort of scurrilous person, but according to him they seem to have been specifically showmen who travelled about selling fake medical cures. They did not work alone. As well as having accomplices amongst their audience to come forward and be ‘cured’, their shows seem to have included a harlequin, a clown and possibly a brass band. I learned two names for a clown that I’ve never heard before. They are merry-andrew and jack-pudding. The entertainment value of the shows they put on was well worth the sixpence they charged for whatever quack cures they were selling. Sometimes, they practised dentistry. It seems pulling teeth was a spectator sport back in the day. The brass band was to drown out the cries of the patient.
Robert Chambers mentions several people who I’d like to revisit on another occasion, but for now I want to tell you about a character surnamed Russell who seems, among other things, to have claimed some medical knowledge. I don’t know when this person was born, probably some time in the late 1660s or early 1670s and lived in Streatham, London. Russell died in 1772 and was buried on April 14th. Russell is described as an itinerant vagabond and seems to have lived to be at least a hundred years old. You might have noticed that I’m avoiding the use of a gendered pronoun for this person. The reason is that, in life, everyone believed Russell to be a woman called Elizabeth, but after her death she was found to be a man. What little information I’ve found about Elizabeth Russell is very old and uses the word ‘he’ all the way through, but as Ms Russell chose to live as a woman, I’m going to stick with ‘she’.
An examination of church registers reveals that her father, John Russell had two sons: William in 1668 and John in 1672. If Elizabeth was born John, she lived to be 100, if William, she was 104. Elizabeth herself believed that she was 108. In 1770 she acquired a copy of a certificate of baptism belonging to her sister Elizabeth who may have died in infancy or just moved away. Elizabeth Russell seems to have taken up a travelling life with ‘strollers and vagabonds’ and she travelled all over Europe. Sometimes she travelled in the company of another once famous, now forgotten vagabond, Bamfylde Moore Carew. In later life, she settled in Chipstead in Kent, where she kept a large shop. She also travelled the countryside hawking her wears along with a man she said was her husband. In fact, she changed her surname to his and was known as ‘Bet Page’. I have been unable to find out exactly what it was that she sold. Googling ‘Bet Page’ is hopeless, you just end up with loads of gambling websites. But I did find out that she worked with travelling physicians and learned their ways.
She had a good reputation as both a healer and an astrologer. She was also an excellent seamstress who could sew a mean shirt. Elizabeth could have lived comfortably on what she earned, but spent most of it in the alehouse, buying drinks for herself and her friends. It’s pretty amazing that, over two hundred years later, we know anything at all about her, but she really came to attention because she was so very old. She became a frequent visitor to Henry Thrale, the MP for Southwark and it was at his house that she met Samuel Johnson. Doctor Johnson enjoyed talking with her very much. He found her shrewd, sensible and to have an excellent memory, despite her advanced age.
Elizabeth died very suddenly and everyone was astounded when it was discovered that she had been a man. Elizabeth had been a woman for as long as anyone could remember. I’ve no idea what prompted her to live as a woman. Whether it was what she actually wanted or whether it was just a really good disguise, she certainly had everyone fooled. She often used to share the bed of her landlady when a new lodger came along unexpectedly. Tantalisingly she is described as having a: ‘wildness and eccentricity… which seemed to border on insanity’ but no one seems to have gone into any detail about how this manifested itself.
Posted on April 14, 2016 July 10, 2016 Categories brilliant eccentrics, brilliant women, british and brilliantTags british isles, chambers book of days, elizabeth russell, london, mountebank, robert chambers, samuel johnsonLeave a comment on Away with the Showfolk
Today is Candlemas and, in the northern hemisphere, we should be over the worst of the winter. At least in terms of unacceptable day length, there could still be plenty of cold weather ahead. Today we are half way between the solstice and the equinox. All the candles that will be used in services throughout the year are brought into church to be blessed at Candlemas. It also commemorates two events. The presentation of the infant Jesus to God in the Temple at Jerusalem and the ritual purification of Mary forty days after giving birth. Women were considered unclean for forty days after giving birth to a son. If Jesus had been a girl, she would have been unclean for sixty days.
Like most Christian festivals, it’s roots are much older. In Ancient Rome, February 2nd was commemorated as the day that Pluto, the god of the underworld carried away Proserpene (in Greek, Persephone). Her mother Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and fertility, and her female attendants searched everywhere for her with torches and candles. When she was found in his kingdom, Pluto agreed to let her return to her earthly home, but first he made her eat six pomegranate seeds. Anyone who ate the food of the dead, could not return to the land of the living in any permanent way, so Proserpene could return to her mother for six months of every year, the other six months she must spend in the underworld with Pluto. This is clearly a myth about the changing seasons. In Spring, Ceres welcomes her daughter and everything begins to grow. But when she has to leave again everything dies and we have Winter. In Rome, the event was celebrated annually with a procession of torches and candles. Also, in this month, they had a festival called Februa, after which this month is named. They carried candles to all parts of the city in a ritual act of purification. So it’s easy to see how the stories of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary fitted in well with an existing tradition. Whether you are welcoming Jesus as the Light of the World, or searching for the returning spring; celebrating the purification of Mary, or driving out some lingering spirits left over from the old year, a candle or two wouldn’t go amiss.
There is also a pretty widespread superstition connected with Candlemas. The weather on that day is supposed to predict how long the winter will last. If the weather is fine, it means that winter is far from over and the crops that year will be bad. If it snows and the weather is terrible, it means an early spring. Robert Chambers gave us a lovely Scottish rhyme about it when wrote about Candlemas in his ‘Book of Days’ in 1864:
If Candlemass day be dry and fair,
The half o’ winter’s to come and mair;
If Candlemass day be wet and foul,
The half o’ winter’s gave at Yule.’
He tells us that this belief existed throughout Europe and in Germany, on February 2nd, a shepherd would rather see a wolf in his stable than the sunshine. He also says that the Germans believed that the badger will look out of his sett on Candlemas Day. If it is snowing, he will come out and go hunting. But if the sun is shining, he will go inside and go back to sleep because he knows winter isn’t over. This same superstition crossed the Atlantic with the Pennsylvania Dutch. Only they don’t use the badger to foretell the weather. They have a groundhog. Today is also Groundhog Day. There are several weather predicting groundhogs in the United States and Canada. The most famous is probably Punxsutawney Phil. With great ceremony, he will emerge from his temporary home on Gobbler’s Knob, just outside the town of Punxsutawney. He will be attended by several gentleman in top hats. If Phil sees his shadow, he will return to his hole and there will be six more weeks of winter. If Phil does not see his shadow, he has predicted an early spring. The Groundhog Club, who attend him tell us that Phil speaks his prediction in a language called ‘groundhogese’ that only the president of the club can understand. The president then interprets it for the rest of the world. They further insist that there has only ever been one Punxsutawney Phil and that the same animal has been making his predictions since 1886.
In 2013, a man from Ohio issued an indictment against Phil when he wrongly predicted an early spring. He called for the death penalty. But no such indictment was issued against Ohio’s own prediction groundhog Buckeye Chuck, who also failed to see his shadow. Punxsutawaney Phil doesn’t always get it right. Probably he gets it right less than half of the time. But then, he does spend the rest of the year living in a library, so maybe he’s a bit out of touch.
Thomas Browne mentions the weather-lore prediction as well in his book ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ first published in 1646. He says: “…there is a general tradition in most parts of Europe, that inferreth the coldness of the succeeding winter from the shining of the sun on Candlemas-day”. It is a large and sprawling work with no index, so I haven’t been able to find what else he had to say about it. But as the book is alternately titled ‘Vulgar Errors’, I presume he thought it was all nonsense too.
Posted on February 2, 2016 July 10, 2016 Categories brilliant americans, brilliant europeans, brilliant festival, brilliant gods, brilliant romans, british and brilliantTags america, ancient rome, british isles, candlemas, europe, groundhog day, pseudodoxia epidemica, punxsutawney phil, robert chambers, thomas browne1 Comment on Light and Shadow
Here’s What You Could Have Won
There’s been a lot of fuss recently about the British National Lottery, which has recently increased the number of balls from forty-nine, to fifty-nine, decreasing the chances of winning the top prize from one in fourteen million to one in forty-five million. The first English lottery, which was drawn, or rather began to be drawn, on this day in 1569 had much better odds. Everyone won a prize. Also all the money that was raised was spent on prizes. 40,000 lots were sold at ten shillings each. That meant it raised £20,000. The top prize was worth £5,000 made up of £3,000 in cash £700 in silver and gold plate and the rest in tapestries and expensive fabric. The many smaller prizes were either luxury goods or a small cash prize. I imagine you’re wondering how anyone profited by this. Well, they didn’t, not really. But rather than waiting till the end of the week to find out if you’d won, the ticket holders had to wait three years. The tickets had been sold in 1566. What the money did do was provide an interest free loan for the government which was used for the: “reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme, and towardes such other publique good workes”. Specifically it was used to strengthen our ports at a time when England was competing with Spain, Holland and Portugal to set up colonies overseas and establish export markets.
To promote the lottery, scrolls were posted all over the country showing drawings of the prizes on offer. Despite the tempting prizes and the assurance that no one would lose, ticket sales were slow . Queen Elizabeth was forced to offer other inducements to ticket holders. Anyone with a ticket could visit certain towns in the kingdom and do anything they liked there for seven days, without fear of arrest. Just so long as it wasn’t treason, murder or piracy. The drawing of the lottery began on January 11th outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Each ticket had to be matched against a prize and recorded. It took a really long time. The lottery continued to be drawn day and night until May 6th. I’m afraid I don’t know who won the big prize.
It can’t have been a huge success, Because the second ever English lottery seems not to have taken place until 1585. it was to win a rather splendid suit of armour. We know that in 1612, James I granted a lottery to raise funds for a colony in Virginia which was won by a poor tailor, so that’s nice. Lotteries really took off in the reign of Charles II. The government had learned by this time that they could make far more money if they included ‘blanks’ in the draw, which meant there were people who didn’t win anything at all. They would raise money for a scheme by selling £10 shares in the lottery to brokers who actually paid around £16 for them. The brokers then offered the tickets to the public for about £20. In practice, not many people could afford to buy a whole ticket and it was common for them to sell a person half a ticket, a quarter, an eighth, even a sixteenth. The money they could get from sixteen people for a sixteenth share would be more than the £20 they could get for a whole share, and they made the most money this way. What you have here, in essence, is a stock market.
Lottery brokers would vie with each other for custom by advertising how many previous winners they had sold tickets to. As though, just because they had once had a couple of winners, they were somehow lucky and would be favoured again. One firm of lottery ticket contractors paid an old woman £50 a year to become a nominal director simply because her name was Mrs. Goodluck. Then, as now, people had their favourite lucky numbers. Some people won and their stories were recorded: The baby who won £1000 the day after his birth; an innkeeper who won £20,000 and bought a new coach and horses for the coachman who brought him his ticket, but mostly they lost. The real winners were the government and the brokers. By 1826 people had got a bit fed up with the way the lottery was run and the whole thing rather imploded. Robert Chamber’s, in his Book of Days has rather a lot to say about lotteries on his entry for this day. Writing in 1864, he can’t believe people could ever have been so stupid as to think they had a chance of winning. I wonder what he would think if he could see us now?
Posted on January 11, 2016 July 10, 2016 Categories british and brilliantTags british isles, chambers book of days, lottery, robert chambersLeave a comment on Here’s What You Could Have Won
I Bet You
Today I have been referring to Chambers Book of Days, which is a massive two volume work written by Robert Chambers and published in 1864. It takes each day of the year, in chronological order, mentions notable births, deaths and saints days and includes several longer articles on events connected with that day. So, as you might imagine, I like him a lot.
There are two basic problems related to researching this blog. Firstly, I am sometimes presented with a long list of completely awful things that happened on a certain day. This is dispiriting, and on those days Robert has often presented me with some forgotten individual or event which has escaped the wikipedia day lists. The second problem is called ‘falling down a wikipedia hole’ when I become so distracted by following links that have nothing to do with the original story but are none the less fascinating. Robert didn’t have the internet, but something similar seems to happen to him occasionally. Just as he seems to be near finishing recording the days events, he will find a topic that sends him off at a complete tangent.
Today’s entry is a good example. He has a small story about a man called Foster Powell who, on November 29th 1773, set off to walk from London to York and back again. It took him three days to walk there, and three days to walk back. He did this for a bet and won a hundred guineas for his effort. This leads Chambers to take a look at other mad bets in history and gives me the opportunity to share a few of them.
Sir Walter Raleigh once won a wager against Queen Elizabeth I about the weight of smoke contained in a pound of tobacco, they weighed out the tobacco, set fire to it and then weighed the ashes. By subtracting the weight of the ashes from the original pound they assumed they had calculated the weight of the smoke. Then there was a gentleman named Corbet, about whom we know nothing except for the fact he made a bet that his leg was the handsomest in the whole kingdom. Apparently he won and, in 1864 at least, his family still had a picture showing how the legs of the various claimants were measured.
In 1806 in York two men called Thomas Hodgson and Samuel Whitehead bet each other five shillings which of them could dress the most weird. Hodgson chose to fasten bank notes of varying denominations all over his coat and waistcoat and a row of five guinea notes and a netted purse of gold on his hat. On his back he had attached a sign saying ‘John Bull’ Whitehead appeared dressed half as a white woman and half as a black man. On one side he wore a silk stocking and slipper and had painted one half of his face. On the other he wore half a gaudy, long tailed, linen coat, half a pair of leather breeches, a boot and spur. I think the judges made the wrong decision because they awarded the wager to Hodgson. Maybe they were distracted by the showy display of wealth. Then there was the unnamed man who laid a wager that he could stand all day on London Bridge with a tray of sovereigns fresh from the royal mint, offering them for sale at a penny each, and that he would be unable to sell them. He won, he wasn’t able to shift a single one.
There was the case of John James Heidegger, Master of Revels to George II. He was not a good looking man, but took this fact with good humour. He bet his friend, the Earl of Chesterfield, that he could not produce an uglier person than himself in the whole of London. A search was made and the earl presented a very old lady from the neighbourhood of St Giles who was, at first sight, as poorly blessed by good looks as himself. But then Heidegger asked if he might put on the lady’s bonnet, and everyone had to agree that he had won his bet.
One last example from Robert Chambers exuberant list is a man who bet his friend that he dared go into the crypt at Westminster Abbey at midnight. To prove he had been there, he would stick a fork in one of the coffins. He accomplished this, but as he turned to leave he felt something pull at him. He was so scared that he fainted. After a while, his friend came to look for him, found him on the floor and revived him. It turned out that as he tried to walk away, the fork had caught on the hem of his cloak.
I can’t really leave the subject of historical bets without mentioning someone else who is similarly fascinated by these odd wagers. In fact, he’s made a couple of series for the BBC about them. Tim FitzHigham has also unwittingly provided me with a couple of colourful characters for this blog. So, this might not make much sense, but here he is with my friend Bob recreating a bet to find out whether a man can run faster than a racehorse.
Posted on November 29, 2015 Categories brilliant eccentrics, british and brilliantTags betting, bob slayer, british isles, eccentric, robert chambers, tim fitzhigham, wagersLeave a comment on I Bet You
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Charles Munch Boston Symphony Orchestra
Hector Berlioz, “Overture to Beatrice and Benedict.” Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Munch RCA/Sony Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “Hamlet” Fantasy Overture. New York Philharmonic,
Overture "Carnival", Op. 92, Symphony #9/RCA Living Stereo Hybrid Multichannel SACD 82876-66376-2 Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner
Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), American symphony orchestra based in Boston, founded in 1881 by Henry Lee Higginson. The orchestra achieved renown for its interpretations of the French repertoire under such conductors as Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch and for its championing of contemporary music.
Mr. Perry was associated with the Boston Symphony during the tenures of five music directors, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg and Seiji Ozawa. After his.
Date Time Title Artist Length ; 1/31/2019: 12:00:33 AM: TCHAIKOVSKY: Serenade/Strings in C: I: SLSO / Leonard Slatkin: 9:30: 1/31/2019: 12:10:03 AM: TCHAIKOVSKY.
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SPECIAL PROGRAM: Composer of the Week The Literary Muse Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) Episode 2 of 5. Donald Macleod explores the life and music of Hector Berlioz.
as we announce the appointment of Andris Nelsons as the next Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra," said Mark Volpe. "With the appointment of such legendary leaders as Serge Koussevitzky,
Please send reports of such problems to [email protected] The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch began its final visit of the season at Carnegie Hall last night, but even though.
Musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This website has two listings of musicians of the great Boston Symphony Orchestra: – A listing of the Principal Musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra with short biographical notes and photographs. To go to this list of the Principal BSO musicians, click: Principal Musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Munch Paints La Mer Charles Munch was an excitable. There is an organic quality to his 1956 interpretation of La Mer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra — it feels "live", urgent and quite passionat.
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In his early years, Dutoit graduated from the Conservatoire de musique de Genève, where he won first prize in conducting, and studied under French conductor Charles Munch of the Boston Symphony.
Charles Dutoit had. I met him in Boston, when I was a student, when Munch was conducting the first performance of his Second Symphony [in 1959], which was commissioned by the Boston Symphony.
The cause was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Firth joined the Boston Symphony in 1952, when he was 21 and was the orchestra’s principal timpanist for more than 40 years, working under such acclaimed conductor.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra has anointed Andris Nelsons its new. The BSO has not always been so friendly toward youth, having turned down Leonard Bernstein for Charles Munch and Michael Tilson Th.
Principal Cellos of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. 1886 – 1892 Victor August Herbert. Victor Herbert was born in Dublin in February 1, 1859. Victor’s father Edward Herbert died when Victor was an infant, and subsequently, Victor and his mother Fanny Lover moved to London.
Get The Beat Dance Competition Singapore It’s unfair to base arguments against mid-major contenders on the limited competition in. Furman beat Villanova, while Lipscomb defeated TCU by nine points in nonconference play. Power Five squads. Onyeka likes the vibe “a lot better” because it’s by a beautiful beach and not just in crummy Singapore. Yuck, who likes stunning Singapore, amirite? Right
And they had their reasons. If Mr. Ozawa was in trouble, so was the Boston Symphony, which had lost much of its preeminence after Charles Munch retired. It was simply not playing as well as it had. An.
and the Denver Symphony Orchestra before joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra, ascending to become its Concertmaster in 1962 during the last year of Charles Munch’s conductorship. In the subsequent.
Sonata for Flute and Orchestra Francis Poulenc Steuart Bedford Scottish Chamber Orchestra Jennifer Stinton, flute
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts.It is one of the five major American symphony orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five".Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston’s Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at Tanglewood. Andris Nelsons is the current music director of the BSO.
South Dakota Symphony Orchestra Schedule The Black Hills Symphony Orchestra performs at the Rapid City Performing Arts Center, located in Rapid City, South Dakota. Hours/Seasons Concerts begin at 7:30pm, except for the New Year’s performance, which begins at 8pm. Lord, thou has been our refuge Ralph Vaughan Williams Andrew Nethsingha Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge David Blackadder, trumpet Tickets:
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His music was championed by Charles Munch, and was added to the repertoire of the Boston Symphony Orchestra while Munch was conductor. The “Fanfares Liturgiques,” which opened the program in brilliant.
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch: Munch’s driving tempos and innate feeling for Franck’s symphonic drama make this one of the most satisfying performances available. Hilversum Radio.
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Even such respected ensembles as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and Philadelphia. Jean Martinon, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Seiji Ozawa, Fritz Reiner, Artur Rodzinski, Georg.
Charles Munch will direct an extra concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra this Sunday at 8:30 p.m. at Symphony Hall, bringing to a close the BSO’s 75th season. The program will be Beethoven’s.
In the heart of the city is Boston Common, America’s oldest park and the start of the Freedom Trail.In this large green space, which is much used by locals year-round, are various monuments and the Central Burying Ground of 1756.
(Boston Symphony Orchestra, New England Conservatory Chorus & Alumni Chorus, Charles Munch, conductor; RCA Gold Seal). Ravel: ”Daphnis et Chloe”; ”Valses nobles et sentimentales” (London Symphony.
Please send reports of such problems to [email protected] The Boston Symphony Orchestra, under Charles Munch, gave superb performances of Bach’s "Art of the Fugue" and Strauss’ "Symphonia.
Charles Munch (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl mynʃ]; born Charles Münch; 26 September 1891 – 6 November 1968) was an Alsacian, German-born symphonic conductor and violinist.Noted for his mastery of the French orchestral repertoire, he was best known as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Faust biography Founded in Wümme, Germany in 1971 – Disbanded in 1975 – Regrouped since 1990 (from 2004 as two bands) Considered by many music historians as one of the most important group out of Germany, FAUST were certainly ahead of their time.
Pierre Monteux: Franck Symphony in D minor (with works by Berlioz. that made this partnership legendary. Charles Munch: Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, "Organ" (with works by Poulenc and Franck). (Bost.
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Woman-led Conservatism
By Christopher Chantrill
I admit it. I was wrong. When I wrote about the importance of "woman-centered" conservatism back in 2007, here, in 2008, here, and this year, here, I was thinking about a continuing of the old conservatism, but centered on the issues that matter most to women: health, education, and welfare.
It was an easy mistake to make. But it was wrong. Now we know what is really going to happen. Indeed it is happening before our very eyes. The new conservatism is going to be a "woman-led" conservatism.
No doubt when our liberal friends get to hear of this they will come up with a suitable pejorative. But it will probably be more insulting than "chick-con."
The scales fell off my eyes as I was reading Steven F. Hayward's article in the Washingon Post enticingly titled (for liberals) "Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?" Where are all the serious conservative titles that used to crowd the best-seller list, Hayward mourned? Your Glenn Becks, your Ann Coulters, your Michelle Malkins don't quite make the grade, at least not for Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan.
But wait a minute. What about all the serious titles by conservative women that have been coming out in recent years? I am thinking of titles like Return to Modesty by Wendy Shalit, The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us by Danielle Crittenden. Those are just the more popular ones. There is also Smart Sex by Jennifer Roeback Morse and Domestic Tranquility by F. Carolyn Graglia.
It's true that these titles haven't been best-sellers on the scale of George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty and Charles Murray's Losing Ground that scored big in the 1980s. Anyway, Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption is a best-seller, a solid investigative work, and should be a bible for any young conservative activist that can't wait to go underground into Chicago politics armed with a Flip MinoHD.
The woman-led conservative future is not just about conservative books written by women. It is about political activism led by women.
Let's stop worrying about losing the battle of Web 2.0. The experience of the last few months shows that conservative activists know how to use the on-line social networking tools as well as liberals. We now know how the Tea Parties got started. It wasn't astroturf manufacturers in Washington DC or racists in Racine, WI. It was women organizing with social network sites like Smart Girl Politics.
A couple of weeks ago the Smart Girl Nation held their first Smart Girl Politics summit in Nashville, TN. Then there's NeW, the Network of enlightened Women, celebrating its fifth birthday. The NeW women are conservative college women organizing on campuses all over the US to read conservative titles from Danielle Crittenden and Christina Hoff Sommers and to challenge liberal monstrosities like The Vagina Monologues. No doubt there are hundreds of similar efforts that are operating below the radar.
For all the celebration of women's liberation, the modern world has been difficult for women. The characteristic organizations -- the corporation and the family firm -- have performed miracles in taming the natural male urge for war, booty, and rapine. Now instead of battling for lebensraum, men fight for market share and trophy wives. For those less courageous there's the hierarchical bureaucracy, preferred by absolute monarchies, religious orthodoxies, armies, and welfare states.
Women specialize in social relations. Every women lives at the center of a web of social relations; she spends a good part of her life maintaining those social relations by conversation and the exchange of small gifts. Over the last century liberals have forcibly wrecked the gossamer threads of these webs. To paraphrase Marx, liberals have "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of [loving] fervour, of [emotional] enthusiasm, of [feminine] sentimentalism, in the icy water" of political power. That is why "society," "social," "societal," "socialism" and all the "soc-" words have come to mean not convivial and communal relations but the reduction of all social relations into cruel politics and power.
Another word for social relations is social networking. And in social networking is power of a different kind. It is not the male power of physical force, of bureaucratic offices, armed forces, and market valuations. It is the kind of power that women exert and have always exerted through their social relations. In Spirit and Flesh, James M. Ault related how this worked in a fundamentalist Christian church in Worcester, MA. All the church offices were held by men, he explained, but that didn't mean that the men held all the power. The women controlled the church and they controlled it through their gossip networks. In their daily conversations the women defined social reality, who had done what to whom, and what the church community should do about it.
To imagine what liberal women could do with the social networking tools on the internet is frightening. Fortunately they are all at work, trying to prove that gender is a social construct. To realize what conservative women could do as they ride the crest of the social networking wave in the months and years ahead is awe-inspiring.
You will notice that I have said nothing about a certain woman conservative leader whose unpublished book is, at the moment of writing, #1 on the Amazon bestseller list.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
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Mbala, Zambia
Mbala Old Prison
This old brick building has held everyone from prisoners of war to freedom fighters during its turbulent history.
Mbala Old Prison PatTheGreat (Atlas Obscura User)
The sign for Mbala Old Prison. PatTheGreat (Atlas Obscura User)
This abandoned red-brick building, known as the Mbala Old Prison, was built in 1912 by the British colonial administration back when Mbala (known then as Abercorn) was the seat of the colonial presence in Northern Rhodesia. It is now maintained as a historic building and a Zambian National Monument due to its long and poignant history.
