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Voices From My Heart
While it is pleasant enough to sit back and listen to Julian strum his guitar and perform an absolutely perfect vocal impression of Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable”, it turns into a true masterpiece when Julian brings Natalie Cole into the act and accompanies himself with her soprano voice.
At a recent Princeton University event, this beautiful “duet” rendition of “Unforgettable” brought tears to the eyes of Mrs. Nat King Cole, who was in the audience.
It is during his performances in both local and regional clubs/restaurants that Julian can be heard doing high quality musical impressions of Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Johnny Mathis, Louis Armstrong, Luther Vandross and Barry White. While these are stirring renditions of classic hits and they draw raves from the audience, it is when he does the Coles – both father and daughter – that he brings down the house. People simply cannot believe that this beautiful music is coming from one person.
But, Julian’s talent does not stop there. Julian wrote and sang on the hit song “Take Me In Your Arms” with Lil Suzy. It sold over 600,000 copies as a single and reached number 48 on the Billboard Chart. He has also performed with such outstanding artists as Ben E. King, The Stylistics, and Christina Aguilera, to name a few.
Julian’s recent CD, “Voices From My Heart”, on GrooveScape Records, has been very well received. It includes such classic hits as Unforgettable, Beautiful In My Eyes, Lady In Red, Summerwind, Time To Say Goodbye and two duets with Ben E. King – Stand By Me and Only You. The album now appears in many jukeboxes around New York City.
Voices of Rhythm & Love
Wherever Julian goes and wherever he performs the people want more. If you listen to anyone of his albums just like this one "Voices of Rhythm & Love" you immediately want to see him perform in person. Outside of this album, Julian’s hit single – “Can’t Go This Way Again” – distributed on TC Records, reached number 46 on the Billboard Chart of “The Top 100”.
In addition to Ben E. King, Julian has recorded with such artists as The Delphonics, Shannon (Let The Music Play – reached double platinum), Ray, Goodman & Brown, The Stylistics (14 songs) and on the hit Christina Aguilera album “Just Be Free”.
He has written music for and sang in such movies as Grandview USA, The Survivalist and True Love. His voice can be heard on both radio and TV ads for American Airlines, Pontiac, Ford, Burger King and Foodtown, to name a few.
Julian is the recipient of many awards, including those from The American Song Festival, Music City Song Festival, Billboard Song and the John Lennon Songwriting Event.
You'll Never Find 4:29
You're Still You 3:40
Higher And Higher 3:18
Unchained Melody 3:59
Without You 3:21
I Can See Clearly Now 3:25
At Last 4:15
The Prayer 3:52
Oh Marie 2:58
Songs of Celebration and Love for Weddings and Other Happy Occasions
Julian & Fortune
If You Say My Eye's Are Beautiful 3:58
For The First Time 3:40
Pledging My Love 2:52
True Companion 4:06
Valentine 3:17
Forever 3:01
Grow Old Along With Me 3:08
Nobody Loves Me Like You Do 3:57
Let's Say It Together (I Love You) 2:40
I Need To Be With You Tonight 4:28
Darlin' Little Girl 2:43
Little Boy 1:59
A Mother & Her Son 2:18
I Am Your Child 2:21
Mother 4:36
Happy Anniversary (My Love) 3:24
Her Smile 5:06
Wedding Song (Instrumental) 2:33
Canon In D Spring From The Four 3:39
If you prefer to order by check or money order
Please click on the photo below to download, print and fill out the order form.
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”
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Top Ten Favorite Movies Set in the 1860s
Posted on August 12, 2017 by ladylavinia1932
Below is my current list of favorite movies set in the 1860s:
1. “Lincoln” (2012) – Steven Spielberg directed this highly acclaimed film about President Abraham Lincoln’s last four months in office and his efforts to pass the 13th Amendment to end slavery. Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, Oscar nominee Sally Field and Oscar nominee Tommy Lee Jones starred.
2. “Shenandoah”(1965) – James Stewart starred in this bittersweet tale about how a Virginia farmer’s efforts to keep his family out of the Civil War failed when his youngest son is mistaken as a Confederate soldier by Union troops and taken prisoner. Andrew V. McLaglen directed.
3. “Angels & Insects” (1995) – Philip Haas directed this adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s 1992 novella, “Morpho Eugenia” about a Victorian naturalist who marries into the English landed gentry. Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Patsy Kensit starred.
4. “Class of ’61” (1993) – Dan Futterman and Clive Owen co-starred in this television movie about recent West Point graduates and their experiences during the first months of the Civil War. Produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie was directed by Gregory Hoblit.
