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Stifel Says Buy 4 Large-Cap MLPs That Pay Big Dividends
By Lee Jackson March 19, 2019 8:30 am EDT
Oil has been somewhat range bound as we head into spring this week, but the good thing for most oil producers is that over the $50 a barrel level most are able to wring out a profit. The good news for investors is that the top energy master limited partnerships (MLPs) offer a safer way to play the sector, and they also pay out some sizable distributions.
A new research note from Stifel points out that fourth-quarter results for the companies in its MLP research universe exceeded expectations, and with oil finally edging back toward the $60 level, the firm feels that while it should be supportive of the upstream producer and volumes, investors continue to push the industry toward free cash flow.
The firm remains bullish on four large-cap MLPs, two of which are on the Stifel Select List. All make sense for growth and income accounts looking for dependable distributions.
Enterprise Products Partners
This is one of the largest publicly traded partnerships and a leading North American provider of midstream energy services to producers and consumers. Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE: EPD) is the largest publicly traded master limited partnership providing a wide variety of midstream energy services, including gathering, processing, transportation and storage of natural gas, natural gas liquids fractionation, import and export terminaling, and offshore production platform services.
One reason many analysts may have a liking for the stock might be its distribution coverage ratio. The company’s distribution coverage ratio is well above one times, making it relatively less risky among the MLPs. The company’s distributions have grown consistently over the years, and earlier this year, Enterprise Products Partners announced that the board of directors of its general partner declared an increase in the quarterly cash distribution paid to partners to $0.435 per common unit, or $1.74 per unit on an annualized basis.
Investors are paid a very solid 6.19% distribution. The Stifel price target for the stock is $32, and the Wall Street consensus target price was last seen at $33.41. The stock ended Monday’s trading at $28.82 a share.
This top MLP is a very safe way for investors looking for energy exposure, and it is on the Stifel Select List. Energy Transfer L.P. (NYSE: ET) owns and operates one of the largest and most diversified portfolios of energy assets in the United States, with a strategic footprint in all the major domestic production basins.
The company is a publicly traded limited partnership with core operations that include complementary natural gas midstream, intrastate and interstate transportation and storage assets; crude oil, natural gas liquids (NGLs) and refined product transportation and terminaling assets; NGL fractionation; and various acquisition and marketing assets.
Through its ownership of Energy Transfer Operating, formerly known as Energy Transfer Partners, the company also owns Lake Charles LNG, as well as the general partner interests, the incentive distribution rights and 28.5 million common units of Sunoco, and the general partner interests and 39.7 million common units of USA Compression Partners.
Energy Transfer investors receive an outstanding 8.10% distribution. Stifel has a $20 price objective on the shares, which is lower than the consensus figure of $21.50. The stock closed most recently at $15.30 a share.
ALSO READ: Huge 2019 Market Run Is Over: Move to These 5 Safe Stocks Now
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« Air Force One Costs Jump by a Third to $5.3 Billion
Top Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades: Boeing, Booking, Camping World, Domino’s, iRobot, MetLife, Neogen, Southern Copper, Vertex, Worldpay and More »
Read more: Energy Business, Analyst Upgrades, featured, oil and gas, Enterprise Products Partners L... (NYSE:EPD), Plains All American Pipeline, ... (NYSE:PAA), Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB)
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Native Kyrgyz voice-talents, voice-over services
Kyrgyzstan, officially the Kyrgyz Republic formerly known as Kirghizia, is a country in Central Asia. Kyrgyz language, also spelled Kirgiz, or Kirghiz, member of the Turkic subfamily of Altaic languages. It is spoken in Kyrgyzstan and in the Pamir Mountains on the border between Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and China. The language belongs to the northwestern, or Kipchak, division of the Turkic languages and is closely related to Kazak, Karakalpak, and Nogay.
Our studio provides services only of native and professional voice-talents in Kyrgyz language.
All orders for voice-over job localization into Kyrgyz language must contain directions in Kyrgyz or English languages.
Always provide audioguides for all words that do not have origin in Kyrgyz language, words like names, acronyms, abbreviations ect. that will help voice-talent to understand how to voice-over certain word
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Maria O'Connor
Ticketmaster AU & NZ
Maria O’Connor is a pioneer of Australasian ticketing and a true leader of the industry. As managing director of Ticketmaster in Australia and New Zealand, Maria has played an integral part in establishing ticketing as a viable industry in the region.
Maria’s career in ticketing began in 1981 when she emigrated from Ireland to Australia. At the time entertainment ticketing was a fledgling industry and Maria’s involvement in the field has helped to shape the ticketing landscape we see today. With a career spanning more than 35 years, Maria has seen – and introduced – major changes and innovations in the ticketing industry, most notably the move to computerised and online ticketing.
Throughout her career, Maria has also been a part of the major tours and events that have come to Australia and New Zealand and she has developed strong relationships with the region’s leading promoters, venues and event operators. Under the leadership of Maria, Ticketmaster has thrived and has become the region’s leading ticketing company.
Maria has served on many boards and is currently vice president of Live Performance Australia.
ILMC 31 | 5 - 8 March 2019
The Royal Garden Hotel, 2-24 Kensington High Street, London W8 4PT
Registration & General Enquiries: registration@ilmc.com
Conference & Events: lou@ilmc.com
Agenda: greg@ilmc.com
Advertising & Sponsorship: marketing@ilmc.com
registration@ilmc.com
Looking for the latest industry news?
www.iq-mag.net
Click here to read our Terms & Conditions
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Rally denounces DA’s failure to charge killer cops
Chant says "Gascon must go!" Who would replace him?
A crowd rallied on the steps of the Hall of Justice today to denounce District Attorney George Gascon’s decision not to file charges against the officers involved in two police killings.
After the mother of Mario Woods and the brother of Luis Gongora Pat made impassioned speeches – Woods saying that the decision felt as if her son had been killed all over again – Public Defender Jeff Adachi called Gascon’s decision “horrifying and outrageous.
“The DA says this is a clear-cut case of self-defense,” Adachi said. “But self-defense only applies when you act reasonably.”
Public Defender Jeff Adachi calls out the DA’s decision not to prosecute offers
He said that Gascon’s staff asked the cops if they were afraid and needed to defend themselves, and they said yes. “Can you imagine if everyone who said they acted in self-defense took a walk?” Adachi asked.
Gascon’s decision not to file charges against the officers who killed Woods and Gongora Pat made national news – as it should. The lack of criminal charges means that the officers involved with all be back on the streets, armed, with no apparent disciplinary action against them.
They killed Mario Woods and Luis Gongora Pat with impunity.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start – so let’s start with this:
According to Adachi, no police officer in modern history has been charged with a crime after shooting and killing a suspect in San Francisco:
In both the Woods and Gongora killings, officers were not in immediate danger when they fired their weapons. The San Francisco District Attorney’s decision not to prosecute any officer on any charge is mindboggling and fails to hold police to the same laws we, as citizens, are expected to abide. To date, not a single officer in San Francisco has ever been criminally charged as the result of shooting a citizen, yet citizens are charged with crimes every day despite prosecutors being unable to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It is clear prosecutors are using a different standard in judging police officers’ conduct. The reforms proposed by the Department of Justice’s review are empty promises without officer accountability.
Oh, and I read the reports on the investigation; it took more than two years, with a new team of well-paid staff, to do this?
Gascon declined to talk to me. But Max Szabo, his spokesperson, said that the DA would have had to charge the officers with murder, and the legal standard for that is too high.
I talked to John Burris, attorney for both families, at the event, and he told me that murder wasn’t the only option. “If you kill somebody and you say at the time that it was the only option, but it turns out that you were wrong, that whatever your intentions you made a mistake and somebody died, that’s the definition of manslaughter,” he said.
Gwen Woods, Mario’s mom, with attorney Adante Pointer
Burris said he was going to ask the state attorney general to look into the case. There are two civil suits going on.
And as Adachi pointed out, the standard for murder clearly wasn’t that high when Gascon charged Jose Ines Garcia Zarate with murder in a case where the evidence was, at best, weak and the charges, at best, a stretch.
Let’s look at the larger picture here.
There’s a reason so many activists have been focused on the DA and pushing for him to file charges: Gascon is an elected official, he operates (at least a little bit) in public – and he is apparently the last and only person who has any ability to hold cops accountable.
Which is a problem.
Sure, it’s hard to prove in court that a police officer acted beyond what a “reasonable” officer would do in that situation. It’s hard to send a cop to prison.
But firing an officer doesn’t require a murder charge.
San Francisco has clear standards and training on de-escalation. In both of these cases, there’s a strong argument to be made that the cops violated the department’s rules. And two people died.
As far as anyone knows, not one officer has been disciplined, much less dismissed. The Chron reports that they are looking forward, after a period of paid leave and desk duty, to going back out on the streets.
Now the Police Officers Association says the cops have been “vindicated.”
Not true: The officers aren’t facing jail time, but that in no way means they acted that way police officers are supposed to act in San Francisco.
“The standard for holding a police officer accountable for killing someone as an employment issue is very different from the standard for getting a criminal conviction,” John Crew, a longtime police accountability lawyer, told me. “The fact that an officer isn’t convicted of a crime doesn’t mean they have the right to carry and gun and stay on the job. That’s not the standard we should use in San Francisco.”
But it’s been the standard in police shootings for decades.
Suzy Loftus, former president of the Police Commission, who has announced she will challenge Gascon in 2019, told me that after the Woods shooting, the commission began a process to update the 20-year-old rules for use of force. That process took a while, in part because the POA demanded the right to “meet and confer” on the changes, then sued the city over them. In the meantime, Gongora Pat was killed.
But Crew argues – and if you watch the video and follow the evidence, you get the point – that even under the rules in place at the time, the officers should have faced at least some level of accountability. When that didn’t happen – when Chief Suhr and the Police Commission failed to take action – the demands shifted to Gascon.
Gascon at least supports a change in state law, AB 931, that would make it easier to prosecute killer cops – and he’s the only DA in the state who does. He’s facing a challenge in 2019 from two candidates who are going to run to his right – Loftus and Joe Alioto Veronese.
Veronese wouldn’t comment on whether charges should have been filed in this case, saying “I haven’t seen all the evidence.” Actually, at this point all the evidence – or enough to make a decision – is public. The video of the Woods case alone is pretty clear evidence; the cops statements are all in the DA’s report.
But he accused Gascon of “acting like a public defender,” which in my mind is a complement for a DA.
Loftus also declined to say whether she would have filed charges: “I’ll let George Gascon defend that decision.” She said she doesn’t know if she supports AB 931 since she hasn’t read it. (She’s currently a lawyer in the Sheriff’s Office, and running for DA. She’s a former head of the Police Commission. This bill is hardly a secret.)
Why is there so little accountability in the Police Department?
One reason: Most of the SFPD management, the ones who are supposed to keep things under control, are members of the POA. All the way up to captain. The infrastructure that exists to hold cops accountable is part of the same organization that exists to prevent cops from being held accountable.
Another: It’s been a long time since we’ve had a director of what is now the Department of Police Accountability who is willing to push the envelope and demand serious discipline – and a mayor and a Police Commission willing to defy the POA and support that position.
So we wind up with the only possible accountable public official – the DA – as the only one who can discipline killer cops. And he has declined to do it.
At the rally today, we heard chants of “Gascon has got to go.” Several speakers said that San Francisco needs a new DA.
So Gascon, who in some cases has taken progressive stands and is not a friend of the POA, has just alienated a significant segment of the progressive community. That’s an opening for his challengers.
At this point, there’s nobody running for DA from Gascon’s left, nobody who is offering to reform the cash-bail system or hold police officers accountable.
We haven’t heard real platforms from Loftus or Veronese yet. The election is still a year and a half away.
But neither of them was at the rally today. Neither of them was willing to say that they would have charged the officers in the Woods and Gongora Pat killings with any crime.
Both said the investigation took too long – which it did – but that was as far as they would go.
So where do the progressives go in 2019? Tough question.
chief suhr
George Gascon
Jeff Adachi
Luis Gongora
Mario Woods
Police Killings
SFPD
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Unclassified Topic
People on the Move: Cole & Weber United Names Patrick McKay Executive Creative Director
Also on the Move: Kelli Parsons, Jim Gallagher, Ken Seligman and Heather Torreggiani
By Minda Smiley. Published on November 11, 2014.
Patrick McKay
Cole & Weber United has hired Patrick McKay as executive creative director. He will lead the creative team and be part of the agency-management team. Previously, he freelanced for agencies such as Mullen and Crispin Porter & Bogusky, among others. Throughout his career, he has created award-winning campaigns for clients such as Starbucks and Honda.
Kelli Parsons has joined New York Life as chief corporate communications and marketing officer. She will be responsible for the corporate communications department. Most recently, she served as senior VP and chief communications officer for the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae).
VSW Partners has appointed Heather Torreggiani to fill a new position of chief marketing officer. She will lead the growth efforts across VSA, supporting major areas of business including business development, marketing and brand leadership. Formerly, she served as executive VP-director of business development at Leo Burnett.
Nick Simons is joining Droga5's London office as managing director after serving as senior account lead at the firm's New York office. He will be overseeing operations of all accounts while helping London expand its portfolio. Along with London's leadership team and guidance from New York, Mr. Simons will assist with the process of finding a new CEO for London.
Mobile advertising technology company Marchex has hired Ken Seligman as a national business development director. In his new role, he will help identify and develop partnerships with key clients. Previously, he served as VP-business development at Morpheus Media, where he was instrumental in leading the introduction, pitching and onboarding process for new client partners like Lifetime Network and Tiffany & Co.
Barcardi Limited has appointed Jim Gallagher as global chief communications officer. In this role, he will work on long-term strategic and business-related internal and external communications matters in addition to directing the company's corporate and brand public relations. Previously, he served as senior VP-corporate communications at IMG.
Minda Smiley
PepsiCo creates Mountain Dew for gamers
R.I.P. Jake Phelps, editor of Thrasher, 'Vogue for degenerates'
Toygar Bazarkaya leaves DDB's We Are Unlimited to become Optimist's first global chief creative officer
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Eric the InternEric the Intern
Meet 2018’s Sexiest Man Alive
Jeff Spicer, Getty Images
Actor Idris Elba has been named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive for 2018.
"I was like, 'Come on, no way. Really?'" the British star, 46, said Tuesday to the publication about earning the distinction.
"Looked in the mirror, I checked myself out. I was like, 'Yeah, you are kind of sexy today.' But to be honest, it was just a nice feeling. It was a nice surprise — an ego boost for sure," he continued.
Elba further commented on the honor on Twitter alongside an image of himself on the cover of People's Sexiest Man Alive issue.
"Who'd have thought it! Thank you @people & all the fans for naming me #SexiestManAlive. Don't forget to grab your issue this week. I'm honoured & thankful. What's even more important is your vote in the midterm elections. Your vote can make a difference!" Elba said.
Elba is best known for starring in HBO's crime drama series The Wire and is also the lead star in BBC's Luther. He has appeared in a number of hit films including Marvel's Thor series, Star Trek Beyond, Jungle Book and Pacific Rim, among others.
Elba is the 33rd annual Sexiest Man Alive since People magazine started the award in 1985 with Mel Gibson. Country star and Voice coach Blake Shelton won the title in 2017.
By Wade Sheridan, UPI.com
Copyright © 2018 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Celebrity Bad Boy Transformations
Source: Meet 2018’s Sexiest Man Alive
Filed Under: Idris Elba
Categories: Celebrity News
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Woodlands man pleads guilty to filing false tax return
HOUSTON According to court documents and statements made in court, Paul Zabczuk admitted to filing a false tax return for 2004 wherein he failed to report that he had an interest in or a signature authority over financial accounts at UBS AG, one of Switzerland's largest banks.
Zabczuk provided consulting services relating to the purchase and sale of chemicals by companies involved in drilling for oil. He directed his foreign clients to make payments to his company in offshore bank accounts he controlled in the Bahamas and in Switzerland. Zabczuk would repatriate funds to the United States by making cash withdrawals at UBS branches in Nassau, Bahamas; London; and Zurich, Switzerland.
The defendant would also wire transfer funds from UBS AG to an agent in the People's Republic of China, who would then purchase furniture and other antiques on his behalf, which were then sent to the United States for the defendant's personal use and for resale.
As part of UBS' deferred prosecution agreement under which the bank admitted to helping U.S. taxpayers hide accounts from the IRS, the company provided the United States government with the identities of, and account information for, certain U.S. customers of UBS's cross-border business, including Zabczuk. He is the eighth former client of UBS to plead guilty to a tax felony.
Zabczuk remains free on $1 million bail pending sentencing, where he faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
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The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
Presto Studios
Worldwide 1995 by Sanctuary Woods
You assume the identity of Agent #5 of the Temporal Security Agency. Falsely accused of altering Earth history, you are forced to walk the shadows of time, unearthing clues and escaping mortal danger while seeking crucial evidence that could clear your name and reveal the true identity of the conspirators who've framed you.
Average based on 3 ratings
The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time review
Flashback Friday: Our look back at this 1990's science fiction trilogy continues with the second edition.
Read the review » Jul 16, 2004
Walkthrough for The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
Stuck in The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, or looking for the best way to proceed? Click below to view our walkthrough for The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time and wonder no more!
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What our readers think of The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
Posted by btague on Jan 21, 2013
Very Solid Game, Recommended as Part of a Trilogy
This game is very solid. It is an improvement on the original in the trilogy, as the original had a good story line, but some more action elements and more sloppy gameplay, which was improved vastly by the re-boot enhanced version of the original, Pegasus...
The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time
» Journeyman Project trilogy (series)
ASA: A Space Adventure
» Black Cube (series)
Lighthouse: The Dark Being
Cydonia - Mars: The First Manned Mission
Baron Wittard: Nemesis of Ragnarok
Haven Moon
Beyond Time
Adventure Games by Presto Studios
Star Trek: Hidden Evil
The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
The Journeyman Project
Gameplay Solitary Exploration
Genre Science Fiction
Theme Conspiracy
Action (Compulsory) -
Red Flags Game-over events
Media CD
Windows 3.1 or later
486 DX/33 MHz processor
10 MB hard drive space
SVGA display
Double-speed CD-ROM
The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time by - A Point and Click Adventure Game
The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is an adventure game, released in 1995 by . The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time has a Illustrated realism style and uses a Point-and-click control scheme. Adventure Gamers have published a review of The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time and rate it as Good, meanwhile the community rating for The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is Good.
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Agewell Medical Associates
Primary Care Colorado Springs, CO
Welcome to http://agewellmedical.com (the “Site”). We understand that privacy online is important to users of our Site, especially when conducting business. This statement governs our privacy policies with respect to those users of the Site (“Visitors”) who visit without transacting business and Visitors who register to transact business on the Site and make use of the various services offered by Agewell Medical Associates, PC (collectively, “Services”) (“Authorized Customers”).
refers to any information that identifies or can be used to identify, contact, or locate the person to whom such information pertains, including, but not limited to, name, address, phone number, fax number, email address, financial profiles, social security number, and credit card information. Personally Identifiable Information does not include information that is collected anonymously (that is, without identification of the individual user) or demographic information not connected to an identified individual.
What Personally Identifiable Information Is Collected?
We may collect basic user profile information from all of our Visitors. We collect the following additional information from our Authorized Customers: the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of Authorized Customers, the nature and size of the business, and the nature and size of the advertising inventory that the Authorized Customer intends to purchase or sell.
What organizations are collecting the information?
In addition to our direct collection of information, our third party service vendors (such as credit card companies, clearinghouses and banks) who may provide such services as credit, insurance, and escrow services may collect this information from our Visitors and Authorized Customers. We do not control how these third parties use such information, but we do ask them to disclose how they use personal information provided to them from Visitors and Authorized Customers. Some of these third parties may be intermediaries that act solely as links in the distribution chain, and do not store, retain, or use the information given to them.
How does the Site use Personally Identifiable Information?
We use Personally Identifiable Information to customize the Site, to make appropriate service offerings, and to fulfill buying and selling requests on the Site. We may email Visitors and Authorized Customers about research or purchase and selling opportunities on the Site or information related to the subject matter of the Site. We may also use Personally Identifiable Information to contact Visitors and Authorized Customers in response to specific inquiries, or to provide requested information.
With whom may the information may be shared?
Personally Identifiable Information about Authorized Customers may be shared with other Authorized Customers who wish to evaluate potential transactions with other Authorized Customers. We may share aggregated information about our Visitors, including the demographics of our Visitors and Authorized Customers, with our affiliated agencies and third party vendors. We also offer the opportunity to “opt out” of receiving information or being contacted by us or by any agency acting on our behalf.
How is Personally Identifiable Information stored?
Personally Identifiable Information collected by Agewell Medical Associates, PC is securely stored and is not accessible to third parties or employees of Agewell Medical Associates, PC except for use as indicated above.
What Choices Are Available to Visitors Regarding Collection, Use and Distribution of the Information?
Visitors and Authorized Customers may opt out of receiving unsolicited information from or being contacted by us and/or our vendors and affiliated agencies by responding to emails as instructed, or by contacting us at 2350 International Circle, Colorado Springs, CO 80910
Are Cookies Used on the Site?
Cookies are used for a variety of reasons. We use Cookies to obtain information about the preferences of our Visitors and the services they select. We also use Cookies for security purposes to protect our Authorized Customers. For example, if an Authorized Customer is logged on and the site is unused for more than 10 minutes, we will automatically log the Authorized Customer off.
How Does Agewell Medical Associates, PC Use Login Information?
Agewell Medical Associates, PC uses login information, including, but not limited to, IP addresses, ISPs, and browser types, to analyze trends, administer the Site, track a user’s movement and use, and gather broad demographic information.
What Partners or Service Providers Have Access to Personally Identifiable Information from Visitors and/or Authorized Customers on the Site?
Agewell Medical Associates, PC has entered into and will continue to enter into partnerships and other affiliations with a number of vendors.Such vendors may have access to certain Personally Identifiable Information on a need to know basis for evaluating Authorized Customers for service eligibility. Our privacy policy does not cover their collection or use of this information. Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information to comply with law. We will disclose Personally Identifiable Information in order to comply with a court order or subpoena or a request from a law enforcement agency to release information. We will also disclose Personally Identifiable Information when reasonably necessary to protect the safety of our Visitors and Authorized Customers.
How Does the Site Keep Personally Identifiable Information Secure?
All of our employees are familiar with our security policy and practices. The Personally Identifiable Information of our Visitors and Authorized Customers is only accessible to a limited number of qualified employees who are given a password in order to gain access to the information. We audit our security systems and processes on a regular basis. Sensitive information, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, is protected by encryption protocols, in place to protect information sent over the Internet. While we take commercially reasonable measures to maintain a secure site, electronic communications and databases are subject to errors, tampering and break-ins, and we cannot guarantee or warrant that such events will not take place and we will not be liable to Visitors or Authorized Customers for any such occurrences.
How can Visitors correct any inaccuracies in Personally Identifiable Information?
Visitors and Authorized Customers may contact us to update Personally Identifiable Information about them or to correct any inaccuracies by emailing us at lorit@agewellmedical.com
Can a Visitor Delete or Deactivate Personally Identifiable Information Collected by the Site?
We provide Visitors and Authorized Customers with a mechanism to delete/deactivate Personally Identifiable Information from the Site’s database by contacting . However, because of backups and records of deletions, it may be impossible to delete a Visitor’s entry without retaining some residual information. An individual who requests to have Personally Identifiable Information deactivated will have this information functionally deleted, and we will not sell, transfer, or use Personally Identifiable Information relating to that individual in any way moving forward.
What Happens if the Privacy Policy Changes?
We will let our Visitors and Authorized Customers know about changes to our privacy policy by posting such changes on the Site. However, if we are changing our privacy policy in a manner that might cause disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information that a Visitor or Authorized Customer has previously requested not be disclosed, we will contact such Visitor or Authorized Customer to allow such Visitor or Authorized Customer to prevent such disclosure.
http://agewellmedical.com contains links to other web sites. Please note that when you click on one of these links, you are moving to another web site. We encourage you to read the privacy statements of these linked sites as their privacy policies may differ from ours.
Call to schedule your appointment now:
Send a fax: (719) 475-5797
Contact AgeWell
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Building a Russian Bogeyman
Washington Intentionally ‘Overcharged’ Relations with Moscow for Strategic Advantage
By Robert BRIDGE | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.07.2018
Last week, we considered how the Bush and Obama administrations worked in tandem – wittingly or unwittingly, but I’m betting on the former – to move forward with the construction of a US missile defense system smack on Russia’s border following the attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s decision to scrap the ABM Treaty with Moscow.
That aggressive move will go down in the (non-American) history books as the primary reason for the return of Cold War-era atmosphere between Washington and Moscow. Currently, with the mainstream news cycle top-heavy with 24/7 ‘Russiagate’ baloney, many people have understandably forgotten that it was during the Obama administration when US-Russia relations really hit rock bottom. And it had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton’s home computer getting allegedly compromised by some Russia hackers.
The year is 2008; welcome to the international peace tour – although ‘farce tour’ would be much more accurate. Fatigued by 8 long years of Bush’s disastrous war on terror, with over 1 million dead, maimed or on the run, the world has just let out a collective sigh of relief as Barack Obama has been elected POTUS. Due to Obama’s velvety delivery, and the fact that he was not George W. Bush, he was able to provide the perfect smokescreen as far as Washington’s ulterior motives with regards to Russia were concerned; the devious double game America was playing required a snake-oil salesman of immeasurable skill and finesse.
Just months into his presidency, with ‘hope and change’ hanging in the air like so many helium balloons, Obama told a massive crowd in Prague that, “To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year. President Medvedev and I began this process in London, and will seek a new agreement by the end of this year that is legally binding and sufficiently bold (Applause!).”
It would take another 8 years for the world – or at least the awakened part – to come to grips with the fact that America’s ‘first Black president’ was just another smooth-talking, Wall Street-bought operator in sheep clothing. In the last year of the Obama reign, it has been conservatively estimated that some 26,000 bombs of various size and power were duly dropped against enemies in various nations. In other words, nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.
But more to the point, US-Russia relations on Obama’s watch experienced their deepest deterioration since the days of the US-Soviet standoff. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the 44th US president picked up almost seamlessly where Bush left off, and then some. Initially, however, it looked as though relations with Russia would improve as Obama announced he would “shelve” the Bush plan for ground-based interceptors in Poland and a related radar site in the Czech Republic. Then, the very same day, he performed a perfect flip-flop into the geopolitical pool, saying he would deploy a sea-based variety – which is every bit as lethal as the land version, as then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted – instead of a land-locked one.
Following that announcement, Obama appeared intent on lulling Moscow into a false sense of security that the system was somehow less dangerous than the Bush model, or that the Americans would eventually agree and cooperate with them in the system. In March 2009, a curious thing happened at the same time relations between the two global nuclear powers were hitting the wall. A meeting – more of a photo opportunity than any significant summit – took place between then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva. To the delight of the phalanx of photographers present, Clinton, in a symbolic gesture of “resetting relations” with Russia, produced a yellow box with a red button and the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said to general laughter. “It should be “perezagruzka” [reset],” he corrected somewhat pedantically. “This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.’”
Clinton gave a very interesting response, especially in light of where we are today in terms of the bilateral breakdown: “We won’t let you do that to us, I promise. We mean it and we look forward to it.”
As events would prove, the US State Department’s ‘mistaken’ use of the Russian word for ‘overcharged’ instead of ‘reset’ was far closer to the truth. After all, can anybody remember a time in recent history, aside from perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis, when US-Russia relations were more “overcharged” than now? In hindsight, the much-hyped ‘reset’ was an elaborate ploy by the Obama administration to buy as much time as possible to get a strategic head start on the Russians.
It deserves mentioning that the fate of the New START Treaty (signed into force on April 8, 2010), the nuclear missile reduction treaty signed between Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, hung in the balance on mutual cooperation between the nuclear powers. Nevertheless, it became clear the Obama sweet talk was just a lot of candy-coated nothing.
What is truly audacious about the Obama administration’s moves is that it somehow believed Moscow would radically reduce its ballistic missile launch capabilities, as prescribed in the New START treaty, at the very same time the United States was building a mighty sword along the entire length of its Western border.
The Obama administration clearly underestimated Moscow, or overestimated Obama’s charm powers.
By the year 2011, after several years of failed negotiations to bring Russia onboard the system, Moscow’s patience was clearly over. During the G-8 Summit in France, Medvedev expressed frustration with the lack of progress on the missile defense system with the US.
“When we ask for the name of the countries that the shield is aimed at, we get silence,” he said. “When we ask if the country has missiles (that could target Europe), the answer is ‘no.’”
“Now who has those types of missiles (that the missile defense system could counter)?”
“We do,” Medvedev explained. “So we can only think that this system is being aimed against us.”
In fact, judging by the tremendous strides Russia has made in the realm of military technologies over a very short period, it is apparent the Kremlin understood from the outset that the ‘reset’ was an elaborate fraud, designed to cover the administration’s push to Russian border.
As I wrote last week on these pages: “In March, Putin stunned the world, and certainly Washington’s hawks, by announcing in the annual Address to the Federal Assembly the introduction of advanced weapons systems – including those with hypersonic capabilities – designed to overcome any missile defense system in the world.
These major developments by Russia, which Putin emphasized was accomplished “without the benefit” of Soviet-era expertise, has fueled the narrative that “Putin’s Russia” is an aggressive nation with “imperial ambitions,” when in reality its goal was to form a bilateral pact with the United States and other Western states almost two decades ago post 9/11.
As far as ‘Russiagate’, the endless probe into the Trump administration for its alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, not a shred of incriminating evidence has ever been provided that would prove such a thing occurred. And when Putin offered to cooperate with Washington in determining exactly what happened, the offer was rebuffed.
In light of such a scenario, it is my opinion that the Democrats, fully aware – despite what the skewed media polls erringly told them – that Hillary Clinton stood no chance of beating the Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential contest, set about crafting the narrative of ‘Russian collusion’ in order to not only delegitimize Trump’s presidency, possibly depriving him of a second term in 2020, but to begin the process of severely curtailing the work of ‘alternative media,’ which are in fact greatly responsible for not only Trump’s victory at the polls, but for exposing the dirt on Clinton’s corrupt campaign.
These alternative media sites have been duly linked to Russia in one way or another as a means of silencing them. Thus, it is not only Russia that has been victimized by the lunacy of Russiagate; every single person who stands for the freedom of speech has suffered a major setback one way or another.
Part I of this story is available here.
July 30, 2018 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States
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Public Safety Advocate: FirstNet the Authority and More
Posted By: Andrew Seybold August 15, 2018
With AT&T beating every due date, dealing with its coverage issues head-on, and deploying Band 14 ahead of schedule, not to mention certifying new FirstNet-approved devices, sometimes we forget FirstNet is the most important public/private partnership this nation has ever seen. When Congress formed FirstNet in 2012, it became an independent authority under the auspices of the National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA), which is a part of the Department of Commerce. FirstNet the Authority, as it has become known, was responsible for putting together the FirstNet request for proposal, distributing it, and making the award. Even with the delays caused by others, it shepherded the request through to a successful conclusion and awarded the FirstNet contract to AT&T.
Since then, the focus for public safety has been on FirstNet (Built by AT&T) and not so much on FirstNet the Authority although it continues to play many important roles going forward including being the final authority on how well AT&T is doing against the deliverables established both in the RFP and in the final contract. FirstNet the Authority still has a large staff of qualified people working with federal, state, and local agencies to ensure they fully understand the importance of joining FirstNet (Built by AT&T) and how to go about it. It is the checks and balances organization that, if AT&T strays from the goals set up in the contract (which to my knowledge it has not done) FirstNet the Authority has the clout to ensure AT&T gets back on track.
It is easy to see exactly how engaged both FirstNet the Authority and its board of directors have remained throughout the process. Its last meeting was held August 13, 2018, after the APCO show. Each committee reported to the board on activity that impacts FirstNet. Fiscal highlights for 2018 include that AT&T earned a sustainability payment of $5.5 billion, and the Authority was once again given a clean bill of health by the Inspector General (IG) in his report. This makes five years in a row the IG passed the Authority with high marks. Furthermore, the finance committee reported it met the financial requirements of FirstNet while staying under budget, perhaps one of a very few government-related agencies that does stick to its budget. During 2019, it appears as though funds will be made available for independent validation and verification of the public safety network coverage, which is an important task.
The CEO of FirstNet the Authority outlined his priorities for 2019 including continued oversight of the building, operation, and maintenance of the network, reviewing reinvestment analyses and recommendations for future investment, continued outreach and advocacy to ensure the public safety community is pleased with the network being provided, and for staff to continue support for all network operations and FirstNet programs, audits, and inspections. Anyone who wondered exactly how FirstNet the Authority would spend its time after the bid award should be pleased that it is staying deeply involved in all aspects of the partnership.
The CTO’s Report
FirstNet the Authority’s CTO had good news for Band 14 deployments around the country. When FirstNet was first authorized, a number of agencies had licensed portions of Band 14 for Land Mobile Radio (LMR) use and had complete systems up and operating in that spectrum. FirstNet the Authority came up with a budget to clear Band 14 and relocate the agencies and in the CTO’s report, he stated that four state systems and several municipal systems had been relocated out of Band 14 for a total of $27 million, well under the approved budget.
The CTO’s office has also been working with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help clear the way for vendors (mostly) that ask for permission to operate in Band 14 in order to test their equipment. These cases have to be considered individually and so far, it appears there has not been any interference due to these temporary operating permits. Keeping the spectrum clear going forward will require FirstNet the Authority and the FCC to work closely together and it appears that the CTO’s organization has developed a great working relationship with the FCC.
Network Operation Highlights
As reported elsewhere, the report to FirstNet the Authority stated that as of July of 2018, there were “nearly” 1,500 public safety entities in 52 states and territories making use of FirstNet and this includes 110,000+ connections on FirstNet-branded devices.
FirstNet the Authority Passed Board Resolution 92
This resolution cites the value provided by Chair Sue Swenson over the years and her ability to move FirstNet into action. She has worked tirelessly as the Chair of FirstNet. I worked for Sue as a consultant a number of times before she came to FirstNet and I knew her as capable and talented, but I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly she became a member of the public safety community who cares deeply about how FirstNet is being built and used. Not many outsiders come to truly understand the differences between commercial cellular broadband and FirstNet broadband. Sue understood and conveyed that information to others so they could understand it too. She will be missed by all of us who have worked on behalf of FirstNet.
Sue recently received the President’s Award from the International Association Fire Chiefs (IAFC) and I will be in attendance at the Radio Club of America (RCA) banquet in November when she will be awarded the DeMello Award, which is presented each year at the banquet by the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC). By the time Sue is finished, she will have to build a special room in her house for all of her well-deserved awards.
FirstNet the Authority is a viable and important part of the FirstNet partnership. I am hoping that when the NTIA announces new board members it will have taken the time to find members of the same quality as Sue Swenson and Chief Johnson (Ret), two people who have contributed much more time and effort to the cause than what the federal government is permitted to pay them for. If we did not have this type of dedication among all FirstNet the Authority hires, we could be facing a very different outcome than we have today. Thanks to all of you at the Authority for supporting public safety!
Emails and calls about coverage issues as well as the issue of FirstNet replacing LMR radio systems keep coming. Let’s address the latter issue first. Public safety as a whole knows the need for LMR voice communications will not go away anytime soon. FirstNet (Built by AT&T) and FirstNet the Authority both agree that FirstNet enhances public safety communications but unfortunately, that does not stop elected officials from the federal level down to the local level from believing others who tell them FirstNet is a mission-critical network and LMR is no longer needed.
I am willing to bet that I field at least a dozen emails and calls about this topic each month and even more around the end of the budget year when new budgets are being reviewed and put into place. Local governments especially are looking for ways to cut their budgets and when elected officials are not aware of the continued need for LMR even with FirstNet, one of the seemingly logical assumptions is they can do away with all funding for LMR systems. While it might seem logical to them because of what they have heard, what they have heard is WRONG! LMR funding needs to remain and, in fact, many LMR systems need to be updated over the course of the next ten years. This misunderstanding is caused by non-public safety people who throw around the term “mission-critical” without understanding what mission-critical is really all about. The fact that 3GPP, the LTE standards body, was conned into calling its push-to-talk work “mission-critical” is turning out to be causing more problems than ever. What we need is a time out from talking about Mission-Critical FirstNet to talk about the FirstNet network itself. The public safety community will decide when and if the FirstNet network becomes mission-critical in nature, no one else is qualified to make that determination.
Looking at FirstNet coverage, I can tell you from my observations and the tests I run with my Sierra Wireless MG-90 and my FirstNet phone that the coverage is becoming better by the week. For example, the Yuma area of Arizona now has Band 14 installed. Other areas I have been visiting have better coverage than they did only a few short weeks ago and while FirstNet is not talking about where and when it is building new sites, it is easy to tell when new sites are turned on. AT&T has pledged to continue to build out as fast as possible and it appears it is living up to its promises in many areas of the United States.
Still, once in a while I run into someone who is complaining about coverage in their local area. I try to obtain as much information from him/her as possible because FirstNet needs input from others as it continues to roll out coverage. However, when I come upon a hardnosed person who claims FirstNet is not living up to its mission, I have to remind him/her that if a company other than AT&T had been awarded the contract and was only building out what we expected in the RFP, which was a Band 14-only network, most of the United States would have to wait three to five years to see the network come online. Today a lot of the country is being covered by FirstNet with more coverage on the way. Patience is called for as we work toward achieving the ultimate goal.
There are also those who say I am pro-AT&T in my writings and my views. However, they miss the point—I am PRO-FIRSTNET, and AT&T was awarded the contract to build the network. If you are a regular reader, you have read comments from me where I believe AT&T missed the mark as well as what it has done right. Because of having been involved with what became FirstNet for more than ten years, I admit that FirstNet has become the focus of my business life. When I started writing about public safety broadband there was no thought yet as to what would make up the future. Part of our future has become the past with the formation of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), which held the license for the first 10 MHz of what is now FirstNet’s spectrum, and the coming together of the many different agencies to form the Public Safety Alliance (PSA) in an effort to interest Congress in what public safety wanted and needed.
In 2010, I received a call from the then Assistant Police Chief of San Jose asking me to join in the fight. They needed a technical person who could write so I joined in and worked alongside a wonderful group of people until we succeeded. We were often told we never stood a chance to obtain the needed spectrum and funds but the public safety community, when facing an impossible task, simply starts fighting harder and we won. The number of people who gave their time and effort to achieve these goals is astounding. As we put together a litany of experiences we hope will turn into a book, I am constantly surprised by how many people were really pulling for this project to come together.
FirstNet is operational, coverage is improving, more devices are finding their way into the FirstNet eco-system and more departments are joining and becoming FirstNet users. There is still much work to be done, but at some point, FirstNet will serve each and every department in this nation and the promise of interoperability from area to area and from state to state will be fully realized. Until then, enjoy the journey and take part in making it happen.
Andrew M. Seybold
©2018, Andrew Seybold, Inc.
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Aug 2016 - 2, NewsNat Castañeda August 23, 2016 Rio OlympicsComment
From the favela to the top of the podium
From the favela to the top of the podium, Rafaela Silva earned Brazil's first gold medal of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. And to celebrate, the 24-year-old judo champion shed tears as she jumped into the exuberant crowd with a Brazilian flag wrapped around her shoulders.
"I hope my medal now will open the door for Brazil to win many more medals," Silva said.
Silva, who grew up in the country's largest slum and became the country's first female world champion in judo in 2013, won the 57-kilogram division of the Japanese martial art on Monday as the crowd chanted "Rafa" and waved the green and yellow Brazilian flags.
In the final, Silva beat Sumiya Dorjsuren of Mongolia after two days of disappointment on the mat for Brazil.
In this Aug. 8, 2016 photo, Brazil's Rafaela Silva, centre, celebrates after winning the gold medal of the women's 57-kg judo competition at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Brazil's Rafaela Silva, blue, reacts after winning the gold medal against Mongolia's Sumiya Dorjsuren, white, during the final of the women's 57-kg judo competition at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 8, 2016. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
But the victory provided some vindication for the racial abuse Silva, who is black, endured from Brazilians after missing out on a medal at the 2012 London Games. Four years ago, she received text messages telling her "the place for a monkey is in a cage."
"The monkey that they said had to be locked up in a cage in London is today an Olympic champion at home," Silva said. "Today, I'm not an embarrassment for my family."
At the last Olympics, Silva was disqualified for an illegal leg grab during a fight against Hedvig Karakas of Hungary. This time, Silva beat Karakas in the quarterfinals.
Silva, who trained at a judo dojo founded by former Olympic bronze medalist Flavio Canto, was in top form for much of the day. Her first match lasted only 46 seconds.
On Monday, Silva was given a hero’s welcome as she rode a fire truck into Rio's Cidade de Deus “City of God” neighborhood, the violent, poverty stricken slum where she grew up. Young and old, residents came out in droves to celebrate Silva's inspirational Olympic victory.
Brazilian Judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome as she rides a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Youths wearing kimonos cheer as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
A woman holds her dog as they look as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Children cheer as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome as she rides a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
The Brazilian Judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome as she rides a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
The Brazilian Judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva holds a T-shirt that reads in Poruguese " I just want to be happy," as she is given a hero's welcome riding a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Neighbors cheer as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome as she rides a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
A child watches as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome as she rides a fire truck into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
A woman holding a baby looks from the doorway of her house as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
A cheering woman holds up a pair of sandals as Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva is given a hero's welcome into the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Brazilian Judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva, center, arrives to the street where she used to live in the Cidade de Deus "City of God" slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 22, 2016. Silva who grew up in the violent, poverty stricken slum, won special mention from IOC president Thomas Bach, saying she's an inspiration across the world." (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Text from the AP news story, Rafaela Silva wins Brazil's 1st gold of Rio Olympics in judo, by Maria Cheng.
Aug 2016 - 2, Photos of the DayNat Castañeda August 26, 2016 Comment
Aug 2016 - 2, NewsNat Castañeda August 25, 2016 Comment
National Park Service celebrates centennial anniversary
Aug 2016 - 2, News, Photos of the DayNat Castañeda August 23, 2016 1 Comment
News, Sep 2015 - 1Nat Castañeda September 10, 2015 2035 Olympics, Alegria Sewage Treatment Plant, Brazil, Brazil sewage, dirty water, Olympics, Olympics Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Rio sewage, sewage Rio, sewerage, Silvia Izquierdo, Water Quality2 Comments
Away from Olympics, sewage blights vast swaths of Rio
Photos by Silvia Izquierdo
Aug 2016 - 2, News, Photos of the DayNat Castañeda August 23, 2016
Aug 2016 - 2, News, Photos of the DayAP Images Team August 22, 2016
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State Overwhelmingly Passed Education Legislation Replacing No Child Left Behind
Posted by Monica Oakley in America
The Senate made big waves on Wednesday by overwhelmingly approving legislation that puts an end to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, while cutting the government’s ties to the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. Last week, the bill easily passed through the House of Representatives. On Thursday, President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
Lawmakers have been saying that the legislation, which is known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, will offer more power to local school boards, who have felt restricted by their lack of control. However, the exact effects will vary between different states. Some states might have a more difficult time obtaining high-quality teachers than other states.
Republican Senator of Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Education Panel Lamar Alexander said, “It is the single biggest step toward local control of public schools in 25 years. (The Bill will) unleash a flood of innovation and student achievement across America, community by community and state by state.”
The legislation will have a direct impact on nearly 50 million public school students, along with 3.4 million teachers. Additionally, school boards, mayors, state legislators, governors, business groups, civil rights advocates, teachers unions and any businesses with a stake in the public school market will be affected. The public school market in the United States is worth approximately $700 billion.
The legislation will directly affect nearly 50 million public school students and their 3.4 million teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade. But its impact will also be felt by school boards, mayors, state legislators, governors, business groups, civil rights advocates, teachers unions and businesses with a stake a public school market estimated to be worth about $700 billion.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was considered by many to be the signature domestic initiative of President George W. Bush. It largely increased the federal government’s role in local classrooms throughout America. The law established a nationally recognized system that judged schools based on their math and reading test scores. It also required schools to increase their scores on a yearly basis, or else they would be subject to escalating penalties.
With the new Every Student Succeeds Act, states will be allowed to develop their own methods for judging the quality of their schools. This will give states more power in measuring the academic growth of their students, providing academically challenging courses and determining the proper level of parent involvement. States will also now establish their own goals and timelines for achieving academic progress. That being said, these plans will need to be approved by the Department of Education.
However, schools will still be required to annually test students in math and reading between grades 3 and 8 and at least once in high school. These results will need to be publicly reported according to race, income, ethnicity, disability and whether or not the students learn in English.
While most people involved are optimistic about the bill, some education experts are concerned that the move will allow some states to place a reduced emphasis on education. With federal standards not being as strict, states might start to neglect their schools.
Georgetown University educational policy expert Thomas Toch said, “The reason we evolved to a more centralized system is because local school districts failed to act effectively on their own. Many students were left behind in the era of local control, and now we’re going back to that era. It puts school districts in charge of fixing failing schools, the same school districts that are running the failing schools now.”
That being said, most leaders believe that the new legislation will reduce the over-testing that has been plaguing public schools for years. According to Senator Alexander, this has been a growing national concern.
Alexander said on the Senate Floor on Tuesday, “In our Senate hearings, we heard more about over-testing than any other subject. I believe this new law will result in fewer and better tests because states and classrooms teachers will be deciding what to do about the results of those tests.”
Many teachers are also happy about the move. One fifth grade teacher at a public elementary school in Boston Brianne Brown had seen firsthand how requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act affected her young students.
Brown said, “There are schools in my own district where kids are taking standardized tests every three weeks. It was all with the best intentions. You want them to do well on the end-of-the-year test, so then you’re like ‘Oh, let’s do some interim testing to make sure they’re on track’. But it’s crazy. It seems like the balance swung too far in one direction. I hope this new law will calm some of that down.”
One extremely encouraging aspect of the new bill is that both Democrats and Republicans actually had something to agree on for once. With the overwhelming amount of support that the legislation has received, this act looks to be like a real winner. States across the nation will be very pleased that they can now take education into their own hands.
More: Every Student Succeeds Act, No Child Left Behind, School Boards, Testing
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Tag Archives: E.Z. Mike Simpson
I’VE BEEN COMING TO WHERE I AM FROM THE GET GO: Part II: The 3-Pack Bonanza, or: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in The Land of LA & Dust —SIDE A: THE INITIAL SPIN
ADAM YAUCH, MCA: AUGUST 5, 1964 – MAY 4, 2012; R.I.P.
[Before we begin I’d like to note that this past month state senator for the 25th district of the New York State Senate, Daniel Squadron, wrote up J4637-2011, which was a resolution that officially called for a pause of deliberations on the legislative floor to honor Adam “MCA” Yauch. Text and video below:
WHEREAS, It is the sense of this Legislative Body to honor and pay tribute to those individuals whose commitment and creative talents have contributed to the entertainment and cultural enrichment of their community and the entire State of New York; and
WHEREAS, Adam Yauch, also known as MCA, the rapper, musician, activist, film director and founder of the pioneering New York hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died on Friday, May 4, 2012, in Manhattan at age 47;and
WHEREAS, Adam Nathaniel Yauch was born on August 5, 1964, and raised in Brooklyn Heights; he was the son of Frances Yauch, a social worker, and Noel Yauch, an architect and painter, and attended Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood; and
WHEREAS, Adam Yauch taught himself the bass guitar while growing up and joined the Beastie Boys, originally a hardcore punk outfit, playing his first show with the group when he was just 17 years old in 1981; and
WHEREAS, The Beastie Boys became well-known in the innovative music scene in Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side with a sound and a style all their own; and
WHEREAS, The album “Licensed to Ill” was the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard chart; and
WHEREAS, The music and message of the Beastie Boys evolved over the years, but they can’t, they don’t, they won’t stop changing the face of hip-hop, of music, and of our culture; and
WHEREAS, The Beastie Boys exemplified New York through a period in which grassroots creativity and a community of iconoclastic artists helped redefine and rejuvenate a city on the ropes, with iconic imagery from Brooklyn to Ludlow Street; and
WHEREAS, Having consistently produced multi-million selling albums and receiving Grammy awards, in April 2012 the Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Adam Yauch was unable to attend due to deteriorating health; and
WHEREAS, In addition to his contributions to music, Adam Yauch was an activist and founder of the Milarepa Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting awareness about abuses in Tibet and against Tibetans, and later in life became a successful filmmaker, founding Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film distribution company; and
WHEREAS, A man of colossal talent and charisma, Adam Yauch is survived by his wife, Dechen Wengdu, and their daughter, Losel; he will be missed by his family, his fans and all who knew him; his dedication to his music, his activism, and his heritage leaves an indelible legacy of inspiration for all other artists; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That this Legislative Body pause in its deliberations to mourn the death of famed rapper and activist Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch; and be it further
RESOLVED, That a copy of this Resolution, suitably engrossed, be transmitted to the family of Adam Yauch.”
SIDE A: THE INITIAL SPIN
[It must be noted that this post would have been impossible to write without the invaluable resources of Dan Leroy’s Paul’s Boutique for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33⅓ series, and Soopageek’s website, http://www.beastieboysannotated.com/]
July 25, 1989: George H. W. Bush has just recently become president, Tim Burton’s Batman has just been released, the airwaves are being dominated by New Kids on the Block’s “Hangin’ Tough” as well as by a slew of songs off of Madonna’s Like a Prayer LP, and it’s been nearly three years since those NYC assholes and party animals the Beastie Boys released an album—and you’ve just acquired their follow-up to the #1 selling Licensed To Ill:
The panoramic cover photograph of Ludlow Street by Jeremy Shatan
Insert Photo by Ricky Powell
You press the horizontal triangle on the play button (or drop the needle into the groove) and wait for the opening track “To All the Girls” to begin. And you wait, and wait, and wait…finally you hear faint drums and electric piano fading in on a slow, open, buoyant groove—it’s the moody intro to jazz drummer Idris Muhammad’s “Loran’s Dance” off of his ’74 LP Power Of Soul (keyboards supplied by Bob James[1]*) but most likely you don’t know that. You were maybe expecting a guitar riff supplied by Kerry King[2]* of Slayer, or something of that sort.
Loran’s Dance
——————————————–(Click To Listen)
[1]* Bob James is perhaps best known for the 1978 instrumental “Angela,” which was used as the theme music for the sitcom Taxi. He’s also the man behind ’74 track “Nautilus,” which has been sampled numerous times, most prominently in “Daytona 500” from Ghostface Killah’s 1996 solo debut Ironman.
[2]* Kerry King supplied guitar for the sixth single off Licensed to Ill: “No Sleep till Brooklyn.”
As the music grows louder you can begin to make out what the mumbling voice has been saying; it’s MCA doing a Barry White-like spoken paean to the ladies. This makes sense as, with his George Michael combo of stubble and black leather jacket, he’d been known as the ladies’ man of the Beastie Boys. Although, the latest magazines have shown that his stubble had now grown out to “a beard like a billy-goat.”
To all the Brooklyn girls
To all the French girls
To all the Oriental girls
To all the Swiss girls
To the Italian women
To the upper east side nubiles
To all the Jamaican girls
And to the top-less dancers
And Brazilian
To the southern belles
To the Puerto Rican girls
To the stewardesses flying around the world…
“Shake Your Rump,” released as the B-side on the Love American Style EP[3]*
Then BAM! With “Shake Your Rump” the mood is abruptly shattered by the rapid, successive outburst of a tom-tom fill. The music that follows sounds like the B-side on some vintage vinyl, its the only record ever released by the greatest band that never made it/the music that follows sounds like four full-tilt funk bands all scheduled to play the same disco-themed house party, and they simply cannot wait their turn: you don’t know what it sounds like, but somehow it’s all right on time. The music twists and turns just out of reach, determined to keep you on your toes and your ass on the dance floor.
And then there are the vocals. You hear those three familiar voices: the two adenoidal whines of Ad-Rock and Mike D (although each inhabiting either end of that spectrum, with Ad-Rock pushing a hard sneer, Mike D’s voice richer) contrasted against MCA’s hoarse baritone. Yet, they’re different—looser. They no longer seem so rude, but happy. Line after sinuous line darts out every which way over the music, and the three play hot-potato with the rhymes—beginning and ending each others sentences, sometimes all three ganging up on one word. They seem so exuberant while hollering out these hilarious lyrics that are just flat-out ridiculous. A procession of images fly by: something about having a lava lamp inside their brain hotel[4]* and schlepping around a disco bag; driving around bare foot Like Fred Flintstone. If you are paying attention it will leave you “staring at the radio, staying up all night.” All together, it’s the sound of frantic precision. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard before, and you only wanted a Beastie Boys record.
The dense, lush vinyl sounds of “Shake Your Rump” were meticulously assembled, as with the rest of Paul’s Boutique, one layer and loop at a time, and culled from the massive record collections of seven audiophiles. An arduous labor of love, “[…] the team behind Paul’s Boutique was testing the absolute limits of still-embryonic technologies like computer recording and automation” (Leroy, 2006). Co-producer (and one half of Grammy Award winning[5]* producers the Dust Brothers) “E.Z. Mike” Simpson later recalled:
“Basically, we would find a groove, and we would loop it, and then
we would print that to tape, and we would go for five minutes on
one track of the tape. And then we would find another loop, and we
would spend hours getting that second loop to sync up with the first
loop, and then once we had it in sync, we would print that for five
minutes on another track. And we would just load up the tape like that.
And once we had filled up the tape with loops, we would go in, and
Mario [C.] had this early, early, mixing board that had this very primitive
form of automation. It was pretty complex, but if you knew which tracks
you wanted playing at any given time, you typed the track numbers into
this little commodore computer hooked up to the mixing board. And each
time you wanted a new track to come in, you’d have to type it in manually.
It was just painful. It took so long. And there was so much trial and error…
there was no visual interface to show you what was going on”
(Leroy, 2006).
[3]* In June of ’89, just prior to the album’s official entrance into the marketplace “Shake Your Rump” was released as the b-side to Paul’s Boutique’s first single “Hey Ladies.” The two tracks along with the remixes “33% God,” and “Dis Yourself In ’89 (Just Do It)” were released as a 12” EP entitled Love, American Style. The title was a throwback to the Garry Marshall produced ABC show from which Happy Days was a spin-off, and the cover art (credited to one Nathanial Hörnblowér) is a photo of the kitchen in Ad-Rock’s Los Angeles apartment. If you look close you’ll find three hidden women.
[4]* This image closely echoes those of “Epistle to Dippy,” the 1967 single by Scotland’s psychedelic-troubadour Donovan, with its line: “Elevator in the brain hotel.” At the time of Paul’s Boutique’s recording, Donovan’s daughter, Ione Skye was in the midst of leaving Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis for Adam Horovitz, who she would go on to marry.
[5]* Oddly, despite the overwhelming merits of their other work they would win this award for their contribution to Santana’s 1999 album, Supernatural. Their contribution being a song featuring Eagle-Eye Cherry entitled “Wishing It Was.”
It all begins with that rapid roll on the tom-toms: snipped from the opening seconds of drummer Alphonze Mouzon’s “Funky Snakefoot” off his 1974 album of the same name for Blue Note. Mouzon had been the drummer for McCoy Tyner before joining the initial ’71 lineup (alongside Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Miroslav Vitous, and Airto Moreira) of jazz-fusion pioneers Weather Report.
Alphonze Mouzon’s “Funky Snakefoot”
Drums – Alphonze Mouzon
Clavinet – Harry Whitaker
Piano – Leon Pendarvis[6]*
Saxophone – Andy Gadsden
Trombone – Barry Rogers
Trumpet – Randy Brecker
Then, as Ad-Rock informs you that he can “[…] rock a house party at the drop of a hat” the sample that will serve as the backbone beat for the majority of the song kicks in: 1979’s “Dancing Room Only” by soul vocalist, songwriter, and arranger Harvey Scales[7]*. Raised in Milwaukee, Scales spent the early ’70s recording singles for Stax and the Cadet Concept division of Chess Records before signing with Los Angeles based Casablanca Records. Taken from his second LP for that label, the disco-funky Hot Foot: A Funque Dizco Opera, the track’s drums supplied by Jeffrey Williamson serve to propel “Shake Your Rump” right on through to the other side of its dozen-plus samples, just as they urge the listener to comply with Scales’ command to “shake your you-know-what.”
[6]* Leon Pendarvis has been a member of the Saturday Night Live Band since 1980 and now works as Co-Musical Director as well.
[7]* Scales is noted as the first songwriter to have a single certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for the ’76 hit by Johnnie Taylor “Disco Lady,” which featured Parliament-Funkadelic members bassist Bootsy Collins, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and guitarist Glen Goins (RIAA, 2012).
Dancing Room Only by Harvey Scales
Produced, Arranged, and Written By – Harvey Scales, Melvin Griffin
Vocals – Harvey Scales
Bass – Robin Gregory
Conductor [Strings & Horns] – Melvin Griffin
Drums – Jeffrey Williamson
Guitar – Cedrick Rupert
Keyboards, Saxophone [Alto] – Melvin Griffin
Percussion – Shondu Akiem
Piano – William Scott Harralson
Saxophone [Baritone] – Ben Petry
Saxophone [Tenor] – Kenny Walker
Synthesizer – John Eidsvoog
Trombone – Kevin Lockett
Backing Vocals – L. C. Coney, Thomas Causey
– Harvey Scales, Melvin Griffin
With MCA’s emphasis on the word pimp in the line he shares with Mike D—“so like a pimp I’m pimpin’/I got a boat to eat shrimp in”—enters the cleverly sped-up and looped layer of Roland Bautista’s[8]* funk-scratch rhythm guitar from saxophonist Ronnie Laws’ 1975 instrumental rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Tell Me Something Good[9]*” Released by Blue Note, the album from which this track originates—Pressure Sensitive—would be Laws solo debut.
“Tell Me Something Good” by Ronnie Laws
Producer – Wayne Henderson
Saxophone – Ronnie Laws
Guitar – Roland Bautista
Clavinet – Joe Sample, Mike Cavanaugh
Electric Piano – Mike Cavanaugh
Synthesizer – Jerry Peters
Bass Guitar – Clint Mosley
Tambourine – Joe Clayton
[8]* Bautista was also a featured member on Last Days and Time, the 3rd studio album by American R&B group Earth, Wind & Fire, as well as playing on Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine.
[9]* A year earlier, “Tell Me Something Good” had been a hit for the Chaka Khan incarnation of Rufus.
A clatter of cymbals and descending drum rolls spill into the frame as Ad-Rock and Mike D divvy up a single line, each taking only a few chunks out of the syllables before spitting it back and forth:
“Routines I bust and the rhymes that I write”
They then alley-oop the vocals over to MCA who steps up and rasps:
“And I’ll be busting routines and rhymes all night”
“Supermellow” by Paul Humphrey
“Super Mellow” by Paul Humphrey, Louis Bellson, Willie Bobo, and Shelly Manne
The break-beat clatter that bestows the Beastie Boys’ rap with buoyancy has been clipped from the opening section to “Supermellow.” Composed and originally performed by Paul Humphrey as the title track for his ’73 solo debut released on Blue Thumb Records, the version utilized here however comes from 1975 when he rerecorded the song for The Drum Session LP, which featured a line-up partly comprised by three other all-star percussionists: drummer for Duke Ellington’s big-band, Louis Bellson; Spanish Harlem’s greatest conga player, Willie Bobo[10]*; and the man who has played with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Tom Waits, Shelly Manne. Humphrey himself was a renowned studio musician who played with preeminent jazz artists like Wes Montgomery and Charles Mingus, as well as on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats LP of ’69 and on the seduction masterpiece that is Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On. The Drum Session also features Chuck Domanico on bass, Mike Wofford on keys, Jerome Richardson on sax and flute, and the incredible trumpet player Bobby Bryant whose cover of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” I discussed here.
“[…] rhymes all night”
MCA has hardly finished his sentence when Ad-Rock returns to the mic to rapidly deliver:
“Like eating burgers or chicken or you’ll be picking your nose
I’m on time, homey, that’s how it goes”
MCA and Mike D jump on the next line in unison:
“You heard my style I think you missed the point”
Then (extracted from Diana Ross & the Supremes’ ’69 single “No Matter What Sign You Are”) there’s the crude thap-thap-thap-thap-thap of a drum announcing The Bronx’s own Funky 4 + 1[11]*, their marathon nine-minute party jam here boiled down to the three essential words needed to conclude this verse: IT’S THE JOINT!
[10]* William “Bobo” Correa’s son, Eric, would end up joining the Beastie Boys’ touring line-up, as well as contributing percussion to their albums beginning with 1994’s Ill Communication.
[11]* Funky 4 + 1 are noted not only for having a female MC, (Sha Rock) way back in ’76, but also for being the first hip hop group to appear on a national television show: a Valentine’s day episode of Saturday Night Live in 1981, hosted by Deborah Harry.
“6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock)” by Rose Royce
Suddenly the whole song is swallowed up by one of the thickest (and certainly the most tweaked out) bass notes you’ve ever heard. It rolls its sinuous weight across the steady backbeat, writhing its attenuated tail end until it twitches directly into another roll of the drums, which transports the Beastie Boys right back to front-and-center. Fattened and warped, this bass note is the brief but ominous Moog intro to Rose Royce’s 1:14 long instrumental “6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock)” on their debut double album, the soundtrack to the 1976 comedy Car Wash, which guest starred both Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Creatively helmed by legendary Motown producer Norman Whitfield[12]*, Rose Royce were in the process of recording their 1st album when Whitfield was hired to supply the score for director Michael Schultz’s follow-up feature to his “urban” high school comedy, Cooley High. Whitfield convinced the group to abandon their work-in-progress and allow him to compose new music for them that was closely tied to the film. They obliged and the world was rewarded with two discs of Rose Royce’s classy brand of funk.
[12]* Whitfield is the producer and co-writer behind what Bob Dylan once characterized on his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour as “a jumbo jet of a song”: The Temptations’ #1 epic soul/head-trip, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” A former coworker of mine, Ms. Walker, once turned to me half-speaking, half-singing the chorus “Papa was a rolling stone/Wherever he laid his hat was his home/and when he died, all he left us was alone,” before stating, “that’s some sad, fucked-up shit right there.” Really, who couldn’t help but agree.
As Mike D declares that he’s “back from the dead,” Rose Royce return with Lequeint “Duke” Jobe’s roundabout bass lick from another track on the Car Wash soundtrack: “Yo Yo.”
“Yo Yo” by Rose Royce
The guitar groove of “Tell Me Something Good” reemerges as a series of parabolic frames for the clipped, rising and descending cadence of MCA’s insolent declarations of psychedelic independence despite the edicts of perception imposed by both the dollars behind him and the audience in front. Full to capacity with internal rhymes, the lines are all defiance with a smile:
A puppet on a string I’m paid to sing or rhyme
Or do my thing, I’m in a lava lamp inside the brain hotel
I might be freakin’ or peakin’ but I rock well
As the three recite a brief list of dance-steps the break-beat clatter alerts you that that monstrous Moog spawned bass is about to arrive, but first, to close MCA’s announcement that he’s “got the peg leg at the end of my stump,” comes the sample from which the songs takes its title: Afrika Bambaataa’s command that you “Shake your rump!”
In 1984, Afrika Bambaataa and James Brown released their six-part drum-machine-funk duet “Unity” for which the above video was made by Tom Pomposello, Marcy Brafman, and Peter Caesar by utilizing footage of the duo recording the song in Studio A at Unique Recording Studios, NYC. However, the video is for “Unity (Part 1: The Third Coming)” while the “Shake your rump” sample is actually snipped from “Unity (Part 2: Because It’s Coming).”
When the trio returns it’s to shout out the song’s original title of “Full Clout,” when it existed only as a Dust Brothers’ audio experiment, never imagining anyone would ever attempt to place vocals atop this insane, dense mosaic of disco funk. The sound of a bong-hit supplied by co-producer Matt Dike then introduces the third contribution by Rose Royce, again from the Car Wash soundtrack: “Born to Love You.”
“Born To Love You” by Rose Royce
As Mike D states that he’s “running from the law, the press, and the parents,” a security guard at the Record Plant is brought in to ask, “is your name Michael Diamond?” to which he snidely replies, “No mine’s Clarence.” After the three share a hometown shout out of “downtown, Manhattan, the village,” the track is overwhelmed by the hoots and hollers of an entourage crowded vocal booth. Suddenly, save for the backbone drumbeat and the washtub-rub sounds of Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy Five’s “Jazzy Sensation” from 1981, the song becomes relatively quiet.
“Jazzy Sensation” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy Five
Then, descending into the wind tunnel of “One of These Days” (the opening instrumental rave-up from Pink Floyd’s ’71 album Meddle), “Shake Your Rump” is just gone—. Dumped onto the folky strip-show swamp of David Bromberg’s “Sharon,” which serves as the primary musical element for Mike D’s tale of a washed-up rockabilly star now turned Manhattan vagrant by the name of “Johnny Ryall,” you’re still reeling from what you’ve just heard. You’ve just been gleefully bumped this way and that along the seamless series of dovetail joints that construct “Shake Your Rump” and now for you the art of music has been changed forever. “Changed into what?” You are not quite certain of the answer but you’re sure that something momentous had just occurred. Yet, the entire thing only lasted three minutes and eighteen seconds.
[I must note that after the completion of the writing of the above section, I came across this video in which Long Island’s DJ Funktual performs a similar vivisection, albeit a much more entertaining one:
As the album goes on until its full run-time of just seven minutes shy of an hour, your brain is delighted through a mosaic array of cultural references, associations, and intimations; both real and fictitious:
The “3-pack Bonanza” with its mysterious contents of three older pornographic magazines shrink-wrapped together and usually found in cheap bodegas and liquor stores.
the 7-Eleven chain convenience stores
Town drunk Otis Campbell (portrayed by Hal Smith) on The Andy Griffith Show.
The great Muhammad Ali
Adidas classic “Shell Toe” design.
Stanley Kubrick’s ’71 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of sociopathic-social-commentary: A Clockwork Orange.
Australian rock band, AC/DC
Brooklyn’s annual street festival, The Atlantic Antic.
World champion racecar driver, Mario Andretti.
Sam the butcher and Alice from The Brady Bunch.
Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s superb 1976 film Taxi Driver.
Ballantine Ale brand of beer.
The Band’s 1969 single, “Up on Cripple Creek.”
David Bowie, his addiction of choice, and the mirrors used to facilitate that addiction.
The Godfather of Soul, James Brown.
The Bible,
Particularly the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from Chapters 1–3 of the book of Daniel: The three young men who were tossed into a furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, because they refused worship the golden image. They would burn as they were protected by an angel of God.
Chicago Bears’ legendary linebacker (1965-1973) Dick Butkus .
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) [Napoleon Crossing The Alps by Jacques Louis David]
Actor Raymond Burr’s portrayal of a wheelchair bound detective on the 70s NBC television series Ironside. [1974 TV Guide Magazine cover by Robert Peak]
Cadbury Easter Eggs
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ [The Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dali, 1951]
Vaughn Bodé’s underground comic strip character, and self-proclaimed “Cartoon Messiah,” Cheech Wizard, which, beginning in 1967, was often featured in National Lampoon magazine until Bodé’s death in ’75.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1968 ode to a riverboat, “Proud Mary.”
Tom Cushman, Long-time friend and member of MCA’s ’87-’88 side-project Brooklyn, which also featured Daryl Jenifer of Bad Brains, and Murphy’s Law drummer, Doug E. Beans.
Fonzie’s cousin, the Scott Baio portrayed Chachi on the television series Happy Days, who the received his own ’82-’83 spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi
Charles Turner a.k.a. Chuck Chillout, influential DJ at New York’s 98.7 KISS-FM, who later In 1992 became a VJ for “Uncle” Ralph McDaniels’ Video Music Box.
Colonel Sanders and his Kentucky Fried Chicken (comedian Jerry Lewis is also mentioned).
Johnny Cash [Hugh Morton’s famous image of Johnny Cash holding aloft a tattered American flag. –NC, 1974]
Fastnacht, 1888, by French Post-Impressionist, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).
French, All-inclusive Club Méditerranée.
Cadillac’s Coupe De Ville model (1959 through 1993).
Rudy Ray Moore and his most famous performance as Dolemite, in the 1975 film of the same name.
John Hough’s 1974 Dodge Charger featuring chase-film Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.
Clint Eastwood, and his “Dirty Harry” series of films, initially released in 1971.
Dragnet, the radio, television, and film crime drama about L.A. detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, starring, created, and produced by Jack Webb. The series will always be remembered for its famous opening narration: “Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”
El Diario, (literally “The Daily”) particularly El Diario la Prensa, with its offices at 1 MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn, it is the largest and oldest Spanish-language daily newspaper in NYC, and the oldest Spanish-language daily in the United States.
“I’m just chillin’ like Bob Dylan.”
Bruce Willis and his reluctant-hero series of Die Hard films. The franchise, so far lasting over 20 years (with a new one to be released in 2013), all began in 1988 with Reginald VelJohnson’s (most famous for his portrayal as Carl Winslow on the sitcom Family Matters) shouts of “Shots fired at Nakatomi Plaza!”
Scottish psychedelic-troubadour and scenester Donovan
Victorian author and social critic Charles Dickens.
International doughnut and coffee retailer, Dunkin’ Donuts (with time-pressed mascot, Fred the Baker pictured).
George Drakoulias, A&R man at Def Jam who was involved in the signing of both L.L. Cool J and the Beastie Boys. He later went on to produce Shake your Money Maker, the debut album by The Black Crowes, and Dust, final album by Screaming Trees. Perhaps the most interesting trivia surrounding Drakoulias (other than the Beastie Boys claiming that they bought a hot-dog off him in “Stop That Train”) is that he was an inspiration for Billy Bob Thornton’s character “Big George Drakoulias” in the Johnny Depp starring, Jim Jarmusch directed “Psychedelic Western,” Dead Man.
[Stepping a little off-track here, this really is one of the finest films by all involved and is a must-see if you haven’t already.]
Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.
Production team E.Z. Mike (Michael Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King), aka The Dust Brothers.
Cartoon series, The Flintstones (pictured here in a 1960s commercial for Winston Cigarettes).
Benjamin Franklin depicted harnessing the power of electricity in Benjamin West’s 1816 oil paniting, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky.
Footwear company Fila, which the Beasties claim they “never rock,” as they are in favor of Adidas.
Fundamentalist televangelist and co-founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell (pictured here with President Reagan). Upon Falwell’s death in 2007, friend (and courtroom opponent) Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt had this to say about the man: “My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.”
Fruit Striped Gum.
Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei (pictured here in Galileo facing the Roman Inquistion by Cristiano Banti, 1857).
The state of Arizona’s geological wonder, the Grand Canyon.
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.
Bernhard Goetz, the controversial “Subway Vigilante” who on December 22, 1984, while riding the 2 Train, shot 4 teenage muggers. This incident occurred at a time when NYC had a reported crime rate over 70% higher than the rest of the U.S. In 1984, there were 2 homicides, 18 violent crimes, and 65 property thefts reported per 10,000 people.
The Beatles 1968 blister-inducing, proto-heavy-metal “Helter Skelter.”
Humpty Dumpty (ill. Here by John Tenniel), character from the famous nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty together again. However, more appropriately when discussing the general vibe of Paul’s Boutique, I present an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course
you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice
knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,”
Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a
scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither
more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words
mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute
Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them
—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do
anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
Escape-artist and magician (and Queens resident), Harry Houdini (1874-1926).
American motorcycle manufacturer, Harley-Davidson.
Guitar savant, Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) [photo by Gered Mankowitz, 1967]
The CBS produced Hawaii Five-O, which ran from 1968 to 1980.
Dr. Hfuhruhurr, portrayed by Steve Martin in Carl Reiner’s 1983 comedy The Man with Two Brains. Although, the reference is actually to a supposed brand of ale that bears his name.
The apparently multipurpose gelatin dessert, Jell-O.
NBC coming-of-age drama during the 1977-1978 season, James at 15.
“America’s most familiar law firm,” Jacoby & Meyers
Jamaica, Queens; where the Central Library of the Queens Borough Public Library and numerous stores like Young World and V.I.M are located.
Popular NYC mayor, Ed Koch, who held this office from1978 to 1989.
Kool menthol cigarettes.
the chain of discount stores, K-Mart
Literary figure, pioneer of the Beat Generation, and iconoclast inspiration for nearly every artist to develop after him, Jack Kerouac.
Commander of the USS Enterprise and intergalactic lover, Captain James T. Kirk (as played by William Shatner in the original Star Trek franchise).
Miss Crabtree (as played by June Marlowe) and the Little Rascals from the Our Gang shorts, which ran from 1922-1944.
Chuck Woolery, who hosted Love Connection from 1983 to 1994.
Psychologist, philosopher, and psychedelic advocate, Dr. Timothy Leary (photo by Pat York).
Lee Press-On Nails.
Rock‘n’roll spitfire, Jerry Lee Lewis.
Lee blue jeans and their famous patch.
World famous reggae and dancehall artist, Barrington Levy.
Mardi Gras parade floats (Photo by Grant L. Robertson).
1973 blaxploitation film, The Mack, starring Max Julien as “Goldie” and Richard Pryor as “Slim.”
North American chain of budget hotels, The Motel 6.
Fast-food empire, McDonald’s.
1960s British beat band, Manfred Mann, perhaps most famous for their 1964 #1 hit song “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.”
Hanna-Barberra cartoon character, Magilla Gorilla.
the New Orleans native of Creole ancestry who helped invent jazz music throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941).
The world’s most famous reggae artist, Bob Marley (1945-1981).
The west coast’s Nix Check Cashing.
‘] `Zzw33x3xxEnglish physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and alchemist, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) (Illustration by Jean-Leon Huens, for National Geographic).
Naguals, the spiritual/scientific leaders and protectors of Mesoamerican cultures like the Toltecs.
Anglican clergyman and author the abolition hymn “Amazing Grace,” John Newton (1725-1807).
Mad magazine poster-boy and pictorial depository for cultural criticism, Alfred E. Newman. He’s pictured above physically relating his motto of “What, me worry?” on the June 1975 cover of Mad Magazine #175.
A favorite in 40oz., O.E.
OTBs, now banned within NYC.
Sadaharu Oh, who holds the world career home run record of 868, as well as holding Japan’s single-season home run record of 55, set in 1964.
The coast-to-coast chain of fruit drink beverage stores, Orange Julius, which has been in operation since the late 1920s.
The ABC sitcom that ran a total of 104 episodes from 1963 until 1966, The Patty Duke Show. Child star Patty Duke (born in Elmhurst, Queens) went on to shock audiences with her portrayal of the drug-addicted singer “Neely O’Hara” in Mark Robson’s 1967 film Valley of the Dolls:
The Puma brand of footwear.
Elvis Presley and his 1956 single for RCA, “Blue Suede Shoes.”
MCA is seen here during the Licensed to Ill Tour, hanging from the marquee of legendary Manhattan nightclub, Palladium. Located on the south side of East 14th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue, it is now a dormitory for NYU students. (photo by Sunny Bak).
Spanish explorer Ponce De Leon (1474–1521), often associated with the legend of the Fountain of Youth, reputed to be in Florida. [Illustration by F. R. Harper].
George Clinton’s Parliament and their 1975 LP Mothership Connection.
One of the greatest films of all time, Robert Downey, Sr.’s Putney Swope from 1969.
Extraordinary NYC photographer Ricky Powell (pictured here with Andy Warhol). Often referred as the “fourth Beastie Boy,” his reputation was further cemented with their lines: “Homeboy throw in the towel/Your girl got dicked by Ricky Powell.”
Forest Hills’ own punk rock legends, The Ramones, seen here performing at CBGB’s March 31, 1977 in a photo by Ebet Roberts.
The hip hop trendsetters from Hollis, Queens, Run DMC; seen here in Paris during the “Together Forever Tour.” (Photo by Ricky Powell, 1987).
Robotron: 2084, the popular arcade game released in 1982.
Drake’s Cakes’ Ring Dings.
The celebration of American muscle and bullets that is the Sylvester Stallone featuring “Rambo” film franchise. Above is the poster for 1988’s Rambo III, wherein Rambo aids Afghan rebels, the Mujahideen, to fight the Soviet invaders.
The Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Rapunzel.
The November 3, 1988 episode of Geraldo Rivera’s talk show that involved a full-out brawl between white supremacists, anti-racist skinheads, black activists, and Jewish activists.
New York Yankees Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto, and his TV ads for The Money Store.
Rolo, the chocolate candy with a caramel center.
The chain of seafood restaurants, Red Lobster.
Outlaw hero of English folklore, Robin Hood, who would steal from the rich to give to the poor.
Children’s book author and illustrator, Dr. Seuss (1904-1991); depicted here alongside his most famous creation at The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden in his birthplace of Springfield, MA—which I had the good fortune to visit once. These statues were created by sculptor Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, who also happens to be Dr. Seuss’s step-daughter.
Looney Tunes’s iconic half-pint hot-head with the itchy trigger-fingers, Yosemite Sam.
Shea Stadium, baseball park for the New York Mets from 1964 to 2008.
The Starkist tuna company
Dave Scilken (the one with the Mohawk) who was a childhood friend of Adam Horovitz and member of Ad-Rock’s original group The Young and The Useless. Dying of a drug-overdose in 1991, the Beastie Boys 1992 album Check Your Head is dedicated to him.
David Berkowitz, better known as the serial killer Son of Sam. Between July of 1976 and until his arrest in August 1977, Berkowitz prowled New York City, killing six people and wounding several others in the course of eight shootings with a .44 Caliber handgun. Upon his arrest he claimed that he was commanded to kill by a demon that had possessed his neighbor’s dog.
St. Anthony’s Feast
Kew Gardens songwriter, Paul “Rhymin’”Simon.
80’s straight edge hardcore band, S.S. Decontrol.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), writer of Gulliver’s Travels, and A Modest Proposal, a satirical essay that suggests that impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies.
American author, J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) best known for the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and my favorite, Franny and Zooey.
Pentecostal evangelist (and cousin to Jerry Lee Lewis), Jimmy Swaggart.
1973 film, Shamus, starring Burt Reynolds as the hard-nosed private detective Shamus McCoy.
Russell Simmons, co-founder of pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam, founder of the Phat Farm clothing company, and also owner of Rush Artist Management—referenced in the song “Car Thief” with the lines: “…I had to deal with a money hungry mieser had a ‘caine filled Kool with my man Russ Rush.”
American business magnate, and somehow celebrity, Donald Trump (pictured here on the night of June 27, 1988 for the Tyson Vs. Spinks Fight).
Gonzo journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005).
Landlord Ralph Furley, as portrayed by Don Knotts on sitcom Three’s Company, which ran from 1977 to 1984.
English folklore character (and the first fairy tale printed in English) Tom Thumb. The name was appropriated by Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838-1883), who, as General Tom Thumb, achieved great fame under circus pioneer P.T. Barnum.
33rd President of the United States (1945–1953) Harry S. Truman (1884-1972). As it turns out, The “S” did not stand for anything, but was chosen as his middle initial to please both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
1887 self portrait by Dutch post-Impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), who was completely disregarded during his lifetime but is now hailed as a true visionary of the art.
Raymond White, aka Runny Ray of Run DMC’s crew
Whippets: the recreational drug used by inhaling a steel cylinder or cartridge filled with nitrous oxide (N2O)—a popular recreation for the crew behind Paul’s Boutique.
A 1986 ad for French fashion house founded in 1854 by its namesake, Louis Vuitton.
ABC sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, which ran from 1975 to 1979 and launched the career of John Travolta.
All-star Hawthorne Wingo, who played for the New York Knicks from 1973-1976.
The Bronx based Major League Baseball team the New York Yankees.
Farmer, Max Yasgur, best known as the owner of the dairy farm in Bethel, New York at which the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held between August 15 and August 18, 1969.
Houston, Texas rock group, ZZ Top, comprised of the phenomenal musicians, Billy Gibbons (guitar and vocals), Dusty Hill (bass and vocals), and Frank Beard (percussion).
And these are only some of the references made through the lyrics; the music itself floods your mind with a concurrent ribbon of references and associations. For a culturally inquisitive kid growing up in NYC, the album presented a map for certain chambers and corridors of your mind–and it presented signposts suggesting where to look next. Although steeped in nostalgia, the album utilizes this nostalgia as a platform with which to leap forward; and it compels you to laugh as you leap. It is in fact this sort of informational mosaic that is alluded to in the faux-erudition of this blog’s tagline: the product of an upright hominid with a palimpsest encephalon.
Furthermore, for the same snotty kids behind Licensed to Ill, the album is noticeably devoid of insults. Exuberant, the Beastie Boys are “cool,” but with none of the exclusivity that typically is associated with that label. They are still fighting for their right to party, but it is a party that they truly want you to attend with them.
“Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.”
——————— from On The Road by Jack Kerouac.
Art has many purposes, innumerable reasons for being, and The Beastie Boys here fulfilled a function like that of Louis Armstrong, or Charlie Chaplin—in the words of a master of this art, Mark Twain—they: “[…] excite the laughter of God’s creatures.”
Paul’s Boutique is a masterpiece of modern music, with a modern sense of acceptance and inclusion of both the high- and low-brow, both the stars and the intestines; and its poor reception would nearly end the Beastie Boys’ career.
Stay tuned for Side B of I’VE BEEN COMING TO WHERE I AM FROM THE GET GO: Part II! Where we will further explore the creation of Paul’s Boutique and the architects behind the Sounds of Science!
————————-BOBBY CALERO————-
Bambaataa, A., Brown, J., Pomposello, T., & Brafman, M. (Creators). (1984). Fredseibert (Poster) (2007, Jan. 3). Unity by James Brown & Afrika Bambaataa [Video] Retrieved March 22, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6hE5OmpKyc.
Bambaataa, A. & the Jazzy Five (1981). Jazzy Sensation [recorded by Afrika Bambaataa & The Jazzy 5] On Jazzy Sensation (12″) [Vinyl] Tommy Boy Music (1981).
Beastie Boys (1989). Shake Your Rump [recorded by Beastie Boys] On Paul’s Boutique [CD] Capitol (1989). Capitol (2009).
Carroll, L. (1872). Through the Looking-Glass. Raleigh, NC: Hayes Barton Press
Flynt, L. (2007, May 20). The porn king and the preacher. Los Angeles Times.
Funky 4+1 (1980). That’s The Joint [recorded by Funky 4+1] On That’s The Joint (12”) [Vinyl] Sugar Hill Records (1980).
Humphrey, P. (1973) Supermellow [recorded by Paul Humphrey, Shelly Manne, Willie Bobo, Louis Bellson] On Drum Session [Vinyl] Philips (1975).
Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. London: Penguin Books (2000)
LeRoy, D. (2006). 33⅓ Paul’s Boutique. Continuum: New York.
Mouzon, A. (1974). Funky Snakefoot [recorded by Alphonze Mouzon] On Funky Snakefoot [CD] Blue Note (1974). EMI (2002)
Muhammad , I. (1974). Loran’s Dance [recoded by Idris Muhammad] On Power Of Soul [CD] Kudu (1974). Sony (2002).