Top Places in Mbala
Mbala Surrender Monument
A memorial in the middle of a roundabout marks the spot where German forces formally surrendered, finally ending World War I in Africa.
-8.8483, 31.3699
Added by PatTheGreat
Stevenson Road
This little-known colonial road helped determine the Zambia-Tanzania border.
Itimbwe Gorge
A series of caves within the gorge hold artifacts from the Stone Age.
See more things to do in Mbala »
When World War I broke out in 1914, the Mbala prison was turned into a defense post for the Northern Rhodesia Police, which was the colonial military. The site was well-suited to repel German attacks over the nearby border from German East Africa (modern-day Tanzania). As the fighting progressed, the Old Prison was used to house German prisoners of war.
When the war ended in 1918, the prison was then used to accommodate German Askaris—Africans drafted as soldiers to fight for the colonial powers—until they could be repatriated to their homelands. Later, prominent freedom fighters such as Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe, Zambia’s first vice president, were imprisoned here. Today the building stands empty and disused, preserved as a national monument and one of the oldest prisons in Zambia. Its duties as a prison have been taken over by the new Mbala Prison, located next door.
The prison can be viewed from the street at all times. Visitors interested in learning about the history of Mbala should visit the nearby Moto Moto Museum.
wwiprisonscolonialismwar historyhistory
PatTheGreat
http://www.nor.gov.zm/?page_id=4870
http://www.chipoautumn.com/2017/03/01/a-visit-to-mbala-old-prison/
http://www.kaiserscross.com/188001/363401.html
"The First World War in Northern Rhodesia," published by the Moto Moto Museum
"A Guide to Zambia's Heritage," published by the Zambia National Heritage Conservation Commission
www.kaiserscross.com/188001/363401.html
President Ave
Mbala
to Birmingham, AL, Ukraine, Everglades, Florida, and more.
Mbala Pioneer Cemetery
A small cemetery on a hill overlooking Mbala contains the history of the town's colonial past.
Zombe, Zambia
Fort Zombe
The ruins of a massive World War I fort overlook the border between Zambia and Tanzania.
Doorn, Netherlands
The elegant manor house where Kaiser Wilhelm II lived in exile after World War I.
Added by thkoster
Givenchy-en-Gohelle, France
Canadian National Vimy Memorial
A monument to the thousands of Canadian soldiers who died capturing the French ridge during World War I.
Added by BadRandall
Rouen, France
Tower of Joan of Arc
This medieval tower is all that remains of the castle where Joan of Arc was held before being burned at the stake.
Added by Monsieur Mictlan
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All events for Amnesty International Local Group 500
Amnesty International Local Group 500
May 19 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT
Batch, 3220 Manor Road
Austin, TX United States + Google Map
Our local Austin group meets the Third Sunday of every month starting on 5/19 at Batch, 3220 Manor Road, Austin, to write letters on the latest Urgent Actions and support the work of human rights defenders both locally and internationally. Please come join us!
June 16 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT
August 18 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT
October 20 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT
November 17 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EST
December 15 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EST
January 19, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EST
February 16, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm EST
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Pakistan: Deportation of iconic National Geographic Afghan girl is a grave injustice
Reacting to Pakistan's decision to deport Sharbat Gula, the iconic 'Afghan girl' whose striking portrait adorned a 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine, Amnesty International’s South Asia Director Champa Patel said:
"Pakistan’s decision to deport Sharbat Gula is a grave injustice. For decades, she was known as the world’s most famous refugee and seen as a symbol of Pakistan’s status as a generous host. Now, by sending her back to a country she hasn’t seen in a generation and her children have never known, her plight has become emblematic of Pakistan’s cruel treatment of Afghan refugees.
“By forcing Afghan refugees to return across the border into the arms of an increasingly deadly conflict, Pakistan is in breach of the principle of non-refoulement. It is putting the lives of vulnerable people at risk of serious human rights abuses.”
Sharbat Gula is poised to be deported to Afghanistan after serving a 15-day jail sentence and paying a fine, a special anti-corruption and immigration court in Peshawar ruled today.
She was arrested by Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency on October 26 from her house in the Nauthia area of Peshawar for allegedly forging a Pakistani identity card.
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Kerry Kennedy: Kennedy name didn’t get me acquitted
Kerry Kennedy, center, insisted she didn't "play the Kennedy card" at her trial for driving while impaired. She is photographed here with sister Rory and brother Christopher on July 17, 2012, when she first pleaded not guilty to the charges. Photo Credit: John Meore
March 3, 2014 11:34 AM
Kerry Kennedy insisted Monday that she didn’t “play the Kennedy card” in her recent trial, but rather that she was acquitted on drugged driving charges because she is innocent and had access to “competent counsel.”
“We’ve got to pass legislation which will allow people to have access to competent counsel no matter who they are,” Kennedy told Matt Lauer on “Today.”
Lauer pressed Kennedy, saying, “if your name were Kerry Jones, do you think you would have the same outcome?” Kennedy said that “so many people who have misdemeanors” cannot afford counsel and end up pleading guilty “to something that they didn’t do.”
Kennedy said that the case took 20 months to go through the legal system and cost her a week of work. "I wasn’t going to be fired from my job. And [other people facing these charges] take these pleas, which can really have a devastating impact on their lives. It can harm them in trying to seek a job, in trying to get a loan from a bank, in trying to just rent an apartment.”
Kennedy was charged with one misdemeanor charge of driving while impaired by drugs on July 13, 2012. She said she had accidentally taken an Ambien instead of a thyroid medication. Her attorneys argued she would not have been charged if she had not been part of the Kennedy family. The jury deliberated for just an hour before finding her not guilty.
A plea deal would have hurt Kennedy’s humanitarian work, she told Lauer. She is currently focused on improving the rights of migrant workers.
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Why Amy Is Running
AMY'S PLANS
PART 1: Economic Plan
PART 2: Draining the Swamp
PART 3: Kicking Out The Special Interests
PART 4: Health Care Plan
Issue Videos
Medical Marijuana & Legalization
Teachers' Pensions
Addressing the Opioid Crisis
Kentucky's Economy
Climate change isn’t a theory. It’s a fact.
And it’s not just scientists around the world who know it. The United States military recognizes it – and realizes that it poses a serious challenge to our national security. That’s why our military is already testing, researching, and adapting operations to succeed in these rapidly changing environments.
A changing climate has had and will continue to have hugely disruptive effects not only on the environment, but also on migration patterns, economies, disease vectors, and political unrest around the world. All of these dramatically affect our country’s safety, security and well-being.
We are already experiencing these effects: The Earth is getting warmer. Eight of the last ten summers have each been the hottest in history, and last summer was the hottest ever recorded. Sea levels are rising. This will affect massive numbers of people who live on the world’s coastlines, creating climate refugees, economic challenges, epidemics and pandemics, and geopolitical upheavals on a scale never before seen. Climate change is coming and we can’t afford to look the other way.
Our naval bases around the globe are seeing the consequences now. Ten times a year, floods cripple our Norfolk Naval Base. Key West Naval Air Station – where I learned to air-to-air dogfight in the F/A-18 – will be almost completely under water in the next 70 years. Weather patterns are creating hurricanes, floods, and fires in ways we’ve never seen before and that will both affect and in some cases demand military responses.
Large parts of the world, including the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, are undergoing dramatic desertification at an alarming rate, meaning less food will be produced and large migrations will occur as people will be forced out of the lands they occupy today. In the 20th century, we fought wars over values or economic conflicts; in the 21st century, it will be over food, water and resources.
Another reason climate change is a national security concern is its huge impact on our economy. Rising sea levels will alter global shipping patterns, severe weather will affect the ability of goods to be produced and transported, and markets, particularly for energy, are shifting as nations work to address and mitigate these changes.
All of this is why the Trump Administration’s decision to slash research on sustainable, clean sources of energy is so wrong-headed and concerns me – and should concern every patriotic American.
Both from a security and an economic standpoint, we need to invest in renewable energy. Our military is already one of the biggest proponents of renewable energy research. Why? Because it saves lives – and makes more strategic sense – if forward operating bases overseas do not have to be constantly refueled with traditional forms of energy like petroleum, which require vulnerable ground supply lines and are subject to potentially volatile markets.
Both militarily and economically, the US must be a world leader in renewables investment or we will cede the future energy industry – and our national security – to China, which is developing in this area at a rapid pace.
America should be leading the world in responding to climate change, not running away. The Paris Climate Accords is a global agreement to recognize climate change and pursue a call to action to mitigate its detrimental effects. When President Trump pulled out of the agreement, he not only made an irresponsible move given the trajectory of the global climate, but also severely lessened our power in world leadership. He signified a lack of responsibility and seriousness in protecting our world.
Simply put, “America first” doesn’t work regarding climate change because we don’t live in a bubble. By removing ourselves from the Paris Agreement, we not only turn our back on the rest of the world, but we are turning our back on our own people. We owe it to our fellow Americans to take every measure possible in mitigating the effects of climate change.
But renewable energy research isn’t just something we need to do to respond to a threat – whether security, economic, or environmental – it’s something we should invest in as an opportunity. Renewable energy is both cleaner and more economical in the long-run, and that’s why it has tremendous potential for economic growth and job opportunities across America.
This is especially true for Kentucky. As I discuss in detail in my forthcoming economic plan, Kentucky’s energy future need not be an either/or choice between coal and sustainable sources. We can provide support for our coal communities and boost coal consumption here in Kentucky by using local coal-generated electricity for electric vehicles while we work to transition the energy infrastructure and expertise that we already have to renewables like wind and solar.
Furthermore, renewable energy represents an opportunity not a threat for our state: Kentucky can become a leader in expanding solar and wind production, which will both reduce electricity costs for our families and bring energy-related jobs back to Central Kentucky. We can achieve this in part by leveraging our military bases as national hubs for renewables research, and expanding – not cutting – federal investment in this research.
Because of our location, Central Kentucky can also continue to be a leader in the budding logistics industry by investing in needed electric-vehicle infrastructure, which will itself help produce additional jobs in vehicle manufacturing and energy provision. Such strategies will help contribute to the mitigation of climate change – but they, just as importantly, will help grow our economy and create jobs: not jobs somewhere far away, jobs right here in Kentucky.
In sum, we have the tools right here in Central Kentucky to be leaders not only in the coal economy of the 20th Century, but also in the renewable energy economy of the 21st Century. Renewables research is an opportunity for Kentucky, and we need someone to go to Washington and fight so that when the future economy comes, our district will be its home, just as it was for the energy economy of the past.
The environment shouldn’t be a partisan, political issue. This is a global issue, an American issue, and an issue for Kentucky. It’s about the future of our planet for our children and generations to come. We need leaders that get it.
Amy McGrath for Congress
info@amymcgrathforcongress.com
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The Forty-Two Judges
by Joshua J. Mark
The Forty-Two Judges were the divine beings of the Egyptian after-life who presided over the Hall of Truth where the great god Osiris judged the dead. The soul of the deceased was called upon to render up confession of deeds done while in life and to have the heart weighed in the balance of the scales of justice against the white feather of Ma’at, of truth and harmonious balance. If the deceased person’s heart were lighter than the feather, they were admitted to eternal life in the Field of Reeds; if the heart were found heavier than the feather it was thrown to the floor where it was eaten by the monster Amemait (also known as Ammut, `the gobbler', part lion, part hippopotamus and part crocodile) and the soul of the person would then cease to exist. Non-existence, rather than an after-world of torment, was the greatest fear of the ancient Egyptian.
Although Osiris was the principal judge of the dead, the Forty-Two Judges sat in council with him to determine the worthiness of the soul to enjoy continued existence. They represented the forty-two provinces of Upper and Lower Egypt, and each judge was responsible for considering a particular aspect of the deceased’s conscience. Of these, there were nine great judges, Ra (in his other form of Atum) Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Isis, Nephthys, Horus, and Hathor. Of the other judges, they were depicted as awe-inspiring and terrible beings bearing names such as Crusher of Bones, Eater of Entrails, Double Lion, Stinking Face and Eater of Shades, among others (Bunson). The Forty-Two Judges were not all horrifying and terrible of aspect, however, but would appear to be so to that soul who faced condemnation rather than reward for a life well-lived. The soul was expected to be able to recite the Negative Confession (also known as the Declaration of Innocence) in defense of one's life in order to be considered worthy to pass on to The Field of Reeds.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead provides the most comprehensive picture of the Forty-Two Judges.
The Negative Confession included statements such as: "I have not stolen. I have not slain people. I have not stolen the property of a god. I have not said lies. I have not led anyone astray. I have not caused terror. I have not made anyone hungry." The Egyptian Book of the Dead (the most famous funerary text of ancient Egypt, composed c. 1550 BCE) provides the most comprehensive picture of the Forty-Two Judges as well as spells and the incantation of the Negative Confession. According to the scholar Ikram,
As with the earlier funerary texts, the Book of the Dead served to provision, protect and guide the deceased to the Afterworld, which was largely located in the Field of Reeds, an idealized Egypt. Chapter 125 was an innovation, and perhaps one of the most important spells to be added as it seems to reflect a change in morality. This chapter, accompanied by a vignette, shows the deceased before Osiris and forty-two judges, each representing a different aspect of ma'at. A part of the ritual was to name each judge correctly and give a negative confession (43).
Once the Negative Confession had been made by the soul of the deceased (aided by the spells in the Book of the Dead) and the heart had been weighed in the balance, the Forty-Two Judges met in conference with Osiris, presided over by the god of wisdom, Thoth, to render final judgement. If the soul were considered worthy then, by some accounts, it was directed out of the hall to the creature known as Hraf-haf (meaning He-Who-Looks-Behind-Him) who was an ill-tempered and insulting ferryman whom the deceased had to find some way to be kind and cordial to in order to be rowed to the shores of the Field of Reeds and eternal life. Having passed through the Hall of Truth and, finally, proven themselves worthy through kindness to the un-kind Hraf-Haf, souls would, at last, find peace and enjoy an eternity in bliss. The Field of Reeds perfectly reflected the world one had enjoyed in one's earthly existence, right down to the trees and flowers one had planted, one's home and loved ones. All an ancient Egyptian needed to do to attain this eternal happiness was to have lived a life worthy of approval by Osiris and the Forty-Two Judges.
Joshua J. Mark
A freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy at Marist College, New York, Joshua J. Mark has lived in Greece and Germany and traveled through Egypt. He has taught history, writing, literature, and philosophy at the college level.
Definitions5
The Negative Confession
The Negative Confession (also known as The Declaration of Innocence...
Police in Ancient Egypt
In any society, members of the community recognize they are required...
Ancient Egyptian Law
Ancient Egyptian culture flourished through adherence to tradition...
Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a collection of spells which enable...
Ma'at (pronounced may-et) is the ancient Egyptian goddess of...
The Egyptian Afterlife & The Feather of Truth
Is it possible to have a heart that is lighter than a feather...
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Margaret Bunson. The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. (Random House, NY, 1991)
R.O. Faulkner. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. (British Museum Publications, London, 1972)
Salima Ikram. Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt. (Pearson Education, Ltd, London, 2003)
Mark, J. J. (2012, January 18). The Forty-Two Judges. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.ancient.eu/article/185/
Mark, Joshua J. "The Forty-Two Judges." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Last modified January 18, 2012. https://www.ancient.eu/article/185/.
Mark, Joshua J. "The Forty-Two Judges." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 18 Jan 2012. Web. 15 Jul 2019.
Submitted by Joshua J. Mark, published on 18 January 2012 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.
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News » Zwicker, Lopez & Mukherji Legislation to Help Displaced Professionals from Puerto Rico on Mainland Now Law
Zwicker, Lopez & Mukherji Legislation to Help Displaced Professionals from Puerto Rico on Mainland Now Law
Measure Revises Law on Out-of-State Licenses to Include Professionals from Storm-Ravaged Island
(TRENTON) - Legislation sponsored by Assembly Democrats Andrew Zwicker, Yvonne Lopez and Raj Mukherji to recognize the professional licenses of displaced Puerto Rican doctors, nurses, teachers and other professionals who relocated to New Jersey following Hurricane Maria has been signed into law.
"Prior to Hurricane Maria, New Jersey had one of the highest populations of Puerto Ricans on the mainland. Following the hurricane, we've seen more of our fellow Americans from the island seek safety with family and friends here," said Zwicker (D-Hunterdon/Mercer/Middlesex/Somerset). "As they settle into their new lives in New Jersey, we can and should ensure that men and women from Puerto Rico are treated just as professionals moving here from any state would be, so they're able to continue in their professions and support their families here."
The law (A-1531) revises the section of state law involving the reciprocity process for out-of-state professional and occupational licensing. Currently, licensed professionals from jurisdictions with standards that are substantially equivalent to New Jersey's may work in their respective industries in the state provided they supply the state with proof that an out-of-state license is valid, current and in good standing.
The new law clarifies that the law applies not only to residents of the 50 states but also to individuals with licenses from Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia or any other territory or possession of the United States.
Under the law, verification of licensure must be submitted to the appropriate state licensing board within six months or, in the cases of individuals relocating due to a natural disaster or other catastrophic event, as soon as practicable.
"After losing so much due to Hurricane Maria, people who are qualified to perform a job - and who may have been thriving doing that job in Puerto Rico - shouldn't have to go through the additional stress of repeating coursework and training here in New Jersey," said Lopez (D-Middlesex). "Any American citizen who comes from Puerto Rico and can prove that he or she already did what's required to earn a license to work in New Jersey should be eligible to work in his or her field, and make positive contributions to our state's economy."
"These are highly trained professionals whose documents may have been lost or damaged in the storm or who may not have the funds to undergo retraining and apply for licenses they already earned in Puerto Rico," said Mukherji (D-Hudson). "The tragedy of Hurricane Maria already took so much from these Americans, and we should remove hurdles to securing new employment and facilitate their seamless transition to the next chapter of their lives."
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A dazzling new attraction at the Musée Condé at Chantilly
David Ekserdjian
The Musée Condé at Chantilly, which it takes less than an hour to reach from the heart of Paris via a short train ride from the Gare du Nord, has recently added a notable new attraction to its already illustrious offer to visitors, in the form of an elegant Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques.
Much like London’s Wallace Collection, the Musée Condé in essence does not lend works of art. (Strictly speaking, what it does not lend are pieces from the founding collection of the duc d’Aumale, but in fact these represent the lion’s share of its holdings). In the case of the paintings, this simply means – so to speak – that Mohammed has to go to the mountain, but the same conditions do not apply to works on paper, with the exception of the miraculously beautiful dismembered pages of Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Étienne Chevalier, which are on permanent display.
The new Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques of the Musée Condé at Chantilly
At Chantilly, as elsewhere, works on paper are routinely protected from undue exposure to daylight, but may of course be seen by appointment. The consequence has been that on the whole they have blushed unseen, only known about by the happy few, and only studied in the original by the most determined of specialists. The sheer scale of the collection will therefore no doubt come as a surprise to many, numbering as it does some 4,000 drawings, 5,000 prints, and 1,900 19th-century photographs. Given the eminence of the rest of the collection, its dazzling quality is entirely predictable.
All these hitherto hidden treasures can now enjoy a setting that displays them in style. The five intimate historic spaces which make up the new Cabinet have never previously been open to the public. They originally served as guest rooms for the duc d’Aumale’s closest friends and family, and were appropriately finely appointed. (In the 19th century, most unusually, they even had underfloor heating and ensuite bathrooms). They have now been immaculately restored under the direction of Pierre-Antoine Gatier, and represent a perfect environment for the tranquil contemplation of works on paper.
The new gallery’s inaugural exhibition (until 20 August 2017) is called ‘Bellini Michel-Ange Le Parmesan: L’épanouissement du dessin à la Renaissance’ (‘Bellini, Michelangelo, Parmigianini: The blossoming of Renaissance drawing’) and is accompanied by a compact but highly informative and fully illustrated scholarly catalogue by Mathieu Deldicque. In spite of its title, as a matter of fact this show is a generous anthology of no fewer than 45 sheets, in which the big three of Giovanni Bellini, Michelangelo, and Parmigianino are joined by a whole array of other artists, ranging from major figures such as Fra Bartolomeo and Baccio Bandinelli to less celebrated names – Bambaia and Orazio Samacchini, to name but two – at the height of their powers. The exhibition programme is intended to offer two or three shows a year: the next one will run from 11 September 2017 to 7 January 2018, and will be devoted to the drawings of Nicolas Poussin. It will coincide with a picture in focus exhibition on the artist’s Massacre of the Innocents, a work that stands out even among the Musée Condé’s many masterpieces.
Groupe de quatre figures debout et un drapé by Michelangelo. Chantilly, musée Condé, ©RMN (Domaine de Chantilly) / Michel Urtado
‘Bellini Michel-Ange Le Parmesan: L’épanouissement du dessin à la Renaissance’ is at the Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, Oise.
The Avignon Clock is as good as any sculpture
This spectacular French clock, designed by the best craftsman of the day, is the star of a show at the Wallace Collection
Striking attitudes on the sides of ancient Greek vases
What does the style and subjects of the artist known as the ‘Berlin Painter’ tell us about vase-painting in 5th-century Athens?
A swashbuckling tale of trade and trickery
In 1804, a fleet of English merchant vessels fooled the French navy into retreat. Each captain was presented with an exquisite sword for their troubles
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Hugh Bonneville Presents New Documentary "JESUS: Countdown to Calvary" for Easter 2018 on Public Television
PRESS PREVIEW and PHOTOS available upon request
Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey, Paddington) travels to Jerusalem to examine the events leading up to the death of Jesus of Nazareth, in "Jesus: Countdown to Calvary," releasing on public television stations nationwide March 1, in time for the Easter holiday (check local listings) from American Public Television (APT).
Bonneville, a theology graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, explores the historical context of the last days of Jesus' life. With the help of noted academics and spiritual leaders, he investigates the complex factors that, in just six days, turned a popular preacher into a reviled victim of the Romans’ most brutal form of execution – crucifixion.
Hugh and his guides utilize ancient artifacts, Gospel texts, historical analysis and modern insight to provide a fresh perspective on the social, religious and political tensions at play in first century Jerusalem. The legacies of leading figures like Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas and Judas Iscariot are brought into focus; long-held assumptions, some of which formed the root of centuries of anti-Semitism, are challenged head on.
Featuring state-of-the-art production values, the documentary is framed as a high-stakes political thriller, a clock counting down each critical moment from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. An enriching and engaging film available for the 2018 Easter season, the documentary offers a nuanced exploration of the questions that have existed for more than 2000 years, treating the subject with sensitivity, rigour and historical integrity.
Contributors include Prof. Helen Bond (University of Edinburgh); Prof. Paula Fredriksen (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), author of From Jesus to Christ (1988;2000); Dr. Zuleika Rodgers (Trinity College, Dublin); Prof. Ronny Reich (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); Amit Re’em (Israeli Institute of Archaeology); Fr. Gregory Tatum OP (École Biblique, Jerusalem) and Amos Oz, the acclaimed Israeli author of Judas.
Professor Bond (MTheol PhD) is the principal academic consultant on the project. She is Professor in Christian Origins with Specialization in New Testament and, since July 2011, Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins (CSCO) which aims to promote research into the earliest period of Christianity.
JESUS: COUNTDOWN TO CALVARY is a co-production of RTÉ (Ireland), APT and ARTE and will be available for Syndication to public television stations beginning March 1, 2018.
About APT:
American Public Television (APT) is the leading syndicator of high-quality, top-rated programming to the nation’s public television stations. For more than 10 years, APT distributed one-third or more of the top 100 highest-rated public television titles in the U.S. Founded in 1961, among its 250 new program titles per year, APT programs include prominent documentaries, performance, news and current affairs programs, dramas, how-to programs, children’s series and classic movies. America’s Test Kitchen From Cook’s Illustrated, Cook’s Country, AfroPoP, Rick Steves’ Europe, Chris Kimball’s Milk Street Television, Front and Center, Doc Martin, Nightly Business Report, Midsomer Murders, A Place to Call Home, Lidia’s Kitchen, Globe Trekker, New Orleans Cooking with Kevin Belton, Simply Ming, and P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home are a sampling of APT’s programs, considered some of the most popular on public television. APT licenses programs internationally through its APT Worldwide service. Now in its 13th year, Create®TV — featuring the best of public television's lifestyle programming — is distributed by American Public Television. APT also distributes WORLD™, public television’s premier news, science and documentary channel. To find out more about APT’s programs and services, visit APTonline.org.
About RTÉ:
RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) is Ireland's national public-service media organisation. A leader in Irish media, RTÉ provides comprehensive, cost-effective, free-to-air multi-media services to the public in Ireland and interested audiences internationally.RTÉ's radio service began on 1 January 1926, while television broadcasts began on 31 December 1961, making it one of the oldest continuously operating public service broadcasters in the world. Learn more about the history of RTÉ here. RTÉ services are impartial in accordance with statutory obligations. At its heart, RTÉ is a creative organisation, making and commissioning a broad range of high-quality programming and content to meet the needs of multiple audiences.
About ARTE:
ARTE offers high-quality programmes to 70% Europeans in their own language. ARTE programmes are broadcast in French and German 24 hours a day in HD quality on all screens. For 600 hours a year magazines, documentaries and shows are subtitled in English, Spanish, Polish and soon also in Italian. This is a unique experience cofinanced by the European Union since 2015 "to foster EU integration through culture by providing new subtitled versions of selected TV programmes across Europe". As the European Culture Channel, ARTE provides cultural programming that fosters understanding among Europeans and brings people together. Since its creation in 1991, ARTE stands for cultural diversity and multilingualism. ARTE uncovers new talent, encourages artistic creativity, and preserves and promotes Europe’s cultural heritage. ARTE supports talented film-makers as a co-producer and shows ambitious new creations, daring drama and series. On offer are also bold documentaries, no infotainment but daily news of vital interest to Europeans. Not to forget the live music and performances and avant-garde magazines.