5. “The Tall Target” (1951) – Anthony Mann directed this suspenseful tale about a New York City Police sergeant who stumbles across a plot to kill President-elect Lincoln and travels aboard the train carrying the latter to stop the assassination attempt. Dick Powell starred.
6. “Far From the Madding Crowd” (1967) – John Schlesinger directed this adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel about a young Victorian woman torn between three men. The movie starred Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch.
7. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966) – Sergio Leone directed this epic Spaghetti Western about three gunslingers in search of a cache of Confederate gold in New Mexico, during the Civil War. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach starred.
8. “Cold Mountain” (2003) – Anthony Minghella directed this poignant adaptation of Charles Fraizer’s 1997 novel about a Confederate Army deserter, who embarks upon a long journey to return home to his sweetheart, who is struggling to maintain her farm, following the death of her father. The movie starred Oscar nominees Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, along with Oscar winner Renee Zellweger.
9. “Little Women” (1994) – Gillian Armstrong directed this adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel about four sisters from an impoverished, yet genteel New England family. The movie starred Winona Ryder, Trini Alvarado, Christian Bale and Susan Sarandon.
10. “The Beguiled” (1971) – Clint Eastwood starred in this atmospheric adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel about a wounded Union soldier who finds refuge at an all-girl boarding school in 1863 Mississippi. Directed by Don Siegel, the movie co-starred Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman.
Filed under: Essay, History, Movies, Television | Tagged: abraham lincoln, adam driver, adolphe menjou, alan bates, andre braugher, andrew v. mclaglen, anna massey, annette badland, antebellum, anthony mann, anthony minghella, brendan gleeson, bruce mcgill, charlie hunnam, chase edmunds, chris larkin, christian bale, christien anholt, civil war, claire danes, clint eastwood, clive owen, colman domingo, dakin matthews, dan futterman, dana ivey, dane dehaan, daniel day-lewis, darlene carr, david oyelowo, david strathairn, denver pyle, dick powell, don siegel, donald sutherland, doug mcclure, douglas henshall, eileen atkins, eli wallach, elizabeth hartman, elizabeth marvel, emily deschanel, eric stoltz, eugene jackson jr., fiona walker, florence bates, freddie jones, gabriel byrne, george kennedy, geraldine page, gilded age, gillian anderson, giovanni ribisi, glenn corbett, gloria reuben, gregory itzin, gulliver mcgrath, hal holbrook, history, jack white, jackie earle haley, james best, james gammon, james rebhorn, james stewart, janne mortil, jared harris, jay tavare, jena malone, jeremy kemp, jo ann harris, john hawkes, john neville, john schlesinger, joseph gordon-levitt, josh lucas, jude law, julie christie, katherine ross, kathy baker, kirsten dunst, kristin scott-thomas, laura linney, lee pace, lee van cleef, len cariou, literary, lorraine toussaint, lucas black, luke haas, mae mercer, mark pellegrino, mark rylance, marshall thompson, mary wickes, matt clark, matthew walker, michael stuhlbarg, movies, niall o'brien, nicole kidman, old hollywood, old west, pamelyn ferdin, patrick wayne, patsy kensit, paul guilfoyle, paula raymond, peter finch, philip alford, philip seymour hoffman, politics, prunella ransome, ray winstone, religion, renee zellweger, rosemary forsyth, ruby dee, sally field, samantha mathis, saskia wickham, sergio leone, sophie ward, steven spielberg, sue-ann leeds, susan sarandon, terence stamp, thomas hardy, tim scott, tom aldredge, tommy lee jones, travel, trini alvarado, victorian age, walton goggins, wayne duvall, will greer, william camp, winona ryder | Leave a comment »
Movie and Television Productions Featuring U.S. Marines During World War II
Today is the U.S. Marines’ birthday. To celebrate, I thought it would be nice to recommend ten movie and television productions (in chronological order) that feature U.S. Marines during World War II:
1. “Pride of the Marines” (1945) – John Garfield portrayed real life Marnie, Al Schmid, a decorated hero who was blinded during the Battle of Guadalcanal. Eleanor Parker and Dane Cook co-starred. Delmer Daves directed.
2. “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949) – John Wayne earned an Oscar nomination in this dramatization of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Directed by Allan Dwan, John Agar and Forrest Tucker co-starred.
3. “Battle Cry” (1955) – Raoul Walsh directed this adaptation of Leon Uris’ novel about U.S. Marines in love and war during World War II. Van Heflin, Aldo Ray, James Whitmore, and Tab Hunter co-starred.