NY Senate. (2012) (Creators). NYSenate (Poster). (2012, May 15). Senator Squadron Speaks on the Death of Famed Rapper Adam “MCA” Yauch [Video] Retrieved March 22, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEz_iVmZkOo&feature=player_embedded
Scales, H. (1979). Dancing Room Only [recorded by Harvey Scales] On Hot Foot: A Funque Dizco Opera [Vinyl] Casablanca Records (1979).
Twain, M. (1865). Letter to Orion Clemens, October 19 and 20, 1865. Retrieved from http://www.twainquotes.com/Humor.html
Whitfield, N. (1976). 6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock) [recorded by Rose Royce] On Car Wash (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [CD] Mca Records (1976). (1996)
Whitfield, N. (1976). Born To Love You [recorded by Rose Royce] On Car Wash (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [CD] Mca Records (1976). (1996)
Whitfield, N., & Rose Royce. (1976). Yo Yo [recorded by Rose Royce] On Car Wash (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [CD] Mca Records (1976). (1996)
Wonder, S. (1975). Tell Me Something Good [recorded by Ronnie Laws] On Pressure Sensitive [CD] Blue Note (1975). (1995).
This entry was posted in Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Adam “MCA” Yauch, Afrika Bambaataa, Alphonze Mouzon, Beastie Boys, Dust Brothers, Funky 4 + 1, Idris Muhammad, James Brown, Matt Dike, Michael “Mike D” Diamond, Norman Whitfield, Paul Humphrey, Ronnie Laws, Rose Royce and tagged "Shake Your Rump", 3-pack Bonanza, 33% God, 33⅓ series, 6 O'Clock DJ (Let's Rock), 7-Eleven, A Clockwork Orange., Abednego, AC/DC, Adam Horovitz, Adidas, Afrika Bambaataa, Airto Moreira, Albert Einstein, Alfred E. Newman, Alphonze Mouzon, and What Alice Found There, Andy Warhol, Angela, Anthony Kiedis, Atlantic Antic., “Hangin’ Tough”, “Loran’s Dance”, “To All the Girls”, Barrington Levy, Barry White, Batman, Beastie Boys, Benjamin Franklin, Bernhard Goetz, Bernie Worrell, Blue Note, Blue Suede Shoes, Blue Thumb Records, Blue Valentine, BMW, Bob Dylan, Bob James, Bob Marley, Bobby Bryant, Bootsy Collins, Born to Love You, Bruce Willis, Cadet Concept, Captain James T. Kirk, Car Wash, Casablanca Records, Chaka Khan, Charles Dickens, Charles Mingus, Charlie Chaplin, Cheech Wizard, Chess Records, Chuck Chillout, Chuck Domanico, Chuck Woolery, Clint Eastwood, Club Méditerranée., Colonel Sanders, Coney Island, Cooley High, Coupe De Ville, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Dan Leroy, Dancing Room Only, Daniel Squadron, Daryl Jenifer, Dave Scilken, David Berkowitz, David Bowie, David Bromberg, Daytona 500, Dead Man., Deborah Harry, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Dick Butkus, Die Hard, Dirty Harry, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Dis Yourself In '89 (Just Do It), Disco Lady, Dizzy Gillespie, DJ Funktual, Dolemite, Donald Trump, Donovan, Doug E. Beans, Dr. Hfuhruhurr, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dragnet, Duke Ellington, Dunkin’ Donuts, Dust Brothers, E.Z. Mike Simpson, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Earth Wind & Fire, Ed Koch, El Diario, Epistle to Dippy, Fastnacht, Fila, Frank Zappa, Fred Flintstone, Fruit Striped Gum, Funky 4 + 1, Funky Snakefoot, Galileo Galilei, George Carlin, George H. W. Bush, George Michael, Ghostface Killah, Glen Goins, Goodyear, Grand Canyon, Harley-Davidson, Harry Houdini, Harry S. Truman, Harvey Scales, Hawaii Five-O, Hawthorne Wingo, Heartattack and Vine, Helter Skelter, Hot Foot: A Funque Dizco Opera, Hot Rats, Humpty Dumpty, Hunter S. Thompson, Idris Muhammad, Ione Skye, Ironman, Ironside, Isaac Newton, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Jack Webb, Jacoby & Meyers, James at 15, James Brown, Jazzy Sensation, Jeffrey Williamson, Jell-O, Jelly Roll Morton, Jerome Richardson, Jerry Falwell, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Jesus Christ, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Swaggart, Joanie Loves Chachi, Joe Zawinul, John Newton, Johnnie Taylor, Johnny Cash, Johnny Ryall, Jonathan Swift, K-Mart, Kerry King, Kool, Larry Flynt, Last Days and Time, Lee, Lee Press-On Nails, Leon Pendarvis, Lequeint “Duke” Jobe, Let’s Get It On, Lewis Carroll, Licensed to Ill, Like a Prayer, Louis Armstrong, Louis Bellson, Louis Vuitton, Love American Style, Madonna, Magilla Gorilla, Manfred Mann, Mario Andretti., Mario C., Mark Twain, Marvin Gaye, Matt Dike, Max Julien, Max Yasgur, McCoy Tyner, McDonald’s, Meddle, Meshach, Michael Schultz, Mike Wofford, Miroslav Vitous, Miss Crabtree, Mothership Connection, Motown, Muhammad Ali, Naguals, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nathanial Hörnblowér, Nautilus, New Kids on the Block, New York Yankees, Nix Check Cashing, No Matter What Sign You Are, No Sleep till Brooklyn, Norman Whitfield, Olde English, One of These Days, Orange Julius, OTB, Otis Campbell, Palladium, Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Patty Duke, Paul Cézanne, Paul Humphrey, Paul Simon, Paul’s Boutique, Phil Rizzuto, Pink Floyd, Ponce De Leon, Power Of Soul, President Reagan, Pressure Sensitive, Proud Mary, Puma, Putney Swope, Ralph Furley, Rambo, Rapunzel, Raymond Burr, Record Plant, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Red Lobster, Richard Pryor, Ricky Powell, Ring Dings, Robin Hood, Robotron: 2084, Roland Bautista, Rolo, Ronnie Laws, Rose Royce, Rudy Ray Moore, Rufus, Run-DMC, Runny Ray, Russell Simmons, S.S. Decontrol, Sadaharu Oh, Santana, Saturday Night Live Band, Sha Rock, Shadrach, Shamus, Sharon, Shea Stadium, Shelly Manne, Slayer, Soopageek, St. Anthony’s Feast, Stax, Steve McQueen, Stevie Wonder, Supermellow, Supernatural, Taxi, Taxi Driver, Tell Me Something Good, The Beatles, The Brady Bunch, The Drum Session, the Jazzy Five, The Mack, The Man with Two Brains, The Ramones, The Temptations, The Young and The Useless, Theme Time Radio Hour, Three’s Company, Through the Looking-Glass, Tim Burton, Toltecs, Tom Cushman, Tom Thumb, Tom Waits, Travis Bickle, Unique Recording Studios, Unity, Up on Cripple Creek, Valley of the Dolls, Vaughn Bodé, Vincent van Gogh, Wayne Shorter, Weather Report, Welcome Back Kotter, Wes Montgomery, Whippets, Willie Bobo, Wishing It Was, Yo Yo, Yosemite Sam, ZZ Top on June 10, 2012 by Robert Calero.
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Art & Books > Books
The Mystery of Faith
Faith Ferguson stared out the window, mesmerized by the silver light, as it shimmered across the all but frozen surface of the Charles River. She loved that view. It was the same scene she enjoyed from her condo, just a few blocks away. In fact, one of the reasons she’d chosen Myles University in the first place, was its close proximity to her home. The other being, of course, its highly ranked psychology program, which was her current field of study.
This afternoon, Faith was waiting in the graduate student office for her advisor to arrive. It would be their final, and somewhat perfunctory, meeting of the term. She was in the last year of her PhD program, and, other than completing her internship, was set to graduate in May. In spite of that, she wasn’t looking forward to this meeting, as the relationship with her advisor was, to say the least, complex.
Now, just a few weeks before Christmas, Faith was really looking forward to the holiday break. For the previous six months, she’d been interning as a counselor at various battered women’s shelters across the city, and thoughts of what those women had suffered, as well as Faith’s own issues with her advisor, were weighing heavily on her.
Her contemplation was interrupted, however, as she felt an alarming presence drawing near. She knew instantly that she was in danger. Hearing footsteps approaching, she looked toward the door. As she did, it burst open and slammed against the office wall with such force, that the door’s handle actually put a hole in it. As she had sensed, it was not her advisor, nor was it any of her officemates. It was a man; a man she didn't know. Before he could speak, Faith grabbed the cell phone from the corner of her desk and dialed 911.
“That's not gonna do you any good,” the man said, as he ripped the phone from her hand, turned it off, and threw it across the room. Then, stepping around Faith's desk, and standing far too close to her, he said, “Don't worry, I'm not gonna hurt you … today.”
His aggressive behavior would have been scary enough, but it was compounded by the fact that he was well over six feet tall, with the physical presence of a linebacker. The only upside being that, true to his word, other than grabbing her phone, he hadn't, thus far, touched her. In spite of which, not taking any chances, Faith had slipped her hand into the center desk drawer, where it now rested on a pair of scissors.
“What do you want?” Faith asked, without moving her hand off the only physical weapon at her disposal.
“I’m Colin Wall, and I want you to give me back my wife and kids, or the next time we meet … I will hurt you.”
Faith didn’t bother to deny that she knew what he was talking about. She did. She knew, or was pretty sure, that Colin Wall was the husband of Angela Wall. Angela was a resident at the Bourne Street Women’s Shelter, which was one of the three locations where Faith had been doing her internship. But, how, Faith wondered, did Colin Wall know she worked there, and even more troubling was, how did he know that Angela was at the Bourne Street shelter, at all. Those issues were, however, while problematic, not her immediate concern. She needed to gain control of the situation. Since he’d now moved back a few steps, Faith decided to use her innate, and what could only be described as, extraordinary, powers of persuasion.
“All right,” she said, taking a breath and finally sliding her hand out from the desk drawer, and closing it. “Colin, why are you here?”
“I told you. I want my wife and kids.”
“That’s why I’m confused. I’m just a doctoral student. Even if I wanted to send them home, I have no real authority.”
“That’s not what I was told,” Colin snapped back at her.
“Told? Told by who?”
Colin was silent.
“Well, I swear, I’m just a student,” Faith said, gesturing at their surroundings.
Not willing to back down, and still intent on his mission, Colin said, “You tell her I know where she is, and if she doesn’t come home tonight, she’ll be sorry. You’ll all be sorry. Now get her on the phone.”
“All right, sit down, and let me see what I can do,” Faith said, making deliberate eye contact with him. “Maybe I can get in touch with her.”
Faith, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing, but, at that moment, what she said, wasn’t about content, it was about making a connection. Her voice was soft, with a sultry texture, and her cadence was slow and steady. Colin’s arms had been hanging by his side with fists clenched. As Faith spoke, she saw his hands relax, and with this, ever so slight, confirmation that he was falling under her control, the hint of a smile crossed her face.
He didn’t want to sit down but, in spite of himself, he sat in the chair by her desk, feeling almost a sense of arousal, but not that. It was more a sense of complete peace with a touch of euphoria.
“First,” she said, “I’ll get you some tea.”
While her special skills were well honed and almost never failed, this was an art, not a science, and Faith didn’t entirely trust that Colin would stay put. So, as she got up to cross the room, she gave a subtle glance back toward him, and, with slight trepidation, walked to the far corner. Once there, Faith unlocked a small personal storage cabinet, which hung directly above the student’s communal hotplate, and pulled out a bag that contained one of her own, special, blends of tea. The one she selected had a red tag and was the most potent of her arsenal. Faith took a carafe of boiling water off the hotplate, and selected a mug from the eclectic assortment, next to it. She poured boiling water over the bag of her souped-up herbal tea, while in a barely audible whisper, repeating the phrase, “My words compel you.”
Faith returned to her desk, mug in hand, and said, “Here, drink this, it’ll make you feel better.”
Colin didn’t want the tea. He didn’t drink tea, but he drank this tea.
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Click to copyhttps://apnews.com/d67c1dcf67d94c82b8b26419fdb766a5
Ross Stripling
Brian McCann
Kenley Jansen
Teams find it hard to rebound from tough Series losses
By RONALD BLUMOctober 30, 2017
Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher Ross Stripling celebrates after the seventh inning of Game 3 of baseball's World Series against the Houston Astros Friday, Oct. 27, 2017, in Houston. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dodgers reliever Ross Stripling was confident as the World Series headed back to California.
“If we can just hold them to less than 12 runs, we’ll get some wins,” he said playfully.
Los Angeles players seemed dazed after Sunday night’s 13-12, 10-inning loss to the Astros, which gave Houston a 3-2 Series lead.
Astros felt ecstatic and energized, Dodgers drained and dispirited after 5 hours, 17 minutes that resembled Rock ‘Em Sock ’Em Robots transferred from a ring to a diamond.
“Baseball is a sport of momentum,” said Houston’s Brian McCann, who started the winning rally when he was hit by Kenley Jansen’s pitch with two outs in the 10th at Minute Maid Park.
Los Angeles wasted leads of 4-0, 7-4 and 8-7. The Astros surged ahead 11-8 and 12-9 before the Dodgers tied the score in the ninth on Yasiel Puig’s two-run homer and Chris Taylor’s two-out single on a 2-2 pitch.
Bouncing back from a rugged defeat in the Series can be difficult. Boston was twice within a strike of its first title since 1918 before losing Game 6 in 1986 by a 6-5 score when Mookie Wilson’s grounder went through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner. The Red Sox wasted a three-run lead to the New York Mets in an 8-5 loss in the finale.
“We had the game won,” Boston outfielder Dave Henderson said after Game 6. “I’m beginning to think somebody up there is writing the script to make it interesting.”
Texas was twice within a strike of its first World Series title in Game 6 in 2011, but Neftali Feliz allowed David Freese’s tying triple in the ninth, Scott Feldman gave up Lance Berkman’s tying single in the 10th and Mark Lowe yielded Freese’s game-ending home run in the 11th. St. Louis overcame a two-run, first-inning deficit the next night to win 6-2.
“Sometimes when opportunity is in your presence, you certainly can’t let it get away because sometimes it takes a while before it comes back,” Texas manager Ron Washington said.
Los Angeles landed back home at 4 a.m. PDT after Sunday night’s game, and the Astros traveled Monday. Neither team worked out.
“I think that it’s obviously different than a regular season tough loss,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Obviously the emotions and focus and energy were at an all-time high. But I think that our guys, even on the airplane, just as tough as that was, just looked forward to today, just having an off day, and being ready to win a game on Tuesday.”
Justin Verlander starts for the Astros, tying to win the team’s first title in its 56 seasons. In a rematch of Game 2 starters who did not get a decision, Rich Hill opens for the Dodgers.
Forty-three of the 65 teams with 3-2 Series leads have won the title, including 25 in Game 6. Home teams have won four of the last five Game 6s and 15 of 20.
Last year, Cleveland took a 3-1 lead in the Series, lost Game 5 at Wrigley Field, and failed to win either Game 6 or 7 at home.
Astros manager A.J. Hinch thought back to this year’s AL Championship Series, when the home team won every game.
“Most of the time you ask your team to have a short memory in good and bad. In this particular situation I want our guys to remember exactly how we felt coming home after the Yankees, getting swept with the Yankees and having a 3-2 deficit. We weren’t going to give up and the Dodgers aren’t going to give up, either,” he said.
“So we have to go no further back than the last series that we need remember that anything is possible, and the team that is down is going to come out just as hungry as the team that’s ahead,” he said.
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Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh
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Prime Minister's All Domestic visits[Back]
PM's visit to Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) - [Non-official Tour]
(April 26, 2014 - April 26, 2014 )
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(April 6, 2014 - April 6, 2014 )
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NPR: ARI GOLD ON LOST OPPORTUNITIES
I first came to Berlin when Potsdamerplatz was still a vast wasteland, with shards of leftover wall jutting out from cracked pavement into the night air. My 20th night in the city, I found myself crammed with six near-strangers into an old Trabahnt, careening across the empty icy moonscape, trying to figure out where was the secret door to an underground club. A struggling German actress named Claudia, who I instantly adored, had become obsessed with the American expression “screw my brains out!”, and she was yelling this expression out the window into the winter night every time the car skidded. I’d never been happier. Unfortunately she wasn’t yelling it at me.
Later that night, as the seven of us shivered outside a locked bunker door, debating whether we’d found the club or just an abandoned checkpoint outhouse, I decided that if I sold the brilliant screenplay I’d written, I could really win Claudia and take Berlin, this city in which I was madly in love. But I had no job and no real friends, and the only German classes I could find started after New Year’s, seven homeless weeks away. I realized that if I flew to Los Angeles, sold the work of genius that was burning a hole in my pocket, and returned, all the doors in Berlin could be open. And Claudia might love me too. No one else seemed to care about my big plan–they only wanted to find a party, somewhere where a cluster of warm bodies could help them shake off the cold of their East Berlin squats.
So I tore myself from my gloomy paradise, went to California, and somehow, a decade passed. My genius was not recognized as quickly as I’d hoped, so I wrote another script, and another, always just on the verge of earning the right to return to Berlin, and find the girl whose telephone number was now unreadable, on a decaying napkin in my wallet. Whenever I’d pass through the city again, it seemed that Berlin, the city I always wanted to disappear into, the city with the lonely beautiful girls with bad fashion-sense on the East Berlin S-Bahn, the city where no one seemed to be dreaming of making it, was safer and safer, and harder and harder to dream about. There was now a gleaming mall on top of that underground club we never found. While Claudia and her punk artist friends may have dreamed themselves into oblivion, architects and government planners had scrubbed the city clean. The old punks said the city was past its prime, the wild days were over. But I knew they’d just lost the faith. I hadn’t. Claudia was out there somewhere.
Today I’m returning to Berlin by train from the East–through the sun-drenched Baltic states and Poland–so that I can remember how my dream-city might have felt long before Starbucks came to Potsdamerplatz. I’ve heard Berlin is glorious in summer, but I’ll still always prefer it at its bleakest, when the winter gloom descends and kills off the ticking of time. It’s still the cheapest capital city in Europe, it’s still a place where artists can live cheap, but now there’s heat in the apartments and bills to pay. I’ve changed too. I’m coming back how I always thought I wanted to, with a real live movie I made in my pocket after all these years, and a night to play it at the glorious Babylon cinema. I can hold my head up high to Claudia, wherever she is, and say, “I’m taking Berlin!” But I wonder if it wouldn’t have been more fun to just screw that crazy girl’s brains out, and let Berlin take me.
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SUZUKI – Fracking is neither climate solution nor economic blessing
Posted on July 10, 2019 in Other Voices, Page One, Suzuki // 0 Comments
(Image: Pixabay.com)
THE RUSH TO EXPLOIT and sell fossil fuels as quickly as possible before the reality of climate disruption becomes too great to deny or ignore has generated some Orwellian rationalizations.
Somehow a bitumen pipeline has become part of Canada’s plan to tackle the climate crisis. Another fossil fuel, fracked gas, is being touted as a climate solution.
It’s twisted logic that exposes a lack of honesty, imagination and courage from many of those we elect to serve us. Pipeline proponents say we need the money to fund the transition to green energy.
That’s like saying we have to sell cigarettes to fund lung cancer research. It’s also premised on the idea that “we can’t get off fossil fuels overnight” — something I’ve been hearing since I started talking about climate change decades ago, during which we’ve done little to get off them at all.
Natural gas, which now almost always means liquefied fracked gas, is being vaunted as a climate remedy because it burns cleaner than coal. In Canada and the U.S., governments are so intoxicated by the dollars that they’re helping industry build as quickly and massively as possible. As research in Canada and the U.S. shows, it’s not a climate solution; it’s another way to keep fossil fuels burning.
Natural gas is mostly methane, a greenhouse gas about 85 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. It’s responsible for about a quarter of atmospheric warming, and emissions are rising.
Scientists estimate about 40 per cent is from natural sources, while 60 per cent is human-caused — from agriculture, landfills, coal seams and oil and gas industry leakage. Even some natural emissions are indirectly caused by human activity. For example, human-caused global heating is causing permafrost to melt, which releases methane.
Research by the David Suzuki Foundation and St. Francis Xavier University revealed methane pollution from B.C.’s oil and gas industry is at least 2.5 times higher than reported by industry and government. Studies in Alberta and the U.S. reached similar conclusions.
New research from Global Energy Monitor, a U.S. non-governmental organization that tracks fossil fuel development, found even greater problems with the recent fracking frenzy.
Its report, The New Gas Boom, found that the 202 LNG terminal projects being developed worldwide — including 116 export terminals and 86 import terminals — represent warming impacts “as large or greater than the expansion of coal-fired power plants, posing a direct challenge to Paris climate goals.” Canada and the U.S. account for 74 per cent of these developments.
The report also questions the long-term viability of this gas rush, cautioning that many developments could become “stranded assets,” given rapidly falling renewable energy costs. It points out that, because only eight per cent of terminal capacity under development has reached the construction stage, “there is still time to avoid overbuilding.”
Beyond its climate impacts, fracking comes with a range of environmental and health problems, including earthquakes, contaminated water, excessive water use and health issues.
A recent review of more than 1,500 scientific studies, government assessments and media reports by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility concluded that fracking contaminates air and water with chemicals that can cause serious health problems — especially in children, pregnant women and other vulnerable people, as well as industry workers — including cancer, asthma and birth defects.
Yet, the B.C. and federal governments are going all out to help foreign-owned gas companies. B.C. says total financial incentives for the $40 billion LNG Canada project — owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Mitsubishi Corp., Malaysian-owned Petronas, PetroChina Co. and Korean Gas Corp. — are $5.35 billion.
The breaks are in the form of sales, income and carbon tax exemptions, rebates and reductions; reduced electricity rates; and generous royalty credits. The federal government is also offering tariff exemptions and infrastructure improvements amounting to more than $1.2 billion.
Conserving and using energy more efficiently, rapidly declining renewable energy costs and advances in clean energy, energy storage and power grids make continued climate-altering fossil fuel development unnecessary. But our current economic system demands the kind of massive profits and continued growth that fossil fuel development entails.
Change is never easy, but given everything at stake, choosing clean energy over dirty should be obvious.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor and Writer Ian Hanington. Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.
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Art Blart
Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart
Marcus Bunyan black & white archive 1991-1997
Australian artists/exhibitions by name & posting
International artists/exhibitions by name & posting
Posts Tagged ‘Chelsea Hotel
Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment
Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: Ajitto 1981, american artist, american photographer, American photography, black and white photography, Chelsea Hotel, colour photography, Eros, Finland, Helsinki, Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, Leather Crotch 1980, Lisa Lyon, Lisa Lyon 1982, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, nude photography, Patti Smith, Patti Smith 1979, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Ajitto, Robert Mapplethorpe eros, Robert Mapplethorpe flowers, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Robert Mapplethorpe Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe Leather Crotch, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon, Robert Mapplethorpe Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe Polaroids, Robert Mapplethorpe Poppy, Robert Mapplethorpe portraits, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait 1975, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe Self-Portrait 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe still life, Robert Mapplethorpe's bodies, Robert Mapplethorpe's women, Self-Portrait 1980, Self-Portrait 1988
Exhibition dates: 13th March – 13th September 2015
Curators: The exhibition is curated by Jérôme Neutres from Paris with Director Pirkko Siitari and Chief Curator Marja Sakari from Kiasma.
These images are good to see… but not really what I want to see.
I want to see some of the early work, and some of the S/M photographs. You never get to see these online. It’s almost as though the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation is too scared to authorise the online publication of these works, for fear of – heaven forbid – letting people understand all the facets of Mapplethorpe’s work.
Its the origin story and the picturing of his sexual proclivities that are some of his most powerful work… and we never get to see them. Eros (denied).
Many thankx to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Leather Crotch
“The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) lived a life of passion in the New York underground and rock scenes in the 1970s and ‘80s. That passion also made its way into his art.
Consisting of more than 250 works, the retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma offers a broad overview of the key periods of Mapplethorpe’s career. In their aspiration for perfection, Mapplethorpe’s pictures blend beauty and eroticism with pain, pleasure and death. Mapplethorpe also photographed his celebrity friends such as Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Richard Gere. Although solidly anchored in their time, his photographs are also universal and topical even today.
Arriving from Paris to Helsinki, the high-profile exhibition is a unique opportunity to learn about the art and life of one of the most important photographic artists of our time. The exhibition is curated by Jérôme Neutres from Paris with Director Pirkko Siitari and Chief Curator Marja Sakari from Kiasma.
This exhibition is organized by The Finnish National Gallery – Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, with the collaboration of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation New York.
Unique dye transfer
Exhibition themes
“If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe became interested in photographing sculpture during his first trip to Paris in the early 1970s. He also began taking pictures of people in poses that imitated classical sculptures. Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, was the subject in many of the pictures.
BODY AND GEOMETRY
Mapplethorpe prized order and purity of form in his art. He was also particular about the frames of his pictures, which he often designed himself. He had great respect for the long history of art. Some of his nude studies echo Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man which shows an idealised human body inside a circle and a square.
STILL LIFES AND BODY DETAILS
“I am looking for perfection in form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe’s still lifes and pictures of body parts play with stormy associations. They are distinctly corporeal and vitalistic, whether the subject is an exposed penis or an aubergine on a table. Mapplethorpe said he looked at all objects in precisely the same way. According to Patti Smith, “Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power. He transformed a ring of keys, a kitchen knife, or a simple wooden frame into art.”
CHAPEL & COLOUR BRACKET
“I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe came from a Roman Catholic family, but his interest in the church was primarily aesthetic. He said he wanted his pictures to be viewed like altars. The figure of a crucified Christ appears in some of his works, as does the human skull, a traditional reminder of death. Instead of suffering, however, the images convey a sense of sinful pleasure. Mapplethorpe worked with colour film starting in the late 1970s, but did not routinely exhibit his colour photos until the end of the 1980s.
MAPPLETHORPE AND WOMEN
“Lisa Lyon reminded me of Michelangelo’s subjects, because he did muscular women.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Poet and musician Patti Smith was Mapplethorpe’s first and last model and muse. Mapplethorpe photographed covers for Smith’s albums and books of poems. Another important model was the body builder Lisa Lyon, who is the subject of Mapplethorpe’s book Lady: Lisa Lyon. Both women could be described as androgynous. Locating himself in the same intermediate space between femininity and masculinity, Mapplethorpe photographed himself in drag.
New York and the Chelsea Hotel in particular were places where the American cultural intelligentsia used to gather in the 1970s. There Mapplethorpe met writers, musicians and artists such as William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and David Hockney, and enjoyed the attention lavished on him. He became the court photographer of certain cultural circles, his camera capturing friends, celebrities and famous figures in the art world.
“I don’t think anyone understands sexuality. It’s about an unknown, which is why it’s so exciting.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Sadomasochism, S&M, was both sex and magic for Mapplethorpe. Like the French writer Jean Genet, he too wanted to elevate things into art that were not yet considered art. Mapplethorpe’s depiction of fetishes in his photographs was deliberately formal. He documented spontaneous acts only very infrequently. The sex he captured in his pictures was neither malicious nor repugnant. S&M is about desire and pleasure, and above all about trust.
“I’m trying to record the moment I’m living in and where I’m living, which happens to be in New York. These pictures could not have been done at any other time.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe got his first Polaroid camera in 1970 and fell in love with its simplicity: there were few adjustments to make and you could see the results instantly. Because the film was expensive, Mapplethorpe felt that every picture had to be perfect. Precision and economy became a habit that endured throughout his career. In 1975, he switched over to the more versatile Hasselblad 500.
STILL MOVING
“We were like two children playing together, like the brother and sister in Cocteau’s ‘Enfants Terribles’.” – Patti Smith
Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith began their creative careers together. Frequently they would not plan their projects in advance. The experimental short Still Moving had no script, and Smith improvised her movements and lines. The camera operator was Lisa Rinzler. “He wordlessly guided me. I was an oar in the water and his the steady hand,” Smith has said.
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE – PORTRAITS
New York was home to America’s cultural intelligentsia in the 1970s. Mapplethorpe was the court photographer of the cultural elite. His portraits feature his friends, celebrities and influential figures on the art scene.
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen
Princesse Diane de Beauvau
French aristocrat, model and fashion muse
Bruno Bischofberger
Swiss gallerist and art dealer known for bringing American Pop Art to Europe, long-term associate of Andy Warhol
French-born sculptor known for her gigantic spider sculptures
Miep Brons
Dutch porn dealer
Writer and primary figure of the Beat Generation
Alistair Butler
New York dancer
Patrice Calmettes
American author and journalist whose best known titles include Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood
Leo Castelli
American-Italian gallerist, influential promoter of contemporary art in New York
Katherine Cebrian
San Francisco socialite
Italian-born contemporary artist
Ed and Melody
Mapplethorpe’s brother Edward and his girlfriend at the time, Melody, a friend of Mapplethorpe’s
American actor, idolized at the time of this portrait following his performance in American Gigolo
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson
Glass is a contemporary composer, Wilson a director and playwright. At the time of this portrait, they had worked together on their opera Einstein on the Beach
American Pop and graffiti artist
Singer and actress, best known as lead singer of Blondie
David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler
Hockney is a British artist and Pop Art pioneer. Belgian-born Geldzahler was a curator, critic and art historian
Jamaican-born singer, producer, actress and model
French singer, performer, painter and author, friend of celebrities such as David Bowie, Salvador Dalí and Brian Jones
American photographer whose work featured on the cover Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair
American painter, sculptor and leading Pop artist
Lisa and Robert
Mapplethorpe and his long-term muse, bodybuilder Lisa Lyon
John McKendry
Curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and personal friend who first introduced Mapplethorpe to the MET’s fine art photography collection
American sculptor
Japanese-born artist and musician
French socialite
Singer, songwriter and actor known for his energetic stage presence as lead singer of The Stooges
American artist who inspired later generations of artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, regarded as a major figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art
Italian-born actress, model, filmmaker, author, and philanthropist
Giorgio di Sant’Angelo
Italian-born fashion designer
Budding actor and award-winning bodybuilder at the time of this portrait, he later achieved world renown as a Hollywood star and Governor of California
American contemporary artist, known for photographs analyzing women’s roles and place in society
Holly Solomon
A self-anointed ‘Pop princess’, Solomon was a prominent collector and subsequent dealer of contemporary art. She was famously immortalized by other artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein
American writer and essayist
Finnish artist and illustrator. His drawings had a major influence on gay culture from the 1970s onwards. Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol were among his admirers
Sam Wagstaff
Curator, collector, Mapplethorpe’s lifetime companion and artistic mentor
Pop Art pioneer and filmmaker, greatly admired by Mapplethorpe
American author, known for his work on gay themes
Ajitto
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Text: ‘The defining of Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body’ Dr Marcus Bunyan / Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’ at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, sculpture, space and time
Tags: a beautiful possession, AIDS, Ajitto, Ajitto 1981, american photographer, andy warhol, Apollo, Apollonian, Apollonian and Dionysian ideals, Apollonian and Dyonsian, Apollonian images of the male body, Arcadian themes, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, beauty, black male bodies, Budapest, Chelsea Hotel, classical Greek statues, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Culture Wars, Culture Wars 1980s, Derrick Cross, Dionysian, Dionysian 'Other', Dionysian images of the male body, Dionysus, Dyonsian, ephebes, erotic encounters, eternal beauty, Fred Holland Day, Fredrick Holland Day, Georges Bataille, Georges Bataille eroticism, homosexual identity, homosexuality, homosexuality and the male body, homosocial bonding, identity, Ken Moody, Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, Lisa Lyon, Lisa Lyon 1982, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, male body image, Mapplethorpe AIDS, Mapplethorpe black male bodies, Mapplethorpe Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Mapplethorpe flowers, Mapplethorpe S&M photographs, Marcus Bunyan The defining of Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body, Michel Foucault, minor white, nature, nature - that which is born, NEA/Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, nudes, objectification of bodies, posession of beauty, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Ajitto, Robert Mapplethorpe Derrick Cross, Robert Mapplethorpe Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait 1975, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe The Perfect Moment, Robert Mapplethorpe Thomas, Robert Mapplethorpe Two Tulips, Robert Mapplethorpe Untitled 1973, Robert Sherman, S&M identities, S&M photographs, sadomasochistic practices, sexual freedom, sexual identity, sexual stereotypes, sexuality, subversion, the body, The defining of Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body, the Factory, The Ludwig Museum, The Ludwig Museum Budapest, the male body, The Perfect Moment, the proximity of the same, transcendent spirit, transgressing the taboo, Two Tulips, US cultural-political landscape, von Gloeden, washington d c, yin/yang
Exhibition dates: 25th May – 30th September 2012
“Perfection means you don’t question anything about the photograph. There are certain pictures I’ve taken in which you really can’t move that leaf or that hand. It’s where it should be, and you can’t say it could have been there. There is nothing to question as in a great painting. I often have trouble with contemporary art because I find it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have to be anatomically correct to be perfect either. A Picasso portrait is perfect. It’s just not questionable. In the best of my pictures, there’s nothing to question – it’s just there.”
Written in 1996 (but never published until now), this is one of my earliest pieces of research and writing. While it is somewhat idealistic in many ways, hopefully this piece still has some relevance for the reader for there are important ideas contained within the text.
The defining of Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body
Photography has portrayed the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals of the body throughout its history, but has never fully explored the theoretical implications and consequences of this pairing. Our presentation of the body says precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society and the controls which society exerts over the innerman.1 My research concentrated on how images of the male body, as a representation of the Self/Other split, have been affected by these ideals.
We can clearly define the Apollonian (beauty, perfection, obsession, narcissism, voyeurism, idols, fascism, frigid, constraint, oppression, the defined, the personalised, an aggression of the eye linked to greed and desire) and Dionysian (ecstasy, eroticism, hysteria, energy, anarchy, promiscuity, death, emotion, bodily substances and the universal). In reality the boundaries between these ideals are more ambiguous.
For example, in the work of the American photographer Fred Holland Day we see allegorical myths portrayed by beautiful youths, many of which to modern eyes have a powerful homoerotic quality.
“In close proximity to eroticism associated with homosocial bonding and sexuality, these pictures were infused with desire and anxiety, repulsion and attraction … Day’s male nudes possess the aesthetic trappings of refined art and high culture … but also contain a frisson of impending sexual release and bodily pleasure, to say nothing of their sado-erotic inflection and paedophilic associations.”2
According to some critics,3 societies acceptance of photographs of Apollonian or Orphic (Dionysian) youths [2 different critical views]4 in that era (the fin de siecle of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century), was based on what was seen as their chaste, idyllic nature. They represented ‘ephebes’ – males who were between boy and man – who posed no threat to the patriarchal status quo. To other critics5 these ‘ephebes’ present a challenge to the construction of heterosexual/ homosexual identity along gender lines, echoing Foucault’s thoughts on the imprisoning nature of categories of sexual identity.6
For Day, physical beauty was the testimony of a transcendent spirit.7 His portraits tried to uncover the true spirit of his subjects, revealing what was hidden behind the mask of e(x)ternal beauty. But what was being revealed? Was it the subject’s own spiritual integrity, his true self, or a false self as directed by the photographer whose instructions he was enacting? Was it F. Holland Day’s erotic fantasies the subject was acting out, or was it a perception of his own identity or a combination of both? These works show Day as both director and collaborator, his idols equally unattainable and available, resilient and vulnerable. In portraying this beauty, was Day embracing a seductive utopia in which this Apollonian beauty leads away from the very Dionysian spirit he was trying to engage with?
At around the same time a Prussian named Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was also taking photographs of scantily clad local peasant youths, based on Arcadian themes. “In von Gloeden’s perception of the world human figures are not in themselves merely erotic, but become aesthetic objects … a setting in which beautiful things are the content of the image.”8
While this may be true, the focus of the images is always on what Von Gloeden desired, his full frontal nudes drawing our eyes to the locus of sexual desire, the penis. Von Gloeden’s “transformation of ordinary working class boys into the very image of antique legend,”9 the conjunction of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, blurs the distinctions between the two. Both Day and Von Gloeden were wealthy, educated, influential men who had a desire for working class boys. Did they help create an erotic tension across class lines and effect a particular Camp taste when society at that time (the first decade of the 20th century) was beginning to define areas of sexual categorisation that would label gay men perverts and degenerates? Even today, comparing contemporary critical analysis of Von Gloeden’s photographs can produce vastly differing conceptualisations as to the evidence of sexual overtones:
“The distinction between form and sexual attractiveness is tenuously maintained and the expression of the subjects’ face suggests a lofty remoteness rather than sexual availability or provocativeness.”10
“Von Gloeden’s pictures are fairly specific in depicting erotically based encounters between Mediterranean males. In many of them, the gazes shared between young men or the suggestive relationships of figure to figure hint at activities that might take place beyond the cameras range.”11
For Day and Von Gloeden the need to possess something beautiful, something that was taboo, compensated both photographers for something they had lost – their youth. This transfers their death onto the object of their possession; the beautiful youths ‘captured’ in their photographs. Georges Bataille links eroticism to the inner life of man, the true self, and the eroticism of these photographs opens the way to a viewing of death and allows the photographer the power to look death in the face. According to Bataille, possession of something beautiful negates our need to die because we have objectified our need in someone else.12
What we know and understand about the world is partially built on images that are recorded, interpreted and imprinted in our brains as the result of the experiences we encounter throughout our lives. Our memory is forever fragmenting our remembered reality. It provides us with a point of view of the reality of the world in which we live and on which our identities are formed. When we look at a photograph we (sub)consciously bring all of our social encultration, our hates, our desires and our spirit to bear on the definition of that photograph at the time of viewing (an each viewing can be different!). Inherently embedded in any photograph then, are all these Dionysian stirrings – of desire, of eroticism, of death and of memory. Even if the photograph is entirely Apollonian in content the definition of that photograph can be open to any possibility, by any body.
One photographer who sought to access, and have connection to, fundamental truths was the American photographer Minor White. Studying Zen Buddhism, Gurdjieff and astrology, White believed in the photographs’ connection to the subject he was photographing and the subject’s connection back via the camera to the photographer forming a holistic circle.13 When, in meditation, this connection was open he would then expose the negative in the camera hopeful of a “revelation” of spirit in the subsequent photograph. White feared public exposure as a homosexual and struggled for years to resist the shame and disgust he felt over his sexual desires. Very few of his male portraits were exhibited during his lifetime, his Dionysian urgings difficult to reconcile with or assimilate into his images of peace and serenity, images that urged unity of self and spirit, of yin and yang. In the East yin/yang is both/and, being transformable and interpenetrating whilst in the West black/white is either/or not both, being exclusive and non-interactive. But who is to say what is ugly or what is beautiful? What is black or what is white?
In the work of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, we can see the formalised classical aesthetic of beauty combined with content which many people are repelled by (pornography, sexuality, violence, power) creating work which is both Apollonian and Dionysian.14 Peoples’ disgust at the content of some of Mapplethorpe’s images is an Apollonian response, an aesthetic judgement, a backing away from a connection to ‘nature’, meaning ‘that which is born’. Mapplethorpe said, “I’ve done everything I show in my photographs,”15 revealing a connection to an inner self, regardless of whether he intended to shock. Those seeking suppression of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, mainly conservative elements of society, cite the denigration of moral values as the main reason for their attacks. However Mapplethorpe’s S&M photographs sought to re-present the identity of a small subculture of the gay community that exists within the general community and by naming this subculture he sought to document and validate its existence. The photograph can and does lie but here was the ‘truth’ of these Dionysian experiences, which conservative bigots could not deny – that they exist.
In the NEA/Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center controversy surrounding Mapplethorpe16 his work was defended on aesthetic grounds, not on the grounds of homoerotic content, of freedom of expression or artistic freedom. The classical Apollonian form of his images was emphasised. As one juror put it, “Going in, I would never have said the pictures have artistic value. Learning as we did about art, I and everyone else thought they did have some value. We are learning about something ugly and harsh in society.”17 Ugly and harsh. To some people in the world S&M scenes are perfectly natural and beautiful and can lead to the most transcendent experience that a human being can ever have in their life. Who is to decide for the individual his or her freedom to choose?
This Apollonian fear of the Dionysian ‘Other’, the emotional chaotic self, was found to involve fear of that which is potentially the ‘same as’ – two sides of the same coin. This fear of ‘the same’, or of the proximity of the same, or of the threat of the same, can lead to violence, homophobia, racism and bigotry. Mapping out sexual identities’ toleration of difference, which is ‘the same as’, recognises that there are many different ways of being, and many truths in the world.
In conclusion I have determined that the definition of Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body are at best ambiguous and open to redefinition and reinterpretation. The multiplicity of readings that can be attached to images of the male body, in different eras, by different people illustrates the very problematic theoretical area these images inhabit. As we seek to ‘name’, to categorise, to nullify the ‘Other’ as a Dionysian connection to earth and nature, it may cause an alienated ‘Self’ to revolt against Apollonian powers of control in order to break down the lived distance that divides people. This creates situations/ encounters/ experiences that are regarded as transgressive and a threat to the hegemonic fabric of society.
But do these experiences offer an alternative path for the evolution of the human race? Not the replacing of one patriarchal, capitalist system with another based on ecstatic spiritual consciousness but perhaps a more level playing field, one based on a horizontal consciousness (a balance between Apollonian and Dionysian), a ‘knowing’ and understanding, a respect for our self and others. My claim as an’Other’ is that these perceived transgressions, not just the binary either/or, may ultimately free human beings and allow them to experience life and grow. Where nothing is named, everything is possible.
Marcus Bunyan 1996
Many thankx to the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission
Derrick Cross
Two Tulips
“A renowned figure of contemporary photography, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was in his element in a domain defined by conventions and revolt, classicism and non-conformist cultures, where each picture serves as a document of hard-fought identities, as well as inciting and recording social and artistic debates. The Ludwig Museum Budapest features nearly two hundred works by Robert Mapplethorpe, from his early Polaroid photos to pieces from his final years. Realised in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation New York, this large-scale exhibition is presented to a Hungarian audience for the first time.
Initially, Mapplethorpe had no intention of becoming a photographer. His early collages and altar-like installations incorporated found elements including photos from magazines. Seeking to give these works a more personal and perfect touch, he decided to shoot the photos himself. His major subjects were his immediate environment and personal desires: the alternative circles of the New York art scene, his identity as a homosexual, non-traditional forms of sexuality, and the communities organised around them. The New York of the seventies was a great melting pot of contiguous subcultures, sexual freedom, post-Pop and rock’n’roll. Mapplethorpe’s environment included Andy Warhol and his entourage from the Factory, the superstars of his films as well as the inhabitants of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, who inspired his art and became part of his audience.
His portraits of famous individuals and those longing for fame also positioned their photographer within their circle. He was a renowned artist seeking to establish relationships with people who stand out, one way or another, from the rest of society, without submitting himself to them. Posing for his camera were film stars, musicians, writers and visual artists, the celebrities and central figures of New York in the seventies and eighties, including pornographic film stars and body builders. He made engaging and elegant portraits attesting to his intense attention, humour, and ambition toward a sense of the monumental.
Mapplethorpe developed an increasingly committed and professional attitude to photography. His quest for the perfect image led him to classical compositions and subjects. While precision of forms and a quality of reserve were combined in his works, his intense attention to his models remained unchanged; he photographed torsos and floral still-lifes with the same cool professionalism. His nudes evoke classical Greek statues and Renaissance masterpieces, with their arrangement and sculptural approach to the body dating back to traditions that have existed for several hundred years. Such an incarnation of classical formalism, however, was juxtaposed with shocking new subjects and stark sexual fetishes, resulting in radical re-creations of the approach to tradition.
The perfect image called for the perfect body: his shots of black men, female body-builders and austere flowers seem to articulate his one and only vision, again and again. He almost always worked in the studio, most often in black and white, using increasingly defined tones. With unified backgrounds and balance of forms, his photos remove the subjects from their own realities to relocate them in the timeless, frozen space of the photograph. In terms of their statue-like beauty and rigorous composition of every detail, his pictures continue and renew the classical photographic tradition all at once. Such classical virtues, however, did not make these photos exempt from criticism: both his subject matter and their manner of presentation sparked controversy. Their sexual themes aroused unease, and criticism of the work failed to make a distinction between the statue-like beauty of body parts and torsos, the sexual stereotypes associated with black male bodies, and the objectification of the bodies.
Mapplethorpe’s works created a place for homosexual and S&M identities in the domain of high art, subverting conventions, transgressing unspoken social agreements and revealing prejudices, in line with the artist’s personal desires and self-definition. In the United States, during the eighties, in the first moments of horror in the face of AIDS, the condemnation of homosexuality and the undefined dread of the disease became entwined. Such developments stirred up the already intense controversies around Mapplethorpe’s photos, adding a new overtone to the voice of conservative protesters. (Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, and he died in the spring of 1989 due to complications related to the disease).
The cultural-political debates of the so-called Culture Wars in the late 1980s and 1990s in the United States, fuelled the decision of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to cancel its leg of the travelling exhibition “The Perfect Moment,” which included several thought-provoking photos that the conservative right-wing had denounced as obscene and arrogant assaults on public taste. A long and heated debate was to follow, including both hysterical and absurd commentaries, triggering police actions and a trial against a subsequent venue, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as well as its director. Though the museum and its director were eventually cleared of all charges, the case continued to shape the cultural-political landscape in the US, which partly concluded in a revision of the public funding of artworks and is still referred to today as an outstanding example of the methodology of censorship.”
Press release from the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art website
1. Blain, Robert. The Decorated Body. London: Thames & Hudson, 1979, p.5, Introduction
2. Crump, James. F. Holland Day- Suffering the Ideal. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1995, p.11
3. Foster, Alasdair. Behold The Man – The Male Nude In Photography. Edinburgh: Stills, 1989, p.9
4. Jussim, Estelle. Slave To Beauty- The Eccentric Life And Controversial Career of F. Holland Day, Photographer, Publisher, Aesthete. Boston: Godine, 1981, pp.175-176; Ellenzweig, Allan. The Homoerotic Photograph. New York: Columbia University, 1992, p. 59
5. Ellenzweig, p.59
6. Weeks, Jeffrey. Against Nature: Essays on history, sexuality and identity. London: Rivers Osram Press, 1991, p.164
7. Day, F. Holland. “Is Photography An Art?” p.8, quoted in Crump, James. F. Holland Day – Suffering The Ideal. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1995, p.20
9. Leslie, Charles. Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer. New York: Soho Photographic, 1997, p.86
10. Dutton, Kenneth R. The Perfectible Body. London: Cassell, 1995, p. 95
11. Ellenzweig, p.43
12. Bataille, Georges. Death And Sensuality. New York: Walker And Company, 1962, p. 24
13. Bateson, Gregory. Steps To An Ecology Of Mind – Collected Essays On Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution And Epistemology. St. Albans: Paladin, 1973
14. Danto, Arthur C. Mapplethorpe – Playing With The Edge. Essay. London: Jonathon Cape, 1992, p.331
15. Interview with Robert Mapplethorpe quoted in Cooper, Emmanuel. The Sexual Perspective. London: Routledge, 1986, p. 286
16. Ellenzweig, p. 205, Footnote 1
17. Cembalest, Robin. “The Obscenity Trial: How They Voted To Acquit,” in Art News December 1990 89 (10): 141 quoted in Ellenzweig, p.208
Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art
1095 Budapest Komor Marcell Street 1
Hungary 06 1 555-3444
Tuesday-Sunday: 10.00-20.00
Closed on Mondays
Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art website
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
ARCHIVE OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK
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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Mask’ 1994
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Mask' 1994
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Vale Joyce Evans OAM photographer (1929-2019)
Photograph: ‘PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944’ by Horace Bristol (1908-1997)
Exhibition: ‘Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33’ at the Tate Modern, London
Photographs: Herbert Ponting Chinese stereocards
Auction: Holst manuscripts, Christie’s, London
Photographs: Still life colour separation images by Bernard F. Eilers
Exhibition and auction, photographs and text: ‘The Gay Day Archive 1974-83’ – photographs by Hank O’Neal; text by Alan Ginsberg
Exhibition: ‘Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles
Exhibition: ‘Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Exhibition: ‘Sanlé Sory: Peuple de la Nuit’ at David Hill Gallery, London
Exhibition: ‘Josef Albers in Mexico’ at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Exhibition: ‘The young Picasso – Blue and Rose Periods’ at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland
Exhibition: ‘The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day’ at ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, California
Exhibition: ‘Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Joyce Evans celebration
Vale Joyce Evans OAM photographer (1929-2019). "She looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch."… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 day ago
Photograph: 'PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944' by Horace Bristol (1908-1997) wp.me/pn2J2-bPg Can… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 4 days ago
Exhibition: 'Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33' at the Tate Modern, London wp.me/pn2J2-bNw… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
Exhibition: 'Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography' at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana Part 2
Exhibition: 'Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia' at The Rubin Museum of Art, New York
Photographs: Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (1899-1968) '9 crime-scene photographs' c. 1930s
Photograph: 'PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944' by Horace Bristol (1908-1997)
Exhibition: 'Berlin in the revolution 1918/19' at the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin
Exhibition: 'nude men: from 1800 to the present day' at the Leopold Museum, Vienna
Exhibition: 'The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography' at the Getty Centre, Los Angeles
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: Mask, 1994
Review: 'Photographic abstractions' at the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA), Melbourne
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The Joker (Disambiguation)
This page links to all versions of the character The Joker.
Comics Edit
Emperor Joker
The Joker (Earth-31)
Film Edit
Jack Napier/The Joker of Batman (1989 film)
The Joker (Heath Ledger) of The Dark Knight (film)
The Joker (Batman: Under the Red Hood) of Batman: Under the Red Hood
The Joker (Batman: Assault on Arkham)
The Joker (Jared Leto) of Suicide Squad
The Joker (Batman: The Killing Joke) of Batman: The Killing Joke (film)
The Joker (Batman Ninja) of Batman Ninja
The Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) of Joker (film)
Television Series Edit
The Joker (Dozierverse) of Batman (1960s series) and Batman: The Movie
The Joker (Roger Stoneburner) of Birds of Prey
Jack Napier/The Joker (DCAU) of Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
The Joker (The Batman) of The Batman
The Joker (The Brave and The Bold) of Batman: The Brave and the Bold
Jeremiah Valeska of Gotham (TV series)
Video Games Edit
The Joker (Arkhamverse) of the Batman: Arkham game series
The Joker (LEGO Batman: The Videogame) of LEGO Batman: The Videogame, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, and LEGO DC Super-Villains
The Joker (Injustice) of the Injustice game series
Prime Joker (Injustice: Gods Among Us), an alternate Joker
The Joker (Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe) of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe
The Joker (Telltale) of Batman: The Telltale Series and Batman: The Enemy Within
Retrieved from "https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/The_Joker_(Disambiguation)?oldid=199772"
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Hammond, Wayne G.
J.R.R. Tolkien : artist & illustrator / Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull.
Publisher, Date:
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995.
207 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 30 cm.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892-1973 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Scull, Christina.
760.092 Ham
039574816X (hc)
Along with maps, Tolkien self-illustrated many of his works, and a large portion of his artwork is included in this volume with comment by the authors. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Much has been written about Tolkien's work; Carpenter's splendid biography, Tolkien (1977), reveals fascinating insights into the man's life and books. Interestingly however, until now his art has been mostly ignored; Hammond and Scull reverse this oversight in an informative exploration that includes more than 200 reproductions of the drawings, sketches, and paintings Tolkien made from his early childhood through his final years. In a loosely chronological, well-documented text, the authors discuss Tolkien's early work, the "Father Christmas" letters to his children (recently released with facsimile letters), the images made in connection with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings cycle (which, unlike his stories, received mixed reviews), and his later fascination with decorative patterns and designs. The open and inviting format and the reproductions of his art make this a Tolkien lover's dream, and the insightful text will quickly capture attention as well. --Barbara Elleman
J.R.R. Tolkien, renowned author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was an artist in pictures as well as in words. Though he often remarked that he had no talent for drawing, his art has charmed his readers and has been exhibited to large and appreciative audiences. In fact, his talent was greater than he admitted, and his sense of design was natural and keen. This book explores Tolkien's art at length, from his childhood paintings and drawings to his final sketches. At its heart are his illustrations for his books, especially his tales of Middle-earth. Also examined are the pictures Tolkien made for his children, notably in The Father Christmas Letters and the story Mr. Bliss; his expressive calligraphy; his love of decoration; and his contributions to the typography and design of his books. J.R.R. Tolkien, Artist & Illustrator includes 200 reproductions, many in color and over half published for the first time.
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The Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) Project
Harvey, J. W. and Hill, F. and Hubbard, R. P. and Kennedy, J. R. and Leibacher, J. W. and Pintar, J. A. and Gilman, P. A. and Noyes, R. W. and Title, A. M. and Toomre, J. and Ulrich, R. K. and Bhatnagar, A. and Kennewell, J. A. and Marquette, W. and Patrón, J. and Saá, O. and Yasukawa, E. (1996) The Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) Project. Science, 272 (5266). pp. 1284-1286. ISSN 0036-8075. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20150121-094920761
Helioseismology requires nearly continuous observations of the oscillations of the solar surface for long periods of time in order to obtain precise measurements of the sun's normal modes of oscillation. The GONG project acquires velocity images from a network of six identical instruments distributed around the world. The GONG network began full operation in October 1995. It has achieved a duty cycle of 89 percent and reduced the magnitude of spectral artifacts by a factor of 280 in power, compared with single-site observations. The instrumental noise is less than the observed solar background.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.272.5266.1284 DOI Article
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/272/5266/1284 Publisher Article
© 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 18 March 1996; Accepted 6 May 1996. The GONG project is managed by the National Solar Observatory, a Division of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under a cooperative agreement with NSF.
National Solar Observatory UNSPECIFIED
National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) UNSPECIFIED
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) UNSPECIFIED
Harvey, J. W., Hill, F., Hubbard, R. P., Kennedy, J. R., Leibacher, J. W., Pintar, J. A., . . . Yasukawa, E. (1996). The Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) Project. Science, 272(5266), 1284-1286. doi: 10.1126/science.272.5266.1284
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2019 Honda Civic To Be Locally Assembled In India
The upcoming Honda Civic will go the CKD route, sharing its assembly line and drivetrains with the 2018 Honda CR-V.
By Shubham Parashar | Published: Nov 02, 2018 08:34 PM
Honda will assemble the 2019 Civic at the Greater Noida plant along with the 2018 Honda CR-V.
The 2019 Honda Civic midsize sedan is one of the most awaited launches of the coming year, and there has been plenty of anticipation about the India-spec model. Honda Cars India has confirmed to carandbike that the 2019 Honda Civic will be launched in India as a locally made product. The plan is to assemble the Civic locally using completely knocked-down or CKD kits, at the Japanese carmaker's Greater Noida plant near Delhi. The Civic will share the recently launched 2018 Honda CR-V's assembly line at the plant. "We had upgraded our Greater Noida based production facility before we started the production of the 2018 Honda CR-V to accommodate new models. The assembly lines at both of our plants (Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh and Tapukara, Rajasthan) are flexible and we can produce multiple models on them," a Honda Spokesperson told carandbike.
Also Read: 2019 Honda Civic Launched In India
21.41 Lakh * On Road Price (New Delhi)
Also Read: India-Bound 2019 Honda Civic Revealed
According to sources within the company, the 2019 Honda Civic will have a 68 per cent localisation level. That is a touch higher than the CR-V's 65 per cent. We hope that also indicates that Honda will try and position the Civic aggressively, and so may price it competitively. Moreover the Civic will also share drivetrains with the CR-V which means both petrol and a diesel variants can be expected. The diesel is the 1.6-litre Earth Dreams motor that debuted in India with that new CR-V and is also locally produced at the Greater Noida plant. This engine produces 118 bhp at 4000 rpm and 300 Nm of peak torque at 2000 rpm and is mated to a nine-speed automatic transmission. Similarly, the petrol variant will most likely be powered by a 2.0 Litre petrol i-VTEC engine that develops 152 bhp at 6500 rpm and 189 Nm of peak torque at 4300 rpm. This engine is mated to a CVT gearbox as standard. It is unclear whether Honda will bring the Civic with a manual option too.
Also Read: 2019 Honda Civic: All You Need To Know
Honda Cars India has an annual production capacity of 280,000 units. At present, Honda is utilising 180,000 units of its capacity which is likely to go up by another 50,000 units once the production of the upcoming Honda Civic starts. The added volume should take the production capacity utilisation to around 230,000 annually. We had recently reported that Honda has started the use of 3D printing in India and the current-generation Honda Amaze is the first model on which it's been used. However, the company has not confirmed any such news about the upcoming Honda Civic.
Honda Cars has said that the launch of the 2019 Civic is scheduled in the fourth quarter of the current fiscal, and so we expect the car to launch in February. The eighth-generation Honda Civic was launched in India in 2006 and was a radical looker for its time. The car then caught the attention of many and ruled its segment. Now the tenth generation model will too have its share of competition. The primary rivals will still be the Toyota Corolla Altis and Skoda Octavia. If the localisation and powertrain sharing helps Honda to price it competitively, it will be interesting to see if the Civic brand can rewrite its previous success for Honda and become a new benchmark in the midsize sedan segment.
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Honduras relationship with the united states
Honduras–United States relations - Wikipedia
Honduras: Background and U.S. Relations. Congressional Research Service. Summary. Honduras, a Central American nation of 9 million. U.S.-HONDURAS RELATIONS. Honduras is an ally of the United States, and its population registers some of the highest favorability ratings in. Honduras has a long, and not always beneficial, relationship with the United States. However, there are many scenarios in which the U.S. benefits from foreign.
How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today's migration
In the aftermath of the crisis, the Obama Administration determined that it was "in the national security interests of the United States" to work with Central American governments to improve security, strengthen governance, and promote economic prosperity in the region. Strategy for Engagement in Central America and requested significant increases in foreign assistance to support its implementation.
Although the Trump Administration has maintained the strategy, it also has sought to scale back—and occasionally threatened to cut off—foreign assistance for Honduras and its neighbors.
Many Members of the th Congress have been closely tracking the progress of U. This report analyzes political, economic, and security conditions in Honduras.
Honduras: Background and U.S. Relations
Honduras–United States relations
It also examines issues in U. Honduras at a Glance Leadership President: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Map created by CRS. A number of studies have estimated that the indigenous and Afro-Honduran population is much larger than official statistics indicate. Politics and Governance Honduras has struggled with political instability and authoritarian governance for much of its history.
The military traditionally has played an influential role in politics, most recently governing Honduras for most of the period between and The country's current constitution—its 16th since declaring independence from Spain in —was adopted as Honduras transitioned back to civilian rule.
It establishes a representative democracy with a separation of powers among an executive branch led by the president, a legislative branch consisting of a seat unicameral national congress, and a judicial branch headed by the supreme court. In practice, however, the legislative process tends to be executive-driven and the judiciary is often subject to intimidation, corruption, and politicization.
Both traditional parties are considered to be ideologically center-right, 4 and political competition between them generally has been focused more on using the public sector for patronage than on implementing programmatic agendas.
Zelaya had been elected as a moderate member of the PL but alienated many within the political and economic elite by governing in a populist manner and calling for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.
The post-coup split among traditional supporters of the PL has benefitted the PN, which now has the largest political base in Honduras and has controlled the presidency and congress since Critics contend that the PN has gradually eroded checks and balances to consolidate its influence over other government institutions and entrench itself in power. Although the Honduran minister of justice and human rights asserted that the move was illegal and violated the independence of the judiciary, it was never overturned.
The Opposition Alliance and the PL denounced the TSE's delays and lack of transparency and alleged that the results had been manipulated. In the days and weeks following the election, many Hondurans took to the streets to protest against the alleged electoral fraud.
Crisis of Honduras democracy has roots in US tacit support for 2009 coup
They carried out a series of large-scale demonstrations and road blocks, and some individuals engaged in vandalism and looting. The "state of emergency," which OAS Secretary General Almagro deemed a "disproportionate" response to the situation, expired on December 9, High Commissioner for Human Rights OHCHRHonduran security forces used excessive force to disperse protests both during and after the state of emergency, injuring at least 60 individuals and killing at least 16 others.
Honduras, a monster the US created
On December 22,the U. Both major opposition parties argue that the PN has shown no interest in a genuine dialogue and that any accords reached during the talks would be blocked by the Honduran congress, in which the PN holds 61 of seats, LIBRE holds 30 seats, the PL holds 26 seats, and five small parties that are largely allied with the PN hold 11 seats.
Facing significant domestic and international pressure, however, he negotiated a more limited arrangement with the OAS. According to the agreement, signed in Januarythe MACCIH is intended to support, strengthen, and collaborate with Honduran institutions to prevent, investigate, and punish acts of corruption.
It secured congressional approval for new laws to create anti-corruption courts with nationwide jurisdiction and to regulate the financing of political campaigns. These decades of U.
Honduras: Background and U.S. Relations - avesisland.info
In the post-Reagan era, Honduras remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military, significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty.
Still, liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure provided openings for democratic forces. They contributedfor example, to the election of Manuel Zelaya, a liberal reformist, as president in He led on progressive measures such as raising the minimum wage. Post-coup Honduras The coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U. The Obama administration has played an important role in these developments.
History of the U.S. and Honduras
This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government. Strong military ties between the U. The frequent politically motivated killings are rarely punished.
Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined over the last few years, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods. Government programs are aimed at promoting a healthy and more open economy capable of sustainable growth, improving the business and investment climate, protecting U. The United States works with Honduras to address transnational challenges--including the fight against transnational criminal networks, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, irregular migration, and trafficking in persons--and encourages and supports Honduran efforts to protect the environment.
An estimated 1 million Hondurans reside in the United States,of whom are believed to be undocumented; consequently, immigration issues are an important item on the bilateral agenda. With the inclusion of cruise ship visitors primarily visiting the Bay Islands Roatanmore than 1 million U. Assistance to Honduras U. Strategy for Engagement in Central America Strategy. Announced inthe Strategy is a comprehensive and robust partnership with Central American governments designed to: The Strategy is a multi-year effort for all seven Central American countries that builds off of previous successful partnerships and programs in the region.
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CommTogether
Brand Authenticity
Online Brand Building
Leadership Marketing
What You Can Learn – about Brand Management – from the Cricket Brand Crisis
by Anthony Perl | 21-Mar-2019 11:35:00 | Business, Marketing tips | 1 Comment
MARCH 2019 UPDATE: When it comes to the analysis of the brand management of ‘cricket’ and the three three players at the centre of the ‘ball tampering’ issue we now have the clarity of some hindsight. So what can be learned?
Brand management involves choices
There were four quite different approaches here. ‘Cricket’ was swayed strongly by social media and arguably the severity of its response could well have been handled differently if more time had been allowed for a deeper investigation before the punishments were enforced. The cricket brand management strategy was to react swiftly to the apparent storm. The end result, while debate will rage about the justification of the length of the ban, the loser was the summer of cricket. The crowds were left with a team which was hamstrung when trying to take on the world champions.
Cameron Bancroft had kept a suitable distance, as the least established of the trio, his brand needed to justify his place in the team from a performance perspective. He needed to be seen to be doing everything right here and then taking to the field to prove it. While he ticked those boxes, the interview with Adam Gilchrist in the middle of a test match did not win him support. His brand took a knock as he came over as trying to an extent to play the victim.
Steve Smith immediately became proactive in trying to help kids learn from his mistakes. He was public in demonstrating with actions. He too did an interview which did not win him any extra points, but did little to harm him. Despite what he was involved in, Steve Smith’s brand may ultimately only be strengthened by the way he has conducted himself. If the goal of brand management is to always be authentic, he has played things as best as could have been expected.
David Warner has had the toughest challenge because his brand was the most tarnished in the saga. He has remained silent and only let his wife speak on occasion. He created drama by walking off the field when met with on-field abuse in a local cricket match, but showing he has grown and not taking the bait was a positive. His talent was undeniably missed. There may have been immediate calls for him to never play again, but the reality is the team need him.
The question mark remains for how the English crowds will react during both the World Cup and the upcoming Ashes. The messages at the end and the take out from the early responses are still very relevant to any brand. I will take another look at the impact on the brand later in the year. Meanwhile, what follow is the original article I pulled together as the story was leading every news bulletin for days on end.
The original article
The actions by Australian opening batsman Cameron Bancroft has led to a cricket brand crisis, as well as a huge brand management dilemma. The reactions of his teammates, team management, world cricket authorities, former players, commentators and the general public are all having an immediate impact on the brand. A crisis is all about reactions. While you can't turn back time on an incident, what you can do is be measured in your responses, because otherwise, the consequences can be exaggerated and even terminal.
On a personal note
I am a cricket tragic, and I was watching as this horrible incident unfolded. I love test cricket for so many reasons, but I particularly enjoy the mental aspect. Ask me about it sometime, and I'd be happy to chew your ear for hours. I was sickened by what I saw and disappointed in those involved. Like the rest of the world, I will be watching to see the official reactions unfold over the coming days.
The brand risk
Unfortunately, as anyone who has overseen a business or not-for-profit brand knows, mistakes will happen, we are human after all. Sometimes the mistakes, as was the case in the cricket, are about poor judgement. Suddenly the brand you have worked so hard to build can find itself at a crossroads. Again, as is the case with the cricket, the impact can do damage to more than just your brand.
The cricket brands in the crisis firing line are, Cricket itself, Cricket Australia, the Australian Cricket Team, Steve Smith, Cameron Bancroft and possibly the coaching staff. The actions of one have far-reaching implications. What we have seen immediately was an effort by all those brands (most probably thanks to their brand management techniques) to move straight into crisis mode and protect themselves. Nobody wants the situation to escalate.
The game needs to be bigger than the individual, but without the right responses, the credibility of anyone who plays the game will come into jeopardy.
So far we have seen apologies from the team and Cricket Australia as well as swift punishments from the international cricket body (ICC). Cricket Australia is attempting to get on top of the chorus of anger from the Australian public with its formal response still to come. Meanwhile, the current negotiations for TV rights to the game in Australia are likely to be impacted as a result of all this. How the rest of the team respond will also be telling, because the batting collapse to lose the test was not a great start. The final test in a few days will need a far better showing by the players because they are playing for more than just drawing the series now.
The right response?
So, have the reactions so far been measured enough for their brands? It's hard to say definitively at this stage, but it is incredible to see the enforcement of official repercussions without a full investigation.
There is not always an opportunity to pause, so you have to prepare for a crisis well in advance. How measured your response is will often depend on how well you prepare for various circumstances. We don't yet know the full truth.
In the wash-up
It will take a while for all that has happened in South Africa to play out fully. First, we will have to see what comes out of any reports, and then we will have to see how those involved go about rebuilding their brands.
I fear the brand most at risk is Steven Smith. A month ago we were labelling him the next best after Bradman. An average tour has culminated in a terrible lapse of judgement. The one moment could undo all the great things he has achieved on the field. It could put at risk sponsorships he has in place and even his future beyond the game.
As far as Smith is concerned, the rebuild will be challenging, but he does have raw talent on his side. He can take comfort from examples like Shane Warne. He found himself in trouble some years ago for taking a banned substance, and his brand has still gone from strength to strength.
As is rightly being asked, "is anyone prepared to stand with Steve Smith?", given we don't everything and the fact is what was attempted did not work? Can his brand come back? Time will tell.
The message for all brands is to be ready!
A basic rule for brand management, or If you are overseeing a brand, you need to be ready for anything. There is much to learn from watching the cricket brand crisis continue to unfold. Imagine your building catches fire - will you know how to react? You should because lives may depend on it. The life of your brand can also be under threat by a proverbial fire. Make sure you also regularly check the health of your brand.
You can not be ready for every situation, but you can capture many of them and record processes to follow. You need to know who is in charge of speaking and advising them, including which media platforms you need ot use to reach your audience. Crisis management needs to be considered for every brand.
Your brand is only as good as the perception people place on it. Your reactions will impact perceptions, and it is heightened particularly in a crisis.
Communication Strategy sessions - inspiring ideas to grow your business. Contact us today at 1300 723 033 or + 61 412 702 171, and we’ll talk about how we can work with you to take your business to another level.
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Is Coal the Next Gasoline?
At Esurance, we pride ourselves on being the foremost authority on coal and all of its scientific uses.
OK … maybe that’s not entirely (or even remotely) true.
But one coal trend is of particular interest to us: the notion that this resource (often associated with West Virginia and empty holiday stockings) could actually power our cars.
And the crazy thing about this new idea is that it’s not really that crazy — or new. In fact, Germans have been liquefying coal for use as motor fuel since WWII (when they were cut off from the Middle East and its oil supply). And here in the U.S., we’ve been tinkering with new versions of that very process since 2009.
Now, you might be asking, “If turning coal into motor fuel is so time-tested, why aren’t we doing it on a regular basis?”
The case against coal as gasoline
The main argument against using coal as liquid fuel is simple. It basically says that while the shortage of oil on our planet is a big deal, the threat of global warming is a bigger one — and liquefying coal would not help.
Even the newest methods of transforming coal into fuel (ones that cut back on carbon monoxide) aren’t enough to make fuel clean. Experts say there’s no way to prevent harmful emissions from hitting the atmosphere and causing both health and environmental dangers when we liquefy coal.
The case for coal as gasoline
Those who support using coal for gasoline feel a bit differently. Many of them say that cutting dependency on foreign oil, not halting climate change, is the more urgent matter. And while liquefying coal, and the harmful emissions that come with it, wouldn’t be a permanent solution, supporters believe it would be a solid intermediate step. In other words, it would let us break our oil dependency and search for more sustainable options without neglecting our energy (and driving) needs.
Along with that, there’s another positive aspect to liquefying coal for gasoline: we know we can do it. It’s actually a piece of cake (relatively speaking). And with all the brain-busting our scientific leaders have been doing in search of energy, it can be comforting to know we have at least one option nailed down.
The hung jury
One other issue at play here, one without such defined sides, is how using coal as gasoline for vehicles would affect the burgeoning electric car industry. Is this whole coal craze simply getting in the way of the electric movement, which could prove to be the best option down the road? Or, in the true fashion of capitalism, would coal competition be a good way to keep the electric car business striving and improving?
Clearly, there’s a lot to consider when discussing coal as a viable fuel option. Where do you stand on the matter? Leave a comment below.
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495-497 Beacon
495-497 Beacon (2014)
Irregular Lot: 24′ on Beacon (2,412 sf)
495-497 Beacon is located on the south side of Beacon, between Massachusetts Avenue and Charlesgate East, with 491 Beacon to the east and 499 Beacon to the west.
495-497 Beacon was designed by architect Ernest N. Boyden and built in 1891 by John Hurley, builder, as a three-family building and store. It was built for real estate dealer Seth Russell Baker, one of three contiguous multi-unit buildings built for him at the southwest corner of Beacon and Massachusetts Avenue: 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue, 491 Beacon (21-23 Massachusetts Avenue), and 495-497 Beacon.
Also in 1891, Ernest Boyden designed three multi-family dwellings for Seth Baker at 479–481–483 Beacon (483 Beacon was razed for construction of the Hotel Cambridge in 1898).
Seth Baker is shown as the owner of 495-497 Beacon on the final building inspection report, dated October 9, 1890. On the report, the address is shown as 497 Beacon.
Floor plan for the second, third, and fourth floors of 495-497 Beacon, bound with the final building inspection report, 9Oct1890 (v. 37, p. 17); courtesy of the Boston Public Library Arts Department
Seth Baker purchased the land for 495-497 Beacon, 491 Beacon (21-23 Massachusetts Avenue), and 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue in two transactions. On April 25, 1890, he purchased the corner lot, with a frontage of 44 feet on Beacon and 93 feet on Massachusetts Avenue, from Henry Lee, H. Hollis Hunnewell, and Augustus Lowell, and on May 3, 1890, he purchased the lot to the west, with a 28 foot frontage on Beacon, from Oscar L. Stillings. Oscar Stillings had purchased the lot on August 14, 1888, from Henry Lee and his partners.
All of the land originally had been part of a larger parcel that Henry Lee and his partners purchased on February 20, 1883, from a real estate investment trust formed by Grenville T. W. Braman, Henry D. Hyde, and Frank W. Andrews. The parcel was one of several tracts of land the trust had purchased from the Boston Water Power Company on March 1, 1872.
In subdividing their land, Henry Lee and his partners had created two passageways to provide access and drainage to the alley: a four foot wide passageway at the rear of 499 Beacon and 501 Beacon, connecting with a six foot wide passageway extending south behind 29 Massachusetts Avenue. Unlike similar passageways elsewhere in the Back Bay (for example, at the rear of houses facing on the side streets), these passageways were not created as easements over the lots, but as separate open spaces “appurtenant to the granted premises” to which each property owner had access in common with the owners of the other the abutting properties.
Click here for an index to the deeds for 495-497 Beacon, and click here for further information on the land west of Massachusetts Avenue between the south side of Beacon and the north side of Commonwealth.
1890 and 1895 Bromley maps, showing passageways and easements
Seth Baker sold all three buildings soon after they were completed: 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue in July of 1891, and 491 Beacon and 495-497 Beacon in October of 1891. The deeds included a three and one-half foot wide easement across the rear 495-497 Beacon and a six foot wide easement across the rear of 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue, connecting to the passageways leading to the alley.
On October 14, 1890, 495-497 Beacon was acquired from Seth Baker by wholesale clothing merchant Louis J. Elkan. He and his wife, Pauline (Crohn) Oppenheim Elkan, lived at 244 Newbury.
On December 28, 1894, Horace Fogg foreclosed on a mortgage given by Louis Elkan and sold 495-497 Beacon to attorney Godfrey Morse (born Maas). He was unmarried and lived with his brother and sister-in-law, Leopold and Georgiana Louisa (Ray) Morse, at 203 Commonwealth. He married in January of 1907 to Mrs. Janet (Jennie) (Rosenfeld) Conrad, the former wife of Sidney Smith Conrad; after their marriage, they lived at the Hotel Lenox at 61 Exeter.
In June of 1899, he acquired 499 Beacon.
Godfrey Morse died in June of 1911. 495-497 Beacon and 499 Beacon continued to be owned by his estate.
Jennie Morse married again in April of 1914 to Jacob Joseph Lowe (Lowenburg), a radiologist. He operated the Boston Dental X-Ray Laboratory, and developed and patented a device to use X-Ray technology for fitting shoes to feet. They lived at the Hotel Lenox.
On August 17, 1914, Godfrey Morse’s estate transferred 495-497 Beacon and 499 Beacon into Janet Lowe’s name.
On May 14, 1925, 495-497 Beacon and 499 Beacon were acquired from Janet Lowe by real estate dealer William N. Ambler.
The property changed hands and on January 10, 1927, 495-497 Beacon was acquired by real estate dealer James M. Burr.
495-497 Beacon (ca. 1942), photograph by Bainbridge Bunting, courtesy of The Gleason Partnership
On March 24, 1927, 495-497 Beacon was acquired from James Burr by Mrs. Marie Elise (Chayer) Bordeau, the former wife of Frank (Francois) Xavier Bordeau, who operated it as a lodging house. She lived at 103 Beacon, where she also operated a lodging house.
In April of 1934, Marie Bordeau applied for (and subsequently received) permission to install a fire escape on rear of the building. The current and proposed use of the property was shown as “lodgings and store.”
In August of 1936, she applied for (and subsequently received) permission to remodel the front of 495-497 Beacon to add a storefront with an entrance at street level. The store address became 495 Beacon and the original entrance to the residential portion of the building became 497 Beacon.
From the late 1930s. 495 Beacon became Huntt’s Cafeteria. It continued to be located there until about 1950.
In September of 1947, Marie Bordeau sold 103 Beacon and moved to 495-497 Beacon. She continued to live there and operate it as a lodging house until about 1949.
On June 15, 1949, 495-497 Beacon was purchased from Marie Bordeau by the Esplanade Café, Inc. The Esplanade Café was located in leased space at 23 Massachusetts Avenue and in space it owned at 25 Massachusetts Avenue.
Matchbook cover from Huntt’s Cafeteria, date unknown; courtesy of the Boston Public Library
In October of 1949, Louis Pappas, president and treasurer of the Esplanade Café, filed for (and subsequently received) permission to construct an addition at the rear of 25 Massachusetts Avenue, connecting with the rear wall of 495-497 Beacon.
By 1950, the Esplanade Café had terminated its lease at 23 Massachusetts Avenue and had opened its Zebra Lounge (with live entertainment) at 495-497 Beacon in the space previously occupied by Huntt’s Cafeteria. In November of 1950, when Louis Pappas applied to renew the Esplanade Café’s license to serve alcoholic beverages, the application indicated both 25 Massachusetts Avenue and 495 Beacon as the licensed premises (previous applications had indicated 23-25 Massachusetts Avenue).
In a 2001 post to the WBUR Alumni website, Don Hallock described the Zebra Lounge as “a rather ordinary, dimly lit, smoke-filled watering-hole” that, in the 1950s, “served as an after-work hangout for Boston University scholars and WGBH studio staff. Countless hours (and dollars) were spent there, discussing everything from sunburns, low pay and wild new project ideas, to the philosophical underpinnings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early films.”
The Esplanade Café continued to be located at 25 Massachusetts Avenue and the Zebra Lounge at 495 Beacon until the mid- to late 1950s.
In March of 1959, 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue and 495-497 Beacon were purchased from Esplanade Café, Inc., by I. J. Kennedy, Inc.
In 1961, Kennedy Café, Inc., opened The Crossroads of Boston restaurant and bar at 495 Beacon and at 25 Massachusetts Avenue.
In December of 1961, 495-497 Beacon and 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue were acquired from I. J. Kennedy, Inc., by Edward J. Goodfellow. He and his wife, Mary Dorine (Jewers) Goodfellow, lived at 119 Commonwealth. He was the owner of the Colonial Lounge Bar at 981 Tremont in Roxbury.
In August of 1962, Edward Goodfellow filed for (and subsequently received) permission to convert 495-497 Beacon from four apartments and a restaurant into ten apartments and a restaurant.
By 1963, 25 Massachusetts Avenue had become the location of the Chung Sai Restaurant. The Crossroads continued to operate at 495 Beacon.
In December of 1966, Edward Goodfellow transferred the rear six feet of 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue (the rear yard over which the easement for access to the alley was located) to 495-497 Beacon. The transfer added 180 square feet to 495-497 Beacon (increasing the lot size from 2,232 sf to 2,412 sf, and reducing the lot size at 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue from 1,441 sf to 1,261 sf). The 6 foot wide strip was enclosed with a wall at the southern end, with a door in the wall to provide access to the passageway for 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue and 491 Beacon. The new lot lines were contained in a plan by William S. Crocker, Inc., surveyors, and filed with the Land Court on December 16, 1966.
In March of 1967, 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue was acquired from Edward Goodfellow by Bertha (Levitt/Leavitt) Miller, the widow of Max Miller. She lived at 491 Beacon, where she also operated the Miller Drug Company.
Edward Goodfellow continued to own 495-497 Beacon and, as part of the transaction, he agreed that the occupants of 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue would continue to have access to the passageways connecting to the alley through the existing door in the southern wall across the six foot wide area that had been transferred from 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue to 495-497 Beacon. He also agreed to construct a separate party wall, against the face of the existing western wall of 25-27 Massachusetts Avenue, along the 30 foot boundary between the two properties and entirely on 495-497 Beacon’s land.
In October of 1968, 495-497 Beacon was acquired from Edward Goodfellow by Dominic A. DeCandio.
The property changed hands and in March of 1979, was purchased by Michael W. Brodigan, trustee of the Clearwater Realty Trust.
In August of 2005, he transferred the property to himself and his wife, Karen (Leary) Brodigan, as individuals.
Also in August of 2005, 495-497 Beacon was acquired by the 495-497 Beacon Street LLC (John McGrail, manager of record).
On January 19, 2006, the 495-497 Beacon Street LLC converted 495-497 Beacon into ten residential condominiums and 1 commercial condominium, the 495-497 Beacon Street Condominium. The commercial condominium continued to be occupied by The Crossroads restaurant and bar.
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Quebec government wants to come between you and your medication
Quebec government wants to come between you and your medicationGIS2017-04-18T14:43:59-07:00
MONTREAL, QUEBEC – WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013 – New research released today by the Canadian Health Policy Institute (CHPI) shows that there will be significant cost to the Ministry of Health and Social Services from a misguided policy announced by Minister Hébert last March. As of October 1, reimbursement for proton pump inhibitor (PPI) medication, used to treat ailments such as GERD and stomach ulcers, will be capped at $0.55 per tablet and several widely-used products are priced higher than this amount.
The CHPI study found that the expected additional health system costs from this policy could reach $49.8M, and could even be as high as $162M. This study compares the Quebec policy to a similar one from British Columbia under which switching caused documented increased health care costs in the largest ever study conducted in Canada on actual consequences for therapeutic substitution in this class of medications.
“With this policy about to begin in October, the government of Quebec could be creating serious problems for patients suffering from digestive disorders,” said Gary Fabian, Executive Director, Gastrointestinal Society. “It could put in jeopardy as many as 200,000 patients who would come up against government-forced medication substitution to avoid paying higher medication costs. The costly new switching that is of concern to us is not the generic substitution component but the part of the policy under which patients will be forced, for economic reasons, to switch to a medication that is not bioequivalent.” Who wants their medication prescribed by a government bureaucrat rather than a doctor?
The Minister’s announcement claims this measure will generate savings but the Gastrointestinal Society contends that the government has not taken into account the additional costs that would result from such a policy. These could include costs related to visits to physicians and emergency rooms, new medical exams, and laboratory analyses. In sum, all the forecasted savings do not take into account the associated collateral costs to the health system and to the individual patients. “We are very concerned that Quebec will suffer economic loss by adopting a short-sighted policy. We must take action now to halt its implementation.”
About the Gastrointestinal Society (GI Society)
As the Canadian leader in providing trusted, evidence-based information on all areas of the gastrointestinal tract, the GI Society is committed to improving the lives of people with GI and liver conditions, supporting research, advocating for appropriate patient access to health care, and promoting gastrointestinal and liver health.