Diane Buxton
dianebuxtonphoto@gmail.com
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Directors of Regional Australia Bank and Holiday Coast Credit Union were pleased to announce the commencement of merger discussions on Wednesday, November 7. Due diligence will now commence and once approval was received from both the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) and respective owner/members, a formal merger of the two organisations was anticipated to be completed by June 30, 2019. It was proposed that the merged organisation will continue to operate both Regional Australia Bank and Holiday Coast brands in their respective locations and the combined entity would have an asset size of over $2 billion. Regional Australia Bank’s chairman Graham Olrich said it was very apparent during initial discussions with Holiday Coast Credit Union that the two shared strategic alignment. ALSO READ: “And a passion for member service - an essential ingredient in any successful merger,” he said. “With greater product diversification, simplified fee structures and competitive pricing, members will enjoy an even greater, sustainable, customer owned banking experience.” If approved, this will be the biggest merger in the sector since 2009, and with assets of $607 million, 25,000 members and 98 staff, Holiday Coast is less than half the size of Regional Australia Bank, leaving it as the junior partner in the deal. Regional Australia Bank has merged twice before, once in 2008, when it merged with Orana Credit Union and again in 2010 when it merged with Hunter Mutual. The two smaller merger partners in those deals had assets of $82 million and $107 million, respectively. While you're with us, did you know you can now receive updates about the big stories happening around Armidale, straight to your inbox each Wednesday morning? sign up here
https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/steven.green/7c808c63-3c18-4137-9a8c-36df1cc6dcde.jpg/r290_125_964_506_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg
$2 billion entity from Regional Australia Bank merger with Holiday Coast Credit Union
Regional Australia Bank board of directors Dr Alison Sheridan, Chairman Graham Olich, Geoffrey Thompson, Brian goodall, Michael Fenech and Kate James.
Directors of Regional Australia Bank and Holiday Coast Credit Union were pleased to announce the commencement of merger discussions on Wednesday, November 7.
Due diligence will now commence and once approval was received from both the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) and respective owner/members, a formal merger of the two organisations was anticipated to be completed by June 30, 2019.
It was proposed that the merged organisation will continue to operate both Regional Australia Bank and Holiday Coast brands in their respective locations and the combined entity would have an asset size of over $2 billion.
Regional Australia Bank’s chairman Graham Olrich said it was very apparent during initial discussions with Holiday Coast Credit Union that the two shared strategic alignment.
Regional Australia Bank distributes community partnership funding
Big four told to show some humility
“And a passion for member service - an essential ingredient in any successful merger,” he said.
“With greater product diversification, simplified fee structures and competitive pricing, members will enjoy an even greater, sustainable, customer owned banking experience.”
If approved, this will be the biggest merger in the sector since 2009, and with assets of $607 million, 25,000 members and 98 staff, Holiday Coast is less than half the size of Regional Australia Bank, leaving it as the junior partner in the deal.
Regional Australia Bank has merged twice before, once in 2008, when it merged with Orana Credit Union and again in 2010 when it merged with Hunter Mutual. The two smaller merger partners in those deals had assets of $82 million and $107 million, respectively.
While you're with us, did you know you can now receive updates about the big stories happening around Armidale, straight to your inbox each Wednesday morning? sign up here
Discuss "Bank merger to generate no changes"
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RG21 Mine-Protected Vehicle
Mine-protected vehicle
Length (with spare wheel)
RG21 mine-protected vehicle was unveiled in September 2014. Image courtesy of BAE Systems.
The RG21 vehicle is armed with a 7.62mm machine gun. Image courtesy of BAE Systems.
The RG21 vehicle can accommodate up to 12 personnel. Image courtesy of BAE Systems.
The RG21 is fitted with two large bulletproof wind screens. Image courtesy of BAE Systems.
RG21 is a new 4×4 Mine-Protected Vehicle (MPV) launched by BAE Systems at the Africa Aerospace and Defense (AAD) exhibition held in September 2014. The vehicle is a new addition to the RG range of vehicles which provides combat proven protection for the safe transportation of troops.
The RG21 vehicle integrates large amount of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in the driveline and power-train ensuring a superior design. The conventional lay out features engine at the front, crew area in the middle and troop compartment at the rear. The vehicle can be delivered in left or right hand configuration as per the user’s choice.
Matador Mine-Protected Vehicle, South Africa
The Matador is an armoured mine-protected vehicle manufactured by Paramount Group in South Africa.
RG21 can be used as an armoured personnel carrier (APC) which can accommodate up to 12 people including a driver and a commander. The vehicle features a modular layout with rail mounting system, which enables the repositioning of stretcher brackets, seats, radio racks and C4I equipment.
The vehicle has a length of 6.49m, width of 2.45m and a roof height of 2.93m. The combat weight is 13,800kg, while the payload carrying capacity is 5,200kg.
Troops enter and exit the vehicle through the rear door that opens to the right. Two large bulletproof windows are fitted on the front and either side of the hull. The two side windows are equipped with four firing ports.
The vehicle is equipped with digital CANBUS electrical system. A self-recovery winch at forward supports pulling force of up to 9,000kg. A spare wheel is fixed on the rear door. The vehicle can also be equipped with air-conditioning, radio racks, search light, IR lights, and dual battery system.
The RG21 vehicle on display at the AAD 2014 was armed with Self-Defence Remotely Operated Weapon (SD-ROPW) system mounting a 7.62mm machine gun. The roof can be installed with manual turret, remote turret, smoke launchers, and cupola or seated one man turret.
The vehicle comes with superior mine protection levels to survive the explosion of 21kg TNT under any wheel and 14kg TNT under the hull. It offers STANAG 4569 level 2 ballistic protection and STANAG 4569 level 2A/2B mine protection. It also features protection against 7.62x51mm calibre Nato and 7.62X39mm AK, 5.56x45mm SS109 Ball rounds.
"The RG21 MPV can run at a maximum speed of 110km/h."
The vehicle can be optionally hinged with add-on armour and spall liner to increase ballistic protection.
The RG21 vehicle is powered by a turbocharged, intercooled 5.88L diesel engine coupled to ZF 6S800 six-speed manual transmission. The Euro 3 compliant engine can generate maximum power of 176kW (240hp) at 2,700rpm. The vehicle is fitted with standard exhaust engine brakes. The maximum fuel tank capacity of the vehicle is 115 litres.
The RG21 MPV can run at a maximum speed of 110km/h. The vehicle can climb a 60% slope and has a 15m kerb to kerb turning circle. It has ground clearance of 450mm while angle of approach/departure of the vehicle is 36°.
The vehicle includes a power-assisted adjustable steering wheel and beam axles incorporating hub reduction. The suspension is of parabolic leaf spring type with dual or optional wheel shock absorbers and anti-roll bars.
The vehicle is fitted with four 395/85 R20 tyres fitted to steel rims. It can be transported in a C130 aircraft.
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How Should I Take Ownership of the Property I am Buying?
Real property can be incredibly valuable and the question of how parties can take ownership of their property is important. The form of ownership taken -- the vesting of title -- will determine who may sign various documents involving the property and future rights of the parties to the transaction. These rights involve such matters as: real property taxes, income taxes, inheritance and gift taxes, transferability of title and exposure to creditor’s claims. Also, how title is vested can have significant probate implications in the event of death.
The Land Title Association (LTA) advises those purchasing real property to give careful consideration to the manner in which title will be held. Buyers may wish to consult legal counsel to determine the most advantageous form of ownership for their particular situation, especially in cases of multiple owners of a single property.
The LTA has provided the following definitions of common vesting as an informational overview. Consumers should not rely on these as legal definitions. The Association urges real property purchasers to carefully consider their titling decision prior to closing, and to seek counsel should they be unfamiliar with the most suitable ownership choice for their particular situation.
Common Methods of Holding Title
SOLE OWNERSHIP
Sole ownership may be described as ownership by an individual or other entity capable of acquiring title. Examples of common vesting in cases of sole ownership are:
A Single Man/Woman:
A man or woman who has not been legally married. For example: Bruce Buyer, a single man.
An Unmarried Man/Woman:
A man or woman who was previously married and is now legally divorced. For example: Sally Seller, an unmarried woman.
A Married Man/Woman as His/Her Sole and Separate Property:
A married man or woman who wishes to acquire title in his or her name alone.
The title company insuring title will require the spouse of the married man or woman acquiring title to specifically disclaim or relinquish his or her right, title and interest to the property. This establishes that it is the desire of both spouses that title to the property be granted to one spouse as that spouse’s sole and separate property. For example: Bruce Buyer, a married man, as his sole and separate property.
CO-OWNERSHIP
Title to property owned by two or more persons may be vested in the following forms:
Community Property:
A form of vesting title to property owned by husband and wife during their marriage, which they intend to own together. Community property is distinguished from separate property, which is property acquired before marriage, by separate gift or bequest, after legal separation, or which is agreed to be owned only by one spouse.
Real property conveyed to a married man or woman is presumed to be community property, unless otherwise stated. Since all such property is owned equally, husband and wife must sign all agreements and documents of transfer. Under community property, either spouse has the right to dispose of one half of the community property, including transfers by will. For example: Bruce Buyer and Barbara Buyer, husband and wife as community property.
Joint Tenancy
A form of vesting title to property owned by two or more persons, who may or may not be married, in equal interest, subject to the right of survivorship in the surviving joint tenant(s). Title must have been acquired at the same time, by the same conveyance, and the document must expressly declare the intention to create a joint tenancy estate. When a joint tenant dies, title to the property is automatically conveyed by operation of law to the surviving joint tenant(s). Therefore, joint tenancy property is not subject to disposition by will. For example: Bruce Buyer and Barbara Buyer, husband and wife as joint tenants.
Tenancy in Common:
A form of vesting title to property owned by any two or more individuals in undivided fractional interests. These fractional interests may be unequal in quantity or duration and may arise at different times. Each tenant in common owns a share of the property, is entitled to a comparable portion of the income from the property and must bear an equivalent share of expenses. Each co-tenant may sell, lease or will to his/her heir that share of the property belonging to him/her. For example: Bruce Buyer, a single man, as to an undivided 3/4 interest and Penny Purchaser, a single woman, as to an undivided 1/4 interest, as tenants in common.
Other ways of vesting title include:
A Corporation*:
A corporation is a legal entity, created under state law, consisting of one or more shareholders but regarded under law as having an existence and personality separate from such shareholders.
A Partnership*:
A partnership is an association of two or more persons who can carry on business for profit as co-owners, as governed by the Uniform Partnership Act. A partnership may hold title to real property in the name of the partnership.
As Trustees of A Trust*:
A trust is an arrangement whereby legal title to a property is transferred by the grantor to a person called a trustee, to be held and managed by that person for the benefit of the people specified in the trust agreement, called the beneficiaries.
Limited Liability Companies (L.L.C.)
This form of ownership is a legal entity and is similar to both the corporation and the partnership. The operating agreement will determine how the L.L.C. functions and is taxed. Like the corporation its existence is separate from its owners.
*In cases of corporate, partnership, L.L.C. or trust ownership - required documents may include corporate articles and bylaws, partnership agreements, L.L.C. operating agreement and trust agreements and/or certificates.
How title is vested has important legal consequences. You may wish to consult an attorney to determine the most advantageous form of ownership for your particular situation.
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Tech Tent: Elon Musk’s amazing week
Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent @BBCRoryCJ on Twitter
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39456094
Stream the latest Tech Tent episode on the BBC website
Download the latest episode as a podcast
Listen to previous episodes on the BBC website
Listen live every Friday at 15:00 BST on the BBC World Service
On Tech Tent this week we focus on an extraordinary few days in the career of the tech tycoon who's been likened to the comic book superhero Iron Man.
Image copyright SPACEX
Image caption The Space X booster fires for just over two minutes before separating and returning to Earth
We also discuss Samsung's most important new device in years, and meet one of the creative superstars of the gaming world.
Musk - who dares wins
Just about every day this week Elon Musk has been making news, On Thursday there was another landmark for his Space X business when it launched a recycled rocket and then landed the booster for a second time on an ocean platform. If the most expensive part of a rocket can be used more than once, that could transform the economics of space travel and the satellite industry.
Earlier in the week, news emerged of yet another new Musk venture with the aim of augmenting the human brain with computer technology. Neuralink, which is in its very early stages, plans to implant tiny electrodes into the brain in an attempt to treat various disorders.
And then there were more developments at his Tesla electric car business which has now attracted an investment from the Chinese tech giant Tencent. It has bought around 5% of the company's shares - and that helped propel the valuation of Tesla to around the same level as that of the Ford motor company. To put that in context, Ford has been around for 113 years and made more than 3 million cars last year, while Tesla is just 14 years old and made 84,000 cars in 2016.
We talk to the electric car analyst and long-term Musk watcher Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield on the programme. She says the market is valuing Tesla so highly because it sees it as a Silicon Valley software firm rather than a carmaker.
Investors veer between faith in Elon Musk's vision - and fear that it could all come tumbling down. Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield says Musk has teetered on the edge of disaster many times in his career but has always been willing to bet big on his ideas, "It is the stuff of science fiction - he's willing to take those risks".
Image caption Samsung compared its new phone designs to art
Samsung's comeback device
It's also been a big week for Samsung. For the world's biggest mobile-phone-maker it has - to say the least - been a trying few months. First the Samsung Note 7 had to be withdrawn after it showed a tendency to overheat and catch fire, then the firm's boss was arrested and charged with corruption in a bribery scandal which has rocked the South Korean government. So a lot was riding on the launch of its new flagship smartphone, described by one analyst as its most important device in a decade.
In the event, the Galaxy S8, with its infinity screen and its Bixby AI assistant, got some pretty positive reviews. It is also worth noting that amid all the turmoil of recent months, the Samsung share price has sailed on to record highs.
The company's investors seem convinced by the underlying strengths of a business which, as well as making its own high-end devices, makes components for other leading smartphones. We discuss with the leading gadget pundit Jonathan Margolis whether the brand has recovered from any damage caused by the Note 7 fiasco.
Image copyright 2K Games
Image caption Video game legend Ken Levine was behind the Bioshock series of games
A gaming superstar
This feels like a key moment in the development of the games industry. The smartphone revolution introduced a whole new audience to games - and allowed a new wave of bedroom developers to compete on a more level playing field with the giants.
Now another new technology virtual reality has come along to shake things up again, with billions invested in a new vision of how we will experience games. We went to an event called Rezzed - part of the London Games Festival - to take the temperature of the industry.
And there we ran into a gaming legend, Ken Levine, the creator of the Bioshock series. For all the talk of VR and other innovations he's convinced that something rather old-fashioned, storytelling, is at the heart of what makes a successful game. "I come from a writing background so character and setting have always been most important to me." He says that's important to gamers too: "They want stories, they want characters but they also want a world they can participate in."
As for virtual reality, he says he's tried it and been knocked out by it - but isn't convinced it's quite there as a gaming experience yet. "These things take time to get right, I don't know as a gaming platform whether it's there yet." Ken Levine says augmented reality has already had a killer app in the form of Pokemon Go but VR is still waiting for that.
He is now at work on a new game, and there are few details yet on what form it will take - but one thing it won't be is a virtual reality experience.
Success for SpaceX 're-usable rocket'
Samsung Galaxy S8 - but is it art? The internet reacts
Samsung Galaxy S8 hides home button and gains Bixby AI
Times when Americans were told to 'go back' home
Football phrases
15 sayings from around the world
Full article Football phrases
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Men's Rankings
Women's Rankings
Adare Manor to bid to host 2026 Ryder Cup
From the section Golf
http://www.bbc.com/sport/golf/43840422
Shane Lowry, Paul McGinley, Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington at Adare Manor
Adare Manor in Limerick is bidding to host the 2026 Ryder Cup.
The course was officially re-opened on Friday by Rory McIlroy, Paul McGinley, Padraig Harrington and Shane Lowry.
Ireland last hosted the event in 2006 at the K Club when Europe, inspired by an emotional Darren Clarke, beat the US by a record-equalling nine points.
Adare Manor will host the JP McManus Pro-am in 2020, and is also being tipped to hold an Irish Open, with a new rota of venues to be revealed soon.
McGinley will replace McIlroy as tournament host of the Irish Open next year, with Lahinch & Portmarnock Links in the running to stage the tournament.
2026 is the next vacant date when the Ryder Cup comes back to Europe after the 2024 Ryder Cup in America.
JP McManus, the owner of Adare Manor, said staging a Ryder Cup would be "great for Limerick and great for Ireland".
"We'll put our name in the hat. I think we have the facilities to host it and we'd love to have it."
Four-time major winner McIlroy said he would be "confident the tournament would be very successful" if it were to be held at the Irish course.
"To play a Ryder Cup at home in front of your home fans would be a dream come true. Even thinking about it makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck," said McIlroy.
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Sales and Co-Productions
Theatrical / Cinema Events
Americas Press Room
Overview — BBC Studios - Americas
BBC Studios – Americas is the main commercial arm and wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) operating in the U.S. and Canada. The company exists to maximize the value of the BBC’s assets for the benefit of the UK license payer and invests in public service programming in return for rights. The company operates four businesses in the territory – linear and digital content sales and co-productions, consumer products, BBC.com, and two studios based in Los Angeles – BBC Studios, responsible for the smash hit Dancing with the Stars and the limited series The Night Of; and Adjacent Productions, producers of Life Below Zero and Ladies of London, among others. The company also owns a 50.1% share in cable channel BBC AMERICA through a joint venture with AMC Networks.
© 2019 BBC Studios – Americas
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Celtics notebook: Pollard increasing workload
Oct 29, 2007 at 12:01 AM Oct 29, 2007 at 10:13 AM
The Boston Celtics may have some much-needed frontcourt help available for their season opener Friday night.
Veteran center Scot Pollard, who is being counted on to spell starter Kendrick Perkins, took part in practice Monday after being sidelined this month with a sprained left ankle.
The 32-year-old Pollard, signed as a free agent in August, increased his workload after going through non-contact drills Sunday.
There is hope that Pollard might progress enough this week and play against the Washington Wizards, filling a void the Celtics have at the center position.
"He's still not moving great, but he knows how to play defense,” Coach Doc Rivers said. "I don't know (if he'll play). We'll see how the ankle holds up.”
Pollard was hurt before training camp and was sent home from Europe to undergo an MRI. He wore a protective boot and underwent treatment before getting on the court for the first time Sunday.
The Celtics won't be giving Pollard a lot of minutes this season, but they do need him for depth purposes inside. Perkins is the starting center, and Kevin Garnett can play minutes there in certain situations.
Pollard will spend the rest of the week testing the ankle and learning the Celtics' system.
"He looked good,” Rivers said. "He actually moved pretty well. He doesn't know anything as far as what we're running yet and that's going to take some time.
"If you don't play, I don't care, you can watch it all day. Once you go full speed, you're not going to run it very well. We anticipated that. Anything new, he didn't have the timing or spacing down.”
Opener delayed
The Celtics will be one of the last teams to play their opener as they wait until Friday night to face the Washington Wizards on ESPN.
The NBA season begins tonight with three games, followed by eight more Wednesday and three Thursday.
The Celtics reported to training camp a few days earlier than most teams because they traveled to Europe and now have a couple of extra games to prepare for the opener.
"I love it,” said Rivers of all the practice time "After the season starts, you probably have five quality practices the rest of the year. This gives us a chance to have some more good practices before the season starts.
"Once it starts, you play games, the stars are playing 40 minutes and it's tough to have a good practice after that.”
Rivers had a two-hour practice Monday and figures to reduce the time to 90 minutes leading up to the opener.
-- The Enterprise
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Do you recognize this mystery plant?
By John Nelson For Bluffton Today
It's always gratifying when one of your former students comes back and lets you know how things have been going. Such was the case, several years ago now, when my former pupil Sanders McMillan phoned me up to shoot the botanical breeze.
Sanders had been working with an environmental consulting firm and was involved in several projects embracing what is known as wetland delineation. One of his projects involved a forested wetland site, not too far from here, on the south side of Columbia. At this study site he made a rather impressive discovery.
His photograph is that of an orchid, and it is wild in more than one way. This species has a slender, upright stem bearing a number of smooth, strap-shaped leaves. A number of flowers are loosely arranged along the upper end of the flowering stalk.
The flowers tend to be somewhat greenish or even a bit yellowish, or in the case of Sanders’ plants, snowy white. As with all orchids, there are three sepals and three petals. The two uppermost petals are small and squatty, but the lowermost petal is modified into what botanists call a lip.
In this case, the lip is quite distinctive and it rather easily differentiates this species from its relatives. This marvelous lip is divided into three portions or segments, and each segment is finely divided into numerous threadlike divisions. A dramatic sort of ragged-fringed effect is produced.
At the base of the flower is a very slender tube called a spur, an inch or so long and projecting backward. If pollination occurs successfully, a small capsule will develop from the ovary, eventually producing a very large number of very small seeds. This is a hallmark characteristic of all orchids.
Our little forest friend is fairly widespread here in South Carolina and is known from nearly all of eastern North America. It is fond of wet woods, often growing with other orchid species and frequently seen in places featuring a lot of Sphagnum moss.
Despite its wide distribution, however, this species is not very common anywhere, and its populations usually consist of fairly small numbers of individual plants.
This plant may eventually deserve attention as a species of concern, which is its bureaucratic ranking here. Unfortunately, many orchid species are declining in population numbers due in large part to habitat loss, but also, I am chagrined to say, by overzealous collection by botanists and orchid-growers.
The appreciation and study of orchids is a fascinating aspect of botany, and no matter where you live, there are bound to be local species to learn about. For plenty of information on a number of Southeastern orchids, consider "Wild Orchids of South Carolina" by J. A. Fowler, published in 2005 by the USC Press.
John Nelson is curator of the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. As a public service, the herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, go to www.herbarium.org, call 803-777-8196 or email nelson@sc.edu.
Answer: Ragged fringed orchid, Platanthera lacera
Bluffton Today ~ 6 Promenade St Ste 1005, Bluffton, SC 29910 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service
Sun Today
Jasper County Sun Times
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Espinoza Paz appears in...
BMI Congratulates its 2017 Latin GRAMMY Nominations
From News, posted 9.27.17 It’s been another amazing year for BMI’s Latin songwriters, whose successes were amply represented in the nominations for this year’s Latin GRAMMY Awards. After shattering expectations, setting records and cementing itself as one of the most successful singles of all time, Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” earned four coveted Latin GRAMMY nods,… Read more...
Los Lobos and Top Latin Songwriters Honored at 24th Annual BMI Latin Music Awards
From News, posted 3.22.17 Last night, BMI announced the songwriters and publishers of Latin music’s most-performed songs of the past year on U.S. radio and television at the 24th annual BMI Latin Music Awards at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. Seasoned musical veterans Los Lobos received the BMI Icon Award,… Read more...
BMI Congratulates its 2016 Latin GRAMMY Nominees
From News, posted 9.21.16 BMI is very proud to congratulate our talented Latin songwriters who received Latin GRAMMY nominations today. Spanning several genres, this year’s class of esteemed nominees represents many facets of Latin music. Multiple nominations were received by Brazilian singer/songwriter Djavan, who garnered four nods, including both Record of the Year and… Read more...
Gloria Trevi and Top Latin Songwriters Honored at 23rd Annual BMI Latin Music Awards
From News, posted 3.03.16 BMI last night proudly announced the songwriters and publishers of Latin music’s most-performed songs of the past year on U.S. radio and television at the 23rd annual BMI Latin Music Awards at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. Multi-platinum Latin music singer/songwriter, actress and philanthropist Gloria Trevi received… Read more...
From News, posted 9.24.15 Yesterday was a great day for BMI’s Latin songwriters who received Latin GRAMMY nods for their work across several genres. Leading the BMI pack with multiple nominations are Juan Luis Guerra and Edgar Barrera, who each received four nods; Ricky Martin, Sebastian Krys, Vicentico (SGAE) and Kenny O’Brien with three;… Read more...
Sergio George and Top Latin Songwriters Honored at BMI Latin Music Awards
From News, posted 4.01.15 Broadcast Music, Inc. last night announced the songwriters and publishers of Latin music’s most-performed songs of the past year on U.S. radio and television at the 22nd annual BMI Latin Music Awards at the Fontainebleau Hotel Miami Beach. Also during the star-studded evening, multiple GRAMMY award winner, multitalented producer, pianist… Read more...
BMI Songwriters and Publishers Lauded at the MonitorLatino Radio Awards
From News, posted 9.09.14 Broadcast Music, Inc. proudly applauds the winners of the 2014 MonitorLatino Radio Awards, held on Monday, August 25, 2014, at the Pacific Palms Resort in Los Angeles. Delia Orjuela, Vice President, Writer/Publisher Relations, Latin, was in attendance to celebrate their success. The awards ceremony recognizes outstanding leaders of the radio… Read more...
BMI Writers Take 58% of Billboard Latin Music Awards
From News, posted 5.10.14 BMI songwriters had a hot night at the Billboard Latin Music Awards, which aired live on the Telemundo network on April 24. The recording of mega-hit “Vivir Mi Vida,”performed by Marc Anthony, earned the singer five awards including Hot Latin Song of the Year, Airplay Song of the Year, Digital Song… Read more...