4. “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957) – John Huston directed both Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in this character study about a shipwrecked Marine and a nun, who wait out the war on an island in the Pacific.
5. “In Love and War” (1958) – Philip Dunne directed this adaptation of Anton Meyer’s novel about three Marines on leave in San Francisco. Robert Wagner, Dana Wynter, Jeffrey Hunter, Hope Lange and Bradford Dillman co-starred.
6. “Hell to Eternity” (1960) – Jeffrey Hunter portrayed real-life Marine hero Guy Gabaldon in this biopic about a homeless Latino in Los Angeles, who is adopted by a Japanese-American family and later becomes a hero at the Battle of Saipan. Phil Karlson directed.
7. “The Outsider” (1961) – Tony Curtis starred in this biopic about Marine Ira Hayes, one of the flag raisers on Iwo Jima. Directed by Delbert Mann, the movie co-starred James Franciscus and Gregory Walcott.
8. “Windtalkers” (2002) – John Woo directed this account of the Navaho code talkers in the U.S. Marines and the men assigned to protect them. Nicholas Cage, Adam Beach, Frances O’Connor and Christian Slater starred.
9. “Flags of Our Fathers” (2006) – Clint Eastwood directed this account on three of the six men who raised the flag at The Battle of Iwo Jima. Ryan Phillipe, Adam Beach and Jesse Bradford co-starred.
10. “The Pacific” (2010) – Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg produced this 10-part award-winning miniseries for HBO about the experiences of three U.S. Marines – Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge and John Basilone – during World War II. James Badge Dale, Joseph Mazzello and Jon Seda starred.
Filed under: History, Movies, Television | Tagged: adam beach, ashton holmes, barry pepper, benjamin walker, christian slater, clint eastwood, david janssen, deborah kerr, eleanor parker, frances o'connor, george takei, history, hope lange, james badge dale, jason isaacs, jeffrey hunter, john slattery, john wayne, jon bernthal, jon seda, joseph mazzello, josh helman, martin mcgann, movies, nicholas cage, noah emmerich, rami malek, robert mitchum, robert wagner, ryan phillippe, steven spielberg, television, the pacific, tom hanks, tony curtis, travel, van heflin, william sadler, world war 2 | Leave a comment »
Top Favorite WORLD WAR II Movie and Television Productions
Posted on December 9, 2014 by ladylavinia1932
September 1-3 marked the 75th anniversary of the beginning of World War II.
On September 1, 1939; the German Army invaded Poland on the orders of its leader, Chancellor Adolf Hitler, a week following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. While the Polish military struggled to keep the invading Germans at bay, its government awaited awaited expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom, with whom they had a pact. Two days later on September 3, Poland’s two allies declared war on Germany and World War II; which ended up engulfing both Europe, Asia, North Africa and the South Pacific; began.
Below is a list of my favorite movie and television productions about the war.
1a. “Band of Brothers” (2001) – Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced this outstanding television miniseries about the history of a U.S. Army paratrooper company – “Easy Company” – during the war. Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston starred. (tie)
1b. “The Pacific” (2010) – Spielberg and Hanks struck gold again in this equally superb television miniseries about the experiences of three U.S. Marines – John Basilone, Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge – in the war’s Pacific Theater. James Badge Dale, Joseph Mazzello and Jon Seda starred. (tie)
2. “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970) – Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles starred in this memorable war comedy about a group of Army soldiers who go AWOL to rob a bank behind enemy lines. Brian G. Hutton directed.
3. “Inglorious Basterds” (2009) – Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed this excellent alternate history adventure about two plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent starred.
4. “Casablanca” (1942) – Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in this Oscar winning adaptation of Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s un-produced stage play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the movie also starred Paul Henreid and Claude Rains.
5. “The Winds of War” (1983) – Dan Curtis produced and directed this excellent 1983 television adaptation of Herman Wouk’s 1971 novel. The miniseries starred Robert Mitchum, Jan-Michael Vincent and Ali McGraw.
6. “Hope and Glory” (1987) – John Boorman wrote, produced and directed this 1987 excellent comedy-drama about his own childhood experiences during World War II. Sarah Miles, David Hayman and Sebastian Rice-Edwards starred.
7. “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) – Sir Richard Attenborough produced and directed this darkly fascinating adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s book about the Operation Market Garden campaign. The all-star cast included Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal and Gene Hackman.
8. “Valkyrie” (2008) – Bryan Singer directed this detailed and first-rate account of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944. The movie starred Tom Cruise, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy.
9. “The Longest Day” (1962) – Darryl Zanuck produced this all-star adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s book about the Normandy invasion. The cast included Robert Mitchum, Richard Beymer, Robert Wagner and John Wayne.