Gail Attara | Chief Executive Officer, Gastrointestinal Society
Phone: 1-866-600-4875 (toll-free)
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Sort by:-- Title Volume (date) Author
Documents published in Bahá'í World
Appreciations of the Bahá'í Faith, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 8 (1938-1940) (1941). Excerpts from books, magazines, newspaper articles, and testimonials. [about]
August Forel Defends the Persecuted Persian Bahá'ís: 1925-1927, by John Paul Vader, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). History of Forel's involvement with the Faith. Includes correspondence from Shoghi Effendi. [about]
August Rudd: The First Bahá'í Pioneer to Sweden, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). History of the Baha'i Faith in Sweden, 1920-1947. [about]
Bahá'í Calendar, Festivals, and Dates of Historic Significance, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Feasts, anniversaries, days of fasting, holy days, Nabil's narrative on the Badi' Calendar, and brief chronology of important dates in Baha'i history. [about]
Bahá'í Centres in Iran (1936), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 6 (1934-1936) (1937). [about]
Bahá'í community of the United States (1950), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 11 (1946-1950) (1952). [about]
Bahá'í community of the United States (1954), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). [about]
Bahá'í Revelation, The, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Passages from Fire and Light and Selections from the Writings of the Bab published in Baha'i World as a section titled "Part One: The Baha'i Revelation." [about]
Bahá'í World 2004–2005, The: Activities Report, by Bahá'í International Community, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 33 (2004-2005) (2007). [about]
Bahá'í World, The: Volume 01 (1925-1926), in Bahá'í World (1926). Then titled Baha'i Year Book. [about]
Bahá'í World, The: Volume 02 (1926-1928), in Bahá'í World (1928). Then titled The Bahá'í World: a biennial international record. [about]
Bahá'í World, The: Volume 03 (1928-1930), in Bahá'í World (1930). [about]
Bahá'í World, The: Volume 13 (1954-1963), in Bahá'í World (1970). Includes formatted, proofread version (of pp. 1-478 only). [about]
Bahá'í World, The: Volume 17 (1976-1979), in Bahá'í World (1981). So far only a portion of this volume is available: the table of contents, and pages 1-48. [about]
Bahá'u'lláh and the Fourth Estate, by Roger White, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Baha'u'llah's response to the martyrdom of seven Baha'is in Yazd in May, 1891, and his relationship with the media. [about]
Baha'u'llah's passport, with translation, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 9 (1940-1944) (1945). Baha'u'llah's passport at the time of His exile from Iran, 1853, with translation of text. [about]
Bios of Mihraban Rustam Bulbulan and Kaushal Kishore Bhargava, by Dipchand Khianra, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). "One Kind Deed," a bio of Mihraban Rustam Bulbulan, and "Kaushal Kishore Bhargava: An Appreciation." [about]
Computers in the Bahá'í Community through Ridván 1992, by Bryn Deamer and Steven Kolins, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1992). Historical overview of the use of computers in the Baha'i Faith. [about]
Concept of Spirituality, The, by William S. Hatcher, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Widely-read ABS monograph, re-published in the Baha'i World. Includes chapters "The Nature of Man," "Process of Spiritual Growth," and "Collective Dimension of Spirituality." [about]
Convention for the Election of the UHJ, and Completion of the Seat of the UHJ (1983), by Universal House of Justice, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Two documents from Baha'i World 18 part four section one, The World Order of Baha'u'llah: The Universal House of Justice: Fifth Int'l Convention for the Election of the UHJ, and Completion of Construction of the Seat of the UHJ. [about]
Experiment in Race Relations, A, by Robert P. Powers, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 11 (1946-1950) (1952). An early program in race tolerance, preceding the Civil Rights movement, as described by a prominent Chief Law Enforcement Officer in early 20th-century California. [about]
Fazel Mohammad Khan, by Graham Hassall, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1999). The life of Fazel "Frank" Khan, an Australian Muslim convert to the Baha'i Faith. [about]
Fiftieth Anniversary of the Passing of Bahiyyih Khanum, The Greatest Holy Leaf, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Includes compilations about Bahiyyih Khanum, a selection of her letters, the 50th anniversary commemoration (1982), a bibliography, and tributes by Ruhiyyih Khanum, Ali Nakhjavani, and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. [about]
Gregory, Louis G.: The Advancement of Racial Unity in America, by Harlan F. Ober, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1993). Short biography of an early African-American Baha'i. [about]
Hands of the Cause of God, by Universal House of Justice and Lilian Ala'i, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Six documents from Baha'i World 18 part four section 2: The Hands of the Cause of God and their functions, their work and travels 1979-1983, Boards of Counsellors and the International Teaching Centre, and tributes by Lilian Ala'i and Ray Hudson. [about]
Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah: A Reflection, by George Townshend, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 3 (1928-1930) (1930). Reflections on the meaning and significance of Baha'u'llah's Hidden Words. [about]
Hoahania, Hamuel, by Graham Hassall, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1999). Short biography of an early Pacific islander convert to the Baha'i Faith. [about]
House of Abdu'llah Pasha, The, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Short history and restoration of a house associated with "some of the most dramatic and historically significant events of the Heroic Age of the Bahá'í Faith." [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (1950-1954) (1956). [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 4 (1930-1932) (1932). Ethel Rosenberg, Claudia Stuart Coles, Consul Albert Schwarz. [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 5 (1932-1934) (1936). Bahiyyih Khanum, Keith Ransom-Kehler, Agnes Parsons, Yusuf Khan-i-Vujdani, Arastu Khan Hakim, George Benke, Edwin Scott, Alice Barney, Lisbeth Kitzing. [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 6 (1934-1936) (1937). [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, vol. 3 (1928-1930) (1930). Hippolyte Dreyfus Barney, Mirza Mahmud Zargani, William H. Randall. [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 17 (1976-1979) (1981). So far, only the table of contents has been posted, for bibliographic purposes. [about]
In Memoriam, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). 95 biographies from Baha'i World 18. Includes detailed bios of H.M. Balyuzi, A.Q. Faizi, Robert Hayden, Bernard Leach, Stanwood Cobb, Rahmatu'llah Muhajir, Adelbert Muhlschlegel, Doris Holley, Paul Haney, Enoch Olinga, Muhammad Labib, etc. [about]
In Memoriam 1992-1997, in Bahá'í World (2010). The first In Memoriam supplement to Baha'i World after the journal converted to a shorter, annual format in 1992. [about]
Indexes to Bahá'í World volumes: Obituaries, chronologies, contents, illustrations, in Bahá'í World (2013). Seven separate indexes for Bahá'í World, in PDF, Word, and Excel versions. [about]
Institution of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, The, by Universal House of Justice and Horace Holley, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Five documents from Baha'i World 18 part four section 5: Institution of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkar, its spiritual significance, the temple on the Indian sub-continent, the Lotus of Bahapur, and the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkar of the Pacific Islands. [about]
Introduction: Aims and Purposes of the Bahá'í Faith, by David Hofman, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Introduction to this Baha'i World volume. [about]
Iranian Expatriates, Letter to, following 1979 Iranian Revolution, by Universal House of Justice, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Open letter of support and guidance to Iranians who had recently fled the Iranian Revolution. [about]
J. E. Esslemont, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 1 (1925-1926) (1926). Esslemont's is the only biography or in memoriam in this first volume of Baha'i World. [about]
Kitab-i-Aqdas: its place in Bahá'í literature, in Bahá'í World, 1992-1993 (1993). Offers a broad introduction to the Aqdas and its themes. [about]
Life as Metaphor, by John S. Hatcher, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). [about]
Local Spiritual Assembly, The, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). The institution of the LSA, its significance, and its by-laws. [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (United States, 1935), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 6 (1934-1936) (1937). [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (world, 1932), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 5 (1932-1934) (1934). [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (world, 1944), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 10 (1944-1946) (1949). [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (world, 1956): detailed map, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (world, 1956): simplified map, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). [about]
Localities where Bahá'ís live (world, 1963): The Bahá'í World Community, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 13 (1954-1963) (1970). [about]
Map of Goals for the Ten Year World Crusade, by Shoghi Effendi, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). Shoghi Effendi's map of progress goals for the Ten Year World Crusade, 1953-1963. [about]
Marriage certificates of The Bab and Baha'u'llah, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 5 (1932-1934) (1934). Marriage certificates of The Báb and Bahá'u'lláh. [about]
May Ellis Maxwell, in Bahá'í World, I-XII (1925). Detailed biography, published in A Compendium of Volumes of the Baha'i World I-XII, 1925-1954; includes photo. [about]
Memories of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, by Ali M. Yazdi, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). [about]
National Spiritual Assembly, The, by Universal House of Justice and Horace Holley, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Includes Holley's brief overview of the nature of an NSA and the history of Bahá`í Temple Unity, NSA by-laws and a list of new NSAs as of 1980-1983. [about]
Non-Political Character of the Bahá'í Faith, The: Excerpts from the Writings of Shoghi Effendi, by Shoghi Effendi, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Published as Section 6 of Baha'i World 18, preceding a section on "Relationship to Government." [about]
Objectives and Tasks of Ten-Year Spiritual Global Crusade of the Bahá'í World Faith, by Shoghi Effendi, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). [about]
Oriental Words in Bahá'í Literature, Transliteration, and Pronunciation, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Guide to spelling and pronunciation of Arabic and Persian words encountered in Baha'i history and writings. [about]
Orientation of Hope and Lessons in World Crisis, The, by Alain Locke, in Bahá'í World, vols. 5 and 9 (1936). Two essays meditating on the relevance of Baha'i principles to the period preceding and during the Second World War. [about]
Overview of Bahá'í Social and Economic Development, by Holly Hanson, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 21 (1992-1993) (1993). Evolution of Bahá'í involvement in social and economic development, and some current projects. [about]
Persecution of the Bahá'í Community of Iran: 1983-1986, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 19 (1983-1986) (1994). Lengthy survey of events, and life stories of participants. [about]
Places named by ‘Abdu'l-Bahá in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 17 (1976-1979) (1981). Map of the regions of North America named in Tablets of the Divine Plan, likely based on a 1912 geography book. [about]
Relationship to Government, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Three short sections: Loyalty to the government, the Baha'i view of pacifism, and the Guardian's instructions regarding military service. [about]
Remembering Bernard Leach, by Trudi Scott, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). [about]
Roll of Honor Bahá'í World Crusade 1953-1963, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1998). A scroll listing the names of the Knights of Baha'u'llah. [about]
Seven Valleys of Baha'u'llah: A Meditation, by George Townshend, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 7 (1936-1938) (1938). [about]
Short Obligatory Prayer in Many Languages, in Bahá'í World (1981). Two documents: Short Obligatory Prayer in 501 languages (as published in Baha'i World), and in a collection of African languages. [about]
Sydney Sprague: In Memoriam, by Willard P. Hatch, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 9 (1940-1944) (1945). [about]
Tablet of Shikkar Shikan: Excerpt, by Bahá'u'lláh, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). [about]
Tablet to Auguste Forel, by Abdu'l-Bahá, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 15 (1968-1973) (1976). [about]
Teaching regions of the United States and Canada (1938), in Bahá'í World, Vol. 8 (1938-1940) (1942). [about]
Thelma Perks, by Graham Hassall, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1998). [about]
Tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum, A, by Marjorie Morten, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 5 (1932-1934) (1934). Short bio of the daughter of Baha'u'llah, written by one of her close companions late in life. [about]
Unity of Nations, The, by Stanwood Cobb, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 7 (1936-1938) (1938). A look six decades into the future (from 1938) to envision the Lesser Peace. [about]
Verse, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 18 (1979-1983) (1986). Poems by Ruhiyyih Khanum, Giuseppe de Marco, Gilbert Robert, Martyn Burke, Audrey Marcus, Anneke Buys, Geoffrey Nash, Judith Partelow Provost, Adelbert Mühlschlegel, Larry Rowdon, Victor de Araujo, Shirin Sabri, Roger White, Bret Breneman, et al. [about]
Virgin countries and territories opened during the first year of the 10 Year Crusade 1953-1954, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 12 (April 1950-1954) (1956). [about]
Virgin Territories Opened by the Knights of Baha'u'llah 1953-1990, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 20 (1986-1992) (1998). List of names and dates of pioneers and the NSAs responsible for opening territories. [about]
Western Liberal Democracy as a New World Order?, by Michael Karlberg, in Bahá'í World, 2005-2006 (2007). [about]
Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Baha: A Commentary, by David Hofman, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 9 (1940-1944) (1945). [about]
Writings of Baha'u'llah, The, by Abdu'l-Hamid Ishraq-Khavari, in Bahá'í World, Vol. 14 (1963-1968) (1974). Part of a commentary by the renowned scholar `Abdu'l-Hamid-i-Ishraq Khavari, adapted by Habib Tahirzadih, summarizing many of the early and often untranslated Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh. [about]
select a series to browse
(peer reviewed)
Australian Bahá'í Studies
Bahá'í Studies
Bahá'í Studies Bulletin
Bahá'í Studies Review
Journal of Bahá'í Studies
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Online Journal of Bahá'í Studies
Singapore Bahá'í Studies Review
Lights of Irfán
Studies in Babi and Baha'i Religions
Other Bahá'í journals
Arts Dialogue (offsite)
Bahá'í Journal UK
Bahá'í News
Bahá'í World
One Country
Star of the West
Bahá'í Encyclopedia
Encyclopaedia Iranica
The Open Court (1904-1931)
Journal de Constantinople (1848-1849)
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For one night in September, an Asian night market will set up shop in Baltimore’s old Chinatown
An ornament at Thai Street pop-up, via press handout
Baltimore’s historic Chinatown that you’ve probably never noticed sits in the 300 block of Park Avenue. But if you head there you’ll find the lone family-style Cantonese restaurant ZongShan and the neighboring Po Tung grocery, surrounded by a dotting of Ethiopian spots that have moved into the area.
This wasn’t always the case. The 200 block of Marion Street on the Westside once housed a small, but tight Chinese immigrant community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with laundries, restaurants, a school and more. After World War II, the city pushed the community several blocks northward to the 300 and 400 blocks of Park Avenue. While Chinatown persisted there for several more decades, it ultimately faded away over time as its families joined the masses flocking to the suburbs.
Now a group of local merchants of Asian heritage hopes to reignite the quiet blocks there. The effort begins next month with Baltimore’s first-ever Charm City Night Market, in the vein of other the vibrant, open-air night markets found in China, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and other countries.
Baltimore’s pop-up night market on Sept. 22—timed two days before Southeast Asia’s widely celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival—will be what a release describes as “an epic outdoor block party that connects Lexington Market to Park Avenue, spanning the city’s intertwined communities of color.”
The evening will feature musical performers—the Baltimore Dance Crews Project and traditional Korean drummers Washington Samulnori among them—along with a host of hometown Asian food purveyors, storytellers, an artist and craft market, a sake, soju and beer garden manned by Phil Han of Dooby’s, and more.
The fenced-off, open green space in the 200 block of Park Avenue will serve as the epicenter for the market. The Downtown Partnership of Baltimore is serving as the event’s chief sponsor.
The Chinatown Collective, a group of Asian-American and Pacific Islander merchants and organizers, has spearheaded the planning. Lead organizer Stephanie Hsu, formerly marketing and events director at R. House, said various initiatives were held over the last century to bring back Chinatown and expand it to a “more inclusive pan-Asian area.”
In particular, she singled out the mission of longtime Chinatown residents Kitty Chinn and her late husband, Calvin, during the 1970s to make it “a landing pad for the growing Korean and Vietnamese and Filipino communities at the time.” She said “this initiative is kind of picking up where they left off.”
Baltimore stands to benefit from the potential tourist draw of its own Chinatown, as other cities have, said Han.
“The livelihood and the culture of those neighborhoods is really awesome to see.”
While the old Chinese cultural district—as well as what Han calls Station North’s “kind of nonexistent” Little Korea—have withered away over time, the restaurateur pointed to a recent “significant increase” in local demand for Asian cuisine as a driving force being initiatives to bring them back.
“I think the biggest challenge is that we haven’t had a big presence of Asian food here in town until the past couple years,” Han said.
One can now head to Mount Vernon, Station North, Fells Point and other popular neighborhoods for cuisine ranging from ramen and bibimbap to dumplings and banh mi. Standouts such as Fells Point’s inventive steamed bun shop Ekiben, frozen dessert stall Mochichi and the refugee-owned co-op Mera Kitchen Collective will all be present at the night market next month.
Hsu noted vendor participation won’t be limited to Asian makers, as artisans and entrepreneurs from the city’s creative community will also be involved.
“It’s something that’s very inherently Baltimore—it’s part of both worlds,” she said. “This night market is kind of an excuse to get everybody all together at one place and time.”
But there will be clear signs of the event’s focus. Hsu mentioned a lantern walk down Lexington Street, “signifying and creating a place in a way that gives people the idea that, Oh, this used to be a Chinatown.”
Han, who’s known Hsu personally for a couple years, said the night market “is something that we’ve always talked about as, this should definitely happen.” The event she’s helped assemble is “incredible,” he says, “to bring this many people together.”
4-11 p.m., Sept. 22, 200 Park Ave., Facebook event. Tickets free, RSVP required.
This story has been updated.
Heavy Seas Beer is making a blonde ale that tastes like egg custard - July 12, 2019
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Home > Press Releases > Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn, UN IE SOGI, Nov 30, 2016.: Opportunities for the Human Rights of All Persons in a World of Gender Diversity
Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn, UN IE SOGI, Nov 30, 2016.: Opportunities for the Human Rights of All Persons in a World of Gender Diversity
The quantum leap of the world community to set up a mechanism, a new UN mandate - the United Nations Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (UN IE SOGI), advances the global agenda to "Leave No one Behind" and to protect the human rights of all persons, irrespective of their state or status. It is an invitation to all of us to open our hearts and minds to the beauty of diversity, no less in regard to SOGI: A World of Gender Diversity. In this regard, I must thank profoundly the great work done by the vast number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), communities, governments and other actors worldwide to make the new mandate a reality. Giving voice to our global message: Treat people decently, respectfully, kindly, humanely whatever their origins, our origins.
The mandate of the UN IE SOGI, established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2016, is thematic and covers the globe. The Independent Expert is appointed for a three year term, renewable once, and monitors the situation on behalf of the UN, submitting reports to the UN in Geneva and New York under the mandate. He/she can also take complaints from victims and act on their behalf by issuing urgent appeals and letters of allegations to the concerned authorities, thereby exercising leverage and pressure for compliance with international human rights law. This is complemented by field visits to countries to enable lessons learned from the ground to be shared in the global setting. It should be added that the expert is not a UN employee but a pro bono person, acting independently and objectively in assessing the situation, under the UN umbrella.
At the heart of the discourse is particularly the principle of non-discrimination underlined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and developed by international human rights law and practice. As evidenced by the application of the wide range of international human rights treaties, international human rights bodies and procedures, ranging from the human rights treaty bodies, their general comments and recommendations, the Universal Period Review of the UN, the coverage by the UN Special Procedures in regard to SOGI related violations, and UN resolutions and studies on SOGI, the international human rights system has been strengthening the promotion and protection of the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) people progressively. The protection of persons based on their SOGI and the mandate of the UN Independent Expert are based on International Law, complemented and supplemented by State practice.
The establishment of the UN mandate on SOGI enhances the opportunities offered by the global adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. In particular, the SDGs target an end to violence and discrimination in the timeframe of 2015-2030. Importantly, resolute action is required to stop the violence and discrimination affecting not only LGBTI communities but also the human rights defenders working with them. This goes hand in hand with the broader aspirations of human rights, freedoms, democracy, and peaceful and inclusive society.
The following linchpins direct our actions towards the future, calling for a broad global partnership:
- Decriminalization: abrogate laws which criminalize consensual same sex conduct and which criminalize transgender people based on their appearance; pending their reform, desist from applying these laws; and adopt a moratorium accordingly;
- Depathologization: reform the classification of LGBTI people as suffering from illness/ disorder; work with the medical, scientific and other sectors to delist LGBTI people from such classification; and end the practice of so-called "aversion" therapy/"conversion" therapy (wrongly) aimed at changing LGBT peoples' orientation and identity;
- Status recognition: affirm in law and practice the right of people to have their gender identity recognized on official and other documents; discard the conditions that they must undergo surgery, treatment, divorce, sterilization or medical certification before they can change their legal gender; and overcome bureaucratic hurdles in official and other circles on this front;
- Gender-diverse cultural inclusion: identify and disseminate all-inclusive interpretations of religion and other beliefs with space for gender diversity; work with religious, political, community and opinion leaders to advocate respect for and protection of LGBTI people; and enable LGBTI people to associate and participate fully in family life and societal change;
- Empathization: promote a human rights sensitive and less binary (or non-binary) educational and socialization process to address violence and discrimination from childhood onwards; prevent bullying from a young age; and involve teachers, parents, communities, and children/youth in nurturing an understanding of SOGI which is all-embracing.
Vitit Muntarbhorn is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Law, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. He is currently UN Independent Expert on Protection against Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. This is an excerpt from his Keynote speech at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) World Conference, Bangkok, opening session, 30 November 2016.
The Independent Experts are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council's independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures' experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.
For media inquiries, please contact Jeremy Laurence (+66 84 700 4671 / laurencej@un.org)
For your news websites and social media: Key messages about our news releases are available on UN Human Rights social media channels, listed below. Please tag us using the proper handles
Twitter: OHCHRAsia
Facebook: UNHumanRightsAsia
Google+: unitednationshumanrights
Youtube: unohchr
The Regional Office for South-East Asia in Bangkok represents the High Commissioner for Human Rights within South East Asia. The High Commissioner for Human Rights is the principal human rights official of the United Nations and heads the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which spearheads the United Nations' human rights efforts.
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Baseball Daily
Chicago – June 23, 2018
Hail to the Chief: Presidents and baseball
“I’ll never forget the first time President Taft appeared at our ballpark, in the season of 1909. Our players got so excited that we booted the game away to the Red Sox.”
-Walter Johnson
Washington Senators Hall of Fame pitcher
BY CHRIS REWERS
Just five weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Commisioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis sent a handwritten letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“The time is approaching when, in ordinary conditions, our teams would be heading for Spring training camps,” Landis wrote. “However inasmuch as these are not ordinary times, I venture to ask what you have in mind as to whether professional baseball should continue to operate.”
Roosevelt, in what became known as “The Green Light Letter,” responded to Landis the next day.
“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” he wrote. “There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”
Woodrow Wilson did baseball no favors during World War I. Wilson’s “work or fight” order forced the 1918 season to end on Labor Day. That year’s World Series, between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, was played in early September.
The first president to host organized baseball teams at the White House was Andrew Johnson who met members of the Washington Nationals and Brooklyn Atlantics at the executive mansion on Aug. 30, 1865.
The Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first all-professional team who completed an undefeated 1869 campaign, were honored that year at the White House by President Ulysses S. Grant.
The 1924 world champion Washington Senators
during their White House visit in 1925
(Library of Congress).
The first world championship team to be feted at the White House were the 1924 Washington Senators who paid a visit to President Calvin Coolidge the following year.
The world champion White House visit became an annual tradition during the Ronald Reagan administration. The Chicago Cubs – then known as the White Stockings – first visited the White House to see President Grover Cleveland following their offseason world tour in 1889 and paid their second visit to the White House last week during the final days of Barack Obama’s stay in office.
Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, was the first commander in chief to attend a major league game while in office when he witnessed the National League’s Washington Senators loss at home to the Cincinnati Reds on June 6, 1892. Harrison also attended the Senators’ game 19 days later when they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies.
President William Howard Taft started a baseball tradition on April 14, 1910 when he attended Washington’s season opener against the Philadelphia Athletics at Griffith Stadium. Taft threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the game from his front-row seat and then stayed to watch Walter Johnson shut out the Athletics, 3-0. Legend has it that the portly Taft, who tipped the scales at over 300 pounds, was feeling cramped in his seat. He stood up to stretch his legs midway through the seventh. Out of respect, other spectators also rose to their feet. The tradition of the “seventh inning stretch” was born.
Since Taft, every U.S. president, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, has thrown a ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day.
FDR owns the record with eight ceremonial first pitches between 1933 and 1941. Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy did not miss an opener during their three years in office.
President John F. Kennedy (left) was joined by managers
Mickey Vernon of the Washington Senators and Al Lopez
of the Chicago White Sox during pregame ceremonies on
Opening Day of 1961 at Griffith Stadium (JFK Presidential
Library).
On April 10, 1961, Kennedy attended Washington’s opener against the Chicago White Sox and was the guest of broadcaster Vince Lloyd on WGN-TV’s pregame “Lead-Off Man” show.
By that time, the ceremonial first pitch tradition had evolved to include two balls.
The second ball was sent to the White House as a presidential souvenir.
The first ball was a free-for-all. Players from both teams lined up in front of the presidential box. The president threw the ball into the crowd of players, like a groom hurling the bride’s garter into a crowd of bachelors at a wedding reception. The player lucky enough to catch the ball got to keep it.
Kennedy’s toss in 1961 was hauled in by Jim Rivera. The White Sox outfielder approached the presidential box and asked JFK to sign the baseball. The president sloppily scribbled his autograph on the ball and handed it back to Rivera.
White Sox trainer Ed Froelich, recalling the occasion years later to the Chicago Tribune’s David Condon, remembered that Rivera, upon inspecting the ball, barked at the president.
“What kind of garbage college is Harvard, where they don’t even teach you how to write?” Rivera shouted. “What kind of garbage writing is this? What is this garbage autograph? Do you think I can go into any tavern on the South Side and really say that the president of the United States signed this ball?”
Rivera shoved the ball back into Kennedy’s hands.
“Take this thing back and give me something other than this garbage autograph!” Rivera exclaimed.
Froehlich remembered that Kennedy laughed hysterically and wrote “JOHN F. KENNEDY” on the ball in big block letters.
Rivera looked at the baseball and told the president, “You know? You’re all right!”
President George Herbert Walker Bush – who was the captain of the baseball team while he attended Yale – attended all four Baltimore Orioles home openers during his one term in office and Herbert Hoover was a perfect 4-for-4 in attending Senators’ opening days during his time in office.
Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower each attended seven Washington opening days during their presidencies.
Gerald Ford had the ceremonial first pitch honors at the 1976 All-Star Game in Philadelphia during the nation’s bicentennial celebration.
President Reagan, who once broadcast Chicago Cubs games for Des Moines, Iowa radio station WHO, showed up at Wrigley Field for a late-season game between the Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates on Sept. 30, 1988. Reagan donned a Cubs jacket, strolled out on the field and from several feet in front of the pitcher’s mound, fired a pitch to Cubs catcher Damon Berryhill.
President George W. Bush throws a perfect strike to Derek Jeter before Game 3 of the 2001 World
Series (still from Fox broadcast).
One of the highlights of George W. Bush’s presidency came in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he let loose the ceremonial first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 30, 2001 before Game 3 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks.
Bush, who wore a bulletproof vest beneath a New York Fire Department jacket, walked out to the mound and gave the crowd a thumb’s up before firing a perfect strike to Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.
As Bush, who once was a managing partner of the Texas Rangers, warmed up in the tunnel beneath the stands, Jeter warned the president to not bounce the ball.
“They will boo you,” Jeter told him.
” I was nervous, really nervous,” Bush recalled. “The ball felt like a shot put.”
It was an emotional and powerful moment.
“What President Bush told us without uttering a single word was that we could once again attempt to carry on our lives,” sportscaster Jim Gray told the Dallas Morning News. “What an amazing symbol it was. It’s a moment that when I think about it, I get goosebumps.”
President Obama delivers to Cardinals star Albert Pujols before the 2009 All-Star
Game in St. Louis.
President Obama handled ceremonial first pitch honors at the 2009 All-Star Game in St. Louis, at the Washington Nationals’ home opener in 2010 and before last year’s historic exhibition game in Havana between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team.
“We do a lot of tough stuff as president,” Obama told ESPN. “And by definition you don’t end up being president if you don’t handle stress well. [But] nothing is more stressful than throwing a first pitch.
“They just hand you the ball. And I don’t care if you’ve been practicing ahead of time. When they just hand you the ball…”
Author Chris RewersPosted on January 22, 2017 January 22, 2017 Categories UncategorizedTags 1865, 1869, 1889, 1918, 1918 World Series, 1924, 1942, 1961, 1976, 1976 All-Star Game, 1988, 2001, 2001 World Series, 9/11, Andrew Johnson, Arizona Diamondbacks, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Brooklyn Atlantics, Calvin Coolidge, ceremonial first pitches, Chicago Cubs, Chicago Tribune, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Red Stockings, Cincinnati Reds, Cuban National Team, Damon Berryhill, David Condon, Derek Jeter, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Grover Cleveland, Harry Truman, Harvard, Havana, Herbert Hoover, Jim Rivera, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, New York Yankees, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Ronald Reagan, seventh inning stretch, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, The Green Light Letter, U.S. bicentennial, U.S. presidents, Ulysses S. Grant, Vince Lloyd, Walter Johnson, Warren G. Harding, Washington Nationals, Washington Senators, WGN-TV, White House, WHO, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, work or fight order, World War I, World War II, Wrigley Field, Yale, Yankee StadiumLeave a comment on Hail to the Chief: Presidents and baseball
MLB statistics
MLB schedule/pitching probables
Saturday’s Best
Seattle Mariners at Boston Red Sox
Radio: WEEI-FM (93.7)/KIRO-AM (710)
7:15 p.m. (EDT)
Also On TV
Mississippi State vs. Oregon State
2 p.m. (CDT)
Oregon State’s 12-2 victory over Mississippi State on Friday set the stage for this elimination game. The winner will meet Arkansas in the best-of-3 championship.
1917: Boston starting pitcher. Babe Ruth was ejected in the first inning after walking Washington leadoff hitter Ray Morgan. Ernie Shore relieved Ruth. Morgan was caught stealing second and Shore retired the next 26 hitters he faced to complete a 4-0 no-hit Red Sox victory at Fenway Park.
Cubs broadcaster Jim Deshaies, a left-handed pitcher who won 84 games in a 12-year major league career (1984-95), was born in Massena, N.Y. on June 23, 1960.
Rod Beck, an All-Star relief pitcher who earned 286 career saves in a 13-year major league career (1991-2004), was found dead at his Phoenix home by police officers responding to a call on June 23, 2008. He was 38. The cause of death was not publicly released by the Maricopa County coroner’s office. Beck saved 48 games for the San Francisco Giants in 1993 and 51 games for the NL wild-card winning Chicago Cubs in 1998.
Baseball Daily Blog at WordPress.com.
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Charidee
[Written before Christmas so the Queen was plagerising me and not the other way round!] I’ve always thought that charities are very important, but now I think their work is even more vital, and have been interested recently in what I term ‘charity journalism’, and the variable coverage of the charity sector in the media. Admittedly it’s currently Christmastime, so everyone is thinking about charity that much more, but still… As I mentioned in my post about the little things in life being important, I believe that making people’s everyday lives more comfortable and more pleasant is of such importance, and charities play a major role in doing that.
I’ve read quite a lot of articles recently about charitable giving in the UK, and the majority pointed out that we don’t really give very much at all, and when we do give it often makes us feel we’ve ‘done our bit’ and can therefore justifiable not give at other times. At Christmas, for example, charitable giving rises considerably, as we do our bit in the ‘season of goodwill’. But most charities work all year round, and need the kind of money we give at Christmas all year. Comic Relief was attacked in some quarters, mainly for being a terrible TV show, but also because it again gave people too much of an opportunity to appease their consciences, give themselves a pat on the back and forget about charity for the rest of the year: small charities are finding it harder and harder to compete with the bigger charities, which have enormous resources. When major disasters strike, we’re generally very good at digging deep (apparently 80% of the money requested by the UN emergency appeal for the Indian Ocean tsunami was raised within 10 days), but then we give less to charities we would otherwise have considered donating to (this stat is half-remembered and I have no way of checking, but I think domestic charities reported a one-third decrease in giving in the few months after the tsunami compared to the same time the year before). One article pointed out the correlation between media coverage of events and charitable giving (the tsunami had 4543 stories in the UK press and a great response to the UN appeal; the Kashmir earthquake had 379 and a poor response to its UN emergency appeal, though could that have been partly compassion fatigue, or the fact that people had already done their charitable giving for the year?), explaining that less immediate humanitarian crises (such as the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which suffer from the twin difficulties of reporting and of finding the ‘human interest’ angles for stories, or famine in Africa, which is more ongoing) have great difficulty in raising money, because they don’t have such a high profile and thus also lack the powerful images of suffering being beamed into people’s homes, which move people to give. An article I read today explained the three strands of activity by Oxfam: (i) immediate life-saving (eg the tsunami, or the earthquake), (ii) medium-term development work (eg an irrigation scheme for a farming community), and (iii) lobbying for long-term change (eg its Make Trade Fair campaign). All three are important, and without improving the long-term situation the short-term situations are likely to crop up more often, but it’s far more difficult to persuade people to give money for long-term projects (as the article says that “Heart- and purse-strings are pulled easiest for immediate disasters”). Someone was advocating giving 1% of your income to those in need; another article promoted 10%, in a modern-day tithe.
I guess that when it comes down to it it’s a matter for your own conscience (after all, by paying taxes you’re giving a lot to charity, as the government dishes out a lot, while donating 10% of an annual £7000 salary might have more of an effect on your everyday life than giving 10% of a £700,000 salary), but I was intrigued by the media/giving relationship. Would people give more, or at least more fairly, if there were more charity journalism? Awareness is vital, and greater space in the media for charities, particularly smaller organisations that find it difficult to attract donors as they cannot afford the publicity, would be a wonderful thing. If every major newspaper in the country used one of its pages (or even half a page) to showcase a small charity every day (and, to be honest, they can well afford to give up a page, as there’s so much pap that hardly anybody would miss, and currently the mindless drivel to worthy causes ratio is about 100:1), readers would be reminded of the ongoing needs of others, and might be inspired to give a little more. I’m not much of a fan of tin-rattling, particularly when charity workers try to make you feel bad about not giving, because I think you should give to charities you are particularly impressed by, or feel a particular link to, not those who shout loudest or emotionally blackmail you most successfully, though I recognise they need to raise money as best they can. All the major newspapers I’ve seen have Christmas appeals, where one or a few charities will get the ‘season of goodwill’ donations from readers, but by presenting another good-doing organisation each day, readers would be able to to give money to the charities that they feel most moved by and otherwise wouldn’t hear about. I’d expect I also hate charities sending me pens/stickers/etc, as I’d far rather they spent their money on their charitable purposes, instead of in competition with other good causes. But charity is big business…
So that’s money. Being a poor man (I realise that in a charity context when I’m mentioning poverty in Africa, that makes me sound horribly ignorant/blind/stupid; but it is all relative, and in terms of giving to charities in the UK, I really can’t afford to give more than I do), I feeel I can give more by volunteering, and intend to do a lot more if and when possible. Currently I do a fair bit for the OMV, though I could still be doing more, and I’d like to get involved with Leukaemia Care, as a start, as that’s something I could actually bring some sort of knowledge and experience to. Giving money is one way to help charities; volunteering is perhaps a more active, or at least involved way of doing so. And volunteering can involve either taking part in whatever it is the charity seeks to improve / help with / fight / discover / etc, or increasing awareness of the charity itself. Both are vital: did you know that 2005 has been the Year of the Volunteer? I volunteer because I think it’s important to help others, because I cannot do so by giving much money, and because it’s rewarding for me, too. And fun, in the case of the OMV. And since I’ve been ill, the helping others, the making people happier day by day, the cheering people up and keeping their suffering to a minimum, seems so important. My extensive charidee work: like Smashey or Nicey, of course, I don’t like to talk about it 😉
Anyway, something to think about.
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Fully wired!*
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068068 991991 Foreign Affairs, Knowledge, Modern-day Israel, Palestine, US Government, War Apartheid IsraelknowledgeWar CrimesWars for Israelwisdom
“Whatever you get, get insight.“ Proverbs 4:7
The world needs to acknowledge and deal with a number of lies and deceptions concerning today’s self-styled Jews, who have arrogantly placed themselves above the rest of humanity by crowning themselves God’s chosen people. In the process, they’ve made a mockery of the spirit of brotherhood our Lord Jesus commanded us to abide in.
“The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.” – Hannah Arendt
Let’s get a clear notion of the truth today’s self-styled Jews are trying to obfuscate through intrigues and stratagems.
From our CHURCH REFORM series
Even a cursory study would show that those today who are known as Jews are not remotely bloodline descendants of Abraham.
Israel: Land Of Impostors
Israel was created in 1948 based on lies. Since then there has not been peace in the Middle East.
Why Israelis Speak Hebrew
From our RIPOSTE section
Question: If Jews are not Hebrews, how come Israelis speak Hebrew? Doesn’t that prove their Hebraic heritage?
Answer: No, it doesn’t prove their Hebraic heritage.
1) Non-Hebraic Rabbinists (followers of the Babylonian Talmud) have been using the “Jew” appellation since the late 18th Century in order to appear to be Judahite Hebrews – see How The Ashkenazi Jews Conquered the West.
That way people could see them as the Chosen People, while they endeavored to steal Palestine and create modern-day Israel without the objection of the Christian world, especially since they were Eastern-European Nomads seeking a new country following the loss of their homeland Khazaria.
Then they – who originally spoke Yiddish – resurrected the dead Hebrew tongue after thousands of years in the dustbin of oblivion to make it Israel’s official language. In so doing, they consolidated in the world’s mind the impression that they were Hebrews rightfully returning home, when in fact they were not.
However, in their lust to deceive the world they got blindsided and completely overlooked the fact that, following the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C., not even the Hebrews spoke Hebrew. They spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
That’s why Mel Gibson made the movie The Passion of The Christ in that dialect. In turn, the Jews became furious – still on a vendetta against him – because Mel made them look ridiculous, especially as they wanted to be seen as “kinsmen” of Jesus, which they’re absolutely not. See Are Jews the Israelites of the Bible?
Deception: Yids who faked their Hebrew names
Further, as Jewish land thieves disembarked in Palestine in the 1940s to seize Palestinian lands and homes that Zionist terrorist groups – such as the Irgun, the Stern gang, and Haganah – had stolen in order to turn the country into Israel, they adopted Hebrew names to complete their “Hebraization” process – not unlike what they did when they scattered throughout Europe and America and assumed European surnames. See Israel: Land of Impostors
“We all went ‘native’,” admits Uri Avnery, Israeli political commentator. “On reaching the age of 18, we all exchanged our Jewish names for Hebrew Names. (That’s how Uri Avnery came into being.) We started to think of ourselves as a new nation, with a new “soul”, connected to Judaism, sure, but mainly historically.”
2) Are all people in countries where English is spoken of English descent? No. Were all Catholics, who celebrated mass in Latin, Romans? No. A spoken language is not indicative of a person’s ancestry.
From our JUDAICA section
Talmudic Judaism is not an Abrahamic religion.
Israel is an apartheid country that is revved up by the anti-Christ spirit of “Hate Thy Neighbor.”
It has repudiated the Prince of Peace’s message of neighborly love and peace, and has embraced the genocidal spirit of conquest, terror, and subjugation, which has injected into the Middle East a cesspool of conflict and hate that has begun to metastasize worldwide.
Palestinian fortitude in the face of Israeli aggression
Israel also deceptively insists that the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum is the fault of the Palestinians, when nothing could be further from the truth.
The Israeli-Palestinian problem can be easily solved because the solution is very simple. It would be settled tomorrow if Zionist Jewish leaders were not such bloodthirsty thieves.
How Rabbinists Became Known As Jews
From our WISDOM FOR TODAY series
Of the 12 Hebrew tribes, Judah was the most faithful and the most active in making converts, especially after they teamed up with the Levites.
“For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing the priest’s office unto the LORD.” 2 Chronicles 11:14
Their converts became known as the proselytes (i.e., the ones who prayed to Jehovah, the God of Judah).
“Judahites and proselytes…“ Acts 2: 11
The other 10 tribes, collectively known as Israel, separated from Judah and always did evil in God’s eyes.
“Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit: but Judah yet ruleth with God, and is faithful with the saints.” Hosea 11:12
So while Judah was helping the priests in the implementation of their office, Israel was basking in evil. Thus Judah became the one that carried the torch of God’s light unto the nations.
It was a process that would culminate with the advent of Jesus the Christ and His church assembly. Because, just like the Christian Church, the Judahite Hebrew nation was a proselytizing nation that wanted people all over the world to know and pray to the true God of the Universe; even though, at one point, the conversion process had become totally corrupted because of the pharisaic teachings. Let’s hear Jesus:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” Matthew 23:15
Later on, those proselytes, who obviously were not Judahite Hebrews and adhered to the pharisaic teachings, became known as Rabbinists, while their religion was called Pharisaism/Rabbinism, and their “holy writ” was entitled the Talmud, a Babylonian book full of lies and superstitions.
In the 18th Century, those very same Rabbinists hijacked the words Jew and Judaism, in order to change their appellation along with that of their religion (just like when Blacks didn’t want to be called Negroes no more). A change that was purely cosmetic, as their beliefs, which are still found in their enduring and cherished Talmud, did not change one iota.
The idea behind such superficial name changes was to deceive the world into thinking they were the Judahite Hebrews of the bible.
And what was their reason for wanting to hoodwink the world?
See How the Ashkenazi Jews Conquered the West.
Jerusalem was NEVER the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.
Jew Focus
Question: Why don’t you have anything extensive about Islam? Like you do about Judaism?
Answer: For the same reason we don’t have anything about Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. We preach the ONLY truth: pure Christianity. That’s enough to get all those of different faiths to ponder on what they should adhere to.
We, however, zoom in on Judaism/Pharisaism and Zionist Israel because they have infiltrated the church with their anti-Christ spirit; the other religions have not.
“They shall raise their voices against the serpents (or malicious ones)…” Mark 16:17
Therefore, we must be obedient to God and raise our voices to warn of the destruction that follows in the wake of Bolshevik/Zionist/Neocon Jews (a parasite by any other moniker is still a parasite):
They were the Bolsheviks that destroyed Russia.
They became the Zionists who fomented 2 World Wars and destroyed Europe.
They then stole Palestine and destroyed the Middle East.
They are the neocons who are destroying the Republican Party.
They took over the Democratic Party and destroyed it.
They took over the Federal Reserve and destroyed the US Dollar.
They took over Hollywood and the media and destroyed American culture.
They took over the US Congress and are destroying America.
They infiltrated the Church and corrupted it.
They did 9/11 and disquieted the world with never-ending terrorism and war.
Jesus’s peace and morality had been steadily increasing throughout the world, until that deadly, persistent Talmudic Ashkenazic Khazarian (aka Jewish) virus, which invariably hates the Prince of Peace and His followers, craves immorality, and engenders wars, began its assault on Christian civilization. But it won’t win.
A few decades from now, a generation will look back and label this anti-Christ period of Jewish influence and manipulation as a New Dark Age.
“Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end…” Isaiah 9: 7
Zionist Jews introduced terrorism in the Middle East, built Israel with it, and are taking the world for a ride using it.
Was Einstein Really A Genius?
Albert Einstein’s name has strangely become synonymous with “genius.”
But we couldn’t find one thing that man invented or came up with that made our lives better or that was not a fraud. NOT ONE THING! Even the equation E=mc^2 that is attributed to him is apparently from an Italian named Olinto De Pretto who published it in the scientific magazine Atte in 1903.
Yet everyone knows who Einstein is. His face and name are plastered on everything that hints at “sheer ingenuity.” Even his so-called “accomplishments,” besides being theories to begin with, were unsupported conjectures that amounted and led to NOTHING, especially his Theory of Relativity (including the GPS & Relativity myth). Nikola Tesla, a real scientific genius, categorized said theory as “the greatest historical aberration of scientific thought.” See Puzzled Scientists.
Here are some true scientific geniuses and visionaries: Johannes Gutenberg, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, Charles Babbage, Reginald Fessenden, Guglielmo Marconi, Thomas Edison, Karl Benz, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Wright Brothers, Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce, Tim Berners Lee, Alexander Fleming, Louis Pasteur, and Steve Jobs, just to name a few.
All of them either invented or contributed to the invention of not useless theories but of things that improved our lives and catapulted humanity to a higher level of productivity. Yet none of them is uplifted like Einstein. Then again unlike Einstein they were not and are not Jews (some are still alive), so the Jewish-controlled media inflate their own to godlike status – even when they’re fake – in order to propagandize their misappropriated appellation of God’s “Chosen People.” See How the Ashkenazi Jews conquered the West.
Zionist Jews are mostly behind it.
“We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever.” – Maurice Samuel
If one truly believes the Zionist/Jewish-dominated media, their fake news, and their constant barrage of “Holocaust” movies, one genuinely thinks that there’s only one group of people that everyone on earth hates: Jews. That’s how effective the brainwashing has been.
However, when one wakes up from the media’s induced stupor one realizes that Zionist Jews are themselves the victimizers of the world who camouflage themselves as victims.
Bolshevik Revolution: The Jewish Bolsheviks, who took over the Russian government in the 1910s, killed 66 million Christians, including 200,000 members of the Christian clergy, and destroyed 40,000 churches.
World War 1: Britain was losing the war against Germany. The Zionists stepped in and bribed President Wilson to get the US into the war to help them. In return, the Jews asked the British Empire to deed them Palestine to create Israel. Their wish was granted in the form of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which cost the world 18 million dead.
World War 2: The Zionists fomented that war (just like they’re doing today with Iran and other countries in the Middle East), so that European Jews could feel threatened. The deception worked as European Jews fled in droves to Palestine and took over the homes of Palestinians, who were evicted at gunpoint and then either massacred or driven out of their land into neighboring Arab countries. With enough Jews on the ground, Israel was created in 1948 at a cost of 80 million dead.
World War On Terror: Zionist/Jewish neocons, in cahoots with their bought-and-paid-for politicians in the US government, perpetrated their act of terrorism on 9/11. Then they conveniently blamed it on Muslims so as to obtain a green light to destroy the Middle East using the armies of the US and NATO and the terrorist groups they finance, with the ultimate view to creating Greater Israel. So far, the death toll is over 3 million, including Christians.
World War 3: With Russia protecting Syria and Iran from Israel’s Machiavellian design, will the Zionists succeed in bringing the world once again to the brink of disaster to create Greater Israel? If they do, will it instead bring about their downfall?
Conclusion: It’s a shame that Jews who stand up to Zionism form a minority. The well-financed and extremely powerful Zionist movement, revved up by a foul and racist ideology, drowns out their voices.
Zionist Jews of all stripes – secular, religious, political – have no concept of God’s commandment to love thy neighbor. Instead, the anti-Christ spirit of hate thy neighbor permeates their souls with a sulfuric stench, while Israel remains the undiluted expression of said diseased spirit – a scourge, a cancer that needs to be dealt with.
Appeal: Every conscientious individual should implement a personal boycott of Israel and everything made there.
There are two historical events where Jews went all out with their lies and fabrications: the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Holocaust.
There are 4 groups today that are pretending to be Hebrews. Jews are only one group.
Jews are NOT Semites. So what’s really behind the Anti-Semitism label?
What’s Really Going On In The Middle East
From our VIEWS OF NEWS section
Many are under the impression that the chaos that is spreading throughout the Middle East is to protect the petrodollar and secure oil resources for American and Western companies.
First, the petrodollar is backed by Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries. Yet, the US Congress recently passed a law that allows victims of “terrorism” to sue the Saudis. See this Post here.
That’s not how one maintains the hegemony of the petrodollar. Besides, if the petrodollar was the concern, Israel would be the first country to go, as most Arab countries do not support the theft of Palestine by the Zionists.
Second, oil resources are available all over the world, including the US; so there’s no need for war to control them. At the beginning of the oil rush it might have been a truism that war was necessary, not anymore.
“Oil and gas are abiotic, [and] can be found deep below the surface of the earth in most parts of the world and in very large amounts,” wrote Vinod Dar in Abiotic Oil and Gas
In general, it is true that wars waged by the US are mostly for American control of natural resources, territorial expansions, and the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex. It is also true that all US imperialistic moves are always meant to benefit the country’s most influential elite of the time.
For instance, the Vietnam war was to favor the elite that controls the Military Industrial Complex, whereas the banana wars were engineered to secure control over banana plantations in South America and the Caribbean for another segment of the American elite. The most blatant of the banana wars were in Honduras where the US intervened seven times between 1903 and 1925. None of these wars was about the US dollar.
Today, the US’s most demanding and most pernicious elite are the Jews, who are only satisfied when Israel takes center stage in US foreign policy.
“It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States is deeply involved in a series of seemingly endless wars pitting it against predominantly Muslim nations even though Washington has no vital interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya and Iraq,” explains Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer.
“Who is driving the process and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary of a coordinated effort mounted by more than 600 Jewish organizations in the U.S. that have at least as part of their programs the promotion and protection of Israel. If America goes to war with Iran, as is increasingly likely, it will be all about Israel and it will be arranged by the political and financial services Washington-Wall Street axis, make no mistake.”
So for the first time in America’s history, US-led wars are being waged to benefit a foreign nation, Israel, by wagging America from within, using the Jewish AIPAC as its whipping mechanism and bribe money as its corrupting influence.
Still, the US does want to maintain hegemony of the US Dollar. It does so through American control of powerful financial institutions worldwide, bribe, globalism, coups d’état, assassination, etc.
However, all current wars, conflicts, and fabricated terrorism in the Middle East are only to benefit Israel, destroy its perceived enemies, and facilitate its expansion plan.
Americans had better wake up before it’s too late! The Israeli parasitic infestation of the US government has reached critical mass.
“That (Jewish) stranglehold has got to be broken or this country is going down the drain,” explained Evangelist Billy Graham to President Nixon.
Urgent Appeal To Christians Who Support Israel
We know deep down no real Christian would support evil.
Notice the Israeli Sniper’s bullet right through the heart of the deceased Palestinian boy
Doing so would be antithetical to everything our Christian faith stands for. Besides, we know that many of you were fed a bunch of lies concerning the ungodly State of Israel, which in turn caused you to sanction its demonic actions that are all contrary to God’s commandments.
Converted Jews of today are NOT the Hebrews of the bible. They’re Eastern European nomads who lost their country Khazaria and were in search of a new land. So they stole Palestine and renamed it Israel pretending to be Hebrews, when all Hebrews are irrevocably dead. See A Brief History of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
a) Modern Israel is not comprised of the 10 Hebrew tribes like in scriptures; b) the country’s current geographical demarcation is not as delineated by God in the book of Joshua; c) the nation would be called Judah instead of Israel, with the Levites sheltered therein, if Jews today were of the tribe of David; and d) the modern impostor state of Israel is made up of Jewish converts who are not Semitic descendants of Abraham.
“To your (Abraham’s) descendants I give this land….” Genesis 15:18
Therefore, as you shake off the falsehoods you were brainwashed with, we ask the following of you.
Gaza Christians mourning their dead
Stop encouraging the US Government to fund Israel to the tunes of billions of dollars a year out of America’s coffers for Israel to wage war and oppress another people, while millions of Americans go hungry, jobless, and homeless.
Stop organizing fund raisers for the Zionist “settlers.” In so doing you’re actually helping these land thieves steal another people’s land, while empowering them to kill the original inhabitants in the process.
Stop lobbying the US government to provide the Apartheid criminal state of Israel with diplomatic cover in the international community.
For the sake of peace, start doing the opposite.
Call your political representative and give him/her a piece of your mind: that Israel should no longer get away with murder, and that Israel should accept a Palestinian State. Then organize mission trips to the West Bank and Gaza. Stop these pussyfooting “Holy” Land tourist trips. Go and help the oppressed. That’s the Christian mandate.
“Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” Isaiah 1:17
Unfortunately, many of you, poisoned by compromised preachers and their false teachings in reference to converted Jews being “God’s chosen people,” are infected with Israel’s anti-Christ spirit of hate thy neighbor, especially you leaders of the “Christian” media who sold out Jesus and His Love-Thy-Neighbor command to Israel for 30 pieces of Jewish silver. Your unabashed loathing of Arabs and Muslims to please the Jews is shamefully evident to all.
“The companion of fools will suffer harm.” Proverbs 13:20
Remember the words of our Savior when you, with that anti-Christ spirit, call Him Lord – so don’t be surprised on Judgment Day.
“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” Matthew 7: 15, 22-23
However, you can cure yourselves.
“If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Genesis 4:7
<<<<<<>>>>>>
Read more WISDOM. Click on the banner below.
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Women's Soccer Home
2019 Prospect Camps
UChicago Women’s Soccer Sweeps Top Honors, Earn Seven All-UAA Picks
Mackenzie Peebles, Jenna McKinney and Mia Calamari
2017 All-UAA Team
CHICAGO – For the second-straight year, Jenna McKinney took home University Athletic Association MVP honors as the University of Chicago women's soccer team earned seven All-UAA selections on Thursday. First-year Katie Jasminski won UAA Rookie of the Year, while UChicago captured Coaching Staff of the Year.
McKinney is the third UChicago women's soccer player to win the award, and becomes the second to do so in back-to-back seasons. Renee Neuner achieved the feat previously in 2002 and 2003. The junior midfielder leads the team with 11 goals and has tallied four assists, placing her second in the conference in goals scored and third in total points. In addition to her two selections as UAA MVP, she was also UAA Rookie of the Year and earned Second Team All-UAA honors in 2015.
Accompanying McKinney on the All-UAA First Team are senior midfielder Mia Calamari and sophomore defender Mackenzie Peebles.
Calamari picked up First Team All-UAA honors for the second time. The senior ranks second in NCAA Division III with 17 assists, which nearly doubles that of any other player in the conference. Calamari has also scored five goals. Her 27 points rank second in the conference. It is her third All-UAA selection overall, as she also was named to the Second Team in 2016.
Peebles is a key component of a Maroon defense that limited opponents to just six goals all season, racking up 13 clean sheets. Peebles has also contributed to the attack with five assists. This is her first All-UAA award.
Senior Kelsey Moore earned a repeat appearance on the Second Team on the strength of her work in the midfield. In addition to her anchor presence defensively, she has notched four goals and two assists this year.
Fellow seniors Whitley Cargile and Madori Spiker were also placed on the All-UAA Second Team. For Cargile, it is the second All-UAA selection – she was also named to the Second Team in 2014. Her efforts have been integral to the success of UChicago's defense this year and she has tacked on three assists. Spiker, a forward, haspoured in seven goals and three assists en route to her first All-UAA honors. She ranks third on the team with a career-high 17 points.
Forward Katie Jasminski was voted UAA Rookie of the Year. The first-year has compiled six goals and three assists in her collegiate debut season. She is the fifth UChicago player to win this award.
Sophomore goalkeeper Katie Donovan earned Honorable Mention recognition. She led the UAA in save percentage (.895), goals allowed (2) and goals-against average (0.23). Donovan previously claimed a spot on the All-UAA Second Team last year.
Head Coach Amy Reifert along with assistant coaches Julianne Sitch and Erin Ekeberg were recognized as the UAA Coaching Staff of the Year for the second time in as many seasons. The Maroons won 17-straight games and held the top spot in the national rankings for six weeks. UChicago also shut out six of their seven UAA opponents.
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A Graphic Identity for Global Warming Believers
By Delphine Hirasuna | August 6, 2014 September 4, 2014
Those of us who are concerned about climate change finally have a slogan and graphic identity to rally around, thanks to design legend Milton Glaser.
The campaign’s slogan — “It’s Not Warming, It’s Dying” — doesn’t mince words about what’s ultimately at stake for the earth if we don’t get a grip on global warming. Done in conjunction with New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA), where Glaser is acting chairman and a faculty member, the campaign aims to spark action on climate change through the distribution of lapel buttons featuring a graphic symbol, designed by Glaser. The logo represents the earth as seen from outer space, with the lush green disappearing into an ominous black. To reinforce the sense of a dying planet, the green swath is printed in ghostly glow-in-the-dark ink. Like his iconic “I (heart) NY” image, Glaser’s climate change logo is powerful in its directness and simplicity.
SVA is spearheading this social awareness campaign by offering Glaser’s dying planet logo as a lapel button ($5 for 5 buttons) so wearers can visibly express their concern for the planet. Up until now, the global warming deniers have been the most vocal in expressing their views, while those who believe that the climate is changing have mostly relied on scientific papers, panels of experts citing data, and Power Point-laden documentaries (a la Al Gore) to present their reasoned arguments. It’s time to be seen. If enough people around the world are seen wearing Glaser’s button, politicians and policymakers cannot easily dismiss these constituents as a minority of alarmists.
Posted in Sustainability Tagged al gore, campaign, climate change, concern, data, dying planet, earth, experts, global warming, graphic identity, Milton Glaser, politicians, school of visual arts, scientific papers, slogan, social awareness, SVA
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Home > European Science Cafe: Sustainable transportation
European Science Cafe: Sustainable transportation [fr]
Transportation is a curious thing. While we may soon fly to Mars, we oftentimes find it difficult to safely cross the street. It’s an apparent paradox, considering how crucial transportation is to our personal and economic well-being. In addition, transportation is a major contributor to climate change. It recently surpassed electricity generation as the biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
Sustainability expert Frank Wefering explored the newest transportation trends during the latest European Science Cafe on June 19. His discussion touched on the rapid and fundamental changes currently under way in the field, especially in relation to mobility, accessibility, and road safety in cities. He also discussed the crucial importance of sustainable transportation modes, such as walking, cycling and public transit for today’s climate conscious, healthy and livable cities. Based on his experience in Europe and the United States, he talked about urban mobility planning solutions that can make a true difference in making our cities more sustainable.
Wefering earned his degree in economics at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (’94) and his Master of Economics at North Carolina State University (´97). He is a consultant with more than 20 years of international experience in sustainable development research and implementation, specializing in the application of sustainability principles in transportation and urban mobility projects.
In early 2017, Frank Wefering became the first Director of Sustainability at Greenman-Pedersen, Inc. (GPI), a New York-based engineering consulting firm with 1,500 employees across the United States. He is responsible for developing a GPI service line centered on sustainability planning and transportation. Wefering is also the founder and former CEO of Changing Track, LLC in New York and, for more than 14 years, was a senior consultant at Rupprecht Consult in Cologne, Germany. He served as advisor to the United Nations, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the European Commission and cities worldwide on sustainable transportation and integrated planning.
The event was organized in cooperation with the Consulate General of Germany in Atlanta with the support of the Consulate General of France, the German Cultural Center and the Atlanta Science Tavern. It was held at the Goethe-Zentrum /German Cultural Center at Colony Square.
Four WWII Veterans Receive Legion of Honor
New employees at the French Consulate
The French Consulate is recruiting
Three teachers receive Palmes Académiques
French-American Community - Summer 2019
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Filtering by: Theatre
Teatro La Quindicina Presents A Likely Story
Thu, Jun 6, 2019 7:30 PM 19:30 Sat, Jun 22, 2019 10:30 PM 22:30
Varscona Theatre (map)
Temporarily stranded in a pleasant alpine location, five would-be travellers find themselves increasingly fascinated by one another. Worries and preoccupations go by the wayside as these new friends joyously explode and re-imagine their expected trajectories with trademark Teatro pith and brio. The vivacious and intrepid quintet of adventurers includes Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Jenny McKillop, Vincent Forcier, and Jeff Haslam.
Shadow Theatre Presents Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike
Thu, May 2, 2019 7:30 PM 19:30 Sun, May 19, 2019 2:00 PM 14:00
Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike
By Christopher Durang
Winner Of The Tony Award For Outstanding New Play 2013
Middle-aged siblings Vanya and Sonia bicker and pine about the dashed dreams and squandered hopes of their lives in the sunny Morning Room of the family farmhouse in Bucks County, PA. When their movie-star sister, Masha, suddenly swoops in with her new boy-toy, Spike, old resentments flare up, eventually leading to threats to sell the house. Joined on the scene by their prophetic housekeeper Cassandra, and a dewy aspiring actress named Nina - whose youthful prettiness troubles Masha’s precariously propped-up vanity – they prepare to attend a neighbor’s costume party and the stage is set for a giddy farce on Chekhovian themes.
Wednesday 5/1 7:30PM (Preview)
Thursday 5/2 7:30PM
Friday 5/3 7:30PM
Saturday 5/4 2:00PM (Pay What You Can)
Saturday 5/4 7:30PM
Tuesday 5/7 7:30PM (2-for-1 Tickets at the Door)
Wednesday 5/8 7:30PM
Saturday 5/11 2:00PM (Pay What You Can)
Sunday 5/12 2:00PM (Pay What You Can)
Tuesday 5/14 7:30PM (2-for-1 Tickets at the Door)
Wednesday 5/15 7:30PM
Northern Light Theatre Presents 19 Weeks
Fri, Mar 29, 2019 7:30 PM 19:30 Sat, Apr 13, 2019 7:30 PM 19:30
Northern Light Theatre (map)
19 Weeks (Canadian Premiere)
By Emily Steel
Co-production with Azimuth Theatre
Featuring Vanessa Sabourin
The words are rattling because the story is real. Everyone knows someone who has had an abortion or lost a pregnancy – even if they don’t talk about it. In 2016, playwright Emily Steel had a termination after her baby was diagnosed with Down Syndrome. This is her story, told honestly and publicly, because there are so many more stories out there. We want 19 Weeks to be part of a bigger conversation.
“I made the decision that I was going to tell people the truth about what happened because keeping quiet about such a traumatic experience would have felt like even more of a burden. My fear was that people would think I was a horrible, heartless person, and I had to process those feelings myself, but how people are going to perceive you cannot alter your decisions about the course of your life.
For the most part, my fears did not come true. The response of so many women was to tell me stories of their own abortions or miscarriages, and that was a huge part of the inspiration for the play. There is a lot of controversy about late abortions, but it’s not until you go through that process that you realize how much time it can take to do what you think is the most responsible thing.” – Emily Steel
Awards and reviews can be found at 19weeks.com.
Thursday 3/28 7:30PM (PWYC Preview)
Sunday 3/31 2:00PM(Preshow Director’s Circle Event)
Sunday 3/31 7:30PM
Tuesday 4/2 7:30PM (2-for-1 Ticket at the Door)
Wednesday 4/3 7:30PM (Post Show NLT Guest Speaker Salon)
Thursday 4/4 7:30PM (Post Show Actor Talk Back)
Sunday 4/7 2:00PM
Shadow Theatre Presents Lungs
Thu, Mar 14, 2019 7:30 PM 19:30 Sun, Mar 31, 2019 2:00 PM 14:00
By Duncan Macmillian
Directed by Jon Lachlan Stewart
Production Design by Elise Jason
Starring Chris Bullough and Beth Graham
The world is getting hotter, there’s unrest overseas—the seas themselves aren’t very calm—and one couple is thinking about having a child. Lungs is a smart and funny drama that follows a couple through the surprising lifecycle of their relationship as they grapple with questions of family and change, hope, betrayal, happenstance, and the terrible pain that you can only cause the people you love.
Wednesday 3/13 7:30PM (Preview)
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Now Closing: 5 Shows To See Before They Close in Spring 2019
|by Mark Robinson |March 25, 2019
Don’t miss your chance to see these hit shows
Broadway plays and musicals come and go. Some stay with us for a long time, and others are limited engagements or close prematurely. Here are some not-to-be-missed shows that are currently lighting up the Great White Way, but will soon be departing this spring.
'Anastasia' will close on March 31 (Photo: Matthew Murphy)
This Ahrens and Flaherty musical – based on the beloved animated film of the same name – has seen its fair share of rabid Broadway fans. Starring Christy Altomare, the show tells the story of an orphan named Anya who embarks on a “journey to the past” to discover the origins of her family, and runs into royalty along the way. Anastasia closes on March 25, 2019.
The Tony-winning hit recently accounced that it will depart its current Off-Broadway home this spring. This musical send-up of a Sesame Street-like children’s story – which has a score by Robert Lopez (Frozen) and Jeff Marx, and follows a recent college graduate trying to make his way in the not-so-PG world of New York City – had a Broadway run in 2003 before transferring to Off-Broadway’s New World Stages in 2009. Avenue Q will take its final, puppet-assisted bow on May 26, 2019.
The Band’s Visit
This 10-time Tony-winning show has made quite the splash since its arrival on Broadway in 2017. Originally starring Katrina Lenk and Tony Shaloub – who both took home acting Tonys for their performances – the story follows an Egyptian police band that becomes stranded in a tiny town in Israel for an evening of unintended cross-cultural enlightement, much of which occurs thorugh the magic of music. The Band’s Visit will play its final performance on April 7, 2019.
Arguably the hardest show for us to say goodbye to is the long-running, 2013 Tony winner for Best Musical, Kinky Boots. In an effort to save his collapsing shoe business, not to mention the jobs of his beloved employees, Charlie Price makes an unlikely partnership with the drag queen Lola. Together, they design a line of footwear for the feet of cross-dressing men, creating a bond of friendship along the way. The musical features a Tony-winning score by Cyndi Lauper and a book by Harvey Fierstein. Kinky Boots closes on April 7, 2019.
The Other Josh Cohen
This romp of a musical comedy follows Josh Cohen, an average guy who receives an unexpected inheritence, as well as a visit from his future – and better-looking – self. Full of heart, musicians who double as actors and Neil Diamond fandom, this is one of the season’s Off-Broadway favorites. The Other Josh Cohen will take its final bow on April 7, 2019.
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Budget Amendments - HB30 (Floor Approved)
VMI - Repurpose New Funding
Virginia Military Institute FY2017 ($259,860) FY2018 ($259,860) GF
Page 185, line 31, strike "$38,090,033" and insert "$37,830,173".
(This amendment defers new initiative funding and repurposes the funding as part of the House Appropriations Committee's access and affordability recommendations for higher education.)
Educational and General Programs (10000) $38,090,033 $38,091,414
Higher Education Instruction (100101) FY2017 $15,932,089 FY2018 $15,933,470
Higher Education Public Services (100103) FY2017 $71,011 FY2018 $71,011
Higher Education Academic (100104) FY2017 $5,518,327 FY2018 $5,518,327
Higher Education Student Services (100105) FY2017 $2,543,380 FY2018 $2,543,380
Higher Education Institutional Support (100106) FY2017 $7,223,738 FY2018 $7,223,738
Operation and Maintenance Of Plant (100107) FY2017 $6,801,488 FY2018 $6,801,488
Higher Education Operating FY2017 $27,928,920 FY2018 $27,928,920
Debt Service FY2017 $400,000 FY2018 $400,000
A. This Item includes general and nongeneral fund appropriations to support institutional initiatives that help meet statewide goals as described in the Restructured Higher Education Financial and Administrative Operations Act of 2005 (Chapters 933 and 945, 2005 Acts of Assembly).
B. As Virginia's public colleges and universities approach full funding of the base adequacy guidelines and as the General Assembly strives to fully fund the general fund share of the base adequacy guidelines, these funds are provided with the intent that, in exercising their authority to set tuition and fees, the Board of Visitors shall take into consideration the impact of escalating college costs for Virginia students and families. In accordance with the cost-sharing goals set forth in § 4-2.01 b. of this act, the Board of Visitors is encouraged to limit increases on tuition and mandatory educational and general fees for in-state, undergraduate students to the extent possible.
C. Resources determined by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to be uniquely military shall be excluded from the base adequacy funding guidelines.
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Jane Seymour Says She Was “Harassed” By A “Powerful Producer”
Source: TorontoSun.com
In a new interview with Megyn Kelly, Jane Seymour revealed a high-powered producer harassed her when she was in her early twenties. Jane said she was “told to go to his house” because there was a big screening of a movie with many people, but the producer said he needed to show her a “little test.”
The 66-year-old Golden Globe Winner said she – naively – went there and didn’t expect for him to make a pass at her. She explained, “you have to understand, this guy was the single most powerful man in Hollywood at the time – I mean the most.”
You are all so incredible! Thank you for sharing your videos with stories of all of the wonderful things you're doing to help others. ?? If you haven't uploaded yours yet, please film one and upload it to Instagram using #TheRoadAheadJS, then challenge a friend by tagging them and I’ll showcase some of my favorites!
A post shared by Jane Seymour (@janeseymour) on Dec 3, 2017 at 12:01pm PST
The producer allegedly told Jane she was “amazing” and was “fantastic” and was excited to include the young actress in the movie, but he implied that she had to sleep with him to get the part.
The unnamed person said to Seymour, “you know what you have to do” and put his hand on her leg. As a response, she became alarmed and backed down immediately which caused the executive to become angry.
The producer told the Wedding Crashers star, “If you ever tell anyone you won’t work in the industry ever again or anywhere in the world.”
As a result, Seymour decided it would be best to step back from Hollywood. She claimed that she “gave up” and had no intentions of returning to the USA. After some time, Jane came back to America to work on her career and had another encounter with the man.
However, she brought her agent along and avoided a possible altercation. Seymour said he didn’t even remember her. While many people are curious to know the man’s identity, she revealed that – out of respect – she wouldn’t say his name.
Read more about Jane Seymour
Xscape Member Tamika Scott Collapses On Stage During Wild Concert!
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Jennifer Lawrence Says The Harvey Weinstein Scandal Made Her “Sick In The Bones”
Source: Forbes.com
Jennifer Lawrence hasn’t been quiet when it comes to the allegations which have rocked Hollywood and society at large in recent months. The actress – in a new interview – revealed how she felt upon hearing the accusations against Harvey Weinstein for the first time, whom she had collaborated with several times.
When speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in a discussion published on the 6th of December, the Oscar winner claimed that many people in the industry urged her to talk about the allegations.
However, she needed time to process everything. The actress said there was a moment when all of the allegations against Harvey first surfaced, where her friends and acquaintances told her that it would be best to speak out.
Her friends told her, “You need to come forward, and you need to say something, and you need to condemn!” Lawrence conceded that they were right; “we do have a responsibility to say something.”
Although it would’ve been best for her to condemn Weinstein’s actions, Jennifer said: “we all needed a moment.”
#jenniferlawrence
A post shared by Jennifer Lawrence (@jenniferlawrencepx) on Dec 6, 2017 at 4:03pm PST
Despite the horrific accusations against the disgraced producer, Jennifer said he acted like a father to her. Harvey knew who she was since she was 20-years-old, so the thought of him being a rapist was truly shocking.
However, their relationship had its low points. The actress said there were moments where he was an “a*shole,” and she called him one. She said, “I thought I knew this guy, and then he’s being accused of rape.”
As you may already know, The New York Times published their devastating report on Harvey Weinstein over two months ago, and since then, many women have come forward with their own stories under the hashtag-umbrella of “#MeToo.” When The Times published an audio recording of Harvey trying to lure the model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, into his hotel room, Lawrence said it made her “sick.”
Read more about jennifer lawrence
Adele Allegedly Gearing Up To Throw Jennifer Lawrence An Awesome Bachelorette Party
Jul 7, 2019 4:34 PM PDT
Jennifer Lawrence Jokingly Complains Amy Schumer Doesn’t Have Time For Her Anymore Since Giving Birth
Jennifer Lawrence Spills Details On Her Wedding To Fiancé Cooke Maroney Following Scarlett Johansson Feud Rumors
Jun 13, 2019 11:03 PM PDT
Sandra Bullock Reveals What It Was Really Like To Work With An All Female Cast On 'Ocean's Eight'
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5-Hour Energy Cited in 13 Deaths: FDA
By Andrew Lu on November 15, 2012 12:05 PM
Those tiny 5-Hour Energy drinks may pack a bigger punch than you think: They've been cited in 13 death reports over the past four years, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
In addition, 5-Hour Energy has also been mentioned in 90 filings with the FDA that involved serious injuries such as heart attacks, convulsions, and even an abortion, reports The New York Times.
This is the second time in recent weeks that the FDA has cited a caffeinated energy drink as possibly linked to deaths. Last month, the federal agency said it had received fatality filings that cited Monster Energy drinks.
But just because an incident report mentions an energy drink doesn't necessarily mean the product caused a person's injury or death, the Times reports. Further investigation is underway.
Living Essentials, the distributor of 5-Hour Energy, insists its product is safe if used as directed, and says it is unaware of any deaths linked to the product.
Much of the debate about energy drinks like 5-Hour Energy and Monster centers on the drinks' caffeine content. In addition, many young people are using these products. It's been reported that one "shot" of 5-Hour Energy contains about 215 milligrams of caffeine. That's about twice the caffeine in a typical cup of coffee, reports the Times.
Critics say that energy drinks should bear more warning labels that detail potential health risks.
Besides requiring additional warnings, it is unclear what role the FDA can take to help the alleged victims. Survivors who blame their loved ones' deaths on energy drinks will likely have to bring a wrongful death lawsuit to receive compensation.
To win such a lawsuit, a plaintiff will likely have to prove that the drink, and not some other condition, caused a victim's death. Wrongful death lawsuits can be complicated, and those pursuing such a claim will need the assistance of an experienced attorney.
FDA reports possible link between 5-hour Energy and 13 deaths (Reuters)
Monster Energy Drinks Tied to 5 Deaths? (FindLaw's Injured)
Death by Coca-Cola: 2-Gallon-a-Day Habit Cited (FindLaw's Injured)
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Bob's BlogCast
And I am sure you will agree that was a great landing!
November 28, 2014 Uncategorizedbhuerster
I live and work near several airports. It seems like I can hear a jet or see one on the horizon every time I look up in the sky. Given the number of flights every day, the industry has a very impressive safety record. In addition to amazing technology and rigorous maintenance practices, the industry benefits from excellent pilots. One such aviator, Qantas pilot Richard de Crespigny, tells the story of how he and his crew coped with a catastrophic engine explosion on an Airbus A380 in a riveting interview entitled “Richard de Crespigny,” a segment of the program Conversations with Richard Fidler on RN, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast on July 3, 2013.
Richard Fidler starts his interview with Captain de Crespigny by asking about his background and aviation training. The Captain describes a training flight while he was in the Royal Australian Air Force. He was in a fighter jet with a more experienced pilot who suddenly put the jet into a spinning dive, then sat back smiling with his arms folded and asked de Crespigny what he was going to do now. The new pilot pulled the jet out of the dive and never took a smooth flight for granted after that experience, which left him mentally prepared to deal with a sudden emergency at any time during a flight.
Richard de Crespigny was Captain of Quantas Flight 32 out of Singapore on November fourth, 2010. Shortly after taking off, an engine exploded, causing massive damage to several of the plane’s systems. The cockpit was flooded with warning messages and alarms from the jet’s computers. In order to deal with the engine explosion in the A380 he decided to “invert the logic,” a strategy that he recalled being used by Gene Kranz, NASA’s Flight Director during the Apollo 13 mission. The idea is to switch your focus from what isn’t working to what is still functional. The crew focused on establishing that they had an aircraft with systems functioning well enough to keep flying and safely land on the runway available to them at Singapore Airport. One step in this process was to simulate some landing maneuvers while still in the air.
The passengers felt and heard the engine explode and some of them could even see fuel leaking out of the plane. As related by Captain de Crespigny, the Cabin Services Manager, Michael Von Reth, exuded calmness and confidence throughout the ordeal and kept good order in the cabin. After the crew safely executed an extremely difficult and risky landing, Von Reth went on the public address system and calmly announced “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Singapore. The local time is ten to eleven on Thursday, November fourth. And I am sure you will agree that was a great landing!”
To listen to the program, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience, visit this URL below:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/07/03/3794897.htm?site=conversations
Please, sir, I want some more.
August 27, 2014 Uncategorizedbhuerster
My favorite paragraph in any novel is the first one in “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. In addition to being a fantastic writer, Dickens was a highly influential social reformer. This point is driven home in “Please Sir, I Want Some More,” a segment on the program “Big Ideas” on RN, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast on 10/14/07. In this segment, host Terry Lane talks to Dickens biographer Jane Smiley and Professor David Paroissien, Editor of the Dickens Quarterly. When Dickens was a child his father fell deep into debt and as a result Charles had to go to work in a boot black factory and live with a highly unpleasant land lady. That experience gave him a lot of empathy for children with difficult lives. According to Smiley, Dickens broke with tradition by illustrating how mistreatment in childhood can lead to antisocial behavior in adulthood, including crime. Smiley contends that before Dickens popularized this enlightened view it was thought that people were criminals because they were born that way. Dickens also brought to light the appalling living conditions that poor Londoners had to endure. In this program an actor reads a strikingly powerful and eloquent excerpt from Oliver Twist, which describes living conditions in a slum in London.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/the-terry-lane-interviews-please-sir-i-want-some/3218642
The internal report on innovation at the New York Times.
The New York Times recently completed an internal report that assesses the paper’s difficulties in positioning itself for success in the digital era. The report was leaked and is readily available on the Internet. It’s full of insightful analysis and a great source for anyone interested in the impact the Internet has had on journalism. Joshua Benton, Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, wrote an article about the report entitled “The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age.” Mr. Benton discussed the report in a program entitled “The internal report on innovation at the New York Times,” which aired on the May 22, 2014 edition of Media Report on Radio National from Australian Public Radio.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport/the-new-york-times27-internal-digital-report/5469918
Mr. Benton’s article, through which you can access a copy of the innovation report, can be accessed at this URL:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/
Digital photography, social media and memory.
I was at the Coast Guard Beach on the National Seashore on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one recent evening and saw an amazing moon rise. The moon first appeared as a deep red semi-circle; within a few minutes the full moon was visible low over the ocean in brilliant red; as it rose higher in the sky it turned silver within about twenty minutes. As I watched the moon rise I decided to take a picture of it with my phone. A friend commented on how digital photography has changed the way people take pictures, suggesting that the ease and low cost of taking pictures often leads people to pull out cameras and photograph images instead of savoring them in the moment.
This conversation was on my mind when I listened to a radio program on this very subject from the program Future Tense on Radio National from Australian Public Radio. “Staying in the picture: photography, social media and memory” was broacast on 3/30/14. Host Antony Funnell had four guests on the show, including Dr Linda Henkel, cognitive psychologist at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Dr. Henkel described a study she conducted in which subjects visiting the Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University were instructed to either photograph objects in the museum or try to remember them. Among other findings, it turned out that those who photographed the objects had more trouble remembering what they had seen, which Dr. Henkel called the “photo-taking impairment effect.” If you want to use photos to remember an experience, Dr. Henkel advises reminiscing by looking at the photos as well as talking about and organizing them. I listen to podcasts freqently, sometimes several different programs, of varying lengths, in a single day. About five percent of them end up in this blog. I have found that unless I discuss a podcast with someone, take notes on it, or write a blog about it, I tend to forget it fairly quickly. Technology has amplified our ability to gather information in various forms, but evidence suggests that unless we take the time to think it over and, ideally, share what we have learned, we tend to retain relatively little of what we have captured in electronic form.
To listen to the program, read a transcript, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience, visit this URL below:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/staying-in-the-picture3a-photography2c-social-media-and-memory/5343646
Dr. Henkel’s study is described in a brief article, “Taking photographs ruins the memory, research finds,” published in The Telegraph, 12/10/13, available at this URL:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10507146/Taking-photographs-ruins-the-memory-research-finds.html
The Library of the Future.
July 13, 2014 Uncategorizedbhuerster
The Internet has disrupted many industries, including travel agents, brick and mortar bookstores, car dealers, and journalism (particulary newspapers and magazine newsstand sales). Public libraries have also felt the impact of the digital revolution. People only have so much time to read and digital content is taking a growing portion of that time, allowing people to access reading material without going to a library. In this podscast, “The Library of the Future,” host Paul Barclay, along with three librarians (including one American) and a writer, discuss how public libraries can survive and thrive in the new digital world. This discussion was a segment on the feature “Big Ideas” on the program RN, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast on 3/10/14.
To listen to the program, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience, visit this URL below :
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/the-library-of-the-future/5286116
Women in 1950s England; the woman behind a medical miracle; and a 19th century murder mystery set in Russia.
June 30, 2014 Uncategorizedbhuerster
When my book group read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot a few years back we had an unusually large turnout for the discussion. I found the book very interesting so I was excited to see that it was featured in one of my favorite book discussion programs, Books and Authors, on the BBC on 6/24/14. Harriet Gilbert is the host of the show. She and each of her guests pick a book and they all discuss each one in turn. Financial adviser Alvin Hall picked the book about Henrietta Lacks and lead the discussion, including his perspective as an African American who grew up in segregation around the time a scientist removed some cancer cells from Ms. Lacks, also an African American, without her permission, and without informing her family. These cells were widely used in medical research, including the development of the polio vaccine.
Journalist and author India Knight chose the novel “Jane and Prudence” by Barbara Pym and lead that discussion. This novel, about the lives of two women in England in the 1950s couldn’t be more different than the book about Henrietta Lacks. I never thought I would be interested in reading a book by Ms. Pym, but after hearing about her witty social observations I might give this one a try. The discussion was at times hilarious. The last book, recommended by Harriett Gilbert, was “The Winter Queen” by Boris Akunin, which according to Ms. Gilbert was very popular in Russia recently. In addition to being a very good story, it was noted that the translation from Russian is outstanding.
This edition of Books and Authors was especially entertaining because of the wit, humor, and insightful comments from Ms. Gilbert and her two guests. To listen to the program, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience, visit the URL below, then scroll down until you come to the program entitled “A Good Read: India Knight and Alvin Hall,” and dated 6/24/14.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/openbook
How much would you pay for this blog post?
May 12, 2014 Uncategorizedbhuerster
Online publishers are trying to figure out how they can afford to deliver quality digital journalism when so much content from competitors is available to consumers for free. Publishers have tried different experiments with paywalls over the years, some more successful than others. As explained in NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday on May 03, 2014, Slate was one of the first online magazines to try a pay wall in 1998, but the effort failed and they had to stop charging for content. David Folkenflik of NPR points out that Slate “can’t simply expect that online advertising and some of the revenue they get from their podcasts, from which they derive about 20 percent of their revenues, will be enough to sustain the journalism” people have come to expect from them.
In a new effort to earn money to run the site, Slate has launched Slate Plus, described on the site as “an all-access pass for readers who support our journalism and want a closer connection to it.” For $5 a month or $50 a year, members will have exclusive access to Slate writers, as well as access to private events, and enhanced podcasts. Articles will still be free to those who don’t sign up for Slate Plus, says Folkenflik. Jacob Weisberg, the chairman of the Slate Group, reportedly “wants readers of Slate to think of themselves as customers of Slate, or even as members of Slate.” It will be interesting to see if this model, akin to the way NPR funds its journalism, will work for Slate.
To listen to the program, or download a podcast to listen to at your convenience, visit the URL below:
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/03/309213598/slate-plus-offers-readers-inside-access-for-a-fee
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Cork Airport Appoints New Head of Operational Security and Police
Deirdre O’Donovan has been appointed as the new Head of Operational Security and Police at Cork Airport.
Ms O’Donovan has worked at Cork Airport for over 25 years with her most recent role as Operations and Safety Manager. Her new role will involve responsibility for the full spectrum of the aviation security operations at Cork Airport and will report directly to the Managing Director at Cork Airport, Niall MacCarthy.
The new appointment comes as Cork Airport, Ireland’s fastest growing and most punctual Airport, recently announced plans to invest up to €10m in security capital expenditure (Hold Baggage Screening Project) in the next eighteen months.
Speaking on her new role, Ms O’Donovan said: “I am delighted to lead the Security Operations and Police at Cork Airport and I am passionate about airport excellence. The Airport is in its fourth consecutive year of growth, with passenger numbers forecasted to reach 2.6 million this year. The safety and security of our passengers, along with staff and airline partners, is of utmost importance for me personally and all the team at Cork Airport and I will be working with my team to maintain and enhance the secure facility and services that already exist.”
Managing Director at Cork Airport, Niall MacCarthy commented: “Deirdre brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to her new role. I have great confidence in her personally as well as her abilities and professionalism. I look forward to supporting her in new security role.”
As a result of Deirdre’s new appointment, Eamon O’Donovan will return to Cork Airport to take up the role of Operations and Safety Manager in the coming weeks. Eamon had previously worked as Retail Manager at Cork Airport for two years, prior to his year-long role as General Manager with Caribbean ARI based in Barbados.
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July 30, 2008 / 12:30 AM / 11 years ago
Columbus debunker sets sights on Leonardo da Vinci
Tim Castle
LONDON (Reuters) - Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them, a British amateur historian says in a newly-published book.