BMI Affiliates Take Majority of Billboard Latin Music Awards Nods
From News, posted 2.06.14 Last year, the Billboard Latin Music Awards proved to be an incredible evening for the BMI Latin roster, with reggaeton star Don Omar taking home 10 awards and BMI affiliates winning 77% of the 2013 accolades. With 54% of this year’s nominations and at least one nominee in every category,… Read more...
BMI Congratulates the Winners of the 2013 Billboard Mexican Music Awards
From News, posted 10.10.13 The 2013 Billboard Mexican Music Awards (Premios Billboard de la Música Mexicana), Regional Mexican music’s biggest night, took place on October 9 from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, Calif. The live telecast aired on Telemundo, and featured the genre’s biggest acts as presenters, nominees and performers. Nominees were chosen based… Read more...
Espinoza Paz : Espinoza Paz Interview - The 2008 BMI Latin Awards
Captured at BMI Latin Awards 2008
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sally thomson, finalist of the may 2017 edition
Please scroll down to read the Project Statement and see the images.
Sally Thomson is a freelance photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her passion lies in creating images that focus on environments and cultures that communicate a strong sense of place; one that is informed by it’s history, nature, and people. Her photographs are reflective of a long career as a landscape architect and environmental planner, and explore issues related to the human condition and natural world. The project, Stories from the Range, has been selected for the 2017 FENCE (New Mexico). Her work has been commissioned by private individuals, corporations and not-for-profits, and has appeared in a variety of print and web-based media in New Mexico. Her imagery has been shown in a solo exhibit at the University of New Mexico, and as part of group shows throughout the US.
www.sallythomsonphotography.com
Project Statement, Grace & Grit, The Untold Stories of Women Ranchers in the American Southwest
While women have always been a part of ranching in the Southwest, their stories and contributions have largely been overlooked. But, according to a study released in 2013 by USDA’s Economic Research Service, the number of women-operated farms/ranches more than doubled between 1982 and 2007. The study also reported that nearly half of our country’s women-operated farms and ranches specialize in livestock. In a world where most of us live and locate much of our inspiration from urban areas, who are these women that embrace an often financially risky, and physically demanding lifestyle? How do they live, and what implications might that have for women in general? Grace & Grit will present their stories in a series of color environmental portraits that go beyond typical stereotypes to present a way of life not often seen. Grace and Grit is a natural extension of a project that Sally began 5 years ago called Stories from the Range. The series of images presented along with this summary are related to that project.
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University Of Nebraska Medical Center Selects Cartagenia Bench Platform For NGS And Array Routine Diagnostics
Cartagenia, the world leader in software-based workflow support for genetic variant assessment, lab reporting, and integration of diagnostic knowledge-bases, recently announced that the Human Genetics Laboratory, part of the Munroe-Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation (MMI) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), has selected the Cartagenia Bench platform genetics diagnostics solution for use at its healthcare laboratory. Cartagenia Bench is a cloud-based platform that allows genetics labs and clinicians to analyze, interpret, report, and share genomic variants in routine clinical diagnostics.
Researchers Discover Promising Prognostic Marker for Aggressive Breast Cancer
A team of researchers led by Goutham Narla, MD, PhD, at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals Case Medical Center, and collaborators at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Erasmus Medical Center, have discovered a gene variant that drives the spread of breast cancer. Published in Science Translational Medicine, the study lays the early foundation for predicting which breast cancer patients may develop more aggressive disease and for designing more effective treatments.
“Breast cancer is a genetically complex disease and it remains a challenge to predict disease outcomes and which patients may benefit from more aggressive treatment,” says Dr. Narla, assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and medical geneticist at UH Case Medical Center Seidman Cancer Center. “Our research has uncovered a promising gene marker that will not only help us better identify tumors that behave badly but provide a basis for developing and ‘personalizing’ therapies to better treat our patients.”
The research team discovered that a mutant gene, KLF6-SV1, was linked to the recurrence and metastasis in women with breast cancer. The incorrect splicing of the KLF6 gene essentially creates a protein that causes cancer cells to spread or metastasize. The researchers examined the tumors of 671 breast cancer patients in a tumor bank at Erasmus University Medical Center (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and found that those whose tumors expressed high levels of the gene variant were 50 percent more likely to die. Since recurrence and metastasis are the major causes of death in breast cancer, this finding will provide a new direction of research to both identify women at risk and to develop targeted drugs that block the process of metastasis.
“This study presents biological proof that this splice variant can potentially be a marker for determining which early stage breast cancer patients will have disease progression,” adds Dr. Narla. “More studies need to be done, but this could provide an important prognostic marker to determine which patients need to be treated more aggressively or watched more closely.”
Dr. Narla came to UH Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve in spring, 2012, from Mt. Sinai and is the first Harrington Distinguished Scholar (Early Career Award). This inaugural award provides physician-scientists with the ability to tap into grant funding and a peer network of innovators and mentors within the infrastructure of the Harrington Discovery Institute at UH Case Medical Center. The Institute is part of the $250 million Harrington Project for Discovery & Development, which was launched in February, 2012, with a $50 million gift to UH from the Harrington family of Hudson, OH.
Dr. Narla’s laboratory focuses on the identification and characterization of the genes and pathways involved in cancer metastasis. By studying the functional role of the KLF6 tumor suppressor gene, Dr. Narla and his team have identified new signaling pathways regulated by this gene family thus providing new insight into cancer diagnosis and treatment. The team’s research found that KLF6 and FOXO1, both tumor suppressor genes, are turned off as cancer spreads through the body. Since first discovering the KLF6 gene 13 years ago as a medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr. Scott Friedman, Dr. Narla has been involved in the identification and characterization of the gene and its role in cancer development.
“In this new research as well as previous studies, Goutham and his team have uncovered important and previously unrecognized genetic markers in cancer,” said Stanton Gerson, MD, Director of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UH Case Medical Center Seidman Cancer Center. “This work highlights how understanding the basic mechanisms regulating cancer development and progression can lead to significant advances in the treatment of cancer. We are so pleased to have a physician-scientist of his caliber at our cancer center and are excited about the impact of this important work.”
Dr. Narla will work with the breast cancer team, led by Lyndsay Harris, MD, to study further KLF6-SV1’s potential as a prognostic marker for patients with poor outcomes. The group also will work to develop novel therapeutics that can turn the protein off and cause the cells to become less aggressive.
“We look forward to continuing this work to further define the role of KLF6-SV1 on the molecular basis of tumor progression and metastasis in breast cancer,” says Dr. Harris, Director of the Breast Cancer Program at UH Case Medical Center and Professor, Medicine-Hematology/Oncology at the School of Medicine. “These findings provide us with a biomarker of more aggressive disease and a target for new therapies. This will potentially enable us to develop more “personalized” treatments for patients and thereby reduce breast cancer mortality.”
This work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Additional support for Dr. Narla’s research comes from the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University Institute for Transformative Molecular Medicine, and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Narla is also supported by an early physician scientist career award from the HHMI.
Study: KLF6-SV1 Drives Breast Cancer Metastasis and Is Associated with Poor Survival
Source: University Hospitals Case Medical Center
Raising HDL Not a Sure Route to Countering Heart Disease
A new paper published online in The Lancet challenges the assumption that raising a person’s HDL — the so-called “good cholesterol” — will necessarily lower the risk of a heart attack. The new research underscores the value of using genetic approaches to test biological hypotheses about human disease prior to developing specific drugs. A team led by researchers from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) explored naturally occurring genetic variations in humans to test the connection between HDL levels and heart attack. By studying the genes of roughly 170,000 individuals, the team discovered that, when examined together, the 15 HDL-raising variants they tested do not reduce the risk of heart attack.
Little Benefit from Genomic Testing in CVD Prediction
November 22, 2010 Leave a Comment
An expert US group has concluded there is insufficient evidence to support genomic profiling for cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk prediction.
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Wall of Separation BLOG
Barton’s Bad Season: ‘Christian Nation’ Advocate Continues To Sink
Mar 01, 2013 by Rob Boston
You could say that this has been the winter of David Barton’s discontent.
Barton, a Texas-based pseudo-historian who for years has made a living telling gullible Religious Right audiences that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation and church-state separation is a myth, has run into quite a streak of trouble lately.
Barton’s problems began when a band of conservative Christian scholars, led by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, dissected his book The Jefferson Lies and exposed the many errors therein. The book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson (the nation’s largest Christian publisher), pulled the tome.
More recently, Chris Rodda, director of research for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a longtime thorn in Barton’s side, produced research indicating that a Barton claim about armed schoolchildren during the Wild West period defending their teacher from a killer was in fact taken from a novel by Western writer Louie L’Amour.
Barton originally told the story to Glenn Beck. He still insists that it might be true and claims L’Amour said it was. But as Throckmorton points out, that’s not how history is done.
“If there really is a basis in fact here,” wrote Throckmorton, “it is a fair question to ask: how much more did the story change from the original source to L’Amour’s book? L’Amour doesn’t claim to be an historian and doesn’t say what details were based on the account he used or what he added to make an entertaining novel. Clearly the reason one does not do history this way is because the narrative can change dramatically from the first telling to the last.”
Rodda also took aim at another Barton claim about guns: that during the founding period, there were rarely gun-related accidents. Barton claims he could find only two. Rodda consulted an archive of historical newspapers and tracked down numerous accounts of people being maimed and killed due to gun accidents during this era.(Just to be clear: Americans United doesn’t take a stand on gun control. The point here is to underscore how sloppy Barton’s research is.)
Will any of this make a difference? Well, thoughtful evangelicals have been challenged to look anew at Barton’s influence, and some of them are doing that. Some of the hardest-hitting material about Barton has appeared in World magazine, a conservative Christian publication that Americans United rarely finds itself in accord with.
More satisfyingly, it appears that some political leaders are finally questioning the wisdom of being tied to Barton. Over the years, I’ve been amazed at Barton’s ability to ingratiate himself with certain political figures. Despite having absolutely no credentials, he even served as an advisor when social studies standards were being rewritten in California and Texas.
This week Montana Gov. Steve Bullock announced that he would not attend a prayer breakfast where Barton was the featured speaker. Bullock is a Democrat, and LGBT groups in the state had urged him not to share a stage with Barton, whose views on LGBT issues are predictably extreme.
Barton’s standing among professional historians has already hit bottom. Is this the beginning of the end of this political influence as well? We can only hope.
History and Origins of Church-State Separation
Louie L'Amour
Rights In The Military
Chris Rodda
Michael Coulter
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Supreme Court Should Rule Against Sectarian Prayers Before Town Board Meetings, Says Americans United
The U.S. Supreme Court today announced that it will hear a lawsuit challenging Christian invocations before town board meetings in Greece, N.Y.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the organization that is sponsoring the lawsuit, urged the high court to affirm government neutrality on religion.
“A town council meeting isn’t a church service, and it shouldn’t seem like one,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Government can’t serve everyone in the community when it endorses one faith over others. That sends the clear message that some are second-class citizens based on what they believe about religion.”
Americans United brought the litigation on behalf of two community residents, Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens. They objected to the Greece Town Board’s practice of inviting clergy to open its meetings with sectarian prayers.
The board does not require that the invocations be inclusive and non-sectarian. As a result, the prayers have almost always been Christian. Official records showed that between 1999 and June 2010, about two-thirds of the 120 recorded invocations contained references to “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus,” “Your Son” or the “Holy Spirit.”
In a unanimous May 2012 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the town’s prayer policy. Judge Guido Calabresi said “a given legislative prayer practice, viewed in its entirety, may not advance a single religious sect.”
AU Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan, who directed the litigation for Americans United and will argue the Town of Greece v. Galloway case before the Supreme Court, said the justices should uphold the lower court’s ruling.
“Legislative bodies should focus on serving the community and stay out of the business of promoting religion,” Khan said.
Official Prayer
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Dr. Masad Damha
Dr. Mark Kay
Dr. John Rossi
Masad Damha, Ph.D.
James McGill Professor of Chemistry
Chair, Department of Chemistry McGill University, Canada
Dr. Masad J. Damha attended McGill University, completing a B.Sc. in Chemistry (’83) and then a Ph.D. (’87) in Organic Chemistry there with Professor Kelvin K. Ogilvie. Currently, he is James McGill Professor of Chemistry, and his research is bearing fruit in the development of new therapeutic drugs based on protein and RNA targeting. With his students, he has authored over 160 publications, and filed/received several patents worldwide. In 1999, Professor Damha co-founded Anagenis, Inc. – a start up company with proprietary antisense technologies. Anagenis was formed to assess and develop arabinonucleic acids chemistry against several biological targets, including cancer and a number of infectious diseases. In 2005, Anagenis, Inc. was acquired by Topigen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a Montreal-based biotechnology company that has discovered antisense compounds for the treatment of respiratory diseases including asthma, chronic obstructive lung disease and allergic rhinitis.
Prof. Damha is Chair of the Department of Chemistry (2013-2018), Past President of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (2013-2014), and Treasurer of the International Society of Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids (2012-2014). Recently, he served as Associate Vice-Principal (Research & International Relations) at McGill (2010-2011). He has hosted and/or organized of a number of conferences from the Oligonucleotide Therapeutic Society (2016), International Roundtable on Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids (Montreal, 2012), the CSC (Montreal, 2001 and 2011), and symposia at Pacifichem (Honolulu, 2000- 2015) and the American Chemical Society (2007-09).
Select Honors and Awards: The John Charles Polanyi Chemistry Prize (Ministry of Colleges and Universities, 1989), The IUPAC Award (Chemical Institute of Canada, 1991), Ichikizaki Awards for Young Chemist (1989-94), the Merck-Frosst Award for Therapeutic Research (CSC, 1999), the Fellowship of the Chemical Institute of Canada (F.C.I.C.), the James McGill Professorship (McGill University, 2004-2011), the Bernard Belleau Award of the CSC (2007), the Fessenden Professorship in Science Innovation (McGill University; 2010), the David Thomson Award in Graduate Supervision and Teaching (McGill University; 2010), the Leo Yaffe Award for Excellence in Teaching (McGill University; 2011-12), and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (The Governor General of Canada; 2012).
Mark Kay, M.D., Ph.D.
Dennis Farrey Family Professor in Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics
Head, Division of Human Gene Therapy
Vice Chair for Basic Research (Pediatrics)
Stanford University, USA
Dr. Mark Kay is the Dennis Farrey Family Professor at Stanford University. He is also the head of the division of the Human Gene Therapy at the Stanford School of Medicine. Further, he also serves as the Vice Chair for Basic Research (Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University). He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University (1980), Ph.D. (1987) and M.D. (1987) from Case Western Reserve University.
He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University (1980), Ph.D. (1987) and M.D. (1987) from Case Western Reserve University. He conducted his postgraduate training at Baylor College of Medicine. This was followed by his faculty appointment to the University of Washington and subsequently Stanford University. Dr. Kay is a clinician-scientist for over 25 years specializing in the field of gene therapy and working actively in the area of oligonucleotide drug development.
Dr. Kay has lead and advised several clinical trials in the area of gene therapy, including Phase I/II AAV-human factor IX mediated gene transfer into skeletal muscle, Phase I/II AAV-human factor IX mediated gene transfer into liver, and at present, Phase I/II AAV-2/8-human factor IX mediated gene transfer into the liver. He is currently serving (and has served) on numerous public and professional committees at Stanford University, and has been involved in many leadership positions. He is a member of many major professional and academic organizations in the field of genomics and gene therapy, and serves on many editorial boards. Some of these include the editorial boards for Gene Therapy, Human Gene Therapy, Molecular Therapy, Silence, and Nucleic Acid Therapeutics (formerly Oligonucleotides). During his career, Dr. Kay has given over 300 invited addresses at various international conferences and published over 200 articles in leading and highly respected research journals.
Select Honors and Awards: The Western Society for Clinical Investigation, Young Investigator Award (1996), Arosenius Swedish Honorary Lectureship (1997), American Society for Clinical Investigation-elected member (1997), E. Mead Johnson Award for Pediatric Researcher of the Year (2000), National Hemophilia Foundation Researcher of the Year (2000), Named Professorship-Dennis Farrey Family Professor (2005), Association for American Physicians elected member (2010), Samuel Rosenthal Prize in Pediatrics (2011), Outstanding Investigator Award-American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (2013), and many others.
John Rossi, Ph.D.
Morgan & Helen Chu Dean’s Chair
Lidow Family Research Endowed Chair
Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Dean, Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences
Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope
Dr. John Rossi is Lidow Family Research Endowed Chair and Professor in the Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope. He currently serves as the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean’s Chair, and Dean of Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences. He served as an Associate Director of Laboratory Research – City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center for City of Hope. He joined City Of Hope, Inc. (COH) in 1980 as an Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Molecular Genetics. He was Chairman of the Division of Biology in 1992. In 1993, COH bestowed its highest honor upon him by naming him to its Gallery of Medical and Scientific Achievement for his pioneering work at the molecular level in the battle against AIDS and other major diseases.
Dr. Rossi received a BA in biology from the University of New Hampshire and a PhD in microbial genetics from the University of Connecticut. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in Molecular genetics at Brown University Medical School, he has been on the faculty of City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California.
Dr. Rossi is widely regarded as a World Leader in the development of RNA interference and in clinical research with nucleic acids for the treatment of various diseases. His present focus is on enhancing the intracellular efficacy of ribozymes, small RNAs and siRNAi and their application to gene therapy for HIV and cancer.
He is the Editor in chief of Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids, along with Deputy Editor of Molecular Therapy. He also is an Editor for JBC, Editor in chief BMC Biotechnology and Human Gene Therapy. In 2002 he received the Merit Award from the Division of AIDS of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Rossi was honored with the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Outstanding Speaker Award in 1991, and AAAS Fellow in Medical Sciences 2011. He has authored more than 275 peer-reviewed papers and more than 70 book chapters.
Dr. Rossi Co-Founded Dicerna Pharmaceuticals and Calando Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and was the founding president of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society.
Veenu Aishwarya
Veenu Aishwarya is a biotechnology entrepreneur, innovator and businessman. He received his biomedical research training while working as a visiting scholar at the prestigious Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
He also briefly worked at Temple University, Philadelphia. At AUM LifeTech, Veenu has been strategizing revolutionary concepts to develop innovative genomics products with applications in nucleic acids therapeutics for various diseases. He also focuses on the applications of next generation nucleic acids platforms to facilitate discoveries and innovations in biomedical research and clinical diagnostics.
Veenu serves on the editorial board of Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids (Nature Publishing Group). He is a nominated member of the RNAi Therapeutics Committee of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Scientific Advisory Council of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society. He is also a member of The American Association of Cancer Research, The American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, The New York Academy of Sciences, and The International Society of Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids. He was also selected for a young scientist award program by the Keystone Symposia. He has authored several research articles and invited book chapters in publications like BMC, Oxford, Elsevier and Springer. He serves a referee/reviewer at journals like – Journal of Molecular Biology (Elsevier), Oncogene (Nature Publishing Group), BMC Genomics, Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids (Nature Publishing Group) and Journal of Biomedical Research.
Veenu has also been a Milken Institute Assocaite. The Milken Institute is an independent economic think tank whose mission is to improve the lives and economic conditions of diverse populations in the United States and around the world by helping business and public policy leaders identify and implement innovative ideas for creating broad-based prosperity. The Milken Institute Associates provides a vital link between the worlds of business, government, economics and philanthropy.
Veenu is an uprising business entrepreneur and is a frequently invited delegate at highly regarded global interdisciplinary forums like Forbes Health Care Summit, Fortune Brainstorm TECH, JP Morgan Healthcare conference, Milken Institute Global Conference, Partnering for Cures (Faster cures) and TEDMED.
Mahesh Chand
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Home»Industry News»Movers and Shakers
ISA announces Mary Ramsey as new executive director
Wednesday August 29, 2018
August 29, 2018 - Mary Ramsey has been appointed the executive director of the International Society of Automation (ISA), the nonprofit professional association that sets the standard for those who apply engineering and technology to improve the management, safety, and cybersecurity of modern automation and control systems used across industry and critical infrastructure.
Ramsey has been the interim executive director since January 2018 and has more than 25 years of industrial automation experience. She specializes in leadership, change management and strategy development/execution. Prior to her role at the ISA, she was the senior vice-president of process automation for the Americas at Schneider Electric, where she was responsible for a $550-million profit/loss statement and 1,200 employees. She has also served within Schneider Electric as senior vice-president of US and European industry business. Prior to joining Schneider, Ramsey held several business development roles within Matrikon International, Instrinsyc, Intellution, Inc. and GE Fanuc, among others.
"Mary is a dynamic, experienced leader with a deep understanding of automation and the industries we represent," said 2018 ISA president Brian Curtis. "She has proven her ability to think strategically and help the organization align its priorities during her tenure as interim executive director, and we are thrilled to welcome her on board permanently."
A search committee comprised of nine ISA members and leaders from around the world worked to review dozens of resumes and conduct a series of interviews over the last several months. The committee's work resulted in a recommendation to appoint Ramsey.
"The search committee has dedicated significant time and effort to make this decision. We are confident that Mary's leadership and extensive experience will serve the organization, its members and the automation community well for years to come," said Steve Pflantz, executive search committee chair.
Ramsey holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering (BSEE) degree from the University of Kentucky and a master of business administration (MBA) degree with a specialty in finance and strategy from Loyola University.
"It's an honor to serve as ISA's executive director," said Ramsey. "I'm excited to work with staff, members and leaders to bring a fresh perspective to this important organization. ISA is truly unique in its ability to bring the automation community together to solve difficult technical problems and provide leadership on critical issues facing our industries. We have a lot of work to do, and with the help and support of individuals and companies around the world, we will advance ISA's mission and create a successful future."
ICP DAS USA releases high-speed data acquisition module with built-in Ethernet
Safely automating food and beverage applications
Phoenix Contact appoints new general manager for Canada
More in this category: « David Doyle announced as new CEO of HEIDENHAIN | Pamela Sims promoted to VP marketing at Motion Industries »
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It looks like Bayern Munich coach Jupp Heynckes is going to celebrate a successful end to his third spell as coach of the record German champions
Spring formcheck
Munich - With just eight matches to go and plenty still to play for, the 2012/13 Bundesliga run-in promises to be one of the most exciting yet.
FC Bayern Munich are as sure a bet you'll find for the title, but below them the battle is raging for European spots and, even further down the table, for top-flight survival. bundesliga.com used the recent international break to assess each club's chances heading into the final straight. Simply click on each club's name to view their individual formchecks...
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DeepMind signed a deal with another NHS trust to get its Streams app in the hands of even more medics
Sam Shead
DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman.
WIRED/Michael Newington Gray
DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company that was acquired by Google in 2014, is planning to roll out a smartphone app that has the potential to save people's lives to medics at another NHS Trust in London
The company — backed by the likes of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk before it was bought for around £400 million by Google — announced on its website on Thursday that it has signed a five-year partnership with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
As a result of the deal, medics working in hospitals operated by the Trust, which include St Mary's, Hammersmith, and Charing Cross, will receive access to a DeepMind smartphone app know as Streams from early 2017.
The app, which doesn't yet involve any of the AI technology that DeepMind is known for, allows clinicians to see electronic patient records on their smartphones and get alerts when their patient's conditions start to deteriorate. Blood test data and other pathological data will be uploaded onto Streams and clinicians will receive push notifications if their patients have unusually high or low results.
Dr Sanjay Gautama, Caldicott Guardian and chief clinical information officer for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said in a statement that apps "bring immense opportunities for faster and more efficient care, by making access to vital information quicker and easier for clinicians." Gautama added that apps need to be linked to the core electronic patient record system if they are to be useful and safe.
Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and head of the DeepMind Applied unit, said in a statement that DeepMind will be "implementing infrastructure to help the Trust to work securely with a wide range of other apps."
The Streams app.
Google DeepMind
DeepMind said the task management features in Streams are underpinned by research and early product development for an app called Hark.
Hark is a university spinout app that was cofounded by Imperial professor Lord Ara Darzi and Dr Dominic King, now a senior clinician scientist at DeepMind. DeepMind hasn't said too much about Hark since it was acquired in February 2016 for an undisclosed sum.
Privacy campaigners want DeepMind and the NHS to be even more transparent
This is DeepMind's second NHS partnership for clinical apps. The company has a similar partnership with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
On Wednesday, the Royal Free refused to disclose how much money it is paying DeepMind to use Streams after Business Insider filed a freedom of information (FoI) request asking for the figures. Imperial College Healthcare is also paying DeepMind an unknown sum for Streams.
DeepMind's work on the Streams app with the Royal Free was criticised by privacy campaigners in April when New Scientist published an article highlighting the extent of the data-sharing agreement between the two organisations.
The agreement with Royal Free gives DeepMind access to the full medical history for 1.6 million patients, including their full name, date of birth, blood test results, past procedures, and underlying diagnoses. It also allows DeepMind to see things like whether a patient has ever had a drug overdose, what their HIV status is, and whether they've had an abortion.
After New Scientist revealed the extent of the data sharing agreement, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office began an investigation.
DeepMind insists that it follows all of the necessary procedures and that many other technology companies also have access to this sort of patient data. It's also keen to stress that the data isn't shared with Google.
But Julia Powles, who works on technology law and policy at the University of Cambridge, thinks DeepMind needs to be treated differently. She's writing a report along the lines of "DeepMind Health and its dubious access to the highly sensitive patient records of millions of unwitting Londoners," according to The Financial Times.