10. “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) – David Lean directed this Oscar winning adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1952 World War II novel. The movie starred William Holden, Oscar winner Alec Guinness and Oscar nominee Sessue Hayakawa.
Honorable Mention: “Empire of the Sun” (1987) – Steven Spielberg produced and directed this excellent adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel about a British boy’s experiences in World War II China. The movie starred Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson and Nigel Havers.
Filed under: Essay, History, Movies | Tagged: alec guinness, annie leon, anthony hopkins, ashton holmes, b.j. novak, band of brothers, ben cross, ben murphy, bill nighy, brad pitt, british empire, bryan singer, christian bale, christian berkel, christoph waltz, claude rains, clint eastwood, colin hanks, damian lewis, daniel brühl, david dukes, denis menochet, dexter fletcher, diane kruger, don collier, donald douglas, donald sutherland, donnie wahlberg, early 20th century, eddie izzard, edward fox, eion bailey, elliot gould, frank john hughes, gene hackman, german reich, gert frobe, henry fonda, history, holidays, holocaust, ingrid bergman, james badge dale, james mcavoy, jamie bamber, jason o'mara, jeffrey hunter, jeremy kemp, john houseman, john light, john wayne, jon bernthal, jon seda, joseph mazzello, josh helman, ken annakin, kenneth branaugh, kenneth more, kevin r. mcnally, laurence olivier, literary, marc warren, martin mcgann, matthew settle, michael curtiz, michael fassbender, middle east, movies, neal mcdonough, perry lopez, politics, polly bergen, quentin tarantino, ralph bellamy, rami malek, religion, richard beymer, robert mitchum, robert redford, robert wagner, rod taylor, ron livingston, ron rifkin, sammi davis, sarah miles, sean connery, simon pegg, stephen graham, steven spielberg, stuart whitman, susan wooldridge, television, telly savalas, terence stamp, the pacific, thomas kretschmann, tom hanks, tom hollander, tom wilkinson, topol, travel, william holden, william sadler, wolf kahler, world war 2 | Leave a comment »
Posted on February 3, 2014 by ladylavinia1932
1. “Some Like It Hot” (1959) – Billy Wilder directed and co-wrote with I.A.L. Diamond this still hilarious tale about two Chicago jazz musicians who witness a mob hit and flee by joining an all-girls band headed for Florida, disguised as women. Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon starred.
2. “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994) – Woody Allen directed and co-wrote with Douglas McGrath this funny tale about a struggling playwright forced to cast a mobster’s untalented girlfriend in his latest drama in order to get it produced. John Cusack, Oscar winner Dianne Weist, Jennifer Tilly, and Chazz Palminteri starred.
3. “Singin in the Rain” (1952) – A movie studio in 1927 Hollywood is forced to make the difficult and rather funny transition from silent pictures to talkies. Starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds starred in this highly entertaining film that was directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen.
4. “The Great Gatsby” (2013) Baz Luhrmann produced and directed this energetic and what I believe is the best adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire star.
5. “Five Little Pigs” (2003) – Although presently set in the late 1930s, this excellent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1942 novel features many flashbacks in which a philandering painter was murdered in the 1920s. David Suchet starred as Hercule Poirot.
6. “The Cat’s Meow” (2001) – Peter Bogdanovich directed this well-made, fictionalized account of producer Thomas Ince’s mysterious death aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in November 1924. Kirsten Dunst, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard and Cary Elwes starred.
7. “The Painted Veil” (2006) – John Curran directed this excellent adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel about a British doctor trapped in a loveless marriage with an unfaithful who goes to a small Chinese village to fight a cholera outbreak. Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Toby Jones, Diana Rigg and Liev Schreiber starred.
8. “Changeling” (2008) – Clint Eastwood directed this excellent account of a real-life missing persons case and police corruption in 1928 Los Angeles. Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Michael Kelly, Jeffrey Donovan and Colm Feore starred.
9. “Chicago” (2002) – Rob Marshall directed this excellent adaptation of the 1975 stage musical about celebrity, scandal, and corruption in Jazz Age Chicago. Renee Zellweger, Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly, and Richard Gere starred.
10. “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) – The Coen Brothers co-wrote and co-directed this intriguing crime drama about an adviser to a Prohibition-era crime boss who tries to keep the peace between warring mobs, but gets caught in divided loyalties. Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney and John Tuturro starred.