British historian Gavin Menzies speaks during an interview with Reuters at his home in north London July 15, 2008. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico
Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with the claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus.
Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopedias of technology undiscovered by the West to Italy in 1434, laying the foundation for the engineering marvels such as flying machines later drawn by Italian polymath Leonardo.
“Everything known to the Chinese by the year 1430 was brought to Venice,” said Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, in an interview at his north London home.
From Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says.
“I argue in the book that this was the spark that really ignited the renaissance and that Leonardo and (Italian astronomer) Galileo built on what was brought to them by the Chinese.
“Leonardo basically redrew everything in three dimensions, which made a vast improvement.”
If accepted, the claim would force an “agonizing reappraisal of the Eurocentric view of history,” Menzies says in his book “1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance.”
The urbane 70-year-old sold more than a million copies of his first book, “1421,” which argued Chinese sailors mapped the world in the early 1400s shortly before abandoning global seafaring.
His theories are dismissed as nonsense by many academics — Menzies says Chinese fleets reached Australia and New Zealand as well as America before European explorers — but have gained an international following among readers.
“This whole fantasy about Europe discovering the world is just nonsense,” said Menzies.
In his latest book — published in the United States in June and this month in Britain — Menzies says four ships from the same Chinese expeditions reached Venice, bringing with them world maps, astronomical charts and encyclopedias far in advance of anything available in Europe at the time.
Menzies says Leonardo’s designs for machines can be traced back to this transfer of Chinese knowledge.
Leonardo, born in 1452, is perhaps best known for his enigmatic “Mona Lisa” portrait of a woman in Paris’s Louvre Museum, but he also left journals filled with intricate engineering and anatomical illustrations.
Menzies says designs for gears, waterwheels and other devices contained in Chinese encyclopedias reached Leonardo after being copied and modified by his Italian antecedents Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio.
To support his argument, Menzies publishes drawings of siege weapons, mills and pumps from a 1313 Chinese agricultural treatise, the Nung Shu, and from other pre-1430 Chinese books, next to apparently similar illustrations by Leonardo, Di Giorgio and Taccola.
“By comparing Leonardo’s drawings with the Nung Shu we have verified that each element of a machine superbly illustrated by Leonardo had previously been illustrated by the Chinese in a much simpler manual,” Menzies writes.
“It’s very suggestive, very interesting, but the hard work remains to be done,” said Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University and author of books on Leonardo.
“He (Menzies) says something is a copy just because they look similar. He says two things are almost identical when they are not,” Kemp said.
“It’s not strong on historical method,” he added. But Kemp said he would look out for any signs that Leonardo had access to Chinese material, directly or indirectly, when studying his manuscripts in future.
“I will keep my eye open, without thinking it is going to turn Leonardo studies or any studies of 15th century technology upside down.”
Kemp said the source of the claimed Chinese influence was a separate issue.
“There is a whole series of questions a historian would ask about mediaeval technology, about Islamic technology, about transmission across trade routes, the Silk Route in particular.
“It’s a terrifically complicated area and having a Chinese person in Florence in 1434 ends up giving that person a hell of a lot of work to do.”
Menzies bases his claim that a Chinese ambassador went to Florence on a copy of a letter dated 1474 by Italian mathematician Toscanelli found among Columbus’s papers.
Menzies publishes a translation from the letter reading: “In the days of Pope Eugenius there came a Chinese ambassador to him,” although this is not explicit in the original Latin text.
“It’s drivel,” said Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a British expert on maritime exploration who is a professor of history at Tufts University in the United States and at Queen Mary College, University of London.
“No reputable scholar would think that there is any reason to suppose that the person referred to by Toscanelli was Chinese,” he told Reuters.
Geoff Wade, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, said Menzies’ book and theories should be reclassified as historical fiction.
“Certainly Chinese ideas came to Europe and European ideas went to Iran and onwards,” Wade said in a telephone interview.
“But the premise of the book that there was a Chinese fleet in 1434 which went to Italy is completely without any substance.
“There is absolutely no Chinese evidence for it.”
Menzies brushes off the criticism, pointing to shelves of files in the rooms of his basement study filled with material he says supports his theories, much contributed by readers of his books and associated Web sites.
“I say the claim that critics make that there is no evidence is absolute rubbish. There is stacks and stacks of evidence.
“It’s not me that’s the fantasist, it’s the historians who persist in this complete rubbish which is currently taught as history.”
Editing by Janet Lawrence
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Wine Tasting Rooms
New Website knows where ‘Dolores 3 SW of Ocean’ is.
By MARY SCHLEY – The Pine Cone – 9/22/2017, Page 3A
AS MOST tourists — and more than a few residents — know, finding a particular shop, restaurant or office in town can be difficult. With no numbered addresses, Google and Apple maps are generally at a loss when it comes to asking them to pinpoint a certain business. Instead, they might give you a ballpark location on a street, with no guarantee it’s actually near the place you want to be.
But Mike Bass, a longtime tech expert who went to work for himself in 2008, has solved that problem. His Carmel.Guide website (https://carmel.guide) includes exact locations and can provide walking or driving directions to 500 businesses in town.
“I think it solves a fundamental problem for end-users and business owners — a problem that Google and Apple maps have solved for every city in the country except Carmel,” said Bass, who lives in Santa Cruz but is often here for work as a consultant.
“What happens when a tourist looks for a business in Carmel? It just puts them on Dolores, but maybe near First, and they’re walking past houses,” he explained. “They don’t know whether Google is taking them on a wild goose chase or to an accurate marker.” In contrast, Carmel.Guide leads them to the front doors of whatever businesses they’re searching for downtown.
The guide, which Bass recently put online, “will not only benefit visitors, but also the city as a whole, economically,” he said. While creating it took “hundreds of low-tech hours,” including entering information about each business’ services, website, operating hours, location and other details by hand, Bass doesn’t charge people to use Carmel.Guide, or to be listed in it. Any business in town that’s not already included can simply create an account to be added, and anyone can use it to conduct a search.
Bass believes he has almost all downtown businesses in it already, but he wants to be sure to capture any that might have fallen through the cracks. “Participation from the business owners is key, so the only other part of the equation is that they know it’s free and always will be, because it has to be, in order to work,” he said. That’s because charging would mean some business owners might choose not to participate, which would leave gaps in the information the guide provides.
“I could have created something where I told everyone to create their listing, but it would take five years, and there would still be gaps,” he said. “You either do them all — and there are a lot of them — or you don’t do it.”
Bass spent decades working for big high-tech firms in Silicon Valley before heading out on his own in 2008. His company, Imagineer Design, offers tech support, website development, and photography and video services. While he hopes Carmel.Guide might bring him more customers, he said he just wants a lot of people to use it because it works.
“I’m an idea guy — that’s always been my fascination. How can tech do good things? Make businesses more efficient? It has to be useful,” he said.
And while he might be able to make money by selling ads on Carmel.Guide, they would add clutter. “I know my audience: It’s the tourist who puts that phone in their hand, so the focus is on user interface,” he said. “You can’t clog it up with ads. It has to be a few clicks to find a business and get there. It needs to be lean and mean.”
Bass calls this first version of the guide “Phase 1,” and plans to expand its offerings to help connect people and businesses in Big Sur and elsewhere, and perhaps to create a version that can be used even without a cell signal.
Services Listings
Copyright ©2019 by Imagineer Design. All rights reserved.
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A Multitude of Computer Programming Languages
According to one online programming fanatic, there are 2500 computer programming languages in use today, by someone, somewhere. This article will stick to the languages that are in widespread use today which, by themselves, number perhaps a score or more and are difficult to separate and categorize anyway.
As with many terms in the computer industry, the definition of what constitutes a programming language is subject to debate. One definition holds that a programming language (like other languages) is a set of formal specifications that define syntax, vocabulary and meaning. An interesting crossover to the language arts: here are the criteria contained in that definition:
Data types Data structures Instruction and control flow Design philosophy Compilation and interpretation
Without getting into detail on what those components mean, they do provide some idea of what constitutes a language. It’s a construction design tool with its own proprietary building materials. Some languages are designed and function best with certain categories of software. Here is a list of commonly used programming languages:
READ Study Computer Science Online
Java and PHP are languages that are principally used for internet applications, although Java was designed by Sun Computers with the hope of a much further reach.
Visual Basic is a language developed to be accessible to all programmers for building applications that run on Microsoft platforms. It has been immensely popular because of its ease of use. Visual Basic.net is also on the market today, applying the techniques developed in Visual Basic to an HTML environment. The drag-and-drop feature is an example of a Visual Basic innovation. The program can be used to create an attractive graphical user interface (GUI) with ease. GUI is the appearance of the screen you see when the program is open, and how the buttons and controls on that screen function.
C was developed in Bell Labs in the early seventies as an all purpose computer language. Its successor, C++, differs from C in that it is an object-oriented programming language, providing a fundamentally different set of tools. C++ has been so commonly used that one version of it has gained semi-official status as a programming standard under the acronym ANSI (American National Standards Institute).
READ Minnesota Colleges and Universities Pursuing Online and Campus Based Education in Minnesota
Both Java and dBase are used to create database programs. SQL is another Microsoft-based language that is used for database programs and for data transmission protocols. Increasingly, database programs are becoming the realm of business software producers such as Oracle and Siebel, producing sophisticated database programs that require installation and training from the company’s sales staff.
The History of the C Programming Language
To C or Not To C – That is the Programming Question
Computer Programming – What is it
Computer Programming Concepts
Online Computer Science Degree A Possible Entryway to a Career in the FBI
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Iso Grifo A3/C: Recreating The Riveted Race Car
by Ralf Becker Tuesday 4 December, 2018 Published in Video
Skip the coffee and ditch the Red Bull today, it’s time to upgrade your morning ritual with an Iso Grifo A3/C and the accompanying soundtrack of a modified small-block Chevy echoing in the hills of Bergamo. Almost impossibly low and wide, it is only more striking today than when it debuted in the 1960s. The original cars are exceedingly rare today, and their story in period was rather short-lived and fraught with disagreements between the men responsible for its creation. It was really Giotto Bizzarrini’s baby, and the great Italian motorsport mind—having such cars as the Ferrari 250 GTO and Breadvan to his credit—did not half-ass it when it came to the A3/C either. The Corvette-sourced engine was robust and reliable, Giugiaro’s wind-tunnel-developed shape was endlessly sexy, but the car wasn’t destined to live up to the greatness of the men who built it. Today’s film star is an exacting recreation of one of the original ten cars produced with the riveted alloy bodywork, and better yet it’s owned by a former employee of Iso, who today runs a restoration business that is emphatically the place to go for a perfect restorations of the marque’s machines. See the photoshoot and read more here: https://petro.li/IsoGrifoGallery Drive Tastefully® http://Petrolicious.com http://facebook.com/Petrolicious
Show Video Related Items from Catalogue Show Related Tags youtube#video, phT5RoLfz28, video
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Unable to connect. Please check your internet connection.
FIDE Women's World Championship
Socko, Monika vs. Shvayger, Yuliya
The 2018 FIDE Women's World Chess Championship, held from November 3-23 in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, features 64 players in a series of knockout matches. The early rounds are two games each, plus a tiebreak if necessary. The final is a match of four games, plus a possible tiebreak, with the winner declared the Women's World Champion. The prize fund is USD $450,000 with the winner taking home $60,000. Players receive 90 minutes for the first 40 moves followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game with a 30-second increment from move one. The tiebreaks consist of two 25 min + 10-sec increment rapid games, then if needed two additional 10+10 games, two 5+3 blitz games and finally a single Armageddon game, where White has 5 minutes to Black's 4, but a draw counts as a win for Black. Official website: chess2018.ugrasport.com
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Newly HIV-Infected Gay Men Select Other Infected Partners
Study finds men engaging in unprotected sex, but with those already carrying the virus
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 5, 2007 (HealthDay News) -- Most men newly infected with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) choose to have unprotected sex only with other HIV-infected partners, say U.S. researchers who analyzed data from six clinics in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, New Haven, San Diego and Providence, R.I.
The study included 27 men with acute HIV infection. This refers to the one-month period immediately following HIV infection, when a person tends to have the highest levels of HIV circulating in their blood. This makes it much more likely they'll infect a partner during unprotected sex.
More than 90 percent of the patients in the study were men who have sex with men.
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"While the findings showed condom use was up and the number of partners was down, the most startling effect was seen in men choosing to have unprotected intercourse almost exclusively with other HIV-infected individuals. This reflects a systematic shift by men, most of whom are gay, following HIV infection to behaviors that protect their sex partners," lead author Wayne Steward, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, said in a prepared statement.
Prior to HIV infection, the men in the study had unprotected sex with HIV-negative or HIV-unknown partners almost 75 percent of the time. After learning they were infected with HIV, there was a major change in their behavior. They started having unprotected sex with other HIV-positive partners 97 percent of the time.
The finding has implication for HIV prevention efforts, Steward said. "If all you are doing is counting condom usage, you are missing a powerful risk-reduction strategy that is actually taking place," he said. "In addition, this study highlights the importance of identifying acute or recent HIV infections, so that this partner selection strategy can be implemented at the critical juncture when individuals are most infectious and when our data show they engage in behaviors reflecting strong motivations to avoid infecting someone else."
The study was to be presented Wednesday at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. It comes on the heels of new data from two U.S. studies, released at the same meeting Monday, that found that about a third of HIV-infected gay or bisexual men report having recently engaged in unsafe sex.
However, in many cases, men were selecting other HIV-positive partners when engaging in unsafe sex, a practice called "serosorting," the studies' researchers said.
The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about reducing HIV/AIDS risk.
SOURCE: University of California, San Francisco, news release, Dec. 5, 2007
Last Updated: Dec 5, 2007
Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Mike Polk
See: Comedians
Posted by pengo at 3:24 PM 1 comment:
Labels: hipsters, Mike Polk, stand-up
The St. Louis Compass
Crystal Palace, St. Louis
"The third Compass to play St. Louis, again at the Crystal, was produced in the spring of 1962 and featured Jack Burns and Larry Hankin … Hildy Brooks (then known as Hilda Brawner), Martin Lavut, and Maggie Sullivan under the direction of George Sherman.” - Something Wonderful Right Away (Sweet, Jeffrey)
When I was enrolled at Ohio University, the head of the MFA Directing Program was George Sherman. It is a shame I did not return to O.U. to receive a Masters in Directing from him before he retired. Though I only took one course from him, he was a strong presence at the school, and I had great respect for the work he drew out of those in his program. He had a big smile, and a wonderful snorting laugh.
The one course I did take was Improvisation. Freshman year we received basic improv training from Denny Dalen, geared more in the direction of “club” improv. Though I grew remarkably as a performer under Denny’s tutelage, improvisation was George’s domain, and I soaked in experience during that one quarter course which has served me for the past twenty and more years.
However, it was before working with him that I got the idea to interview him for this paper I would write about improv for Mel Helitzer’s comedy class. It was probably Denny who suggested the idea, informing me that George had once been a member of The Second City, which is not entirely accurate. It was George who first told me of The Compass Players. Following the success of the Compass, and its offspring The Second City, branches of each opened in other cities through the late fifties and early sixties -- and, you know, even today in the case of Second City.
Compass originator David Shepherd had started a Compass in St. Louis in 1957 at the Crystal Palace, which went bust soon after. They tried again in 1959, and again it did not last long. And again in 1962. And that is where George comes in.
The fact is, I do not know where to proceed from here. I haven’t seen George since college, and I have only so far made a cursory attempt to find him. He’s not in the Athens phone book, we may assume he left some time ago.
Another fact is, I never finished my paper on improvisation. I interviewed George, who was very informative and interesting and spoke of many things I did not at that time understand. If there microcassette recording of the interview exists somewhere in my home, I have no idea where it is. But I recently found the notes, and they are spare but kind of interesting.
((These are not exact quotes, but reconstructions based on 23 year old notes.))
QUESTION: So, tell me about your work with Second City.
ANSWER: I wasn’t a member of The Second City.
QUESTION: Oh, uh, but I thought …
ANSWER: I was a director for the Compass Players. The Compass Players started in the late 40s or early 50s at a saloon near the University of Chicago by David Shepherd and Paul Sills. Shepherd was the intellectual of the bunch, in 1962 he started a branch of the Compass in St. Louis, we rehearsed in a big, airy basement. There was Alan Alda, Hildy Brooks, Jack Burns, Diana Sands …
Shepherd would create the premise for a scenario, we would perform object work, and create characters. He’d give us a place and time -- for example, in 1961 Jackie Kennedy gave the people a televised tour of the White House, that is a true story. So Hildy created a scene where she played Nina Khrushchev as this motherly type giving a tour of the “red House” in Moscow, or what have you.
QUESTION: This was an improvised performance?
ANSWER: No. It was developed in a workshop. Everything -- everything you see at Second City today, for example, it is all finished material, developed in a workshop.
{{2011 QUESTION: So, David Shepherd had a hand in the 1957 St. Louis Compass? Did he attempt to make it a “people’s theater”? What role did class and politics play in your work?
ANSWER: (Janet Coleman, “The Compass”) “Shepherd found … producer’s chores, as usual, unfulfilling. He was in a hurry to get back to scenario writing … he did not bear in mind Grotowski’s precept: the theatre belongs to whoever is making it.”
ANSWER: (Del Close, “The Compass”) “I’d had enough of his bullshit about ‘you’re an upper-middle-class housewife in love with a middle-class white-collar worker with lower-class parents.’ As soon as he left, things began to work.”}}
QUESTION: Where did the Compass perform?
ANSWER: We performed at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis. Hildy, Jack … Larry Harkin, he was tall, beautiful not verbal, Martin Lavut ... Lavut was quite knowledgeable, good with verbal styles.
The comedy comes from character. There is a sketch we developed that is still used today, the “Van Sketch.” Two people are driving all night in a van, and each tries to keep the other awake. It doesn’t work unless each has a well-developed character and is committed to the act of keeping the other person awake.
QUESTION: When I asked about improvisation in class, Mel said there is no such thing as improvisation. Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, they prepare everything, it’s all a schtick, it’s all written and planned and they spring it on the audience and it looks like it came from nowhere.
ANSWER: Don’t tell me Jonathan Winters doesn’t improvise. In 1960 or something, he was cutting promos for a show, they just let the tape run for three or fours hour, huge improvised reams of tape. Sure, much of it would end up in some act. But he starts with, he draws on a character. And he can go anywhere.
Bert Lahr said “a comic says funny things, a comedian says things funny.” That is what makes a comedian more endearing than a teller of jokes. The Smothers Brothers routine couldn’t exist without it having grown out of their genuine relationship.
QUESTION: But I am confused. Is a Second City performance improvised or isn’t it?
ANSWER: Early in the week we would have improv sessions. Tuesday, Wednesday night, for people willing for something different. This would be pure improv. What works becomes polished in rehearsal. For the Saturday midnight show, everybody knows everything. We’d use lights to control the bits, wherever the scene was, we would end it on a huge laugh by taking the lights out.
If the show was dying, we’d dim the lights slowly. Lavut was hilarious, he refused to quit and the scene would become about the power going out.
The main show is rehearsed, out of free-form work. We did not think it was fair for people paying top price to receive the rehearsal itself.
... and scene.
Something Wonderful Right Away (Jeffery Sweet)
The Compass (Janet Coleman)
Posted by pengo at 10:05 PM 2 comments:
Labels: comedy, George Sherman, improvisation, Mel Helitzer, Ohio University, Something Wonderful Right Away, The Compass, The Compass (book)
Commemorative Superman Fence Damaged
Car hits decorated fence at Ohio 'Superman house'
CLEVELAND (AP) — A car has taken out part of a fence paying tribute to Superman around the Cleveland home where two high school kids created the Man of Steel.
The picket fence around the childhood home of Joe Shuster is decorated with large metal plates reprinting the first Superman story from a 1938 comic book. The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reports Tuesday night's crash damaged seven of the 15 color plates.
Neighborhood development director Tracey Kirksey tells the newspaper she believes a man who lives near the house hit the fence with his car. She says he wants to pay for the damage.
Last month, a historical marker honoring Shuster and classmate and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was stolen in the same Glenville area of Cleveland. It was returned undamaged weeks later.
Sources: Associated Press
Labels: Glenville, Joe Shuster, Superman
Mel Helitzer
Melvin Helitzer (October 18, 1924 - April 11, 2009) remains a legend at Ohio University, where for decades he was the professor of the Humor Writing for Fun and Profit course, in addition to other journalism classes. The class taught how to write for greeting cards, political speeches, cartoons. It's claim to fame, however, was the final exam which was five minutes of stand-up in front of a sold-out audience of their peers.
In the old days it was held in the Frontier Room, a bar. So the audience was drunk. When the campus went dry and the venue became the Front Room - a coffee house - the audience was still drunk but now also high on caffeine.
Prior to his "retirement" as college professor, Helitzer was one of the "Mad Men" (fo shizz) a Clio-Award winning advertising executive, though his work tended more toward and emphasis on toy companies, cereal and candy than cigarettes and bourbon. Mel was a WWII vet, and a hard-working journalist.
In spite of this sterling reputation, I was a young turk who thought he knew what's what about comedy, and saw Mel Helitzer and his class as Henny Youngman 101.
And so, I was a little confused when the director for Comedians (whose name I cannot recall) invited Mel Helitzer to participate in a symposium on comedy as part of the promotion for the play. I mean, in hindsight, duh, of course, he’s a nationally-known comedy instructor. He was an expert on writing comedy, for stand-up, for print, television, advertising, politics, public speaking. Good gracious, he wrote the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle!
But from my perspective a) he was representative of the kind of fatuous comedy that is sent up as reprehensible and empty in the play in question and b) this 20 year-old thought he was a hack. He did a few minutes of stand-up for our benefit, and every third joke was one I’d heard someone else tell before. It was unbearable. Take my life. Please.
Not to mention the fact that when the director in question did his own five minutes of stand-up at the symposium, it was like hearing watered down Robin Williams. And by 1988, I was already entirely done with Robin Williams.
Which is why, when signing up for winter semester classes, I enrolled in Humor Writing for Fun and Profit. Because in spite of my feeling like I already knew everything about everything, I had enough fire to try and beat the old horse at his own game.
It was challenging, it really was. I am not good at writing comedy. I don’t know how better to put it, but I find it very hard to slow down the thought process in my writing. I know where I am going with something, so I find difficult to spell everything out and bring people along. Gags I come up with seem so obvious I don’t even write them down, and then what I do put on paper is so obscure no one gets it but me. So that was an education. And Mel was invaluable in teaching me about the rule of three (okay, that one is easy) but also timing, set-ups, slow down!
But we had great, enjoyable conflicts about content. My routine was intentionally psychotic, half a series of jokes aimed largely at myself. I refused to make fun of others … except vague others like “ugly people” which could mean anything, and of course, Wham! Unfortunately, the Wham! joke was supposed to just be a weird twist on the old joke about separating the men from the boys in the Greek army, but in hindsight it comes off as homophobic. Sorry about that.
I think the real joke is that I love George Michael, and everybody knows it.
The second half devolves in this uncomfortable Oedipal shaggy dog story, which got laughs, and made people squirm. Mel hated that part AND YET was instrumental in improving upon my delivery. He didn’t like it, but he made it better.
Most people audit Mel’s class. But then you have to pay for it. I wanted to take it for a grade, but then in addition to the live performance, you also have to write a paper. I was going to argue the superiority of improv over stand-up.
Labels: comedy, Humor Writing for Fun and Profit, Mel Helitzer, Ohio University, stand-up
"I should be drinking a toast to absent friends
Instead of these comedians."
My junior year was the year of comedy. Stand-up comedy. One of the main stage productions that fall at the Ohio University School of Theatre was Comedians by British playwright Trevor Griffiths. In brief, the play is about an older man who teaches an after-hours course in stand-up to working class guys in Manchester. The final exam is a five-minute routine at a local pub.
However, when the instructor’s old partner shows up, a very successful British comedian and talent agent, and announces he is scouting for new talent and will be attending that night’s event, well, that raises the stakes considerably, doesn’t it?
These two men of a certain age have differing opinions about comedy, and its uses. Morecambe and Wise vs. Angry Young Men, don’t you know. The guy in downtrodden, 1970s era Manchester, scraping his living, thinks of comedy as a time-honored art form best employed to divine difficult truths. The other gentleman is about entertainment and money -- If you can get everyone in the room to laugh at the fat kid in the front row, you win!
Also in 1988, when Tom Hanks was still willing to risk playing an asshole, he starred in the film Punchline, which might be my favorite role he’s played. A middle-aged housewife (Sally Field) is having a midlife crisis and wants to try out stand-up. Hanks' character is a moderately successful, workaday comedian, kind of a dick troubled character, and takes her under his wing.
"But, doctor ... I am Pagliacci."
Comedians, it turns out, are not happy people. They are bitter, angry people. The best ones can be charming, lose themselves in the content of their “character” and who can cleverly cut down everyone around them but remain adored. Caustic, scorched earth comedians offend everyone and most often flame-out. I don't need to name them. The ones with the longest self-life are beloved, unknowable clowns. Who is Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson? Who cares, they’re funny.
That school year was also my year of graphic novels. The daily comic strip I had written during my sophomore year had been cancelled, but as a result of that experience I had begun delving beyond strips and books, and into what Art Spiegelman called “comix.”
Junior year was when I began reading Harevy Pekar, Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw, and Watchmen, an underground comic posing as a superhero book. Watchmen famously features a character called The Comedian, an psychopathic mercenary who plays the American system to the hilt, G. Gordon Liddy with the expertise, style and strength of Batman. He wears the iconic “smiley face” button that is the signature gaphic for Watchmen. It’s also his blood that gets splattered on it.
He’s The Comedian. He gets the joke.
The second act of Comedians features all of the younger performers presenting their schtick. To the playwright’s credit (and the abilitiy of the actors) the routines actually do make the audience, the actual theater audience, laugh -- or not, if they are supposed to be lackluster. All the student had been instructed carefully to look into themselves, to find the humor within. When one comedian’s work begins to flag, he starts making racist jokes which are unfortunately hilarious. Win! A team of brothers have a melt-down onstage, however, when one of them tries to pull the same thing in the middle of their act, and the other refuses to.
The final comedian, Gethin Price, is entirely balls-out bizarre. It’s more like performance art, it isn’t "funny", it’s a grotesque lashing out against the upper class. It is COMEDY. I wasn’t in this production, but I was very interested by it, read the script in advance. I had made acquaintance of the guy playing Price -- he was an O.U. Alum, a visiting artist -- and gave him a Watchmen pin I had gotten from the Uptown Mini Maul. He was thrilled, and got permission from the costumer to pin it on costume.
I like comedy. I like funny. I do not like comedians. In general, I find them to be misanthropic, mean-spirited people. And the only thing worse than a comedian is an improv comedian.
Labels: Comedians (play), comedy, comic books, Ohio University, Punchline, stand-up, Tom Hanks, Watchmen
Gleason's
William "Jap" Gleason (Cleveland's most successful impresario! The man that finds and makes the stars!) opened his jazz joint at 5219 Woodland near East 52nd St. in 1942. Blues were also a heavy favorite of the owner's, and attracted artists like Bo Diddley and B.B. King. Legend has it a young James Brown, in addition to singing, would sweep up to make a few extra bucks.
By the early 50s it was the home of interracial mixing to enjoy rhythm and blues. By 1952 WJW disc jockey Alan Freed was calling the stuff "rock and roll" and he and his entourage could regularly be found at Gleason's having late night supper and listening to the likes of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Muddy Waters and Big Maybelle Smith.
The advertisement above features The Metronomes, an r&b group (made up of several John Adams High graduates) that won Gleason's Fame And Fortune Contest on March 4, 1954. Their prize was a week-long engagement.
My father told me that when he was in high school he would frequent jazz clubs where the segregation apparent virtually everywhere else in the city was ignored. I need to ask if Gleason's was one of them. One local jazz trumpeter named Earl Douthitt described Gleason's as "a jamming joint, a good spot with no problems, an orderly crowd that came to listen to the music."
Jazzed In Cleveland (Joe Mosbrook)
Marv Golderg's R&B Notebooks
Labels: Alan Freed, Gleason's, James Brown, jazz, John Adams High School, nightclub, race, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, WJW
100 Days In Cleveland
Hot Sauce Williams on Carnegie
This is why it pays to be friends with Larry Collins on Facebook. Today he posted a link to 100 Days In Cleveland, which is now my favorite blog in the universe. Julia Kuo has a mission to draw or paint her favorite places in Cleveland, one day at a time for 100 days.
Make it a year, Julia! Please! These are utterly beautiful and every one of them makes me so happy.
Marc's on Coventry
If you hadn't noticed, I keep a Cleveland-oriented blogroll at left (Cleveland: It's Fun!) Please feel free to suggest others. kliːvlənd recently announced its own demise. Wimp.
Labels: 100 Days In Cleveland, kliːvlənd
My investigation into the 1950s seems to involve a lot of cheap food products.
Ettore "Hector" Boiardi (October 22, 1897 – June 21, 1985) was born in Piacenza, Italy and passed through Ellis Island when he was 16 years old. By the time he was 20 years-old he was the head chef of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York City.
Really? That's what it says. Amazing, there's your American success story for you, right there. His abilities attracted the attentions of the owners of the Windham Hotel, who lured him to Cleveland. He must have been some kind of business entrepreneur because in 1924, before he was even close to 30, Boiardi has opened his own restaurant, Il Giardino d'Italia (The Garden of Italy) at the corner of East 9th and Woodland. He lived at that time at 2501 Arlington Road in Cleveland Heights.
Now, the foods we traditionally think of as "Italian" in this country are based on the simple, inexpensive meals prepared by the poor immigrants who were looking for a new way of life. Italian cuisine was and is diverse and interesting - in Italy. But in the United States in those days it meant pasta and sauce. Experiencing the relative cheapness of the basic ingredients only made the portions larger, not more adventurous.
As the Depression stretched on, spaghetti and the entire Italian food craze was in full swing, and Il Giardino was a hit. Citizens clamored to take home Boiardi's sauce, which he was happy to sell to them, originally in milk bottles with a bag of dry noodles and Parmesan cheese to go with. He soon built a factory to keep up with demand.
"Hello, may I come in?"
Chef Boyardee TV commercial, 1953
You make it look so good.
World War II was where the Chef really hit the big-time, creating easy-to-prepare canned spaghetti for the Allies. By this time, his well-known canned pasta products were selling under the name "Boy-Ar-Dee" in a successful attempt to get everyone to pronounce his name correctly.
Like so much else that gave "our boys" comfort during the war, demand continued when they returned to the States.
DID YOU KNOW ..? Self-adhesive stamps were designed to provide to soldiers during the 1991 Persian Gulf War because gummed stamps were useless to carry around in the deserts of the Middle East -- and that their domestic introduction was due to, you guessed it, demand from Iraq War vets? True story.
Though operations moved to Pennsylvania during the 1930s, he remained a dedicated Cleveland restaurateur, opening Chef Boiardi's in 1931, and becoming a part-owner in several other local establishments.
Chef Boyardee died in Parma. And haven't we all, at least once?
Cool History of Cleveland
Cleveland Heights Historical Society
Labels: Chef Boyardee, Cleveland Heights, Cleveland Heights Historical Society, Cool History of Cleveland, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Giardino d'Italia, Hector Boiardi, processed food, Windham Hotel
We're going bowlin' ... so don't leave 'er in Solon.
Ladies and gentlemen ... Charlie Mosbrook.
We are having a big Cleveland weekend.
Tonight it's Noblefest, the annual PTA fundraiser/carnival held at my daughter's elementary school. It was cancelled last week due to (what else?) rain, and Hell or highwater, literally, it will be taking place this evening. Come join us!
Tomorrow at noon begins the Hessler Street Fair. Time to buy a big, fat pea pod sandwich and a lemonade, get the boy a new tie-dye, straightarm the Communists and listen to the hippie-dippie stylings of Charlie Mosbrook
Charlie goes on at 2 PM people, be there.
If we have been left behind at 6 pm, then the Great Lakes Theater Festival Stratford-Upon-Avon High School Prom is my next stop ... I am playing Vice Principal Shakespeare and the girl will be attending as one of my sprites. Just spent the morning fixing up Gray's Armory in anticipation of the event.
I need to post about the Armory some time soon, it's fascinating.
Sunday, the boy celebrates his sixth birthday in Full Cleveland style, having a big old bowling party at Freeway Lanes in Solon.
Labels: bowling, Charlie Mosbrook, Gray's Armory, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Hessler Street Fair, Noble Elementary, Noblefest
The Day the Earth Stood Still
During the week of February 17 - 24, 1954 President Eisenhower was enjoying a golfing expedition in Palm Springs, CA. On the evening of February 20, he was not to be found, having "disappeared" from his itinerary. The official explanation was that he had broken a tooth while consuming a chicken dinner.
He was actually at Edwards Air Force Base, meeting visitors from outer space. The President, with Howard Hughes, examined the visitors vehicle, which they accidentally crashed on Earth, and met with the extraterrestrial crew.
On the evening in question, the Associated Press reported that "Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs." AP retracted this information two minutes later.
The aliens, of a type referred to as Nordics or Aryans because of their, pale, human-like appearance, made a Day The Earth Stood Still-type offer: to impart technology and wisdom in exchange for mankind giving up on nuclear weapons, the employment of which have damaging effects which reach far beyond our own atmosphere, even as far as their home in the Pleiades.
Eisenhower turned down their offer.
The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in 1951.
Billy Booth, about.com
Labels: Edwards Airforce Base, Eisenhower, Howard Hughes, Nordics, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Visitors
Chip Sheppard
Samuel Reese "Chip" Sheppard (b. May 18, 1947) was sleeping in the next room when his mother was savagely bludgeoned to death. It happened some time before 5:50 in the morning, when his father called the neighbors over to the house. It was Independence Day.
Sometime before 7 AM young Chip was taken from the house by his Uncle Richard while police officers, neighbors and journalists invade his home, touching and looking into everything they own. All this seven year-old boy was told was that his mother had "gone to be with the angels."
His father had been injured, his mother was dead. Due to extensive publicity, the boy would not be allowed to attend his mother's funeral three days later.
Happy birthday, Chip.
PBS.org
Sam Reese Sheppard: Seeking The Truth
Labels: Marilyn Sheppard, Sam Reese Sheppard, Sam Sheppard
Stouffer's
Stouffer's Shaker Square
Abraham and Lena Stouffer had a farm in Richfield, 28 miles from downtown Cleveland. They started a coffee shop in the Arcade in 1922. Lena's apple pie is credited with giving the family name its great reputation.
The first Stouffer's restaurant opened in the Schofield Bldg. on the south-west corner of East 9th & Euclid. Sons Vernon and Gordon expanded the business into a flourishing chain of restaurants in Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia -- every important city in America.
The first "suburban" Stouffer's restaurant opened at Shaker Square in 1946.
Their nation reputation was based on the distribution of "partially cooked" meals which could be prepared at home in limited time. In 1953 they opened a plant on Woodland Avenue to develop these "frozen foods." This brand of their business was a separate corporate entity, in 1954 named the Stouffer Foods Corporation.
The "TV Dinner" was originally a brand name, which later became a genericized trademark, created by C.A. Swanson & Sons in 1953. You know what that is, a pre-packaged meal, complete with meat dish and sides in an aluminum tray that you can heat up quickly in the oven. Stouffer's, however, tried to set itself apart from Swansons by touting the "high-end" quality of its frozen food products.
For those of you unaware because you haven't read Fast Food Nation or because you simply haven't been paying attention, "flash-freezing" food products (chicken, potatoes, what have you) virtually erases all discernible flavor, and so most pre-packaged meals are jacked up with salt, fats and artificial flavoring.
FYI - The Stouffer's name would not be added to the hotel on Public Square until 1978.
Ohio History central
Stouffers.com
Labels: processed food, restaurant, Schofield Building, Shaker Square, Stouffer's, The Arcade, TV dinner
Bearden's (1954)
One of the iconic images of 1950s Americana is the drive-in burger joint. When we have visited car shows I have pointed out to my children the trays that some of the cars feature, often original "Big Boys" trays, with a clip to secure it to the window, with the tray facing either into or out of the window. I help them imagine what it might be like to drive up to a restaurant, park, and not have to get out of the car, to have it brought to you.
Never having sat in a car with seats a comfortable nor as large and unrestrictive as a living room couch, I do not believe they actually think this would be an enjoyable experience. And the truth is, I am too young to have actually experienced this phenomenon myself. A drive-in move is as close as I get,
My parents would have visited the original Bearden's in Rocky River, 19985 Lake Road. Anyone who has been there knows about the model train, set up high on a ledge running around the entire dining room, which was a feature left over from its original owner, Charlie Jackson. Then the place was known when it first opened in 1934 as Jackson Limited because of that train (and Jackson.)
When Ross Bearden operated the place in 1948, and changed the name, he kept the train. It's a great gimmick, as a kid I always thrilled to visit the place with the train. You will notice the restaurant was not renamed in honor of Gene Bearden's performance as pitcher in the 1948 World Series anymore than the team was named after an actual Indian.
The 1950s were the heyday of the drive-in restaurant theme and Bearden's was no exception. Staying open until 2 or 3 in the morning on Friday and Saturday nights and having police direct traffic and provide parking lot security was the norm. To this day, we still hear stories of high school romances, first dates and hot cars. The popularity of the drive-in theme waned in the early 1960s and soon "Curb Service" was a thing of the past.
The food itself wasn't legendary, a greasy burger wrapped in paper, a milkshake and a basket of onion rings, but aren't those things everybody wants, after all?
Three years of extensive construction on Lake Road combined with a flagging economy forced the present owner to close Bearden's doors in December 2010.
UPDATE: Following a brief closure, Bearden's reopened in Fall 2011 !!!
Bearden's Homepage
Labels: Bearden's, pop culture, processed food, restaurant
Communist Activities in the Cleveland, Ohio, Area (con't.)
TUESDAY AFTERNOON—JUNE 5, 1962
United States House of Representatives, Subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities, Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities reconvened at 2 p.m., Hon. Francis E. Walter (chairman) presiding.
Subcommittee members present: Representatives Walter, Doyle, Scherer, Johansen, Bruce; also present Representative Schadeberg.
The Chairman. Call your next witness.
Mr. Nittle. Would Julia Brown please resume the stand?
TESTIMONY OF JULIA C. BROWN— Resumed
Mr. Nittle. Mrs. Brown, the committee would like to turn briefly to the organization of the Communist Party structure in Cleveland, Ohio. This committee last November received a great deal of testimony with respect to the Comnuuiist Party organization nationally and with respect to its international ties. Your long experience in the Communist Party would indicate that you miglit well add some details, at least, to our store of knowledge, or miglit confirm certain conclusions that can be reached based upon such testimony. The evidence indicates that the party today persists as it was originally conceived by Lenin, and slavishly operates upon the principles laid down by him. Lenin pointed out that the party was not a party of reform. He confirmed that it was not a democratic party, but a revolutionary organization, organized for rebellion and agitation and must therefore be, and I now quote Lenin :
* * A small, compact core, cousistiug: of reliable, experienced and hardened workers, with responsible agents in the principal districts and connected by all the rixles of strict secrecy * * *
He further stated that it must consist of people who "will devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings but the whole of lives," and must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession. This kind of party, he declared, must be organized "from the top," a "strictly centralized," chain-of-command type of organization, and disciplined like an army. We should like to record your experience, and in order to establish your further competency to testify, at least with respect to certain echelons of the Communist Party hierarchy, I ask you the question : Did you obtain an official position of leadership of any kind in the Cleveland area organization of the Communist Party?
Mrs. Brown. I was treasurer of five clubs in the Northeast Section, and also treasurer of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice.
Mr. Nittle. As treasurer of five clubs, you may well be described as section treasurer ; is that correct?
Mrs. Brown. Yes. That is right.
Mr. Nittle. Who was the chairman of the section during the time you were section treasurer?
Mrs. Brown. Jean Krchmarek.
Mr. Nittle. When did you become section treasurer?
Mrs. Brown. In the middle l950's.
Mr. Nittle. And remained as section treasurer until when?
Mrs. Brown. Until 1960.
Mr. Nittle. And did Jean Krchmarek, who is the wife of Anthony Krchmarek, the Ohio party chairman, remain also as section leader during the period you were acting as section treasurer?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, she did.
Mr. Nittle. Was she acting in that capacity at the time you left Cleveland and went to the West Coast?
Mrs. Brown. She was.
Mr. Scherer. Is that the witness who just testified here a few moments ago?
Mrs. Brown. This afternoon she testified.
Mr. Nittle. What was the location of this section? What area did it cover in Cleveland?
Mrs. Brown. Well, the central area was included in the Northeast Section, and it was in the Glenville area of Cleveland.
Mr. Nittle. May we refer to the section of which you were treasurer then, hereafter, as the Northeast Section of the Communist Party organization in Cleveland?
Mrs. Brown. Yes.
Mr. Nittle.. Did you have what was known as a Section Committee?
Mr. Nittle. What did that consist of?
Mrs. Brown. It consisted of the heads of the five clubs and officers of the section.
Mr. Nittle.. The Section Committee, did I understand you to say, consisted of the heads or leaders of each of the five clubs and the section officers?
Mrs. Brown. That is correct.
Mr. Nittle. When the leadei-s of tlie five clubs would meet together with you and Jean Krchmarek, that was known as a Section Committee meeting?
Mr. Scherer. These meetings you are talking about — can you distinguish them from the social gatherings that you talked about?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, sir. Yes, indeed.
Mr. Scherer. Were they entirely different?
Mrs. Brown. Entirely different. The section and club meetings are secret meetings that no one else can attend.
Mr. Scherer. But the social gatherings, you said this morning, are attended by Communists and non-Communists?
Mrs. Brown. Well, mostly Communists; a few non-Communists.
Mr. Scherer. That is where you said they raised money?
Mr. Scherer. I was wondering how they raised money at these social gatherings.
Mrs. Brown. Well, they sold liquor and food.
Mr. Scherer. Sold liquor?
Mrs. Brown. And food ; drinks and food. They sold them by the drinks.
Mr. Scherer. Did they raise their money any other way?
Mrs. Brown. Well, they did have a donation at the door, too.
Mr. Scherer. Is that all?
Mrs. Brown. Well, that is all I can think of at this time.
Mr. Nittle. The club leaders who met with you and Jean Krclimarek at a meeting, which would be called a Section Committee meeting — would that group have any privileges with respect to laying down club policy?
Mr. Nittle. What matters would you discuss in section meetings?
Mrs. Brown. Well, just how to operate the clubs, and the distributing of leaflets, and the different social affairs that were to be given to raise money for the clubs and the Communist Party, and what places to infiltrate, and directions for infiltration.
Mr. Nittle. Who told the club leaders in the section meetings what was to be done?
Mrs. Brown. Jean Krchmarek was the head of the section, and the orders came from Jean Krchmarek.
Mr. Nittle. Do you mean to say that the final decision rested with Jean Krchmarek, when you say that orders came from her?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, for the section ; yes, indeed ; and then they were handed down to the leaders of the clubs.
Mr. Nittle. So that the section meeting was simply a means of bringing the club leaders into conference with Jean Krchmarek, so that she could direct them as to the activities they would undertake?
Mr. Nittle. Now, where did Jean Krchmarek get her orders?
Mrs. Brown. Well, I didn't see anyone give Jean Krchmarek her orders, but I am sure she got them from the next top, which was the state, or the district.
Mr. Nittle. Was that her husband, Anthony Krchmarek, chairman of the Communist Party of the State of Ohio, that you are referring to?
Mrs. Brown. Anthony Krclimarek is the husband of Jean Krchmarek, yes.
Mr. Nittle. Where would her husband, Anthony Krchmarek, get his orders?
Mrs. Brown. Anthony Krchmarek would get his orders from the national office, in New York.
Mr. Nittle. So that the orders originated at the national headquarters of the Communist Party, were then transmitted down to the Ohio District of the Communist Party, the chairman of which was Anthony Krchmarek. He would pass that order down to the section leader, who was Jean Krchmarek, and she would pass this order down, then, to the club leaders, who wouki inform finally the people who constituted the clubs, the rank and file.
Mrs. Brown. That is correct. That is correct.
Mr. Nittle. I might note for the record, Mr. Chairman, that the committee hearings last November showed where the National Committee of the Communist Party got its orders. I think the hearings conclusively established that the orders to the headquarters of the National Committee of the Communist Party in the United States came directly from Moscow.
Mr. Doyle. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the registration and disclosure provisions of the Internal Security Act of 1950, in its recent decision in the case of the Communist Party of the United States, Petitioner v. Subversive Activities Control Board (367 U.S. 1), decided June 5, 1961. At page 111 f ., the Supreme Court pointed out that the Congress in 1954 enacted the Communist Control Act (68 Stat. 775), which declares in its second section : The Congress hereby finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.
. . . [T]he policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders of the world Communist movement. . . . [I]ts role as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger to the security of the United States. . . .
At page 112, the Supreme Court declared : First: We have held, supra, that the congressional findings that there exists a world Communist movement, that it is directed by the Communist dictatorship of a foreign country, and that it has certain designated objectives, inter alia, the establishment of a Communist totalitarian dictatorship throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide Communist organization, §2(1), (4), are not open to re-examination by the Board. We find that nothing in this violates due process.
Mr. Nittle. As section treasurer, did you actually have anything to do with party policy?
Mrs. Brown. No, indeed, I did not.
Mr. Nittle. Did you get your orders also from Jean Krchmarek?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, I did.
Mr. Nittle. What were your duties as treasurer of the section?
Mrs. Brown. Well, when we would have the section meetings, the heads of the clubs would pay dues, give me the dues from the club members, with 10 percent taken out; and then I would take out 20 percent and give it to the state treasurer.
Mr. Nittle. Who was the state treasurer?
Mrs. Brown. Betty Chaka.
Mr. Nittle. C-h-a-k-a?
Mr. Doyle. Who got the 10 percent?
Mrs. Brown. The chibs kept the 10 percent and the section kept 20 percent ; and we used that for parties and
Mr. Doyle. Did you handle that money, or was it someone else?
Mrs. Brown. I handled the money that I received. I always kept the 20 percent, and the other was given, whenever I felt like taking it to her, Betty Chaka, the state treasurer.
Mr. Nittle. Who was the husband of Betty Chaka?
Mrs. Brown. Ed Chaka.
>Mr. Nittle. Also known as Edward Chaka?
Mrs. Brown. Edward Chaka.
Mr. Nittle. Mr. Chairman, I think the record should show that Edward Chaka was a member of the National Conunittee of the Commmiist Party, and that he was in attendance at the 17th National Convention of the Communist Party in December 1959, which was held in New York City. He attended that convention as a delegate from the Ohio District of the Commmiist Party. Did you know Edward Chaka?
Mr. Nittle. How long have you known Edward Chaka?
Mrs. Brown. I have known Edward Chaka since 1948.
Mr. Nittle. Did you deliver this money personally to Betty Chaka?
Mrs. Brown. I certainly did.
Mr. Nittle. And she was the state treasurer?
Mr. Nittle. Could you tell us the names of the leaders of the five clubs in that section? I just want the names of the leaders.
Mrs. Brown. Ruth Lend was one.
Mr. Nittle. You have already identified her, yes.
Mrs. Brown. Harry Spencer.
Mr. Nittle. Of course, you have stated he was a Communist club leader.
Mrs. Brown. That is right. Sally Clark was a chairman.
Mr. Nittle. Sally Clark, C-1-a-r-k?
Mrs. Brown. Yes. And of course Bert Washington, who is deceased.
Mr. Nittle. Bert Washington was at one time a club leader? When did he die?
Mrs. Brown. Well, sometime in 1960. And there were Laura and Fred O'Neal.
Mr. Nittle. Was Jean Krchmarek a club leader, as well as acting in her capacity as section chairman?
Mrs. Brown. Well, you hardly knew what leadership Jean Krchmarek was in, because she led everything and everyone, as far as the clubs were concerned.
Mr. Nittle. Was a gentlemen named Hugh Statten in your area?
Mrs. Brown. At one time Hugh Statten was in the club, in a club office. But he moved back to Chicago.
Mr. Nittle. Wlio succeeded him, if anyone?
Mrs. Brown. Well, it was the central area that Hugh Statten had charge of. He was sent from Chicago by the Communist Party to Cleveland, to reorganize the Negroes in the central area and in Cleveland proper.
Mr. Nittle. I believe you have also spoken of a Harry A. Spencer, did you?
Mr. Nittle. What position did he occupy?
(At this point Mr. Walter left the hearing room.)
Mrs. Brown. He was one of the leaders of his club. I think it was the 124 Club.
Mr. Nittle. In what section was that located?
Mrs. Brown. In the Northeast Section.
Mr. Nittle. That was in your section as well?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, it was.
Mr. Nittle. You mentioned an Edith and Lloyd Gaines as being active in the party.
Mr. Nittle. Were they in your section?
Mr. Nittle. Would you regard them as club leaders in that area?
Mrs. Brown. Oh, yes.
Mr. Nittle. Now, did you have occasion to attend any state conventions of the Communist Party?
Mr. Nittle. The state convention was the next highest level above the section?
Mr. Nittle. This is where leaders obtained their information as to party policy to carry down to the section level?
Mr. Nittle. So that as treasurer and a section leader, you were selected as a delegate to the state convention?
Mr. Nittle. Was it at the state convention that the delegates had an opportunity to learn what orders the state party chairman was instructed to give you?
Mr. Nittle. Then at the state convention, the only matter you would debate was how to carry out the orders received from higher headquarters, which was the national grouping?
Mr. Doyle (presiding). And you were elected to attend the state party convention in Ohio while you were an FBI informant?
Mrs. Brown. Oh, sure. That was the only time I did my work, when I was with the FBI.
Mr. Doyle. Did not any of your brother or sister Communists suspect you were an informant for the FBI?
Mrs. Brown. Well, I am very sure they didn't know it. One or two had accused me of writing names down at one of the state conventions, and claimed that I was under suspicion, but they never let up on me. They still kept using me.
Mr. Nittle. You have indicated that the Communists in party meetings usually met secretly. How did they maintain their secrecy when they would have to meet in larger numbers at a state convention?
Mrs. Brown. Well, you had to be known us a Communist. You had to be a Communist, and somewhat of a dedicated Communist, to be elected to the state convention; state meetings, if you want to say. And there would always be someone at the door to let you in, and they would know always whether you were a Communist or not.
Mr. Nittle. Were you delegates, who attended the state convention, ever explicitly informed or clearly informed of the place where the meeting was to convene?
Mrs. Brown. Not often. Maybe once I was informed. But I have stood on the sidewalk in the cold and snow for hours, waiting for someone to pick me up to take me to the meeting. They don't tell you where the meetings are. They have them at secret places, and the members are picked up and carried to this place.
Mr. Nittle. I noted you indicated that the club meetings usually took place in private homes.
Mr. Nittle. I believe some of the evidence here has indicated that these meetings lasted into the late hours of the evening and the early morning of the next day.
Mr. Scherer. Which ones went on that long? The social, or the business meetings?
Mrs. Brown. Well, they had social affairs and business meetings, mixed. They would have a business meeting early in the evening in the party, and then after the party was over, they would have another meeting, sometimes in the early mornings, 6 and 7 o'clock, where some would go from the meeting to their jobs to prepare for meetings the next evening.
Mr. Scherer. What would you do all that time?
Mrs. Brown. Well, they are just like termites. They are working all the time.
Mr. Nittle. What kind of place would be selected for the state conventions?
Mrs. Brown. Some hall, secret hall, where they thouglit no one would know they were there, very often some hall — that is what I learned — on Kinsman Avenue. And then they began to stop them from having it there, and they began to have it at some other secret place where I have been at least three or four times. But as a rule, I never went directly there on my own.
Mr. Doyle. What do you mean by that answer?
Mrs. Brown. Well, I mean that most of the times I was picked up by a Communist and driven there in their car.
Mr. Scherer. You mean you didn't know in advance where the meeting was to be held?
Mrs. Brown. No, I did not.
Mr. Johansen. Well, how many persons out of a group that were meeting — how many of those individuals would know where the meeting was? Just one person?
Mrs. Brown. Well, maybe a few of the heads, the state heads, would naturally know ; and maybe Jean Krchmarek would know.
Mr. Johansen. It would be one of your superiors in the hierarchy?
Mrs. Brown. That is correct, yes. That is right.
Mr. Doyle. But there would not be a large attendance at these meetings? Perhaps 25 or 50 people?
Mrs. Brown. Well, 50 would be a large attendance. Maybe 20; and never over 30, I don't think they can trust 50 of them.
Mr. Nittle. This is the assemblage of what Lenin has described as the hard-core workers, the hardened workers, who were bound to rules of secrecy?
Mr. Nittle. Persons you have described as dedicated Communists ; termites was another expression you used to describe them.
Mr. Scherer. Were there more women than men, usually, at these meetings?
Mrs. Brown. Just about 50-50.
Mr. Nittle. Can you recollect some of the persons who were in attendance from the Ohio area at the state convention meetings with you?
Mrs. Brown. Well, Frieda Katz, Dave Katz, Jean Krchmarek and Anthony Krchmarek, and Martin and Sally Chancey, the Winters girl, Sally Winters, Pearl Levin, Regina Sokol, and others.
Mr. Nittle. Did Ethel Goodman attend any of the state convention meetings?
Mrs. Brown. Yes, Ethel had attended.
Mr. Nittle. Counsel, the reporter is asking for a 3-minute recess, so the committee will stand in recess. That will also give the witness a short rest.
(Short recess.)
Labels: Communism, Communist Party, HUAC
Circle Mirror Transformation
I really did not think I was going to like this play.
I have read one play by Annie Baker, The Aliens, and that I did not expect to enjoy either, and I enjoyed reading that very much. I was looking forward to Circle Mirror Transformation because it features one of my friends of co-workers in this Dobama production and I was very proud of her and happy for her, and then I heard it was about a drama workshop in Vermont and I began to feel oogy.
The postcard did not help. Everyone on the floor, heads together. It took a moment for me to realize, okay, all right they are doing a floor relaxation exercise, and that it wasn’t just a horribly cliche group theater shot, but that only made me feel worse.
Guerrilla Theater Company, Summer 1992
Are we going there again? Is this play a bunch of theater exercises, that theater people know only too well and can laugh at because ho-ho-ho, we’ve all done this haven’t we and “civilians” (I use the term ironically, you can tell by the quotation marks, ever since my first acting class in college I despised the pretentious use of the word “civilian” to describe non-theater people … I might be a beatnik but theater people don’t generally put themselves in mortal danger for the sake of national security and therefore have the right to distinguish themselves from those who have the freedom not to) can just sit back and laugh because those touchy-feely, promiscuous theater nuts sure do a lot of craaaazy things, training to do whatever it is they do.
I saw Alan Parker's Fame when it was first on cable, and that was my first experience with theater exercises. I was thirteen. I was enthralled but also found it humorous. Finding that those were things people really do, and then being asked to do them made me more self-conscious than if it had been a new discovery. We do, actually, need to feel self-confident enough to do, well, anything, really, to create performances that are worth people laying down money to watch. And these exercises help. Unless you feel like a clown doing them. So making fun of them as part of a play, a play about learning how to act … you get my point. It has the potential to make me unhappy.
Let’s change the subject for a moment. Dobama. The new Dobama. Just bizarre. It looks like the old Dobama, on Coventry, for the most part. Seating on three sides (though the dimensions are different) featuring red chairs ripped from a defunct movie house (different movie house, different chairs - still red) so the illusion of the same place. And my emotions for that house run deep. The old house, the one on Coventry, not this place, in the library, in the former Lee Road YMCA swimming pool, where we did so many amazing things late at night. I left my 20s in that theater. I am glad I am no longer that person. But it was exciting.
Dobama's Night Kitchen, Spring 1998
Earlier than that, when I was in my early 20s, Guerrilla Theater days, no, before that, when I worked at Karamu and started getting involved in local shows and meeting the crowd I would eventually become so familiar with, I was offended by all of these middle-aged people, in their 40s or older, who were in the thrall of this certain acting coach. We won’t name names, it’s not their fault, it is not about the coach per se, but their pupils, who reversed this person as one would a sensei, someone who taught them everything, how to taste flavors a anew, to see the world as a baby, how to feel deeply. So deeply.
I knew what they meant, even at 23 years-old I understood what was going on. I had experienced all of these things at college, in theater classes, at the age of 18, 19, 20 years-old, when it is okay to embarrass yourself because you are young and stupid. And these were accountants and environmental lawyers who were finally, in middle-age, getting in touch with their emotions and learning how to function like feeling human beings -- but because they were adults with children and mortgages, they weren’t discovering things that others my age with my training already knew, they were discovering things NO ONE HAD EVER KNOWN BEFORE and this acting coach was a GOD.
Because they were too mature to be so young and silly. This shit was important. It changed their lives.
And so, after all, I was touched my this play. Because it confounded my expectations. Annie Baker can take the slackers-smoking-by-a-dumpster play and give it heart. She can take the amateur-drama-workshop play and people it with characters who I am glad to spend two hours in the presence of.
One moment I was particularly struck by (SPOILER ALERT.) There is a point in the middle of the second act when the coach asks everyone to reveal a secret about themselves. This is five weeks into a six week course. It is a dumb, dumb exercise. Dangerous, and pointless. I have engaged in that kind of exercise, I remember an undergraduate directing class my junior year. In order to get into the emotions of a certain two-person scene, the director of that scene (neither of us performing in the scene respected her at all) asked us to hide in the wings on the opposite sides of the stage and probe each others’ deepest fears. The actress in question and I, while not exactly trusting of each other, were unified in our disgust of what we were being asked to do and were able to a) say the most horrid sounding, spiteful things that we knew were already open secrets and didn’t sting when b) the MFA Directing Grad who was leading the course was in the room. The teacher stormed out of the space to visit another scene, but first admonished our scenework director in the harshest terms for engaging in “psychological bullshit.”
Of course, the actress and I were the ones experimenting in psychological bullshit, fucking over our director in that way.
The scene, as presenting in Baker’s play, put me in mind, of all things, of a scene from the 6th issue of the comic book Sandman, where Dr. Destiny has Morpheus’ amulet and spends twenty-fours in a diner, influencing those present to live out their id until everyone has has sex with, mutilated and/or eaten everyone else in the joint.
Baker’s play is not literally grotesque in that way. But it did make me feel that creepy.
I would say I really liked the ending, only she stole it from my new play. The one I haven't finished yet.
God dammit.
Labels: Annie Baker, Circle Mirror Transformation, Dobama Theatre, Dobama's Night Kitchen, Guerrilla Theater Company, Neil Gaiman, Sandman
Communist Activities in the Cleveland, Ohio, Area
TESTIMONY OF FRIEDA KATZ, ACCOMPANIED BY COUNSEL, JOSEPH FORER
Mr. Nittle. Would you state your name, please?
Mrs. Katz. My name is Frieda Katz.
Mr. Nittle. You are represented by counsel ?
Mrs. Katz. Yes, I am.
Mr. Nittle. Would counsel please identify himself for the record ?
Mr. Forer. Joseph Forer.
Mrs. Katz. Will the committee give me permission to read a statement?
The Chairman. No. You can leave the statement, and if we think that it is relevant, we will make it a part of the record.
Mrs. Katz. Thank you.
Mr. Nittle. Does the statement contain any references as to whether or not you are a member of the Communist Party as of this moment?
Mr. Forer. Well, all you have to do is look at the statement.
Mr. Nittle. Are you a member of the Communist Party, Mrs. Katz, as of this moment ?
Mrs. Katz. I should like to use my privilege under the fifth amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and my privileges and rights under the first amendment to the Constitution, of freedom of speech, redress to the Congress, and so on.
The Chairman. You said, "I should like to." Do you?
Mrs. Katz. I do. I refuse to answer the question on those grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Do you know Julia Brown ?
Mrs. Katz. I refuse to answer the question on the previously mentioned grounds.
Mr. Scherer. Witness, were you in the hearing room during the time that Julia Brown testified ?
(Witness conferred with counsel.)
Mrs. Katz. Yes ; I was present.
Mr. Scherer. You heard her testimony ?
Mr. Forer. During part of the time, I think.
Mrs. Katz. Part of the time. That is correct.
Mr. Scherer. Did you hear testimony with reference to you ?
(Counsel conferred with witness.)
Mrs. Katz. I did not hear all of the testimony.
Mr. Scherer. You heard part of it ?
Mrs. Katz. I heard part of it.
The Chairman. Whose testimony are you talking about?
Mr. Forer. He is talking about Julia Brown's testimony.
The Chairman. Let the witness answer the question.
Mrs. Katz. I must refuse to answer the question, on the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Scherer. Now, is there anything that Julia Brown said about you that is untrue ?
Mrs. Katz. I refuse to answer the question on the previously stated grounds, under the first amendment and the fifth amendment to the Constitution.
Mr. Scherer. Was Julia Brown telling the truth when she identified you as one of the leading Communists in the State of Ohio ?
Mrs. Katz, I must refuse to answer this question on the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Scherer. I have no further questions at this time.
The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Nittle.
Mr. Nittle. Do you also refuse to answer the question on the ground that the statements made by Julia Brown are true?
Mrs. Katz. I have already stated the grounds on which I have refused to answer the questions. These are my constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, and the right not to incriminate myself, and these are the grounds on which I have refused and will decline to answer questions.
Mr. Nittle. I state as a fact, Mrs. Katz, that you were also a member of the Communist Party prior to your marriage to Dave Katz, and that you were a member of the Communist Party under the name of Frieda Zucker. Will you affirm or deny that assertion ?
Mrs. Katz. I shall refuse to answer, under the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Is it not a fact that under the name Frieda Zucker you were the secretary of the Tom Paine branch of the Communist Party in Cleveland, Ohio, and you were so listed in the Ohio 1939 yearbook of the Communist Party ?
Mrs. Katz. I again refuse to answer the question under the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Do you know Abe Strauss ?
Mrs. Katz. I refuse to answer the question on the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Were you the executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress in Cleveland, Ohio ?
Mrs. Katz. I decline to answer the question, again on the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Mr. Chairman, I would like to read into the record a reference to the Civil Rights Congress as it appears in the committee's Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications.
There is a footnote on page 44, as follows:
In response to a petition from the Attorney General for an SACB order requiring the Civil Rights Congress to register as a Communist-front organization, the SACB held hearings between November 1954 and June 1955 * * *. Thereafter, the Civil Rights Congress moved to dismiss the Attorney General's petition on the ground that the organization had dissolved on January 6, 195G. The SACB denied the request to dismiss the petition, stating that the Civil Rights Congress had "failed factually to establish its dissolution, and in any event, that under the proper application of the [Internal Security] Act dissolution of the respondent would not divest the Board of jurisdiction."
Now, I ask you, Mrs. Katz, as its executive secretary, was the Civil Rights Congress in Cleveland dissolved by the Communist Party ?
Mrs. Katz. I must decline to answer this question on the previous grounds stated.
Mr. Nittle. Are you not presently the secretary of the Ohio Bill of Rights Conference?
Mrs. Katz. I must decline to answer that question, on previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. And was not that local organization a counterpart of the national organization titled "Civil Rights Congress" ?
Mrs. Katz. I again decline on previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. I state to you as a fact that your name appears in the City Directory of Cleveland as secretary of the Ohio Bill of Rights Conference, 2014 East 105th Street, Room 202.
Mrs. Katz. I must again decline to answer the question on the previously stated grounds.
Mr. Nittle. Now, Mrs. Brown testified that about the mid-1950's, the Communist Party headquarters, which was then operating under the disguise of its front names, had moved its quarters from Euclid Avenue to 2014 East 105th Street, Room 202. Do you affirm or deny that testimony ?
Mrs. Katz. I shall again decline to answer the question on the previous grounds stated.
Mr. Nittle. Are not the Civil Rights Congress and the Ohio Bill of Rights Conference one and the same organization?
Mrs. Katz. I must again decline to answer the question on the grounds stated.
Mr. Nittle. Was not this a case of the same Communist group in Cleveland operating under different disguises and names to confuse the public ?
Mrs. Katz. I repeat my declination on the grounds previously stated.
Mr. Nittle. And did not the Communist Party succeed in duping many Negro people in that area ?
Mrs. Katz. I have already indicated my reasons for declining to answer. I do not see the point in the continued making of such statements. I am declining to answer under my rights under the first amendment to the Constitution, and the fifth amendment, not to incriminate myself.
Mr. Nittle. The staff has no further questions, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Are there any questions ? The witness is excused.
Source: Communist activities in the Cleveland, Ohio, area : hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-seventh Congress, second session. June 4 and 5, 1962 (1962)
We're going bowlin' ... so don't leave 'er in Solo...
Communist Activities in the Cleveland, Ohio, Area ...
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On 31, Dec 2014 | In Singles Specialty Guitar | By Leigh
Nate Jones – Guitar and Vocals
Nate Jones is a young singer/songwriter who carves his folky, soulful sound from the same bedrock as Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Stephen Stills. Jones is a troubadour in the old-school tradition. A Cleveland native, he launched his music career while attending college in New Orleans. The town left its swampy mark on Jones, who became a regular performer at venues like Tipitina’s and Howlin’ Wolf Club, where he spiked his coffeehouse folk songs with soulful vocal melodies and intricate, funky fretwork on the acoustic guitar.
On 20, Apr 2016 | In Jazz Ceremony Guitar | By Leigh
Duo Unitas
Duo Unitas combines the talents of both woodwind player Thomas Lempner and guitarist Adam Sarata. They bring a flavorful arrangement of sambas, bossa novas, tangos, boleros, and Spanish music. As their name implies, Duo Unitas’ objective is to perform with unity of vision, character, musicianship, joy, and energy. The duo also performs classical repertoire for wedding ceremonies, and jazz standards for receptions and private parties.
On 10, Dec 2014 | In Jazz Ceremony Guitar | By Leigh
John Toula
As a soloist, John Toula’s virtuoso guitar explores the charm and beauty of the musical adventure called jazz. His trio, JT3, and quartet, JT4, both honor the traditions of this wonderful art form.
While acquiring his bachelors degree at Cleveland State University, John performed several quarters with the university’s Jazz Orchestra, as well as becoming quite accomplished as a classical guitarist at that time. Well-schooled as a musician, he continued his quest for the jazz vocation studying with some of the areas finest teachers. “JT” is a 20-year-veteran full-time performer in Northeastern Ohio’s most well-known high energy dance clubs and corporate hotels. He has appeared in venues that ranged from Top 40, Rock, R&B, as well as Jazz.
On 13, Oct 2016 | In Singles Guitar | By Leigh
Guitar – Joshua Robert
Joshua Robert is a singer/songwriter out of Willoughby, Ohio with a passionate voice and a crisp acoustic guitar style. After living in Nashville, Tennessee, for a a few years, he made a move back home to Ohio to pursue music full time. This lead to many wedding performances and private events. With over 300 shows under his belt, his goal is to expand and play more shows every year. Joshua has an amazing passion for his performance and truly understands how to make an event special.
On 26, Dec 2017 | In Singles Jazz Guitar | By Leigh
Dan Bruce – Guitar
By embracing the influence of his heroes from the jazz tradition and retaining his own musical personality, guitarist Dan Bruce has developed a unique and impressive musical voice. A recent transplant to Ohio after spending a decade as an important member of Chicago’s vibrant jazz scene, he is active throughout the United States as a performer, recording artist, composer and educator.
On 12, Nov 2014 | In Jazz Ceremony Guitar | By Leigh
Pete Cavano – Guitar
As a professional guitarist for close to 40 years, Pete Cavano is no stranger to the local music scene.
Performing with artists as diverse as the late Robert Lockwood Jr. and local legend Anne E. Dechant, to name just a few, has given Pete a formidable command of the guitar.
Not only recognized on a local level, Pete has been an annual performer at the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society Convention held in Nashville. This is a showcase of the best solo guitarists from around the world.
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With names like Carolina heelsplitter, dwarf wedgemussel, Appalachian monkeyface, Atlantic pigtoe, Appalachian elktoe, wavy-rayed lampmussel and pistolgrips, mussels are an interesting testament to the sometimes-bizarre imaginations of those who coined the terms, primarily fishermen who harvested them for a thriving pearl button industry.
It was this industry that first really wreaked havoc on mussel populations. A single mussel can filter 20 gallons of water per day and because of their status as filter-feeders, mussels are reliable indicators of water quality. They are also an important food source for many other species, such as otters, raccoons, herons, egrets and some fish.
Defenders is fighting for clean water protections throughout the country, and especially in the Southeast, which is a hotspot of freshwater biodiversity. We are bringing enforcement lawsuits against polluters for illegally discharging pollutants from coal ash landfills and other point-source pollution.
Defenders is also a member of several coalitions and partnerships throughout the Southeast to protect and restore the health of streams and rivers for all freshwater wildlife.
Threats & Status
Range & Population
Behavior & Reproduction
Mussels have continued to decline drastically because they can’t tolerate changes in water quality resulting from pollution, sediment and even remnants of pharmaceutical drugs that end up in wastewater. They also suffer from the introduction of non-native species, dams blocking movement of mussels and fish they rely on and climate change warming the waters.
Protection Status
Despite protection for at least 70 mussels under the Endangered Species Act, many species have not been seen for years. Another 180 species are identified as imperiled or vulnerable, making freshwater mussels one of the most endangered groups of animals in North America.
Limit pesticide use and help control erosion by planting trees and other plants to keep water clean. Make sure to clean boats, trailers and motors to help prevent the spread of invasive species like zebra mussels.
Bivalvia
The smallest mussels can fit on a fingernail when full grown and the largest can be as long as a dinner plate.
Most species live for decades and some for over a century.
Range/Habitat
Freshwater mussels are found in every state except Hawaii, with the majority of their diversity concentrated in the Mississippi River basin and east in the Southern Appalachians. They live in lakes, streams, creeks and rivers.
North America once boasted some 300 species of freshwater mussels, but as a result of land development, over-harvesting and chronic pollution over the last 200 years, 38 mussel species are already thought to be extinct and another 77 are considered imperiled.
Mussels rarely move, growing at the bottom of lakes and rivers, on rocks and stationary docks.
Since mussels rarely move, males release sperm directly into the water and females draw it from the water to fertilize their eggs. After brooding the eggs, the female releases the larvae either in the same year or the spring of the following year. Mussels go through a parasite phase as larvae where they attach to a fish host and then complete metamorphosis in their juvenile stage before taking up a sedentary life.
Mussels are filter-feeders, straining the water for phytoplankton, diatoms and other microorganisms.
Freshwater Mussels Blog Posts
Rocky Fork and Its Wildlife Need Saving - Again
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Man Arrested For Murder Of A Dozen Elderly Women Is In The Country Illegally
May 17 -edited
Billy Chemirmir has been charged in the deaths of 12 women, and faces attempted homicide counts for two more victims.
Dallas, TX – An illegal immigrant working as a home health aide has been charged with robbing and murdering a dozen elderly women in multiple jurisdictions.
Kenyan citizen Billy Chemirmir, 46, has been in jail since March of 2018 in connection with the murder of 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris, who was found suffocated to death in her bed, according to the New York Post.
Harris’ body was found after a 91-year-old woman told Plano police that a man had forced his way into her home and tried to suffocate her with a pillow, the Associated Press reported.
“Go to bed. Don’t fight me,” he told her, according to court documents.
Once she lost consciousness, the suspect stole her jewelry box and took off.
Paramedics were able to revive the elderly woman, who told police about the missing valuables.
Investigators were able to identify Chemirmir using a license plate, and began following him days later.
That’s when they spotted the alleged serial killer dumping a jewelry box into a trash bin.
But the box he tried to dispose of didn’t belong to the 91-year-old woman – it belonged to Harris.
When they went to Harris’ home, they discovered she had been smothered to death, the New York Post reported.
Chemirmir was indicted on six additional counts of capital murder in Dallas County on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
His victims, all female, ranged in age from 76 to 94.
Court records identified them as Phoebe Perry, Norma French, Rosemary Curtis, Phyllis Payne, Doris Gleason, and Mary Brooks, all of whom died in 2016 and 2018, KXAS reported.
A Collin County Grand jury indicted him on five more capital murder charges the same day, according to the Associated Press.
The details of those killings have not been released.
He is also being held for being in the U.S. illegally, and has been charged with attempted murder in two other similar incidents.
Chemirmir used his experience as a health aide “to his advantage in targeting and exploiting seniors, some of the most vulnerable people in our community,” Plano Police Chief Gregory Rushin said shortly after the accused serial killer was apprehended in 2018.
“These cases came out of the blue and I don’t have any information on them yet,” Chemirmir’s attorney, Phillip Hays, told the Associated Press on Thursday.
But he argued that his client has “denied it since day one” that he had anything to do with Harris’ murder.
“They have circumstantial evidence that puts him in the area but that’s as far as the evidence goes,” Hays added.
Investigators said they have been reviewing as many as 750 unsolved deaths to determine whether or not Chemirmir had any connection to the victims, the New York Post reported.
“We’re worried we could have more,” Dallas Executive Assistant Chief of Police David Pughes said in 2018. “It will be a monumental task. But we’re up for the challenge and we’re gonna make sure we check each and every case.”
Sgt961
Monkey, Obama’s cousin!
Noooooooo, say it aint so!?!?!?!
Shastabeau
Damned animal!
Lbw654
We’re HCD to troll and stick up for this piece of trash?
Being Kenyan he is likely to be English speaking. Is he, by chance, Muslim?
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Target 60,000
Planted 60,000
Remaining 0
at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, India
25,000 Trees Adopted by DCB BANK for the FY 2019-20
Trees for benefit of Indian Giant Flying Squirrels
Plantation of trees in the community lands of the villages of Samplipathar and Borankheda, Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan.
Restore the surrounding areas of the Sanctuary to develop the habitat for the Giant Flying Squirrels.
Mitigate the anthropogenic pressure in the core-areas by developing the buffer area at the periphery.
Provide forest products to the community to provide steady means of income.
Conserve the soil and water resources in the villages.
With changing land use and developmental activities, biodiversity in the low-lying areas faces a genuine threat. Habitat degradation, fragmentation, encroachment, anthropogenic pressure and occasional poaching are major issues of the area. Poaching and habitat loss have been mentioned as the prime threats to the Giant Squirrel, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This is due to the habitat fragmentation due to loss of trees, that has made locomotion difficult for the species and resulted in the loss shelter, thus making them vulnerable to poaching. The plantation at the periphery will provide livelihood opportunities to the people preventing them from venturing into the forest and protect the animals and their habitats. The Food and Agricultural Organisation mentions the importance of Non-Timber Forest Products in the subsistence livelihoods practised by the local forest communities.
Trees like mahua (Madhuca longifolia), teak (Tectona grandis), dhao(Dracontomelon dao), bamboo(Bambusa vulgaris), ber(Ziziphus mauritiana), sadad(Terminalia arjuna) grow here in addition to the Ground Orchids(Spathoglottis plicata) which form a distinct species of the region.
The popular mammal species is the Indian giant flying squirrel and animal species at this location include chausingha, chital, nilgai, jungle cat, jackal, leopard, fox, hyena.
The bird species found here include the red turtle dove, parakeet, golden oriole, paradise flycatcher, blue-cheeked bee-eater, white-necked stork, red-vented bulbul, gray heron, white breasted kingfisher.
Indian Giant Flying Squirrels
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, some Indian Giant Flying Squirrels of tropical India and south-eastern Asia weigh 1 to 2.5 kg (2.2 to 5.5 pounds) and have a body length of about 30 to 60 cm (12 to 24 inches) and a tail 35 to 64 cm long. Although these rodents do not fly, they glide up to 450 meters (almost 1,500 feet). The Indian Giant Flying Squirrel is a mammal that lives in tree cavities and tree canopies. The IUCN in 2008 described its population as "decreasing"; scientists have advocated planting trees to protect the species. Habitat loss and degradation resulting from logging, shifting cultivation, expansion of human settlements and forest fires are considered to be threats for this species. We have therefore initiated this project for planting in areas adjacent to the Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, which has a population of such squirrels. As of now, the IUCN in 2016 describes its population as "least concerned".
According to B.K.Sharma, Faunal Heritage of Rajasthan, India (2013): 563-572, January 01,2013, “Elliot’s Giant Flying Squirrel has been recorded from dense forests of Phulwari, Sitamata, and Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuaries and avoids agricultural fields, grasslands, and human settlements. It is the next giant rodent after Porcupine in the state which was initially believed to be confined to Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary. Protection of old Mahuwa (Madhuca indica) groves and planting of new Mahuwa trees in the distribution range of flying squirrel and awareness programs in tribal zones have been suggested to protect this species.”
University of Michigan Museum of Zoology in Animal Diversity web says that the average home range for an adult is 4 hectares and for the female 2.2 hectares; daily range distances average 255 to 640 metres, with longer distances in summer. Their diet consists mainly of, but not limited to, fruits and leaves of ficus trees. They do not eat insects, but besides leaves and fruits, also eat bark and flowers. Since more light at the edge of forest results in more leaves, feeding is more common at the edge of a forest. The flying squirrels are found to be selective in their diet in Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary consuming 13 plant species and 8 plant parts in their summer diets. Pith, the central part of a stem or twig, rich in water, formed 58.59% of their diet. Mahua trees are the primary source in their feeding. Large owls and arboreal snakes are their most common predators. - Chhaya Bhatnagar, Vijay Kumar Koli and Satish Kumar Sharma, JOURNAL OF BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY107(3), Sep-Dec 2010 (food habit in Sitamata).
Tree Species planted here include Amla (Emblica officinalis), Khair (Acacia catechu), Churail (Holoptelea integrifolia), Siris (Albizia lebbeck) Karanj (Pongamia pinnata),Sitaphal (Annona squamosa) Baheda (Terminalia bellirica), Bel (Aegle Marmelos)
The arboreal and nocturnal species, listed in the IUCN Red list has been marked under concerned species and their conservation is important to conserve the diverse fauna of the country that contributes to the gene pool. The trees will provide proper habitat to the species, like food, shelter and the means of locomotion thereby helping in their conservation.
Creating rural jobs, in remote areas where jobs are rare, in the nursery, planting and post-planting activity, amongst the tribal people, especially women. The 25,000 trees to be planted will create approximately 2046 workdays of jobs in the nursery and planting activities alone. This will prevent the community to indulge in activities like poaching. Also, the involvement of the community during the plantation process will make them aware about the importance of conservation of the natural habitat of the area. These trees will provide flowers, fruit, fodder and fuel to rural communities and living creatures, improve water catchment, generate oxygen, reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, fight climate change and benefit the Indian Giant Flying Squirrel, a species decreasing in numbers.
Adoption Summary:
Number of Trees Adopted
Pepsico 10,000 trees FY 2018-19
DHL Group 25,000 trees FY 2017-18
Audit for Rajasthan, India
Total saplings planted were 25,000 in five villages in 2017-18. A Non-Trespassable fencing covering the plantation area was made to limit grazing by the animals. Contours were also prepared in order to stop the soil erosion and increase the vegetation cover. This strategy ensured the Survival Rate of 92%.
Various local native species were selected by the village institutions for planting on common land for eco-restoration. Every household participated in the planting or seeding activity. Members of the community institutions entrusted with the planting and supervising of operations played their role effectively in ensuring good quality of work.
The planting has been carried out as per the plan and the approximate number of saplings physically verified is in agreement with the number of saplings planted (as per the report of Grow-Trees.com’s planting partner). We are of the opinion that looking to the steps taken i.e. location of the site, encouragement to planting and positive response from the village to save the planting, the result of the activity will be affirmative.
Trees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, IndiaTrees for Indian Giant Flying Squirrels, at the Periphery of Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan, India
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2018 Dean's Women's Basketball Challenge (Duke vs. UNC-CH)
Sunday, February 25, 2018 - 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Cameron Indoor Stadium, Duke University
studentlife@div.duke.edu
Duke Divinity School faculty, staff, students, and their families are invited to attend the Duke Women's basketball game against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the 2018 Dean's Women's Basketball Challenge. The annual competition between Duke graduate schools boosts support for the women's team, with the school selling the largest number of tickets and showing the most spirit at the game winning the Dean's Challenge trophy.
Tickets are $10 each and includes a T-shirt, meal ticket, and a reserved seat at the game. Tickets and T-shirts may be picked up Feb. 19-23 in 102 Westbrook (the Financial Aid Office) from Lenore Budget, staff assistant, between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m.
The deadline to register to attend and buy tickets is Friday (Feb. 9 at 5 p.m.) Register and include how many tickets, T-shirts, and what size T-shirts (from adult small to 3XL) are being ordered.
Conferences, Workshops & Seminars
Lectures, Panels & Discussions
Clergy/Laity Training & Programs
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Alessandro Gropplero
funding representative, market representative
Choose from menu Biography Companies IDF Activities
IDF Activities
Graduated in Communication Studies at the Trieste University, he started to work in 2000 with the Italian production company Pidgin; later he moved on to collaborate at the London based company Number 9 Films and in 2005 he returned to Italy and started working for the Udine Far East Film Festival.
In 2007 he was appointed head of international relations of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Audiovisual Fund and in this capacity he has planned the international policy of the fund and managed a variety of events, such as When East Meets West, Ties That Bind Asia Europe Producers Workshop (both supported by Creative Europe) and RE-ACT – Regional Audiovisual Cooperation and Training. He is an EAVE graduate, board member of EURODOC and member of the European Film Academy.
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Welcome to the digital.law repository at the University of Washington
[3ShidlerJLComTech015] Cases in Wake of Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Continue to Narrow the Scope of a “Reverse Passing Off” Claim
digital.law Home
Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts
Shidler Journal of Law, Commerce, and Technology vol 1 (Spring 2004)- vol 5 (Spring 2009)
Shidler Journal of Law, Commerce and Technology; Barrett, Jared
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1773.1/399
Abstract: In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp, narrowing the scope of protection under the federal Lanham Act for “reverse passing off.” “Reverse passing off” is derived from the statutory language in § 43(a) of the Lanham Act prohibiting a “false designation of origin” that is likely to cause consumer confusion and generally occurs where one company puts forth another company’s product as its own. A “reverse passing off” claim was also thought to be feasible against one who misrepresented the source of the creative or communicative work embodied in a product. In Dastar, however, the Court limited the ability to bring a claim of “reverse passing off” by narrowly defining the term “origin,” holding that “origin” refers only to the source of the tangible goods and not to the source of any idea, concept or communication embodied in the tangible goods. Following Dastar, several cases have further defined the scope of a “reverse passing off” claim. This Article introduces the concept of “reverse passing off” and then discusses the impact of Dastar and its application in subsequent cases.