"They are categorically different to another electronic healthcare provider," Powles told Business Insider. "They try to analogise to [electronic health records provider] Cerner but they are not the same. They are delivering particular products for a segment of the population, but collecting and holding data on everyone."
More: DeepMind NHS
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Home > Government & Economy > Singapore Budget 2017
Broad-based policy, Budget 2017 measures can help firms: Iswaran
He says the government is committed to helping firms to cope with short and medium-term challenges
Wed, Mar 01, 2017 - 5:50 AM
Soon Weilunsoonwl@sph.com.sg@SoonWeilunBT
"The government recognises these immediate challenges that our SMEs are facing, and we'll continue to provide certain forms of short-term relief where necessary, and through the system of broad-based support we've built up over the years," Mr S Iswaran said.
PHOTO: THE BUSINESS TIMES
SOUNDING a markedly sympathetic tone, Singapore's Minister for Industry S Iswaran reiterated on Tuesday the government's commitment to helping companies tackle immediate and medium-term concerns, and said that its fiscal budget for this coming year can adequately address these worries.
This is because broad-based policy support built up previously are in place to support companies, while the new measures introduced in Budget 2017 will reach out to specific sectors and companies needing more help, he told Parliament on Tuesday.
This comes as Singapore presses ahead with medium-term goals laid out in a recent economic restructuring report amid a slowing economy and brittle economic sentiment.
"The government recognises these immediate challenges that our SMEs are facing, and we'll continue to provide certain forms of short-term relief where necessary, and through the system of broad-based support we've built up over the years," he said.
"And in all of these efforts, SMEs are our central focus," he added. SMEs are small and medium enterprises.
Mr Iswaran returned to the theme of collaboration that has been at the forefront of the current government's policy approach. "The government looks forward to working closely with trade associations and chambers and unions to ensure a diverse enterprise eco-system, a thriving SME community, and a strong economy rich with opportunities."
He was responding to comments by Members of Parliament (MPs) on the first day of debate on the Budget speech delivered last week by Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat. Should budgetary plans get the approval of the House at the end of the two-week debate, the Budget will take effect on April 1.
For close to four hours on Tuesday, 17 backbenchers aired their views on Mr Heng's speech, with many bringing up issues such as companies' worries, stresses in the labour market, the proposed water price hike and fiscal prudence.
Since Mr Heng's speech, businesses have expressed unhappiness with the lack of support measures for them. The chiefs of the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) and the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (Asme) have come out quickly to express disappointment with Budget 2017.
The perceived lack of short-term measures comes at a time when economic growth in 2016 was slow by historical standards, at 2 per cent.
MPs, in a change of tone from last year's Budget - when many called for businesses to rely less on state assistance, on Tuesday called on the government to be more sympathetic to the plight of struggling businesses and give them room to grow.
MP for Mountbatten Lim Biow Chuan said during the debate: "I don't believe that businesses are asking for handouts from the government. What they're appealing for is a business climate that is less costly and friendlier."
Mr Iswaran's response put the focus squarely on how Budget 2017, despite the seeming lack of help for firms, can support businesses.
Acknowledging that there were not many new broad-based measures in Budget 2017, he said that programmes already in place would continue to support businesses.
As for the targeted responses outlined in Budget 2017 - including those for the marine, process and construction sectors - they were made "in response to the varied needs in the economy".
But even as he soothed ruffled feathers, he also restated a point Mr Heng made - that firms should also do their part to buck up, or be left behind.
Mr Iswaran said: "The SMEs are key change agents. They have to accept the reality, they have to embrace the change and be change agents."
Expanding on the theme of collaboration, MPs also shared their views on labour issues, stressing that labour practices should reflect new realities.
In particular, union representative Desmond Choo was concerned about what can be done in the new economy so that workers' aspirations can be safeguarded.
He said that the growing emergence of a "gig economy" meant that part-time and freelance jobs will become more prevalent, and that this requires stronger workplace protection and retirement support.
"We'll need a robust framework to protect freelancers and the employers hiring them. Give them a sustaining ecosystem to grow," he said.
Mature workers were also a focus for MPs, as they pondered the role the silver generation can play in the new economy. They expressed concern that such workers may be displaced due to structural shifts in the economy, and urged the government to place an emphasis on jobs-matching for this segment of the labour force.
The MPs also said older workers are a valuable labour resource for demographically-challenged Singapore, and that the Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs), a key restructuring strategy in the recent Committee on the Future Economy report, is key to tapping their potential.
NTUC deputy secretary-general Heng Chee How said: "It is important for ITMs to include plans to fully utilise and continually sharpen this resource - and to do so as part of strategy, rather than as an accommodation or afterthought."
The Budget debate resumes on Wednesday.
As economy reboots, mindsets need to be rewired
Government not in the business of picking winners: Iswaran
Business, household costs top concerns
Iswaran
Purchase this article as republication.
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The "Hotline Bling" Drake Spoof On 'SNL' With Donald Trump Is The Only Skit Worth Watching — VIDEO
By Marisa LaScala
The Donald Trump episode of Saturday Night Live has been rough so far. All of the sketches Trump has been in have been toothless; they try to have their cake and eat it, too, portraying Trump as a politician willing to poke fun at himself without really tackling any of the recent controversies that Trump has churned up during his political campaign. It's just been a bunch of weak jokes about Rosie O'Donnell (old news) and his wife, Melania, without any mention of Megyn Kelly or Mexican immigrants. But then there was the "Hotline Bling" Drake spoof with Trump. It was gold.
It saved the episode from being totally devoid of laughs. This is one sketch that managed to totally nail its subject. Unfortunately, it wasn't Trump. It wasn't any of the political nominees so far, either. Instead, it was Drake. Saturday Night Live cast member Jay Pharoah has an amazing take on the rapper and his new "Hotline Bling" video. Unfortunately, Trump does show up at the end. But he manages not to ruin it. Instead, the focus is on Pharoah as Drake, the interesting way he dances in his video. "I'm standing by my dance moves," he sings. And Pharoah does a good job of re-creating them, too.
Of course, Trump gets in some of his own dance moves as well. Try to keep this image out of your nightmares.
But he wasn't the only one to pop up. An old SNL favorite did a cameo. Look, it's Ed Grimley!
Hopefully, Saturday Night Live will get Drake on sometime this season. I bet he'd do at least as good a job as Trump at poking fun of himself, and his dance moves would be far less frightening. And it'd be super sweet to see him do a duet with Pharoah on the dance floor.
Watch the full video below:
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Jenna Maroney Reacts to Team USA Advancing in the World Cup
As you may have heard, on Thursday the USA lost to Germany and advanced to the next round of the World Cup. And if you didn't hear about this, now you know why your neighbors kept screaming. Advancing with a loss is a weird way for things to go down and while everyone is glad the U.S. is going forward into the round of 16, having the team advance because they lost by only one goal and because another team in their group won but only by one point, doesn't exactly make for a climactic ending. "Yay!!! We lost and Portugal beat Ghana 2-1!" Yeah... the story of our triumph is a confusing one, but it is what it is and we're moving on! Huzzah!
While now we don't have to worry about explaining group play to those who don't understand — Or having it explained to us, or some combination of the two, because this thing was really that confusing — you still may be wondering about how this all went down. It's never too late to get into the World Cup! (Order your team U.S.A. t-shirts now! There is at least one more game where it will be appropriate!) For this reason, for this week's character react I decided to go with the one person who would make even the newest soccer fan feel like an expert: 30 Rock's Jenna Maroney. Is she the smartest tool in the shed? No way, but she sure is passionate. She would jump on the Team USA bandwagon as quick as she could. Plus, I'm pretty sure rooting for a soccer team counts as normaling.
Before She Knew the World Cup Is a Thing That Exists
Finding Out & Hearing the U.S. was Actually Doing Pretty Well
And That She Should Root for Them
Finding Out They Might Not Advance Out of the Group Round
But That They Could If they Lose to Germany & Portugal & Ghana Tie
Or If the U.S. Ties or Wins Against Germany
We know, Jenna. It's overwhelming.
Or If the U.S Loses & Portugal OR Ghana Wins But Then It Depends Goal Differential Between the U.S. & the Winning Team... Blah, blah, blah.
Giving In & Just Watching the Game
Seeing Germany Score
Realizing It Didn't Matter
Hearing the U.S. Was Advancing to the Next Round
And That Ghana & Portugal Were Eliminated
Knowing This Means There Is Another U.S. Game Coming
It's not over yet, Jenna. It's not over yet.
Images: NBC; Giphy
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Is BBC's Les Miserables Based On A True Story? The Adaptation Has Such An Important Message
By Aoife Hanna
Les Miserables/BBC
Oui oui, it is that time of year again and non non, I haven't done my Christmas shopping either. What I have done though is began preparing myself for the onslaught of incredible TV that is going to be hitting our screens. Christmas specials a go-go, plentiful period dramas, and a few days off to really get your TV on. One of the most hotly anticipated parts of the Yuletide schedules is the BBC's version of a classic French novel. But is Les Misérables a true story?
Erm, guys I am afraid that is a non. Les Mis is in fact based on the novel of the same name by French author Victor Hugo. It is set in a time of enormous chaos and is a dark look at the struggles of those suffering from abject poverty in France at the time. The story centres around a French convict, desperate to escape his murky past. It follows him being constantly pursued by the guy who just won't quit, Inspector Javert. It also tells the story of a young mother who, owing to her desperate and terrible situation, is forced to leave her young daughter and seek out work as a sex worker.
Now if you're anything like me, the words Les Mis send a shudder down your spine. Mental images of West End musicals, school drama productions you suffered through, and Hugh Jackman singing paralyse you with fear. Yes, I am outing myself as decidedly not a musical fan, shoot me, but this is one gay stereotype I am very glad to eschew.
WELL worry thee not fellow non musical fans (seriously why are they suddenly singing?), this particular edition of a classic will NOT be a musical. OMG, thank eff for that. Finally an edition of Les Mis that I will enjoy. Also y'all, the cast is seriously good. And when I say good, I mean absolutely excellent.
The woman who has low-key managed to become more famous than the mustard of the same name, Olivia Colman is playing the not so nice Madame Thénardier, and Adeel Akhtar stars as her husband Monsieur Thénardier. Dominic West appears as Jean Valjean and David Oyelowo is playing the low key a-hole inspector Javert. Lily Collins stars as poor unfortunate Fantine, who is having a pretty bad time of it.
The BBC are keen to point out that yes, this story is a period piece, but the narrative is as old as the hills, and still relevant today. According to the BBC site "With striking intensity and contemporary resonance, Hugo’s novel explores the struggles and triumphs of the underclass and the quest for a better life."
The story has been adapted for screen by the damn successful Andrew Davies. Name ring a bell? Well this guy is a low key don of the period drama world. He is responsible for the BBC's hit version of War And Peace as well as the 1995 production of Pride And Prejudice that launched Colin Forth into the sex symbol stratosphere.
I know right, when the heck does this start and which snacks should you eat? Well the snack thing is personal, but the show starts on BBC1 on Dec. 30 at 9p.m. and will be in six parts.
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General Zombies
The Cult, the Overlords, and the Ancient Order of the Keepers
By Tac, December 5, 2015 in General Zombies
Hey guys, Tac here with another thread! I want to immediately note that this thread was a compilation effort between myself, @MrRoflWaffles, @NaBrZHunter, @BlindBusDrivr, @MixMasterNut, and @Monopoly Mac, and I was just the one fortunate enough to post it. This thread goes over the Ancient Order of the Keepers, the cult mentioned in the radios, and the Shadow Man and his associates. Lines are then drawn between these three things and the conclusion is yours to decide until we learn more!
The Journalist begins his correspondence with Mr. Rapt by expressing feelings of uneasiness caused by strange happenings within Morg City. From an unidentifiable mold, to a devastating sickness, he heavily implies that something is not right. He tells the tale of a fruit seller, who is unwilling to talk at first, but eventually reveals the history of the city. When the fruit seller was young, his uncle would tell stories of a dark force which cast its shadow over the metropolis. He elaborates; good and evil were engaged in battle, and the only thing holding back the forces of the apocalypse was the Ancient Order of the Keepers. This is not our first encounter with the Keepers. First present on the battlefields of the Great War, and now too in the dimly lit streets of Morg City, they are an interdimensional race of beings devoted to preserving the status quo.
The fruit seller isn’t the only person to eventually become more talkative in the Journalist’s presence. Rumors abound concerning chanting heard emanating from beneath the city. Furthermore, the Journalist asserts that the Ancient Order of the Keepers, who we presume to be a force of good combating the nefarious motives of the Shadow Man and Overlords, is actually some kind of cult. Crates belonging to the cult can be found in Morg City’s various districts. Within, statues of squid-like monsters lie, waiting to be used by the player as required.
It is important to note that it is fairly likely that the Overlords are Apothicons. Due to the fact that the Keepers have the same mouths as Margwas and tentacle-like suckers on their tongues, it’s also very likely that the Keepers are Apothicons. This puts the Shadow Man, the Apothicons, and the Keepers in the same race/species/etc.
Across the map, there are various sets of symbols. The first set of symbols can be seen on the Pack-a-Punch, a broken stone disc from which upgraded weapons are delivered by an uncoiling tentacle. The origins and implications of the symbols on the disc are, as of yet, unknown.
A second set of symbols, which we will refer to as CONA (‘con Alphabet), can be seen inscribed on the mystery box, the Apothicon Rift Stone, the swords, the hands of our sinners, and the cultist statues. These are the marks of the Cursed and are related to the Shadow Man and his associates, likely meaning that the statues are representations of the Overlords that they worship.
The final, and most noticeable, set of symbols, is cuneiform. Cuneiform appears in several places around Morg City, one of which is on the Keepers themselves. The text is also printed on their robes, and drifts around the portal they enter through. It can also be seen on the chained doors leading into the subway and on all the chained crates that hold the sacrifice items, cult statues, and the Apothicon Rift Stone. This implies that the cuneiform is strongly related to the Keepers, as if they employ it to serve as a warning to avoid that which they hide behind it.
Following his discussion of the Order, the journalist pauses, before beginning to discuss rumors of human sacrifice (his pause is indicative that it is not likely the Ancient Order or the Keepers are performing these sacrifices) in Morg City. Additionally, the history of the subway and Sacred Place presents an interesting conundrum; which of the aforementioned groups is it associated with? The Ancient Order can be ruled out as they chain shut all subway entrances in order to prevent us from entering (note that this does not apply to the Sacred Place). In regards to the Sacred Place, the only sacrifices we have knowledge of are done for the benefit of the Overlords, and seeing as the room is described as sacred by The Shadow Man, it is likely fairly significant for those sympathetic to his cause.
So now that all background information has been presented, let’s dive into the details. Who exactly is this chanting cult? The options are as follows:
1. The Ancient Order of the Keepers is an organization, consisting of Keepers as members. This Ancient Order itself, as an organization, is the cult, and the Keepers chant beneath the city.
2. The Ancient Order of the Keepers is an organization, consisting of Keepers as members. There is a separate cult that worships the Keepers, and they chant beneath the city.
3. The Ancient Order of the Keepers is an organization, consisting of Keepers are members. There is a separate cult that worships the Shadow Man and company, and they chant beneath the city.
For option one, an explanation must be presented for why the statues and artifacts inside the crates belong to the ‘bad’ force while the crates are listed as belonging to the cult, which option one says is the Keepers (not the ‘bad’ force). One potential explanation is to take the “cultists crate” literally and say that the artifacts didn’t belong to the cultists and only the crates did, as if the Keepers seized the artifacts, put them in crates, and chained them up. The question of why they put them in crates and hid them in plain sight then needs to be addressed. In regards to subway, seeing as the only feasible options are that it either belongs to the cult or the Shadow Man and company, it must belong to the Shadow Man and company, since the Keepers are the cult and it doesn’t belong to the Keepers.
For option two, an explanation must be presented for why the cult mentioned is not either the Ancient Order of the Keepers or the Keepers themselves arises, as the journalist very clearly says that one of them is the cult. Additionally, one would have to explain how this cult was able to seize the artifacts and statues. From there, they would have to explain whether the Keepers themselves then took the crates from their cult and locked them, or if the cult themselves were somehow able to lock them. As for subway, we said it either belonged to the cult or the Shadow Man, and if the Keepers attempted for people to not access it, it’s unlikely that it belonged to the cult that worshiped them, meaning it belonged to The Shadow Man and company.
For option three, similar to option two, an explanation must be given for why the cult is not either the Ancient Order of the Keepers or the Keepers themselves, as heavily implied by the journalist. Also similar to option two, one would need to explain how this cult got hold of the artifacts and statues inside the crates. While they belonged to those they worshiped, they are still enormously powerful objects. At that point, after the cult had managed to acquire the artifacts and statues, option three’ers would say that the Keepers then locked these crates in hopes of preventing us to get to them. In regards to the subway, it is undecided whether it belonged to the Shadow Man and company themselves, or simply the cult that worshiped them.
A conundrum that is wrapped up in each of the three options is that, if the ‘good’ force chained the crates that held the statues and artifacts belonging to the ‘bad’ force, and being the Curse is the only way to break these chains, why did the ‘good’ force make it so the only way to unlock these artifacts is by essentially being their enemy? It’s been said that the Shadow Man and other relevant ‘bad’ forces can’t open the crates themselves and need humans, but then it would need to be explained why the cult in question could not anticipate the Shadow Man having the ability to make humans cursed.
If anyone has any ideas on how to fix some of the issues, or simply want to weigh in on one of the options, feel free to do so and I'll catch ya in the comments!
Am I allowed to present a fourth option?
4 minutes ago, Stop Mocking Me0 said:
Of course! What do you have in mind?
Yeah can I add the fourth option of their are humans within the Ancient Order of the Keepers, that are chanting underneath the city for the Apothicon Keepers to come and help them from a prophesied future or something of the sort?
So when this thread was originally written out, the option you mentioned @Nightmare Voyager was included, but for some reason I took it out. More generally, what you're saying is combining options one and two, saying that the Ancient Order of the Keepers is essentially split into at least two levels, with the lower level (say, humans) being the cult that worships the upper level (the Keepers). As evidence that the Keepers and the Ancient Order of the Keepers may not be the same is the journalist statement where he says "I've heard more than a few whispers about this Ancient Order and the Keepers," putting an odd emphasis on the word 'and.' This could perhaps indicate what you're talking about, or something else entirely. While I'm not fond of the idea of adding this variable into the Order when it can't be substantiated, I think it still has some back so I'll throw it into the original.
How the hell do you guys work this stuff out?
Haha lots of time and technicalities (oh, and almost a thousand messages fired off back and forth :p)
BlindBusDrivr
@Stop Mocking Me0
If you're going to make a big post like that which shifts the discussion, it probably deserves it's own thread.
But since it's here, let me just get rid of all of these misconceptions, falsehoods, and illogical assumptions, so discussion around Shadows of Evil can actually progress:
-Where are you getting this info about 115 in Morg City? What evidence is there that the stairs and monorail run on 115? There is none. Not every electrical system runs off 115; battery-electric rail cars have been around since the early 1900s. No need for 115 to explain any of this. It's quite obvious that the first encounter in Morg City with 115 is the meteor shower, in which people become sick (just like every other time somebody is exposed to 115's radiation throughout zombies).
-It helps if you use the communities shared terminology instead of making up your own, and even so your theory about the "Margs", which is what I believe we all call "The Overlords" (since that is what they are called in-game), is founded on incorrect assumptions. The Overlords whom the Shadow Man works for are APOTHICONS. This actually has numerous references to back it, the Apothicon rift stone, the Apothicon Servant, the Apothicon Sword, etc. The Margwas, the 'Meatballs', and the 'Parasites' (flying things), do not even appear to have an allegiance to either the Overlords or the Keepers. No idea where you're getting this stuff about 115 being used to summon anything at all. No idea where you're getting that Maxis has done anything to the Overlord's world. The Overlord's are predators, that is why they are manipulating the cursed ones to open the rift and allow them passage, not to save a dying race. The people in this version of Morg City didn't even become zombies naturally, Shadows of Evil does not take place in reality, if you watch the prologue you can see that when the characters pass out at the start, they wake up in an empty city now surrounded by zombies, and it becomes clear that this world has been constructed by the Shadowman to manipulate them into performing the deeds he needs done:
"Your world, as it was, is still here. It shifted slightly, wrenched, from it's rightful place. Many of the souls who inhabited it have succumbed to the, darkness. They are echoes of themselves, trapped in a fractured shadow of reality..." -Shadowman
"The Keepers[read: Shadowman, he is lying to the characters] corrupt and distort reality, providing a means for their masters to overwhelm this world." -Shadowman
No idea where the MPD stuff is coming from either. You made all of this up. The MPD was a device created by the Vril-ya which offers a stable passage to 'Aether'. It has virtually no connection to anything the Apothicons are doing. You're drawing unnecessary parallels between the two, for example there are four sacrifices, not because the MPD had four canisters, but because there are FOUR PLAYERS. The Moon Artifact has nothing to do with the Summoning Key, the only thing they have in common is that they are spheres. The Moon Artifact was made by the Vril to use on their MPD, which connects our world to Aether. The Summoning Key/Apothicon Rift Stone is a device is used for the sacrifices (by performing the sacrifice ritual it summons a gate worm), and appears to be able to provide a stable passage between dimensions ( the key appears to act as the 'key' to open the gate once the gate worms release their energy). They have no relation.
-You got the Keepers right for the most part, they seek to prevent the weaknesses between the dimensions from being exploited. Except we cannot confirm that they are in fact the cult.
-We know very little about Mr.Rapt, but it has been highly speculated that Mr.Rapt is the Shadowman, and also in each of the phone calls on the map, since they all have the same voice. There's other posts explaining this theory more in depth which you can easily find, so I won't bother going into it here.
-The Keepers did not plan for this to happen. It would add another layer of complexity to the story for no reason, without any evidence. The mural/carving in the Sacred Place shows the Keepers holding off the forces of the Overlords with the O4, which shows that the battle between the Overlords and Keepers is ancient, not sure how that means they planned this. Also, why would the Keepers chose Nero, Jessica, Jack, and Floyd, to join an organization who's responsibility is keeping the universe safe? They were all complete scumbags with no morals and did whatever they could to get ahead; opportunistic sociopaths. It makes no sense why they would be the chosen ones. And we even know for a fact that the Keepers did not chose them, as they were chosen by the Shadowman and the Overlords, hence the mark of the Beast, "you have been chosen", "you are cursed", etc. They were chosen by the Shadowman and company because they were easy to manipulate. The Keepers were helping them to defeat the Overlords because they were working with all that they had.
It would seem that you have attempted to force everything to support your narrative that the Keepers planned all of this to happen, with the end-game being to recruit the four characters, which is false. I suggest a complete re-evaluation of Shadows of Evil's story.
52 minutes ago, Stop Mocking Me0 said:
Ok, A- I did ask.
Well, to be fair, you asked to add a fourth option about how the cult, Keepers, etc. relate to each other, which isn't exactly what you did.
There is some truth to this. The world you're in, is part of the gateway. It's the city, but it's got that weird room in the basement which is clearly interdimensional. Other then that, this map is somewhat grounded. The souls around you are zombies, and the city's residents.
Ummm, what? You're asking if a United States metropolis was capable of utilizing propulsion in 1945?
The Overlords only applies to the massive octopus in the sky. It doesn't account for the Shadowman, nor the Margwas. Both of which are from unspecified sources. The parasites we know to come from the campaign's world. The zombies are Morg city inhabitants, after being afflicted with 115.
See now you've contradicted yourself. We know that the Margwa's heart, xenomater, and tenticle are needed to build the apothicon's servent. That being said, we can infer those things are servants of the apothicon, and thus, serve the "overloards.".
So, because it's clear you didn't read the original post, I'll say that part again.
Or it's the room belonging to the cult that chants from beneath the city in the real world?
Also.... The order of the keepers delves into human sacrifice, as stated by the reporter, They're not exactly looking for Mother Teresas.
As it's again clear you didn't read the OP, I'll say it again:
Following this discussion of the Order, the journalist pauses, before beginning to discuss rumors of human sacrifice (his pause is indicative that it is not likely the Ancient Order or the Keepers are performing these sacrifices) in Morg City.
Don't be so quick to slash down a theory just because you don't like it. Lord knows if you ever found out about the Shangri-la Mars theory.....
Are you fucking kidding me right now, Mocking? You're going to sit here in this thread I create and absolutely trash on another thread I created?
57 minutes ago, Tac said:
Well it required backstory.
Not like the shield can.
I did read the original post, I don't think the keepers are of the same race as the overlords.
Or it's this world's version of the MPD.
Again, did read the OP. The rumors spread about the cult, how would the reporter even hear about the human sacrifices if not from the keepers? If the overlords had success in human sacrifices, who's to say they didn't just perform the rituals themselves with whomever was doing the killings for them?
Wow... I feel like an asshole for not remembering it was your thread... It was a good theory, the shangri-la one, that you clearly spent a lot of time on.... I'm not trashing it, so to speak, just showing how much theories can alter one's perception of the storyline.
NaBrZHunter
@Stop Mocking Me0 "Because 115" doesn't slide. There is more to the world of technology than just Divinium. And to straight up respond to a statement made by the creator and backed by the contributors of this thread as "wrong" is cold, hard arrogance. If you're going to come into someone else's thread and hijack it with your own tome, then at least provide solid supports. Otherwise, create your own thread, and if you wish to make it a response to another, then state your intentions in the new thread.
The contributors to this thread worked for three solid days on the information used to create the OP. To respond "wrong," is bold, my friend. Bold.
But here comes the good ol' Bus Driver. :-)
I ask to offer my own idea.
Tac accepts.
I offer it, it's a bit extensive, but It gets my point across. I have to write this twice as it's deleted the first time by a technical error.
Me and Tac are discussing what I'm implying, then bus driver comes in and accuses me and my theory, which I've spent hours as well striving to piece together, of being full of falsifications. Then proceeds to point out these "falsifications" however, not one of these implementations are backed with solid evidence I can't combat. In fact he states that the zombies are both a result of dimensional travel, as well as 115 from meteors which logically, it's either one or the other.
I have never stated Tac is wrong with his theory (only that these keepers can't automatically be labeled as "good").
115 is not my go-to for solutions. I've brought the concept of the MPD to the mix. Linking the whole event to the main storyline from BO1. There's more actual backing behind my solution then you're seeing.
To state that I am being arrogant and want to highjack this thread is both rude, and false. If you wanted me to leave then ask nicely, I'll be glad to take my theory elsewhere.
3 hours ago, Stop Mocking Me0 said:
Ok, A- I did ask. B-There are no misconceptions, falsehoods, or illogical assumptions. These are theories. The beauty of the storyline here is that almost half of it has been derived from nonspecific theories and discussions. Like Mob of the Dead. At first, it appeared to many people to be a normal map with odd occurrences. But now it appears to be a map set in the domain of the great evil. There's nothing in the map that outright says it, but we've drawn this conclusion from evidence in the map.
@Stop Mocking Me0 There is a difference between theorizing and making things up while ignoring facts. I took a break from the zombies storyline around the time Mob of the Dead was released, so I don't know what people were coming up with at the time. All I know is that even to this day the discussion of the story behind that map is a clusterf*ck, but this is about Shadows of Evil anyway.
Then explain the robot civil protectors. Or the ability to craft a rocket shield? What you expect me to believe one just FOUND a few mechanisms in a city like this capable of such propulsion? Also look at the Meatballs. How do they get into the map? They fall from the heavens. The parasites and Margwas just teleport in, now... Why would they do that? Surely there's some significance?
The civil protector is the one thing that's up in the air due to the fact that they have given us approximately zero background info on it and it just appears to be put in for gameplay's sake, and even so it does not necessarily have to run on 115. Morg City is a retrofuturistic metropolis after all, so it's not far fetched that they could have a steampunk/dieselpunk robot. Since it is not mentioned in the main narrative (and complicates due to the question of why they would need crooked cops like Vincent when they have robots that can do the job and so on), I don't worry too much about it. As for the rocket shield, rocket technology has been around since ancient china (~1200 AD), it's not like it's some sort up super secret futurstic nazi technology. In fact, on the map, the shields are fueled by plain old fuel canisters which you pick up around the map. And again, what is so far fetched about a retro-futuristic city having this tech? It's a slab of metal and glass that can ignite fuel, no need for 115. And the Meatballs? Hmmm, why do they fall from the sky like that. Why it couldn't just be because A) Treyarch already came up with the code for an enemy that falls from the sky, rolls towards you, and explodes, for the campaign in the form of RAPS, and all they'd have to do is change the skin to make it work in zombies. Or just because B) Everything else on the map randomly spawns in and these just happen to fall from the sky because of the reasons I listed above. And I don't understand what point you're making as to it being significant that the Margwas teleport in, maybe because there isn't one and you just keep repeating it as though it means something.
Denial. To insist that the Kraken in the sky is the only thing applying to the Overlords is obnoxious. Here are some Shadowman quotes for you, and note that the Shadowman is lying to the characters about the situation, so whenever he talks about what The Keepers are trying to do, it's what he himself is trying to do:
"The Keepers corrupt and distort reality, providing a means for their Masters to overwhelm this world."
"They will not rest until this world belongs to their Overlords."
"The Keepers seek to exploit the weakness between the dimensions to allow their Masters passage to this world, you must repel their onslaught at all costs."
"Your service to the OVERLORDS is appreciated, our complete assimilation of this dimension will now, proceed."
"Your world belongs to us, the process cannot be reversed."
"Accepts your fate, and kneel before your new Masters."
So, for some reason you insist the only Overlords applies to a single creature, even though every single reference to Overlords/Masters is plural? And then for some reason you claim that my explanation of the Overlords does not account for the Shadowman? So is that why every single action taken by the Shadowman has been for the Overlords? And is it also why the Shadowman says the Overlords thank you, and calls it "our" dimension, referring to himself and the Overlords having control of it? Or why the Shadowman says "your world belongs to us", again referring to himself and the Overlords? I'm very interested to hear you explanation as to why my explanation about the Overlords cannot "account" for the Shadowman despite the fact the Shadowman explicitly stating that he is working with the Overlords to take over the dimension throughout the game. The Shadowman and Overlords, are all clearly from the same place, as they are all working towards the same goals. The Margwas are also clearly involved with this as they constantly show up while you are doing rituals affiliated with the Overlords. Go and actually read Tac's post which this thread is actually about and he explains where the same symbols show up and what is related.
Then you say that the "parasites" are from the campaign? I mean, they did also include the flying things in Nightmare mode (the canon of said mode is highly questionable at best), but what the hell does that have to do with Shadow of Evil?
And yes, 115 meteors made people sick in Morg City, but we don't know if everybody turned into zombies, we really don't know what happened with that, there is no mention of it. 115 can make you sick and crazy, like what happened to Maxis due to years of exposure, but it won't necessarily turn you into a zombie. And again, we know what happened to the inhabitants of Morg City: "Many of the souls who inhabited it have succumbed to the, darkness. They are echoes of themselves, trapped in a fractured shadow of reality...". They are NOT conventional 115 zombies, they are a product what has happened to Morg City as a result of the Overlords meddling with the dimensions and displacing the souls who lived there.
I have done no such thing, you simply haven't made a valid argument to refute mine. What do the part's needed to build the Apothicon servant, have to do with what allegiance they have? The Apothicon Servant get it's name, because it is Apothicon in origins, and SERVES whoever picks it up. The pieces which you use to make it, just show that all of those things are apothicon in Origin. Since the Margwas, meatballs, and parasites attack you both while you are helping the Overlords, and while you are helping the Keepers, it is difficult/impossible to determine whose side they are on, or if they even have one.
And again here, first you say 115 caused the zombie sickness from the meteors, now you're saying it's a separate reality influenced by the shadowman's masters? Which is it? My theory is that 115 was already present, and was awoken by the "Overlords" or the keepers, leading to interdimensional rifts that caused a huge issue. When the 4 fell out, they weren't transported, the 115 around them was used to help them become one with their Marg-selves.
I never stated that. I said people became sick, not that they become zombies. Could explain to everybody else here what it means for 115 to be 'awoken'? Because it looks like you're making up terms again. We already know that the inter dimensional rift has been caused by the Overlords, it is said explicitly "they seek to exploit the weakness between dimensions".
Your last sentence makes no sense. Nobody but you knows what "Marg-selves" means, because you made that term up.
No evidence that the 'basement'(The Sacred Place) itself is inter dimensional. If it was, then why the Overlords need you to perform the rituals to allow them to get into our dimension, if the basement was already connected between dimensions? Doesn't make sense, and there's nothing objective to support that claim.
The MPD is a device on the moon which works when one uses a round device combined with four sacrificial alters. I should also mention the Shadow man describes the summoning key as the most powerful artifact in any universe. On moon, you need to send the ball of almost the exact same look, size, and pattern to A-open the MPD, and B-Send to maxis to launch the 3 world-destroying nukes. To me that sounds like an artifact of unimaginable power. See the connection?
The MPD was made by the Vril. It is based on the lore of the Vril Ya. The Inter-dimensional stuff in Shadows of Evil surrounds the Apothicons and is based on the Cthulhu Mythos. They are completely different. Again, the MPD is Vril in it's origin and is a "stable gateway to Aether", Richthofen's exact words. The exact purpose of the Artifact on Moon is unknown, all we know is it is used to open the pyramid and Maxis needed it before he sent the rockets. They are roughly the same size, but they do not have the same pattern or appearance at all. We see the Summoning Key's round pieces fly off into shurikens/blades/whatever and fly around during the sacrifice rituals, and then the energy of the sacrificed flows into it. There is nothing like that happening with the Moon Artifact, is just f*cking chills underground, then it chills in the pyramid, then you throw a gersch device at it a couple times and it moves. We have no idea what it's purpose is, just that it allows the pyramid to work, and that Maxis wants it.
And here you go trying to draw this parallel here again between the two. The Summoning Key aka The Apothicon Rift Stone literally allows the Overlords into the dimension. While the Moon Artifact was just kind of along for the ride whilst MAXIS was the one who took over the computers, overrode the rocket's guidance systems, and launched them at Earth. The Summoning Key and the Moon Artifact, going off of all of the information new have at this time, are NOT related.
Also the amount of characters doesn't change the amount of sacrifices needed.
The MPD is also used to control the zombies. But more noticeably, it's used to control the map elements. Look at the box, and the horrible squid-faced teddy. When richtofen takes over the box gets a new noise. When maxis takes over the same thing happens. Owning the MPD, means owning the ability to control the zombies world. Logically, the "overlords" as you put it are in control of a MPD.
Except we can. By the Reporter. Who specifically says "The ancient order of the keepers". The cult worship the keepers. Meaning they approve.
The amount of sacrifices is based on the number of characters. I don't see how you cannot understand this. In storyline terms there are always four players. This is like arguing that in Ascension, or Shangri La or whatever, only Dempsey might have been there, because you start up a solo game as Dempsey. Doesn't work like that. There is a sacrifice specifically made for each of the characters, based on where they commit their sins, and a person who they knew.
Except the Overlords are not in control of the MPD. We don't even know what has happened with the MPD in this universe or if it even exists. This is not even normal Morg City, is has been displaced by the Overlords meddling between dimensions. The Overlords appear to be in charge of this world, because it has been shifted from it's normal place, and they are able to distort the reality seen by the 4 characters we play as.
"The Keepers (the Shadowman) corrupt and distort reality, providing a means for their Masters to disrupt this world."
The Report says he has heard of the "Ancient Order and The Keepers" by talking to people. He says he think it's some kind a cult. Not that it is, but he thinks. Then follows up by saying "They say you can hear them (the cult) chanting sometimes, beneath the city." This does not prove the Keepers are the Cult, or that the cult favors the Keepers. If anything his next line, "There's all these rumors about human sacrifice and freaky shit", supports the idea that the cult is actually affiliated with the Overlords, whom we already know are fond of Human Sacrifice.
This is a theory saying Mr. Rapt is not the shadow man, but rather the keepers.
Actually they arn't sociopaths, look back at the cop after you kill his partner. "Taking out that squealer wasn't hard... But my partner?.... He didn't deserve that....
In fact, almost all of the 4 regret killing the person they sacrificed. A real psychopath would have no implementation of right or wrong as long as they got their way.
Except there is literally no evidence that Mr.Rapt is affiliated with The Keepers in any way and you are just making a baseless speculation to support your idea, while there are better one that actually go along with existing evidence.
You can argue my use of the word sociopath, but that is really irrelevant to my point. Even if they did feel bad, they still did those things. Jessica killed a man without second thought and didn't even flinch. She had no issue manipulating people. Jack was okay with letting innocent people go to prison or worse, in exchange for bribes. He had no problem killing people either. Floyd was willing to end another man's career and possibly his life, so he could get a title shot which he didn't deserve. Nero was a hopelessly arrogant narcissist who killed is wife to get out of debt (she was no angel but that's not the point). Each one of them stood for nothing except their own personal gains. To argue that the 4 characters on this map were good people, is like arguing that John Wayne Gacey would have made a good babysitter.
The keepers are the superior beings, they would never allow four idiots to be able to stumble in, sacrifice 4 people, and bring the Margs (yes I will continue to call them that) to the world. They're a hyper-intelligent force, you think it's by chance that the keepers put up little to no effort in stopping you? When the world gets taken over that they just sit around and wait for YOU to piece together the puzzles? The Margs are evil, but their plans aren't well thought out, otherwise how would four idiots be able to stop them with little to no help from the Keepers? The keepers are after the prime directive, not the typical goal: And to do this they need fresh agents.
There's no evidence they are hyper-intelligent, you are just making yet another illogical assumption. Bravo. You're right, The Keepers would never chose these idiots to save the world, that's why the SHADOWMAN and the OVERLORDS chose them to DOOM that dimension.
And what did you expect from a Zombies map? Of coarse we are going to have to piece together everything and figure it out. And for you to say that the Keepers sat around and did nothing is rather strange considering they: attempt to stop you at every attempt to aid the Shadowman, then they Allow you to get the swords, upgrade the swords, and ultimately take down his shield so you can sacrifice him, and in the end they banish the Shadowman and Overlords and close the Rift. The characters on the map did a lot of the legwork, but the Keepers did a lot too, considering Treyarch can't just have them go and do everything or else we wouldn't have a f*cking zombies map.
Again, you entire "theory" rests on the premise that the Keepers need 'fresh agents', which is a completely baseless asseration. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. If they are a superior alien race as you state, why would they need 4 human goons as their new agents to protect the dimensions?! It makes ZERO sense. And there is literally no evidence to support this theory, when it is already made clear by everything that the Shadowman and the Overlords chose the characters and planned all of this, only for the Keepers to show up and rain on their parade.
What is happening here, is you seem to be suffering from the 'Confirmation Bias':
Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.
You have been twisting any and all available information (and even coming up with some astounding assumptions) you can to fit your "theory", which is that the Keepers had all this happen to gain a new group of dysfunctional recruits, and disregarding anything which goes against this idea.
Like I said before, you need to completely re-evaluate the Shadows of Evil story. (By the looks of it, you should also check up on your understanding of fundamental aspects of the zombies storyline)
I slash down theories which have no support, are founded on false and/or baseless assertions, and which distract from actually progressing our understanding of the storyline. And some Shangri-La Mars theory from 4+ years ago is irrelevant.
Here is a good place to start with learning the basics: http://www.callofdutyzombies.com/index.php?/topic/139175-transcripts-of-zombies-radios-journals-cinematics-and-letters/
BlindBusDriver
I'd hate to clutter up anything else on tac's thread. I made my own.
And deleted it because honestly if Bus driver is going to spend that much time on a warpath with my one theory, while bringing nothing else to the table, and insulting my understanding, which apparently is greater than his if I was actually here for the discussions of MOTD and Origins alike, then I'm glad to just forget about it entirely.
I don't want to anger anyone or derail this topic anymore, if you want I can delete this message but I just wanted to point out an easter egg with the Civil Protector where his badge on his chest says 115. Might just be an EE but you never know, just wanted to point that out.
Anyways after MrRoflwaffles pointed out this new code that translates too: Although they have discovered the way Primis will fail. So I am wondering if this ancient war between the Keepers and the Apothicons that seems to have happened, failed. I believe that their will be a map literally named Primis where we play as the YO4 and go back to this war, but we have an EE where we either fail or win the war to contribute towards unraveling the story. I just wanted to point this out because it seemed to be important to this storyline of the Apothicons vs. Keepers.
12 hours ago, Nightmare Voyager said:
Nah I appreciate it, thank ya :)
I saw that, and I too am curious as to its meaning. I'm not caught up with Primis, in my mind that is, and I haven't spent really any time at all thinking about it, so with this new note I'm definitely gonna have to go think about it a bit.
InfestLithium
1,719 Divinium
I was actually discussing it in a Skype chat with some friendos and that message really concerned me; why would an ancient event between good and evil that already occurred in the past be said to fail, especially in future tense? It seems that this ancient war is coming once again and will be repeated; except now, the Ancient Evil has been unleashed and this time wants to stop the process from occurring again.
My original assumption was that Richtofen wrote these ciphers as some sort of back-end journal or log reference. But seeing this note makes it feel so...negative and uncomfortable. Why would Primus fail? Why would locking away the Ancient Evil fail, and are were attempting to replay the events which occurred so many centuries ago? That just led me to believe something else wrote these...perhaps Shadow Man himself or another with darker intentions. Or just a party-pooper.
12 hours ago, InfestLithium said:
I am hoping that what it is alluding to is that it did fail in the past loop, which all this time loop stuff does exist still since Maxis last mentioned it in Origins, but in this one we are going to do stuff so that it doesn't when we get to that point.
(Tiptoes in, opines):
The cthulu crates have New York stamped on them, and the chains would be for hooking to a crane for large crates such as this. So they appear to have been delivered, not bound up.
(Backs away slowly).
51 minutes ago, 83457 said:
That'd make sense. Although I think it's a little weird where the crates ended up, two of which were strown about on high rafters, another in the arms of a crane, and the last one behind a metal grate in the canals.
I may have been confused, and then confused you.
I was referencing the large crates that the Statues are in, I was not thinking of the other boxes.
I'm thinking small boxes= Shadowman/Overlords for rituals.
Large Statue crates= keeper's stuff for you to use against Shadowman and co.
Both are in this 'shifted' world and so don't make 100% sense as to their locations or means of being transported to where we find them. Obviously our ways of interacting with them are otherworldly or supernatural, further pulling them from a rational explanation.
20 hours ago, 83457 said:
What about the fact that the statues have the marks/symbols of the Shadow Man? The marks signify to me that they'd belong to the Shadow Man and his associates.
1 hour ago, Tac said:
Either the marks are universal to both groups, or my theory is poo. Thanks for pointing this out as i hadn't noticed.
AresTheAncient
On 12/5/2015 at 7:32 PM, Tac said:
What about Primis and the ancient beings that controls the mystery box and PaP
Just for the sake of people scrolling through the thread, is there any chance that you can edit your post and take out the quote @AresTheAncient? It takes up quite a bit of room :p
As for your question, I'm a little confused. Are you asking how PRIMIS and the Apothicons are connected to each other, or something else?
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Home News Funcinpec Leaders Visit China Communist Party Benefactors
Funcinpec Leaders Visit China Communist Party Benefactors
Alex Willemyns and Hul Reaksmey
Funcinpec leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh and second vice president Nhiek Bun Chhay left for China on Sunday to meet with officials from the Chinese Communist Party, the Cambodian royalist party’s longtime benefactor and supporter.
China has provided financial support to Funcinpec since it was founded in 1981 by Prince Norodom Sihanouk as an armed resistance against the government in Phnom Penh, and today continues to provide the party with basic funds and political training.
Multiple delegations are exchanged by the parties each year but this trip is Prince Ranariddh’s first since he returned to Funcinpec’s leadership this year after his ouster as leader in 2006.
At a brief press conference before departing for China, Prince Ranariddh rejected the idea that Funcinpec has become an irrelevant force in Cambodia since the party lost all its seats in parliament.
He said that the royalist party still has a role to play in domestic and foreign policy that the opposition CNRP is unable to.
“The opposition party just relies on the culture of talking and dialogue, but…one [party] is the partner and another one is the opposition,” the prince said. “Funcinpec is a partner of the CPP, and they are the opposition party.”
Funcinpec leaders revealed last year that the Chinese Communist Party continued to provide annual training to civil servants and youth members of the party, as well as giving them electric bicycles and petty cash to pay for office rental and amenities.
Prince Sisowath Sirirath, a member of the Funcinpec standing committee, said that he was not aware of the specific purpose of the present trip, but that a close relationship was forged between Funcinpec and China during the 1980s civil war.
“The Chinese Communist Party is very close to us, and had always assisted Funcinpec during our struggle. We maintain that today, and are very close to them,” Prince Sisowath explained. “No matter what, Funcinpec people will go to China, and we go there on the same level as the CPP.
“The Chinese see us at the same level,” he said.
Alex Willemyns
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Championship 2019: Indonesia beat Cambodia to secure Semi birth
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Episode 12 July 2019
Acclaimed comedy drama from BBC Films, based on the true story of Miss Shepherd, an eccentric woman of uncertain origins, who 'temporarily' parked her broken-down van in writer Alan Bennett's London driveway - and proceeded to live there for the next 15 years.
Catch up The Lady in the Van
Most recent episodes of The Lady in the Van
Acclaimed comedy drama from BBC Films, based on the true story of Miss Shepherd, an eccentric woman of uncertain origins, who 'temporarily' parked her broken-down van ...
Most popular episodes of The Lady in the Van
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BAKER: America’s public defense system must be reformed
With the growing incarceration crisis in America, the first step must be to reform the public defense system
By Matthew Baker | 10/01/2018
In this country, the defining legal standard quote is “innocent until proven guilty.” The problem with that statement is that not every American is given an equal chance to defend their innocence.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
When opinion pieces on criminal justice reform are penned, the majority tend to focus on sentencing reform, poor prison conditions, and the racial inequalities inherent in the current system. However, writers, activists and legislators who work towards reforming those laws and procedures, while important in their own right, overlook the largest challenges facing the criminal justice system — the underfunding and mismanagement of the public defense system.
In 1963, the Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright established all citizens, regardless of the ability to pay, are entitled to legal counsel. In the decades since 1963, the rate of incarceration in America has grown exponentially, due in part to discriminatory and harsh laws such as the 1994 “Crime Bill.” However, the money and resources devoted to defending the newly accused and incarcerated have not risen comparatively. Most public defense offices are chronically understaffed as a result; it is possible for a public defender to be assigned upwards of 346 cases per year. A caseload of 346 cases per year averages out to approximately one and a half cases per day. Let me rephrase — to properly assist a citizen who may be wrongfully convicted of a crime, the average public defender is given less than one day.
In the most populated cities, the situation is even more dire. Some investigative journalists estimate that public defenders in New Orleans, Detroit, and Atlanta are only able to spend up to an hour on each case. Countless public defenders are overworked, and as a result many public defenders recommend that their client take unfair plea deals, leading to the common phrase “Meet ‘Em and Plead ‘Em.” ACLU lawyer Tanya Greene stated in her Mother Jones article, "You've got so many cases, limited resources, and there's no relief. You go to work, you get more cases. You have to triage." Triage is not a term that one should ever use to describe the process of defending an individual’s life and liberty in court.
In a country where 90 to 95 percent of criminal cases are decided by a plea deal, rather than a trial, to ignore the chronic mismanagement and overburdening of the public defense system while trying to correct the other components is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Furthermore, like many problems in our nation, the current crisis disproportionately affects lower income Americans. Americans who are able to afford a private defense are far more likely to be able to obtain bail and walk free. While wealthy Americans are able to afford professional lawyers, low income Americans are forced to hope that their plea deal does not include time served. At a certain point, the equity of the public defense system becomes a constitutional issue — if low income Americans are not given adequate access to legal counsel then they do not receive “due process of law” or “the right to council” as stipulated by the 6th Amendment and the Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, respectively.
The first step to fixing the broken system is to standardize it across all 50 states. Currently states are not required to pay any money towards the defense of its citizens, and many states instead pass the burden to an underfunded federal government. This has led to certain states spending no money on public defense under the guise of “fiscal prudence,” even though states that do not provide proper defense can lose millions in appeals cases and can lead to astronomically high prison maintenance costs. The federal government must mandate that state governments raise the budget of the public defense system to match the rate at which they are incarcerating their own residents, and set a standardized funding formula that does not set the burden entirely on local counties. Ensuring that enough money is available will allow public defenders offices to hire additional staff and reduce the average workload per case, providing all Americans their constitutional right to due process.
Mandating that states set a fixed funding equation for financing the public defense system and index that funding to the rise in the costs of incarceration will ensure that the number of public defenders rises proportionately to the other costs of the criminal justice system. In practice, this would force states to fund their public defense system and spend money on protecting the most disadvantaged Americans who are unfairly maligned by the current complex system. Furthermore, this law would provide additional incentive to states that have elected to throw criminals in jail without due process. Forcing states to find ways to reduce recidivism and alternatives to imprisonment, as each new prison inmate would cost more to the state than it has in the past.
In this country, the defining legal standard quote is “innocent until proven guilty.” The problem with that statement is that not every American is given an equal chance to defend their innocence. When states underfund the public defense system they unfairly disparage the most vulnerable Americans. This crisis is present in every state, and is far more pressing that sentencing reform or improving prison conditions. There is no justice in improving a convicted individuals’ sentence or prison cell if they never would have been there in there first place had they been give an adequate defense.
Matthew Baker is a Viewpoint Writer for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
By Katherine Viti | 07/12/2019
By Hunter Hess | 07/12/2019
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Edmonton population growth outpacing national rate
New census data shows the population of the metropolitan area of Edmonton outpaced the national growth rate over the last five years.
The Canadian Press · Posted: Feb 08, 2012 8:50 AM MT | Last Updated: February 8, 2012
The 2011 population of the Edmonton area was 1,159,869, compared with 1,034,945 from the 2006 census. (CBC)
New census data shows the population of the metropolitan area of Edmonton outpaced the national growth rate over the last five years - a period of time that saw the country spiral into the most serious economic tailspin since the Great Depression.
Statistics Canada released the first batch of numbers from the 2011 census on Wednesday and the population of what the government agency refers to as the census metropolitan area of Edmonton increased by 12.1 per cent since the last census in 2006.
The area's growth rate was above the national growth rate of 5.9 per cent, while the population of Alberta increased by 10.8 per cent.
Census metropolitan areas do not conform to established municipal boundaries. Statistics Canada defines them as a metropolitan area with a population of at least 100,000, where the urban core of that area has at least 50,000 people. Commuting patterns and other factors are used in determining these census metropolitan areas.
Looking at metropolitan areas this way takes in to account the growing impact of suburban areas on Canada's largest cities.