Name: vol3_no4_art15.pdf
Published Articles [119]
Shidler Journal of Law, Commerce, and Technology vol 1 (Spring 2004)- vol 5 (Spring 2009) [92]
Search digital.law
All of digital.law
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Home > Student Research > Master's Theses > 443
The proteomic response of sea squirts (genus Ciona congeners) to heat stress: Evidence for differential thermal sensitivities
Loredana Serafini, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis ObispoFollow
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2011.1
Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/443
MS in Biological Sciences
Lars Tomanek
The sea squirts Ciona intestinalis and C. savignyi have disparate distribution patterns, which may result from differences in their thermal tolerance limits. Because C. intestinalis, an almost cosmopolitan species, has a more widespread distribution, it is thought that it is better adapted to endure a wide range of temperatures. In order to compare the heat stress response between these two congeners, we studied global changes in protein expression, using a proteomics approach. To characterize the response to extreme heat stress, animals of both species were exposed to temperatures of 22°C, 25°C, and 28°C for 6 h, and then were left to recover at a control temperature (13°C) for 16 h. An additional experiment was conducted to assess the effect of mild-to-moderate heat stress including a 6 h exposure to temperatures of 18°C, 20°C, and 23°C, and a 16 h recovery at a control temperature (16°C). A quantitative analysis, using 2D gel electrophoresis and gel-image analysis, showed that in the high heat stress (HHS) experiment, 15% and 18% of the all protein spots detected demonstrated changes in expression in C. intestinalis and C. savignyi, respectively. In the low heat stress (LHS) experiment, 4% of the total number of proteins detected changed significantly in both C. intestinalis and C. savignyi. Using matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) tandem time-of-flight mass spectrometry, we were able to identify proteins with a 65-100% success rate, depending on species. Our results indicate that C. intestinalis maintains higher baseline levels of molecular chaperones and launches a quicker response to thermal stress than C. savignyi, suggesting it may be the more thermally tolerant of the two. In addition, actins, tubulins, and ATP-synthase F1 β-subunits were the most susceptible to proteolytic degradation, which may indicate that they have relatively higher thermal sensitivities.
Molecular Biology Commons, Systems Biology Commons
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A Thomistic Approach to Chemistry
dga471 (Daniel Ang) July 5, 2019, 6:49pm #1
Hi @vjtorley, @structureoftruth, @jongarvey, @Eddie and others listening,
So I just came back from the 4-day symposium on Thomism and modern science, which focused heavily on the philosophy of chemistry. I’m not yet an expert on A-T philosophy, but I think I’m getting better at it.
Substantial change and the cone of possibility
What are Laws of Nature?
According to Thomists, I have one and only one substantial form, and when I die, my corpse has another form entirely. The only thing in common between me and my corpse is prime matter, which is pure passive potency, devoid of any positive characteristics at all. So by rights, there ought to be nothing in common between me and my corpse - and yet they both have the same shape, size and mass (at least, immediately after my death, they do). Thomism doesn’t provide a good explanation of this fact.
We talked about this question (and variants of it). The best explanation that I got (inspired by Fr. James Brent, O.P. and Jordan Haddad): you, Vincent Torley, being a physical human being, consists of secondary matter, i.e. prime matter which has substantial form. Thus your potentiality is limited by actuality. This means that while you do have the capacity for substantial change, you only have a limited number of things that you can substantially transform into within your “cone of possibility”. Now, in principle an external cause with infinite power (i.e. God, who is pure actuality) could act upon you and substantially turn you into a raccoon or car. But if what we have are only natural causes with limited actuality, then you are stuck within that cone of possibility. You can only transform into a corpse when you die.
The composition of water
The next topic concerns what water is. Is water composed of H2O? First, I’d like to narrow down and clarify the scope of the problem from water to H2O molecules. In a random body of water, there is H2O, but also other free radicals and other molecules, so this would confusing. Instead, we’re going to ask a simpler question: do hydrogen and oxygen exist actually or virtually in an H2O molecule?
The Thomistic answer is usually the latter, as Thomists tend to be against chemical reductionism. Chemistry is not a strict result of the laws of physics. I found out that this is by no means a minority or fringe position among philosophers of science, even those who are not Thomists. This is because there are several problems with reductionism, as detailed in this SEP article (section 6) and this paper by Robert Bishop, Whence Chemistry?. In short, in general it is currently impossible to completely and exhaustively work out the properties of molecules from their constituent atoms, even if we’re only talking energy levels. A good test case is isomers, molecules which have the same chemical formula but different structure, causing them to have different properties. Currently, there is no way for a quantum chemist to calculate the properties of different isomers without manually inputting the chemical structure. Of course, perhaps someone someday will find a way to do so. But there seem to be serious conceptual obstacles if we only have QM. These issues and others are talked about in more detail in the Bishop paper.
Thus, hydrogen and oxygen only exist virtually in H2O, which is its own thing, with different properties than either hydrogen and oxygen. Now, there are some properties that water may have in common with either atom. But this reflects the reality that to exist virtually means to have the powers of hydrogen and oxygen affect (though not fully determine) the properties of H2O. Therefore, it is unsurprising that these commonalities exist.
Once this argument works, you can go on and argue that a body of water could be thought of as a single substance consisting of H2O molecules all existing virtually within it. Some properties of a body of water, such as surface tension, apparently do not make sense to talk about if you have only a few molecules of water. The existence of macro-level properties irreducible to its constituents points towards its constituents existing only virtually.
Next, Robert Koons was one of the main lecturers in the symposium, and he talked about his own specific views on the philosophy of chemistry. Some of his ideas are summarized in this paper we read: Hylomorphic Escalation: An Aristotelian Interpretation of Quantum Thermodynamics and Chemistry. He takes the view, common among Thomists, that only macro-level objects with thermodynamic properties exist. Elementary particles/fields and even atoms for the most part exist only virtually as part of a greater object. Koons’ paper gives a fairly persuasive argument that thermodynamics cannot be reduced to a collection of discrete, individual particles. But in general, one of the main reasons why Thomists are reluctant to think of elementary particles and fields as individual substances is because in practice, we almost never (if at all) find them existing by themselves (instead of as part of some other substance). Thus, Thomists tend take a more structural realist view (as Feser does) towards the reality of atoms, molecules, and elementary particles.
Now, I would not go as far as Koons and say that electrons, for example, are never a substance on their own - there are specific situations where you can trap individual electrons, for example. But for the most part, the vast majority of electrons we encounter daily are never encountered on their own. They do not have their own unity, but are always part of some atom in a solid or liquid with their own macro-level properties.
Overall, after this symposium I became more aware of the problems with reductionism and the plausibility of Aristotelian philosophy of science to solve some of these problems. Still, I had many unanswered questions, partially because many of them are active research areas for Thomistic philosophers of science. For example, it is not clear whether light is a substance (or perhaps the EM field which gives rise to it is). I realized that in many areas of physics, it is still awkward to interpret them with A-T philosophy. I think that much more work still needs to be done, even if there are many areas where A-T philosophy is clearly useful. It is indeed a puzzle to me why A-T philosophy seems useful to understand science holistically, but when actually doing and thinking about science, it’s just much easier to revert to an atomistic model of nature consisting of building blocks which form together into a bigger whole.
Most scientists would probably not appreciate the uses of A-T philosophy, as it is probably not going to be beneficial for the practice of science itself. (This is unsurprising, as it is the same case with philosophy of science in general.) You certainly can be a scientist and take the “shut up and calculate” or “I have no need of that hypothesis” approach. However, A-T philosophy gives a better philosophical explanation for why science is possible at all, for example with regards to the laws of nature, which prompted this thread in the first place.
Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy and Scientific Evidence
jongarvey (Jon Garvey) July 5, 2019, 6:33pm #2
@dga471
Thanks for this useful summary, which is gratifying to me, at least, in telling me I wasn’t making nonsense up in my previous comments on the subject. And on one point I was vindicated, in that when I’ve suggested the chemical properties of compounds cannot be predicted from the constituent elements, there were those who denied it. That very fact ought to tell us that “something is going on.”
It is indeed a puzzle to me why A-T philosophy seems useful to understand science holistically, but when actually doing and thinking about science, it’s just much easier to revert to an atomistic model of nature consisting of building blocks which form together into a bigger whole.
It seems to me that, in part at least, the answers to this are that dealing with substances holistically is intractable to the mathematical, abstracting methods of modern science. If a brain were, in fact, irreducible to the sum of individual “algorithmic” nerve impulses, then modelling it in simplified form would be minimally informative, and replicating it exactly impossible in practice. It’s a clear case of searching for the keys where the light is, rather than where you lost them. In fact, because the brain is so complex, one could search for reductionist explanations forever, without ever realizing that the whole approach is wrong.
The whole point of the AT approach, I think, is that a substantial form is such a unity, so a holistic methodology of some sort would need to be developed. The only specific example I can think of is that of Goethe (see here, which of course (like Thomism itself) was conceived at a much less developed state of science and has been largely ignored in the modern explosion of science.
In practice, it seems, science deals with the problems you raise largely by formulating a new, higher level, science: physics can’t predict chemistry, so you investigate chemistry empirically. If AT thinking is true, the conceptual error only comes from the assumption that, if someone gets round to serious work, the bridge from physics to chemistry will be found (an example you mention).
A more serious error would come from not taking the holistic form of chemical compounds seriously, eg by using the principle of reductionism to argue that water cannot have macro-structures, or that we can ignore the whole organism in, say, evolution and need explore only the molecules.
This subject has has many implications. For example, as I mention in one the blogs linked above, it brings insights into what are deemed “random causes” in nature.
Secondly, it suggests that much important knowledge can only be gained by the holistic functions of the mind (this was Goethe’s insight) - and that links in to the protracted discussions here about knowledge of God or morality requiring something more “intuitive” than deductive logic from evidence.
structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau) July 5, 2019, 6:33pm #3
Thanks for the report on that conference, Daniel. Very interesting!
swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass) July 5, 2019, 6:34pm #4
jongarvey:
And on one point I was vindicated, in that when I’ve suggested the chemical properties of compounds cannot be predicted from the constituent elements, there were those who denied it.
Who denied it? That seems to be well known.
Jordan (Jordan Mantha) July 5, 2019, 7:04pm #5
So I just came back from the 4-day symposium on Thomism and modern science, which focused heavily on the philosophy of chemistry.
Awesome! Philosophy of chemistry is a very small community compared to physics and biology, it’s good to see it getting some love.
Instead, we’re going to ask a simpler question: do hydrogen and oxygen exist actually or virtually in an H2O molecule?
The Thomistic answer is usually the latter, as Thomists tend to be against chemical reductionism. Chemistry is not a strict result of the laws of physics.
This is a fascinating question. I would say that the hydrogen and oxygen actually exist in H20 . I’m not sure how that is exactly related to chemical reductionism, though. It’s my impression that reductionism (that chemistry is just physics) is the majority opinion in philosophy of chemistry, though I know it’s one of the primary questions in the field. If chemistry is not a result of the laws of physics, what laws does it result from?
A good test case is isomers, molecules which have the same chemical formula but different structure, causing them to have different properties. Currently, there is no way for a quantum chemist to calculate the properties of different isomers without manually inputting the chemical structure.
What do you mean here by “manually inputting the chemical structure”? Chemical structure comes from physical laws (QM, etc.) so I’m a bit unsure of what you’re saying.
That water has different properties than hydrogen and oxygen, does not mean that hydrogen and oxygen are virtual does it? This view seems to depend on the idea that atoms have immutable properties, when we know that many properties of atoms (energy levels being a ready example) change with the environment. That a hydrogen atom within a water molecule behaves differently than a hydrogen atom in vacuum doesn’t mean it ceases to be hydrogen does it?
Some properties of a body of water, such as surface tension, apparently do not make sense to talk about if you have only a few molecules of water. The existence of macro-level properties irreducible to its constituents points towards its constituents existing only virtually.
But again, bulk level surface tension arises from forces present at the microscopic level. Modern chemistry education is predicated on the idea that molecular structure, determined by QM, determines macroscopic level behavior. A few water molecules have the same intermolecular forces that bulk water has, so surface tension is macroscopic application of microscopic properties. I don’t understand why we would want to think of the water molecules in a beaker of water as “virtual”.
only macro-level objects with thermodynamic properties exist. Elementary particles/fields and even atoms for the most part exist only virtually as part of a greater object.
Doesn’t that fly in the face of statistical mechanics, one of the more useful fields of physics to modern day biology?
Overall, this Thomist stuff seems kinda nutty to me.
nwrickert (Neil Rickert) July 5, 2019, 8:07pm #6
However, A-T philosophy gives a better philosophical explanation for why science is possible at all, for example with regards to the laws of nature, which prompted this thread in the first place.
Instead of “better philosophical explanation”, I would prefer the term “pseudo-explanation”. I don’t think it actually explains at all.
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for engaging. You raise some good questions.
Jordan:
It’s my impression that reductionism (that chemistry is just physics) is the majority opinion in philosophy of chemistry, though I know it’s one of the primary questions in the field. If chemistry is not a result of the laws of physics, what laws does it result from?
First, I’m not sure whether the majority of philosophers of chemistry hold to the reductionist position - the SEP article gives representative arguments for both sides. There are also differing degrees of reductionism - strong vs. weak and so on.
In any case, if one holds to a non-reductionist position (Thomistic or not), then that means that chemistry has a set of unique laws which are irreducible to that of the laws of physics. This does not necessarily mean that these laws violate the lower-level laws of physics, only that they are not derivable from the latter. The higher-level laws are “just there”; by definition, they cannot be explained in terms of other laws.
More specifically, Aristotelian philosophy of science is at its core opposed to the philosophy of atomism [1]. In the conventional reductionist picture, the lowest level “building blocks” of matter - atoms (or elementary particles, or strings) are the most fundamental and the entities that actually exist. Higher-level entities such as bodies of water and chairs and humans do not really exist as a single “thing” (or substance), but are only an aggregate of these atoms. Chemical laws are only aggregates of the laws of physics.
In contrast, Aristotelian philosophy reverses this bottom-up picture to take a top-down picture. Here, macro-level objects [2] exist actually, while their constituents do not “really” exist; they exist only virtually. This doesn’t mean that the Aristotelian denies the utility of modern scientific theories about the atom. Rather, she tends to take a non-realist approach to the reality of entities such as atoms and molecules. By non-realist, I do not mean instrumentalist; Feser for example defends a structural realist view of philosophy of science, where scientific laws capture something real about the structure of reality but not every entity in these laws actually exist.
Here, I’m only summarizing some of the points made by Bishop in his paper Whence Chemistry?. I strongly advise you to read that paper in entirety if you want to get a fuller picture of the non-reductionist (not necessarily Aristotelian) position. In particular, Bishop’s point is that the Hamiltonian for different isomers are identical, since they only contain different terms corresponding to nucleons and electrons (and interactions between them) added together, without mathematics to indicate the molecular structure:
This view seems to depend on the idea that atoms have immutable properties, when we know that many properties of atoms (energy levels being a ready example) change with the environment. That a hydrogen atom within a water molecule behaves differently than a hydrogen atom in vacuum doesn’t mean it ceases to be hydrogen does it?
No, Aristotelians do not think that atoms are immutable. But that’s precisely the point of Aristotelianism - a hydrogen atom can undergo smaller-scale changes while remaining a hydrogen atom. The basic metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle is that it’s a middle ground between the two extremes of Heracliteanism (where everything changes, there is nothing constant) and Parmenideanism (where nothing changes, and everything is constant). In Aristotelianism, sometimes things can change while remaining the same (this is called an accidental change), while at other times things do change so much to the point that they are a totally different thing (substantial change).
In contrast, philosophical atomists do tend to fall into the Parmenidean extreme, where (philosophical) atoms are thought of as immutable. If you’re a hardcore reductionist, then you would probably believe something along the lines that (chemical) atoms are really just aggregates of smaller, immutable fundamental particles (i.e. quarks and electrons, or even strings) which are rearranging themselves according to some immutable laws of nature.
Going back to the question of H2O. As you asked, does a hydrogen atom cease to be a hydrogen atom when it becomes part of H2O? Now, it just happens to be that most Aristotelian-Thomists tend to think that the answer is yes. But this is by no means logically entailed by Aristotelian philosophy. The answer depends, of course, on what it means for a hydrogen atom to be a hydrogen atom. Or, in A-T terms: when hydrogen reacts with oxygen to form H2O, does it undergo a substantial change? To answer this question we cannot simply argue from the armchair, but also take into account actual empirical data. Currently our data says that there seems to be properties of H2O which are not possessed by hydrogen at all when it is existing by itself. This seems to point to the answer that yes, hydrogen does undergo a substantial change when becoming H2O.
Now, if someone, whether through empirical investigation or argument, found out that the properties of water are indeed fully reducible to that of hydrogen and oxygen, then the Aristotelian would answer that yes, H2O is not a unified entity (or substance) by itself, but only an aggregate of hydrogen and oxygen, similar to two rocks being piled on top of each other. Note, however, that this wouldn’t disprove A-T philosophy, only change the A-T interpretation of H2O. It’s important to understand that A-T philosophy is not being offered here as a competitor to scientific method and facts and, but as a competitor to meta-interpretations of scientific facts.
At least on face value, it doesn’t. You should read the Koons paper to understand his argument. My very crude recap of his argument: in statistical mechanics, we commonly start by summing over a discrete number of states. At some point, we change our summation signs to an integral, taking the limit of an infinite number of states. Most of actual statistical mechanics is done by integrating, not discrete summing. Koons argues that when this switch (from sums to integrals) happens, a more significant change occurs - the transition from the micro to the macro-level, which has behavior irreducible to the micro-level. He advances arguments that you cannot obtain this continuum limit by simply adding discrete states, invoking the Stone–von Neumann theorem in the process.
[1] Note that I am referring to atomism as a general philosophy of science, not necessarily the modern scientific model of the atom that formed in the early 20th century with Rutherford, Bohr, etc.
[2] The majority of Thomists seem to only things as large and tangible as human beings and chairs exist, or molecules can exist. However, I don’t see in principle any obstacle against taking a hybrid view, where say, molecules exist actually but quarks and electrons (mostly) exist only virtually.
nwrickert:
I don’t think it actually explains at all.
It really depends on what you mean by explanation. If you define explanation as something that is necessarily reductionist, then of course A-T explanations would not be real explanations. But why so? I think that would be an interesting topic to discuss by itself in a different thread. Meanwhile, it’s good to also watch Feser’s lecture on the laws of nature that we discussed here and his argument as to why the Aristotelian view explains laws of nature better than the conventional “regularity” view, which is basically no explanation at all, period.
It could be useful to briefly try to distinguish some different senses of reduction. This is me just thinking out loud at the moment:
One sense might be epistemic reduction: the thesis that we can deduce anything we might want to know about chemistry at the macroscopic level from underlying physical laws at the microscopic level. This seems impossible for us given the required computational complexity and the uncertainty principle, not to mention the measurement problem of QM - but whether it is in principle impossible may depend on whether other kinds of reduction hold.
Another sense could be called ontological reduction: the idea that the chemical substances that macroscopic things are made of are nothing more than some arrangement of extrinsically related fundamental physical entities (e.g. quarks and leptons). The Aristotelian-Thomistic approach is ontologically non-reductionistic: things are more than the sum of their material parts, since there is also their form which exists objectively and is irreducible to the mere arrangement of and extrinsic relationships between the matter which things are made of.
I’ve been reading a book recently (while waiting to get a hold of Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge) called Material Things by Steven Duncan. (Not light reading by any account, but I recommend it if this thread interests you!) His version of non-reductionism is a little different: while he holds that chemical substances have form irreducible to the arrangement of their microscopic constituents, he also says that form is emergent from, and supervenes on, the structure of the microscopic constituents. Maybe that could be called weak ontological non-reductionism rather than strong (the difference possibly being lack of top-down causation - Duncan seems to deny top-down causation, at least for merely material things).
Duncan also points out that a lot of description and explanation can only happen with recourse to the macro-level: there’s no way to describe and explain (for example) what a baseball is using only the language of physics. (Describing it as “particles arranged baseball-wise” always ends up smuggling in something from the macroscopic level; he says something similar about chemical substances as well, not just recognizable objects.) Perhaps this could be called explanatory non-reductionism. This form of non-reduction probably holds; I am not quite satisfied that it is a sufficient condition for ontological non-reduction, however.
Jordan (Jordan Mantha) July 5, 2019, 10:12pm #10
Going back to the question of H2O. As you asked, does a hydrogen atom cease to be a hydrogen atom when it becomes part of H2O? Now, it just happens to be that most Aristotelian-Thomists tend to think that the answer is yes. But this is by no means logically entailed by Aristotelian philosophy. The answer depends, of course, on what it means for a hydrogen atom to be a hydrogen atom . Or, in A-T terms: when hydrogen reacts with oxygen to form H2O, does it undergo a substantial change? To answer this question we cannot simply argue from the armchair, but also take into account actual empirical data. Currently our data says that there seems to be properties of H2O which are not possessed by hydrogen at all when it is existing by itself. This seems to point to the answer that yes, hydrogen does undergo a substantial change when becoming H2O.
But that’s not really right is it? Hydrogen isn’t hydrogen because of some total number of properties that are hydrogen-like and if enough of those properties are missing it ceases to be hydrogen. Hydrogen is hydrogen because it is an atom with a nucleus composed of one proton. Oxygen is oxygen because it has a nucleus with 8 protons. We can distinguish between H2O and neon, even though both have the same number of protons and electrons, I don’t know how that could be without H and O being real within the water molecule. Of course the hydrogen and oxygen atoms change when they form water but I have a hard time understanding how that makes them virtual. We can easily reform the hydrogen and oxygen from water, for instance.
structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau) July 5, 2019, 11:51pm #11
But that’s not really right is it? Hydrogen isn’t hydrogen because of some total number of properties that are hydrogen-like and if enough of those properties are missing it ceases to be hydrogen. Hydrogen is hydrogen because it is an atom with a nucleus composed of one proton.
Here’s how Steven Duncan, as far as I understand him in Material Things, would describe the situation - it is slightly different from Feser’s take. The substance hydrogen is composed of matter (H2 molecules) and particular form (the arrangement or structure of those molecules that makes them a gas, lets say, along with irreducible macroscopic properties like temperature, pressure, colorlessness, etc - note the SEP article says there are difficulties even with the reduction of thermodynamic properties like temperature). H2 molecules are themselves composed of H atoms and a form, though Duncan suggests that at the level of molecules that may just be an accidental form rather than a substantial form; and so on further down. For Duncan, the H2 molecules (and the H atoms in those molecules) really exist within the substance hydrogen as the matter underlying that substance.
Similar story with the substances oxygen and water: composed of O2 and H2O molecules respectively, together with appropriate forms. The substance water really contains H atoms and O atoms within its H2O molecules - but it only virtually contains the substances hydrogen and oxygen, because the substantial form of those substances is absent, although the matter required to make up those substances is present.
I like this better than Feser’s account.
nwrickert (Neil Rickert) July 6, 2019, 12:00am #12
If you define explanation as something that is necessarily reductionist, then of course A-T explanations would not be real explanations.
I’m not a reductionist, so that’s not my reasoning.
Meanwhile, it’s good to also watch Feser’s lecture on the laws of nature that we discussed here and his argument as to why the Aristotelian view explains laws of nature better than the conventional “regularity” view, which is basically no explanation at all, period.
I went back and listened to Feser in full.
Sorry, but I am not a Feser fan.
He starts with a theological account of laws (he calls that divine command theory). And he rightly rejects that. However, his deep theological assumptions are implicit throughout the rest of his talk. I’m sure Feser would deny that, but it is clear to see.
In his discussion of the Aristotlean approach, his theological assumptions show up as assumed essences. He gives no explanation of where essences come from. It seems just the kind of implicit assumption that would come from theology. The Aristotlean view is not a real explanation if it depends on unexplained essences.
A little earlier, arguing against Sean Carrol, he gives an extraodinarily bad argument for PSR.
Jordan (Jordan Mantha) July 6, 2019, 12:27am #13
structureoftruth:
The substance hydrogen is composed of matter (H2 molecules) and particular form (the arrangement or structure of those molecules that makes them a gas, lets say, along with irreducible macroscopic properties like temperature, pressure, colorlessness, etc - note the SEP article says there are difficulties even with the reduction of thermodynamic properties like temperature).
But I guess I don’t see how this matter/form distinction matters, or how we would even know. A molecule’s form depends on its matter, they don’t seem independent.
If it’s not already evident, metaphysics is by far my least favorite area of philosophy. It just doesn’t make much sense to me and I have a hard time seeing the use for it or how it could really make much of a difference.
BruceS July 6, 2019, 10:12am #14
There are different approaches to metaphysics. For example, scientific metaphysics resists intuition and a priori reasoning, and instead emphasizes using only scientific results and scientific methods for problems that could be called metaphysical, such as the nature of free will, of causation, of the laws of nature. Such an approach in no way implies a reductionist ontology; indeed many of these philosophers are non-reductive physicalists.
Scientific Metaphysics
Don Ross, James Ladyman, Harold Kincaid
But even among metaphysicians who accept a greater role for a priori thinking, starting with Thomist intuitions is only one possibility in analytic metaphysics.
Regardless of their position on intuition and a priori reasoning in metaphysics, I believe most of the philosophers agree with Daniel’s point that
A-T philosophy, [or any other approach to metaphysics …] is probably not going to be beneficial for the practice of science itself.
So if these various metaphysical approaches have no scientific consequences, is there an independent set of standards for selecting the right approach to metaphysics? I suspect not. Instead, I think people aim for reflective equilibrium, and so accept a metaphysics which is consonant with their overall worldview of how our reality came to be and how we find meaning in living in it.
Even if metaphysics makes little difference to the practice of science, it does play a role in how scientific theories are interpreted. I certainly would say that fundamental physics needs a dose of clearer thinking about metaphysics (John Bell is an example of a physicist who recognized this, evident in his writing about quantum foundations).
But even aside from science entirely, what we believe about metaphysics has important implications for how we understand the everyday world around us. If you believe the universe is devoid of telos, it becomes much more plausible to think that morality is all merely subjective. If you believe animals are soulless automatons as Descartes did, it makes sense to argue that there’s nothing at all problematic with vivisection. If you think that the body is nothing but a certain arrangement of atoms, it becomes easier to think of the mind as having such priority that subjective feelings are justified in trumping objective truths about the physical characteristics of said body, and it makes it easier to believe that human personhood is something separable from a human organism.
None of the above goes any way to showing whether this or that metaphysical theory is true, of course, but it demonstrates that metaphysics affects ethics. Metaphysics is, in that sense, an eminently practical area of inquiry.
swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass) July 6, 2019, 2:50pm #16
It is worth pointing out that modern science arose as a near total rejection of A-T philosophy in Bacon’s Novum Organum. It isn’t surprising to see A-T philosophers struggling to make sense of chemistry. It seems that at its core, A-T is incompatible with science. Perhaps not for being anti-science, but because science is anti-A-T.
structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau) July 6, 2019, 3:04pm #17
Also with noting that some A-T scholars (such as Feser) say that Bacon and the other early moderns give no good arguments for their rejection of Aristotelian philosophy, and that said rejection actually ends up creating an inconsistency in science hiding under the surface, which can only be untangled by undoing that mistake.
I’m afraid I haven’t read Bacon or Descartes to check on that claim!
They have to say that if they are A-T. Sounds tautological. The justification for Bacon’s approach is that it worked where A-T failed for over 1000 years.
vjtorley (Vincent Torley) July 6, 2019, 3:24pm #19
Hi @dga471,
Thank you for your highly informative summary of the 4-day symposium you attended. I’d like to make a few brief comments on the topics you discussed.
…[Y]our potentiality is limited by actuality. This means that while you do have the capacity for substantial change, you only have a limited number of things that you can substantially transform into within your “cone of possibility”… You can only transform into a corpse when you die.
Yes, but my question was: why does my corpse (which has nothing in common with me except primary matter) have the same shape, size and mass as me? On an Aristotelian-Thomistic account of nature, there’s absolutely no reason why it should retain these particular properties, while having a different color (being pallid), a different texture (being rigid) and a different smell.
Chemistry is not a strict result of the laws of physics. I found out that this is by no means a minority or fringe position among philosophers of science, even those who are not Thomists… In short, in general it is currently impossible to completely and exhaustively work out the properties of molecules from their constituent atoms, even if we’re only talking energy levels.
I think you may be confusing ontological irreducibility with epitemological irreducibility here. The fact that we are currently unable to deduce the properties of molecules from their constituent atoms does not entail that the properties of molecules are not (in fact) determined by their constituent atoms. Think about it this way. Do you believe that God personally ordains the chemical properties of each and every isomer, on top of the underlying properties of their constituent atoms?
Now, there are some properties that water may have in common with either atom. But this reflects the reality that to exist virtually means to have the powers of hydrogen and oxygen affect (though not fully determine) the properties of H2O. Therefore, it is unsurprising that these commonalities exist.
I’m afraid this won’t do. According to Thomists, hydrogen and oxygen no longer exist in H2O. If they no longer exist, then neither do their powers, which are proper accidents of hydrogen and oxygen, and are therefore unable to exist in the absence of their underlying subject. Therefore, it is very surprising that these commonalities exist.
Once this argument works, you can go on and argue that a body of water could be thought of as a single substance consisting of H2O molecules all existing virtually within it.
Seriously? So if I’m out on a lake in a fishing boat, and I dip a cup into the water of the lake, that water undergoes a substantial change when I take it out of the lake? And if I pour it back in again, the new substance that existed inside the cup suddenly ceases to exist? Or again: if a puddle of water on the road partially evaporates, leaving two separate, smaller puddles of water, there has been a substantial change? And if it rains again and the two puddles merge into one puddle of the same size and shape as the old one, does the substance of the original puddle return, or is it a new puddle?
Can you now see why Scholastic philosophers were ridiculed by philosophers of the Enlightenment?
But in general, one of the main reasons why Thomists are reluctant to think of elementary particles and fields as individual substances is because in practice, we almost never (if at all) find them existing by themselves (instead of as part of some other substance).
I have two words for you: interstellar space. Here’s Wikipedia on the interstellar medium:
In astronomy, the interstellar medium (ISM) is the matter and radiation that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, as well as dust and cosmic rays… By mass, 99% of the ISM is gas in any form, and 1% is dust. Of the gas in the ISM, by number 91% of atoms are hydrogen and 8.9% are helium, with 0.1% being atoms of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, known as “metals” in astronomical parlance.
So all of these floating atoms, ions and molecules are accidents and not substances? And when a large number of hydrogen atoms coalesce (over millions of years) to form a star, that means that a large number of accidents, aggregated together, magically form a substance? On an Aristotelian-Thomistic account, this makes absolutely no sense at all.
For example, it is not clear whether light is a substance (or perhaps the EM field which gives rise to it is).
So when a piece of matter (i.e. a substance) encounters a piece of anti-matter (i.e. another substance), causing both to dissolve in a sea of photons, the result is an accident? Substance plus substance equals accident? This, I have to say, is gobbledygook.
I realized that in many areas of physics, it is still awkward to interpret them with A-T philosophy.
Aristotelian philosophy reverses this bottom-up picture to take a top-down picture. Here, macro-level objects [2] exist actually, while their constituents do not “really” exist; they exist only virtually.
I will grant that some skepticism about the reality of atoms may have been justified during the time of Ernst Mach (who famously doubted their existence), but today, we have photos of them, for heaven’s sake. How can you have a photo of something that’s purely virtual?
The basic metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle is that it’s a middle ground between the two extremes of Heracliteanism (where everything changes, there is nothing constant) and Parmenideanism (where nothing changes, and everything is constant).
All well and good. But is it the only middle ground?
In contrast, philosophical atomists do tend to fall into the Parmenidean extreme, where (philosophical) atoms are thought of as immutable.
Well, perhaps fields are immutable. But you’re a physicist, so I shall bow to your superior wisdom on this point.
Daniel, I really appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to. I’d like to leave you with a concluding thought. Take it from me, as someone who delved into modern Scholastic philosophy about 35 years ago: Aristotelian-Thomism and chemistry don’t mix very well. I think you sense that, too.
I think it’s fair to say that the Cartesian approach to biology leaves something very important out. Living things have a telos, and Baconian science ignores final causes. But only a tiny fraction of the cosmos is alive. In the field of chemistry, I’m sticking with atomism.
Hi @Jordan
That a hydrogen atom within a water molecule behaves differently than a hydrogen atom in vacuum doesn’t mean it ceases to be hydrogen does it?
Hear, hear!
Hydrogen isn’t hydrogen because of some total number of properties that are hydrogen-like and if enough of those properties are missing it ceases to be hydrogen. Hydrogen is hydrogen because it is an atom with a nucleus composed of one proton. Oxygen is oxygen because it has a nucleus with 8 protons.
A molecule’s form depends on its matter, they don’t seem independent.
I hadn’t thought of that point before, but it’s a very profound one.
Hi @structureoftruth,
His [Duncan’s] version of non-reductionism is a little different: while he holds that chemical substances have form irreducible to the arrangement of their microscopic constituents, he also says that form is emergent from, and supervenes on, the structure of the microscopic constituents. Maybe that could be called weak ontological non-reductionism rather than strong (the difference possibly being lack of top-down causation - Duncan seems to deny top-down causation, at least for merely material things).
The substance hydrogen is composed of matter (H2 molecules) and particular form (the arrangement or structure of those molecules that makes them a gas, lets say, along with irreducible macroscopic properties like temperature, pressure, colorlessness, etc - note the SEP article says there are difficulties even with the reduction of thermodynamic properties like temperature). H2 molecules are themselves composed of H atoms and a form, though Duncan suggests that at the level of molecules that may just be an accidental form rather than a substantial form; and so on further down. For Duncan, the H2 molecules (and the H atoms in those molecules) really exist within the substance hydrogen as the matter underlying that substance.
I have to say that Duncan’s account seems to make more sense than the Aristotelian-Thomistic account.
swamidass:
They would have to say that if they are A-T. Sounds tautological. The justification for Bacon’s approach is that it worked where A-T failed for over 1000 years.
Yet if Aristotelian philosophy (and I’m not bothering to defend Thomistic philosophy specifically, since I agree with @vjtorley that some aspects of it - the idea that living things are composed directly from prime matter and substantial form, for example - lead to absurdities) is not incompatible with the practice and findings of science, then the success of science since Baconian and Cartesian philosophy became dominant does not demonstrate the falsity of Aristotelian metaphysics, but at best that something like “methodological Cartesianism” is good scientific practice. And it seems, from the suggestions that Steven Duncan puts forth, that a broadly Aristotelian view is both entirely compatible with science and makes more sense as part of an overall worldview than the early modern philosophy. (Or at least, that there’s a good case to be made for that thesis.)
Also, I suspect that it is rather unfair to say that the Aristotelian tradition failed for 1000 years, as both downplaying what ancient and medieval scholars were able accomplish, and imputing values and standards on them that would have been foreign to their way of thinking. But confirming that would require a deeper dive into the history of science and philosophy than I can manage right now.
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Home | Sports | El Paso Sports | El Paso Rhinos Ready to Host WSHL Playoffs; Tickets On Sale Starting Saturday
El Paso Rhinos coach Cory Herman: “We’re also thankful to have the support of El Paso behind us as we make a run for the Thorne Cup here in Rhino Country.”
El Paso Rhinos Ready to Host WSHL Playoffs; Tickets On Sale Starting Saturday
Staff Report March 2, 2018 1 Comment
UTEP’s Gatewood named to 2019 C-USA Preseason Football All-Conference Team
Isotopes scorch Chihuahuas 12-3
For the third time in the team’s 12-year history, the El Paso Rhinos will host the annual Western States Hockey League season finale tournament, featuring six of the best teams in the nation, at the El Paso County Coliseum Events Center (4100 East Paisano.)
The first round gets underway April 11, with the semifinals April 14 and the championship April 15.
“We are excited to have teams from around the country experience the hospitality of the Sun City,” said El Paso Rhinos coach Cory Herman. “We’re also thankful to have the support of El Paso behind us as we make a run for the Thorne Cup here in Rhino Country.”
The Rhinos have two Thorne Cup titles – 2008 and 2014.
The last time El Paso hosted the Thorne Cup tournament, the team won the championship with a stellar 44-2 record. Currently, the Rhinos are in the midst of a phenomenal season with a 46-1-1 record, so far, in their quest to win the title once again on home ice.
The Rhinos have only three games left in the regular season – 7 p.m. Friday-Saturday, March 2-3, and 4:30 p.m. Sunday, March 4, against the Wichita Jr. Thunder at the Events Center – before competing in the Thorne Cup playoffs.
The WSHL is an Amateur Athletic Union-sanctioned Tier II Junior A ice hockey league, which features 23 teams split into four divisions: Mid-Western, Western, Northwestern and Mountain.
El Paso plays in the Mid-Western Division, along with the Oklahoma City Blazers, Dallas Snipers, Springfield Express and Thunder.
Tickets, which will cost $7, $10, $15, $20, $30 and $35, plus fees, will be available at the Coliseum Box Office, all Ticketmaster outlets, by phone at 800-745-3000 and online.
el paso rhinos hockey in el paso rhinos hockey thorne cup wshl 2018-03-02
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Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sega Game (SEGA)
Dr. Robotnik is back and he has a new ally to help him defeat you in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Go to an adventure in a mystical floating island that caters your enemy.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a platform video game and the fourth main game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series that was released for the Sega Genesis in 1994. In this game, you will play the role of Sonic the Hedgehog and Miles “Tails” Prower to defeat the Dr. Robotnik and destroy his evil inventions. The game begins after the events of the previous installation of the game where Dr. Robotnik’s Death Egg crash-lands on the Angel Island. Dr. Robotnik meets the guardian of the Master Emerald, Knuckles the Echidna, and tricks him to fight against Sonic.
Z = A X = B C = C
A = X S = Y D = Z
space = Mode
Classic Tetris
Sonic Advance 3
Super Mario Advance 4 Classic Tetris Sonic Advance 3 Super Mario Kart Super Mario World
Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is an online SEGA game that you can play at Emulator Online. This free Sega game is the United States of America region version for the USA. Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a single title from the many arcade games, skill games and sonic games offered for this console. If you enjoyed playing this, then you can find similar games in the sega games category. Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game is from the various retro games on the site, and there are more games like this, including Sonic Mania Edition, Knuckles Chaotix 32X and Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
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Raw milk – What it is and why it shouldn’t be consumed
Last week, a Victorian toddler died and four other children aged 1 to 4 fell seriously ill after drinking raw milk.
The tragic death has led to various health bodies to urge for the sale of raw milk to be outlawed, with Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Dr Rosemary Lester, commenting, “If this was a food, it is something we would recall.”
The problem is that raw milk is sold under the guise of ‘bath milk’ in order to sideline the law that requires milk to be pasteurised.
Pasteurisation, the process of heating milk to 72 degrees for 15 seconds to kill harmful bacteria, was first introduced in Australia in the 1950s. Pioneered by Louis Pasteur over 150 years ago, the process ensures safer consumption of dairy products, which are consumed by upward of 80% of Australians.
Without pasteurisation, milk can contain harmful bacteria like salmonella, listeria, and e coli – the latter of which caused haemolytic-uremic syndrome and subsequent kidney failure in one of the five children, who luckily survived.
The child’s mother reported that he developed diarrhoea and vomiting, which lasted for 10 days as doctors remained mystified at the cause of his illness. The condition worsened, and “he turned grey” before being taken to the Royal Children’s Hospital with 20% kidney function.
So why are people still buying it?
Some might say it comes down to the popular view that anything raw must equal healthy, while processing of any kind must be bad.
The common belief that pasteurisation depletes milk of nutritional value is totally false, and to quote one impassioned journalist, the trend “goes hand in hand with anti-vaccination and fluoride denial when it comes to public health lunacy.”
But undoubtedly the most alarming thought is that raw milk continues to be sold in health food shops across Melbourne, and despite disclaimers that it is not for human consumption, it is packaged like regular drinking milk and stocked in food stores.
Click here for the full recall statement of Mountain View Organic Dairy – Organic Bath Milk
2014 – a year in review
Tags: Australia, bacteria, bath milk, Chief Health Officer, dairy, diet, food, health, Louis Pasteur, milk, myth, nutrition, pasteurisation, pasteurised milk, raw milk, trend
davehpt
Reblogged this on Lose Weight, No Bullshit.
I’ve stopped drinking milk a year ago and never look back. I love raw nut milk now…They are not only delicious but nutritious and safe to drink (especially when cold pressed).
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That’s “Mr. President The Donald” to you…
Filed under: Talking Politics — Fergal Casey @ 1:20 pm
Tags: Andrew Jackson, Armando Iannucci, AV, Barack Obama, Benjamin Harrison, Bill Clinton, David Cameron, Donald Trump, Franklin D Roosevelt, George McGovern, George W Bush, Hilary Clinton, JFK, Jimmy Carter, John F Kennedy, John Quincy Adams, Lyndon B Johnson, Nigel Farage, Reconstruction, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Rutherford B Hayes, The Donald, Watergate, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson
Yes, it’s time for one of the regrettable lapses into politics on this blog; occasioned by the vitriol thrown at Donald Trump’s Presidency, which is of dubious historical merit when considered under the headings of mandate, legitimacy, and suitability.
Donald Trump got 46% of the popular vote.
Bill Clinton got 43.01% of the popular vote in 1992.
Woodrow Wilson got 41.8% of the popular vote in 1912.
Armando Iannucci is one of many people to claim that Trump has no mandate, because more people voted for someone else.
Well, the only way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to win over 50% of the popular vote, isn’t it?
If a candidate must receive more than 50% of the popular vote to have a mandate, then no Democrat President in the 20th and 21st centuries has ever had a mandate except Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.
By contrast every Republican President from William McKinley’s 51% in 1896 onward has had a mandate, except Richard Nixon, George W Bush, and Donald Trump; and Nixon and Bush both achieved over 50% of the vote on re-election.
The electoral college system is silly, but it’s been silly for a long time now.
Andrew Jackson blew a gasket in 1824 when he was denied the Presidency.
But it wasn’t fixed then.
Rutherford B Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1876 to be let be President.
Nor in 1888, nor in 2000, because, like AV in England, it is politically insoluble.
If you weep for Hilary Clinton’s near 3 million votes and no Presidency, did you also weep for Nigel Farage’s 5 million votes and only 1 (previously filched Tory) seat in 2015?
Hilary Clinton effectively built up massive and useless majorities in safe seats, while Donald Trump eked out tiny majorities in seats that could be flipped, and so won with equal legitimacy as David Cameron did in 2015.
Trump as an unsuitable character to be President…
More unsuitable than Johnson, who boasted that he’d had more women by accident than JFK had on purpose?
More unsuitable than JFK, who was so out of control new Secret Service agents were aghast at being assigned hooker detail?
More unsuitable than Nixon and Reagan, who both committed treason to win the Presidency?
Should the Republicans only be allowed to nominate candidates approved by the Democrats?
Would the Democrats then be happy to only nominate candidates approved by the Republicans?
Wasn’t that instinct what led to Watergate – Nixon trying to swing the nomination towards McGovern because he felt, and rightly so, that he could easily destroy him in the campaign proper?
Donald Trump is the President.
He has more of a mandate than Bill Clinton in 1992, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
He has the same legitimacy as John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W Bush.
And he has fought fewer duels than fellow populist and all round short-fuse exponent Andrew Jackson.
All three strands are ahistoric rationalisations obscuring the raw howl ‘I voted for the other candidate!’.
Well, in a two-party system, there is a 50/50 chance that the other candidate wins every 4 years.
And then you wait for the next roll of the dice in 4 years and place your money on your candidate again.
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9 Days of 90s Horror
Filed under: Talking Movies — Fergal Casey @ 1:08 pm
Tags: 22 Jump Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Anjelica Huston, Anthony Hopkins, Bernard Rose, Better Midler, Blade, Blade II, Bram Stoker Festival, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Brian Cox, Bryan Fuller, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Candyman, Clarice Starling, Clive Barker, Count Dracula, David Arquette, David Warner, Daywalker, Donald Sutherland, Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola, Freddy Kreuger, From Dusk 'Till Dawn, Gary Oldman, George Clooney, Guillermo Del Toro, Halloween, Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter, Harvey Keitel, Heather Langenkamp, Hocus Pocus, Horrorthon, IFI, Jamie Kennedy, Jason Blum, Jerry O'Connell, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Harker, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Joss Whedon, Juliette Lewis, Kathy Najimy, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Williamson, Kirsty Swanson, Kris Kristofferson, Last House on the Left, Lighthouse, Luke Perry, Manhunter, Michael Mann, Mina Murray, Neve Campbell, Nicolas Roeg, Philip Glass, Quentin Tarantino, Roald Dahl, Robert Englund, Robert Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, Rutger Hauer, Salem, Salma Hayek, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Scream, Skeet Ulrich, steampunk, Stephen Dorff, Sundance, The Blair Witch Project, The Forbidden, The Grand High Witch, The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, Timothy Olyphant, Tony Todd, Van Helsing, Wes Craven, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Wesley Snipes, Winona Ryder
Hallowe’en comes to the Lighthouse with 9 days of 90s horror films from 23rd to 31st October culminating in a Scream-themed party before a screening of the late Wes Craven’s third reinvention of horror cinema.
While the IFI’s Horrorthon unleashes a slew of new genre entries, the Lighthouse will hark back to the 1990s; the origin of the ‘ironic slasher’ sub-genre which was murdered by torture porn, and found-footage, which, like many a horror bogeyman, just won’t die. In association with the Bram Stoker Festival the 90s Vampire strand brings Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Stoker’s text back to the big screen, placing it beside other 90s vampire movies Blade, From Dusk Till Dawn, and the original iteration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The most important film being screened, however, is Scream. Wes Craven redirected the current of horror cinema three times: Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. Teamed with razor-sharp screenwriter Kevin Williamson he delivered a totemic movie well worthy of a Scream-themed Hallowe’en night costume party.
FROM DUSK ‘TILL DAWN
Friday 23rd October 10:30pm
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s first blood-soaked collaboration is presented in a digital restoration; that won’t make QT happy… A grimy, violent B-movie about a seedy Mexican bar that happens to be crawling with vampires this had its origins in VFX guys wanting a showcase script for their handiwork. So, after some quintessentially Tarantinoesque build-up, with fugitives George Clooney and Tarantino trading taunts and riffs with their hostages Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis, Rodriguez’s aesthetic takes over: Salma Hayek and energetic mayhem.
BLADE I & II – (Double Bill)
Saturday 24th October 9:00pm
Never let a high concept get in the way of a good double bill! Guillermo Del Toro’s 2002 sequel sees humans and vampires form an uneasy alliance to defeat the mutated vampires known as ‘Reapers’, who threaten to infect and/or eat everyone. But first we have to see Wesley Snipes’ vampire superhero take down Stephen Dorff, with some help from Kris Kristofferson, in the 1998 debut of the ‘Daywalker’. All together now: “Some motherf****** are always trying to ice-skate uphill.”
Sunday 25th October 10:30pm
Nothing bad is ever Joss Whedon’s fault. That trope began here. His script for this 1992 teen comedy was apparently neutered in production, leading Whedon to dream it all up again for TV; where, even as show-runner, season 4 was also somehow not his fault. Buffy’s cinematic origin story isn’t a patch on the TV development, and, while Donald Sutherland’s Watcher and Rutger Hauer’s Master Vampire add class to proceedings, this is more interesting as a time capsule (Look! It’s Luke Perry!).
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Monday 26th October 3:30pm
Director Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplay differs wildly from Stoker’s book. Coppola fixated on a ‘true love never dies’ doppelganger love story between Gary Oldman’s Count and Winona Ryder’s Mina Murray, that shaped Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ recent steam-punk TV adaptation. Cast adrift amidst outré sets that bellow their obvious artifice, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing and Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker try to ground things, but the best verdict remains Winona Ryder’s acidic “I deserved an Oscar for the job I did promoting that movie…”
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – (Cinema Book Club)
Tuesday 27th October 8.00pm
The Halloween edition of the Lighthouse’s Cinema Book Club is Jonathan Demme’s film of Thomas Harris’ best-selling chiller. Harris’ universe has been thoroughly mined, most recently in Bryan Fuller’s hallucinatory series Hannibal, but this 1991 Oscar-winner was the breakthrough adaptation. Jodie Foster’s FBI rookie Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins’ imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lecter are indelible performances. It’s become fashionable to disparage this in favour of Manhunter, but there’s a reason few people ever saw Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter…
Wednesday 28th October 8.30pm
The greatest horror producer of the 21st century Jason Blum passed on this at Sundance, and has been kicking himself ever since. Some people at early screenings in 1999 thought that this was real; giving its unnerving ending enough power to create a buzz that made it a sensation. It wasn’t real. It was, however, the moment where found-footage horror stomped into the multiplex and declared it would never leave, all because of an unsettling walk in the woods in Burkettsville, Maryland.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE
Thursday 29th October 8.30pm
Wes Craven wrote and directed this late meta-instalment in the franchise he had kicked off with his original vision of Freddy Kreuger. Heather Langenkamp, Nancy in 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street, plays herself; plagued by dreams of a Freddy Kreuger far darker than the one portrayed by her good friend Robert Englund. Featuring cameos from several of the original cast and crew Craven produces a postmodern musing on what happens when artists create fictions that take on a life of their own.
Friday 30th October 8.30pm
Bernard Rose’s cult classic, an adaptation of genre legend Clive Barker’s The Forbidden, follows a thesis student who is researching urban legends. Unfortunately for him he discovers the terrifying world of ‘Candyman’, the ghost of a murdered artist who is summoned by anyone foolish to say his name out loud into a mirror five times. Masterfully made, still absolutely terrifying, and the reason we all cheer whenever Tony Todd makes a cameo ever since, this also features the unlikely bonus of a Philip Glass score.
HOCUS POCUS, Kathy Najimy, Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, 1993
Saturday 31st October 3.00pm
A token film for the kids is 1992’s Hocus Pocus. Why the misfiring hi-jinks of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy’s trio of Salem witches is perennially on TV is a mystery, but to present it as the essential kids’ Hallowe’en film is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle. Especially when Nicolas Roeg’s film of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, starring a scary Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch, dates from 1990…
SCREAM I & II – (Double Bill & Party)
Saturday 31st October 9.30pm.
Neve Campbell confidently carries this 1996 classic, a blackly hilarious self-aware dissection of slasher clichés which is also a brilliant slasher filled with tense sequences. Williamson’s delicious dialogue (“Movies don’t create psychos, they just make psychos more creative…”) is brought to memorable life by an ensemble on truly top form, with star-making turns from Jamie Kennedy, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, and Skeet Ulrich. 1997’s sequel isn’t quite as good, but Kevin Williamson’s dialogue remains a joy, there are some nail-biting moments, it’s as subversively self-aware as 22 Jump Street of its sequel status, and uses Timothy Olyphant, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jerry O’Connell, and David Warner to great effect.
‘9 Days of 90s horror’ ends with a Scream-themed Hallowe’en party preceding the Scream double bill, beginning at 8pm. Dress as your favourite 90s horror icon and enjoy the ironically-named cocktails, soundtrack of 90s hits, and general japery all related to Wes Craven’s classic slasher.
TICKETS FOR 90S VAMPIRE FILMS:
http://www.lighthousecinema.ie/newsarticle.php?sec=NEWS&_aid=8323
TICKETS FOR 90S HORROR FILMS:
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Announced on Blu-ray
caliblue15|3084d ago |News|2|
Jorge writes: Warner Home Video has announced “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1″ and “Harry Potter Years 1-7 Gift Set” for Blu-ray release on April 15. The gift set will include all the previous titles and will also include the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. The regular release will be available in a combo pack that will include the Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy of the film. Check below for a list of supplements for the single Blu-ray release.
Blu-ray DVD Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 hidefninja.com
hidefninja.com
Silly Mammo3083d ago
If you waited this long for a box set. Why wouldn't you wait for part 2 and the inevitable complete series box set in December?
Sunny_D3083d ago
I think I am going to just watch the last movie. I haven't cared for the Harry Potter movies since part 1. I will watch the last one since it is the closer, you know.
1d 10h ago
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Economy, Business And Markets
India Expects Rise in Basmati Exports as Iran Resumes Rice Imports
The resumption of rice imports by Iran could give a fillip to India’s basmati shipments that have risen by about a fourth in rupee terms in the first eight months of the current fiscal year (started March 21, 2017), the Indian newspaper Hindu Business Line reported.
Iran is the largest buyer of India’s basmati and accounts for a fourth of India’s annual aromatic rice shipments of around four million tons.
The country restarted rice import registration this year from Jan. 21 till June 21. The permission was communicated by Agriculture Minister Mahmoud Hojjati in a letter to Minister of Industries, Mining and Trade Mohammad Shariatmadari.
According to the letter, the order registrations will be valid for a three-month period and are extendable by a further one month.
Hojjati noted that any rice shipments as per the new orders need to be cleared through Iranian customs by July 22, after which all imports will be banned.
Every year and during the rice harvest season (July-January), the Iranian government bans rice imports in support of local farmers and domestic production.
“Based on the current export trend, we expect basmati shipments to be higher than last year,” said DK Singh, chairman of India’s Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority.
Basmati is the second largest product in Apeda’s export portfolio after buffalo meat and accounts for over 22% of the total shipment value.
In the April-November period of this fiscal year, basmati exports grew 29% to $2.61 billion from $2.02 billion in the corresponding period of last year.
In rupee terms, basmati exports grew 24% to Rs.16,838 crore (1 crore=10 million) during the April-November period from Rs.13,571 crore in the corresponding year-ago period. In 2016-17, India’s basmati exports stood at 3.98 million tons valued at over $3.22 billion.
However, Indian rice exporters are cautiously optimistic over the shipment prospects with Iran, considering the fact that they have been facing issues related to traces of fungicide in exports to the European Union, another major market.
“We expect basmati shipments this year to be the same as last year or even higher,” said Rajen Sundaresan, executive director of All-India Rice Exporters Association.
Sticking Points
“While Iran has reopened its market, it has stopped extending concessional foreign exchange (set at lower rates compared to market prices) to its rice importers,” said Vijay Setia, president of AIREA.
The move is aimed at discouraging more rice imports into the West Asian country.
Furthermore, Iran has also been raising objections to the digital phyto-sanitary certificates issued by Indian authorities. The issues have been taken up with India’s Agriculture Ministry and are likely to be resolved soon, sources said.
Iranians consume 3.2 million tons of rice a year while domestic production stands at 2.2 million tons.
“We need imports, but imports that are limited and controlled,” Hojjati has been quoted as saying.
More than 1.05 million tons of semi- and wholly-milled rice worth close to $996 million were imported into Iran during the first half of the current Iranian year (March 21-Sept. 22), registering an 84.4% and 108.4% surge in weight and value respectively compared with the corresponding period of last year.
Rice imports accounted for 6% and 4.2% of the volume and value of Iran’s overall imports respectively during the six-month period.
Imports are made mainly from the UAE, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey and Iraq.
The two northern provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran are home to a majority of Iran’s paddy fields.
A total of 81% and 70% of rice harvest in the two provinces respectively were mechanized in the last Iranian year.
Indian Exporters Wary of Dealing With Iran Due to US Sanctions
Indian Basmati Rice Exporters Facing Iran Defaults Woes
Basmati Imports to Pick Up After October
Seasonal Ban on Rice Imports to Be Lifted on Sunday
Iran Continues to Import Pakistani Rice From Dubai
Growth in Rice Imports
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Research Report for Investors: Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE)
Adobe Systems Incorporated (ADBE) belonging to the Technology sector has surged 2.72% and closed its
Investor Research Report on Real Goods Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:RGSE)
Real Goods Solar, Inc. (RGSE) belonging to the Technology sector has declined -0.28% and closed
Analytical Report on Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE:WY)
Weyerhaeuser Company (WY) belonging to the Basic Materials sector has declined -0.25% and closed its
Insider News of Cheniere Energy, Inc. (NYSE:LNG)
Cheniere Energy, Inc. (LNG) belonging to the Energy sector has surged 0.24% and closed its
Insider Activity of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:APC)
Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (APC) belonging to the Energy sector has surged 0.46% and closed its
EPS Growth overview of Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (NYSE:ADM)
Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (ADM) belonging to the Consumer Defensive sector has surged 0.1% and closed its
Price Target Overview of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (NASDAQ:MLCO)
Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (MLCO) belonging to the Consumer Cyclical sector has surged 1.01%
Price Target Analysis of Lam Research Corporation (NASDAQ:LRCX)
Lam Research Corporation (LRCX) belonging to the Technology sector has surged 1.22% and closed its
Insider Activity for Investors: Home Depot, Inc. (The) (NYSE:HD)
Home Depot, Inc. (The) (HD) belonging to the Consumer Cyclical sector has surged 0.51% and
Analysts Upgrade/Downgrade Activity of Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY)
Workday, Inc. (WDAY) belonging to the Technology sector has surged 4.32% and closed its last
Two Stocks To Watch For: General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS), Omega Healthcare Investors, Inc. (NYSE:OHI)
Comparison of Two Hot Stocks: Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP), Briggs & Stratton Corporation (NYSE:BGG)
Comparison of Top Two Shares of the Day: Avnet, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVT), Pluralsight, Inc. (NASDAQ:PS)
Two Stocks To Ponder On: Altria Group (NYSE:MO), Home Depot, Inc. (The) (NYSE:HD)
Two Shares Face To Face: TE Connectivity Ltd. (NYSE:TEL), C&J Energy Services, Inc (NYSE:CJ)
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Descendants of John Jaffray
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Original Research - Jeff Gray - https://www.gray.kiwi/Jeff-Gray
Maintained by Robert Gray.
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Archives & Special Collections: University Archives
Sigurd M. Raschèr
Walter S. Hartley
Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes
Holland Land Company
Local History Collections
Other Collections Toggle Dropdown
Masters Theses & Capstone Projects
The University Archives collects materials of enduring historical value and certain non-current records that document both the administrative activities of the State University of New York at Fredonia and its overall history. Decisions on collection development in this area are informed by the SUNY Records Retention and Disposition Schedule, as well as by the input of key university departments and individuals.
With the support of a 2018 Regional Bibliographic Databases (RBDB) grant from the Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC), the Archives and Special Collections has collaborated with Backstage Library Works to digitize 20 bound volumes of the earliest issues of the college's newspaper, The Normal Leader, spanning the years 1893 to 1922. The Normal Leader, first published in 1893 in several handwritten volumes by the all-female Agonian literary society and later the Zetesian literary society, originally focused on literary content created by students at the Fredonia Normal School and provided a glimpse into student life at the turn of the 20th Century. While The Normal School at Fredonia was only one among many teachers colleges in the United States, The Normal Leader gives a unique account of the school's inception and growth over time in relation to the overall history of the region.
In total, 191 individual issues are now text-searchable and available for browsing, research, and enjoyment via New York Heritage - click here to view the collection (originals available for viewing in the Archives and Special Collections reading room).
Please contact the Archives & Special Collections for further assistance.
<< Previous: Masters Theses & Capstone Projects
Next: Genealogy Resources >>
Last Updated: Mar 4, 2019 9:20 AM
URL: https://fredonia.libguides.com/archives
Subjects: Archives & Special Collections
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José Rizal University
(Redirected from Jose Rizal University)
This college or university article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia guidelines for college and university articles. Please improve this article if you can. (March 2010)
Find sources: "José Rizal University" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
José Rizal University (JRU) (Formerly José Rizal College / JRC) is a non-sectarian, non-stock private educational institution. Located at Shaw Boulevard, Mandaluyong City, Philippines, it was founded in 1919 by Don Vicente Fabella, Philippine's first certified accountant.
Pamantasang José Rizal
Former names
Far Eastern College
José Rizal College
We care about good education.
Private, Nonsectarian
Don Vicente Fabella
Vicente K. Fabella
No. 80 corner Shaw Boulevard and Kalentong St. Mandaluyong
Alma Mater song
Himno Jose Rizal
Blue and gold
Varsity team names:
Heavy Bombers
(college men's varsity teams)
Lady Bombers
(college women's varsity teams)
Light Bombers
(High School varsity teams)
Rizalians
Sporting affiliations
NCAA (Philippines)
www.jru.edu
Facade of the university
The JRU Campus
José Rizal University joined the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1927. The college varsity teams are called the Jose Rizal University Heavy Bombers. It is one of the schools situated in the east side of Mandaluyong city, the others being Arellano University – Plaridel Campus and Don Bosco Technical College.
José Rizal University was established in 1919 by Vicente Fabella.[1] Fabella was the first Filipino certified public accountant. The university was originally known as Far Eastern College Schools of Accounts, Commerce and Finance and it was situated along Arlegui Street. In 1921, it transferred location to Hidalgo Street and changed its name to José Rizal College a year after.[2]
It closed operations throughout the Japanese occupation of the Philippines as Fabella joined the guerrilla movement. The closure was also a symbol of opposition against the Japanese. After the second world war, in 1946, it reopened and moved to its present location in Mandaluyong in 1949.[2]
Originally offering commerce and high school degrees, the college expanded its offerings to include an elementary school, education and liberal arts at the undergraduate level, and law, business administration, public administration, and education at the graduate level. It has its own research publication, the Journal of Business, Education and Law. The college is especially proud of Ramon Magsaysay, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1932 and who subsequently became the 7th President of the Philippines.
José Rizal University was declared a university by the Commission on Higher Education in 2000.[2] It was granted autonomous status by CHED "from 6 October 2009 to 5 October 2012".[3][4] This is the highest form of certification that can be granted to a Higher Education Institution. As at end of October 2009, only 44 (2.5%) out of 1,726 higher educational institutions in the Philippines had been granted autonomous status by CHED.[5]
Academic programsEdit
Law SchoolEdit
The primary purpose of the law school is to prepare men and women to meet the needs of progress and modern technology in the various aspects of the practice of law. These needs call not only for technical skills but also for responsible leadership in the development of the law and the administration of justice. It is in response to these needs that the four-year curriculum leading to the degree of Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) was offered in 1967.
Graduate SchoolEdit
Doctor in Business Administration (D.B.A.)
Doctor in Public Administration (D.P.A.)
Master in Business Administration (M.B.A.)
Master in Public Administration (M.P.A.)
Master of Arts in Education (M.A.Ed.)
CollegeEdit
Inside the JRU Campus
All courses offered in the College Division are recognized by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. In addition, the undergraduate programs have been accredited by the Philippine Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines, and qualified by the Commission on Higher Education and the Department of Education, Culture and Sports.
The collegiate undergraduate programs in Commercial Science, Liberal Arts and Education have been granted Level III accreditation by Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Accreditation and the Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines, and qualified by the Commission on Higher Education.
In addition, the University was granted a deregulated status by the Commission on Higher Education to recognize its commitment and contribution to the promotion of quality education. Only 50 universities in the Philippines have this seal.
Business and Accountancy
Bachelor of Science in Accountancy (B.S.A.)
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (B.S.B.A.) - CHED Center of Development
Major in Accounting
Major in Computer Science
Major in Economics
Major in Finance
Major in Management
Major in Marketing
Major in Secretarial Science
Major in Service Management for BPO
Major in Supply Chain Management
Major in Office Management
Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Restaurant Management (B.S.H.R.M.)
Major in Cruise Management
Bachelor of Science in Tourism Management (B.S.T.M.)
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
in Mathematics
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (B.S.Cp.E.)
Bachelor of Science in Electronics and Communication Engineering (B.S.E.C.E.)
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (B.S.I.T.)
Major in Animation and Game Development
Bachelor of Science in Nursing (B.S.N.)
Bachelor of Science in Criminology (B.S.C.)
Students Organizations
There are several of student organizations in the campus, all under the leadership of students with faculty supervision. From time to time, the different organizations sponsor convocations and open forum on subjects of current interest. Notable speakers with special knowledge of the topic are usually invited.
The Central Student Council
The highest student body on the campus, the Central Student Council prepares students for leadership in the community outside the College. It is composed of the officers of the different recognized campus organizations and advised by a senior faculty member. It has the basic task of coordinating student activities in which the whole student body has direct interest.
The Junior Philippine Institute of Accountants (JPIA)
One of the largest college organization in the Philippines, the JRU-JPIA is composed of different students who are taking BSA and BSBA-Accounting. It is an honor society devoted to the promotion of accounting through different programs. Furthermore, it aims to develop accounting students mentally, emotionally and socially as preparation for their journey to become Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in the future.
Other Organizations in the College Division
MANSOC - Management Society
MATHSOC - Mathematics Society
YES - Young Educators Society
COMSOC - Computer Society
ICpEP.se - JRU Chapter - Formerly ACES (Auxiliary of Computer Engineering Students)
ASH - Association of Students in History (formerly History Society)
ATOMS - Association of Tourism Management Students
JPIA - Junior Philippine Institute of Accountants
JFINECS - Junior Finance and Economics Society (formerly Finance Society)
LASO - Liberal Arts Students Organization (Formerly Communication Arts Society)
HHRS - Hospitality Hotelier and Restaurateurs Society
YMA - Young Marketers Association
SMS - Supply Management Society (Formerly Supply Management Elites)
Teatro Rizal
Jose Rizal University Book Buddies
Jose Rizal University Chorale
Jose Rizal University Dance Troupe
Jose Rizal University Pep Squad
High schoolEdit
Literary and musical programs, convocations featuring noted resource persons, and other social gatherings are frequently held at the campus. Complete computer facilities are provided for the students' hands-on experience.
The High School has an active Student Catholic Action unit. Holy Mass is celebrated every first Friday of the month at the school campus. Religious instruction is conducted on a voluntary arrangement to interested Catholic students. The prayer room is open during school hours, where the students of all denominations may meditate.
The High School student body publishes a school paper, The Scroll, completely managed and edited by students. Students are encouraged to write and publish original articles in this school organ. They are given the opportunity to express themselves freely through writing. Managing the paper imbues the students' minds with the significance of responsibility and work, and plays an important role in the development of a mature student body. A yearbook, The Blue and Gold, is published annually by the senior class.
AthleticsEdit
Main article: JRU Heavy Bombers
José Rizal University has participated in the NCAA Philippines since 1927. The Bombers emblem features a man riding on a bomb, with the letters "JRU" ("JRC" when the school was José Rizal College) on his face. The school got the name "bombers" because of the rumored underground bombs on the campus area from the country's Japanese period.
"Heavy Bombers" is the title of the men's varsity teams, "Light Bombers" is for the High School Teams, and "Lady Bombers" for the women's teams.
Notable alumniEdit
This is a partial list of notable alumni of Jose Rizal University. Entries on this list should either have an accompanying existing article link which verifies they are an alumnus, or reliable sources as footnotes against the name.
President Ramon Magsaysay, BCS '32 (President of the Philippines, 1953-57)[6]
Armand Fabella, MA '53, Chairman-UCPB, Chairman-JRU, Former DepEd Secretary)
Dir. Avelino Razon, LLB, Chief of the Philippine National Police
Jimmy Santos, TV host and former basketball player the Philippine Basketball Association.
John Marion R. Wilson, basketball player in the Philippine Basketball Association.
Vergel Meneses, former basketball player for the JRU Heavy Bombers in the NCAA and the Philippine Basketball Association.
Mel Lopez, former Mayor of Manila, businessman, and PNOC chairman.
^ Adonis, Meg. "'Rizals' of today". business.inquirer.net. Retrieved 2019-06-21.
^ a b c "Jose Rizal University unveils its historical marker". GMA News Online. Retrieved 2019-06-22.
^ Ched Resolution 013-2009
^ "rpt2009HEIDirectory" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-06-14.
^ plus 2 more granted later in October 2009.
^ "Ramon Magsaysay". Presidential Museum and Library. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
José Rizal University Central Student Council official paged
José Rizal University official website
JRU Computer Society (JRUCOMSOC) official website
Coordinates: 14°35′33″N 121°01′43″E / 14.59250°N 121.02861°E / 14.59250; 121.02861
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=José_Rizal_University&oldid=903678559"
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Starsailor (album)
Starsailor is a 1970 album by Tim Buckley (see 1970 in music), released on Herb Cohen's Straight Records label. It marks the moment Buckley's folk rock origins became invisible as he fully incorporated jazz rock and avant-garde styles into his music. Although it alienated elements of his fanbase upon release,[1] it also contains his best known song "Song to the Siren". This more accessible song was written much earlier than Starsailor's newer material, originally in a more traditional folk arrangement, as shown on the later released compilation album Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology. Bunk Gardner, a former member of the Mothers of Invention, joined Buckley's normal band to record the album. Also, Buckley began working again with lyricist Larry Beckett, after a three-album absence.
10–21 September 1970
Whitney Studios, Glendale, CA
Experimental rock, psychedelic folk, avant-folk, jazz-pop
Straight Records LP
Enigma Retro CD
4 Men with Beards LP (2007 Reissue)
Tim Buckley chronology
(1970) Starsailor
(1970) Greetings from L.A.
Down Beat [2]
Christgau's Record Guide C–[3]
Leontyne Price attended a concert in New York City during the supporting tour and told Buckley, "Boy, I wish they were writing things like that for us opera singers," to which Buckley responded, "Well, do what I did; get your own band."
Renewed interestEdit
"Song to the Siren" has been covered by a variety of artists, most notably This Mortal Coil, which featured on the 1984 album It'll End in Tears. John Frusciante, in 2009, covered this song on his album The Empyrean. Amen Dunes covered the song on their 2015 released "Cowboy Worship" EP. The British trance act Lost Witness also released a remix single; "Did I Dream (Song to the Siren)".
While the revival of "Song to the Siren" renewed interest in Buckley amongst independent artists in the 1980s, the success of his estranged son, Jeff Buckley, in the 1990s, inspired indie rock artists to look at the career of his father.[4] The British band Starsailor took their name from this album.
The album had a brief reissue on CD by the Enigma Retro label, but like the other Tim Buckley release on the Straight Records label, Blue Afternoon, it drifted out of print due to legal battles over who owned the rights to the music. This stems back to a 1976 separation and lawsuit between Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa, the co-owners of Straight Records.[5] As a result, many of the albums released on Straight (including Captain Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off, Baby) are very difficult to find on CD. In 2006, the album was released on the iTunes Music Store, making it available to the general public once more. In 2007, 4 Men With Beards reissued the album on vinyl, as well as the rest of Tim Buckley's nine-album catalogue. However, CD copies of this and Blue Afternoon remained out of print and difficult to find on the market until the release in 2017 of The Complete Album Collection box set.
It was featured at #50 in Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of the 1970s.[6]
In addition, Starsailor was selected as the 47th best rock record of all time in the 1987 book The Top 100 Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time.[7]
All lyrics by Larry Beckett and all music by Tim Buckley, except where noted.
"Come Here Woman" (Buckley) – 4:09
"I Woke Up" – 4:02
"Monterey" – 4:30
"Moulin Rouge" – 1:57
"Song to the Siren" (Buckley) – 3:20
"Jungle Fire" (Buckley) – 4:42
"Starsailor" (John Balkin, Beckett, Buckley) – 4:36
"The Healing Festival" (Buckley) – 3:16
"Down by the Borderline" (Buckley) – 5:22
PersonnelEdit
John Balkin – double bass, electric bass
Lee Underwood – guitar, piano, pipe organ
Buzz Gardner – trumpet, flugelhorn, solo on "Down by the Borderline"
Maury Baker – percussion
Tim Buckley – guitar, 12-string guitar, vocals
Bunk Gardner – alto flute, tenor saxophone, solo on "The Healing Festival"
Art Direction and Photography - Ed Thrasher
Repackaging for 1989 remastered CD version - L.J. Moche
^ a b Allmusic review
^ Down Beat review
^ Christgau, Robert (1981). "Consumer Guide '70s: B". Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields. ISBN 089919026X. Retrieved February 22, 2019 – via robertchristgau.com.
^ "The Rough Guide to Rock". Retrieved 2009-07-08.
^ "Herb Cohen - Random Notes". united-mutations.com. Retrieved 2008-07-05.
^ "Pitchforkmedia.com Top 100 albums of 1970s". Retrieved 2008-05-03.
^ Gambaccini, Paul. The Top 100 Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time, Harmony Books. 1987
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starsailor_(album)&oldid=884666132"
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Obituary: dissident Ebrahim Yazdi
An emblematic figure of Iranian politics bows out
The image of Ebrahim Yazdi, who passed away on 27 August aged 86, fittingly portrays the paradoxes of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Those involved in Tehran′s political scene of the last twenty years knew him as the opposition, an ′Islamic liberal′ and supporter of democratic reforms. By Marina Forti
An intellectual of serene temperament capable of acute analysis, who was nevertheless destined to remain an outsider. Once an integral member of the most restricted circle of Iranian revolutionary leaders, Yazdi was among those who accompanied Ayatollah Khomeini on his return flight to Iran in February, 1979. He worked to establish the Islamic Republic and went on to serve as its first foreign minister.
Born in 1931 in Qazvin, a city in the north-eastern region of Iran, Ebrahim Yazdi came from a well-to-do family. His formative years took place during the time of Mohammad Mossadegh′s government, the prime minister who had delivered a breath of democratic fresh air to Iran – before being deposed from power by a CIA-backed coup d′etat after having nationalised the oil industry.
Yazdi was studying pharmacology at the time, at the University of Tehran. In 1959 he went on to complete his studies in the United States at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtained U.S. citizenship and began working as a doctor. This was where his militant political stance against the Shah′s regime took shape in the 1960s. In 1961 he joined the Freedom Movement for Iran, founded by Mehdi Bazargan. In 1963 he helped establish the Islamic Association of Students in Iran.
Organised opposition to the Shah
Over several years he worked to knit together an international network of contacts which, at the time, also involved organising camps for guerrilla warfare in Egypt and Lebanon. In 1972, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had by then emerged as charismatic leader of the opposition to the Shah (then in exile in Najaf, Iraq), nominated Yazdi as his representative in the U.S.. When, in 1978, Saddam Hussein′s regime forced Khomeini to leave Iraq and he was denied entry into Kuwait, it was Yazdi who hosted him at Neauphle-le-Chateau, on the outskirts of Paris.
A pioneer of the Islamic Republic: Ebrahim Yazdi (left) war foreign minister in the first transitional government under Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan (right, next to Khomeini), leader of the Iranian Freedom Movement. He and Bazargan′s entire cabinet resigned in November 1979, following the ′hostage crisis′ in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. He subsequently became member of the liberal Freedom Movement, becoming its chairman in 1995
During this French exile, Yazdi often acted as spokesman to Khomeini – along with other young western-educated revolutionaries such as Abolhassan Bani Sadr and Ghotbzadeh. He represented the liberal, moderate and constitutional side of a revolution which was inclusive towards all sorts: from the most fundamentalist Islamic factions to the ′Islamic nationalists′ such as Yazdi himself as well as, on the left, the communist party, the liberals, the intellectuals, the enlightened bourgeoisie and the more popular factions. None were excluded. Perhaps those such as Yazdi thought that, following the revolution, Khomeini would have settled for a role as ′spiritual guide′ at his theological seminary in Qom. As we know, this was not to be.
During those first months of 1979, following the Shah′s exile, Ebrahim Yazdi became foreign minister for the first ad interim post-revolution government of which, Mehdi Bazargan, the leader of the Freedom Movement for Iran, was prime minister. At the same time, Bani Sadr became the first president of the Iranian Republic. In those months, whilst the elections for the constitutional assembly (which subsequently laid out the blueprint for the Islamic Republic) were being prepared, Yazdi contributed in the establishment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Triumph and downfall of the Islamic Revolution
In short: Ebrahim Yazdi was a product of the Islamic Republic – and never ceased to defend it. His involvement in government, however, was to be brief: once the Shah was ousted, it wasn′t long before the more extremist factions took the upper hand (″The power struggle between the various groups and currents broke out at the dawn of the revolution, such is the way of the world,″ Yazdi told me calmly the last time we met, in 2009).
According to him, the downfall began in November 1979, when a group of revolutionary students occupied the U.S. embassy of Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. The ′ hostage crisis′ would last 444 days, marking the beginning of the Islamic Republic′s international isolation.
One of Iran′s most prominent dissidents – both before and after the Islamic Revolution: Ebrahim Yazdi was a liberal Muslim and a supporter of democracy. Yet he never distanced himself from the Islamic Revolution which he himself helped bring about. Following the occupation of the U.S. embassy, however, he refused to have anything to do with the Islamist hardliners. He was arrested multiple times for criticising the religious clerics and the policies of Ahmadinejad
When Khomeini expressed his support for the occupation of the embassy, Bazargan and his government resigned in protest: Yazdi later expressed his conviction that the fall of the ′moderate′ government was actually one of the objectives of the revolutionaries.
In any case, Yazdi would never step foot inside the chambers of power again. In 1980 he was elected as a deputy, but was subsequently banned from putting himself forward for the position. After all this was amongst the most difficult periods in Iran′s history, a time of internal repression and war: in September 1980, the Iraqi army invaded Iran and the defence efforts reunited the country under a common cause – but it also allowed extremist factions to reinforce their hold on the government. It was thus that Bani Sadr, deposed on behalf of a parliamentary vote, was forced into exile.
In 1981, during a series of arrests amongst moderates, including the execution of Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, Ebrahim Yazdi accused the Islamic Revolutionary party to have used ″Stalinist and anti-Islamic methods″. In 1983, when Iran succeeded, following strenuous battles, in warding off Iraqi forces at the border, the Freedom Movement pronounced itself against a continuation of hostilities (which, nevertheless, carried on until 1988). For this, the party was ostracised and heavily repressed by the factions who were by then in power. Yazdi himself was arrested multiple times and had his passport confiscated.
Ebrahim Yazdi – the Islamic Republic′s new pariah
In 1990, shortly after the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini, he was denounced as ″footman of the U.S.″. In 1995, following the death of Mehdi Bazargan, he took on the presidency of the Movement for Freedom in Iran – which, by then, was reduced to a mere symbol, at most a movement of opinion, not quite illegal but barely tolerated.
35 years of the Islamic Republic
In February 1979, Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown. The Iranian Revolution turned the country's monarchy into an Islamic theocracy. This photo gallery presents some of the key events of the revolution that profoundly changed the course of the country's history
1 February 1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Tehran from exile in Paris. Euphoric Iranians greeted him at the airport as he touched down. For years, he had criticised the shah and the political elite in Iran for suppressing dissidents, for westernising the country and for their extravagant lifestyles.
On 16 January 1979, Shah Reza Pahlavi left the country. The shah lost support at the Guadeloupe conference, which was attended by the leaders of four Western powers – the US, UK, France and West Germany. Instead of supporting the shah, the West was now talking about seeking dialogue with Khomeini. US President Jimmy Carter offered the shah asylum in the US – an offer he accepted.
In an attempt to appease his opponents, the shah had previously appointed Shapour Bakhtiar, a leading member of the opposition National Front, to the post of interim prime minister. The move was not, however, a success. Bakhtiar was expelled from the party for being appointed by the shah; other party members had agreed to work only with Khomeini.
Around four million Iranians took to the streets to catch a glimpse of Khomeini's motorcade as it headed to Tehran Central Cemetery, where he held his arrival speech. Before Khomeini's return, mass demonstrations against the shah had been taking place for about a year. Widespread work stoppages organised by the opposition had been crippling the country’s economy since August 1978.
When he arrived in Tehran, Khomeini declared that he did not recognise Bakhtiar's government. From the airport, he drove straight to Tehran Central Cemetery, where he addressed thousands of enthusiastic on-lookers. In his speech, he rejected the monarchy and the parliament, saying it weakened legitimacy, and pledged that he alone would select Iran's new government.
In Tehran and in other cities across the country, violent clashes broke out between revolutionaries and the shah's supporters. The fighting went on for days, and it was unclear which side had the upper hand. The military imposed a curfew, but most Iranian's simply ignored it.
On 5 February 1979, Khomeini named Mehdi Bazargan of the National Front the country's transitional prime minister. At first it looked like the clergy would co-operate with the liberal opposition. However, disagreements between the two quickly escalated. Bazargan resigned on 5 November 1979 in response to the US embassy hostage situation in Tehran.
After Bazargan's re-appointment, large numbers of Iranians took to the streets in support of the transitional government. The military declared it would not interfere with the power struggle. Shapour Bakhtiar had lost all support and had to flee his home when armed Khomeini supporters intruded. In April 1979, he went into exile in France.
Standing to attention for religious leaders: an elite unit of the Iranian Air Force greets Ayatollah Khomeini. The Homafar unit played a major role in the revolution victory by giving the public access to its arsenal during the civil unrest. On 9 February, the Imperial Guard made a last ditch effort to attack the Homafar base.
Fighting between the Imperial Guard and the people intensified. On 11 February 1979, the regime collapsed: revolutionaries occupied parliament, the Senate, the television broadcaster and other state-run institutions. Shortly thereafter, the fall of the monarchy was announced. To this day, Iranians celebrate 11 February as the anniversary of the "Islamic revolution".
Only when reformist president Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1998, inaugurating a period of political and social easing, was Yazdi′s voice publically heard once again. By this point he had long left the political stage, but remained an icon in the eyes of young political reformists as a reference point in the debate regarding Islam, democracy and social transformations.
Nor did he hold himself back: he protested the exclusion of renowned reformists from candidatures, against the recurrent waves of arrests endured by journalists and the opposition, as well as signing various appeals – which often saw him being detained, interrogated and sometimes jailed.
Ebrahim Yazdi was a liberal Muslim, a supporter of democracy who, however, never renounced the Islamic Revolution to which he contributed. The last time I met him was in 2009, shortly after the elections which gave a second (contested) mandate to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whilst the Iranian TV was announcing the seven deaths at the end of a manifestation of support for the defeated reformist candidates. According to Yazdi, that protest signalled ″the most serious political crisis experienced by the Islamic Republic in its thirty-year history″.
Yazdi was convinced, however, that the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic was not in question – an opinion shared by many reformists and opponents: ″There′s room for change within the system and all those in opposition, who are now contesting the vote, are loyal to the Islamic Republic. Rather: the constitution has been violated and this undermines the legitimacy of institutions.″
Ebrahim Yazdi was arrested shortly thereafter for ″attempting to convert the government of the velayat-e-faqih (′supremacy of the jurisconsult′, the primacy of the clerics over political power) to a democratic power″. How paradoxical. He was once again condemned in 2011, to an eight year sentence nonetheless, for ′threatening national security′, the standard accusation for any dissidence.
Ebrahim Yazdi died in Turkey at the end of August following a long illness.
Marina Forti
© ResetDoc 2017
Translated by Liam Mac Gregor-Hastie
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Progressive Rock Music in Iran
A Darkening of the Emotional State
Unlike their US role models, the Iranian progressive rock band Dash has to play either in basements or abroad. But despite the country's strict censorship laws, the band is reaching its fans via Internet. Alessandro Topa reports from Tehran
Unlike their US role models, the Iranian progressive rock band Dash has to play either in basements or abroad. But despite the country's strict censorship laws, the band is reaching its fans via Internet. Alessandro Topa spoke to some of the band's members in Tehran
The Tehran-based progressive rock band Dash prefers to sing about the emotional state of young male Iranians rather than risking the wrath of the authorities by making socio-political statements
The socio-political reality of life in Iran appears to have become so complex that the creative minds spearheading underground rock in the country resort to scepticism. Instead of surrendering to the risk of making a political error, Dash sing about an ego that is unfathomable to itself. This ego is male and is housed inside a progressive rock body that has been hardened by melancholy and has dreadful problems with women.
With his reddish blonde locks, Maani looks a bit like the British drummer Ginger Baker when he played with the rock group Cream in the late 1960s. The 26-year-old guitarist with the Tehran-based progressive rock band Dash has no intention of allowing political generalisations into his song lyrics. Even the woes of his contemporaries in southern Tehran are completely alien to him, he says. "I barely understand what's going on in my city socially, so how am I supposed to arrive at any general political statements?"
This is why he thinks it's a good thing to simply express his "inherent feelings and thoughts," just as the band's singer Babak does. "Then at least no one can come along and say: that's not true!" Meanwhile drummer Milad, who has been fiddling around with the mixing console, takes his drumsticks out of his mouth and says: "I don't think that's all our music is about. It's about the break-up of a relationship. And that's ultimately a social issue, isn't it?" Siavash is a year older than his fellow band members and says nothing, an eloquent silence specific to bass players.
Rehearsals with band members abroad
Strikes a chord with many youngsters in Tehran and other Iranian cities: the rock band Dash during an interview
The band rehearses in a small industrial estate between two urban motorways in north-eastern Tehran. The tiny room in the basement of a construction company is not the best place to be pondering the difference between the social and the political or questioning the politically abrupt self-assurance of a subject that is not transcendental in any way, but actually rather masculine.
Before the practice session begins, the boys go out again to inhale some fresh traffic fumes. Thousands of cars are rolling bumper to bumper onto a huge sloping plane, which is bathed in a greyish pink dusky light and framed by the gigantic Elburz mountain range to the north. Lights are being turned on in the surrounding apartment blocks.
It will soon be six years since Dash began playing together, but since 26-year-old singer Babak went to Australia to complete his material sciences degree, and 23-year-old multi-instrumentalist Makhan went to hang out in Europe, the band's work methods have changed dramatically, explains IT engineer Milad from behind his laptop: "Here are the click tracks with sound tracks from the record. So we're listening to rhythm information and play to the basic parts of our vocalist and guitarists. It means we can at least simulate a practice situation."
Dash performed at the Morgenland Festival in Osnabrück in 2008. It was one of band's rare appearances together. Since releasing their album Si onto their website for download, they have no longer been able to perform as a complete band.
Psychedelic aesthetic
This vexing issue even draws Siavash out of his silence: "In Iran right now, we can't try out anything new, nor can we market our CD," he says. Aside from the fundamental medium that is the Internet, word of mouth is the only marketing tool known to the Iranian underground.
"But we're very popular with 20 to 30-year-olds," says webmaster Milad. Website statistics appear to confirm this, as does a second place at the virtual music festival organised by the online magazine Tehran Avenue. Dash is striking a chord with many young people.
Nevertheless, Dash has not even tried to obtain all the various permits for CD release from the Ershad Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This is because not only does the censorship authority base its decisions on moral, religious and political criteria, it also takes aesthetics into consideration.
"The heroes of Dash are granite-hard US bands like Tool and Perfect Circle, whose songs loom like cable-stayed bridges to hell," writes Alessandro Topa
In this respect, it is of secondary importance whether the guardians of culture actually do base their decision on sura 31, verse 6 of the Koran, which threatens "shameful retribution" to those who "divert others from the path of God" through "captivating entertainment", the aesthetic preferences of a band such as Dash, which creates such hard, sometimes psychedelic music with complicated rhythms, means its members have not even thought of attempting to negotiate the red tape. "Although we're non-political and it's our trademark to combine Persian and western elements, we wouldn't stand a chance," says Maani.
Permission to play
Dash has performed four times in six years: at private concerts and at the state University of Tehran. "That was more than five years ago," says Milad, working it out. "No, it was 1383!", says Maani (2004–2005 according to the Solar Hejri calendar used in Iran). Whenever it was, at the time they played cover versions of songs by Nirvana, Radiohead and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Siavash interjects that the group was supposed to have played with 10 other bands in the park of the Saadabad Palace as part of a UNESCO event in 2008. "It was all sorted – programmes had even been printed up – but then the Music Association banned the concerts," he says. The organisation explained its decision by saying that the music was not traditional Persian music.
Both Persian folk music and – originally courtly – classical ensemble music have been consistently fostered in Iran since 1979, as a cultural alternative to the western music of the Shah era. Under the reformist President Khatami, all kinds of non-traditional musical genres were able to win back their place in the musical life of the nation. Much of what is acceptable today would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. "My sister always had to take a permit along with her every time she left the house with her guitar case," Milad recalls.
Gradual darkening of the emotional state
In modern-day Tehran, not only are there music shops where you can legally purchase frothy Persian pop and Phil Collins CDs, electric guitars are also displayed in shop windows and there is evidence of a vibrant concert scene ranging across the genre spectrum from ethno-jazz to religious propaganda music.
Dash holds its practice sessions in a basement room in a building on an industrial estate between two urban motorways in north-eastern Tehran
In July 2009, for example, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra played pieces by George Bizet and Jean Sibelius, only to follow this up in August with a performance of a 12-part symphonic composition that ended with the return of the hidden twelfth imam and sought to propagate the "philosophy of Mahdism" – to the undoubted approval of President Ahmadinejad.
The heroes of Dash are granite-hard US bands such as Tool and Perfect Circle, whose songs loom like cable-stayed bridges to hell. "Our album relates the gradual darkening of the emotional state of a guy who initially and euphorically believes he has found the love of his life and who is eventually consumed by murderous thoughts," says Siavash, neatly summing up the Dash philosophy.
"Our relationships start out on an unhealthy foundation, develop along stereotypical lines and end in a way that soon makes you hate the game," says Milad. They can't explain why this is the case. The young technology freaks are far removed from the subtle hermeneutics of gender relations portrayed in Asghar Farhadi films such as About Elly. Milad's conclusion is backed up by the country's rising divorce rates: "Relations are fucked up in Iran," he says.
Alessandro Topa
Translated from the German by Nina Coon
The Iranian Rock Band "Kiosk"
Musical Nomads
Iran's rock and pop musicians cannot hope to escape the censorship of their songs in the Islamic Republic – except, perhaps, by exercising self-censorship. Many bands have therefore turned their backs on the guardians of Islamic morals in their country and instead only play abroad. The rock group "Kiosk" is among them. Shanli Anwar introduces the band
Rock and Alternative Music in Iran
A Tightrope Walk between Adaptation and Protest
Despite all the harassment by religious moral watchdogs, Iran has been witness to the development of a vital music scene. Although strongly popular among the country's youth, many bands still live in the shadows even today. By Arian Fariborz
Ban on Western Music in Iran
Return to the Khomeini Era?
Since the end of last year, broadcasting western music on Iranian state-run radio has been prohibited. But how to draw the line between what's permissible and what's not? And what consequences does the new law have for cultural practitioners in Iran? Arian Fariborz reports
Dash's official website
Click here to visit the official website of the Iranian prog rock band Dash and to hear their music.
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Faith Chapel (Jekyll Island, Georgia)
Faith Chapel
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. Historic district
Show map of Georgia (U.S. state)
Show map of the United States
181 Old Plantation Rd., Jekyll Island, Georgia
31°3′38″N 81°25′18″W / 31.06056°N 81.42167°W / 31.06056; -81.42167Coordinates: 31°3′38″N 81°25′18″W / 31.06056°N 81.42167°W / 31.06056; -81.42167
2.4 acres (0.97 ha)
Howard Constable,[2]
Constable Brothers, NYC
NRHP reference #
71000277[1]
Added to NRHP
Faith Chapel is a historic chapel on Old Plantation Road in Jekyll Island, Georgia and was built in 1904. It was used as a non-denominational chapel until 1942. The state of Georgia purchased it along with Jekyll Island in 1947. It is administered by the Jekyll Island State Park Authority and was opened to the public in 1970. It has a wood "A" frame and a brick foundation. The interior and exterior walls are shingled, with gargoyles that are replicas of the ones at Notre Dame Cathedral. The chapel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and it is open to the public.[3]
It has stained-glass windows. One is "David's Window" which was made by Louis Comfort Tiffany; the other is "The Adoration of the Christ Child" by Maitland Armstrong and his daughter, Helen Maitland Armstrong.
Photos[edit]
Tiffany stained-glass window
Armstrong stained glass
Steeple with gargoyles
^ National Park Service (2010-07-09). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
^ McCash, June Hall (1998). The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony. University of Georgia Press. p. 57. ISBN 9780820319285.
^ NRHP form
Media related to Faith Chapel, Jekyll Island at Wikimedia Commons
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Category: H.D.
Tribute to Freud
April 25, 2018 May 3, 2018 gettingoffthepageLeave a comment
Here’s the “script” (as it were) I used for two lectures I delivered a few years ago on H.D.’s Tribute to Freud for the “American Writers Abroad” course.
This week we find ourselves confronted yet again with yet another difficult modernist text, certainly one that presents as many challenges to understanding and interpretation as did Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) in week three. As was the case with Nightwood, an awful lot of effort gets expended in one’s first reading of Tribute to Freud (1956) to get a sense both of what is happening and of when what is said to be happening in fact happened. As the clunky use of verb tenses in what I have just said demonstrates, even trying to straightforwardly express the difficulties with which H.D.’s psychobiography presents its readers requires us in part to embody or perform those same difficulties, even when we’re simply trying to pithily or manageably describe them. As good a way as any to emblematize these difficulties would be to start today at the beginning and ask you all to tell me when are we on pages 3 and 4—that is, in section 1 of “Writing on the Wall,” which is perhaps not quite so confusing an opening as something like Nightwood until you start asking questions like the following: When are we on these pages? What year is it? What’s happening in Vienna? What sorts of relationships to time do these two pages enact, perform, describe, or represent?
For these opening two pages do not represent time so much as a superimposed set of relationships to time: time-as-period, calendar time/rationalized time, evental time, habitual time, present time (WWII), national historical time. Note that the overarching relationship to time here is quasi-spatial in that it involves a pick-and-mix approach to different temporalities that can be broken down, separated, and put back together in novel, non-chronological arrangements whose ultimate compositional principles do not rely upon fidelity to progressivist notions of history or sequence (think of history as chronicle: in 1933 A happened then B followed by C, which led in turn to E but not before D happened, so on and so forth; alternatively, in 1915 H.D.’s first child was born stillborn, in 1918 her brother Gilbert died in battle during WWII, in 1919 her daughter was born, in 1920 she has the writing-on-the-wall hallucination on the Isle of Corfu in the company of Bryher, in 1933 she has first sessions of analysis with Sigmund Freud, in 1934 she has her second session, in 1944 she writes her memoirs of these two sessions, so and so forth).
Instead of this progressivist philosophy of history, H.D. invokes archeological, cinematic, and psychoanalytic models throughout Tribute to Freud to describe her own creative attitude toward history—toward time, its passing, and its potential prophetic openings onto futurity. According to these three models, which we will be looking at extensively today together, time is a substance that leaves behinds traces that can be excavated, that can be put together into jagged collages or montages of associations, and that can be superimposed on, above, or below each other, as when one used to place two images on top of each other in a film or photograph to suggest the uncanny proximities of totally unproximate things (think here of Victorian spirit photography) or to double an actor’s performance by having him play two different characters in the same scene.
A good example or emblem of these simultaneously archeological, cinematic, and psychoanalytic relationships to time can be found in the first paragraph on page 47, where H.D. observes the following regarding her experience with the writing-on-the-wall on the island of Corfu: “But there I am seated on the old-fashioned Victorian sofa in the Greek island, and here I am reclining on the couch in the Professor’s room, telling him this, and here again am I, ten years later, seated at my desk in my own room in London. But there is no clock-time, though we are fastidiously concerned with time and with a formal handling of a subject which has no racial and no time-barriers. Here is this hieroglyph of the unconscious or subconscious of the Professor’s discovery and life-study, the hieroglyph actually in operation before our very eyes. But it is no easy matter to sustain this mood, this ‘symptom’ or this inspiration.”
I will return to this quote in the final half of today’s lecture, so for now let it suffice for to point out that for H.D. such a practice of re-approaching history involves opening oneself up to the strange forms that history itself takes through a complementary exploration of one’s own unconsciousness, of those instinctual parts of oneself that escape conscious awareness or present attention. In other words, going deeply into yourself is the same thing as opening yourself up to abstract forces and examples that exist outside or beyond you according to Tribute to Freud, for to deeply subjectivze yourself through analysis seems to be the same thing as radically objectivizing yourself, as making yourself the object of historical forces and patterns that exceed your isolated self, or any account you could give of your own self. As she notes early on, “I do not want to become involved in the strictly historical sequence. I wish to recall the impressions, or rather I wish the impressions to recall me. Let the impressions come in their own way, make their own sequence.”[i] Alternatively, as H.D. admits in her journals from her first session with Freud on page 137, “I cannot classify the living content of our talks together by recounting them in a logical or textbook manner. It was, as [Freud] had said of my grandfather, ‘an atmosphere.’ . . .”
I will have much more to say about this impressionistic and atmospheric representation of time, history, and sequence, but let it suffice at the beginning of today’s lecture to emphasize that the overmastering relationship to time that H.D. sketches in here in Tribute to Freud is a relationship that we are being asked to categorize under the heading of human recollection or memory—not time itself but a potentially de-subjectivizing relation to an overlapping and superimposed set of times or temporalities is the material with which H.D. actively works and by which she more or less gets herself worked over. In a word, time is most certainly not an arrow reliably flying onwards and upwards in Tribute to Freud. Instead, it is a confusing mosaic, made up of broken bits and pieces that have been exhumed up by H.D., that have been dug up in her mind and then super-glued together in novel patterns that these broken bits and pieces seem to have suggested themselves and that (in turn) are badly in need of de-coding or deciphering. Alternatively, time exists in Tribute to Freud as an uncollated clutter of film strips badly in need of being edited together in ways that the film strips themselves seem to will, demand, or imply—and, again, this new strange assemblage will then need to be interpreted and translated into a less strange and more clearly ordered assemblage of words. To sum up, then, the shattered mess of time seems to suggest to H.D. through psychoanalytic processes of free-association (or the involuntary selection of thoughts and impressions) a new relationship to time in which these shattered bits get stuck together and superimposed upon the other in ways that exceed or even contradict our assumed ways of interpreting history progressively.
Therefore, in a nutshell, the mosaic, free-association-like presentation of her retrospective account of being psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud himself in “Writing on the Wall” tends (on first approach) to derange or deform our sense of the book’s contents and events, along with the order in which those things may have chronologically happened. To consequentially revise a mythological figure and story that would have been near and dear to H.D.’s antiquarian heart, we as first-time readers of Tribute to Freud find ourselves lost in a labyrinth of cunning and intricate design without so much as the frayed end of a string to guide ourselves back out again. We are, as it were, Theseus lost in Daedalus’ labyrinth on Crete entirely bereft of Ariadne’s thread, waiting to be devoured by Minos’ minotaur.
Now admittedly, if this particular reference was opaque or bombastically confusing to you, then you will probably sorely feel the need of limbering up on your ancient Greek mythology and cultural knowledge because such mythology and such a knowledge present the very patterns and relationships that H.D. unfailingly discerns in the world around her—and this is true of H.D. throughout her writerly life, from her early days as an Imagist poet in Ezra Pound’s orbit and on into her subsequent development as a writer of prose and poems quite overtly modeled after ancient or mythological narratives, characters, themes, and images. Myth, as it were, is the very medium in and through which H.D. experiences the world around her, and we get a pretty explicit expression of this archetypal impulse of hers on pages 28 to 29 in Tribute to Freud, just after she has described a scene from her childhood in which her mother playfully leaves H.D. and her brother behind alone to sit, seemingly abandoned, on the curb of Main Street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:
It seems odd that my mother should be laughing. My brother had defied her. He is seated on the curb-stone. He is not going home. As he repeats this solemnly, my mother laughs more. People stop and ask what has happened. My mother tells them and they laugh too. They stand either side of my mother, more people, friends and strangers, all laughing. “But we’re collecting a crowd,” she says, “we can’t stay here, crowding the pavement.” She obtains supporters; strangers and near-strangers repeat her words like a Greek chorus, following the promptings of their leader.
There is a slight, whispered conspiracy. The strangers melt away and my mother, with feigned indifference, strolls off. My brother knows perfectly well that she will relent, she will pretend to go away but she will wait aorund the corner, and if we don’t follow her she will come back. He has told her that he is going away to live by himself, and he has moreover told her that his sister is coming with him. His sister waits anxiously, excited yet motionless, on the curb beside him. In addition to this final ultimatum of my brother’s, we were not supposed to sit on the curb-stone. But there we sit, not “crowding the pavement” but making a little group, design, an image at the crossroads. It appears variously in Greek tragedies with Greek names and it can be found in your original Grimm’s tales or in your nursery translation, called Little-Brother, Little-Sister. One is sometimes the shadow of the other; often one is lost and the one seeks the other, as in the oldest fairy tale of the twin-brother-sister of the Nile Valley. Sometimes they are both boys like the stars Castor and Pollux, sometimes there are more than two. Actually in the case of Castor and Pollux there were four, with Helen and Clytemnestra—the children of a Lady, we are told, and a Swan. They make a group, a constellation, they make a groove or a pattern into which or upon which other patterns fit, or are placed unfitted and are cut by circumstance to fit. (28-29)
H.D.’s mother and her “supporters,” we are told, look like the members of a Greek chorus, which would presumably leave H.D. and her brother in the roles of protagonists in this comedy that the pair nevertheless seem to think is a tragedy, though this initial image of the siblings changes suddenly on the next page into a German and then an ancient Egyptian fairy tale before H.D. and Gilbert finally become Castor and Pollux or rather Helen and Clytemnestra.
Now to be honest, I am not all that interested in the particular exemplary figures to which H.D. here relates the “little group, design, [or] image” that she, her brother, their mother, and their mother’s “supporters” make on the curbside of Main Street early on in her memoir. While it would probably be a useful exercise to link this specific “group, design, [or] image” to the particular Grimm’s fairy tales she cites or to the various Greek myths concerning Leda’s children (Castor, Pollux, Helen, and Clytemnestra)—let me back up: while following such linkages and resonances out might be a useful undertaking, I do not think that is where the action is at in this passage, nor do I think that it is where the action is at in Tribute to Freud as a whole. For one thing, such an interpretive approach would mire us all in the worst sorts of pedantic inquiry, with me reconstructing for you, tale-by-tale, myth-by-myth, and page-by-page, the complexly allusive network of mythical citations that H.D. throws over her experience of being analyzed by Freud much as one would cast a net into the sea. What we would be doing maybe could have a use of some sort, but I am not at all interested in deciphering Tribute to Freud anecdote-by-anecdote or memory-by-memory or free-association-by-free-association using some sort of outsized mythic decoder ring, despite the manifest temptations for studiously undertaking just such a task, which H.D. herself seems to punctually solicit from us on every other page or so. At the very least, the overabundance of references to Greek myths, to middle European fairy tales, and to actual relics of ancient material culture seem to be calling out to us from every other page, begging us to re-read H.D.’s Tribute to Freud all over again, to translate it mytho-poetically, specifically in terms of Herculean labors, in terms of written-over or slightly effaced hieroglyphs, and in terms of visionary pilgrimages to Delphic shrines, where Freud is as likely to pop up as an oracle as is H.D. herself is.
It would, in other words, be damn awful easy to spend an hour-and-forty-five minutes today doing nothing but annotating all the specific mythic archetypes, characters, and forms to be found in Tribute to Freud, so that H.D.’s two sessions of analysis with Freud in the early 1930s start to take shape as a sort of pastiche collage or experimental cinematic montage of specifiably meaningful ancient myths. My point is not to slag off such approaches but to point out that they likely shut the book down for first-time-readers, they tend to make Tribute to Freud look more daunting or unapproachable than it actually is. Getting hung up on such allusive details gives the illusion that the book requires a deep knowledge of myth and history that no undergraduate can likely hope to possess as an undergraduate in the first place. My goal today is to demonstrate to all of you that Tribute to Freud is more open, more inviting than its densely allusive mythological surface may in fact seem to suggest to a reader the first go-round.
Therefore, what I want us all to be attentive to as we re-traverse this text together today is the fact that mythic structures are insistently assumed by H.D. to intervene between her and the world around her in the first place. That is to say, it’s probably not earth-shatteringly important that H.D. compares her and her brother to Castor and Pollux or to brothers and sisters from Grimm’s fairy tales. However, what is of consequence to any interpretation of H.D.’s Tribute to Freud is that she is constantly invoking such fairy tale and mythic archetypes in the first place, not only to explain the world around her but also her position in that world. Not specific myths themselves but the overmastering relevance that H.D. ascribes to mythic figures and forms in general as she attempts to navigate the confusions, the ephemeral visual hallucinations, and the apocalyptic political events of early-twentieth-century European daily life ought to be where our attention is most focused today.
I want us to be attentive not to specific myths so much as to the fact that there are myths at all in Tribute to Freud and that their explanatory or organizing force goes largely unquestioned by H.D., either in “Writing on the Wall” or in “Advent.” At a brass-tacks level, then, the sort of questions I want you all to tarry with today go something like this: How is it that characters, objects, and stories that have been dead and (quite literally) buried for millennia happen to offer “moderns” like H.D. and like us the urgent and timely tools with which to manageably re-organize the distractions, entropy, and chaos of our contemporary moment into a coherent unity or shapely whole? In insisting upon the contemporary relevance of mythic archetypes, narratives, and figures, isn’t H.D. simply just erasing the fact of history or of historical difference itself? Surely interwar Austrofascist Vienna and Minoan civilization on the island of Crete in the pre-classical Bronze Age (27th Century to the 15th Century B.C.E.) are radically different times and places, such that a myth about bestiality, a minotaur baby, a labyrinth, and the heroic founder of Athens developed and expressed in the one cannot be made to explain or orient experience in the other, right? That is to say, just how a-historical or anti-historical are H.D.’s assumptions as a creative writer and early-twentieth-century American abroad? Alternatively, what sort of philosophy of history do her writing and living practices adumbrate or vaguely foreshadow? Finally, to sum all these questions: What’s so mythical about modernity? What’s so mythical about expatriation in the early 1900s? What’s so mythical about psychoanalysis? Alternatively, what’s so modern about antiquity, what’s so modern about myth?
Therefore, what most strikes me about this passage and what offers us some important cues to follow as we make our way through H.D.’s labyrinth is her incredible admission at the end of the passage I just got done reading a few minutes ago: mythic archetypes, narratives, and figures make, we are told, “a group, a constellation, they make a groove or a pattern into which or upon which other patterns fit, or are placed unfitted and are cut by circumstance to fit.”
Earlier in the quarter, we read Tropic of Cancer (1934) where Henry Miller scatologically sought to upset literary values and traditions by negating the category of literature as such and replacing it with the unlikely positive values he ascribed to various verbally expressed obscene experiences and encounters, which were said by him to be ephemeral and disruptive of coherent human identities. In his most apocalyptic moments, Miller is able to credibly present obscenity as an event of sorts in which the human body as such gets imaginatively broken down into an indeterminately gooey mass of bodily fluids dissolving into an even bigger mass of other people’s bodily fluids, hydraulically circulating throughout subterranean pipes and chambers endlessly. If there is any such thing as a classic in Miller’s view, then, a classic would have to be a text capable of arousing just such a radical reaction, either speculatively or affectively. The Miller-ish masterpiece would identity itself as such by endurably threatening human identities and relationships to oneself through the offensively salacious claims it happens to make.
For Miller, therefore, there is a specifically nihilistic function to be served by properly obscene writing, for such writing acts to negate whatever happens to be, such texts act to clear out a space in what there is for differences that might yet come to be, and it is precisely this act of evacuation or of clearing that ensures for Miller that a work will have an enduring value through time because people will likely always need a way of confronting (if not necessarily mastering) their impulses toward nihilism, toward negating the conditions of life in which they find themselves and by which they find themselves more or less meaningfully constituted as human subjects.
Now in this passage from Tribute to Freud, we can see H.D. quite explicitly coming at questions of literature, value, history, and even life itself from a perspective that attempts to put people like Miller back on their feet, right-side-up as it were. Antiquity, we are told time and time again, always already provides us with the outlines and examples and shapes through and by which we currently experience our lives and worlds. Not the Miller-ish anticipation of an unrepresentable difference anticipated through creatively obscene negation but rather the concentrated pursuit of mythic pattern recognition is said by H.D. in Tribute to Freud to be the way to measure the value or worth of a piece of writing.
For H.D. there most certainly are classics, but they don’t look like the works of Menippean satire that Miller most prizes, such as Apuleius, Boccaccio, or Rabelais. H.D. isn’t celebrating writing or art that dissolves human identity or that calls it into question; instead, she is constantly giving voice to the wish for more certain grounds on which to credibly re-secure such time-honored identities and certainties. She is constantly expressing the impulse for finding a transcendental gauge, a transhistorical ruler by which to measure the coherence of our identities as human subjects and agents, who both proportionately act on the world and are acted upon by the world. Not hydraulically circulating human slime but eternally present ancient godheads are H.D.’s yard-sticks, in other words.
At the very least, according to her, such sacred divinities and the heroes they spawned and/or manipulated provide the prototypes for all human behavior and relationships, and even for all visual and narrative experience as such. Again, for H.D., the utter contingency of our encounters in the world and with other people in the world manages to achieve a consistency and a meaning by means of this mythic pattern recognition that they would not otherwise possess on their own terms. Accordingly, to truly grasp the fact that human experience on this planet has any meaning means that we need to be attentive to the age-old human designs into which such experience can be made to fit.
Also, it must be pointed out, this practice of mythic pattern recognition is, as we shall shortly see, not simply a writerly practice but part of H.D.’s equipment for living. It is a mode of operating that extends beyond the blank page and into everyday life. Also, I perhaps ought to make it clear that I am ventriloquizing H.D., the speaker or narrative persona in Tribute to Freud. The positions I am ascribing to H.D. rightly belong with this narrative persona, not with the “real” historical person per se.
It is in this sense, therefore, that antiquity and its cultural artifacts are said by her to comprise “a set of groove[s] or pattern[s] into which or upon which other patterns fit, or are placed unfitted and are cut by circumstance to fit.” These grooves and patterns exist not only outside time, they not only are timeless, they not only are not bound to their time or place of origin. In addition to all of this, they are the very grooves and patterns that present-day circumstances produce out of themselves and on their own.
In short, the various accidents and catastrophes of present existence are said by H.D. to endlessly confirm the timeless value of mythic archetypes because such contingencies ensure that shapeless, formless experience eventually breaks down into more classically legible figures and forms. The contingencies of daily life are not as contingent as they first appear in Tribute to Freud; instead, they always seem to be a means of making patterns and structures emerge from beneath the surface of sensory experience. Amorphous immediacy, according to H.D., is always reducible to mythic mediations, and the way to get through life and the way to create art that lives on after you die is to recognize these mediations, these patterns, these figures and to anticipate and to commemorate the overarching design that such mediations, such patterns, and such figures happen to make.
My opening comparison of Tribute to Freud to Dedalus’ labyrinth, therefore, was not a gratuitous gesture on my part—if anything, it was a gesture that expressed a gently satirical fidelity to the vision of the world and of time that informs H.D.’s own outlook and poetics. After all, to approach the world in such a way that you see Greek myths in every sight or encounter is to put a damn awful lot of trust in the continuing exemplarity of myths in the first place. In other words, at the end of the day, the excavation of Tribute to Freud’s relationship to specific myths and artifacts is not all that important; instead, what is important is the attention we as readers pay to the impulses, motivations, and compositional practices that both lead into and follow from a worldview in which everything in our lived experience comes down to us always already cut or ever-ready to-be-cut-down-to pre-made patterns fabricated millennia ago in ancient Greece, Egypt, or China, which times and places are understood by H.D. to be as much a present reality of sorts in her life as the hallucinatory projected writing on a wall in Corfu in 1920, as the swastika-chalked sidewalks in 1933 and 1934, and as the bombed-out ruins in London during the Blitz of 1944, when she finally sits down to draft “Writing on the Wall” in the fall of that year.
Now I realize that this all sounds downright mystical, and to a certain degree it all ought to sound downright mystical because it is downright mystical. That is to say, there is a rather strong tendency in H.D.’s writing to view all things through a quasi-religious or sacralizing lens, whereby the repugnant contingencies of everyday life are understood to be mysteriously redeemed by a veneration for transhistorical features of individual and social experience that loom timelessly and significantly behind immediate sensory perception, as is said to be the case in all her involuntary thought-associations in Tribute to Freud detailing the interlocking network or web of mythical patterns into which her childhood, young adulthood, and middle age are said to have happened to fall.
Think here for instance, to take a more or less arbitrary example, of her recollection of the incident involving her, her brother, and her father’s magnifying glass, in which the magnifying glass soon gets overloaded with signification, with meaning, with transhistorical resonances (this incident gets described on pages 21 to 26). The magnifying glass, we are told, goes from being a simple magnifying glass used to truantly burn up some newspaper to representing a sacred symbol, an Egyptian hieroglyph, ankh (☥), the symbol of life itself, before the slide of signification spills ever onwards to the planet Venus supposedly annotated by means of this same symbol at the top of a ledger kept by H.D.’s astronomer father (24-25).
There are at least two things I want us all to hold onto from this passage in Tribute to Freud. The first thing is that this sort of involuntary slide through more or less arbitrary associations and significations is not as singular as it may appear to be at first glance because as H.D. makes clear in section 50 of “Writing on the Wall,” such an involuntary slide and such a set of arbitrary associations and significations occurs every time we open a dictionary to look up the definition of a word and are confronted with a strange and almost archeological jumble of dissonant, archaic, and variable meanings all seemingly held together capriciously by a single word. This comes out following H.D.’s revelation of her “peculiar dream or merely a flash of vision” at the age of eighteen or nineteen, when she had the vision of a picture of “an altar-shaped block of stone [that] was divided into two sections by the rough stone marking,” with a serpent, “roughly carved,” on one side of the altar-shaped block of stone and with “a roughly incised, naturalistic yet conventionally drawn thistle” on the other (64).
She receives, you all will remember, a hasty and unlikely bit of dream analysis from a young Ezra Pound, who insists that the vision is either a flashback or a prophetic vision of Asklepios, son of Phoebus Apollo, the “blameless physician,” and Greek divinity of medicine whose serpent-entwined rod remains a symbol of medicine and healing in the western world.
As we all know from having read Tribute to Freud and from having a glance back at the book’s epigraph (where we are told Freud himself is in fact the “blameless physician”), Pound is kinda sorta right: at one level it would not be hard to read H.D.’s teenage vision of Asklepios’s rod by way of snake and thistle both as an early expression of her project of mythic pattern recognition and as an early instance of a prophetic omen, whereby her visit to Freud roughly thirty years later gets dramatically adumbrated in an ambiguous and hard-to-decipher sign. (And parenthetically here I would note that H.D. presents her practice of mythic pattern recognition consistently in an altogether Kit-like fashion: that is to say, much like Port’s wife in The Sheltering Sky (1949), H.D.’s mythic method is constantly invoked as a sort of prophetic indication of the coming war and the coming continent-wide atrocities committed against Europe’s Jewish populations, from which atrocities H.D. seems both impelled to save Freud even as she finds herself wholly unable to talk to him directly about the contemporary terroristic activities committed by Nazis in the city of Vienna itself. More important than this for our present purposes, however, is the fact that H.D. finds the same exact design on a Graeco-Roman signet ring in a gallery in the Louvre years later, which leads her, in section 50, to present us with the dictionary definitions of the word “signet”:
Signet—as from sign, a mark, token, proof; signet—the privy seal, a seal; signet-ring—a ring with a signet or private seal; sign-manual—the royal signature, usually only the initials of the sovereign’s name. (I have used my initials H.D. consistently as my writing signet or sign-manual, though it is only at this very moment, as I check up on the word “signet” in my Chambers’ English Dictionary that I realize that my writing signature has anything remotely suggesting sovereignty or the royal manner.) Sign again—a word, gesture, symbol, or mark, intended to signify something else. Sign again—(medical) a symptom, (astronomical) one of the twelve parts of the Zodiac. Again sign—to attach a signature to, and sign-post—a direction post; all from the French, signe, and Latin, signum. And as I write that last word, there flashes into my mind the associated in hoc signum or rather, it must be in hoc signo and vinces. (66)
As this trip to a ready-to-hand copy of the Chambers’ English Dictionary ought to suggest, therefore, H.D.’s disorienting free-associations don’t look any more or less weird than the definitions to be found in a dictionary itself. If starting with a magnifying glass she is able to move back to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph and then upward into the stars where she ends up on the planet Venus, then starting with the word “signet” the dictionary is able to move from signs, marks, tokens, and proofs to rings and royal signatures before going on to encompass words and symbols themselves and then on to medical symptoms and to interstellar space itself, with a penultimate reference to “one of the twelve parts of the Zodiac,” before we come back down to earth again with a direction post (certainly an ironic touch on the dictionary writers’ part, no?).
Furthermore, if H.D.’s father’s magnifying glass took her all the way back to ancient Egypt, then “signet” in the dictionary takes us all the way back to Latin, to the Graeco-Roman period with the etymological root, “signum,” which in turn leads us back to a specific historical event in 312 A.D., when Constantine I saw the chi-rho (☧) in the sky before a battle with a rival Roman co-emperor, Maxentius. After defeating Maxentius in battle following this vision, he adopted as his motto in hoc signo vinces: “in this sign you will conquer.”
The gist and pith of what I would have you all hold onto from this experience as it gets represented in Tribute to Freud is the degree to which hyperbolically subjective experiences (like personal memories, like involuntary associations of images, ideas, and impression, like hallucinated visions) start to structurally resemble objective, historically conditioned records, such as those to be found in any dictionary, where the collaged presentation of obsolete and contemporary meanings, of definitions and etymological roots, can, with a slight adjustment of perspective, start to look like so many exercises in psychoanalytic free-association. As H.D.’s visionary experiences and involuntarily selected impressions suggest, and as any good dictionary itself demonstrates, the world is (if anything) too full with signification, with meaning, and there is really no hard-and-fast rule that one can make use of to get this slide of meaningful associations to stop or stay still for once and for all. There is no stop-button to the meaning of things in other words, as the dictionary and as H.D.’s free associations make clear.
My second point here is more easily and quickly put, and it goes something like this: the explicit appearance of a hieroglyph here in the magnifying glass incident is no accident because the relationship of H.D. to almost all the objects, events, and people around her evinced throughout Tribute to Freud is reliably that of an Egyptologist to a recently disinterred set of ancient artifacts in a dead language that needs to be translated into vocabularies and grammars with a more widespread currency among present-day speakers. That is to say, everything in everyday life for H.D. in Tribute to Freud is a text waiting to be decoded using a key made up of ancient and sacred works. Everything is potentially a myth somewhere below the commonplace surface it presents to the world, and part of the onus of living and writing in Tribute to Freud is digging below this surface and interpreting the mythic substructures one happens to find there.
As H.D. remarks following the other big childhood recollection in her memoir—the one in which her half-brother removes a log to reveal “curled, white slugs,” ants, and cocoons—“There were things under things, as well as things inside things” (21). The thought experiment that Tribute to Freud is, in no small part, asking its readers to seriously engage in is that of rendering everything in the world as an uncollated set of vaguely significant hieroglyphs, of picture-words awaiting organization and translation, though readers need to reconcile themselves to the fact that (much like the dictionary itself) none of these hieroglyphs can be reduced to a single definition or meaning. There is no single message waiting for us at the end of all this rebarbative labor of deciphering, except maybe Constantine I’s “in this sign you will conquer,” meaning only by attending to the hieroglyphic significance of all experience can one ever hope to master its seeming contingencies, accidents, and formlessness with direction, meaning, and form. Yet, for all that, there will always be an irreducible quality of ambiguity sticking to these hieroglyphically processed experiences, images, events, and relationships. If myths are the lens through which H.D. approaches her world most generally, then at a linguistic level, this lens is more specifically that of an Egyptologist to a recently exhumed or excavated set of hieroglyphically covered artifacts.
I want to briefly interject here to turn our attention to the film we watched last week, to Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline (1930), on which H.D. wrote an essay you all read in preparation for that screening.
I want to do this now because it nicely brings out the degree to which H.D.’s practice of mythic pattern recognition extends to Borderline as well—that is to say, it’s not just the way she interprets the world and it’s not just the way she writes, it’s also the way she interprets actual texts as well, including films. In that essay, you all will recall, H.D. makes a strong case for our reading Paul Robeson’s Pete (surprise surprise) mythically. At the very least, on page 233 of the PDF you all have, she makes the following observation:
Adah is real, Pete is real, vital dynamic, indifferent in his giant mastery. Nevertheless, there is dream in them, nightmare, and that dream-nightmare permeates our consciousness although we may not know what it is or why. Pete and Adah escape from their little room and stand on a hill slope. Like a dream, the great negro head looms disproportionate, and water and cloud and rock and sky are all subsidiary to its being. Like a personal dream, gone further into the race dream, we see (with Pete) hill and cloud as, on that first day created. Dream merges with myth and Pete, regarding a fair heaven far from the uncreated turmoil of that small-town café, says quite logically, “let there be light.” Light has been, it is obvious, created by that dark daemon, conversant with all nature since before the time of white man’s beginning. (233)
While faithful to the mythic method articulated by H.D. throughout Tribute to Freud, the racialization of that method with respect to Pete here ought to make us somewhat uncomfortable. Compare, for instance, H.D.’s ascription of the demonic energy exerted by Pete’s “race dream” here to Langston Hughes’s description of primitivism in The Big Sea (1940). In that autobiography, Hughes quotes himself as saying, “In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every movement of life becomes a part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the truth of the physical for the sake of the mind. [. . .] The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world” (311).
You all will remember that Hughes himself insists that such an organic relationship to the earth is impossible for Black Americans to achieve because they are no longer Africans but rather are Americans, saddled with all the contemporary problems, hang-ups, and aptitudes of every other modern person in the West. Black Americans, in short, are decidedly not primitive, they decidedly are not the exotics of American mass culture. After all, his falling out with his patron, we are told, occurred because she wanted him to write about Black Americans exclusively in terms of their primitiveness, while he wanted to write at a more socially engaged level about the urgent day-to-day problems Black Americans and the proletariat masses were facing at the beginning of the Great Depression. From Hughes’s perspective, then, H.D.’s comments here would seem to be potentially offensive and harmful because Paul Robeson’s Pete is no more primitive than H.D.’s neurotic racist, Astrid.
Yet for all this uncomfortable-making ambiguity, H.D.’s description of this sequence of the movie is, on the whole, fairly accurate. At the very least, I would have you all think about how the experience of watching this sequence compares with the experience of reading H.D.’s account of it as it plays out:
Mixing naturalistic quasi-documentary footage with stagebound images of Pete and Adah as artfully posed profiles against an ostentatiously painted backdrop of sky and clouds, this sequence does (on its face) seem to make much of the associations to be drawn out between Pete’s mysterious smiles and the numerous (and occasionally rapid or jump) cuts to the ambient natural beauty of the Swiss setting, from windblown trees and clouds to gushing waterfalls and whirling streams. Pete may not actually say, “Let there be light,” but H.D.’s commentary does draw out the extent to which this sequence does potentially ascribe a mythological demiurgic or creative force to Pete, as if he were in fact responsible for physically creating the world around him, as if his enjoyment of and his at-oneness with the scenery were part and parcel of the very sort of relationship that would have created that same scenery in the first place.
Consequently, reading this sequence and H.D.’s commentary in terms of the larger structure of the film, according to which Pete gets scapegoated and expelled from the small mountain community, we can say that Borderline never really lets him into that community, since it seems to overload him with all the primitivistic abilities and aptitudes that explicitly disqualify him from being a modern citizen there in the first place (at the very least, such is Hughes’s contention in the final pages of The Big Sea). Thus, what we have in Borderline is a representation not only of exclusive thought-forms and behaviors at the borderline of the binaries existing waveringly between nation-states, sexualities, races, and classes, but also of the potential exclusion of mythic self-relationships to the world. That is to say, this organic mythic communion between self and environment gets ascribed only to Pete; all the other characters who come up against mythic archetypes according to H.D. (like Thorne, who confronts his wife, the bar maid, and the hotel manager as if they were the three Furies) do so in an adversarial way. Only Pete engages in a bit of H.D.-like mythic pattern recognition in a life-affirmative way, meaning his subsequent expulsion from this Swiss mountain community is not only racially marked but also visionarily significant. In other words, living the way that H.D. outlines in Tribute to Freud is dis-encouraged by the exclusively operative binaries of modern life itself, which actively seems to impede our realizing that we are all, in our dream-lives if not our real ones, demiurgic forces to which natural and social life are subservient. Consequently, to live the life of a mythical being is to live the life of an eternal exile, as it were.
I want to stay with this sequence from Borderline just a few more minutes in order to tweak H.D.’s mythic method a bit. At the end of the day, what H.D.’s preoccupation with mythic structures subtending the world implies is that everything is connected to everything else by a dense web of intertextual allusions. If we’re feeling a bit reluctant to follow H.D. down the rabbit-hole of classical myths and allusions, then perhaps we will be less reluctant to revise her theses a bit and start to think about popular culture (specifically movies themselves) in terms of mythic texts, structures, images, characters, and situations through which we all implicitly and explicitly orient our waking and dream lives today. Hercules, Asklepios, and Constantine I may not seem to have much bearing on our lives here in the U.S. in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but The Big Lebowski (1998), The Dark Knight (2008), and (to take a much less high class-example) The Room (2003) certainly do. (And, parenthetically here, I would note that this was the implicit argument of Inception [2010], where all the dreams in the central episodes of that film seem to be collages of images and plot-business cribbed from other films, like Fred Astaire’s ceiling dance from Royal Wedding [1951] in the topsy-turvy hallway fight scenes, like the ski scenes lifted directly from the George Lazenby James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1969], and like the 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] echoes in the father-son scenes in the mountain castle in the same part of that film—which is a long roundabout way of saying even our popular films take it for granted at this point that movie myths and images have colonized our dreams lives and unconsciousnesses.)
At the very least, for people who work on cultural studies since the 1950s, the interpretation of pop cultural objects as instances of modern myths has long been a working assumption we can credibly make, insofar as these objects do seem to implicitly organize our respective places in the world and how we comport ourselves in those places. In a nutshell, despite H.D.’s assertions to the contrary, perhaps our unconsciousness today is more in thrall to the mass culture industry and (specifically) to things like the movies and video games than it is to Homer’s Iliad or to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Extrapolating from this situation, then, we ought to be on the lookout for movie citations in the sequence that H.D. herself picks out from Borderline because such citations are perhaps the more urgent bits and pieces of allusiveness in the film for those of us interpreters and readers reviewing it today. As it happens, such citations prove to be quickly enough discernible.
To refresh your memories a little, here’s the entrance of Pete and Adah into the sublime Swiss scenery:
And here’s the epilogue to G.W. Pabst’s 1926 film, Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul), a film to which Kenneth Macpherson’s essay, “As Is,” explicitly compares Borderline:
Beyond affinities of their mountaintop settings, what these two sequences draw out is the degree to which Borderline’s scene plays off of the ludicrously happy-ending of Secrets of a Soul, in which a successful series of sessions of psychoanalytic therapy allows the protagonist husband to overtake the hill and lift his progeny to the heavens Lion King-like. Not the mythic and transhistorical demiurgic forces so much as the hyperbolic ending of a recent German art film seems to be the organizing allusion here, such that Secrets of the Soul’s final orgiastic hymn to the husband’s safely secured reproductive futurity becomes the occasion for Borderline’s comparable orgiastic hymn to Pete’s communion with Adah and nature.
The implication, then, is that Pete and Adah don’t need psychoanalysis to achieve this heightened sensory and affective state because their close mythic communion with the world around them when the interfering ways of society are removed apparently gives them access to such states always already. Alternatively, everyone who cannot innately access such mythic relationships to the world does need psychoanalysis to recover this lost condition. Looming behind this scene from Borderline, then, is not so much an African creation myth as a successfully carried-out psychological analysis.
Okay, to return to Tribute to Freud more directly: for all her possible pretension and mysticism, H.D. is still yet able to evince some gallows humor at the expense of herself and her worldview, a feature of the text that gets activated quite early in the memoir. The passage I have in mind here takes place on pages 11 to 12, when Freud finally receives some gardenias from H.D., only to be slightly confused by the handwriting on the note accompanying them. The flowers and note, you all will remember, have been sent by her to Freud in celebration of the safe arrival of his relics from the continent to his home-in-exile in London.
But in imagination at least, in the mist of a late afternoon, I could still continue a quest, a search. There might be gardenias somewhere. I found them in a West End florist’s and scribbled on a card, “To greet the return of the Gods.” The gardenias reached the professor. I have his letter.
20 Maresfield Gardens,
London, N.W. 3
Nov. 28th, 1938
Dear H.D.,
I got today some flowers. By chance or intention they are my favourite flowers, those I most admire. some words “to greet the return of the Gods’ (other people read: Goods). No name. I suspect you to be responsible for the gift. If I have guessed right don’t answer but accept my hearty thanks for so charming a gesture. In any case,
affectionately yours,
Sigm. Freud
I only saw the Professor once more. It was summer again. French windows opened on a pleasant stretch of lawn. The Gods or the Goods were suitably arranged on ordered shelves. I was not alone with the Professor. He sat quiet, a little wistful it seemed, withdrawn. I was afraid then, as I had often been afraid, of impinging, disturbing his detachment, of draining his vitality. I had no choice in the matter, anyway. There were others present and the conversation was carried on in an ordered, conventional manner. Like the Gods or the Goods, we were seated in a pleasant circle; a conventionally correct yet superficially sustained ordered hospitality prevalied. There was a sense of outer security, at least no words were speaken to recall a devestatingly near past or to evoke an equivocal future. I was in Switzerland when soon after the announcement of a World at War the official London news bulletin announced that Dr. Sigmund Freud, who had opened up the field of the knowledge of the unconscious mind, the innovator or founder of the science of psychoanalysis, was dead. (11-12)
Here we have a somewhat self-satirizing view of just how much H.D.’s mytho-poetic worldview can potentially get mixed up with misprision or misinterpretation. That is to say, it is not always clear where a credible act of mythic pattern recognition shades off into a comical act of misunderstanding, where the putative divinity of human experience ends up getting confused with something that is (at bottom) just a material good, just a commodity, as it were, seemingly unredeemable by any spiritual force or breath. When is a good just a good and not a good and a god?, we can see Freud (and with him, H.D.) indirectly asking us here, and the answer seems to be, properly speaking, never. A good is never just a good without also being a god at one and the same time, according to H.D. To insist that Freud’s relics are either goods or gods is to risk giving up access to a deeper, more significant mode of organizing human experience.
As she says on page 12, describing her last visit to Freud in London, separating the transcendent meaningfulness of gods from the arbitrary market logics of mere goods means reducing human encounters to empty conventions and falsely hospitable surfaces: “Like the Gods or the Goods, we were seated in a pleasant circle; a conventionally correct yet superficially sustained ordered hospitality prevailed. There was a sense of outer security, at least no words were spoken to recall a devastatingly near past or to evoke an equivocal future.” With no gods in goods and with no goods in gods, human relationships hollow out into mere conventions, into rank superficiality and a tenuously maintained sense of hospitality that can do nothing to prevent the onset of new World Wars and Holocausts, according to H.D. In other words, according to the fantasy and anxiety being articulated here, we need a transhistorical metaphysical project of sorts to help us better orient and manage the confusions and terrors of everyday life in the interwar period, for without the compensatory structures of such a project and such a fantasy, there is nothing for an anti-fascist pacifist such as herself to fall back on in the face of unfolding historical events in the 1930s. If H.D. seems to rather solemnly articulate the significance of her mytho-poetic method, then that is because the stakes could not be higher, as those of us who are all familiar with what came of World War II and of German Nationalist Socialism ought to know too well.
The other thing whose salience I need to bring out a bit more is the degree to which H.D.’s compositional methods of mythic pattern recognition are, in many respects, simply more extreme versions of a widely-employed modernist writing practice that received one of its canonical expressions in T.S. Eliot’s 1923 essay, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” That is to say, if H.D.’s mytho-poetic methods are situated in a tragic set of national and world-historical narratives, then those same methods are no less circumscribed by a specifiable set of literary historical narratives—to wit, those of literary modernism itself. In his essay on Joyce’s second novel, released the previous year in limited edition book form, Eliot elaborates upon the mythic referents subtending the various banal everyday doings of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom on June 16, 1904 in Dublin, which is made to encompass the entire classical Mediterranean cosmos in Homer’s The Odyssey. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ulysses [1922], in that text Joyce patterns the characters, events, themes, and images that take place in one ho-hum day after the characters, events, themes, and images that take place in Homer’s epic.
To take some obvious examples: Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s Telemachus, spiritual (if not actual) son to the Jewish Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s Odysseus or (if you prefer Roman names instead of Greek ones, Joyce’s Ulysses), whose wife, Molly, is Joyce’s not-so-faithful Penelope (perhaps the most consequential “event” that takes place on June 16, 1904 is that Molly, unlike Penelope in Homer’s epic, cheats on her Ulysses in their home). Moreover, the book is famously divided up into eighteen un-titled episodes patterned after sections from The Odyssey itself. Thus, just as Odysseus finds himself at one point in The Odyssey facing the threats to his life posed by a human-eating giant, the Cyclops Polyphemus, so too Leopold Bloom finds himself physically threatened for being a Jew in a pub by an extremely tall and athletic Irishman with one-eye in the twelfth episode of Ulysses. I could go on with drawing out these and other parallels, but I think you all get the point.
So in a nutshell, it is to this seemingly structural (and, it ought to be emphasized, it is to this satirical and ironic) use of ancient mythical figures, narratives, and texts that Eliot appeals in his essay as an innovative way of organizing modernist poetry and prose following Joyce. Eliot, in other words, is making a strong case in this essay for other modernist writers and poets to start using myths in precisely the same structural, satirical, and ironic way that he sees Joyce’s Ulysses as working. That is to say, other modernists are not supposed to write novelizations of ancient Greek epics; instead, they are to take the drab banality of everyday present-day reality and then to superimpose tropes, images, and figures from ancient texts and myths over or beneath them.
To make this argument, he starts by asserting that he and the person he is addressing his essay primarily to (Richard Aldington, a member of the Imagist poets centered briefly around Ezra Pound in the previous decade and H.D.’s ex-husband as it happens, so my forcing of this essay upon your attentions is also partly biographically motivated) are agreed on what constitutes literary value. Value, it is commonly held by them both, is said to reside in the classical. Where Eliot and Aldington are said to meaningfully differ is in how a writer ought to go about achieving or realizing this value:
We are agreed as to what we want, but not as to how to get it, or as to what contemporary writing exhibits a tendency in that direction. We agree, I hope, that “classicism” is not an alternative to “romanticism,” as of political parties, Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat, on a “turn-the-rascals-out” platform. It is a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its place and time. One can be “classical,” in a sense, by turning away from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand and selecting only mummified stuff from a museum—like some contemporary writers, about whom one could say some nasty things in this connection, if it were worth while (Mr. [Richard] Aldington is not one of them). Or one can be classical in tendency by doing the best one can with the material at hand. The confusion springs from the fact that the term is applied to literature and to the whole complex of interests and modes of behaviour and society of which literature is a part; and it has not the same bearing in both applications. It is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism than in creative art—because in criticism you are responsible only for what you want, and in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept. And in this material I include the emotions and feelings of the writer himself, which, for that writer, are simply material which he must accept—not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished. The question, then, about Mr. Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but as an artist?
What we have here, then, are two opposed mythic or classical methods, one credibly available to literary critics and the other plausibly usable by creative writers, and never in the middle shall the twain meet according to Eliot because being a classicist or a classically formed literary scholar permits one to flee from the vile or objectionable parts of present-day reality into an artificially celebrated and preserved classical past. That is to say, as a passive receiver of culture and literature, the classical literary critic can approach both culture and literature as one would a buffet, picking and choosing only those things most appetizing to him and her, and if he or she happens to be a properly classical literary critic when it comes to taste, then he or she will likely draw the overwhelming majority of his or her objects from antiquity, thereby disregarding much of potential value in the present.
As I have had occasion to mention throughout this quarter, for many English-language writers of high modernism in the teens and twenties (e.g., Eliot, Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, etc.) early-twentieth-century modernity and the rise of mass cultures were an unqualified “bad” thing that one (as a writer) had to resist by separating out what one did (one’s poems, one’s novels, one’s essays, one’s fiction) from all the other claptrap books and textual commodities circulating among and being aimed at the degraded and degrading masses. In this view, then, for Eliot the insistence on the unquestionable value of classical or mythical forms and archetypes was a way of similarly resisting all the confusions and depredations of contemporary writing and culture. As this paragraph makes very clear, Eliot is taking for granted that any competent literary critic of the 1920s agrees that classical texts are the measure of modern art. That, he says, is not the problem he has with H.D.’s ex-husband’s negative evaluation of Ulysses.
What ought to interest us here, therefore, is the fact that Eliot insists that there is a bad way and a good way of invoking classical archetypes, and the bad way seems to involve using mythical narratives and figures as a way of escaping from history and modernity. According to Eliot, the use of classical or mythical forms to avoid confronting present-day realities is an inescapably flawed way of invoking such forms. Instead, for Eliot, classical myths ought to be a way of processing and organizing contemporary experiences, be they howsoever individual or social. Not as a flight-from but as a direct altercation-with modernity is the function to be served by myths for modernist novelists and poets: “It is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism than in creative art—because in criticism you are responsible only for what you want, and in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept.” You cannot legitimately ignore the repugnant aspects of present-day life by escaping into Homer, Sophocles, or Virgil, in other words. If you use Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil at all, then you need to use them to help you compositionally manage or process present-day events and experiences, to relativize those events and experiences with respect to human kind’s collective past, to the “classics” of human culture, as it were.
It is in this sense of relativism, therefore, that Eliot goes on to accredit Joyce’s novel with all the force of a major scientific discovery:
It is here that Mr. Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a “novel”; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one novel—the Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one novel—Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them will ever write another “novel.” The novel ended with Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence.
The novel, we are told here, is an art-form whose sell-by date has come and gone, and if the cutting-edge “novels” of Joyce and Lewis seem to present-day readers to be disorienting and unshapely messes, then that is because the present age demands that new prose forms develop that are capable of less artificially expressing the anxieties, desires, beliefs, and aspirations of the times, of the bad new days, not the good old ones. What Tarr and Ulysses presumably anticipate, then, is the discovery of new forms, of new epics that the novel-as-a-nineteenth-century-form can yet hope to become or be, even though it itself has not yet become that new thing or form. The novel-as-a-form cannot adequately express the present, Eliot argues, at least not on its own. Nineteenth-century realism, he contends, needs the supplement of Joyce’s mythic method:
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough [1890-1915] have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance.
The key sentences here are “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” and “Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.” In a nutshell, Eliot’s obituary for the novel is really an obituary for narrative as such, for stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, roughly in that order. At the very least, a narrative presupposes that one could (if one put in enough effort) take a text and re-organize it chronologically.
What Eliot argues here, however, in his manifesto-like claims for “the mythical method” is that narrative as such is an altogether insufficient way of confronting modernity in the early twentieth century. One certainly could take Ulysses apart and chronologically re-order all its memories and reveries in terms of “real” unfolding events, but in doing so one would have added nothing to that book—in fact, one would have actively subtracted from its merits and values (and parenthetically, I would note here that a lot of the early literary criticism on Ulysses and later Finnegans Wake [1939] wasn’t properly critical but merely descriptive—it merely tried to explain to readers what was supposed to be actually happening beneath or behind the densely layered and mythically suggestive verbal surface and its representations of interiority in those two books).
For Eliot, then, to return to claims in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” experience at this time in Europe and in America simply was not breaking down into stories. In restricting itself to the events that happen over the course of a rather insignificant day in the lives of the Dubliners it represents, Joyce’s Ulysses after all suggested that the overarching story designs of comic or tragic or sentimental or realistic emplotment were dead dogs, were of no use in adequately confronting the strange shapes into which early-twentieth-century modernity was twisting social and personal experience. No narrative, in other words, could hope to encompass or represent the world it purports to encompass or represent anymore. Modernity has become too chaotic to be tidily presented in terms of beginnings, middles, and ends, whatever the order imposed on such things.
Yet for all this disenchantment with narrative as such, Eliot is not saying that all cutting-edge writing from here-on-out is an anarchic or futile free-for-all of a little bit of this mixed with a little bit of that. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” after all, in its very title cues us to be on the lookout for order as an organizing desire for Eliot and other modernist writers who would follow the supposed example he sees in Joyce’s prose. Just because modernity was shaping up into a shapeless mess didn’t mean that creative writers could legitimately use that shapelessness as an excuse to make formless novels and poems. Instead, according to Eliot, Joyce’s “mythical method” offers such writers the means with which to meaningfully organize the confusions and degradations of modern experience in a way that relates that experience not to a cookie-cutter narrative structure but rather to a variety of archetypal experiences shared by all humans across history and against which modern experience itself could be credibly measured, compared, and judged.
As Eliot points out furthermore in this final paragraph, such a method is no isolated literary thing: psychology, ethnology, and the comparative study of religions and mythologies all provide contemporary and interdisciplinary warrants for our approaching modernity in a comparative frame-of-mind. For Eliot, a key text to consider in this regard is James Frazier’s massive twelve-volume mythological and religious study, The Golden Bough, in which Frazier attempted to reduce all mythologies and the historical development of religious practices in the world to a core set of shared beliefs. According to Frazier, a central pattern or structure suggested or covered over by all these world mythologies and religions is that of fertility cults worshipping and then sacrificing a sacred king. This, for Frazier, is an important kernel of all mythological experience and religious ritual, and Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), is itself a tour of a dessicated, vulgar, arid, and infertile 1920s London landscape that takes this mythological essence as its structuring guide, thus making this poem a modernist myth or a modernist religious expression calling for in its own dense and ironic way a sacrificial renewal that could possibly right the world and change the interwar waste land into a fertile plain again.
In a nutshell, then, H.D.’s mysterious reverence for antiquity and its archetypal patterns was no predilection peculiar to her. We have a number of other important English-language male modernist writers themselves persuasively embodying and/or invoking the utility of such patterns and forms to make their own very difficult and strangely organized works of art. As I have intimated throughout this lecture, however, what makes H.D.’s mytho-poetic method somewhat singular as compared to Eliot’s essay is the degree to which that method extends beyond the page and into life. At the end of the day, Eliot is not claiming in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” that human everyday experience really does get mediated by mythical archetypes. His problem in this essay, in other words, is not so much how to live as it is how to write well, how to write a good poem, how to create a cutting-edge novel or play in a social and cultural milieu that seems positively inimical to art as such. To some extent, such compositional issues and concerns are on H.D.’s plate as well in Tribute to Freud, but these issues and concerns are merely a subset of a much wider-ranging group of problems that pertain to the problem of life itself, of living in, with, and through the traumas of early twentieth-century experience, from one World War to the next and everything else in between. Again, if Eliot is interested in how the “mythic method” will help him and other modernists to write in the interwar period, H.D. is concerned above all else with how such a method will help her to live unreconciled to the violent and chaotic experiences that Western modernity was producing in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Therefore, if there is an intertextual model for H.D.’s life and writing practice of mythic pattern recognition, then that model derives as much from Freudian psychoanalysis as it does from Eliotic poetics. After all, if you know nothing else about Freudian psychoanalysis, then surely you all are familiar in a sort of pop cultural kind of way with the Oedipus Complex, according to which all the affections and hostilities evinced by all children everywhere always towards their parents are incredibly said by Freud to hew closely to the archetypal patterns described in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus inadvertently kills his father, marries and has children by his mother, and threatens the security and prosperity of the Theban state with these crimes that are simultaneously familial and civic in scope. What you may not know about the Oedipus Complex is that Freud’s empirical bases for it are startlingly frail: though it is considered by him to play a foundational role in the structuring of all human personality and desire, Freud ascribes explanatory power to the Oedipus Complex not because of extensive clinical research and evidence (most of his research and evidence derives in any case from a few abnormal subjects and from scattered allusions to his own self-analysis); instead, his main piece of evidence is the Sophoclean tragedy itself.
In other words, Freud claims that the Oedipus Complex is a universal feature of human personality development because Oedipus Rex is an ancient play that transcends history in its capacity to still effectively move modern audiences. What we have here then is a recapitulation of Miller’s obscene classics and H.D.’s mythic classics because what is said to make the Oedipus Complex a real feature or dimension of human interiority and childhood development is the capacity of Sophocles’ classic to persist throughout time as a moving work of art. The fact that Oedipus Rex can still dramatically affect early twentieth-century audiences is understood by Freud as all the proof he really needs in arguing for the secretly harbored oedipal urges hidden deep within all human beings. Or as Freud himself puts it in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), “[Oedipus’] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so”[ii]
Now my point in offering you all this gloss on the Oedipus Complex is not to take Freud to task tsk-tsk-ingly for his unduly gendered reading here nor is it my place to show him up as being obviously wrong on “scientific” grounds. I am, to be quite frank, uninterested in whether the Oedipus Complex does or does not have the sorts of universal and transhistorical explanatory power that he empathically describes it as having when it comes to human personality development. Instead, what I am most struck by here, and what I would have you all graphically struck by as well, is the degree to which Freud’s work on the Oedipus Complex is, itself, a rather startling example of what H.D. means by mythic pattern recognition, of seeing and interpreting everyday life in terms of the shapes and forms handed down to us by millennia upon millennia of human culture. In other words, I am trying to make especially salient to you all
(1) the wider cultural affinities that H.D.’s project of mythic pattern recognition had both with other writers and with other disciplines and
(2) the deeper implications of H.D.’s desire to be psychoanalyzed by Freud himself, with whom she explicitly forged an imagined affiliation based around their respective preoccupations with the explanatory powers of mythical images, characters, and situations in daily life.
Or, to use the words that H.D. herself invokes in her journal entries in the “Advent” section of Tribute to Freud, “The Professor said that we two met in our love of antiquity. He said his little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether” (175).
I think it can be plausibly claimed that this admission of Freud’s which H.D. records in her journal offers us not only some clues for figuring out why H.D. was in analysis in the first place but also for determining what it is she hoped to get out of it. At a fundamental level, Freud’s claims here seem to be that antiquity and its enduring myths provide a much needed stabilizing force to the unduly ephemeral qualities of contemporary cultural, literary, and psychological production. That is to say, antiquity’s mythological traces are a means of preserving one’s own work against the looming immediate threats of obsolescence and unfashionability—mythical pattern recognition is, in a word, a way of protecting the meaning of one’s own work against the seeming meaninglessness of contemporary mass life in the West, overrun as it then was with developing culture industries, insurrectionary mass politics, World Wars, fascist states, and racial and ethnic genocidal programs.
Keeping this in mind, then, we ought to carefully re-read an account that H.D. gives of her free-associations in Tribute to Freud:
We touched lightly on some of the more abstruse transcendental problems, it is true, but we related them to the familiar family-complex. Tendencies of thought and imagination, however, were not cut away, were not pruned even. My imagination wandered at will; my dreams were revealing, and many of them drew on classical or Biblical symbolism. Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analyzed, shelved, or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and iridescent glass bowls and vases that gleamed in the dusk from the shelves of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up on the couch in the room in Berggase 19, Wien IX. The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in dream. (13-14)
In a nutshell, what this passages seems to be claiming is that H.D.’s impulses in being psychoanalyzed by Freud have to do with her translating or transforming the uncollected fragments of her interior life into relics—that is to say, her project in these sessions and in writing Tribute to Freud itself involves her concerted attempt to redeem the junk associations of her mind into meaningful or mythically significant artifacts, like the much-remarked upon artifacts to be found upon Freud’s desk itself or (as described in this passage) on the shelves of the cabinet facing her on Freud’s couch. Part exercise in waste management, part attempt to further hone the implications and connotations of her mythic pattern recognitions, H.D.’s analyses with Freud not only follow from their mutual interest in antiquity but also lead back to that same antiquity, where she hopes to discern more clearly the vague foreshadowings and transhistorical structures of the world she and he fitfully inhabit. You all will have noted, after all, that in the passage we just read, H.D. lightly dismisses Freud’s obsession with “the familiar family-complex” and emphasizes instead the mythic impulses subtending his work—not the Oedipus Complex but rather the mythic complexes are where the action is at for H.D. in her psychobiography.
Before I end today’s lecture by pointing out some of the ways in which H.D. goes on to transform Freud’s work, I would like to make a brief (and, given our topic, an appropriate) detour back to the beginning of class, when I mentioned that H.D.’s approach to time is an estranging one—that is to say, in Tribute to Freud time does not progress linearly but rather in a jagged set of overlapping and overlaid associations in which relationships of cause-and-effect or of one-thing-after-another appear to break down altogether. I would like now to sketch in an important psychoanalytic concept that might help us to re-approach this seemingly counterintuitive representation of temporality, not least of all for the light it might shed on it.
This concept in Freud’s German is called Nachträglichkeit, which tends to get (rather clumsily) translated as “deferred action,” though the original German is more evocative than that rather vague pair of words. Träglichkeit comes from the German verb tragen, meaning (among other things) “to carry,” “to sustain,” “be bear,” and “to drag.” Thus, with the preposition nach, meaning “after,” what we have in this suggestive word Nachträghlichkeit is not a deferred action so much as a “carrying after” or a “sustaining after” or a “bearing after” or a “dragging after.” This is the word that Freud uses when he refers to mental relationships to time and temporality that are marked by a structure in which the present creates the meaning of the past rather than the other way round.
The paradigmatic and perhaps the most famous example of Freudian Nachträghlichkeit ought to bring this structure out for us in a fairly clear-cut way. In Freud’s analysis and case-history of the “Wolf-man,” the patient (that is, the “Wolf-man” himself) was troubled by a reoccurring dream he was having in which he saw a pack of wolves sitting in a tree (this is where his nickname comes from, not—spoiler alert—from his ability to change into a wolf during full moons: apologies to all the Larry Talbot fans out there). After a long set of exhaustive analysis sessions, he and Freud came to the conclusion that the dream was covering up a repressed memory of the patient’s in which he once saw his parents having sex doggy-style. Whether this repressed memory was really a memory or an imaginative vision posing as a memory never conclusively got determined upon by the patient, leading Freud to decide that the “doggy-style” memory was both a repressed memory and a fantasy pretending to be a repressed memory. In other words, the “Wolf-man” certainly saw something—something, whatever it was, was being repressed in the “Wolf-man’s” dreams—but (and here’s the important thing) whatever that something may have ended up being really, it nevertheless took place and got repressed in the patient’s memory before it meant anything to him.
At a brass-tacks level, therefore, the meaning of this traumatic event did not acquire either its meaning or its traumatic force until after the patient entered adulthood, until after the patient developed enough emotionally, physically, and mentally to discern and decipher its meaning or its traumatic potentials. According to Nachträghlichkeit, then, meaning does not come from the past, from past events that inherently contain meaning like a water bottle holds water; instead, meaning comes from the present as it reviews, repeats, stages, and remembers the past. Meaningful events from our past, in other words, do not happen in the past, they happen in the present (the past only becomes an event in a present moment that retroactively causes that past to become event-like, in a movement much like of the name of Nachträghlichkeit itself). Far from the past causing the present, it is, in fact, the present that drags the past after it. The present meaning of the past, therefore, is a long-drawn-out and ever-unfolding process of selection, of sorting and collating fragmentary bits of memory that may or may not be meaningful. Or, to use the words that H.D. herself uses on page 9 of Tribute to Freud, here’s how Nachträghlichkeit works: “It was not that [Freud] conjured up the past and invoked the future. It was a present that was in the past or a past that was in the future.” It is a present that assigns meaning to the past or a past whose meaninglessness gets redeemed in some future meaning-making moment.
I want to close today’s lecture by swerving from the course I’ve been tentatively mapping out for the last few minutes by bringing to your attention the ways in which H.D.’s Tribute to Freud manages both to show gratitude for and to positively value Freud’s contributions to psychological research and to mental health in the interwar years while nevertheless demurring in some striking ways. What I mean by that is this: though quite explicit in expressing its desires to draw out the affiliations and affinities between H.D.’s mythic pattern recognitions and Freudian psychoanalysis, Tribute to Freud nevertheless resists taking on all of Freud’s concepts and terms unreflectively. In fact the very word resist or resistance is one such concept and term that Freud uses in his writing to refer to anything in the actions and words of an analysand that obstructs analysis, that obstructs the analysand from gaining access to his or her unconscious. In H.D.’s journal, she admits at one point that Freud accused her of exhibiting signs of such resistance: “Sigmund Freud said at our next session that he saw ‘from signs’ that I did not want to be analyzed” (139). At another point she records the following:
The Professor asked me if I had ever wanted to go on the stage. He said he felt I narrated these incidents so dramatically, as if I had “acted them out” or “prepared” before coming to him. I told the Professor how I loved “dressing up,” but most children do. There were some old stage properties in our first home, left to my mother by a retired prima donna who had taught singing at the old school where my grandfather was. The Professor said he felt some sort of “resistance.” (184)
This last excerpt gets to crux of the matter of H.D.’s resistance to analysis because what we have elaborated throughout “Writing on the Wall” and “Advent” is not so much a desire to achieve psychic health by plumbing H.D.’s unconscious depths as we do a desire on her part to sharpen or hone her abilities as a poet and her method of mythic pattern recognition. Paradigmatically, analysis sessions are supposed to be staging grounds for memory. That is to say, in analysis, the analysand unconsciously projects element of his or her mental life onto external people and objects, and a big part of analysis is concerned with staging these projections in an unconsciously carried-out performance of sorts until the analyst can bring meaningful dimensions of these performances to the conscious attention of the analysand.
This is another big claim of Freudian psychoanalysis: what we repress in our memory, what gets buried in our unconscious, what we can’t recollect we are doomed to express in our encounters with people: what we can’t remember, we performatively enact in our intersubjective relationships, and part of the function of analysis is to provide a screen of sorts for these projections and displacements. One particular type of projection of note here is that of transference, which refers to the projections that occur in analysis sessions themselves, to the process by which unconscious wishes get actualized in the presence of the analyst. Often these transferences have to do with repressed material concerning events in one’s childhood, meaning a lot the process of transference in analysis has to do with the analyst taking on the roles of one or both parents at different times (and Freud, you all will remember, even cops to his discomfort in playing mother in these things to H.D. at one point). Finally, it ought to be noted that to the degree that Freudian psychoanalysis provides a cure to its patients, that cure depends upon the patient unconsciously establishing transference with his or her analyst, acting it out, recognizing it as such, interpreting it with the analyst, and resolving it.
What is interesting to note about the passage I just read, however, is the fact that H.D. is treating the inherent (if nonetheless unconscious) performativity of transference too much like an opportunity to perform for Freud. She is too deliberate, too conscious, too aware of what she’s doing in their sessions together for analysis to work. In far too elaborately staging a scene of transference, she is effectively resisting it, she is effectively resisting her own analysis and its potential psychic cure as well. She is too dramatic, too prepared, too performative in her approach to her first sessions with Freud, and in H.D.’s journals she admits to this fact quite explicitly: as she says (again, very Kit-like) on page 139, “How can I tell him of my constant pre-vision of disaster? It is better to have an unsuccessful or ‘delayed’ analysis than to bring my actual terror of the lurking Nazi menace into the open.”
Remarkably, H.D. interprets her own unconscious here socially: her psyche is a matter of political critique and divination, as it were. In other words, what H.D.’s resistance indexes here is Freud’s own resistance to her re-visioning of psychoanalysis as a tool-kit for prophetic interpretation and poetic creation. On page 173, H.D. records the following exchange with Freud, in which Freud himself refuses to interpret H.D.’s projections, symptoms, and images prophetically or poetically: “The Professor repeated, ‘You see, after all, you are a poet.’ He dismissed my suggestion of some connection with the old mysteries, magic or second sight. But he came back to the Writing on the Wall. The drama, as he called it, he said held no secret from him; but the projected pictures, seen in daylight, puzzled him.”
I want to close our discussion of Tribute to Freud by asking you all to consider closely Freud’s puzzlement here (“but the projected pictures, seen in daylight, puzzled him”), for what is Freud’s puzzlement based on if not H.D.’s poetic misappropriation of Freudian terminology to her own creative ends? In the Writing on the Wall experience, you all will remember, H.D. successively sees projected in lights the head and shoulders of a visored airman, a lamp, a tripod, a ladder, tiny flying people, winged Niké ascending this ladder, a sun, and an entrance of Niké into this sun. Instead of the expected displacement of elements of mental interiority onto an exterior world, as is said to happen when you ascribe wishes and desires you unconsciously possess onto a friend who does not possess those same wishes and desires—instead of this properly psychoanalytic relationship, H.D. poetically re-activates the word project, turning herself or her world into a magic lantern, into a movie projector casting images of light that she (with the collaborative encouragement of Bryher) can see. H.D.’s account refuses to tell us if she or if something in her circumambient environment itself projected these images, and contrary to psychoanalysis, she demands that this indecision remains a radical indeterminacy, for to settle for the expected Freudian explanation (according to which she must be the projector) is to give up the mystical or sacred experience that H.D.’s visionary poetics and practice mythic pattern recognition demand. Freud, for all his insight and innovations, is elaborating a dogma of sorts, a set of moves and vocabularies that were to be followed by psychoanalysts within certain circumscribable limits; yet what H.D. seems to want from the analyses described in Tribute to Freud is not a first-hand grasp on this dogma but rather a chance to stage her own scene of recognition as a poet in Freud’s eyes, her own counter-scene of transference as it were.
After all, in H.D.’s telling of it, Freud seems to think that he is gently chiding H.D. when he calls her truly a poet, for in telling her as much he also insists that all her talk of mysteries, magic, and prophetic vision are hogwash and horsepucky. Yet H.D., true to form, refuses to take the de-sacralizing insult that Freud directs toward her at face value. His dismissal is an affirmation in the end, or at least that’s how she re-casts it in her memoir, Tribute to Freud, and in her 1935 poem to Freud called “The Master,” the seventh and eighth parts of which are on the second side of your handout, and which parts I will read now in closing so that H.D. can have the last word on this subject today:
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.
Kennst du das Haus? Auf Säulen ruht sein Dach.
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn.
Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg;
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut;
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut!
Kennst du ihn wohl?
Geht unser Weg! O Vater, laß uns ziehn!
Knowest thou where the lemon blossom grows,
In foliage dark the orange golden glows,
A gentle breeze blows from the azure sky,
Still stands the myrtle, and the laurel, high?
Dost know it well?
‘Tis there! ‘Tis there
Would I with thee, oh my beloved, fare.
Knowest the house, its roof on columns fine?
Its hall glows brightly and its chambers shine,
And marble figures stand and gaze at me:
What have they done, oh wretched child, to thee?
Would I with thee, oh my protector, fare.
Knowest the mountain with the misty shrouds?
The mule is seeking passage through the clouds;
In caverns dwells the dragons’ ancient brood;
The cliff rocks plunge under the rushing flood!
Leads our path! Oh father, let us fare.
[i] H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions,1974), 14. Further references provided parenthetically.
[ii] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Vintage, 2001), 4:262.
Posted in H.D., Teaching
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Big Internet Companies Can Expect Tougher Regulation, Even As User Privacy Concerns Decline, Analyst Says
EnergyKeystone Pipeline
What you need to know about the Keystone pipeline
A depot used to store pipes for Transcanada Corp's planned Keystone XL oil pipeline. Photograph by Reuters
Debate over the Keystone pipeline is gushing again in Washington as both sides of the controversial project try to sway its future.
The proposed pipeline, which would transport oil from the Canadian tar sand fields to the Gulf Coast, has been a political hot button for years. The heat is building up again now that the Republicans, who generally support the project’s construction, have seized control of both houses of Congress.
They are hoping to have more success is getting the pipeline approved after a number of previous attempts fell short. The most recent failure came near the end of 2014, when a Senate bill lost by a single vote.
In current push, a bill approving the pipeline passed the Senate energy committee 13-9 on Thursday. The full Senate could vote on the measure next week.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives considered a similar bill Friday for the tenth time, voting to approve it by 266 – 153. Twenty-eight Democrats joined almost every Republican to vote in favor of it.
The White House, however, has made it clear that President Barack Obama would veto the bill. His administration argues that the pipeline must be approved through proper channels, meaning the State Department.
With more political machinations to come, here’s a look at the pipeline and why it’s such a controversial issue.
What does the project entail?
Keystone XL Pipeline, as the project is officially known, would transport oil from just over the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. It involves building 1,179 miles of new pipe across the northern Plains to Nebraska, where it would connect with an existing pipeline network.
The goal is to transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day to refineries on the Gulf Coast and in Midwest. The sales pitch is that it would lower American dependance on foreign oil by up to 40%.
The cost of the massive project would be enormous. Original estimates put the price tag at $5.4 billion. But because of delays, the price has since ballooned to $8 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Why is it so controversial?
TransCanada, the company proposing to build the pipeline, first applied through the State Department for approval in 2008. Almost immediately, lawmakers turned the project into a huge rallying point over issues like energy dependence, the environment and jobs.
Supporters of the pipeline have used the issue to attack the Obama Administration for what they call its misguided energy and economic policies. They argue the project would create thousands of construction jobs and boost energy security. Opponents, meanwhile, have fought back by criticizing what they say is the project’s environmental impact including carbon dioxide emissions and the risk of oil spills.
“The tar sands flowing through the pipeline will result in pollution that causes serious illnesses like asthma and increases in carbon pollution – the main cause of climate change,” California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer, a critic of the bill, said recently.
Most U.S. citizens are in favor of the project, according to a Pew Center for Research survey in November. Fifty-nine percent said they favored building the pipeline while 31% were opposed.
What’s everyone saying?
Pipeline supporters, most of whom are Republicans, have vowed to push a bill approving construction through, despite the White House promising Tuesday to veto the legislation. Because the pipeline crosses an international border, the White House argues that the State Department can only give approval.
“There is already a well-established process in place to consider whether or not infrastructure projects like this are in the best interest of the country,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
In response, Canada issued a strongly worded statement in support of the pipeline and Congressional approval.
“Our position on Keystone remains the same: we believe the project should be approved,” according to Jason MacDonald, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman. “It will create jobs for American and Canadian workers, it has the support of the Canadian and American people, and the State Department itself has indicated it can be developed in an environmentally sustainable manner.”
The head of TransCanada reacted to the veto threat, too. CEO Russ Girling said that the Obama administration’s review process appears to be endless. “The bar continues to move again and again,” he said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Sponsors of the Senate bill are Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va, who said that the legislation has more than 63 votes in its favor. Passage requires 60 votes. But to overturn a presidential veto, they would need the support of 67 senators. Getting enough votes appears unlikely.
That vote is expected for next week.
In the House, supporters needed 290 votes to defeat a White House veto. However, it received 266 votes on Friday.
In November, the Senate measure failed 59 to 41, just one vote shy of passage. All 45 Republicans supported the pipeline’s construction along with 14 Democrats.
Just days earlier, the House passed its measure 252-161, with 31 Democrats voting in favor of the pipeline.
In threatening to veto any legislation, the White House said earlier this week that the State Department should be the one to recommend whether to approve the pipeline, not Congress. The argument is that the pipeline would cross and international border and therefore give diplomats a big say in whether to proceed with the project.
Earlier on Friday, before the House’s vote, Nebraska’s Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit challenging the pipeline’s route. It was was victory for pipeline supporters.
The State Department responded that it would review the legality of having the pipeline built in Nebraska.
“The State Department is examining the court’s decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement. “As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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Superhero Playlist: Daredevil
Posted by Jeff Gould on April 8, 2015
It’s a huge week for everyone’s favorite blind lawyer! With the premiere of Marvel’s newest venture quickly approaching, we prep for our upcoming Netflix binge and ponder…what would Matt Murdock have on his playlist? First, what do we know about the scarlet swashbuckler? Well, he’s the child of a prize fighter in Hell’s Kitchen, Jack Murdock. He is one of New York’s greatest lawyers. Oh, and did we mention that he was blinded in a twisted radioactive accident that left him unable to see, but also granted him extraordinary powers of hearing, smell, touch, and taste? In many ways, Matt Murdock is one of the most vulnerable Marvel superheroes, but his gifted fighting techniques and ability to use his other heightened senses make him a lovable favorite. Not taking into account the soundtrack for 2003’s Daredevil movie, which is, in this writer’s opinion, the greatest superhero soundtrack to date, we take a look at the songs that best fit the character we know and love. So what does a man like Matt Murdock have on his mp3 player? Let’s find out!
The Sound of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel 1964
Perhaps Simon and Garfunkel’s most identifiable song, “The Sound of Silence” is eerily a perfect choice for Matt’s playlist. With all of the heightened sounds and noises that he’s subjected to each and every day, the little moments of silence that Matt gets are a blessing. This song is about a man who walks alone, and who feels like he is the only one aware of the growing darkness. The lyrics are pretty interesting to consider too. “When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light that split the night,” is a pretty close description of the accident that left Matt Murdock blind. In many ways, darkness is Daredevil’s best friend, and he would find a different sense of understanding in Simon and Garfunkel’s words.
No Rain, Blind Melon 1992
Everyone has a reflective day. When Matt Murdock reflects on his life, maybe this song plays in the background. We know that the rain is one of Daredevil’s greatest assets when fighting, as the raindrops creating a certain type of echolocation for his ears to “see” his surroundings. It’s no wonder that Matt would like to “watch” the puddles gather rain. When there’s no rain in Matt’s life, there’s little to take in. It seems like this song would be a great one for Matt to listen to on a sunny day with no crime to take care of.
Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones 1968
This classic rock song might be the perfect song for Daredevil to pump himself up. Maybe the lyrics are a bit of a stretch, but the title and main chorus are definitely ones that Matt Murdock would appreciate. “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name,” is probably what Matt thinks while he’s approaching the criminals of Hell’s Kitchen. Most of them do know his name…the Daredevil.
Hemorrhage, Fuel 2000
While Fuel’s song, “Won’t Back Down”, on the 2003 Daredevil movie Soundtrack is this writer’s favorite Daredevil-related song, the beautifully painful lyrics of the band’s, “Hemorrhage,” really strike a chord. The lyrics can almost be interpreted as Matt’s ode to the ones he has lost: his father, his past lovers, and the people of Hell’s Kitchen who he was unable to save. “Don’t fall away, and leave me to myself,” are really quite depressing lyrics in the big scheme of things. Matt’s desire to save the people of his city and those he loves is his strongest suit, and this song would be a pretty great song for him to listen to after a tough day fighting crime. Plus, Daredevil has been known to take a beating, so hemorrhaging is something he’s quite familiar with.
In the Air Tonight, Phil Collins 1981
Possibly one of the greatest builds in the history of songwriting, “In the Air Tonight”, is a great choice for Matt Murdock’s playlist. How can you not include it, if he can ACTUALLY feel things coming through the air? Despite the literal analysis, the lyrics really do have an interesting connection to Daredevil and the emotions that he experiences on an average day in Hell’s Kitchen. When Daredevil faces off against Kingpin, “I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am,” is the perfect lyric to be going through Matt’s mind.
Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Creedence Clearwater Revival 1970
To a man who sees the rain differently than most of us, this song is a perfect tune for ol’ Horn-head. Yes, it probably has a different meaning to him, but the song is a great classic rock hit with a beautiful progression and a chorus. If you listen to the song and imagine Matt Murdock singing the words, it takes on a new meaning.