When the 2011 census was taken last May 10, the population of the census metropolitan area of Edmonton was 1,159,869, compared with 1,034,945 from the 2006 census.
The population of the actual city of Edmonton was 812,201 up from 730,372 in 2006.
The census indicated that Edmonton ranked No. 6 among the country's 33 census metropolitan areas.
Canada's population on census day was 33,476,688, Statistics Canada reported.
The national census is conducted every five years.
The information published Wednesday is the first of several releases of data to come from Statistics Canada over the next year and longer that will eventually paint a detailed picture of the country, right down to the local level — including age breakdowns of the population, family makeup, languages spoken, immigration and ethnic origin, the level of education attained and income earned.
At the national level, the 2011 census showed Canada's population grew the fastest of the G8 countries over the last five years — ahead of the United States (4.4 per cent), the United Kingdom (3.5 per cent), Italy (3.2 per cent), France (2.8 per cent), Russia (0.1 per cent), Japan (no change) and Germany (which had a population decrease of 0.8 per cent).
The western provinces, where the recession had less of an impact than in central and eastern Canada, led the way in population growth.
Alberta saw the highest increase at 10.8 per cent, followed by British Columbia (7.0 per cent) and Saskatchewan (6.7 per cent).
Manitoba (5.2 per cent) was the only western province with a population increase below the national average. Other provinces below the national growth rate were Nova Scotia (0.9 per cent), Newfoundland and Labrador (1.8 per cent), New Brunswick (2.9 per cent), Prince Edward Island (3.2 per cent), Quebec (4.7 per cent) and Ontario (5.7 per cent). Among the northern territories, the population changed by 0.0 per cent in the Northwest Territories, 11.6 per cent in the Yukon and 8.3 in Nunavut.
Ontario is still the country's most populous province, with a population of 12,851,821. The population of other provinces and territories: Quebec, 7,903,001; British Columbia, 4,400,057;
Alberta, 3,645,257; Manitoba, 1,208,268; Saskatchewan, 1,033,381; Nova Scotia, 921,727; New Brunswick, 751,171; Newfoundland and Labrador, 514,536; Prince Edward Island, 140,204; Northwest Territories, 41,462; Yukon, 33,897 and Nunavut, 31,906.
How does your community compare in the 2011 census?
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> Protected Areas > Programme of Work > Programme of Work
The Programme of Work on Protected Areas includes an introduction and 16 goals, divided across 4 programme elements. Click on an element or goal above to learn more.
Download the full Programme of Work
Element 1: Direct Actions for Planning, Selecting, Establishing, Strengthening, and Managing, Protected Area Systems and Sites
Element 2: Governance, Participation, Equity and Benefit Sharing
Element 3: Enabling Activities
Element 4: Standards, Assessment, and Monitoring
In situ conservation, sustainable use of biological diversity and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources are dependent upon properly maintaining sufficient natural habitat. Protected areas, together with conservation, sustainable use and restoration initiatives in the wider land-and seascape are essential components in national and global biodiversity conservation strategies. They provide a range of goods and ecological services while preserving natural and cultural heritage. They can contribute to poverty alleviation by providing employment opportunities and livelihoods to people living in and around them. In addition, they also provide opportunities for research including for adaptive measures to cope with climate change, environmental education, recreation and tourism. As a result, most countries have developed a system of protected areas. The protected-area network now covers about 11 per cent of Earth's land surface. Less than 1 per cent of the Earth's marine area is covered. The central role of protected areas in implementing the objectives of the Convention has been repeatedly emphasized in decisions of the Conference of Parties. They form a vital element of the various thematic programmes of work, namely, marine and coastal biological diversity, inland water ecosystems biological diversity, dry and sub-humid lands biological diversity, forest biological diversity and mountain biological diversity.
Given their many benefits, protected areas are important instruments for meeting the Convention's targets of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. However, according to the best available data on the status and trends on protected areas (see UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/9/5), the current global systems of protected areas are not sufficiently large, sufficiently well-planned, nor sufficiently well-managed to maximize their contribution to biodiversity conservation. Therefore, there is an urgent need to take action to improve the coverage, representativeness and management of protected areas nationally, regionally and globally.
The Convention on Biological Diversity works with many partner organizations, conventions and initiatives in facilitating conservation and sustainable use through protected areas. These include the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA); the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC); the International Maritime Organization (IMO); the World Resources Institute (WRI); The Nature Conservancy (TNC); the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF); the UNESCO Man and Biosphere programme (MAB); the UNESCO World Heritage Convention; the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat (Ramsar Convention); the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals and the associated agreements; the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES); (EU) the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF); the Global Environment Facility (GEF), International Convention for Regulation of Whaling (ICRW); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); indigenous organizations, other stakeholders and industry; and various regional agreements and programmes.
The present programme of work on protected areas features goals and activities that are specific to protected areas. Some elements of existing programmes of work on forests, inland waters, dry and sub-humid lands, coastal and marine and mountain biological diversity as well as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Global Taxonomy Initiative also apply to protected areas. The goals and activities contained in these existing programmes of work should also be applied and implemented, as and whenever appropriate for their respective protected areas. Other relevant guidelines developed under cross-cutting issues of the CBD should also be taken into account when implementing the programme of work.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development, in its Plan of Implementation, has stated that the achievement of the 2010 target requires new and additional financial and technical resources for developing countries, and that the progress in establishment and maintenance of a comprehensive, effectively managed, and ecologically representative global system of protected areas is of crucial importance for achieving the 2010 target. The WSSD also called for provision of financial and technical support for activities in this field, recognizing that funding for this purpose generally should consist of a mixture of national and international resources and include the whole range of possible funding instruments such as public funding, debt for nature swaps, private funding, remuneration from services provided by protected areas, and taxes and fees at the national level for the use of ecological services.
II. Overall purpose and scope of the programme of work
The overall purpose of the programme of work on protected areas is to support the establishment and maintenance by 2010 for terrestrial and by 2012 for marine areas of comprehensive, effectively managed, and ecologically representative national and regional systems of protected areas that collectively, inter alia through a global network [67] contribute to achieving the three objectives of the Convention and the 2010 target to significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional, national and sub-national levels and contribute to poverty reduction and the pursuit of sustainable development, thereby supporting the objectives of the Strategic Plan of the Convention, the World Summit on Sustainable Development Plan of Implementation and the Millennium Development Goals.
The programme of work consists of four interlinked elements intended to be mutually reinforcing and cross-cutting in their implementation. It was developed bearing in mind the need to avoid unnecessary duplication with existing thematic work programmes and other ongoing initiatives of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and to promote synergy and coordination with relevant programmes of various international organizations. Parties are encouraged to apply where appropriate the objectives and activities from these thematic work programmes and the work on cross-cutting issues.
The Convention's work on protected areas takes into account the ecosystem approach. The ecosystem approach is the primary framework for action under the Convention, and its application will help reach a balance between the three objectives of the Convention. Multiple-use protected areas applied in an ecosystem approach context can, for example, help meet specific goals relating to conservation, sustainable use and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. The ecosystem approach provides a framework within which the relationship of protected areas to the wider landscape and seascape can be understood, and the goods and services flowing from protected areas can be valued. In addition, the establishment and management of protected area systems in the context of the ecosystem approach should not simply be considered in national terms, but where the relevant ecosystem extends beyond national boundaries, in ecosystem or bioregional terms as well. This presents a strong argument for and adds complexity to the establishment of transboundary protected areas and protected areas in marine areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. Any work under this programme on marine and coastal protected areas should be consistent with decision VII/5 on Marine and Coastal biodiversity.
The programme of work is intended to assist Parties in establishing national programmes of work with targeted goals, actions, specific actors, time frame, inputs and expected measurable outputs. Parties may select from, adapt, and/or add to the activities suggested in the current programme of work according to particular national and local conditions and their level of development. Implementation of this programme of work should take into account the ecosystem approach of the Convention on Biological Diversity. In implementing the programme of work, Parties are encouraged to pay due regard to the social, economic and environmental costs and benefits of various options. In addition, Parties are encouraged to consider the use of appropriate technologies, source of finance and technical cooperation, and to ensure, through appropriate actions, the means to meet the particular challenges and demands of their protected areas.
The implementation of the programme of work will contribute to achieving the three objectives of the Convention.
[67]/ A global network provides for the connections between Parties, with the collaboration of others, for the exchange of ideas and experiences, scientific and technical cooperation, capacity building and cooperative action that mutually support national and regional systems of protected areas which collectively contribute to the achievement of the programme of work. This network has no authority or mandate over national or regional systems.
Programme Element 1: Direct actions for planning, selecting, establishing, strengthening, and managing, protected area systems and sites
Goal 1.1: To establish and strengthen national and regional systems of protected areas integrated into a global network as a contribution to globally agreed goals
Target: By 2010, terrestrially [68]/ and 2012 in the marine area, a global network of comprehensive, representative and effectively managed national and regional protected area system is established as a contribution to (i) the goal of the Strategic Plan of the Convention and the World Summit on Sustainable Development of achieving a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010; (ii) the Millennium Development Goals - particularly goal 7 on ensuring environmental sustainability; and (iii) the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.
1.1.1 By 2006, establish suitable time-bound and measurable national and regional level protected area targets and indicators.
1.1.2 As a matter of urgency, by 2006, take action to establish or expand protected areas in any large, intact or relatively unfragmented or highly irreplaceable natural areas, or areas under high threat, as well as areas securing the most threatened species in the context of national priorities [69], and taking into consideration the conservation needs of migratory species.
1.1.3 As a matter of urgency, by 2006 terrestrially and by 2008 in the marine environment, take action to address the under-representation of marine and inland water ecosystems in existing national and regional systems of protected areas, taking into account marine ecosystems beyond areas of national jurisdiction in accordance with applicable international law, and transboundary inland water ecosystems.
1.1.4 By 2006, conduct, with the full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders, national-level reviews of existing and potential forms of conservation, and their suitability for achieving biodiversity conservation goals, including innovative types of governance for protected areas that need to be recognized and promoted through legal, policy, financial institutional and community mechanisms, such as protected areas run by Government agencies at various levels, co-managed protected areas, private protected areas, indigenous and local community conserved areas.
1.1.5 By 2006 complete protected area system gap analyses at national and regional levels based on the requirements for representative systems of protected areas that adequately conserve terrestrial, marine and inland water biodiversity and ecosystems. National plans should also be developed to provide interim measures to protect highly threatened or highly valued areas wherever this is necessary. Gap analyses should take into account Annex I of the Convention on Biological Diversity and other relevant criteria such as irreplaceability of target biodiversity components, minimum effective size and viability requirements, species migration requirements, integrity, ecological processes and ecosystem services.
1.1.6 By 2009, designate the protected areas as identified through the national or regional gap analysis (including precise maps) and complete by 2010 terrestrially and 2012 in the marine environments the establishment of comprehensive and ecologically representative national and regional systems of protected areas.
1.1.7 Encourage the establishment of protected areas that benefit indigenous and local communities, including by respecting, preserving, and maintaining their traditional knowledge in accordance with article 8(j) and related provisions.
Suggested supporting activities of the Executive Secretary
1.1.8 Identify options for quantitative and qualitative protected areas targets and indicators that should be used at the global level that could contribute to the 2010 target and the Millennium Development Goals.
1.1.9 Invite relevant international and regional organizations to offer their assistance to the Parties in conducting national-level gap analyses.
1.1.10. Compile and disseminate through the clearing-house mechanism and other relevant media relevant approaches, frameworks and tools for system planning and promote and facilitate the exchange of experiences and lessons learned in applying and adapting them to different ecological and social settings.
Goal 1.2: To integrate protected areas into broader land- and seascapes and sectors so as to maintain ecological structure and function
Target: By 2015, all protected areas and protected area systems are integrated into the wider land- and seascape, and relevant sectors, by applying the ecosystem approach and taking into account ecological connectivity [70]/ and the concept, where appropriate, of ecological networks.
1.2.1. Evaluate by 2006 national and sub-national experiences and lessons learned on specific efforts to integrate protected areas into broader land- and seascapes and sectoral plans and strategies such as poverty reduction strategies. 1.2.2. Identify and implement, by 2008, practical steps for improving the integration of protected areas into broader land- and seascapes, including policy, legal, planning and other measures.
1.2.3. Integrate regional, national and sub-national systems of protected areas into broader land- and seascape, inter alia by establishing and managing ecological networks, ecological corridors [71] and/or buffer zones, where appropriate, to maintain ecological processes and also taking into account the needs of migratory species.
1.2.4. Develop tools of ecological connectivity, such as ecological corridors, linking together protected areas where necessary or beneficial as determined by national priorities for the conservation of biodiversity.
1.2.5.Rehabilitate and restore habitats and degraded ecosystems, as appropriate, as a contribution to building ecological networks, ecological corridors and/or buffer zones.
1.2.6. Encourage the organization of regional and sub-regional workshops for the exchange of experiences on integration of biodiversity and protected areas into relevant sectoral and spatial plans.
1.2.7. Compile and disseminate, using the CHM and other media, case-studies of best practices and other reports regarding the application of the ecosystem approach in relation to protected areas at the international, regional, national and sub-national levels.
Goal 1.3: To establish and strengthen regional networks, transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) and collaboration between neighbouring protected areas across national boundaries
Target: Establish and strengthen by 2010/2012 [72]/ transboundary protected areas, other forms of collaboration between neighbouring protected areas across national boundaries and regional networks, to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, implementing the ecosystem approach, and improving international cooperation.
1.3.1 Collaborate with other parties and relevant partners to establish effective regional networks of protected areas, particularly in areas identified as common conservation priorities (e.g. barrier reef systems, large scale river basins, mountain systems, large remaining forest areas and critical habitat for endangered species), and establish multi-country coordination mechanisms as appropriate to support the establishment and effective long term management of such networks.
1.3.2 Collaborate with other Parties and relevant partners through the United Nations Informal Consultative Process on the Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS) to establish and manage protected areas in marine areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, in accordance with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and based on scientific information.
.3.3 Establish, where appropriate, new TBPAs with adjacent Parties and countries and strengthen effective collaborative management of existing TBPAs.
1.3.4 Promote collaboration between protected areas across national boundaries.
1.3.5 Collaborate and consult with relevant organizations and bodies for developing guidelines for establishing transboundary protected areas and collaborative management approaches, as appropriate, for dissemination to Parties.
1.3.6 Compile and disseminate information on regional networks of protected areas and transboundary protected areas, including, as far as possible, their geographical distribution, their historical background, their role and the partners involved.
1.3.7 Review the potential for regional cooperation under the Convention on Migratory Species with a view to linking of protected area networks across international boundaries and potentially beyond national jurisdiction through the establishment of migratory corridors for key species.
Goal 1.4: To substantially improve site-based protected area planning and management
Target: All protected areas to have effective management in existence by 2012, using participatory and science-based site planning processes that incorporate clear biodiversity objectives, targets, management strategies and monitoring programmes, drawing upon existing methodologies and a long-term management plan with active stakeholder involvement.
1.4.1 Create a highly participatory process, involving indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders, as part of site-based planning in accordance with the ecosystem approach, and use relevant ecological and socio-economic data required to develop effective planning processes.
1.4.2 Identify appropriate measurable biodiversity conservation targets for sites, drawing on criteria laid out in Annex I to the Convention on Biological Diversity and other relevant criteria.
1.4.3 Include in the site-planning process an analysis of opportunities for the protected area to contribute to conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity at local and regional scales as well as an analysis of threats and means of addressing them.
As appropriate, but no later than 2010, develop or update management plans for protected areas, built on the above process, to better achieve the three objectives of the Convention.
1.4.5 Integrate climate change adaptation measures in protected area planning, management strategies, and in the design of protected area systems.
1.4.6 Ensure that protected areas are effectively managed or supervised through staff that are well-trained and skilled, properly and appropriately equipped, and supported, to carry out their fundamental role in the management and conservation of protected areas.
1.4.7 Compile and disseminate through the clearing-house mechanism current relevant approaches, frameworks and tools for site planning and promote and facilitate the exchange of experiences and lessons learned in applying and adapting them in different ecological and social settings.
1.4.8 Disseminate information on successful management models of protected areas which serve to further the three objective of the Convention and may also contribute to poverty reduction and the pursuit of sustainable development.
Goal 1.5: To prevent and mitigate the negative impacts of key threats to protected areas
Target: By 2008, effective mechanisms for identifying and preventing, and/or mitigating the negative impacts of key threats to protected areas are in place.
1.5.1 Apply, as appropriate, timely environmental impact assessments to any plan or project with the potential to have effects on protected areas, and ensure timely information flow among all concerned parties to that end, taking into account decision VI/7 A of the Conference of the Parties on guidelines for incorporating biodiversity related issues into environmental impact assessment legislation and/or processes and in strategic environmental assessments.
1.5.2 Develop by 2010 national approaches to liability and redress measures, incorporating the polluter pays principle or other appropriate mechanisms in relation to damages to protected areas.
1.5.3 Establish and implement measures for the rehabilitation and restoration of the ecological integrity of protected areas.
1.5.4 Take measures to control risks associated with invasive alien species in protected areas.
1.5.5 Assess key threats to protected areas and develop and implement strategies to prevent and/or mitigate such threats.
1.5.6 Develop policies, improve governance, and ensure enforcement of urgent measures that can halt the illegal exploitation of resources from protected areas, and strengthen international and regional cooperation to eliminate illegal trade in such resources taking into account sustainable customary resource use of indigenous and local communities in accordance with article 10(c) of the Convention.
1.5.7 Address issues specific to protected areas, in the guidelines for incorporating biodiversity considerations in environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment, procedures and regulations.
1.5.8 Collaborate with the International Association for Impact Assessment and other relevant organizations on further development and refinement of the impact assessment guidelines particularly to incorporate all stages of environmental impact assessment processes in protected areas taking into account the ecosystem approach.
1.5.9 Compile and disseminate through the clearing-house mechanism and other means case studies, best practices and lessons learned in mitigating the negative impacts of key threats and facilitate the exchange of experiences.
[68]/ Terrestrial includes inland water ecosystems
[69]/ Parties may wish to use IUCN Red List of Threatened Species criteria, version 3.1
[70]/ The concept of connectivity may not be applicable to all Parties
[71]/ Ecological corridors may not be applicable to all Parties
[72]/ References to marine protected area networks to be consistent with the target in the WSSD plan of implementation.
Programme Element 2: Governance, Participation, Equity and Benefit Sharing
Goal 2.1: To promote equity and benefit-sharing
Target: Establish by 2008 mechanisms for the equitable sharing of both costs and benefits arising from the establishment and management of protected areas.
2.1.1. Assess the economic and socio-cultural costs, benefits and impacts arising from the establishment and maintenance of protected areas, particularly for indigenous and local communities, and adjust policies to avoid and mitigate negative impacts, and where appropriate compensate costs and equitably share benefits in accordance with the national legislation.
2.1.2. Recognize and promote a broad set of protected area governance types related to their potential for achieving biodiversity conservation goals in accordance with the Convention, which may include areas conserved by indigenous and local communities and private nature reserves. The promotion of these areas should be by legal and/or policy, financial and community mechanisms.
2.1.3. Establish policies and institutional mechanisms with full participation of indigenous and local communities, to facilitate the legal recognition and effective management of indigenous and local community conserved areas in a manner consistent with the goals of conserving both biodiversity and the knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities.
2.1.4. Use social and economic benefits generated by protected areas for poverty reduction, consistent with protected-area management objectives.
2.1.5. Engage indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders in participatory planning and governance, recalling the principles of the ecosystem approach.
2.1.6. Establish or strengthen national policies to deal with access to genetic resources within protected areas and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization, drawing upon the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Fair and Equitable Sharing of the Benefits Arising out of their Utilization as appropriate,.
Goal 2.2: To enhance and secure involvement of indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders
Target: Full and effective participation by 2008, of indigenous and local communities, in full respect of their rights and recognition of their responsibilities, consistent with national law and applicable international obligations, and the participation of relevant stakeholders, in the management of existing, and the establishment and management of new, protected areas
2.2.1. Carry out participatory national reviews of the status, needs and context-specific mechanisms for involving stakeholders, ensuring gender and social equity, in protected areas policy and management, at the level of national policy, protected area systems and individual sites.
2.2.2 Implement specific plans and initiatives to effectively involve indigenous and local communities, with respect for their rights consistent with national legislation and applicable international obligations, and stakeholders at all levels of protected areas planning, establishment, governance and management, with particular emphasis on identifying and removing barriers preventing adequate participation.
2.2.3 Support participatory assessment exercises among stakeholders to identify and harness the wealth of knowledge, skills, resources and institutions of importance for conservation that are available in society.
2.2.4 Promote an enabling environment (legislation, policies, capacities, and resources) for the involvement of indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders [73]/ in decision making, and the development of their capacities and opportunities to establish and manage protected areas, including community-conserved and private protected areas.
2.2.5 Ensure that any resettlement of indigenous communities as a consequence of the establishment or management of protected areas will only take place with their prior informed consent that may be given according to national legislation and applicable international obligations.
2.2.6 Make available to Parties case-studies, advice on best practices and other sources of information on stakeholder participation in protected areas
2.2.7 Promote, through the CHM, technical publications and other means, the international sharing of experience on effective mechanisms for stakeholder involvement and governance types in conservation in particular with regard to co-managed protected areas, indigenous and local community conserved areas and private protected areas.
Programme Element 3: Enabling Activities
Goal 3.1: To provide an enabling policy, institutional and socio-economic environment for protected areas
Target: By 2008 review and revise policies as appropriate, including use of social and economic valuation and incentives, to provide a supportive enabling environment for more effective establishment and management of protected areas and protected areas systems.
3.1.1 By 2006, identify legislative and institutional gaps and barriers that impede the effective establishment and management of protected areas, and by 2009, effectively address these gaps and barriers.
3.1.2 Conduct national-level assessments of the contributions of protected areas, considering as appropriate environmental services, to the country's economy and culture, and to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals at the national level; and integrate the use of economic valuation and natural resource accounting tools into national planning processes in order to identify the hidden and non-hidden economic benefits provided by protected areas and who appropriates these benefits.
3.1.3 Harmonize sectoral policies and laws to ensure that they support the conservation and effective management of the protected area system.
3.1.4 Consider governance principles, such as the rule of law, decentralization, participatory decision-making mechanisms for accountability and equitable dispute resolution institutions and procedures.
3.1.5 Identify and remove perverse incentives and inconsistencies in sectoral policies that increase pressure on protected areas, or take action to mitigate their perverse effects. Whenever feasible, redirect these to positive incentives for conservation.
3.1.6 Identify and establish positive incentives that support the integrity and maintenance of protected areas and the involvement of indigenous and local communities and stakeholders in conservation.
3.1.7 Adopt legal frameworks to national, regional and sub-national protected areas systems of countries where appropriate.
3.1.8 Develop national incentive mechanisms and institutions and legislative frameworks to support the establishment of the full range of protected areas that achieve biodiversity conservation objectives including on private lands and private reserves where appropriate.
3.1.9 Identify and foster economic opportunities and markets at local, national and international levels for goods and services produced by protected areas and/or reliant on the ecosystem services that protected areas provide, consistent with protected area objectives and promote the equitable sharing of the benefits.
3.1.10 Develop necessary mechanisms for institutions with responsibilities for conservation of biological diversity at the regional, national and local level to achieve institutional and financial sustainability.
3.1.11 Cooperate with neighbouring countries to establish an enabling environment for transboundary protected areas and for neighbouring protected areas across national boundaries and other similar approaches including regional networks.
3.1.12 In collaboration with key partners such as OECD, IUCN, WWF and the secretariats of other conventions compile information on relevant guidance, resource kits and other information on incentive measures including those relating to the development of incentive options.
3.1.13 Compile and disseminate, through the CHM and other media, case-studies on best practices on the use of incentive measures for the management of protected areas.
3.1.14 Compile and disseminate through the CHM and other media best practices on ways and means to integrate the use of incentive measures into protected area management plans, programmes and policies including opportunities for the removal or mitigation of perverse incentives.
Goal 3.2: To build capacity for the planning, establishment and management of protected areas
Target: By 2010, comprehensive capacity building programmes and initiatives are implemented to develop knowledge and skills at individual, community and institutional levels, and raise professional standards.
3.2.1 By 2006 complete national protected-area capacity needs assessments, and establish capacity building programmes on the basis of these assessments including the creation of curricula, resources and programs for the sustained delivery of protected areas management training.
3.2.2 Establish effective mechanisms to document existing knowledge and experiences on protected area management, including traditional knowledge in accordance with Article 8 (j) and Related Provisions, and identify knowledge and skills gaps.
3.2.3 Exchange lessons learnt, information and capacity-building experiences among countries and relevant organizations, through the Clearing-house Mechanisms and other means.
3.2.4 Strengthen the capacities of institutions to establish cross-sectoral collaboration for protected area management at the regional, national and local levels.
3.2.5 Improve the capacity of protected areas institutions to develop sustainable financing through fiscal incentives, environmental services, and other instruments.
3.2.6 Cooperate with IUCN and other relevant organizations to compile and disseminate available information.
3.2.7 Cooperate with initiatives such as the Protected Areas Learning Network (PALNet-IUCN) and explore lessons learned from those experiences, in collaboration with relevant organizations.
Goal 3.3: To develop, apply and transfer appropriate technologies for protected areas
Target: By 2010 the development, validation, and transfer of appropriate technologies and innovative approaches for the effective management of protected areas is substantially improved, taking into account decisions of the Conference of the Parties on technology transfer and cooperation.