I Can See for Miles, The Who 1967
“I know you’ve deceived me, now here’s a surprise. I know that you have ‘cause there’s magic in my eyes.” The first two lines in The Who’s classic hit are extremely powerful, and probably have important meaning for Matt Murdock. For Daredevil, being blind doesn’t limit his sight. With his gifts and years of training, his sight is incredibly fine-tuned and allow him the ability to hone in on things miles away. Seems like Matt would appreciate this song.
Running With the Devil, Van Halen 1978
Ok, so this was an easy choice. Who can’t picture Daredevil running across the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen while his song blasts in the background? From the first lyric, this song captures Daredevil’s mentality perfectly. “I live my life like there’s no tomorrow,” is a great representation of Matt’s dedication and willingness to sacrifice himself for the people of his city. It’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting a little classic Van Halen in their musical diet too.
Theme from Law and Order, Mike Post 1990
We had to throw in a fun one! Laugh all you want, but it probably isn’t too far of a stretch to think that Matt Murdock likes to throw on a little Law and Order every now and then. His background as a successful lawyer and his passion for justice might also effect his taste in TV entertainment. Plus, it’s hard to hate a show that has been on the air for nearly 25 years. Who knows, maybe this week Matt will be doing a little binge-watching of his own…if the Kingpin decides to keep the streets quiet, that is.
Well, there you have it. Daredevil’s Superhero Playlist! If you have any suggestions for other tracks Daredevil might listen to, or if you disagree with any of our choices, let us know! Check in weekly for more installments of Superhero Playlist! Have a request for whose playlist we should cover? Let us know in the comments section! Most importantly, get ready for an awesome weekend of binge-watching and get ready for Matt Murdock to bring the pain to the criminals of Hell’s Kitchen, New York. It all starts April 10th on Netflix!
blind melon, comic books, comics, comics and books, creedence clearwater revival, daredevil, fuel, have you ever seen the rain, hemorrhage, i can see for miles, in the air tonight, marvel, music, netflix, no rain, phil collins, running with the devil, simon and garfunkel, superhero playlist, superheroes, sympathy for the devil, the rolling stones, the sound of silence, the who, van halen
Callisto 6 Fan Art and Playlist: Anton Andazola by Hector Navarro
Callisto 6 Celebrity Playlist: Game Master Eric Campbell
Callisto 6 Fan Art and Playlist: Cassie Charke by Amy Dallen
Take the Kids on a D&D Journey With YOUNG ADVENTURER’S GUIDES
WATCH: Lost, Found, and Found Again | Callisto 6 | Season 2 Episode 6
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192 Reasons Your D&D Character Has to Miss the Next Game Night
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Artist Releases 300 Printable D&D Miniature Patterns. For Free.
https://t.co/Z1HeMZbX1g
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DEORRO (Formerly known as TONIC), a Los Angeles native who grew up in West Covina, is one of the top young upcoming producer/DJs in the music industry. At the age of 14, DEORRO began his DJ career by playing at local gigs and house parties. By the age of 17, DEORRO was already producing his own tracks. A few years later, DEORRO was considered a Soundcloud sensation and sold out international events in Australia twice under the name TONIC. His unique
Colorblind (Interlude)
Feeling Pretty Good
Hands Up (Interlude)
Reality (Interlude)
Sometimes (Interlude)
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Category Archives: cost of municipal bankrupcty
Taking Stock in Stockton!
Posted on September 7, 2018 by Frank Shafroth
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the remarkable fiscal success of the implementation of Stockton’s plan of debt adjustment, before crossing over Tropical Storm Florence to the equally stormy demands of the PROMESA Board to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló to make major changes to his fiscal blueprint for the territory’s quasi plan of debt adjustment.
Taking Positive Stock in Stockton. Stockton, California, a now post-chapter 9 municipality, which was founded by Captain Charles Maria Weber in 1849 after his acquisition of Rancho Campo de los Francese, was the first community in California to have a name not of Spanish or Native American origin. The city, with a population just under 350,000, making it the state’s 13th largest, was named an All-America City in 1999, 2004, 2015, and again last year. It is also one of the cities we focused upon as part of our chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy analyses, after, a decade ago, it became the second largest city in the United States to file for chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection—a petition which was successful when, three years ago last February, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved its plan of debt adjustment. This week, S&P upgraded the city’s credit rating to “positive,” with CFO Matt Paulin noting the upgrade reflected the health and strength of the city’s general fund—after, last summer, the City Council approved the FY2018-19 budget, which anticipates $229.6 million in general fund revenues, versus $220.6 million in expenditures—with S&P, last month, noting its rating action “reflects our view of the city’s sustained strong-to-very strong financial performance, sustained very strong budgetary flexibility, and institutionalized integration of a revised reserve policy into its last three budget cycles.” S&P analyst Chris Morgan noted: “What we’re seeing is a pretty good record of discipline in terms of spending and having a long-term view…“We’re increasingly confident they’re going to continue to meet their obligations,” adding that, over the last three budget cycles, Stockton has adopted a 20-year plan and built up its reserves. Stockton CFO Matt Paulin described the four-notch upgrade as unusual; he said it marked a reflection of the city’s fiscal discipline and improvement: “It’s really an affirmation of the things we’ve instituted here at the city so we can maintain fiscal sustainability.” The rating here, on some $9.4 million of lease revenue bonds, backed by the city’s general fund, had been originally issued in 1999 to finance a police administration building; they were refunded in 2006.
While the new fiscal upgrade reflects key progress, the city still confronts challenges to return to investment grade status: its economy remains weak, and, according to S&P, the city continues to fester under a significant public pension obligation, so that, as analyst Morgan put it: “How they handle the next recession is the big question.” And that, CFO Paulin, notes, is a challenge in that the city is not yet, fiscally, where it needs to be. nevertheless, he believes the policies it has enacted will get it there, noting: “I think if we continue to sustain what we’re doing, I’m pretty confident we’ll get to that investment grade next time around,” noting that the rating reflected the city’s strong-to very strong financial performance, sustained very strong budget flexibility, and “institutionalized integration of a revised reserve policy into the last three budget cycles,” adding that since the city’s emergence from chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the city has only issued two refundings. Now a $150 million sewer plant renovation could become the trigger for Stockton’s first post-chapter 9 municipal bonds if it is unable to secure sufficient grant funding from Uncle Sam or the State by next spring.
Mandating Mandate Retention. Without having been signed into law, the Puerto Rico Senate’s proposal to relieve municipios from the mandate to contribute to Puerto Rico’s health reform program has, nevertheless, been countermanded and preempted by the PROMESA Oversight Board after, yesterday, PROMESA Oversight Board Director Natalie Jaresko wrote to Governor Ricardo Rossello Nevares, to Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz, and to House Leader Carlos Méndez to warn them that the bill which would exempt municipalities from their contribution to the government’s health plan is “inconsistent” with the unelected Board’s certified fiscal plan. Chair Jaresko wrote: “The Board is willing to amend the Certified Fiscal Plan for the Commonwealth to permit the municipality exemption contemplated by SB 879, provided that the legislation be amended such that the exemption terminates by September 30, 2019,” a deadline imposed by the Board which coincides with the moment when the federal funds to finance Mi Salud (My Health), would expire. The bill establishes that the exemption from payment to municipios would remain until the end of FY2020. In her letter, Director Jaresko also wrote to the officials that to grant the exemption, the government will need to identify the resources which would be devoted to cover the budget provisions to which the municipios would stop contributing. (Since 2006, municipios have been mandated to contribute to Mi Salud, based on the number of participants per municipio—a contribution currently equal to $168 million. The decision appears to be based upon the premise that once the Affordable Care Act ended, the federal government allocated over $2 billion for the payment of the health plan, an allocation apparently intended to cover such expenses for about two years. Thus, at the beginning of the week, Secretary of Public Affairs Ramon Rosario Cortes, said that the “Governor intends to pass any relief that may be possible to municipalities;” albeit he warned that the measure, approved by the Legislature, should be subject to PROMESA Board oversight—especially, as the Governor noted: “At the moment, there has been no discussion with the Board.”
The PROMESA Oversight Board has also demanded major changes to the fiscal plan Gov. Ricardo Rosselló submitted, with the Board requesting seeking more cuts as well as more conservative projections for revenues, making the demands in a seven-page epistle—changes coming, mayhap ironically, because of good gnus: revenues have been demonstrating improvement over projections, and emigration from the island to the mainland appears to be ebbing—or, as Director Jaresko, in her epistle to the Governor, wrote: “The June certified fiscal plan already identified the structural reforms and fiscal measures that are necessary to comply with [the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act], accordingly, the Oversight Board intended this revision to the fiscal plan to incorporate the latest material information and certain technical adjustments, not to renegotiate policy initiatives…Unfortunately, the proposed plan does not reflect all of the latest information for baseline projections and includes several new policies that are inconsistent with PROMESA’s mandate.” Ms. Jaresko, in the letter, returned to two issues of fiscal governance which have been fractious, asserting that the Governor has failed to eliminate the annual Christmas bonus and failed to propose a plan to increase “agency efficiency personnel savings,” charging that Gov. Rosselló had not included the PROMESA Board’s mandated 10 percent cuts to pensions, and that his plan includes an implementation of Social Security which is more expensive than the Board’s approved plan provided.
Director Jaresko also noted that Gov. Rosselló’s plan includes $99 million in investment in items such as public private partnerships and the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Services Office, which were contingent on the repeal of a labor law. Since, however, the Puerto Rico Senate has opted not to repeal the statute (Law 80), she stated Gov. Rosselló should not include spending on these items in her proposed fiscal plan, noting that Gov. Rosselló has included $725 million in additional implementation costs associated with the planned government reforms, warning that if he intends to include these provisions, he will have to find offsetting savings. In her epistle, the Director further noted that she believes his plan improperly uses projected FY2019 revenues as a base from which to apply gross national product growth rates to figure out future levels of revenue. Since the current fiscal year will include substantial amounts of recovery-related revenues and these are only temporary, using the current year in this way may over-estimate revenues for the coming years, she admonished. She wrote that Gov. Rosselló assumes a higher than necessary $4.09 billion in baseline payroll expenditures—calling for this item to be reduced—and that the lower total be used to recalculate payroll in the government going forward. Finally, Director Jaresko complained that the Governor’s plan had removed implementation exhibits which included timelines and statements that the government would produce quarterly performance reports, insisting that these must be reintroduced—and giving Gov. Rosselló until noon next Wednesday to comply.
Posted in Alternative to municipal bankruptcy, California, chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, credit rating, debt restructuring, demographics, fiscal integrity, Gov. Ricardo Rossello, governance, implementing a plan of debt adjustment, migration, municipal bankruptcy, Municipalities in Fiscal Crisis, Oversight Board, Plan of debt adjustment, PROMESA, public pension obligations, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Oversight Board, recovery, S&P, state authorization of municipal bankruptcy, Stockton, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
The End of State Usurpation of Local Elected Authority? Uneasy shelter from the Fiscal and Physical Storms?
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the end of the State of Michigan to usurp local authority via the appointment of an Emergency Manager, the safety of school drinking water has become an issue in Detroit—especially after Flint, and we consider the extraordinary revisions in the projected Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rica—and the White House response.
Protecting a City’s Children. Detroit Public School Superintendent Nikolai P. Vitti has directed turning off drinking water across the district’s 106 schools in the wake of after discovering higher-than-acceptable levels of copper and lead in some facilities, with Superintendent Vitti noting his decision came out of caution “until a deeper and broader analysis can be conducted to determine the long-term solutions for all schools.” he said in a statement. Test results found elevated levels of lead or copper in 16 out of 24 schools which were recently tested. Supt. Vitti stated: “Although we have no evidence that there are elevated levels of copper or lead in our other schools where we are awaiting test results, out of an abundance of caution and concern for the safety of our students and employees.” His actions, no doubt affected by fiscal and water contamination in Flint, came even as Detroit officials and the Great Lakes Water Authority sought to assure residents that water provided by the authority is safe to drink: they pointed to the city’s aging infrastructure as the problem. Superintendent Vitti said he will be creating a task force to determine the cause of the elevated levels and solutions, noting he had initiated water testing of all 106 school buildings last spring to ensure the safety of students and employees. Water at 18 schools had been previously shut off. He added: “This was not required by federal, state, or city law or mandate: This testing, unlike previous testing, evaluated all water sources from sinks to drinking fountains.” The District does not plan to test students: a spokesperson for the school system noted: “Dr. Vitti said…he has no evidence at all that children have been impacted from a health standpoint.”
Fiscal & Physical Challenges: Earlier this summer, Supt. Vitti released details from a facilities review which had determined the school district would need to spend $500 million now to fix the deteriorating conditions of its schools—an effort for the system projected to cost as much as $1.4 billion if there is a failure to act swiftly, with the Administrator pointing to the failure by former state-appointed emergency managers to make the right investments in facilities while the system was preempted of authority and state-appointed emergency managers from 2009 to 2016 failed to make the right investments, sending what Dr. Vitti described as “the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit.” The remarks raised anew questions with regard to Michigan’s governance by means of gubernatorially chosen Emergency Managers.
Superindent Vitti said he had notified Mayor Mike Duggan of his decision to shut off the drinking water, and a spokesperson, John Roach, noted: Mayor is “fully supportive” of the approach Supt. Vitti has taken, adding: “We will be supporting Dr. Vitti in an advisory capacity through the health department and the DWSD (Detroit Water and Sewerage Department) has offered to partner with the district on any follow-up testing that needs to be done.” At the same time, the Great Lakes Water Authority issued a statement in an effort to assure “residents and customers of GLWA’s regional system that they are not affected by the lead and copper issues,” noting: “Aging school infrastructure (i.e. plumbing) is the reason for the precautionary measure of providing bottled water,” adding water treated by the authority meets and surpasses all federal and state regulations, albeit adding: “A task force will be formed consisting of engineering and water quality experts” to will help the district “understand the cause and identify solutions.” (Initial results this past week showed elevated levels of copper, lead or both at one or more water sources in 16 of 24 school buildings, according to the statement. Water bottles will be provided at the schools until water coolers arrive. The district also found water-quality issues in some schools in 2016.)
The incident in Detroit raises a host of fiscal and governance issues—especially in the wake of the tragedy in upstate Flint—with, in both cases, the state’s history of appointing Emergency Managers to preempt the authority of local elected leaders. In the case of DPS, Dr. Vitti has contacted the Mayor, the Governor, and a task force of engineers and water experts to understand the cause and possible solutions; Superintendent Nikolai P. Vitti opted to close the water taps out of caution “until a deeper and broader analysis can be conducted to determine the long-term solutions for all schools,” with the decision coming just days before the school district’s 106 schools are scheduled to open next Tuesday. (Water bottles will be provided at the schools until water coolers arrive.) Water officials have blamed aging infrastructure as the cause of the public safety threat. Now Dr. Vitti has asked Mike Duggan and Gov. Rick Snyder to convene a task force of engineers and water experts to determine the cause of the elevated lead and copper levels, and to propose solutions.
Importantly, it seems the public safety risk is limited to Detroit’s public schools: water officials released a statement Wednesday assuring residents and customers of the Great Lakes Water Authority and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that they are not affected by the lead and copper issues at the school district, noting: “Aging school infrastructure (i.e. plumbing) is the reason for the precautionary measure of providing bottled water…The water at GLWA’s treatment plants is tested hourly, and DWSD has no lead service lines connected to any DPSCD building. The drinking water is of unquestionable quality.”
Nevertheless, the threat to public safety—combined with the heartbreaking, long-term threats to Flint’s children from that city’s public water contamination—could add further challenges to Detroit’s recovery from the nation’s largest-ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy: a critical part of the city’s plan of debt adjustment was to address its vast amassment of abandoned houses by enticing young families with children to move from the suburbs back into the city—an effort which had to rely on a perception of the quality and safety of its public schools. Now, for a system itself recovering from bankruptcy, DPS faces a bill of at least $500 million to repair its buildings: approximately 25% of the system’s school buildings are in unsatisfactory condition and another 20%are in poor condition, according to the report. The district noted nearly $223 million of high-priority repairs involving elevators and lifts, energy supply, heating and cooling systems, sprinklers, standpipes, electrical service and distribution, lighting, wiring, communications, security system, local area networking, public address and intercoms, emergency lights and plumbing fixtures.
Mayor Duggan’s office and the Detroit Health Department Wednesday issued a joint statement supporting “the approach Dr. Vitti has taken to test all water sources within DPS schools and to provide bottled water until the district can implement a plan to ensure that all water is safe for use,” noting: “We will be supporting Dr. Vitti in an advisory capacity through the health department and the DWSD has offered to partner with the district on any follow-up testing that needs to be done. We also will be reaching out to our charter operators in the coming days to work with them on a possible similar testing strategy to the voluntary one Dr. Vitti has implemented.”
Restoring Municipal Authority. Mayhap it is ironic that Michigan’s relatively rare authority for the Governor to appoint an emergency manager to preempt local elected authority reflects the uneven results of the program—a program I well remember from meeting with Kevyn Orr, whom Gov. Rick Snyder had appointed as Emergency Manager (EM) to preempt all governing authority of Detroit’s Mayor and Council, at the Governor’s office in Detroit on the first day the city entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history—and after the grievous failure of a previous gubernatorially-appointed Emergency Manager to help the Motor City. The very concept of state authority to appoint a quasi dictator and to preempt any authority of local leaders elected by the citizens, after all, feels un-American.
Yet, from that very first moment, Mr. Orr had acted to ensure there was no disruption in 9-1-1 responses—and that every traffic and street light worked. Unlike the experience under an Emergency Manager in Flint, Mr. Orr was intently focused on getting Detroit back on its fiscal and physical feet—and restoring elected leadership to today’s grieving city.
Now, as of this week, Michigan no longer has any local government under a state appointed emergency manager—and observers are under the impression the state program to preempt local authority may be quietly laid to rest. It has, after all, been a program of preemption of local democracy with untoward results: while it proved invaluable in Detroit, it has proven fiscally and physically grievous in Flint, where it has been blamed for contributing to Flint’s water contamination crisis. Indeed, two of Flint’s former EMs have been criminally charged in connection with the crisis. Their failures—at a cost of human lives, appears to have put the future of state pre-emption of local governing authority—may well make state officials leery of stepping in to usurp control a local government, even as some municipal market participants and others see state oversight programs as a positive credit feature. The last municipality in Michigan to be put under a state-imposed emergency manager was Lincoln Park—an imposition which ended three years ago. Michigan Treasury spokesperson Ron Leix noted: “Each situation that led to the financial emergency is unique, so I can’t give a broad-brush assessment about how the law will be used in the future…For the first time in 18 years, no Michigan municipality or school district is under state financial oversight through an emergency manager. This is really about the hard work our local units of government have achieved to identify problems and bring together the resources needed to problem-solve challenging financial conditions.”
In Michigan, the emergency manager program was authorized twenty-eight years ago, granting the governor authority to appoint a manager with extensive powers over a troubled municipality or school district. By 2012, Michigan voters repealed the emergency manager program in a referendum; notwithstanding, one month later Gov. Snyder and legislators re-adopted a similar intervention program—under which local governments could opt among three new options in addition to the appointment of an emergency manager who reports directly to the Governor: chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, mediation, or a consent agreement between the state and the city to permit local elected officials to balance their budget on their own. (In Michigan, municipalities which exit emergency management remain under the oversight of a receivership transition advisory board while executive powers are slowly restored to elected mayors and city councils.)
The state intervention/takeover program had mixed success, according to Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone, who noted: “In some cases it’s worked well, like Allen Park where the situation was pretty clear-cut and the solution was pretty clear as to what needed to be done.” (Allen Park regained full local control of its operations and finances in February of 2017 after nearly four years of state oversight. Last June, S&P Global Ratings upgraded the city to investment-grade BBB-plus from junk-level BB, crediting strong budgetary performance and financial flexibility more than 12 months after exiting state oversight. But the appointment, in Flint, of emergency managers demonstrated the obverse: the small city had four emergency managers: Ed Kurtz, Mike Brown, Darnell Earley, and Gerald Ambrose—where the latter two today are confronted by charges of criminal wrongdoing stemming from the lead contamination crisis and ensuing Legionnaire’s disease outbreak that claimed 12 lives. It was the gubernatorially appointed Mr. Earley who oversaw the decision to change Flint’s water source to the Flint River in April 2014 as the city awaited completion of a new pipeline—a decision with fatal human and fiscal consequences. Indeed, two years ago, Gov. Snyder named a task force to investigate the Flint crisis and review the Emergency Manager law—a review which recommended the Governor consider alternatives to the current approach that would engage local elected officials. (No action has been taken to change the law.)
Because only a minority of states have authorized chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, there is no uniform state role with regard to city or county severe fiscal distress and bankruptcy. Jane Ridley, senior director in the U.S. public finance government group at S&P Global Ratings and sector lead for local governments, has noted that state oversight is considered as part of the rating agency’s local GO criteria: “We do think that having a state that has oversight, especially if it’s a proven mechanism, can be very helpful for struggling entities…If they ended oversight entirely it would likely have an impact on the institutional framework scores and their sub scores.” A Moody’s analyst, Andrew Van Dyck Dobos, noted: “While an EM is in most cases is a last option, the ability for it to implement some policies and procedures is going to be typically viewed, at least at the onset, as a credit positive.”
Ending Shelter from the Storm. U.S. District Judge Timothy Hillman yesterday ruled that temporary housing given to hundreds of Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria will end next month, meaning Puerto Ricans will be forced to check out of temporary housing provided by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as part of the agency’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program. Judge Hillman, in his decision, wrote: I strongly recommend the parties get together to find temporary housing, or other assistance to the Plaintiffs and other members of the class prior to that date,” with his decision coming the same week Puerto Rico updated its official death toll from Maria to 2,975, a vast increase from the original count of 64. Judge Hillman’s decision also comes about two months after a national civil-rights group filed a lawsuit which had sought a restraining order to block FEMA from ending the program. The group, LatinoJustice, argued in the suit that it would lead to families’ evictions. It also came as, two days ago, President Trump met with reporters to respond to questions with regard to the mounting death toll—a session in which the President told the reporters: “I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico.” Some 1,744 Puerto Rican adults and children were in the FEMA program when the lawsuit was filed. U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin temporarily extended the program to the end of last July, and subsequently extended it until today—and then, once more, to September 14th.
Now, the White House is responding to a new estimate which increases the number by about 33% more to 2,975 after an independent study. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed in a statement that the back-to-back hurricanes which hit last year prompted “the largest domestic disaster response mission in history.” She added that President Donald Trump “remains proud of all of the work the Federal family undertook to help our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.” She also says the federal government “will continue to be supportive” of Gov. Ricardo Rossello’s accountability efforts and says “the American people, including those grieving the loss of a loved one, deserve no less.” The new estimate of 2,975 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. It was released Tuesday.
Posted in Allen Park, Michigan, Alternative to municipal bankruptcy, chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, credit rating, debt restructuring, demographics, Detroit, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Detroit Public Schools, Detroit Review Commission, Drinking water & assessed property values, emergency manager, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Financial Review Board, fiscal disparities, fiscal sustainability, Flint, Gov. Ricardo Rossello, Great Lakes Water Authority, Hurricane Maria, implementing a plan of debt adjustment, lead in drinking water, Michigan, Moody's, municipal bankruptcy, municipal income tax revenues, municipal income taxes, Plan of debt adjustment, PROMESA, property tax assessments, property taxes, public education, public infrastructure, public safety, Puerto Rico, Safe Drinking Water, School closings, schools, Shutting down essential public services, state intervention, State Role in Addressing Municipal Fiscal Stress & Disparities, State Role--or lack thereof--in municipal bankruptcy, State Takeover, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
Motor City Rising
Posted on June 1, 2018 by Frank Shafroth
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we consider the remarkable turnaround of Detroit—a city which, when I inquired on its very first day in chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, for walking directions from my hotel to the Governor’s Detroit office—in response to which I was told the one mile route was not doable—not because I would be too physically challenged, but rather because I would be slain. Yet now, as the fine editorial writers for the Detroit News, Daniel Howes and Nolan Finley, wrote: “A regional divide that appeared to be healing since Detroit’s historic bankruptcy is busting wide open over a plan for regional transit, exposing anxiety that the city is prospering at the expense of the suburbs,” noting that the trigger is a is a proposed millage to fund expansion of the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan, a $5.4 billion plan that would seem to promise an exceptional reshaping of the metro region—indeed: a reversal a what had been a decades-long shift of the economy from downtown Detroit to is suburbs: an exodus that contributed to a wasteland and the nation’s largest ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy.” Or, as they wrote: “That battle reveals growing suburban resentments over the region’s shifting economic fortunes: decades-long capital flow is reversing directions as more jobs and tax revenue flee the ‘burbs for a rejuvenated downtown.”
Mr. Finley noted that Mayor Mike Duggan, this week, told him: “I can’t explain why Oakland and Macomb (suburban counties) are doing what they’re doing” three weeks ago Microsoft brought 400 employees from Southfield into the city of Detroit. And last week, Tata Technologies said they were moving 200 people from Novi and into Detroit. Google is in the process of moving people from Birmingham into the city of Detroit.” What the Mayor was alluding to was a u-turn from a decade of moderate and upper income families leaving Detroit for its suburban counties in the days when former Mayor Coleman Young had advised criminals to “hit Eight Mile” has the relationship between the Metro Motor City’s regional leaders become so difficult in the wake of the unexpected reverse exodus: this time from Detroit’s suburbs back into the city. Billions in private sector investment, spearheaded by Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans Inc., the Ilitch family, and growing enthusiasm among other business leaders to be part of the city’s post-chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy have been changing demographic and economic patterns.
As the city continues under decreasing state oversight to carry out its judicially approved plan of debt adjustment, Mayor Duggan notes: “Expectations are rising.” This, after all, is not a City Hall bound mayor, but rather what the editors described as a “short, stocky, balding white guy who is no stranger to block after block of dilapidated houses—and who was reelected to a second term with an amazing 72% of the vote in a city where slightly more than 82% of the voters are black—and where, when he took office, there were about 40,000 abandoned homes. He is not a stay at City Hall type fellow either—rather an inveterate inspector of this mammoth rebuilding of an iconic city, who listens—and with his cell phone—takes action immediately in response to constituents concerns. After all, as the Mayor notes: “Expectations are rising…People are putting more demands on me and more demands on the administration, and I think that’s a really good thing and that will keep us motivated to work hard.”
Already, the urban wasteland is changing—almost on a daily basis: already, under a city program which supports renovation over demolition to try to preserve the mid-century architectural character of neighborhoods, that number of abandoned homes has been halved—with many of the units set aside for affordable housing. In his State of the City address this year, Mayor Duggan said he wants 8,000 more homes demolished, 2,000 sold, another 1,000 renovated and 11,000 more boarded up by the end of next year.
On that first day of the nation’s largest ever municipal bankruptcy, Kevin Orr, whom the Governor had tapped to become the Emergency Manager for Detroit, had flown out from the Washington, D.C. region, and told me his first actions were to email every employee of Detroit that he would be filing that morning in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, but that he expected every employee to report to work—and that the most critical priorities were that every traffic and street light work—and that there be a professional, courteous, and prompt response to every 911 call.
That was a challenge—especially for a municipality in bankruptcy, but, by 2016, the city had completed a $185 million streetlight repair project; 911 response times have been reduced from 50 minutes in 2013 to 14.5 minutes last year, and ambulance response times fell from 20 minutes in 2014 to the national average of 8 minutes this year.
As we have previously noted, two months ago, just three and a half years after Detroit emerged from chapter 9, the city has exited from state oversight; its homeless population has, for the third consecutive year, declined—and, its unemployment rate, which had peaked during the fiscal crisis at 28%, is now below 8%. No wonder the suburbs are becoming fiscally jealous. And the downtown, which was unsafe for pedestrians when the National League of Cities hosted its annual meeting there in the 1980’s and on the city’s first day in bankruptcy, has been transformed into a modern, walkable metropolis.
Nevertheless, the seeming bulldog, relentless leader has refused to sugarcoat the fiscal and physical challenge—or, as he puts it: “I don’t spend a lot of time promising. I just say, here’s what we’re doing next and here’s why we’re doing it and then we do what we say…Over time, you don’t restore trust by making more promises; you restore trust by actually doing what you said you were going to do.”
Mr. Finley wrote that the Mayor, deemed a “truth teller” by Detroit Housing Director Arthur Jemison, has been direct in confronting the city’s harsh legacy of racist policies after the Great Depression lured thousands upon thousands of African-Americans north in the early decades of the 20th century to work in auto factories—luring them to a city at a time when Federal Housing Administration guidelines barred blacks in the city from obtaining home mortgages and even led to the construction in 1941 of a wall bordering the heavily African-American 8 Mile neighborhood to segregate it from a new housing development for whites.
Aaron Foley — the 33-year-old author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, noted: “When you deliver that kind of message about this is why black people are on this side of the wall in 8 Mile versus the other side of the wall, that gets people talking: This is a history that we all know in Detroit, and for the city government to acknowledge that in the way that it did on that platform, it did resonate.”
Mayor Duggan’s concern for Detroit’s people—and not forcing low-income families out, is evidenced too by his words: “Every single time that we had a building where the federal [housing] credits were expiring and people were going to get forced out of their affordable units, I had to sit down for hours with the building owner to convince them why those who stayed were entitled to be there, and I thought: I need to do just one speech and explain that this is the right thing to do…Since then there’s been just great support for the direction we’re going in the city. We have very little pushback now from our developers over making sure that what they’re doing is equitable.”
Posted in abandoned property, Blight, chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, debt restructuring, demographics, demolition, Detroit, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Detroit Review Commission, emergency manager, Financial Review Board, First Responders, fiscal sustainability, home ownership, implementing a plan of debt adjustment, Judge Steven Rhodes, Mayoral governance, Michigan, municipal bankruptcy, municipal elections, Municipal governance in chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, Plan of debt adjustment, Population decline, population loss, public safety, recovery, restructuring plan, state intervention, State Intervention in Municipal Bankruptcy, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
Innovative, but Challenging Paths to Exiting Municipal Bankruptcy
Posted on May 25, 2018 by Frank Shafroth
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we observe Detroit’s physical and fiscal progress from the nation’s largest ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, before exploring the seeming good gnus of lower unemployment data from Puerto Rico.
Motor City Upgrade. Moody’s has upgraded Detroit’s issuer rating to the highest level in seven years, awarding the Motor City an upgrade from to Ba3 from B1, with a stable outlook, noting: “The upgrade reflects further improvement in the city’s financial reserves, which has facilitated implementation of a pension funding strategy that will lessen the budgetary impact of a future spike in required contributions…The upgrade also considers ongoing economic recovery that is starting to show real dividends to tax collections.” The stable outlook, according to Moody’s, incorporates the Motor City’s high leverage, weak socioeconomic profile, and “volatile nature” of local taxes. Albeit not a credit rating, Detroit likely received another economic and fiscal boost in the wake of President Trump’s actions calling for new tariffs on cars and trucks imported to the U.S., with an estimated additional duty of up to 25% under consideration.
The twin positive developments follow just weeks after the 11-member Detroit Financial Review Commission, created to oversee city finances following its 2013 chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, voted unanimously to restore Detroit’s authority to approve budgets and contracts without review commission approval, effectively putting Detroit on fiscal and financial probation, with a prerequisite that the restoration of full, quasi home rule powers be that the city implement three straight years of deficit-free budgets—a condition Detroit has complied since 2014, according Detroit Chief Financial Officer John Hill. Or, as Councilmember Janee L. Ayers told the Commission this week: “Not to say that we don’t recognize everything that you’ve brought to the table, but I do recognize that you’re not really gone yet.” The city recorded an FY2018 surplus of $36 million, in the wake of regaining local control over its budget and contract authority, with a projected FY2018 $36 million surplus via increasing property tax revenues and plans that will earmark $335 million by 2024 to address key pension obligations in the city bankruptcy plan of debt adjustment for its two public pension funds. In addition, Moody’s revised Detroit’s outlook to stable from positive—albeit an upgrade which does not apply to any of its current $1.9 billion in outstanding debt, writing that its upgrade reflects an improvement in Detroit’s financial reserves, which have allowed Detroit to implement a funding strategy for its looming pension obligations “that will lessen the budgetary impact of a future spike in required contributions.”
As part of its approved plan of debt adjustment by former U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes, Detroit must pay $20 million annually through FY2019 to its two pension funds, after which, moreover, contributions will increase significantly beginning in 2024. Moody’s noted: “The stable outlook is based on the city’s strong preparation for challenges ahead including the need to make capital investments and absorb pending spikes to fixed costs…Underperformance of pension assets and revenue volatility remain notable budgetary risks, but the city has amassed a large reserve cushion and adopted conservative budgetary assumptions that provide breathing room to respond to adverse developments,” adding that the “ongoing economic recovery that is starting to show real dividends to tax collections: Further growth in the city’s reserves and tax base growth to fund capital projects for either the city or its school district could lead to additional upgrades. In contrast, the agency warned that a downgrade could be spurred by slowed or stalled economic recovery, depletion of financial reserves, or growth in Detroit’s debt or pension burden, fixed costs, or capital needs. CFO Hill noted: “A second rating upgrade in just seven months from Moody’s shows that we have created the financial management infrastructure necessary to continue to meet our obligations and enhance our fiscal position…Working with the Mayor and City Council, our team has made a variety of improvements to financial management practices and our financial planning and budgeting practices are strong, as reaffirmed by Moody’s in their report.”
Nevertheless, while the gnus on the ratings front is exhilarating, governing and fiscal challenges remain. A key challenge is the ongoing population hemorrhaging—a hemorrhaging which has slowed to a tenth of its pace over the previous decade, but, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent release, the Bureau determined last week that the city’s population was 673,104 as of last summer, a decline of 2,376 residents, slightly down from last year’s 2,770, even as the metropolitan region continued to grow, as did cities such as Grand Rapids and Lansing, which posted among the largest gains. Nevertheless, Mayor Mike Duggan, after his reelection last November, said his performance should be measured by the milestone of reversing the outflow. He has blamed the city’s schools for the continued losses: “At this point it’s about the schools: We have got to create a city where families want to raise their children and have them go to the schools…There are a whole number of pieces that have gotten better but at the end of the day, I think the ultimate report card is the population going up or going down and our report card isn’t good enough.”
Mayor Duggan added that Detroit utility records show at least 3,000 more homes are occupied than last year; however, it appears to be one- and two-person households who are moving in; families with children are moving out. Nevertheless, researchers believe the overall trend is a marked improvement for Detroit. As we had noted in or report, and other researchers have, the Motor City lost an average of 23,700 annually in the decade from 2000 to 2010; Detroit’s population declined by nearly 1.2 million since its 1950 peak. If anything, moreover, the challenge remains if the city leaders hope to reverse the decades-long exodus: the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments forecasts Detroit will continue to experience further decline through 2024, after which the Council guesstimates Detroit will bottom out at 631,668.
Nevertheless, Detroit, the nation’s 23rd largest city, is experiencing less of a population loss than a number of other major cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, according to the most recent estimates, or as Mayor Kurt Metzger of Pleasant Ridge, a demographer and director emeritus of Data Driven Detroit put it: “Our decreasing losses should be put up against similar older urban cities, rather than the sprawling, growing cities of the south and west: “I still believe that the population of Detroit may indeed be growing.” (Last year, Detroit issued 27 permits to build single-family homes in the city, according to the Southeast Michigan Conference of Governments–another 911 building permits were issued for multi-family structures, and 60 permits for condominiums. Meanwhile 3,197 houses were razed, while according to the Detroit regional council of governments.
A key appears to be, as Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel determined in Chicago, the city’s schools. Thus, Mayor Duggan said he hopes the Detroit School Board will approve his bus loop plan as a means to help lure families back into the city proper, noting that many families in the city send their children to schools in the suburbs‒and end up moving there. In his State of the City Address, he said he intended to create a busing system in northwest Detroit to transport children to participating traditional public and charter schools and the Northwest Activities Center. This will be an ongoing governance challenge—as his colleague Mayor Metzger noted: “There’s no lessening of the interest in outlying townships: People are still looking for big houses, big lots with low taxes.” Indeed, even as Detroit continues to witness an ongoing exodus, municipalities in the metropolitan region‒the Townships of Macomb, Canton, Lyon, and Shelby are all growing.
Detroit Chief Financial Officer John Hill notes: “A second rating upgrade in just seven months from Moody’s shows that we have created the financial management infrastructure necessary to continue to meet our obligations and enhance our fiscal position: Working with the Mayor and City Council, our team has made a variety of improvements to financial management practices and our financial planning and budgeting practices are strong, as reaffirmed by Moody’s in their report.” Thus, in the wake of the State of Michigan’s restoration of governing authority and control of the city’s finances on April 30th, more than three years after its Chapter 9 exit in December of 2014, Detroit now has the power to enter into contracts and enact city budgets without seeking state approval first, albeit, as Moody’s notes: “Underperformance of pension assets and revenue volatility remain notable budgetary risks, but the city has amassed a large reserve cushion and adopted conservative budgetary assumptions that provide breathing room to respond to adverse developments.”
Motor City Transformation? In the wake of real estate development firm Bedrock Detroit gaining final approval from the Michigan Strategic Fund for its so-called “transformational” projects in downtown Detroit, the state has approved $618 million in brownfield incentives for the $2.1 billion project, relying in part on some $250 million secured by new brownfield tax credits, enacted last year by the legislature—a development which Mayor Duggan said represents a “major step forward for Detroit and other Michigan cities that are rebuilding: Thanks to this new tool, we will be able to make sure these projects realize their full potential to create thousands of new jobs in our cities.” In what will be the first Michigan to use the Transformational Brownfield Plan tax incentive program, a program using tax-increment financing to capture growth in property tax revenue in a designated area, as well as a construction period income tax capture and use-tax exemption, employee withholding tax capture, and resident income tax capture; the MIThrive program is projected to total $618 million in foregone tax revenue over approximately 30 years. While Bedrock noted that the tax increment financing “will not capture any city of Detroit taxes, and it will have no impact on the Detroit Public Schools Community District,” the plan is intended to support $250 million in municipal bond financing by authorizing the capture of an estimated average of $18.56 million of principal and interest payments annually, primarily supported by state taxes over the next three decades, to repay the bonds, with all tax capture limited to newly created revenues from the development sites themselves: the TIF financing and sales tax exemption will cover approximately 15% of the project costs; Bedrock is responsible for 85% of the total $2.15 billion investment, per the financing package the Detroit City Council approved last November, under which Bedrock’s proposed projects are to include the redevelopment of former J.L. Hudson’s department store site, new construction on a two-block area east of its headquarters downtown, the Book Tower and Book Building, and a 310,000-square-foot addition to the One Campus Martius building Gilbert co-owns with Detroit-based Meridian. Altogether, the projects are estimated to support an estimated 22,000 new jobs, including 15,000 related to the construction and over 7,000 new permanent, high-wage jobs occupying the office, retail, hotel, event and exhibition spaces—all a part of the ongoing development planned as part of Detroit’s plan of debt adjustment.
In an unrelated, but potentially unintended bit of fiscal assistance, President Trump’s new press for tariffs of as much as 25% on cars and trucks imported to the U.S., Detroit might well be a taking a fiscal checkered flag.
Avoiding Risks to Puerto Rico’s Recovery. Yesterday, in testifying before the PROMESA Board, Governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares told the members his governing challenge was to “solve problems, and not to see how they get worse,” as he defended the agreement with the Oversight Board—and as he urged the Puerto Rico Legislature to comply with his fiscal plan and repeal what he described as the unjust dismissal law (Law 80), a key item in the certified fiscal plan that the PROMESA Board is reevaluating. That law in question, the Labor Transformation and Flexibility Act, which he had signed last year, represented the first significant and comprehensive labor law reform to occur in Puerto Rico in decades. As enacted, the most significant changes to the labor law include:
Effective date (there is still no cap for employees hired before the effective date);
Eliminating the presumption that a termination was without just cause and shifting the burden to the employee to prove the termination was without just cause;
Revising the definition of just cause to state that it is a “pattern of performance that is deficient, inefficient, unsatisfactory, poor, tardy, or negligent”;
Shortening the statute of limitations for Law 80 claims from three years to one year, and requiring all Law 80 claims filed after the Act’s effective date to have a mandatory settlement hearing within 60 days of the filing of the answer; and
Clarifying the standard for constructive discharge to require an employee to prove that the employer’s conduct created a hostile work environment such that the only reasonable thing for the employee to do was resign.
The Act mandates that all Puerto Rico employment laws be applied in a similar fashion to federal employment laws, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the local law. It applies Title VII’s cap on punitive and compensatory damages to damages for discrimination and retaliation claims, and eliminates the mandate for written probationary agreements; it imposes a mandatory probationary period of 12 months for all administrative, executive and professional employees, and a nine-month period for all other employees. It provides a statutory definition for “employment contract,” which specifically excludes the relationship between an employer and independent contractor. The Act also includes a non-rebuttable presumption that an individual is an independent contractor if the individual meets the five-part test in the statute. It modifies the definition of overtime to require overtime pay for work over eight hours in any calendar day instead of eight hours in any 24-hour period, and changes the overtime rate for employees hired after the Act’s effective date to time and one-half their regular rate. (The overtime rate for employees hired prior to the Act remains at two times the employee’s regular rate.). The Act provides for alternative workweek agreements in which employees can work four 10-hour days without being entitled to overtime, but must be paid overtime for hours worked in excess of 10 in one day. The provisions provide that, in order to accrue vacation and sick pay, employees must work a minimum of 130 hours per month; sick leave will accrue at the rate of one day per month—and, to earn a Christmas Bonus, employees must work 1,350 hours between October 1 and September 30 of the following year; employees on disability leave have a right to reinstatement for six months if the employer has 15 or fewer employees; employers with more than 15 employees must provide employees on disability leave with the right to reinstatement for one year, as was required prior to the Act. For employees, the law includes certain enumerated employee rights, including a prohibition against discrimination or retaliation; protection from workplace injuries or illnesses; protection of privacy; timely compensation; and the individual or collective right to sue or file claims for actions arising out of the employment contract.
In his presentation, the Governor suggested that the repeal of the statute would be a vital component to controlling Puerto Rico’s budget, in no small part by granting additional funds to municipalities, granting budgetary increases in multiple government agencies, including the Governor’s Office and the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration (PRFAA), as well as increasing the salary of teachers and the Police. While the Governor proposed no cuts, a preliminary analysis of the document published by the Office of Management and Budget determined that the consolidated budget for FY 2018-19 would total $ 25.323 billion, or 82% lower than the current consolidated budget, as the Governor sought to assure the Board he has achieved some $2 billion in savings, and reduced Puerto Rico’s operating expenses by 22%.
In his presentation to the 18th Puerto Rico Legislative Assembly, the Governor warned that Puerto Rico has an approximate “18-month window” to define its future, taking advantage of an injection of FEMA funds in the wake of Hurricane Maria, as he appeared to challenge them to be part of that transformation, noting: “We have an understanding with the (Board) that allows the approval of a budget that, under the complex and difficult circumstances, benefits Puerto Rico: Ladies and gentlemen legislators: you know everything that is at risk. I already exercised my responsibility, and I fully trust in the commitment you have with Puerto Rico.”
According to Gov. Rosselló Nevares, repealing Law 80, which last year was amended to grant greater flexibility to companies in the process of dismissing workers, would be the first step for what would be a phase of greater economic activity on the island, and would join different measures which have been put into effect to provide Puerto Rico a “stronger” position to renegotiate the terms of its debt, as he contrasted his proposal versus the cuts and austerity warnings proposed by the PROMESA Board, adding that, beginning in August, the Sales and Use Tax on processed food will be reduced, and that tax rates will be reduced without fear of the “restrictions” previously established and imposed by the Board, adding that participants of Mi Salud (My Health) will be able to “choose where they can obtain health services, beyond a region in Puerto Rico,” and that the budget guarantees teachers and the police will receive an increase of $125 per month.
Shifting & Shafting? In his proposed budget, the Governor proposed that municipalities would be compensated for the supposed reduction in the contributions of the General Fund, stating: “Through the agreement, the disbursement of 78 million dollars that this Legislature approved for the municipalities during the current recovery period is secured; the Municipal Economic Development Fund of $50 million per year is created.” Under the administration’s proposed budget, the contribution to municipalities would be about $175.8 million, which would be consistent with the adjustment required for that item in the certified fiscal plan. As a result of the agreement with the Board, municipalities would, therefore, practically receive another $ 128 million. As proposed, Puerto Rico’s government payroll would be reduced for the third consecutive year: for example, payments for public services and those purchased will increase 23% and 16%, respectively; professional services would increase by 40%. Expenses for the Governor’s office would see an increase of 182%.
Ending the Long Delay? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) yesterday announced it is accelerating community disaster loans to help Puerto Rico muncipios mitigate the loss of income due to natural disasters, the Government of Puerto Rico reaffirmed that, for the time being, as well as the approval of another $39 million in loans from the CDL program for the municipalities of Aguadilla, Cabo Rojo, Canóvanas, Carolina, Manatí, Mayagüez, Peñuelas, and Orocovis—with the approvals coming in the wake of last month’s approvals for Bayamón, Caguas, Humacao, Juncos, Ponce, Toa Baja, and Trujillo Alto—meaning that, in total, FEMA has, to date, distributed at least $92.8 million for municipalities on the island and $371 million for the U.S. Virgin Islands, as part of the $4.9 billion loan passed by Congress to help local governments recover. At the same time, the U.S. territory’s Treasury Secretary Raúl Maldonado reported: “The administration (of Puerto Rico) has been very successful in lowering operational costs and achieving an increase in collections.” The new loans will offer access to the Puerto Rican Government through March of 2020, as Secretary Maldonado considers that it may be useful in case of another disaster or a drop in the income of public corporations.
Nevertheless, because Puerto Rico—unlike other U.S. states, is also under the authority of the PROMESA Board, it appears that Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s budget will have to be revised and may be rejected if proposed labor reforms do not satisfy the Board—with Board Executive Director Natalie Jaresko, in the wake of the Governor’s release of his proposed $8.73 billion general fund budget to the Legislature Tuesday night dictating that the future of the budget is linked to the legislature’s approval of at-will employment. Her statement came after the Governor and the board had announced an agreement on a compromise on reforming labor practices as well as agreeing to other changes in the Board-certified fiscal plan. In exchange for the Board waiving its demands for the abolition of the Christmas bonus and reduction of the island’s mandatory 27 days of vacation and sick leave, Gov. Rosselló agreed to bring at-will employment to the territory by repealing Law 80 from 1976—a concession which Director Jaresko described this agreement as an “accommodation.” Earlier this week, Director Jaresko said that the first step for Gov. Rosselló should be to resubmit a fiscal plan consistent with the new agreement with the Board, followed by a resubmitted budget consistent with the new plan, adding she anticipated these actions should all be completed by the end of June: the agreed-to changes to the fiscal plan are expected to reduce the 30 year surplus to $35 billion from $39 billion in the April certified fiscal plan, according to Director Jaresko, who noted that most of the surplus is expected to be used for debt payment. From the Governor’s perspective, he noted: “The approval of the agreed budget makes it easier for Puerto Rico to be in a stronger position to renegotiate the terms of the debt. We have significantly improved the management and controls over the cash flow of the General Fund. Contrary to the past, there is now visibility on how cash flows in government operations. At present Puerto Rico has robust and reliable cash balances.” Finally, she stated she expected it would take 12 to 18 months for the Board to create a plan of adjustment on the debt and pensions for the central government—a plan which would likely take the Title III bankruptcy court several more months to confirm.
Posted in abandoned property, Alternative to municipal bankruptcy, assessed property values, Baltimore, chapter 9, Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, cost of municipal bankrupcty, credit rating, debt restructuring, Detroit, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Detroit Review Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Financial Review Board, Fiscal stress monitoring systems, fiscal sustainability, Gov. Ricardo Rossello, implementing a plan of debt adjustment, Labor Transportation & Flexibility Act, Michigan, MIThrive Program, Moody's, Municipal Economic Development Fund, Pittsburgh, PROMESA, property taxes, public pension obligations, Sales & Use Tax, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
Planning Municipal Debt Adjustment
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we take a fiscal perspective on post-chapter 9 Vallejo, before exploring the seeming good gnus of lower unemployment data from Puerto Rico.
Fiscal Reinvention. After Vallejo, a waterfront city in Solano County of about 115,000 in California’s Bay Area, filed for chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, just over a decade ago, on May 17, 2008, claiming it could no longer afford to pay wages and benefits promised to its employees; it appears its chapter 9 plan of debt adjustment has worked. The municipality, which served twice as California’s capital, was the nation’s largest city to file for municipal bankruptcy when it did—a period during which, in the wake of cuts of as much as 40 percent in its police force, and closure of its fire stations, leading to sharp increases in crime—there were, consequently, serious declines in assessed property values. The municipality’s cash reserves disappeared; it was unable to pay its bills amid falling property tax revenue, soaring costs of employee compensation and pension liabilities, and a consequent surge in foreclosures. Thus, with its official exit, the city will be able to resume its governance—albeit, as Moody’s moodily explained last month, the city’s plan of debt adjustment will bequeath “significant unfunded and rapidly rising pension obligations,” adding that in addition to higher taxes, the city will be confronted by “challenges associated with deferred maintenance and potential service shortfalls.” Further, the credit rating agency noted, the “probability of continued financial distress and possibly even a return to bankruptcy.” Today, median household income in the city is under $40,000, while average municipal employee compensation is over $114,000. The city currently has 17 police sergeants receiving compensation packages which range from $220,000-$469,000—in addition to generous promised retirement pensions.
Vallejo Assistant City Manager Craig Whittom last week noted that the city had been left to determine its Chapter 9 bankruptcy end date in the wake of U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael McManus’ approval of the city’s plan of debt adjustment last August—a key component of that plan being the codification of municipal bond repayment obligations to the city’s largest creditor, Union Bank, a plan approved by the Vallejo City Council three weeks ago, with Mr. Whittom noting that Vallejo’s formal chapter 9 exit is important in tangible ways for the city. For instance, he noted the elimination of real estate agents’ requirement to disclose that the city is in bankruptcy when selling properties, albeit conceding that municipal bankruptcy-deferred lawsuits against the city will now be free to go forward.
Nevertheless, leaving municipal bankruptcy is a fiscal challenge of its own—especially in instances where a municipality’s plan of debt adjustment does not take into account public pension obligations. As Ed Mendel of Calpensions explained: “Vallejo received court approval to exit from bankruptcy last week with a plan that includes a sharp increase in pension payments to CalPERS—the opposite of what many expected when the city declared bankruptcy in May 2008,” a resolution which, left the municipality with a proverbial ball and chain around its ankle because, by 2014, the city was confronted by ballooning public pension liabilities, with CNN reporting that Vallejo’s recent public-safety retirees have annual pension benefits which top $100,000 a year, leading Wallet-Hub to describe Vallejo as the “second least recovered city.” That is, absent the ability to trim benefits for current employees, there are few options to keep pensions from consuming ever-increasing parts of a municipality’s budget.
Nevertheless, the city’s leaders have demonstrated innovative fiscal grit and determination: it has begun reinventing itself, using technology to fill personnel gaps, rallying residents to volunteer to provide public services, and even offering its voters the chance to decide how their taxes will be used—in return for an increase in the sales tax. Now, for the first time in five years, the city expects to have enough money to address potholes, weeds in public rights of way, etc.
Lessons Learned. Prior to its chapter 9 filing, Vallejo’s salaries for city employees had ballooned: a number of top officials were making $200,000 or $300,000—enough so that some 80 percent of the city’s budget went toward compensation, even as the city’s credit rating was downgraded to junk status—meaning that, as part of the city’s plan of debt adjustment, the municipality paid only five cents for every dollar it owed to its bondholders, while the city also reduced employees’ pay, health care and other benefits—making it harder to attract key employees.
That meant, as former Councilmember Marti Brown noted, that for Vallejo to fiscally survive, the city needed to study best practices from around the world and bring some of them to California—an effort which, in retrospect, she said turned “out to be a really positive experience for the city.” Together with former Councilmember Stephanie Gomes, the two elected leaders focused on public safety: they went the neighborhood to neighborhood setting up e-mail groups and social media accounts so residents could, for instance, share pictures of suspicious vehicles and other information: the number of neighborhood watch groups jumped nearly 300% from 15 to 350. Moreover, the City Council worked out an unusual compact with residents: in return for agreeing to a one-penny sales tax increase, projected to generate an additional $9.5 million in revenue, the resident gained the right to vote on how the funds would be used: citizen participatory budgeting—the first in a North American city.
This fiscal and governing innovation—or “ground-up restructuring,” as Karol Denniston, a partner with Squire Patton Boggs LLP notes, has meant that, today, Vallejo is “now routinely one of the top 10 cities where people want to live, which is a huge turn-around from when they entered bankruptcy.” The median listing price in Vallejo had soared to $420,000 by last month from $290,000 in May of 2015, according to realtor.com, crediting city leaders for turning around the relationships with its police and fire employees: “It looks like someone was able to improve those relationships: You have to bring the employees and the taxpayers along at the same time to reach a good consensus on financial goals.” Thus, unsurprisingly, last week, Finance Director Ron Millard presented a structurally balanced $105 million budget to the City Council for the fifth consecutive year—proposing reserves of 17.3%, after a strict fiscal diet of austerity measures in the intervening years composed of cutting police and fire services to the bone, tax increases, and economic development measures.
The Challenging Road to Recovery. Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate slipped below 10% last month for the first time in nearly two decades—albeit the change is more a reflection of emigration than economic improvement. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonetheless, Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate was 9.9%, its lowest level since it was 9.8% in November of 2000—a rate nearly 50% lower than the Spring of 2009. The BLS reported that the number of residents with jobs declined 1% last month from April of 2017 according to the Bureau’s Current Employment Statistics, and this showed total non-farm employment declining last month by 3.6% from a year earlier, with private sector non-farm employment down 3.3% from a year earlier—denoting a further sign of the fiscal challenges ahead as the U.S. territory restructures its debt. Of concern is who is leaving, as Advantage Business Consulting President Vicente Feliciano noted that the “unemployment rate is down mainly due to emigration: Thus, there are fewer people employed, but as a result of emigration, fewer people are looking for a job; meanwhile, the Puerto Rico economy is being impacted by the start of [hurricane-related] insurance and federal transfers.” Nevertheless, he reported that the Economic Activity Index in March 2018 was up with respect to February 2018: “Cement sales are up over 20% in March 2018 compared to March 2017. While these transfers are only beginning, they are non-recurrent and therefore should not be the basis for debt renegotiation.” However, Inteligencia Económica Chairman Gustavo Vélez noted: “The [labor force] participation rate remains very low…The information that I have is that the labor market is not normalized yet. Nevertheless, key industries like construction and retail are doing well because of the federal recovery funds already deployed into the local economy ($10 billion since October 2017).” According to the most recent economic activity index release (March), the index was down 2.6% from a year earlier; however, this was a rebound from the 19.7% decline in November 2017 from November 2016.
Who’s on First? Confidential conversations between the PROMESA Board and Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares’s administration continued over the past few days without the certainty to reach a balance between the revenues and expenses the Government will have during the upcoming fiscal year—a year commencing in little over a month, on July 1st. Yet, even with the adjustments made by Governor Rosselló, following some of the Board’s mandates, government expenses are proposed for some $8.73 billion, a level some $200 million higher than the revenue certified by the Board. Nevertheless, neither the Board, nor the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (FAFAA) have been willing to discuss the preparation of the new budget or the differences, which have been publicly outlined between the parties. For his part, the Governor has refused to accept the revenue scheme certified by the Board to prepare the budget, instead opting to use the numbers contained in the new Fiscal Plan—while the PROMESA Board has objected that pensions adjustments contained in the Fiscal Plan have not been implemented, nor have their proposed labor reforms been listed.
Some parties have indicated that, as part of the process between the parties, Puerto Rico has promised, as required by the PROMESA Board, to eliminate Law 80, a Puerto Rican law which protects workers from unjust dismissals, in exchange for the allocation of some $100 million to municipalities, as well as an increase in funds for the Legislature, the Governor’s Office, and the Federal Affairs Administration. The see-saw issue at a time of steep cuts in Puerto Rican government services and school closures, including limitations in the Government’s Health Plan, has led Gov. Rosselló Nevares’ administration to criticize the seemingly contradictory fiscal situation in which the PROMESA Board has requested nearly a 33% increase from $60 million to $80 million in the amount it receives to finance its operation and bankruptcy lawsuits of the central government and several public agencies, at the same time, as Rafael Hernández Montañez, spokesman of the Popular Democratic Party minority in the House, expressed the Board does not appear to “think the same about the elimination of workers’ rights,” and at the same time the Governor is looking to increase government investment in Puerto Rico’s future.
Posted in Alternative to municipal bankruptcy, assessed property values, California, chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, debt restructuring, demolition, Financial Review Board, foreclosure, population loss, PROMESA, public infrastructure, public pension obligations, public safety, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Oversight Board, restructuring plan, Sales and Use Tax, structural deficits, Uncategorized, Vallejo, What are essential government services? | Leave a reply
The Uneven Challenges to Chapter 9 Recovery from Municipal Bankruptcy
Posted on May 1, 2018 by Frank Shafroth
Mayday, 2018
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we note the uneven recovery in Detroit from the largest chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in American history.
An Absence of Fiscal Balance? In a new report by 24/7 Wall Street about the nation’s poorest urban regions, Detroit is ranked 5th, raising, the publication notes, the question why so many communities in such good times have been left fiscally behind. . The report — from 24/7 Wall St., a New York-based financial news organization — ranks the Detroit area at No. 5 in a list of impoverished communities. It also raises the question: During such good economic times, why are so many being left behind? While the report notes the seeming good times for the U.S. economy, it also reports that the share of Americans living below the federal poverty level ($25,100 for a family of four) has increased by nearly 10 percent since 2010. But of greater concern for state and local leaders, the concentration of poverty has also risen—or, as the report noted: “This increased concentration of poverty is far more pronounced in certain metropolitan areas: The share of poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods—defined as those with a poverty rate of at least 40%—climbed by more than 3.5% in 20 metro areas in the last six years.” That is, in a post-Richard Nixon era where the federal government no longer appears to believe it has a role in providing some fiscal equity, the report writes that the Detroit metro area has “long been the poster child for economic decline in postindustrial America.”
It appears we are in a state of fiscal disequilibrium, where no major municipality is any longer in chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, and Detroit, emerging from the largest ever municipal bankruptcy and now a center of innovation again for the auto industry, with the city’s poverty rates having declined by more than 10% from 2015 to 2016—to its lowest rate in a decade. Nevertheless, with a poverty rate of 35.7% in 2016, the report found that an increasing share of residents in the metro region are, today, below the federal poverty level: 16.2%, putting the Motor City behind Bakersfield, Fresno, Springfield (Mass.), and Albuquerque, N.M. The report noted: “The share of poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods—defined as those with a poverty rate of at least 40%—climbed by more than 3.5% in 20 metro areas in the last six years: Such high-poverty neighborhoods are often characterized by high crime rates, low educational attainment rates, and high unemployment. Partially as a result, those living in these extremely poor neighborhoods are at a greatly reduced likelihood of success and upward economic mobility.”
The 24/7 Wall Street bears out Brooking’s 2016 report which defined the Detroit metro region (including Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston, St. Clair, and Lapeer) to have the highest rate of concentrated poverty among the most populous metro areas in the U.S. That is, in a nationally growing economy, one can, mayhap, better appreciate some of the appeal of President Trump, as there remains, in a growing economy, a large segment of the population unable to take advantage of the growing economy.
Part of it, of course, is that the issue of fiscal disparities is neither on the agenda of the President nor Congress.
Nevertheless, as our colleagues at Municipal Market Analytics note, Detroit’s exit from state oversight this week after shedding about $7 billion of its fiscal liabilities “seems a bit fast, given the depths of the city’s challenges, and suggests that the state continues to value a narrative of quick rebound versus evidence that such can be sustained.” While MMA noted Detroit’s relatively conservative budgeting, small resulting surpluses, planning for the upcoming spike in pension payments, and decision to redeem $52M in recovery bonds; it noted the “the rising pension payments are a significant concern (even with funds set aside to temporarily smooth incremental costs) particularly when considered in conjunction with the city’s limited flexibility to address other potential events outside of its control such as reductions in federal or state aid, changes in federal policies that impact the economy in the state and/or nationally, and probably most concerning, an economic recession.”
Interestingly, MMA noted that were the Motor City’s recovery to stumble, the “potential for additional state intervention or aid is remote. Going forward, the city is likely on its own,” adding that, notwithstanding that the city has become an epicenter of the self-driving car industry; nevertheless, this represents just a portion of the city and: “The rising living costs in these areas risks pushing existing residents out to more challenged neighborhoods, creating a greater income divide and worsening inequality. Notwithstanding the burgeoning economy in some pockets of Detroit, significant challenges remain across the vast city including horribly high poverty, crime, and poor educational outcomes. Detroit’s poverty rate is 39.4%, and only 13.8% have attained at least a bachelor’s degree.”
Posted in chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, debt restructuring, demographics, Detroit, fiscal sustainability, Michigan, Municipal Market Journal, pensions, Plan of debt adjustment, poverty, recovery, restructuring plan, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
The Fiscal Challenges of Exiting from Fiscal Oversight
Posted on April 23, 2018 by Frank Shafroth
Good Morning! In this morning’s eBlog, we return to Michigan to assess the unbalanced state of its municipal public pension and post-retirement health care obligations, before turning to the state’s largest city, Detroit, which appears to be on the brink of earning freedom from state oversight—marking the remarkable fiscal exodus from the largest chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in American history. Then we return to Puerto Rico, a territory plunged once again into darkness and an exorbitant and costly set of fiscal overseers.
Imbalanced Fiscal Stress. In the Michigan Treasury Department’s first round of assessments under a new state law, the Treasury reported that 110 of 490 local units of government across the state are underfunded for retiree health care benefits, pension obligations‒or both. That number is expected to increase. Nineteen municipalities in Wayne County, including Allen Park, Dearborn and two of the five Grosse Pointes (Farms and Woods), are behind on their retiree health care funding, the state says, as well as six Wayne County jurisdictions, including Redford Township, Trenton, Wayne and Westland are underfunded on both, as are Hazel Park, Oak Park, and Madison Heights in Oakland County. The state fiscal oversight effort to highlight the expanding obligations competing for scarce taxpayer dollars in the state which is home to the largest chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in American history, the result of the state’s “Protecting Local Government Retirement and Benefits Act,” Act 202, which was enacted last December, marks a pioneering effort to put tighter local data to detect and assess the likelihood of severe fiscal distress—kind of a municipal fiscal radar—or, as Michigan Deputy Treasurer Eric Scorsone, who is the designated head of the State and Local Finance Group, describes it: “By working together, we can help ensure the benefits promised by communities are delivered to their retirees and help ensure that the fiscal health of communities allows them to be vibrant now and into the future,” Eric Scorsone, deputy state treasurer and head of Treasury’s State and Local Finance Group, put it: “This is just a start. One of the common denominators of the financial crisis has been legacy costs. We know this is a big liability out there”—and it continues to grow for current and retired public employees, as well as their counterparts in public schools, whose districts are not covered by the new state law. In an era featuring longer lifespans, the unfunded liability of the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System totaled $29.1 billion, or 40.3 percent, at the end of FY2015-16—an aggregate number, the likes of which have not been previously available at the municipal level. Now, under the new statute, a municipality’s post-retirement health care plan is deemed underfunded if its assets are “less than 40 percent” of its obligations, or require annual contributions “greater than 12 percent” of a jurisdiction’s annual operating revenues. A pension plan is deemed underfunded if it is “less than 60 percent funded,” or its annual contributions are “greater than 10 percent” of annual operating revenues. The new state mandates require the state’s panoply of cities, villages, townships, counties, and county commissions to report pension and retiree health care finances by the end of January. (Municipalities whose books close later could be included in future lists.) The aim is to underline the fiscal need to local elected leaders to do something the federal government simply does not do: reconcile reconciling long-term obligations with current contributions and recurring revenue—that is, not only adopt annual balanced budgets, but also longer term. The new state law, an outgrowth of the Responsible Retiree Reform for Local Government Task Force, is intended to enhance transparency and community awareness of local government finance, as well as to emphasize that failure to account for such obligations could negatively impact municipal bond ratings—effectively raising the costs of capital infrastructure. Indeed, as East Lansing City Manager George Lahanas stated last week, “The city’s pension plan was 80 percent funded in 2003 and is 50 percent funded today…The city has implemented numerous cost-controlling measures over the years to address the legacy cost challenges…City officials have identified that more aggressive payments need to be made moving forward to further address the challenges.”
Nevertheless, in one of the very few states which still try to address municipal fiscal disparities, the Michigan Senate General Government subcommittee met last week and reported (Senate Bill 855) its budget recommendations, including for revenue sharing, the subcommittee matched the Governor’s recommendation, which eliminate the 2.5% increase cities, villages, and townships received this year—a cut, ergo, of some $6.2 million for FY2019; the Senate version retained the counties current year 1% increase (which the Governor had also recommended removing) and added another 1% to the county revenue sharing line item—with the accompanying report language noting the increase was intended to ensure “fairness and stability” across local unit types, since counties do not receive Constitutional revenue sharing payments. Estimates for sales tax growth related to Constitutional payments anticipate an additional 3.1% next year for cities, villages, and townships, distributed on a per capita basis.
Moving into the Passing Lane? The Legislature’s actions came as the Detroit Financial Review Commission has approved the Motor City’s Four-Year Financial Plan, setting the stage for the city’s exit from direct state supervision as early as this month, enabling the city with the largest chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history to glimpse the possibility of exiting state oversight—or, as Detroit CFO John Hill put it: “Today’s FRC approval of the City’s 2019 budget and plan for fiscal years 2020-2022, is another key milestone in the city’s financial recovery: It demonstrates the continued commitment of city leaders to prepare and enact budgets that are realistic and balanced now and into the future. It also demonstrates continued progress toward the waiver of active State oversight, which we expect will occur later this month.” The Commission is scheduled to meet at the end of this month for a vote to end state fiscal oversight, albeit the Commission would remain in existence, so that it could be jump started in the event of any reversal in the city’s fiscal comeback. Thus, Mr. Hill said there would likely be a memorandum of understanding between Detroit and the Commission to lay out the kinds of information the city would need to provide to the Commission for review, as he noted: “They still can at any time decide to change the waiver, although we hope and will make sure that doesn’t happen.” Mr. Hill noted that the now approved financial plan includes Mayor Mike Duggan’s budget for FY2019, as well as fiscal years 2020-2022—and that the Motor City now projects ending the current fiscal year with an operating surplus of $33 million: that would mark Detroit’s fourth consecutive municipal budget surplus since exiting from the nation’s largest ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy. He also noted that, as provided for under the city’s plan of debt adjustment, Detroit continues to put aside funds to address the city’s higher-than-expected pension payments, payments starting in 2024, when annual payments of at least $143 million begin. Payments of $20 million run through 2019 with no payments then due through 2023.
Unbalanced Budgets & Power–& Justice. Although they are still evaluating the impact that a new reduction of their budget would have, Puerto Rico’s Judicial Branch has expressed apprehension with regard to the PROMESA Board’s imposed cuts, with Sigfredo Steidel Figueroa, Puerto Rico’s Director of the Office of Court Administration, expressing apprehension: “At the moment, we are evaluating the impact that the proposals of the Fiscal Oversight Board, contained in the fiscal plan published yesterday, could have on the Judicial Branch,” referring to the Board certified plan of staggered cuts for the Judiciary—cuts of $31.9 million, rising to a cut of $161.9 million by 2023. He noted: “In the light of the measures already taken, any proposal for additional reduction to our budget is a matter of concern. Therefore, we will remain vigilant to ensure that the Judicial Branch has the resources it needs to ensure its efficiency and that any budgetary measures taken do not affect the quality of judicial services and the access to justice that corresponds to all the citizens and residents of Puerto Rico,” as he stressed that, “At present, even with the budgetary limitations of recent years, the Judicial Branch has managed to draw and execute the work plan defined by the presiding judge, Maite D. Oronoz Rodríguez, for an increasingly more judicial administration—one of efficiency, transparency, and accessibility.” He added: “An independent and robust judiciary is essential to guarantee the legal security necessary for the stability and economic development of Puerto Rico.”
PROMESA Board Chair Jose Carrion, at the end of last week, issued a warning: “We hope the government and the legislature will comply. We don’t want to sue the government, but we have to fulfill the duties that we understand the law gives us.” That is to write that in this fiscal governance Rod Serling Twilight Zone, somewhere between chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy and hegemony; there is an ongoing question with regard to sovereignty, autonomy, and, as they would say in Puerto Rico, al fin (in the end): who is ultimately responsible for making decisions in Puerto Rico? We have a federal, quasi U.S. bankruptcy judge, a federal oversight board, a Governor, and a legislature—with only the latter two representing the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico.
And now, in the midst of a 21st century exodus of the young and educated to Florida and New York, it appears that banks are joining this exodus—threating, potentially, to further not only isolate Puerto Rico’s financial system—a system in which the number of consumer banks has dropped by half over the past decade, and in which two of the largest, Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Santander SA, have been quietly shrinking—the challenge of governance and fiscal recovery as Puerto Rico seeks to emerge from recession and rebuild after last year’s Hurricane Maria, a small number of financial institutions could end up in charge of deposits and lending for its 3 million citizens. Poplar, Inc., First Bancorp/Puerto Rico, and OFG Bancorp, are cash rich and have many branches, but these financial institutions appear to have limited ability to facilitate trade beyond the Caribbean and Florida—and, as economist Antonio Fernos of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico notes: “What would really be negative is if we lose access to the network of international banks.” The U.S. territory, once was an attractive place for banks to invest, with pharmaceutical manufacturing driving growth, meant that financial institutions entered and opened what had been scarce financing for everything from homes and cars to consumer electronics. However, as Congress changed the rules which had incentivized pharmaceutical companies to locate there—and as Congress moved to make it more attractive to provide shipping to other Caribbean nations, rather than the U.S. territory, many drug companies departed. Today, in the wake of a decade-long recession, Puerto Rico’s economy is 14% smaller, and the emigration of college graduates to the mainland appears to have accelerated—leaving behind the elderly and those who could not afford to leave—increasing a crushing public pension burden, while imposing greater fiscal burdens to serve an increasingly elderly and poor population left behind—and left with over $120 billion in debt and pension liabilities, and now, in then wake of Maria’s devastation, a spike in mortgage delinquency.
Posted in Alternative to municipal bankruptcy, chapter 9, cost of municipal bankrupcty, debt restructuring, demographics, Detroit, Detroit Review Commission, East Lansing, Michigan, Financial Review Board, fiscal sustainability, Gov. Ricardo Rossello, governance, Hurricane Maria, implementing a plan of debt adjustment, Insolvency, Michigan, municipal bankruptcy, Oversight Board, pensions, Plan of debt adjustment, population loss, PROMESA, public infrastructure, public pension obligations, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Oversight Board, recovery, restructuring plan, Uncategorized | Leave a reply
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Home » Locations » Africa » Western Africa » Sierra Leone
Active Investigators
Active Projects: 7
Institute for Global Orthopedics and Traumatology (IGOT) Richard Coughlin, MD Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Egypt, Morocco, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Viet Nam, Thailand, Philippines, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Brazil 7/1/06 6/30/20
iBiology: Bringing the worlds best biology to you Ronald Vale, PhD Burundi, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Sudan, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, Philippines, Ireland, Malta, Belize, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu 8/1/09 6/30/20
Blood safety standards and lab capacity in low & mid income countries Elizabeth Donegan, MD Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Philippines, Armenia, Moldova, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Dominica, Haiti 7/1/14 6/30/20
Trauma, critical care, global health, and physician well-being Krista Kaups, MD Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Thailand, Albania 7/1/14 6/30/20
Acute and Emergency Care Health Systems Development and Disaster Preparation Andrea Tenner, MD, MPH, FACEP Djibouti, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone 7/1/14 6/30/20
UN Special Envoy for Tuberculosis: Strategic Priorities Eric Goosby, MD Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Central African Republic, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Lesotho, South Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, China, North Korea, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Myanmar, Thailand, Philippines, Russia, Brazil, Papua New Guinea 10/1/15 9/29/19
PREDICT-2 Dean Jamison, PhD Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand 10/1/18 9/30/19
Archived Projects: 16
Congenital Syphilis Elimination Cost-Effectiveness Analysis James Kahn, MD, MPH Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Sudan, Tunisia, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Philippines, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, United Kingdom, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea 7/21/08 6/30/10
Role of the Informal Sector in Mixed Health Services Project Dominic Montagu, DrPH Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Congo (Kinshasa), Sudan, South Africa, Benin, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, China, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Yemen, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Papua New Guinea 4/15/10 4/14/12
University of California Global Health Institute Women's Health and Empowerment Center of Expertise Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program Craig Cohen, MD, MPH Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territory, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, American Samoa, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu 9/15/10 8/31/12
Global Health Sciences Clinical Scholars Program Immersion Experience Christopher Stewart, MD Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, North Korea, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territory, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, American Samoa, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu 10/1/10 6/30/12
Advancing Academic Understanding of the Private Sector, and Strengthening the Social Franchising Community of Practice Dominic Montagu, DrPH Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Congo (Kinshasa), Sudan, South Africa, Benin, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, China, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Yemen, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Papua New Guinea 8/1/11 10/31/12
Improving Data on Private Healthcare Use and Provision Dominic Montagu, DrPH Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Congo (Kinshasa), Sudan, South Africa, Benin, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, China, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Yemen, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Papua New Guinea 9/15/11 1/31/12
University of California Global Health Institute Program for Fellows and Scholars (UCGHI-PFS) Craig Cohen, MD, MPH Burundi, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Sierra Leone, Kyrgyzstan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Haiti 4/4/12 6/30/17
WHO Adolescent HTC Review Update (PO# 200660799) George Rutherford, MD Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Western Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Hong Kong S.A.R., China, North Korea, Japan, Macao S.A.R., China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jersey, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Anguilla, Turks and Caicos Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Australia, Cook Islands, Guam, French Polynesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu 10/15/12 3/31/13
International Dissemination of the UCSF Graduate Education in Medical Science Seminars and Conferences Through Creation of a Web Resource in Collaboration with iBioSeminars Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Micronesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea 4/1/13 3/31/16
Interventions for Improving Retention in Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Programs (PO 200988865) George Rutherford, MD Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Haiti, Jamaica 5/6/14 7/31/14
Challenges and Stressors facing Clinicians returning from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa Liza Dernhel, MS Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone 7/1/14 9/1/15
The Contribution of Unsafe Blood Transfusion to HIV Transmission in Africa: A Literature Review Malika Morar, MS Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo 9/1/14 9/1/15
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Wendy Winkler Sawyer Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Sudan, Tunisia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines 10/1/14 3/31/17
Systematic reviews to support the Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Consolidated Guidelines - 2014/HTM/HIV/007 George Rutherford, MD Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Western Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, South Korea, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Slovenia, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Turks and Caicos Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu 1/1/15 12/31/15
Office of the UN Special Envoy for Tuberculosis Eric Goosby, MD Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Hong Kong S.A.R., China, North Korea, South Korea, Macao S.A.R., China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jersey, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Caribbean, Anguilla, Turks and Caicos Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, United States, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Australia, Cook Islands, Guam, French Polynesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu 5/26/15 2/28/16
Fellowship - Award - 2016-2017 Pathogenesis and Treatment of Ebola-Associated Uveitis Rationale Nisha Acharya, MD Sierra Leone 9/1/16 7/31/17
Active Investigators: 7
Richard Coughlin, MD
Elizabeth Donegan, MD
Eric Goosby, MD
Dean Jamison, PhD
Krista Kaups, MD
Andrea Tenner, MD, MPH, FACEP
Ronald Vale, PhD
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h+ Media | Book Review - Zendegi, by Greg Egan - h+ Media
Pei Wang on the Path to Artificial General Intelligence H+ Magazine Undergoing Overhaul
Book Review – Zendegi, by Greg Egan
January 31, 2011 Arts & Entertainment, images, Reviews
authors Giulio Prisco
Greg Egan’s Zendegi has been the second book that I have bought in Kindle format (the first was David Eagleman’s Sum ). I bought it a few minutes after midnight on January 1: I had decided to begin the new decade by reading this e-book. Some explanations and thoughts before starting with the review:
I don’t own a Kindle device yet, but my HTC Desire HD phone has a screen big enough to read comfortably, and the Kindle reader is available for most platforms including Android. This was one of the main reason why I selected this phone, but I will also buy a dedicated Kindle device because I will mainly buy e-books. We have been talking of e-books for 20 years, but e-books never seemed ready to overtake paper books. This is changing very rapidly now, and it appears that e-books will soon become the norm. This is frequently the case for emerging technologies, they often need more time than expected to take off. In Zendegi, Egan describes the early development stage of very advanced mind uploading technologies which, of course, at the beginning do not work well enough for practical use. But these things do change, and they can change quite fast after reaching critical thresholds of performance, usability and acceptance.
Science fiction writers and futurists have been criticized for making very wrong predictions. When we were kids, our generation “knew” that in 2011 we would have flying cars and holidays on Mars. Looking back, it is easy to see why this future did not happen. But I have a magic device in my pocket which can hold thousands of books which I can read where and when I want. With the same device I can talk to most people on the planet, take pictures and upload them to social networks, send email, surf the web, see where I am on a map, stream video, play games, post to Twitter and edit my blogs. We are in the future! It is not the same future that science fiction writers predicted in the 60s, but perhaps it is even stranger and more interesting. Sooner or later, and I hope sooner, we will also have cities on Mars (flying cars I can do without).
Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction writers. In some novels like Diaspora, Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence he explores the very far future, and in others he stays closer to the present. At times, Egan also makes some very optimistic predictions. For example in Permutation City, he places the first successful tests of mind uploading in 2026, which seems quite over-optimist from here. But he is not blindly in love with technology gadgets and never forgets that the evolution of science and technology takes place in a very complex social, cultural and political context which at times can speed development up, but often slows it down (remember those cities on Mars).
Actually Egan, an author loved by many transhumanists, is not overly fond of his transhumanist fans. See Greg’s many comments to Russell Blackford’s article on “Transhumanism still at the crossroads” (a recommended reading which goes to the heart of the tension between different interpretations of transhumanism), but be prepared to read things like “I consider a self-description of “Transhumanist” to be a useful filter to identify crackpots...”. In other comments, though, Greg defends the feasibility in-principle of mind uploading: “I certainly don’t imagine that any worthwhile form of uploading is imminent, but that it is impossible in principle is a much larger claim… To render the most sophisticated forms of uploading impossible for all time, you really have to insist that only the precise biochemistry of the human brain can give rise to human subjective experience.” There are many other interesting comments, including one saying that, if Egan wasn’t such a good writer, less people would join the evil transhumanists. See also this Lesswrong post. Mature uploading technologies are described in Diaspora and other novels set in the far future, but in Zendegi Egan explores early developments.
Much of Zendegi takes place in Iran (see Egan’s notes on his trip to Iran when he was writing the novel). In 2012, the Australian journalist Martin is in a politically troubled Iran at a time of major changes, and the young Iranian refugee Nasim is in the US working as a computational neuroscientist in the Human Connectome Project. 15 years later, both Martin and Nasim live in Iran. Martin is married to a woman he met in the first part of the book, and they live with their young son Javeed. Nasim has returned to Iran soon after the events in 2012, to be part of the change, and now works at the popular virtual world Zendegi, a Second Life on steroids powered by very realistic virtual reality technology. It is interesting that Zendegi is a local company, and their main competitor is an Indian company. It is also interesting that most Iranian characters, in 2012 and 2027/28, are good and decent persons. Not that I had any doubts, but seeing a good science fiction novel set in a country currently demonized by the media is refreshing.
Zendegi has financial problems and is losing market share to its competitors. Nasim realizes that her old colleagues at the Human Connectome Project have achieved important advances and released a large database of high resolution brain scans of thousands of volunteers. The data are not sufficiently detailed and personalized for individual mind uploading, but they can be used to build accurate generic models of human minds (the models that we use to call “mindware” or “me-program” in uploading discussion groups). Nasim understands that these advances may permit developing better technology for Zendegi, and she turns to her old connection Nate Caplan for funding.
Caplan is an extropian entrepreneur, a mind uploading enthusiast and a transhumanist cliché. When he first meets Nasim in 2010, he introduces himself as “My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now”, quite in line with Egan’s unforgiving opinion of transhumanists. Egan has been accused of being mainly an epic writer who under-develops his characters. It is not always so, for example Martin and Nasim are real persons, like many characters in other novels such as Teranesia, but Caplan is really a fake in black and white: I have met some monomaniac transhumanists with an inflated opinion of their intelligence and worth, but Caplan is far too extreme for a believable character. There is also a parody of the Singularity Institute, the “Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project”, busy at building a godlike Friendly Artificial Intelligence with the billions left to them by a very wealthy donor. Of course transhumanist clichés are primadonnas unable to work together and never agree on anything, and Caplan is very much against the Superintelligence Project. He wants to achieve personal transcendence through uploading, and sees their schemes as conflicting with his.
Javeed is an avid Zendegi user, and when Martin becomes terminally ill he asks Nasim to upload him to Zendegi so he can continue to be present in his son’s life. Martin does this only for his son, and he does not really believe that he may actually continue to live in Zendegi, or at least he never says so. The uploading technology used, more appropriately called “sideloading”, consists of tweaking and fine-tuning a generic mindware “me-program” obtained by the Human Connectome Project, with long and involved training sessions, until it behaves like a specific person. Nasim and Martin do not see their sideloading project as a means to actually preserve Martin beyond physical death, and only want to build a credible emulation for Javeed. But Caplan supports the project because he sees sideloading as a precursor of uploading and personal cybernetic immortality
I should not give spoilers here, but you have probably guessed that this story does not have a happy ending. Nasim and Martin do their best, but Martin’s copy never becomes good enough for its purpose, and the book ends with sad thoughts of Nasim after Martin’s funeral. The project has failed, and sideloading technology is not yet good enough to permit preserving people after death. In the meantime Caplan’s attempts at biological life extension have made him ill, and he decides to spend a few decades in cryonic suspension waiting for better technologies. Even though the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project has not produced any result, their premises in Houston have been bombed by terrorists. Perhaps because the publicity given to other sideloading projects at Zendegi (more limited in scope but more successful) has made people realize that these projects may actually produce results, and somebody (perhaps Caplan himself) has wanted to cripple them.
The tragic end is already expected by the reader and does not come as a surprise. Egan knows that the development of disruptive technologies is never easy, never linear, and always troubled. I think uploading technology will be developed eventually, perhaps in the second half of this century, but I am afraid Greg is right, and in the early development stages there will be unexpected problems and major setbacks, there will be unhappiness, and there will be tragedies. But, fast forward a few centuries to the upload society in Diaspora, this is how the “Introdus” to a next phase of our evolution might begin.