3.3.1 Document and make available to the Executive Secretary appropriate technologies for conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity of protected areas and management of protected areas.
3.3.2 Assess needs for relevant technologies for protected area management involving indigenous and local communities and stakeholders such as the, research institutions, non-Governmental organizations and the private sector.
3.3.3 Encourage development and use of appropriate technology, including technologies of indigenous and local communities with their participation, approval and involvement in accordance with Article 8(j) and Related Provisions, for habitat rehabilitation and restoration, resource mapping, biological inventory, and rapid assessment of biodiversity, monitoring, in situ and ex situ conservation, sustainable use, etc.
3.3.4 Promote an enabling environment for the transfer of technology in accordance with decision VII/29 of the Conference of Parties on technology transfer and cooperation to improve protected area management.
3.3.5 Increase technology transfer and cooperation to improve protected area management.
3.3.6 Compile and disseminate information provided by Parties and relevant international organizations on appropriate technologies and approaches for efficient management of protected areas and conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity of protected areas.
Goal 3.4: To ensure financial sustainability of protected areas and national and regional systems of protected areas
Target: By 2008, sufficient financial, technical and other resources to meet the costs to effectively implement and manage national and regional systems of protected areas are secured, including both from national and international sources, particularly to support the needs of developing countries and countries with economies in transition and small island developing States.
3.4.1 Conduct a national-level study by 2005 of the effectiveness in using existing financial resources and of financial needs related to the national system of protected areas and identify options for meeting these needs through a mixture of national and international resources and taking into account the whole range of possible funding instruments, such as public funding, debt for nature swaps, elimination of perverse incentives and subsidies, private funding, taxes and fees for ecological services .
3.4.2 By 2008, establish and begin to implement country-level sustainable financing plans that support national systems of protected areas, including necessary regulatory, legislative, policy, institutional and other measures.
3.4.3 Support and further develop international funding programmes to support implementation of national and regional systems of protected areas in developing countries and countries with economies in transition and small island developing States.
3.4.4 Collaborate with other countries to develop and implement sustainable financing programmes for national and regional systems of protected areas.
3.4.5 Provide regular information on protected areas financing to relevant institutions and mechanisms, including through future national reports under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and to the World Database on Protected Areas.
3.4.6 Encourage integration of protected areas needs into national and, where applicable, regional development and financing strategies and development cooperation programmes.
3.4.7 Convene as soon as possible, but not later than 2005, a meeting of the donor agencies and other relevant organizations to discuss options for mobilizing new and additional funding to developing countries and countries with economies in transition and small island developing States for implementation of the programme of work.
3.4.8 Compile and disseminate case-studies and best practices concerning protected area financing through the clearing-house mechanism and other media.
3.4.9 Review and disseminate by 2006 studies on the value of ecosystem services provided by protected areas.
Goal 3.5: To strengthen communication, education and public awareness
Target: By 2008 public awareness, understanding and appreciation of the importance and benefits of protected areas is significantly increased.
3.5.1 Establish or strengthen strategies and programmes of education and public awareness on the importance of protected areas in terms of their role in biodiversity conservation and sustainable socio-economic development, in close collaboration with the Communication, Education and Public Awareness Initiative (CEPA) under the Convention on Biological Diversity and targeted towards all stakeholders.
3.5.2 Identify core themes for education, awareness and communication programmes relevant to protected areas, including <i>inter alia</i> their contribution to economy and culture to achieve specific end results such as compliance by resource users and other stakeholders or an increased understanding of science-based knowledge by indigenous and local communities and policy makers and an increased understanding of the needs, priorities and value of indigenous and local communities' knowledge, innovations and practices by Governments, non-Governmental organizations and other relevant stakeholders.
3.5.3 Strengthen, and where necessary, establish information mechanisms directed at target groups such as the private sector, policy makers, development institutions, community-based organizations, the youth, the media, and the general public.
3.5.4 Develop mechanisms for constructive dialogue and exchange of information and experiences among protected-area managers, and between protected area managers and indigenous and local communities and their organizations and other environment educators and actors.
3.5.5 Incorporate the subject of protected areas as an integral component of the school curricula as well as in informal education.
3.5.6 Establish mechanism and evaluate the impacts of communication, education and public awareness programmes on biodiversity conservation to ensure that they improve public awareness, change behaviour and support the achievement of protected area objectives.
3.5.7 Collaborate with IUCN and other relevant organizations to collect and disseminate educational tools and materials for adaptation and use in the promotion of protected areas as an important means of achieving the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.
3.5.8 Establish, in collaboration with the IUCN and other relevant partners, an initiative to engage the global news and entertainment industry (television, film, popular music, internet, etc.) in a global campaign to raise awareness of the consequences of biological diversity loss and the important role of protected areas in biodiversity conservation.
Programme Element 4: Standards, assessment, and monitoring
Goal 4.1 - To develop and adopt minimum standards and best practices for national and regional protected area systems
Target: By 2008, standards, criteria, and best practices for planning, selecting, establishing, managing and governance of national and regional systems of protected areas are developed and adopted.
4.1.1 Collaborate with other Parties and relevant organizations, particularly IUCN, on the development, testing, review and promotion of voluntary protected areas standards and best practices on planning and management, governance and participation.
4.1.2 Develop and implement an efficient, long-term monitoring system of the outcomes being achieved through protected area systems in relation to the goals and targets of this work programme.
4.1.3 Draw upon monitoring results to adapt and improve protected area management based on the ecosystem approach.
4.1.4 In collaboration with the key partners and based upon the best practices promote available guidance for parties minimum standards for planning, selecting, establishing, managing and governance of protected area sites and systems.
4.1.5 Compile information on best practices and case-studies on effective management of protected areas and disseminate it through clearing-house mechanism and facilitate exchange of information.
Goal 4.2: To evaluate and improve the effectiveness of protected areas management
4.2.2 Implement management effectiveness evaluations of at least 30 percent of each Party's protected areas by 2010 and of national protected area systems and, as appropriate, ecological networks.
4.2.4 Implement key recommendations arising from site- and system-level management effectiveness evaluations, as an integral part of adaptive management strategies.
4.2.5 Compile and disseminate information on management effectiveness through the clearing-house mechanism and develop a database of experts in evaluation of protected area management effectiveness and consider the possibility of organizing an international workshop on appropriate methods, criteria and indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of protected area management.
4.2.6 In cooperation with IUCN-WCPA and other relevant organizations, compile and disseminate information on best practices in protected area design, establishment and management.
Goal 4.3: To assess and monitor protected area status and trends
Target: By 2010, national and regional systems are established to enable effective monitoring of protected-area coverage, status and trends at national, regional and global scales, and to assist in evaluating progress in meeting global biodiversity targets.
4.3.1 Implement national and regional programmes to monitor and assess the status and trends of biodiversity within protected area systems and sites.
4.3.2 Measure progress towards achieving protected area targets based on periodic monitoring and report on progress towards these targets in future national reports under the Convention on Biological Diversity as well as in a thematic report at COP-9.
4.3.3 Improve and update national and regional databases on protected areas and consolidate the World Database on Protected Areas as key support mechanisms in the assessment and monitoring of protected area status and trends.
4.3.4 Participate in the World Database on Protected Areas maintained by UNEP-WCMC, and the United Nations List of Protected Areas and the State of the World's Protected Areas assessment process.
4.3.5 Encourage the establishment and establishment use of new technologies including geographic information system and remote sensing tools for monitoring protected areas.
4.3.6 Develop and consolidate working partnerships with appropriate organizations and institutions that have developed and maintained monitoring systems and databases on protected areas, in particular with the UNEP-WCMC and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.
4.3.7 Explore establishment of a harmonized system and time schedule for reporting on sites designated under the Convention on Wetlands, the World Heritage Convention, and UNESCO MAB programme, and other regional systems, as appropriate, taking into account the ongoing work of UNEP-WCMC on harmonization of reporting and the IUCN protected area management category system for reporting purpose.
4.3.8 Prepare an updated format for the thematic report on protected areas covering, inter alia, integration of protected areas and national systems of protected areas into relevant sectors and spatial planning taking into account decision VII/25 on national reporting.
Goal 4.4: To ensure that scientific knowledge contributes to the establishment and effectiveness of protected areas and protected area Systems
Target: Scientific knowledge relevant to protected areas is further developed as a contribution to their establishment, effectiveness, and management.
4.4.1 Improve research, scientific and technical cooperation related to protected areas at national, regional and international levels.
4.4.2 Promote interdisciplinary research, to improve understanding of the ecological social and economic aspects of protected areas, including methods and techniques for valuation of goods and services from protected areas
4.4.3 Encourage studies to improve the knowledge of the distribution, status and trends of biological diversity.
4.4.4 Encourage collaborative research between scientists and indigenous and local communities in accordance with Article 8(j) in connection with the establishment and the effective management of protected areas
4.4.5 Promote the dissemination of scientific information from and on protected areas including through the clearing-house mechanism.
4.4.6 Promote the dissemination of, and facilitate access to, scientific and technical information, in particular publications on protected areas, with special attention to the needs of developing countries and countries with economies in transition, in particular least developed countries and small island developing States.
4.4.7 Develop and strengthen working partnerships with appropriate organizations and institutions which undertake research studies leading to an improved understanding of biodiversity in protected areas.
Indicative list of partners and other Collaborators
Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species
InterGovernmental Oceanic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
International Coral Reef Initiative
International Association for Impact Assessment
IUCN - The World Conservation and its World Commission on Protected Areas, Commission on Ecosystem Management, and Species Survival Commission
Man and Biosphere Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNEP - World Conservation Monitoring Centre
United Nations Forum on Forests
World Heritage Centre of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Other Collaborators
Conservation International
Fauna and Flora International
Wildlife Conservation Society
Indigenous and local communities
Other relevant national, regional and international non-Governmental organizations and other organizations
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Iraq al Qaeda says U.S. withdrew to save money
January 25, 2012 / 4:03 PM / AP
BAGHDAD - The U.S. pulled its troops out of Iraq because its economy is collapsing and it needed to save money, an al Qaeda front group said in a message posted on its website Wednesday, its first online comment since the U.S. completed its pullout last month after nine years of war.
Al Qaeda was one of the main U.S. enemies in Iraq. It was behind some of the deadliest attacks on U.S. soldiers, Iraqi security forces and American-backed government institutions. Since the U.S. pullout, al Qaeda and other Sunni militants have stepped up attacks on Shiites, killing more than 170 people since the beginning of the year and raising concern that the surge in violence and an escalating political crisis might deteriorate into a civil war.
In an audio message, a spokesman for al Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq who identified himself as Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said "America has been defeated in Iraq."
"They pulled out because its economic and human losses were unbearable," al-Adnani said. "America's bankruptcy and collapse is imminent. This is the real reason behind the withdrawal." .
Al-Adnani called on former Sunni fighters who switched sides and fought al Qaeda to return, promising to forgive "whatever their crime was."
Despite the bombast, the appeal was a sign of the group's problems. In July, al Qaeda in Iraq made an online appeal for new fundraising ideas, saying they were in dire need of money to help thousands of widows and children of slain fighters.
At the height of Iraq's insurgency, tens of thousands of Sunni fighters, most of them members or sympathizers of al Qaeda, switched sides and joined U.S. and government forces. Their support created a crucial turning point in the war against al Qaeda in 2007.
Since then, many members of the pro-government Sunni militias known as the Awakening Councils say they haven't been given jobs fitting to their contribution in the war and still feel they're viewed with suspicion by the Shiite-led government.
After the government disarmed thousands of Awakening Council fighters and sent some to jail, al Qaeda launched a series of attacks, killing dozens of them and leading others to return to the insurgent group.
On Tuesday, one of the Council's leaders was killed in a drive-by shooting in western Baghdad, according to police and hospital officials. Mullah Nadhum al-Jubouri fought the Americans with al Qaeda, but then switched sides.
In 2009, al-Jubouri was detained in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on suspicion of carrying out attacks three years earlier, including downing a U.S. helicopter. He was later released.
First published on January 25, 2012 / 4:03 PM
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Revealed: Sanders Volunteered in Israel for Marxist Revolutionary Group
AP Photo/Chris Carlson
TEL AVIV – In the 1960s, Sen. Bernie Sanders volunteered at a kibbutz in northern Israel as the guest of a Marxist-socialist youth movement with a revolutionary mission, it was revealed on Thursday.
For months, Israeli reporters have been searching for the name of the kibbutz on which Sanders spent several months in 1963. The presidential candidate, who has not been shy about his affinity for socialism, was reluctant to disclose much about his Jewish upbringing or his time in Israel in 1963, where he traveled with his first wife, Deborah Shiling.
Sanders’ campaign has conspicuously refused to answer inquiries about the identity of the kibbutz.
On Thursday, Jerusalem Post Intelligence and Security columnist Yossi Melman revealed that Sanders volunteered the information about the kibbutz during an interview with the reporter in 1990, while Melman was the intelligence correspondent and analyst for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
The 1990 interview, discovered in the Haaretz archive, cites Sanders saying that in 1963 he spent several months in Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim in northern Israel as a guest of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, which was affiliated with the kibbutz.
The information has garnered some news media attention from Israel-themed outlets. Yet not a single news report reviewed by Breitbart News mentioned that Hashomer Hatzair was an openly Marxist movement that sought to use Zionism as the first stage of a utopian plan for Israel. The second stage was to be a revolution to transform Israel into an Arab-Jewish socialist paradise.
Hashomer Hatzair is still around. It currently identifies as a progressive Zionist organization and is a member of the International Falcon Movement–Socialist Education International.
Hashomer Hatzair runs a youth program in the U.S. that says it “encourages youth to build progressive Jewish values, explore connections to Israel and the Jewish community, and develop a commitment to social, environmental, and economic justice.”
The organization, founded in Europe in 1913 to prepare young socialists for the move to Mandatory Palestine, has rebranded its mission numerous times. It once was a revolutionary Marxist organization.
Movement members first settled in Mandatory Palestine in 1919 and seven years later founded several kibbutzim as well as a political party called the Socialist League of Palestine.
In a lengthy history for the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, Hebrew University Political Science Professor and prolific author Shlomo Avineri in 1977 documented the Marxist revolutionary ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair movement.
In a 404-page work titled, “Varieties of Marxism,” Avineri recounted the Marxist “baptism” of Hashomer Hatzair, which he referred to as HH, in the 1920s as “one of the most exciting intellectual chapters in the modern history of Zionism and Palestine.”
He continued:
It bears testimony to the historical essentiality of Marxism in those years, which saw a new wave of Marxism that was to grow and intensify until it reached its political peak in the 1950s, whereupon it would disintegrate in face of political reality.
Unlike other pragmatic socialist movements at the time, Hashomer Hatzair “refused to accept constructivism as the main content of class war in the Palestinian reality, or to contend that socialism could be realized without revolution.”
Hashomer Hatzair saw Zionism, or support for a Jewish national homeland, as an entryway into the Jewish state in order to accomplish a socialist revolution in two phases. It enumerated this mission by creating its own “Etapist Theory,” according to which “Jewish socialist society would be realized in two stages,” wrote Avineiri.
The historian elaborated:
In the first stage, the Jewish national home would be established in Eretz Israel, based on a productive and self-sufficient economic foundation. In the second stage, the social revolution itself would be accomplished.
The function of the Zionist movement and Zionist cooperation was limited to the first stage only; it would be terminated after the economic, cultural, and political foundations had been laid in Palestine, and after the national funds, based on national donations, were no longer required. Partnership with the Zionists was therefore considered only temporary.
The social revolution was to be realized, however, by the international organization of the workers, i.e. Jewish-Arab collaboration. This “theory of stages” formulated by Meir Yaari had many advantages for HH. It could continue to participate in the Zionist Organization, to build socialist cells within the framework of the existing regime, and, at the same time, to maintain revolutionary radicalism.”
While that radicalism may now be tempered, the group continues to maintain its socialist identity.
In 2008, Haaretz reported on the continuing efforts of Hashomer Hatzair to spread socialism in Israel and worldwide.
The newspaper reported on a world conference marking the movement’s 95th anniversary that attempted to update the organization’s basic tenets. Participants in the 2008 conference could not agree on which style of socialism to adopt. “While Latin American graduates favored classic socialism, the European delegates sided with democratic socialism,” reported Haaretz.
The newspaper continued, quoting a delegate from Argentina:
According to Dana Merweiss, from Argentina, the way to implement socialism today is by education and creating communities with socialist awareness.
Levine said the movement in the past required its members to work within its community, but today “we say we should also work outside our community as part of the fulfillment of the principle of socialism. In Argentina we work in poor neighborhoods, Jewish and non-Jewish,” he said.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Israel / Middle EastPoliticsBernie Sanders 2016IsraelJewish faithMarxismZionism
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Edward Joseph Blackwell
American musician
Edward Joseph Blackwell, (born Oct. 10, 1929, New Orleans, La., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1992, Hartford, Conn.), American jazz drummer who was known for his role in the development of free jazz beginning in the 1960s.
Blackwell played with rhythm-and-blues groups in New Orleans, where he was influenced by the city’s musical tradition and by such drummers as Paul Barbarin. From 1951 Blackwell lived in Los Angeles and performed with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, before moving to New York City in 1960 to become the regular drummer in Coleman’s quartet, which was at the forefront of the free jazz movement. Blackwell also performed with a number of other avant-garde musicians, including trumpeter Don Cherry and a group headed by trumpeter Booker Little and saxophonist Eric Dolphy. In 1975 he became artist in residence at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. From 1976 he performed and recorded with other former Coleman associates under the name Old and New Dreams.
Jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of…
Free jazz, an approach to jazz improvisation that emerged during the late 1950s, reached its height in the ’60s, and remained a major development in jazz thereafter. The main characteristic of free jazz is that there are no rules. Musicians do not adhere to a fixed harmonic structure (predetermined chord progressions)…
Ornette Coleman, American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiator and leading exponent of free jazz in the late 1950s. Coleman began playing…
Hartford, capital of Connecticut and city coextensive with the town (township) of Hartford, Hartford county, U.S., in the north-central part of the state. It is a major industrial and commercial centre and a port at the head of navigation on the Connecticut River, 38 miles (61 km) from Long Island…
October 7, 1992 (aged 62)
AllMusic - Biography of Ed Blackwell
All About Jazz - Biography of Edward Blackwell
Blackwell, Ed(ward) Joseph - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
Clint Eastwood, American motion-picture actor who emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars…
The Beatles, British musical quartet and a global cynosure for the hopes and dreams of a generation that…
Elvis Presley, American popular singer widely known as the “King of Rock and Roll” and one of rock music’s…
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Security tops IT budget priorities
Companies are still making room in their budgets to invest in IT security initiatives, reports Robert Half Technology.
Joan Goodchild 14 April, 2009 22:00
Security is on the minds of American companies and many are still making room in their budgets to invest in IT security initiatives, according to a new survey by Robert Half Technology.
The research found that, despite a challenging economy, seven out of 10 chief information officers interviewed recently said their companies will invest in information technology initiatives in the next 12 months.
Information security topped the list of projects executives expect their firms to invest in, with 43 per cent of the response. Technology executives in the financial services and transportation sectors cited security most often, with 59 per cent and 58 per cent of the responses, respectively. The results are based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.
"Although times are lean, many companies are finding that they can't afford to postpone IT investments that lead to increased security, efficiencies or revenues," said Dave Willmer, executive director or Robert Half Technology, in a statement. "Organisations also are trying to make sure they are prepared for growth when conditions improve, and enhancing their IT infrastructure is part of that process."
The other top IT investment areas were:
2. Virtualisation (28 per cent)
3. Data centre efficiency (27 per cent)
4. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (26 per cent)
5. Software as a Service (SaaS) (26 per cent)
6. Green IT (20 per cent)
7. Business intelligence (19 per cent)
8. Social networking (18 per cent)
9. Web 2.0 (17 per cent)
10. Outsourcing (16 per cent)
The RHI survey falls in line with research released earlier this year by Forrester Research. Forrester interviewed nearly 1000 firms for its State Of Enterprise IT Security: 2008-2009 report and found, among other things, that the security portion of IT budgets is expected to rise 12.6 per cent in 2009, up from 7.2 per cent in 2007 and 11.7 per cent in 2008.
However, a poll conducted by CSO earlier this year found that the economy was having a negative impact on security spending. CSO polled security-decision makers in over 100 companies about their spending plans for 2009. Of the 159 respondents, 64 per cent indicted that the economy was having a negative impact on security spending and 35 percent said security budgets would decrease this year. CSO
DaaS; the new direction for many CTOs.
More from The Laptop Company
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Dell software chief John Swainson discusses transformation
The challenges of selling hosted applications, consolidating the Quest portfolio and the state of innovation in enterprise software
By James Niccolai
John Swainson has one of the more challenging jobs in the tech industry right now. As president of Dell's software division, he's charged with sorting through all the software Dell has acquired and organising it into coherent offerings that can further its effort to become a more profitable, software- and services-driven company.
After Dell announced some product packages for mobile device management, we sat down with Swainson to discuss the challenges of selling hosted applications, the tough job of consolidating Quest's software catalogue from 200 products down to about 40 and the state of innovation in enterprise software.
First, the elephant in the room. What impact has Michael Dell's battle to take the company private had on your efforts to build its software business?
None. Every indication I've had from Michael and the potential investors is that they're as interested in building a bigger, more diverse software business in the future as they ever were in the past, so it's full speed ahead.
People credit Michael Dell with making some smart software acquisitions and having good technology, yet Dell's transformation isn't happening as quickly as people would like. Why is that?
I think it's going about as fast as any transformation of any business I've ever seen. That doesn't mean every product people have talked about has been successful. The whole notion of the converged infrastructure for Dell has taken a little longer than we would have thought, we did a reset on Dell's first virtualisation products and started some other initiatives that we talked about last autumn. But if you step back and look at where Dell is today from where it was three years ago, there's a lot of progress.
There's still a perception of Dell being a PC company. How much of an issue is that when you're trying to sell complex systems that include software and services?
It's a perception you have to address in the marketplace. We've shipped and integrated servers and software and done outsourcing for some of the most complex companies in the world. A couple of weeks ago we announced a supercomputer with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and that's as big and complicated a system as anyone is doing in the world. Our challenge from a branding perspective is getting people to think of us more how we aspire to be and less how we were. Where it hurts you is when customers don't know you offer something so they don't think to ask, that's why you have to gain critical mass and tell your story in a visible way.
What's Dell's applications strategy?
It's an area we haven't figured out yet, quite honestly. We made one change between then and now: we decided it was more of a services play than a software play, so we moved the hosted business I had over to the services division. The hosted applications market looks like it has a lot of potential but it's taking a long time to take off. What I decided to do after a year of experimentation was to focus on the three other businesses I had that were growing faster. So Dell is still thinking about hosted applications, but I'm not.
It just seems like such a good fit with your focus on small and mid-sized businesses.
The challenge is that it's a different customer, it's a different selling cycle, it's quite heavily fragmented, and the only real way to make money out of it I think is to own your own intellectual property, and the IP is very expensive. Those were the conundrums we faced as we tried to figure out how to make money from this.
People have talked about Quest as the glue that binds your other software acquisitions together. How do you view Quest? There seems to be technologies you can apply across all the other different areas.
That's what makes it so attractive for us. I sometimes described Dell's software business as not really a company, it was more like a VC company masquerading as a business. You had all these acquired businesses sitting there more or less unconsolidated. They had consolidated their IT systems and things like that, but the development teams and the product teams were still sort of sitting there in virginal form, and that provided us with an enormous base to build on. They had a data protection business and we put that together with ours and now we have a $200 million data protection business. They had a relatively small endpoint management business, we had quite a big one and we put those together and now we have a $150 million endpoint management business.
Having that many products is a blessing and a curse. Have you done much paring back? You have a few different data protection products, a few virtualisation platforms.
We had four data protection products, several virtualisation, a bunch of performance management. The first time we did the count we decided we had something like 200 products in Quest alone, and after we went through in gruesome detail and eliminated the obvious overlaps. We've got about 40 or 50 products.
That's a big paring back.
A lot of this was features that were masquerading as products. So things that should never have been products, like utilities, we'd merge back into the performance management product and have a suite instead of trying to sell it separately. Some of it was straight overlap. In storage management, we really did have four data protection products, so now we're going through the technical process of taking the best of each product and putting it together, on a common framework. That's the long hard way to do it but sometimes it's worth it because there's a $200 million revenue stream and it's worth protecting.
Which one wins, the one with the most customers?
The one that's the best architected and the most flexible and modern and that has the most features usually wins, because it's the one you can take back to that customer set and make it the upgrade. And you can usually modify it enough so that the upgrade is seamless.
So then you end-of-life those products?
Only maybe five of them have been literally end-of-lifed. You converge them, you sell them as packages. They're not discrete products any more, that's the big difference. The reason you don't want to end them is because in the software industry, all the profitability comes from the tail. You're better off putting it on maintenance. Even though it'll attrition away over time, it'll still be profitable. Exhibit A on this are people like Oracle.
The software industry went through tremendous consolidation recently, what's the state of the ISV market today? Is there a lot of startups and innovation?
There are a lot of startups. For a while there weren't. After 2001 there was a real wall, obviously, then there was a bit of a plateau, and then people got distracted and a lot of startup money went to green tech and other things. Now people are coming back, because of cloud and mobile and some of these other areas. There's a lot of VC money going in and a lot of corporate money being spent too. So there's a lot of innovation in the enterprise software space.
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