And, in fact, the novel ends with a positive thought: “Maybe in Javeed’s lifetime a door could be opened up into Zendegi-ye-Bethar; maybe his generation would be the first to live without the old kind of death. Whether or not that proved to be possible, it was a noble aspiration.”
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Extropia DaSilva February 5, 2011, 11:33 am
Hello Giulio. The first book I read on Kindle was Greg Bear’s ‘Blood Music’.
Anyway, about the uploading debate. I see two flawed assumptions exhibited by its skeptics. The first has to do with the phrase ‘downloading the mind to a computer’.
Imagine it was 1950, a time when computers used vacuum tubes. Imagine that ‘sillicon chip’ and ‘integrated circuits’ were completely unfamiliar terms. Some visionary comes along, talking about a future in which computers millions of times more powerful yet small and light enough to sit comfortably on someone’s lap will exist.
I have no doubt that such a prediction would meet with criticisms, explaining how the physics of vacuum tubes renders this idea utterly impossible. But, introduce the new paradigm of computational systems based on integrated ciruits, and such laptops are perfectly feasible.
Similarly, if by ‘download to a computer’ you mean contemporary computers with their graphics chip, integrated circuit and hard drives, well yes you could talk about the difference between a brain and this kind of computer, and conclude the differences are too large for this idea to be feasible.
But consider one of the hopes of Henry Markram: “We believe that the neocortical microcircuit is the essence of neocortical computation and that deriving this blueprint is essential for a comprehensive understanding of high cognitive functions…Furthermore, this neocortical microcircuit exhibits computational power that is impossible to match with any known technology. Deriving the blueprint and its operational principles could therefore spur a new generation of neuromorphic devices with immense computational power”.
So what about downloading the mind to a neuromorphic device, a design based on a comprehensive understanding of cognitive functions? Depending on how close these functions can come to those of a particular brain, I think uploading based on this ‘new generation of neuromorphic devices’ is feasible.
But this assumption can be challenged with a variation on Moravec’s ‘gradual upload’. Say a person’s fingertips are replaced with prosthetic parts, complete with artifical nerve endings that the natural nerve cells can communicate with, thereby allowing signals to-and-from cyber-fingertips to the brain. Would they feel like somebody else’s fingertips? Not part of that person’s body? No, I think the person’s bodymap would adjust so as to make the prosthetic parts as much a part of this body as all the natural limbs and organs. And then you can imagine gradually replacing everything except the brain. I think a 100% artificial body would feel just as much ‘my body’ as a 100% natural one, provided that body provides enough sensory data for the brain’s various body maps.
Or consider phantom limb syndrome, in which an amputee feels the presence of a limb located in a particular position in space (and, in some cases, can move their phantom limb), even though the limb does not exist. What does exist, is the parts of the brain that used to receive stimulation from the sense organs that were in that limb. Those neurons don’t die, and if they are stimulated the mind feels the presence of a limb.
So what about a brain-in-a-jar, provided with all the stimulation and perceptions it would receive from an actual body, including tricking the visual cortex into seeing a body moving around in accord to free will? I mean, sometimes when you dream you are inhabiting a body while unaware of your real body lying on the bed, so it seems possible..
The brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. It therefore seems highly unlikely that any people technologically-advanced enough to create neuromorphic devices capable of running uploaded minds could not also provide that mind with an artificial body or a full phantom body for when that person wants to enter full sensory VR.
Hmm..for some reason I forgot to mention what ‘assumption’ I am challenging. It is the notion that the mind requires a (physical) body. I also believe some people go further and insist my brain requires MY body (meaning an artificial body, even if it provided full sensory experience, would feel alien to that mind). I was trying to show why these assumptions are not true.
Giulio Prisco February 5, 2011, 5:41 pm
Hi Extie! Blood Music is also a great book, one of Greg Bear’s best and perhaps the best. I loved it.
A mind requires some means to interact with other minds and with its habitat. The current means of our minds are our physical bodies, but perhaps not for long.
A mind requires a computational substrate (a bio brain, a computronium chip, or what else). Perhaps we can just call it a brain, and its I/O sensors and actuators a body.
Giulio Prisco February 4, 2011, 6:20 am
After writing this review I have started reading again the first part (Iran in 2012), with a description of a popular uprising against the theocratic regime, which is eventually brought down.
It is quite similar to what is happening now in Egypt. The governments shuts down the Internet and cell phone systems, and the citizens react by creating ad-hoc mobile mesh networks. The government tries to shut off these as well, and the citizens react with more and more ingenious solutions.
It is bad to see governments at war against their own citizens, but I am afraid we will see more and more of that, and not only in the “developing world”. There is now a very disturbing trend – that big governments and big corporations now want to control the Internet much more.
I have written a short article on this, with links to some countermeasures that we citizens should begin to adopt:
http://spacecollective.org/giulio/6633/We-must-protect-the-Internet
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Fox News is Not Funny
I think it’s safe to say that Fox New’s latest attempt to smear Bernie in a so-called comedy routine was a failure. The main problem with this attempt is that lies are not funny. The same goes for frantic meanness in the defense of ideology. In short, Fox News can never be funny.
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Author Sheila MarlerPosted on March 23, 2019 June 22, 2019 Categories A Conversation About the ConversationTags Bernie Sanders, Fox News, truthLeave a comment on Fox News is Not Funny
Venezuela Update
The Venezuelan military has again rejected the Trump administration’s offer to join the forces of Juan Guaidó. The military is an important part of the government in Venezuela and its show of support for Nicolás Maduro is a bad sign for Trump’s regime change plans. Some readers may think the following video is too unapologetic in its support for Maduro, but there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground in this conflict. There are a few exceptions however, including Bernie Sanders .
As I said, this video is extremely pro-Maduro, but even Sanders’ more moderate analysis was met with screams of anguish from Democrats who support regime change in Venezuela. Here’s Bernie’s Univision interview with Jorge Ramos. The questions concerning Venezuela are toward the end.
The most vocal criticism of Sanders’ stance on Venezuela has come from members of Congress who represent Venezuelan communities in the United States. However, it’s important to be aware of the makeup of these communities, as a 2018 editorial in the Houston Chronicle makes clear.
This editorial is not sympathetic to Maduro, but it expresses concern about the effects of sanctions on the Venezuelan people. One problem is that sanctions hurt the country’s main source of revenue, which directly affects the people. Another problem is that the Trump administration’s sanctions ignore Venezuelan oligarchs who are living in the United States, largely in Houston and Miami. The majority of Venezuelans living in the United States have nothing to do with the oligarchs, but law enforcement officials believe that some of them have made fortunes by scamming the government and its oil company, PDVSA. The Justice Department only started prosecuting them in 2015. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/How-can-the-U-S-help-Venezuelans-Prosecute-12945314.php
Sanders calls for a fair election in Venezuela rather than sanctions and military action. In his view, the choice of president should be left to the Venezuelan people.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on February 22, 2019 February 22, 2019 Categories U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Houston, Jorge Ramos, Miami, Venezuelan militaryLeave a comment on Venezuela Update
The establishment fears another Sanders presidential campaign. They obviously expect him to run again, no matter what, because we can already see their strategy in that regard—they plan to label him a sexist socialist.
Recently, when Liz Cheney called socialism a fraud, Sanders, who is a Democratic Socialist, countered by saying that Cheney’s father defrauded the entire country by lying us into the Iraq War. Sanders was then called a sexist for criticizing Liz Cheney’s father rather than Liz. But under the circumstances, it was the kindest thing Sanders could have said. There is no difference between Liz Cheney and her father.
From her Middle East Partnership Initiative that funneled money to unidentified groups working to undermine foreign governments, to collaboration with the International Republican Institute to promote war with Iran and Syria, to serving on her father’s re-election campaign, Liz Cheney has willingly associated herself with Dick Cheney’s policies.
American voters know that Bernie Sanders represents the correction the country needs at this time. The chief selling point of a Sanders presidency is not Socialism. It is criminal overreach by conservatives—both Republican and Democrat.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on January 5, 2019 January 5, 2019 Categories A Conversation About the ConversationTags Bernie Sanders, Dick CheneyLeave a comment on The Dishonesty of Liz Cheney
Reactionary Politics in Brazil
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on October 11, 2018 October 11, 2018 Categories The Progressive InternationalTags Bernie Sanders, Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Real NewsLeave a comment on Reactionary Politics in Brazil
In the past it would have been risky for an American politician to propose an international progressive front, but today it seems like a logical response to big money aggression. It is a measure of the seriousness of our present circumstances that someone like Bernie would propose it, yet an eerie silence reigns on both the Left and the Right. September 15, 2018: I missed this article published on September 13 by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and cofounder of DiEM25, whose New Deal for Europe will be put to European voters in the May 2019 European Parliament elections.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on September 15, 2018 September 15, 2018 Categories A Conversation About the ConversationTags Bernie Sanders, Yanis VaroufakisLeave a comment on Silence on the Progressive Front
This is a War in the Making
See this link for the latest statements warning Trump against striking Syria. First is Democracy Now’s report of a statement from Bernie Sanders:
On Wednesday, Sanders tweeted, “President Trump has no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria. It is Congress, not the president, who determines whether our country goes to war, and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility.”
Democracy Now also reports that Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya directly addressed his U.S. counterpart, Nikki Haley at the United Nations Security Council.
Vasily Nebenzya: “You are very good at threatening. And the threats you are proffering, that you are now stating vis-à-vis Syria, should make us seriously worried—all of us—because we could find ourselves on the threshold of some very sad and serious events. I would once again ask you, once again beseech you, to refrain from the plans that you’re currently developing for Syria.”
And finally there is this warning reported by Press TV. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said that the threat of using force against a UN member state is a gross violation of the UN charter.
“We call upon… members of the international community to seriously consider the possible consequences of such accusations, threats and especially action (against Syria),” she added.
This escalation must be stopped in any way possible. When will you people stop being confused about Donald Trump? Will you at least consider that he may be the Clinton’s Plan-B, and controlled by the same people?
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on April 12, 2018 Categories GeopoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Maria Zakharova, Vasily Nebenzya, warningsLeave a comment on This is a War in the Making
Neoconservatives Against the World
We knew that this election was a contest between two deep state factions, but the most interesting thing in my opinion is the fact that both Trump and Clinton represent neoconservative influences.
It was Bill Clinton who allowed the left-wing neocons to take control of the Democratic Party.[1] (Page 36, Location 465) He did so because he needed their support for his first presidential campaign. This would explain the DNC’s treatment of Bernie Sanders in 2016. Bernie’s Democratic Socialism is more threatening to left-wing neocons than the right will ever be. However the neocon influence on the left tends to stay under the radar. It usually takes the form of neoconservative candidates posing as progressives, including John Kerry, Howard Dean, and John Edwards. Those ‘in the know’ hoped that the imperialist-democratic ideal was on its way out with the election of Barack Obama. Little did they know…
It goes without saying that the right-wing religious leaders who supported Donald Trump are also neocons, although everyone seems to chalk up their bizarre statements to religious extremism. The Christian Right has been considered a natural ally of the neocons since the time of Irving Kristol. The neocons shared the Christian Right’s aversion to the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s. They rejected the Democratic Party when President Carter proved to be too open-minded and respectful of people’s different lifestyles, and they were disappointed again at Reagan’s moderate stance on family and cultural issues. From that time the Christian Right has supported the most radical groups and it has violently opposed the Democrats, particularly the Clinton administration, which it considered too timid in foreign affairs.
This alliance has been courted by both the Christians and the neocons. Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition from 1989 to 1997, had neocon sympathies, putting him somewhere between a sometimes anti-Semitic protestant fundamentalist and the pro-Israeli group in Washington. On the neocon side, PNAC sought to create links with key Christian groups such as William Bennett’s Empower America, and neocons like Kristol or Eliott Abrams showed their support by sharing extreme Christian positions on abortion and Aids. This alliance was boosted after September 11 when Christian Right think tanks, lobbies, and affiliated preachers adopted the neoconservative vision of Islam, Islamic terrorism and the ‘War on Terrorism’.
Many Americans are not aware of how often the Christian Right has swayed presidential decisions. George Bush was threatened with their sanctions when he condemned Israel’s assassination attempt on Hamas leader Rantissi in June of 2003. As a result of their threats Bush’s reaction to the successful assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi in 2004 took on an entirely different character: he sided with Sharon. (When Empire Meets Nationalism, Page 35, Location 447)
Thus, starting from a deep-rooted anti-communism, the neoconservatives have gradually developed their analyses, which go far beyond the strict mould of their supporters to irrigate the whole political scene. During all their historical trajectory, there has always been a desire for American supremacy and a wariness of the rest of the world which can only lead them towards a re-legitimization of the Empire as a key to world order. (When Empire Meets Nationalism, Page 38, Location 489)
Given this discouraging state of affairs, it’s important to identify a pointed and coherent resistance. The position of Pope Francis in this struggle is probably best illustrated by the identity of his Catholic critics. As described in Todd Scribner’s book, A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the rise of Neoconservative Catholics,[2] Francis’s critics are Catholic neocons. This is probably the faction represented by Paul Ryan when he stated that Francis should not be involved in politics. Bernie Sanders on the other hand, has been sympathetic to Francis’s approach.
Orthodox criticism of the Catholic Church represents political rivalry of another sort. The Orthodox Church is not a disinterested religious voice. It vies with Alexander Dugin for influence over Vladimir Putin.
Dugin’s neo-eurasianism represents a line of thought similar to neoconservative thought. His influence on both Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon reveals the true dilemma of our time.
[1] Didier Chaudet, Florent Parmentier, Benoit Pélopidas, When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey, England and Burlington VT, 2009. (All page numbers and locations correspond to the Kindle edition.)
[2] As reviewed by Patrick Garry, Neoconservative Catholicism in America. First Things, December 2, 2015
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on November 3, 2017 November 3, 2017 Categories GeopoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Clintons, Eliott Abrams, George W. Bush, Irving Kristol, Islamic terrorism, Neoconservative Catholicism in America, PNAC, Pope Francis, Ralph Reed, Steve Bannon, When Empire Meets Nationalism, William BennettLeave a comment on Neoconservatives Against the World
Donald or Hillary: a Calm Discussion
The election conversation gets narrower and narrower the closer we get to November 8. I’ve already told you what I plan to do. I’ve also urged my readers to vote for Hillary, even though when she was first nominated I said I wouldn’t talk about my plans. This began out of loyalty to Bernie but I stuck with it because I don’t see another way. However judging from the polls many people don’t agree with me.
We now know the WikiLeaks emails came from a faction associated with the U.S. intelligence community. As I’ve already said, I have a problem with the timing of this so-called coup. I’m also afraid that once the word coup is associated with our electoral process it will open the door for more of the same in future elections. Something similar has already happened. In the short time since George W. Bush openly stole the presidency, the electoral process has become a sham. I’ll hold both parties responsible for any future incidences of the dueling-coups approach to elections.
The details we’ve been given in the emails have been a diversion from what we should be talking about—our interests. Donald Trump has plenty of nefarious associations, so electing him will hardly be a vote for virtue. We should be strategizing over which candidate best serves our real interests.
Peace is one of our interests. The driving force behind the world’s conflicts today is foreign policy–and not just U.S. foreign policy. The leaders of the world are locked in an infernal struggle for supremacy, and whatever you may have heard our interests are not their interests. We were outraged by Hillary’s actions abroad and her seeming lack of concern for the consequences, but she didn’t do those things on her own account. She was only serving the status quo, which will continue on its merry way regardless of who wins this election. (The status quo was one of the things this conversation was supposed to address.)
Donald talks a good game about making peace with Russia, but what will he do when confronted with the machine? I’ll leave it to his supporters to figure this one out. One of the things they like about him is his feistiness. What do they think he’ll do when it’s explained to him that Russia stands in the way of ‘our’ victory? (I put ‘our’ in quotation marks because regardless of who wins it will be a victory for the wealthy interests behind the scenes—not for us.) Trump’s supporters might be divided on the question of what he will do, but his vice president has already said he’ll be another Dick Cheney. And Mike Pence is definitely part of the machine right down to his allegiance to Israel. Trump was strongly encouraged to choose Pence as his running mate by the way. And Russia aside, many other places in the world are ripe for intervention.
We don’t even know how Bernie Sanders would have dealt with these pressures, but we do know that if he had been elected he would have listened to us. That’s the choice he made when he turned his back on the billionaires. But Bernie intends to be influential in a Clinton Presidency–an important difference between the two candidates. Some might discount his influence in future military decisions, but the point here is that a Trump presidency will serve the machine too, and without the influence of Bernie and his progressive allies in Congress. For these reasons the candidates cannot be clearly differentiated by their foreign policy.
Domestic policy is also in our interests. Clinton has positive economic policies and they are not all due to Sanders’ influence. For example she’s been talking since January about increasing the estate tax–an important step towards correcting economic inequality. Trump’s economic policies on the other hand will increase the advantages of the wealthy.
Social policies are in our interests as well. Trump has gone all socially conservative in this campaign. Some of his followers might expect him to relax this stance if he’s elected but that doesn’t seem likely because his running mate’s social policies are downright terrifying. For example as Governor of Indiana Pence signed an abortion bill that required parents of an aborted fetus to give it a funeral. However the law was blocked by a federal judge.
According to an article on politifact.com Clinton’s campaign website lists 32 topic headings, some as specific as Alzheimer’s disease and animal welfare. Trump’s web pages offer broad statements without details. In addition, Trump is known to shift his views even from interview to interview.
While Clinton changes her views, for example on the TPP, trump sometimes reverses positions within minutes. Still it’s possible to see a difference between them.
Trump has been consistent on three big economic policy items, according to Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution: raising barriers to immigration; imposing potentially large tariffs on goods from Mexico and China; and enacting large tax cuts. Clinton is more cautious. Clinton proposes a fairly small increase in taxes that would be borne almost entirely by the wealthy. Her plan would increase revenues over 10 years by $1.1 trillion. Trump’s plan, across-the-board tax cuts (but favoring the wealthy) would lower revenues over 10 years by $9.6 trillion. Moody’s Analytics predicts that Trump’s proposals would make the U.S. economy less global and would substantially increase the federal debt, benefit the wealthy disproportionately, and push unemployment up.
In energy policy Clinton would wean the U.S. from fossil fuels by setting targets for renewable energy, while Trump would ‘revitalize’ the domestic oil and gas sector.
They agree however on increased spending on infrastructure, with Clinton offering more specifics for the budget.
Trump opposes the TPP. Clinton has moved away from her former support of it mostly as a result of her campaign against Sanders.
Clinton would increase the minimum wage nationally to $12, and in some locations, $15. Trump would leave this to the states. She would offer tax incentives for companies to bring back jobs to the U.S. She also favors increased policing of trading partners. Trump would use aggressive trade enforcement and possible tariffs. She would enhance worker training options. He has no public stance on this. She would boost federal investment by $275 billion over five years and create a $25 billion infrastructure fund. Trump hasn’t offered any details on his infrastructure expansion. She will propose a goal of renewable electricity ‘to power every home in America within 10 years. He’ll revive the fossil-fuel sector, including decreasing regulations. She would increase funding for scientific research at agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He has no public stance on this. She would create a 15 percent tax credit for companies that share profits with workers on top of wages and pay increases. He has offered few details outside of a tax plan and a comment criticizing CEO pay. She supports keeping the Dodd-Frank law and in some cases would tighten rules for Wall Street, such as taxing high frequency trading. Trump would dismantle Dodd-Frank. She would ease regulatory burdens on community banks and support innovative financing methods. He has criticized government regulation but has offered no specific proposals. She Advocates equal pay, paid family leave, earned sick days, and expanded child care. He has no public stance on these things. ((Louis Jacobson, Compare the Candidates: Clinton versus Trump on the Economy. Politifact.com, July 22, 2016.))
We still haven’t found a solution for this momentum toward war. I’ll talk about that in the next post.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on November 3, 2016 Categories U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Mike Pence, minimum wage, tax revenue, the environmentLeave a comment on Donald or Hillary: a Calm Discussion
This New York Times Article Didn’t Help Clinton
The New York Times recently published an article supporting Hillary and blaming Bernie for the fact that people don’t seem more excited about her presidency. I think they’ve got it wrong. Hillary and Bernie are in this together, more than anyone realizes.
I say this because I’ve learned that the people telling us to write in Bernie’s name are the same ones who were promoting Jill Stein in the primary. Only now they’re claiming it won’t make any difference to Hillary if people write in Bernie’s name in seven states. As usual they’re being disingenuous because at the same time they’re telling voters in the other states to vote for Stein. They just don’t quit!
Curiously the Stein supporters were the first to turn on Bernie after the convention, and they did so in a way that I think casts doubt on their former support for him. One of the YouTubers even went so far as to tell her viewers not to join Bernie’s revolution. If all she wanted was to get her candidate elected you’d think Bernie’s exit would make her happy, but for some reason she’s still obsessed with him.
Many of us former Bernie supporters are voting for Hillary. On the other hand the Stein supporters (who claimed to be Bernie supporters in the primary) are some of Clinton’s loudest critics today. In my opinion this is not an act of loyalty to Bernie. It’s an act of defiance.
Although the New York Times thought it would be helpful to the Clinton campaign to blame Bernie, I hope Hillary understands what an asset he is for her campaign and for the Democratic Party.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on October 26, 2016 Categories A Conversation About the Conversation, U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Jill SteinLeave a comment on This New York Times Article Didn’t Help Clinton
Shady Business in North Carolina
Did you ever wonder how Bernie could raise so much money from ordinary people and still lose the vote in some states? Watch this video on Tim Black’s YouTube channel.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on March 22, 2016 Categories U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's dirty tricks, Niko House, Tim BlackLeave a comment on Shady Business in North Carolina
Bernie Sanders and the Supreme Court
It’s my theory that Merrick Garland will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. I think this is inevitable for the reason that everyone involved in this process has an interest in maintaining the Court’s conservative majority. Then if the next president has to replace a liberal justice he or she will be able to be magnanimous and appoint another liberal since it won’t affect the conservative majority. But if the Court loses another conservative, a conservative will be appointed to replace him.
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who says he will ask President Obama to withdraw his nomination of Merrick Garland if he’s elected to the presidency. He’s the only candidate who has said he’ll nominate a justice who will overturn Citizens United. He’s the only candidate who will be willing and able to change the majority on the Supreme Court.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on March 22, 2016 Categories U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, Merrick Garland, ObamaLeave a comment on Bernie Sanders and the Supreme Court
Keeping Politics in Perspective
The news networks were recently called out for their blatant favoritism of a presidential candidate, Donald Trump. It’s been interesting to watch their response since this calling out. After disappearing for a day or two, the candidate is back in the news with a vengeance, although now the writers take a more critical approach. And I think I see a new element with the potential to be just as damaging as the unequal coverage—the disparagement of this candidate’s supporters on the basis of class. This is particularly dangerous because it’s effects are subliminal.
It is legitimate to criticize one’s political opponents on a political or moral basis, but in my opinion it’s not legitimate to criticize them for class differences, i.e. for wearing a blouse ‘right off the rack at Walmart’, or living in a mobile home. I’m afraid I didn’t notice this problem when we were first told that these voters are poorly educated, but it’s become impossible to ignore.
When I first [intlink id=”2062″ type=”post”]endorsed[/intlink] my candidate, Senator Sanders, I explained that I never intended to use this blog for political strategy. In my view his presidency was an opportunity to reorient our politics and our policies to address the reality of the future, a future which includes a growing population and diminishing resources. The class issue, which many people have said is probably made up anyway, makes this peaceful existence unlikely.
Of course fighting these divisions is not our responsibility alone—our opponents have chosen hostility, fear, and selfishness as the way forward. What’s really damning in my view is that they chose these things over the brighter way that was available to them. This is a legitimate criticism. The class criticism on the other hand might have subliminal effects because it hides behind the legitimate one.
As I write, I realize that this article has been influenced by this media trick too. it’s sounds like I’ve forgotten that Senator Sanders is the champion of social justice and that it’s not our policies that need explaining. That’s what these tactics are meant to do.
Author Sheila MarlerPosted on March 21, 2016 Categories A Conversation About the Conversation, U.S. PoliticsTags Bernie Sanders, building a new civilization, media class warLeave a comment on Keeping Politics in Perspective
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Sisters For Sale
Meet Saroj
by Ben Randall | Jun 15, 2014
Distance covered: 36,796 km (22,864 miles)
Subjects found: 78
In 2011, I spent five months living in a small village in the hills of central Nepal, and came to know many of the locals there.
One of them was a fourteen-year-old boy named Saroj. The second of three children, Saroj was a very bright boy, always at the top of his class despite a difficult home life.
Saroj was the easiest to find of all our subjects – in fact, there was no search at all. After a quick phone call, Saroj came to find Moreno and I at our Kathmandu guesthouse. Saroj was also the first of our subjects to require no translator; he speaks English quickly and softly, his words running together.
In the past three years, Saroj has grown from a village boy into a good-looking and well-mannered young man. Having recently finished high school, he moved to a Kathmandu hostel only two weeks ago.
It’s too crowded and too polluted here in the capital, he says, but it’s the only place to get a good education.
For the next ten weeks, Saroj will be studying seven days a week in a preparatory institution for engineering college, where he hopes to study mechanical engineering. It won’t be easy, however: over 16,000 applicants from across Nepal will be competing for only 432 positions at the college.
Saroj may have been the brightest in his vilage, but here in Kathmandu he’s up against some serious competition, and has dedicated himself completely to his studies. He wakes at half past five each morning, and doesn’t sleep until past midnight.
He has no time for a girlfriend, he says. They’re too distracting.
Moreno and I are now drawing very near the end of our nine-month search, with only two of our 100 people left to find!
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Floyd Mayweather: I’m Coming Out of Retirement to Fight Manny Pacquiao Again
Floyd Mayweather wants a rematch with Manny Pacquiao.
The undefeated boxing champ, whose record is 50-0, says he is coming out of retirement to fight Pacquiao for a nine-figure sum in December.
Mayweather, after running into Pacquiao Saturday (Sep. 15) in Japan announced the news via Instagram just moments ago: “I’m coming back to fight Manny Pacquiao this year another 9 figure pay day on the way.”
Mayweather’s last “comeback” boxing match was in August 2017 when he beat the crap out of UFC fighter Conor McGregor, winning the 12-round match in 10 rounds with a TKO. Mayweather reportedly brought home $300 million for that fight, which recorded the second highest pay-per-view buy rate in history with 4.6 million purchases.
Mayweather fought Pacquiao in 2015 after going back and forth with him for years. That fight lasted for 12 rounds, with Mayweather winning by unanimous decision (two judges scored it 116 to 112 and the third scored it 118-110).
Even though the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight was considered to be one of the most anticipated sporting events in history, it was largely considered a letdown by audiences and critics alike.
Mayweather agreed, saying in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel two years later while on a press tour for the McGregor fight that he felt like he owed boxing fans for the disappointing match against Pacquiao.
“I’ve talked about this before: I feel like I owe the fans since me and Pacquiao didn’t give the fans a blockbuster,” he said.
Floyd Mayweather: I’m Coming Out of Retirement to Fight Manny Pacquiao Again is a post from: Gossip On This – Pop Culture, News, Videos & Humor
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About Us > Jose Martinez
Jose Martinez
Jose Martinez is Harm Reduction Coalition’s Hepatitis C Fellow. He is responsible for supporting and mentoring the Hepatitis C Peer Navigators who work at all of the SSPs in New York City. He helps to support peers to develop their educational and career goals, organize to push for better funding and policies, and support peers to become strong leaders on harm reduction and hepatitis C. Jose started his career in harm reduction as a member of the NYC Hepatitis C Peer Navigation program for St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction in the South Bronx. He was promoted to be a full time case manager working with young people who inject drugs. Joses’ career led him to working with diverse populations in the shelter systems and in different agencies throughout New York City. Today he is a New York State Certified Peer and hopes to guide future peers and navigators towards their goals to success.
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← Dumbo (a review)
Weekender, April 2019, Part 1: Is This Month Over Yet? →
Now we’ve watched, as far as I can tell, just about the full run of … season 2? Season 3? of Star Trek: Discovery. Or there are a couple of episodes to go. I don’t know. I can’t keep track and that’s a (very minor) part of the problem.
Follow-up after checking: we are 11 episodes in, and there’s been a bit of a pause (maybe) and there are apparently a few more episodes coming on this season. So.
This was brought to my attention, and seems to be an interesting viewpoint from author Steven Erikson, who thinks the show is a “clusterfuck”. I’m just going to go through the whole thing bit by bit, for shits and giggles and because I’m still ramping up over here, and post responses to some of the pertinent points.
Did I really use that word in my title? I searched high and low for an alternative, something, anything to describe what has been done to my beloved Star Trek. But nothing else quite fits as well as that single word: clusterfuck. But even typing it makes me wince.
Well it was pretty harsh, and overall the framing of his critique is a bit more indignant and strident and self-inflated-seeming than I would go with, but I guess he’s entitled to his opinion and his means of expression and I don’t entirely disagree with him on most of it. And his suggestions aren’t invalid, far as I can see.
And he gets harsher from there because it seems like he really doesn’t like this show.
Alas, any sort of in-depth critique of ST: Discovery cannot help but turn into a rant, it’s that bad. So frigging bad I don’t even know where to start, but I’ll give it a good try.
Well, I’ve been guilty of ranting about things in the past and I’m sure I’ll be guilty of it again in the future, but for now I’ll just say this was a pretty fucking genteel rant, Steven. But let’s crack into it.
I won’t even bother naming names in this, but on the creative, show-running side, there’s a choke-hold on Star Trek: it’s desperate, it’s haunted by its own mediocrity, it’s utterly unoriginal and incapable of innovation, it’s ignorant of anything remotely scientific, and it’s under siege by a fan-base that knows more than it does when it comes to what Star Trek is actually about.
This certainly seems to be true. I don’t personally mind about the scientific inaccuracies but I will concede that Trek is meant to be “better” than Wars, let alone Doctor Who, when it comes to science fiction over science fantasy. I don’t know if Star Trek: Discovery is more guilty of breaking this rule than any other Trek, mainly because – like I just said – I don’t personally mind. It’s all science fantasy to me, and a spore drive and time travelling wossname is no better or worse than any other lovely preposterous bullplop Trek does.
As for being attacked by Trekkies, I guess I’d have to abstain from voting on that one. From what I’ve seen, some Trekkies hate everything. Some of them hate anything that happened after The Original Series. Some of them hate everything after Deep Space Nine. Some of them just hate Enterprise and Discovery, and some of them just hate Discovery. Some of them hate the reboots.
On the other side of that, there are solid Trekkies I know of who like the reboots, and some who like Star Trek: Discovery too. So this whole thing is impossible to get much of a bead on, especially with all of these people insisting that they’re the actual Trekkies and their opinion is the actual one.
Star Trek fans, circa 2019, colourised.
Speaking of the Abrams reboot movies … I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently the people in charge of the reboot had some difficulties with the original Star Trek people and there’s been some legal in-fighting, and the reason Discovery is so wildly un-Trek is because it’s the product of the reboot people rather than the original Star Trek people somehow. Now, I liked the reboot movies. So that can’t be all of it.
This is apparently a good summary but I haven’t bothered to watch it yet. Erikson mentioned it, is all.
I was deeply confused, and remain confused (although I have now added a thick layer of fuck-it sauce and now everything just tastes like fuck-it) by the timeline and which universe is which, although it has all started to hang together. Star Trek: Discovery happens after The Cage pilot episode of The Original Series but before the first actual episode, so Pike is still in command and Spock is there and … mmm, fuck-it.
Mysterious signals from deep-space fifty thousand lightyears apart, the nearest one of which would take years to reach by Warp speed. Uhm, folks, a signal from, say, thirty thousand lightyears away, is actually thirty thousand years old. Astronomy 101. So, what’s the effing hurry? Did no-one – I mean no-one – put up a timorous hand in the writing room, to point out this fact?
Yeah but actually, this whole thing is easy enough to explain once you have time travel in there. They just needed to make it clearer that the signals were being planted in the past so they would show up right at that moment wherever the Discovery was when they saw the signal, and then vanish again, leading the Discovery around by the nose. But that is impossibly convoluted. Still possible, though.
Now, how sensor data even works when you have warp speed … maybe we’re better off just avoiding that altogether. Because it seems to me sensors would be picking up signals from ships from all over the galaxy in tens of thousands of years’ time depending on where each ship was and where it then flew at faster than the speed of light … just no.
The signals all appearing and then vanishing (nobody took a screenshot? The signals vanish so you couldn’t find out where they’d been? Jesus) and then reappearing one at a time though, it all seemed like a huge McGuffin that we should have left behind after the first episode. But that’s a larger question of Trek series structure. I don’t care for this attempt at an overall arc storyline. Deep Space Nine did it well enough, but that was about as far as I think they should have taken it. And they still dropped stand-alone episodes in there. They should have seen from the Enterprise arcs that it wasn’t working out, and tried something different. Lots of sci-fi shows have successfully done overarching plot arcs.
A junior officer-in-training constantly makes herself the center of attention, and yet everyone keeps saying what a great captain she’d make.
I’m with Erikson on this one, Tilly shits me to absolute tears and my favourite moment so far was when Stamets made her say “I will stop saying things.” I get that she’s brilliant in some really specific way and her daffiness is meant to be charming, but no. It’s just grating, and there’s no way so many characters would consider her command material. Potential, maybe, once she goes and does another twenty years of training. All their encouragement just comes off as cruel and shallow.
I’m also unconvinced by Burnham, she’s just not as interesting and compelling a character as I think we’re supposed to consider her. I wouldn’t follow Erikson necessarily as far as declaring her a total Mary Sue as he seems to be flirting with, but she’s not a load-bearing character. And Star Trek: Discovery got some load on it, son.
In fact, I think I’d be way more interested in her without the connection to Spock. She could still have been a human raised on Vulcan, but we’ve basically already had that with Spock (a halfbreed) himself. We’ve also had a Klingon raised among humans. So why not make Burnham something else, to bring depth into another Trek species? Like the Andorians? She could have been a human raised by Andorians. Or the Tellerites, which have apparently been a member species since the beginning of the Federation but we never really see. Their culture of argument and assorted other facets could make for a fascinating character.
Does anyone know who the rest of the bridge crew are? I mean, we keep seeing them and stuff. But this plays into the structural problems with the whole series. No time! Onto the next action scene!
Agreed. There was one episode where we got a really beautiful and poignant look at one of the characters and her backstory, but it was handled appallingly. And then she died. Fucking infuriating.
If you want to build tension, you work at it from page one, and that requires 1) patience, 2) planning, 3) subtlety and nuance, 4) faith that your audience has an attention span longer than that of a cockroach.
Agreed, although #4 there might just be overestimating today’s audiences. Sorry to say.
Does anyone really care whether Burnham and company live or die? I don’t. I can’t even decide if I like anyone on that ship. How can I? I barely know them. The action sequences, the endless rushing about, overwhelms everything else. The stick keeps swinging, wildly, out of control, in a frenzy of set-piece special effects scenes, each one striving to be bigger, louder, more conflagratory than the last one. It’s pretty much Transformers in space, with all the misanthropy thrown in for free.
Again, I rather agree. I like Stamets, and I love Saru, and Pike adds a solid 75% to the total character of the entire crew as a good Captain should … but the rest are just nothing.
Oh, and they spent so goddamn long getting Spock to actually appear on screen, I thought they were leading up to something interesting but it turns out they were just stringing us along. He might as well have appeared five episodes sooner and added some fun smarmy one-liners in a sibling-rivalry context. We haven’t seen a brother and sister in Trek before, although I’m sure I’m just not remembering some example or other. We had Quark and Rom in Deep Space Nine but that was about it. Oh, the Delaney sisters in Voyager, but they were a running joke. They could have done so much with this.
Although the alternative, an adopted Tellerite, would still have been better. Because Spock already had a half-brother, he doesn’t need to be piled on with more bullshit family.
Consider the role of Chief Engineer as an example. When do we see the guy and what’s he doing when we do see him? Well, either it’s his love-life or it’s the frigging spore-drive. Ever seen him in a Jeffries tube with a wrench in his hand? No. Oh, he taps awful fast on the big screens, but then, everyone does that. Does this guy care about his ship? Its engines? Not that I’ve seen. Does he have the emotional attachment real chief engineers have for their vessel, consistent with the tradition? No.
This was really fascinating because Stamets, like I said, is one of the best characters as far as I’m concerned. But I thought he was almost entirely a spore drive and general sciencey type, not Chief Engineer.
And if the argument is that more could have been done with his character, I couldn’t agree more. Make him a new Chief to go into the Trek Pantheon, or else give us a different character as Chief Engineer – an actual proper character – and go full Mos “the Artist” Karturi with Stamets.
That was a reference to my books, if you don’t get it you can go right to Hell.
When it comes to the welfare of a ship you’re on, and therefore your own welfare, who would you rather have as your chief engineer: this guy or Scottie? This guy or Geordi? This guy or O’Brien? This guy or Trip?
Hey now, don’t be leaving out B’Elanna Torres, Steven. That’s sexist. But I’d rather have Torres so your original point stands. I mean, I’d still like Stamets on board, but not as Chief Engineer.
And no, it’s not about him being married to a guy; in fact, I like the efforts at inclusivity that much of the casting exemplifies, and those dubious few ‘fans’ prattling on about SJW’s taking away their Star Trek: you’re idiots, because ST has always been about social justice. What bloody show were you watching? No, the guy could be married to a mushroom for all I care (oh, hang on, I think he is).
Yes. And zing, well played.
On the subject of what audience exactly they’re catering to:
In other words, we can watch and enjoy the Space Fantasy worlds of Marvel Comics and Star Wars, and get plenty from them. But when it comes to Star Trek, we look for something different. We’re not distinct groups as such: we are, in fact, capable of holding different expectations for different franchises.
I don’t mind Star Trek: Discovery, although I’m increasingly irritated and feel increasingly cringey as I watch it. And it shouldn’t go that way. When we watched Enterprise, I felt cringey right from the start and then the feeling gradually faded into “hey, this isn’t awesome but it may just be Star Trek after all”. Discovery doesn’t seem to be going in that direction.
I know plenty of Trekkies who like this show as a Star Trek show, and others who like it (ish) just as a sci-fi show. But it’s really not whelming me in either sense at this point, despite the retconny attempts made to explain some of the problems in recent episodes. All in all, while I wouldn’t go that far with it, I have to side with Mr. Erikson here.
This entry was posted in Hatboy's Movie Extravaganza, Hatboy's Nuggets of Crispy-Fried Wisdom and tagged abrams, reboots, Star Trek, star trek discovery, steven erikson, you know the. Bookmark the permalink.
8 Responses to Star Trek: Discovery
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Opinions are like arseholes. I got my arsehole replaced with an extra opinion.
I know you know what I mean. And that I learned that one from Stover himself.
You said there’s no point discussing matters of taste. I said the same, except of course my taste counts more. Not sure who you learned a saying from really matters.
Wait, why does your taste count more?
(The thread didn’t have the option of a Reply Here text)
I mean, hey, like what you like. Erikson’s clearly not a fan, and wants something else, and – hey, that’s okay!
It was a joke. You know, opinions are like arseholes? I don’t have an arsehole so I get two opinions.
Also it’s my blog and I am like unto a God here.
But yes, like I said in the original post, lots of people don’t like the show and lots of people do. Entirely their call and if they enjoy it, that’s great. I don’t want to spoil that for anyone and I kind of feel like Erikson went a bit far in his “ranting”. I greatly prefer The Santa Clarita Diet myself.
I showed the post to our housemate, Perry, who is a massive Trekker fan, and he frowned when he saw the bit about Erikson complaining about Pike almost flunking a subject about astrophysics or what ever it was, and said “Yeah his job is to be on the bridge and know how to make the right calls, pardon me if he’s not great at everything”.
He also pointed out to me that the comments around Tilly being a wonderful captain some day are likely in part due to her ability to have faked the appearance/tone/voice of the Alt-Tilly in the Murderverse Dimension (maybe that’s where Zack Snyder comes from?).
But that said, Jade, Perry, and I – we all love Tilly. That she’s also presenting a type of autistic person so incredibly well on screen (speaking as someone who has been officially diagnosed as autistic and spent a lot of time reading up on and learning about the subject), and she’s also just really pleasant as a character.
That said – I agree that Stamits could be given more to do. But then, really, whenever I think of a Star Trek Engineer, the line that comes to mind is “I cannae do it captain!” and an image of a moustachioed fellow behind a console spouting techno-babble.
However, I do get the impression that there’s a long-game being played here, and as such, I am loathe to be overly critical of what at present is an unfinished story – one that has managed to take the Kill Your Gay trope and – (OKAY, SPOILERS HERE, SO I AM GOING TO JUMP A FEW LINES DOWN OUT OF BASIC SPOILERY CONSIDERATION SO THAT RIVER SONG DOESN’T GET ANGRY AT ME)
and create a new Not Yet Trope of “Resurrect Your Gays” (Jade’s line, not mine, but I like the line regardless.)
As concerns Michael – I am so very invested in her plight, her story, her decisions, and where she ends up. Sonequa Martin-Green is first and foremost an acting powerhouse, and she had me from the first episode. She’s a marvel to watch. And watching her bounce off equally strong actors? Oh man. Watching her and Anson Mount (Pike) bounce off one another? Or her and Michelle Yeoh? Or Doug Jones? Bring it on.
Granted, I know Star Trek is more about ideas than emotions, but the playing up of character frictions, having people snark at one another, argue with one another – gods it’s fun! Stamets arguing with and working with Jett Reno, or with Spock in a more recent episode, where Spock utters the absolutely BRILLIANT deadpan line of “I really like science” – this iteration really works for me, and for Jade as well, who in comparison to me, enjoyed pre-Discovery Trek quite a bit (she’s well-versed in all things TNG onwards, what I sometimes perhaps unfairly refer to as BB Era – the Berman and Braga Era).
And part of that has to do with, I suspect, upon a considerable amount of analysis, on the aspect ratio used for filming. Most Trek shows prior to Discovery used a 4:3 aspect ratio. Discovery instead went for a 2:1 ratio. Which makes the show feel much more cinematic. That, alongside a changed approach to lighting, makes the sets look and feel, to my eyes, less like props.
I went looking for some information around this, and found one commentator on Reddit who talked about this topic intelligently enough that I’d like to share their thoughts:
“In earlier eras, film stocks and lenses were both much slower than what we have now. You had to put a lot of light into a scene in order to film it. Contrast between light and shadow was difficult to achieve without either overexposing the scene or ending up with an excessively grainy shot. That’s why TV shows like Star Trek and The Next Generation have such flat lighting in general. The DPs on the shows wanted to light scenes creatively, and did to a certain extent, but the technical requirements of lenses and film stocks demanded a certain lighting setup which was neither naturalistic nor particularly artistic.
Now we have *super-*fast lenses available to rent at TV-budget prices, and we have electronic cameras that are as sensitive or more sensitive than the best film stocks of prior decades, with more dynamic range and less noise. So it’s now technically possible to light scenes for TV in ways that were simply not practical until pretty recently.”
(Origin of this text: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/74g9kj/spoiler_is_it_just_me_or_does_star_trek_discovery/dny9zht/)
In line with that, is the approach taken by the cinematographers and designers of the show (via Wikipedia this time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery):
For the visual scope of the series, Kurtzman felt that the show had to “justify being on a premium cable service”. The showrunners were particularly inspired by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its “wider scope”, with Harberts explaining that the series is shot in a 2:1 aspect ratio which “just lends itself to a very lyrical way of telling the story.” He added that some of the series’ visuals were influenced by the modern Star Trek films from J. J. Abrams.
Some of these influences, per Goldsman, are “the ability to be creative cinematically…the intimate discourse, the humanistic storytelling with the giant canvas that is Star Trek. A more kinetic camera, a more dynamic way of existing, a much greater use of practical sets so when you’re running down a corridor, you’re running down a corridor. A sense of rhythm…there is a sense of litheness, a kind of fluidity in the characterisations.”
The producers worked closely with pilot director David Semel to make the series look as cinematic as possible, including filming the bridge of Starfleet’s ships in such a way as “not to shoot in a sort of proscenium box…to be able to get the camera into spaces where, you know, to shoot it in interesting ways, which is a combination of choreographing a scene to motivate the camera moving, and also lighting.”
The cinematographers for the series wanted to emphasize on set sourcing, with lighting built in wherever it would naturally appear to help create a more realistic feel, and distance the series from the “stage” feel of the original series.The lighting could also be controlled to create completely different situations, such as the lighting of a Starfleet red alert. Harberts said that the cinematographers wanted the series to have a “Rembrandt texture”.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this has led to me feeling as though the screen feels less like a set and more like a real place. But I understand this is not everyone’s preference, and that there’s a tie here to nostalgia to a certain extent as well.
I showed the post to our housemate, Perry, who is a massive Trekker fan,
Point of order 1: Like I said in the main post, I don’t care about the Trekkie cred of opinion-holders because they’re all over the shop, so it’s an irrelevant qualification at best, and gatekeeping at worst.
Point of order 2: What the fuck is a Trekker fan? You can be a Star Trek fan, or a Trekker / Trekkie. Do you mean he’s a fan of fans? Or have you nicknamed Star Trek “Trekker” the way some people call rugby “rugger”?
and he frowned when he saw the bit about Erikson complaining about Pike almost flunking a subject about astrophysics or what ever it was, and said “Yeah his job is to be on the bridge and know how to make the right calls, pardon me if he’s not great at everything”.
Yeah, I had no problem with that. Actually I rather liked it, because it was a very clear bit of backstory and character building. I can imagine that, rarefied breed as Starfleet Captains are, something like that “big red F” would be something he is haunted by, if only jokingly. He obviously still got granted a command, and a good pne.
Possibly, yeah. She did that well.
That’s a good point, I didn’t think of it in terms of that sort of spectrum. I can see the appeal.
I’m afraid she still shits me, but I guess I’ll … try to do better?
Right, so like Stamets, except he has a worrybrow instead of a moustache, and the console is holographic in front of his face and often revolving 365 degrees with the camera.
However, I do get the impression that there’s a long-game being played here, and as such, I am loathe to be overly critical of what at present is an unfinished story
Agreed on this too, it’s why I’m still watching. There are glimmers, and Hell I gave Enterprise two or three seasons – full-length old style TV seasons – and was glad I did, so these guys can have the same. Just don’t expect me not to opine about that shit.
– one that has managed to take the Kill Your Gay trope and – (OKAY, SPOILERS HERE, SO I AM GOING TO JUMP A FEW LINES DOWN OUT OF BASIC SPOILERY CONSIDERATION SO THAT RIVER SONG DOESN’T GET ANGRY AT ME)
That’s … true? Look, if there’s one complaint you can’t level at this iteration of the franchise, it’s falling victim to tropes. There might be a few, but if anything they err on the other side of the problem and I have no problem with that.
That’s cool, I’m glad you’re enjoying it.
No I’m with you, it doesn’t even have to be about emotions. Character and dialogue and intelligent interaction is great to watch. We’re probably not going to agree on how much of that is on show in Discovery, but that’s fine.
Don’t you think the “emotion and snark” angle might have been better served, not to mention the whole concept of the Vulcan species preserved, by Michael being adopted into a Tellerite family? The idea just occurred to me as I was writing the blog post and now I can’t let it go, I think it would have been great – and way better for her character and her acting chops. Why do we need to keep piling stuff onto the Vulcans – and Spock in particular? There are other worlds in the Federation.
And part of that has to do with, I suspect, upon a considerable amount of analysis, on the aspect ratio used for filming.
True. I snipped all the copy-pasted stuff about the techniques, though it was interesting. I just don’t have much to add there. It’s not a huge deal to me, although obviously it makes the show look “less Trek”. However, they’ve been playing with that for a long time. The look and feel of Terok Nor in Deep Space Nine, and the overall near-industrial look of Enterprise, were good attempts while still keeping with a theme.
Discovery benefits from almost two decades in advancement of special effects technology, and blows a lot of it (to my mind) in weird camera-pans and attempted-gritty realism that just makes everything look gloomy. Which isn’t to say that the camera movements and setups aren’t sometimes great! They definitely are. It all just adds up to a net loss for me, in terms of watchability. But that’s just personal taste, I’m glad this style appealed to you and helped bring in a new viewer.
What’s fascinating is that people had the opposite complaint about the movie reboots, which were apparently made by the same crowd! Those had the Trek look dialled up to 11, and lens flares thrown in. There was some gloom and gothicry (there always is in alien enemy ships and habitats though, always has been), but most of it was pure Trek bubblegum with halogen spotlights behind every camera.
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Introduction to Hilltop
Hilltop By-laws
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Hilltop Community
I live in a place called Hilltop Community (Bellevue WA), in a home designed by John Morse in 1951 for Victor and Beth Scheffer. Approximately 150 feet to the east is the home that Morse designed and built for his own family about a year earlier. The Scheffer and Morse houses sit on a piece of land at the top of a gentle hill. From both structures, views stretch out to the north and south through large panes of glass, while the spaces within rest upon platforms suspended between the opposing vistas. Like many other houses in the neighborhood, these are simple platforms in the landscape. There is an informal quality to the rooms that allows one to feel part of each site. The Scheffer house is small, but provides views to the garden and horizon from any point, thus pushing the perception of space out well beyond the actual enclosure. Although the idea of the Morse house is similar, it was also somewhat larger. He referred to his home as having a “barn like space” that was well suited to the many community meetings that were held there.
In 1993, a few months before my family moved into the Scheffer house, I had not heard of John Morse. I knew only of his one time partner, Fred Bassetti. However, I soon learned the story of how these two architects, along with other architects and educators at the University of Washington, had been the founders of this intriguing place called Hilltop Community. After living in the Scheffer home and participating in the community, I gradually realized that to understand the design of any house at Hilltop, one had to also gain an understanding for the community philosophy as a whole. I spoke with John about the houses he had designed at Hilltop and he always referred to them in modest terms; sometimes describing the structures as “Harvard boxes” or simply “boxes.” His enthusiasm and pride were most evident when he spoke of the idea and spirit of Hilltop and the unique character of the community that emerged. Here was a situation where clearly, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts
The general history of Hilltop Community is thoroughly covered in Victor Scheffer’s book Hilltop: A Collaborative Community (Bellevue Historical Society, 1994), however a brief description of its inception is necessary to provide some context. In 1946, the initial participants in Hilltop Community began looking for a place to build. As it turned out, Morse was the member who found the site in September of 1947. It was somewhat remote and difficult to access, but the numerous hikes and picnics to the hill confirmed to everyone involved that this was the place to pursue their dream. For months there were frequent meetings spent planning the community, determining financing and infrastructure, and establishing the rules by which they would function. One of the first concepts to take shape was an overall definition of building design called the site plan rules. An early version of these rules stated that houses were required to “...have a straightforward contemporary character...adapted to the site. Achievement of a harmonious relationship between individual houses is considered to be an important factor. It is felt that the traditional styles would not be compatible with the character of the development we seek.”
In 1997, when he was asked what was meant by “contemporary,” Morse replied with a characteristic dry wit: “Well that’s the safest word we could find which meant nothing. However we put it to use because one would-be-owner proposed a log cabin. We said no way and so he withdrew.” Having lived in a ‘contemporary’ Morse designed house for more than 40 years, Scheffer had this to say: “If I may speak for the founders, I suggest that ‘contemporary’ is functional, designed more for comfort, utility, and internal beauty than for display. As though to acknowledge humankind’s primal link to the planet, it favors the use of natural materials such as wood and stone, complemented by the lightness of space... It stands for honest construction... It expresses the richness of simplicity.”
A description by Morse about the early planning process for the community provides a sense of the site and the integral part it played in the design of the structures to come: “How do you physically plan and develop the hill? We had enough dreamers and enough engineers and enough architects and enough artists and enough environmentalists to make quite a team to plan that community... We had a topo survey made and we... designed the location and shape of the road… By hiking and looking we decided what were good sites for houses... Those sights were selected at about 150-foot spacings which gave plenty of privacy for everybody. After that, we drew the property lines, contrary to usual development, where you lay out a grid of lots and then sell them off. We got 40 sites on 63 acres and we left a space in the middle for a play field development and a border -- a green belt we called it -- around the community of about 60 feet or more in width... After we laid out the physical development, people chose their lots.”
Thus each site was established not as a piece of property, but as a specific place in the landscape. Each place had a floor elevation that had a precise relationship to the site. The first community plan drawing depicted each site as a rectangular platform with a number in feet above sea level. The physical manifestation of the Hilltop dwellings began as conceptual camping platforms where the early community members hiked and explored. This initial idea carried through to the design of many of the actual houses. Some are concrete slab-on-grade (left exposed) while others hover as slightly elevated wooden platforms.
John Morse was the principal architect for 8 of the 39 Hilltop houses. These structures represent a consistent dedication to the principles and spirit of the site and the community. The first two houses by Morse (Jones, 1949 and Isaacs, 1950) take advantage of a “head and tail” strategy where the living space is the primary volume and the bedrooms, bathrooms, and carport trail off as secondary elements. In the Isaacs house the tail components wrap to form a “U” that defines the primary dwelling platform as an outdoor courtyard.
Beginning with his own house in 1950, Morse designed a series of simpler structures to establish the dwelling platform while the site and views define the overall spatial parameters. In these houses the bedrooms and bathrooms are compacted into a service zone contained within the primary volume. The houses of Scheffer (1951), Birnbaum (1954), Lerchenmueller (1956), and Yang (1959) follow this theme. Each plan becomes progressively more simple and clear in its approach. These houses were built on modest budgets that were reflected in the size of the structures and level of detailing. Morse commented on this economy and simplicity: “...a lot of people called them boxes and they were… that seemed to be the simplest form and… the cheapest to build.” These structures also directly reflect the concept of platforms in the landscape as established in the original community site plan. They allow the outdoor room of each site to overlap and move through the enclosed space. The houses are spatially modern, yet due to their intimate scale and straightforward detailing, they avoid the expression of a self-conscious modernism. Details consist of simple juxtapositions of basic elements. Structural systems butt together or overlap without the use of custom fittings. Ceiling heights are relatively low, reinforcing the presence of floor and roof planes that frame the views to the landscape beyond.
The Hilltop houses of John Morse provide a simple place to dwell without overwhelming their sites with complex programs or elaborate architectural inventions. They rely on proportion and scale and the landscape around them to communicate their art. These houses offer a poetic simplicity that defers to the greater notion of site and a strong community fabric.
John Morse passed away on July 26, 2000
Charles Anderson is an architect in Seattle and lecturer at the University of Washington
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From IS Theory
This site is sponsored by the University of Colorado
Hermeneutic theory
Alternate name(s)
Theory of Interpretation, Hermeneutics
Main dependent construct(s)/factor(s)
Main independent construct(s)/factor(s)
Concise description of theory
Hermeneutic theory is a member of the social subjectivist paradigm where meaning is inter-subjectively created, in contrast to the empirical universe of assumed scientific realism (Berthon et al. 2002). Other approaches within this paradigm are social phenomenology and ethnography. As part of the interpretative research family, hermeneutics focuses on the significance that an aspect of reality takes on for the people under study. Hermeneutics focuses on defining shared linguistic meaning for a representation or symbol.
In order to reach shared understanding as proposed in hermeneutic theory, subjects must have access to shared linguistic and interpretative resources (Marshall et al. 2001). However, hermeneutic theory also posits that linguistic meaning is likely open to infinite interpretation and reinterpretation due to the interpretative ambiguity coming from presuppositions, to the conditions of usage different from authorial intention, and to the evolution of words (Marshall et al. 2001).
Due to its interpretive nature, hermeneutics cannot be approached using a pre-determined set of criteria that is applied in a mechanical fashion (Klein et al. 1999). However, a meta-principal, known as the hermeneutic circle, guides the hermeneutic approach where the process of understanding moves from parts of a whole to a global understanding of the whole and back to individual parts in an iterative manner (Klein et al. 1999). This meta-principal allows the development of a complex whole of shared meanings between subjects, or between researchers and their subjects (Klein et al. 1999).
Other co-existing principles that may help assure rigorous interpretive analysis involve: a) understanding the subject according to its social and historical context, b) assessing the historical social construction between the researcher and the subject, c) relating ideographic details to general theoretical concepts through abstraction and generalization, d) being sensitive to potential pre-conceptual theoretical contradictions between research design and actual findings, e) being aware of possible multiple interpretations among participants for a given sequence of events, and f) being conscious of potential biases or systematic distortions in the subject’s narratives (Klein et al. 1999).
Berthon, P., Pitt, L., Ewing, M., and Carr, C., L. "Potential research space in MIS: A framework for envisioning and evaluating research replication, extension, and generation," Information Systems Research (13:4) 2002, p 416.
Klein, H.K., and Myers, M.D. "A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems," MIS Quarterly (23:1) 1999, p 67.
Marshall, N., and Brady, T. "Knowledge management and the politics of knowledge: Illustrations from complex products and systems," European Journal of Information Systems (10:2) 2001, p 99.
Diagram/schematic of theory
Originating author(s)
Berger, P., and Luckman, T., Bernstein, R.J., Derrida, J., Gadamer, H.G., Heidegger, M., Palmer, R., Ricoeur, P.
Seminal articles
Berger, P., and Luckman, T. The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge, Penguin Publishers, London, 1967.
Bernstein, R.J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania, 1983.
Derrida, J. On Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976.
Gadamer H.-G. Philosophical Hermeneutics, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.
Heidegger M. Being and Time, SCM Press, London, 1962.
Palmer, R., Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1969.
Ricoeur, P. The conflict of interpretations : essays in hermeneutics, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1974.
Originating area
Level of analysis
IS articles that use the theory
Bhattacharjee, A. ""Interpretive" mobility, IS and computing," European Journal of Information Systems (13:3) 2004, p 167.
Boland, R.J.J. "Information System Use as a Hermeneutic Process," in: Information Systems Research: Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions, H.-E. Nissen, H.K. Klein and R.A. Hirschheim (eds.), North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1991, pp. 439-464.
Chalmers, M. "Hermeneutics, information and representation," European Journal of Information Systems (13:3) 2004, p 210.
Davis, G.B., Lee, A.S., Nickles, K.R., Chatterjee, S., Hartung, R., and Wu, Y. "Diagnosis of an Information System Failure: A Framework and Interpretive Process," Information & Management (23:5) 1992, p 293.
Hirschheim, R., and Klein, H.K. "Realizing emancipatory principles in information systems development: The case for ETHICS," MIS Quarterly (18:1) 1994, p 83.
Klein, H.K., and Truex III, D.P. "Discourse Analysis: A Semiotic Approach to the Investigation of Organizational Emergence," in: The Semiotics of the Workplace, P.B. Andersen and B. Holmqvist (eds.), Walter De Gruyter, Berlin, 1995.
Lacity, M.C., and Janson, M.A. "Understanding qualitative data: A framework of text analysis methods," Journal of Management Information Systems (11:2) 1994, p 137.
Lee, A.S. "Electronic mail as a medium for rich communication: An empirical investigation using hermeneutic interpretation," MIS Quarterly (18:2) 1994, p 143.
Loizos, H., and Michael, B. "Organizational change as discourse: Communicative actions and deep structures in the context of information technology implementation," Academy of Management Journal (44:4) 2001, p 755.
Lynch, T., and Gregor, S. "User participation in decision support systems development: Influencing system outcomes," European Journal of Information Systems (13:4) 2004, p 286.
Mingers, J. "Combining IS research methods: Towards a pluralist methodology," Information Systems Research (12:3) 2001, p 240.
Myers, M. "A Disaster for Everyone to See: An Interpretive Analysis of a Failed IS Project," Accounting, Management and Information Technologies (4:4) 1997, pp 185-201.
Ngwenyama, O.K., and Lee, A.S. "Communication richness in electronic mail: Critical social theory and the contextuality of meaning," MIS Quarterly (21:2) 1997, p 145.
Panagiotidis, P., and Edwards, J.S. "Organisational learning--A critical systems thinking discipline," European Journal of Information Systems (10:3) 2001, p 135.
Perry, M.J. "(IS)4: is information systems interesting in itself?," European Journal of Information Systems (12:3) 2003, p 231.
Phillips, N., and Brown, J.L. "Analyzing communication in and around organizations: A critical hermeneutic approach," Academy of Management Journal (36:6) 1993, p 1547.
Sarker, S., and Lee, A. S. “Does the Use of Computer-based BPC Tools Contribute to Redesign Effectiveness? Insights from a Hermeneutic Study," IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (IEEE-TEM), Vol. 53, No. 1, 2006, pp. 130-145.
Trauth, E.M., and Jessup, L.M. "Understanding computer-mediated discussions: Positivist and interpretive analyses of group support system use," MIS Quarterly (24:1) 2000, p 43.
Links from this theory to other theories
Social cognitive theory, Language action perspective, Phenomenology, Organizational learning, Communication Theory, Sensemaking, Social Learning Theory, Ethnomethodology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics, Wikipedia Encyclopedia Entry
http://www.bartleby.com/65/he/hermeneu.html, Columbia Encyclopedia Entry
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/, Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry
http://www.friesian.com/hermenut.htm, Entry in The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series
Original Contributor(s)
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Return to Theories Used in IS Research
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F.R.E.E. International to Expand Reach Through STL
Speed the Light has made F.R.E.E. International a special project this year to help purchase additional response vehicles for the anti-trafficking ministry. on Jul 5 2019
When Michael and Denise Bartel began working to rescue and restore victims of human trafficking in 2004 in Eurasia, they had no idea God was preparing them to lead a ministry that is now fast becoming a trusted leader in the United States’ fight against human trafficking.
Recently, the Bartel’s ministry, F.R.E.E. International, was selected by Speed the Light (STL), the Assemblies of God’s Youth missions program that focuses on meeting the transportation and communication needs of missionaries, as an STL special project.
The Bartels, who serve as AG U.S. missionaries with Intercultural Ministries, base F.R.E.E. International out of Las Vegas, with a second mobile command center in the Gulf region. The ministry also has 16 additional missionaries and workers serving throughout the country.
The mobile command centers are 48-foot-long trailers pulled by powerful pick-up trucks. Michael Bartel explains that the trailers are multifunctional, offering a broad range of resources, from medical and dental to mentoring services and assisting law enforcement with search and rescue missions. “Whatever the need, these units have the space and flexibility to meet that need,” Bartel says.
However, although the command centers are ideal for large areas, on inner-city narrow streets, logistical problems arise. “It’s tough to respond quickly with a 48-foot trailer and truck,” Bartel says. “We needed a smaller version of the units to allow us to be more nimble when we get a call or attempt to provide services in cramped neighborhoods.”
STL, which has assisted F.R.E.E. International with the purchase of its first two mobile command centers, recognized the need and the opportunity for the ministry to increase its effectiveness.
“Currently they’re raising funds for us to buy two medical units, two scaled-down command centers, and three smaller and more nimble rapid response vehicles along with an 18-foot outreach trailer,” Bartel says. “All of the vehicles will come with the latest facial recognition technology to assist us in identifying and rescuing missing and exploited children.”
Eric Hoffman, Speed the Light national director, says STL is honored to partner with a vital ministry such as F.R.E.E. International.
“Sex trafficking is the fastest growing market in our nation and it is directly impacting this generation of young people,” Hoffman says. “As I continue to share with teens and adults alike about the darkness within trafficking, from state to state the response has been the same: Somebody should do something about it! Why not us? Through this effort, I believe that we can play a small part in rescuing and restoring those who have been trafficked.”
Bartel says one of the most successful events they lead several times a year — which is also supported by Boys and Girls Missionary Challenge (BGMC) — is something they call The Big Search. This event entails involving local law enforcement, churches, and other ministries and organizations to help locate missing and/or trafficked kids.
“We just did a Big Search and based everything out of the mobile command center,” Bartel says. “In 72 hours, 24 kids were recovered.”
The mobile units are used almost daily. For example, in addition to all the other efforts F.R.E.E. International is a part of, in the Gulf, the organization’s lead there, Jody Dyess, has trained 7,000 first responders (firefighters and EMS personnel) out of that command center and around 2,000 law enforcement officers.
Jody and his wife, Wendy, are the directors of Student Awareness with F.R.E.E. International. Formerly U.S missionaries with Youth Alive, they transitioned to Intercultural Ministries missionaries in 2015 to serve with F.R.E.E. International fulltime.
“We have the same-sized rig as they do in Las Vegas, but here we use ours mainly in association with law enforcement searching for trafficked and missing children,” Jody says. “Our front work portion has eight computer stations as well as a law enforcement dispatch station from which they can work from.”
Dyess says that one of the new, smaller investigative vehicles provided by STL will be joining the command center in the Gulf, which will aid in maneuverability. He says that through their school assemblies, more than 400,000 students nationwide have heard F.R.E.E. International’s challenging and inspirational message to both recognize and avoid human trafficking.
Although there may seem to be something glamorous about rescuing individuals who are being trafficked, it is not without its risks. Bartel is well aware that there are people who profit immensely through trafficking, and “breaking free” is far more difficult than some may imagine. Yet by working closely with law enforcement, while also often providing resources — including free medical care — F.R.E.E. International is able to serve the vulnerable while searching for the missing and trafficked.
Bartel understands that no anti-trafficking organization is large enough to cover the world or even the United States, but he believes that if the Church gets involved, local churches can make huge impacts on their neighborhoods and communities.
“If we’re going to get anywhere [in ending human trafficking],” Bartel observes, “it is going to be through the agency God chose, which is His Church. We have strong connections with federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as the government, but the thing that is going to make the biggest impact is how good we do in mobilizing the local church and getting their involvement.”
Dan Van Veen
Dan Van Veen is news editor of AG News. Prior to transitioning to AG News in 2001, Van Veen served as managing editor of AG U.S. Missions American Horizon magazine for five years. He attends Central Assembly of God in Springfield, Missouri, where he is BGMC coordinator and teaches 4- and 5-year-old Rainbows boys and girls.
1445 North Boonville Avenue
usmissions@ag.org
© 2019 The General Council of the Assemblies of God
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PCMag India | Motorola Moto Z3 | News
Race to 5G: June 2019 Update
By Sascha Segan
Sprint's new 5G network covers more ground than either AT&T's or Verizon's does, on day one. But how does it perform? Check out the status of the race to 5G in June.
Verizon maintains its lead in the Race to 5G for June, but there's a bold new competitor lighting up the map in yellow. Sprint 5G is here, it's big, and it's different.
At the end of May, Sprint launched its mid-band 5G network in four cities, immediately covering more people and more area than any other 5G launch has done so far. In Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Kansas City, Sprint now says it covers 3.59 million people, far more than AT&T or Verizon are doing. That doesn't quite get it points for coverage, though: You need to cover 5 million people to get a point in our scoring system.
SEE ALSO: Verizon Launches 5G in Chicago, Minneapolis With Moto Z3
Sprint is now selling a phone and a hotspot, the LG V50 and the HTC 5G Hub, netting it six points. We tested the LG V50 on launch day in Dallas, and had middling results—speeds went up to 700Mbps on a Sprint bus tour, but were harder to track down when we were on our own. That means the network doesn't get points for speed, either. With Sprint 5G launching in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and Washington at some point in June or July, we look forward to testing it again soon.
Verizon still says it's available only in central Chicago and Minneapolis, although we've heard reports of Verizon 5G working in downtown Saint Paul. The company has been selling the Moto Z3, the new Moto Z4, and Samsung Galaxy S10 5G phones to eager subscribers in those cities. We award five points when our partners at Ookla tell us that ten devices have passed a 1Gbps threshold on a 5G network, and four more if all the 5G connections average out above 200Mbps. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company.) Verizon surpassed both of those thresholds by a long shot this month, so it gets 9 solid points for speed.
AT&T's situation hasn't changed much from last month. It still says it has 5G in 19 cities, but only on a hotspot, and only by invitation. We are not currently giving AT&T any points for speed or coverage, although it gets 3 points for the hotspot. AT&T has an entertainment conference, SHAPE, on June 22-23, and we're hoping it launches the Galaxy S10 5G there or gives more details on coverage.
T-Mobile is the only major carrier that now hasn't shown some form of 5G. The company has pledged to launch 5G by the end of the first half of 2019—which means the end of June—but it's in a bit of a tough position because its 5G strategy is heavily dependent on low-band 5G, which won't be supported by any devices until later this fall. T-Mobile owns some millimeter wave 5G spectrum in a handful of major, important cities, so we anticipate it will launch a little bit of 5G in those cities, along with the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G phone, by the end of June to fulfill its promise.
Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle are our best guesses for upcoming T-Mobile launches. We've tested T-Mobile's pre-launch 5G here in New York and gotten speeds up to about 500Mbps, which is great performance considering it has limited millimeter wave spectrum and it's on an unofficial network.
Verizon Launches 5G in Chicago, Minneapolis With Moto Z3
Verizon to Launch Mobile 5G in 30 Cities This Year
How Fast Is a 5G Phone? We Find Out With Motorola's Z3 on Verizon
Qualcomm's Next Snapdragon Is Not the 8150
Sascha Segan Lead Analyst, Mobile
PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite ... See Full Bio
More From Sascha Segan
Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Generation)
Amazon Fire HD 10
Amazon Echo Input
Samsung Galaxy Note 10 'Unpacked' Event Set for Aug. 7
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Modernisation of water management key to India’s modernisation, says President Ram Nath Kovindhttps://indianexpress.com/article/india/modernisation-of-water-management-key-to-indias-modernisation-says-president-ram-nath-kovind-4884449/
Speaking at the inaugural function of the fifth India Water week, 2017, he said that water was fundamental to “economy, ecology and human equity” and that the issue was becoming more critical in view of climate change and related environmental concerns.
By Express News Service |New Delhi | Published: October 11, 2017 4:30:53 am
President Ram Nath Kovind bats for translating High Court verdicts in local languages
President Kovind to release translated copies of 100 SC verdicts
Decisive mandate to Narendra Modi to build new India: Prez Ram Nath Kovind
In India, he said, water was central to some of the government’s flagship programmes. (File Photo)
Noting that India supports 17 per cent of the global population, but only had four per cent of the world’s water resources, President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday said, “I would go to the extent of saying that the modernisation of India is dependent on the modernisation of its water management.” In India, he said, water was central to some of the government’s flagship programmes.
Speaking at the inaugural function of the fifth India Water week, 2017, he said that water was fundamental to “economy, ecology and human equity” and that the issue was becoming more critical in view of climate change and related environmental concerns. “I would urge a water management approach that is localised. It should empower village and neighbourhood communities and build their capacity to manage, allocate and value their water resources,” he said.
He added that any 21st-century water policy must factor in the “concept of value of water” and encourage all stakeholders, including communities, to expand their mind and to “graduate from allocating a quantum of water to allocating a quantum of benefits.”
Presently, 80 per cent of water in India is used by agriculture and only 15 per cent by industry, he said, adding that “this ratio will change” in the years to come. “The total demand for water will also rise. The efficiency of water use and reuse, therefore, has to be built into the blueprint of industrial projects. Business and industry need to be a part of the solution.”
President Ram Nath Kovind
1 SIT probe ordered into farmer deaths due to pesticides in Maharashtra
2 Passive euthanasia Bill ready, but ‘living will’ may be misused: Govt tells SC
3 On PM Modi’s Economic Advisory Council table today: Speeding up growth and generating jobs
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The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
Alice Shalvi
Shalvi, Alice: See biographical entry.
Suzy Yogev
Yogev may be said to have been instrumental in changing not only the name but also the role of women serving in the IDF, in keeping with principles of equality and equal opportunity.
Dvora Tomer
Tomer was the first woman outside the Women’s Corps to obtain the rank of colonel, thus paving the way for other women.
Michal Smoira-Cohn
One of Israel’s best-known musicologists, Smoira-Cohn’s expertise has led to her involvement in innumerable musical features and events and continues to be a leading figure in Israel’s cultural life.
Mathilde Dorothy De Rothschild
Shortly before her eighteenth birthday, Mathilde Dorothy (Dolly) de Rothschild married James de Rothschild (1878–1957) and so moved into a whirl of political, social and Zionist life. When her husband was mobilized into the French army in 1914 Dorothy was left to act as the intermediary between him and his father and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was then living in London. Thus she became deeply immersed in all facets of Zionist politics.
Dalia Raz
Dalia Raz enlisted in the IDF in 1955, first serving in the Nahal (Fighting Pioneer Youth), where she was promoted to NCO before proceeding to officer training. In 1957, she was appointed head of personnel in the navy, becoming the only woman ever to serve in this position.
Israela Oron
Israela Oron was active in effecting women’s integration into the military and in ensuring the recognition of their enormous potential in contributing to the Israel Defense Forces.
Dalia Ofer
A noted historian of contemporary Jewry, with a research specialization in Holocaust studies, Dalia Ofer was born in Jerusalem on January 8, 1939.
Ora Namir
One of Israel’s outstanding advocates and legislators in the field of social justice in general and women’s rights in particular, Ora Namir was the only child of pioneering agricultural laborers in the moshav of Hoglah in the central Sharon region of Israel (founded in 1933).
Ruth Muskal
Born in Israel, Ruth Muskal studied education at both the A voluntary collective community, mainly agricultural, in which there is no private wealth and which is responsible for all the needs of its members and their families.Kibbutz Seminar and in university. She joined the IDF in 1955 and filled various positions until her promotion to OC Women’s Corps (See “CHEN”: Women’s Corps in the Israel Defense Forces).
Israel Women's Network
To page through the newsletters and annual reports published periodically by the Israel Women’s Network between February 1986 and January 2000 is to become aware of the powerful impact that can be made by a group of well-informed, energetic, articulate and determined feminists. Combining consciousness-raising, education, litigation and lobbying, the Israel Women’s Network was responsible for a veritable transformation in the status, image and self-image of Israeli women which marked the last fifteen years of the twentieth century.
Jewish Women's Archive. "Alice Shalvi." (Viewed on July 15, 2019) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/shalvi-alice>.
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← Libraricating
‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson →
‘The Silkworm’ by Robert Galbraith
J.K. Rowling has a sense of humour. After it became public that Robert Galbraith was a pseudonym for her new crime novel series, she came to the Theakston’s Crime Writing Festival dressed in a suit and tie! Rowling has implied that the new series which started with ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, will go the distance as long or longer than the Harry Potter series, with at least six or seven instalments. This second in the series was, in my opinion, way better than the first, so I think she is finding her stride in this genre, and with the characters of Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin. Although I don’t think this series holds any of the genius that she displayed with Harry Potter, I am looking forward to what is coming next. The series definitely now ‘has legs’, a pun in poor taste if you know that the protagonist is a war veteran with a debilitating injury.
‘The Silkworm’ is set in the literary world of authors and publishers and editors, perhaps because the author knows the publishing industry. When Owen Quine goes missing after writing a despicable controversial book, his wife calls Cormoran Strike to investigate. Quine has gone off before, but when it becomes clear that there are several people who are angry about the poisonous portraits he has written into the new book, and when his body is discovered in brutally bizarre circumstances, the investigator realizes there might be several people who wanted Quine silenced. I love how Cormoran gathers all of the suspects into one room near the end and flushes out the culprit – reminds me of the old classic whodunits. Cormoran as a character, in my mind’s eye, kind of reminds me of a younger, more handsome version of Fitz from Cracker (Robbie Coltrane).
Robert Galbraith even has his own website! (Robert Galbraith Website) I especially enjoyed the FAQs there.
This entry was posted in Fiction and tagged J.K. Rowling, Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm. Bookmark the permalink.
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JODY WHITESIDES
happy when I'm with you
All posts tagged with: happy when I'm with you
January 14, 2014 In Video Tagged as colin hanks happy when I'm with you lucky lyric video lyrics movie video youtube By Jody Whitesides
Happy When I'm With You Lyric Video
Back in 2011 I had a song I had cowritten with Johnny Elkins appear in a movie starring Colin Hanks. That movie is called “Lucky”. Ever since it’s release I’ve had people contacting me about the song “Happy When I’m With You” which appears in the middle of the movie as the song playing over the montage sequence. People wanting to know what the words are can now do their own karaoke of it with the video below. The only place to purchase the song is here Buy Now.
Happy When I’m With You Lyric Video
http://youtu.be/J1h90GO9aUE
“Welcome. Thank you for stopping by in order to watch the official lyric video for Happy When I’m With You, the song that appears in the movie Lucky starring Colin Hanks.”
Doesn’t matter the time or the place
Only know there’s a smile taking over my face
Always seems to be here when you’re there
Just feel it inside and it’s in the air
I’m happy when I’m with you
I’m hap-a hap-a hap-a happy when I‘m with you
Doesn’t really matter what we do
I’m hap-a hap-a hap-a happy when I‘m with
Happy when I’m with you
Jumping over the sun dancing under the rain
Acting seriously or completely insane
Ain’t no place on earth that I’d rather be
Then with me next to you and you next me
When I’m with you there’s sunshine
In my heart the whole time
Everybody around us is catching the feelings
We’re feeling
Chorus Out:
Wanna know more about the song click here.
March 16, 2012 In News Tagged as colin hanks happy when I'm with you happy when I'm with you lyrics jody whitesides lucky lyrics movie music By Jody Whitesides
Happy When I'm With You Lyrics
It appears that a recent request for a copy of a song I’ve written has sparked a little interest across the internet. The song in question makes an appearance in the movie Lucky starring Colin Hanks. Recent traffic to my little corner of the web has shown that there’s a growing interest in this song. Such that people are looking for the words. I’m announcing that I’m posting the Happy When I’m With You lyrics in my lyrics section.
If the interest continues I may very well see what can be done about releasing the song to iTunes and other digital outlets. In the meantime if you’re landing here due to wanting to find a copy of the song and/or lyrics then you’re welcome to purchase the song directly from me. You’ll even get a better version than what could be bought via iTunes or Amazon.
There is one catch…
In order to read the lyrics you’ll have to login to the website. Easy enough to do with your favorite social ID. No extra site info to fill out. Just pick your favorite one and away you go. You’ll get the words directly from me. What can be better?
Thanks for stopping in. Take a look around and explore my sound a little further.
March 6, 2012 In In Film Tagged as amazon ann-margaret ari gaynor bigfoot colin hanks happy when I'm with you itunes jeffery tambor jody whitesides johnny elkins lucky mimi rogers movie music nessie pirate song youtube By Jody Whitesides
Lucky Music In A Movie
I got an email recently. One from someone who had seen a movie that was released mid year last year. The movie in question actually has me scratching my head about one of the supposed stars in the film. As it turns out, a song that I had a hand in writing and performing called “Happy When I’m With You” was in this movie. In a way, I could say it’s lucky music in a movie.
The flick is called Lucky. It’s main star is Colin Hanks. Son of Tom Hanks. Other stars include Jeffery Tambor, Mimi Rogers, Ari Graynor, and Ann-Margaret. If I were prone to playing the Sesame Street game of which one of these is not like the other, it would be Mimi Rogers. Why? Well, quite frankly due to the fact that she is credited with a starring roll and I couldn’t find her in a single moving image in the movie. That’s pretty Lucky if you ask me.
Music can often make or break a film. While I would like to think the song I co-wrote in the film made the movie, it did fit very well and didn’t break it. How it got in was a little strange and how it got credited was a bit of a mistake. See, I did write the song with Johnny Elkins. I did perform all the instruments (except for the drums, they were done by my buddy Donny Gruendler). I did sing the song. Where it names the artist performing it should have said: The Pieces. Somehow it got credited to me – Jody Whitesides. Additionally, it got credited with the wrong title too.
I’m not trying to hide from something I created. It was an agreement Johnny and I had that it would go out as a band name rather than a solo artist. Despite that, somewhere along the line, there was miscommunication on the credits part and I got named. Not the end of the world. Oh well.
Getting back to the original first line here. Someone wrote me an interesting email. In it, he had stated how he tried to find the song on iTunes, Amazon, and other digital sites and could not find it. Then he went on to explain how he tried to find it on YouTube, other places and then pirate sites. All to no avail. He likened it to a search of Bigfoot and Nessie. This made me chuckle and I was flattered. Flattered that someone would go to such lengths to find a song from a movie.
Needless to say the song was not released on a soundtrack. Johnny and I never thought of releasing the song. It’s a catalog type of track, that wasn’t really intended for sale. However, I loved the email so much and I felt this fan really wanted the song. So we made an agreement. He sent a $1 and I got him a copy of the song for his very own.
I’m going to guess that you’re reading this post right now having searched for Happy When I’m With You as co-written and performed by Jody Whitesides. Which means you’ve seen the movie and now wondering where you can obtain a copy of that song. Which to me is lucky music in a movie. You can contact me and I’ll work it out with you on how to get the song. I also appreciate that you want to purchase it and not pirate it. That means the world to me.
Maybe You’re The Problem
Grand Rapids Drive Lyric Video
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Canton Charge Lyric Video
© 2019 Too Much Music
There's more to life than just traffic jams
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Normani Gets Candid About Wanting To Rep For Young Black Women
posted by Hayden Brooks - Jan 10, 2019
We're less than 24 hours away from her anticipated team-up with Sam Smith, but Normani's new Billboard cover story has arrived to hold us over and it sees the former Fifth Harmony singer get candid about her responsibility as a black woman in mainstream music.
"There's so much that I have to get off my chest," the 22-year-old singer told the magazine. "And there’s a responsibility I have as a black woman -- one of the very few to have the power to kill it. Even in the mainstream, there's not many of us. Especially chocolate girls. Like, being African-American is one thing, but girls [with] my complexion, it's unheard of. It's me, and SZA. Who else?"
Normani's pursuit to rep for young black women is one that exists far beyond her career in Hollywood. Elsewhere in the interview, she revealed that she was one of just three black students in her predominately white elementary school. "It was a subconscious thing," she revealed. "You think, 'Why am I the least followed in the group?' Even if you don't recognize that you're paying close attention to it, it takes a toll on your confidence. You worry -- is it me? Is it because I'm black? Or am I just not talented?"
It eventually caused a moment of tension for her when she received death threats after Camila Cabello fans thought the singer dissed her in a Facebook Live interview in 2016. "They tried to be there for me as best as they could," she said of her other bandmates. "But I don't think they had the tools that they needed, because it's not their experience. I can give them credit for trying to be there for me, but at the same time...The girls don't experience things the way I did."
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MAURIZIO AMBROGETTI
Dr. Maurizio Ambrogetti is President and Founding Shareholder of J.A.S. Motorsport. Born in Milan in 1948 he holds a bachelor degree in Politic Science and Business from Università Statale di Milano.
Motor enthusiast since he was young, in the early 70s he found a Company as Italian exclusive distributor of PUCH Enduro motorbikes, a well-known Austrian brand.
Dr. Maurizio Ambrogetti has worked for more than twenty-five years (1973 – 1998) in his family-owned Company which has been leader for chemical products distribution in Italy. Former President and shareholder of Pioneer Car Stereo Italia, and later of Alpine Italia Car Audio System, both top level electronic brands in the world.
During the 70’s he has been a rally driver for ten years; contesting more than 100 rallies, he won the Italian GT Rally Championship in 1973. Later in the 80’s, he switched to Powerboat races.
He raced in different Motorboat categories, winning two times the European Offshore Championship in Class 1 (1990 -1991) and in 1991 the World Championship. Furthermore he won twice the renowned Viareggio-Bastia-Viareggio race (1983 -1991).
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