Filed under: Essay, History, Movies | Tagged: agatha christie, aidan gillen, albert finney, angelina jolie, baz luhrmann, billy wilder, british empire, carey mulligan, cary elwes, catherine zeta-jones, clint eastwood, coen brothers, colm feore, david suchet, debbie reynolds, diana rigg, donald o'connor, douglas mcgrath, early 20th century, eddie izzard, edward hermann, edward norton, f. scott fitzgerald, gabriel byrne, gatsby, gemma jones, gene kelly, history, j. michael straczynski, jack lemmon, jack thompson, jack warden, jason clarke, jean hagen, jeffrey donovan, jennifer tilly, jessica biel, jim broadbent, joe e. brown, joel edgerton, john c. reilly, john cusack, john malkovich, jon polito, julie cox, kirsten dunst, leonardo dicaprio, liev schreiber, literary, marc warren, marilyn monroe, michael kelly, movies, music, naomi watts, nehemiah persoff, old hollywood, peter bogdanovich, politics, progressive era, prohibition, rachael stirling, renee zellweger, richard gere, rob marshall, ronan vibert, sports, talulah riley, television, tobey maguire, toby jones, toby stephens, tony curtis, travel, woody allen, world war 1 | Leave a comment »
“J. EDGAR” (2011) Review
Posted on September 7, 2012 by ladylavinia1932
Actor/director Clint Eastwood directed his third – or possibly fourth – biopic film, during his career, with “J. EDGAR”, an examination of the career and private life of F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover. The movie starred Leonard Di Caprio as the infamous lawman.
“J. EDGAR” is a 137 minute movie that spanned Hoover’s career in a series of flashbacks. The movie begins in the early 1960s, when the famed F.B.I. director is recounting his forty-to-fifty years as a Federal lawman. Hoover’s recollections span from his participation in the Palmer Raids – a series of attempts by the U.S. Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States, his appointment as director of the Bureau of Investigations in the 1920s, his “War on Crime” campaign in the 1930s, the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping during the same decade and his investigation of civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr.. The movie also focuses on his use of blackmail to retain his position with the F.B.I., and his relationships with both his mother and Clyde Tolson, his assistant director for the Bureau.
I do not think I would ever regard “J. EDGAR” as one of Eastwood’s best work. It had the potential to be a top-notch film. But a slightly incoherent script written by Dustin Lance Black prevented the movie from reaching its potential. One, the movie’s use of flashbacks started fine. But somewhere in the movie’s second half, this use fell flat. I suspect that my problem with the flashbacks was that Black’s script and Eastwood’s direction seemed inconsistent and slightly confusing.
Another problem I had with “J. EDGAR” was its focus on the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. It was simply too much. Hoover reached the heights of his fame as the Bureau’s director, because of the manhunt for Midwestern criminals such as John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and Charles Floyd. I realize that this topic was also covered in Michael Mann’s 2009 crime drama,“PUBLIC ENEMIES”. But Eastwood and Black seemed determined to ignore the topic, aside from Hoover’s bouts of jealousy toward the agent that hunted down many of these criminals – Melvin Purvis. Instead, Eastwood and Black decided to focus a great deal on the Bureau’s participation in the Lindbergh case. Too much, if you want my opinion. The film never touched on the Bureau’s dealings or lack of with organized crime. I find this a pity, because one of the most memorable moments in Hoover’s career was his so-called “arrest” of gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, a publicity stunt supported by columnist Walter Winchell.
Fortunately, “J. EDGAR” was not a complete loss. I must admit that despite its flaws, it was a solid and entertaining movie. Eastwood’s direction seemed to be at its best in scenes that featured anarchist Luigi Galleani’s attempted to assassinate Hoover’s boss, Mitchell Palmer with a mail bomb; Hoover’s meeting with Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf and Charles Lindbergh; a highly charged scene between Hoover and his mother regarding his sexual preference; and especially the scenes featuring Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. Most movie or television productions tend to portray the relationship between the two men with a slight tawdriness. Eastwood and Black’s portrayal of the Hoover-Tolson relationship struck me as surprisingly tasteful and compassionate – especially since other aspects of Hoover’s life and character was portrayed with less sympathy.
I must admit that Tom Stern’s cinematography was a solid piece of work, but it did not exactly blow my mind. And if I must be frank, I was not exactly enamored of the film’s slightly gray tone. I also felt slightly leery of the makeup created for Di Caprio, Arnie Hammer and Naomi Watts. The makeup did not seem effective in aging the three leads in the 1960s and 70s sequences. However, I was impressed by James J. Murakami’s production designs that conveyed the years between 1919 and 1972. I believe the re-creation of the early and mid 20th century would not have been complete without Deborah Hopper’s superb costume designs.
The biggest virtue of “J. EDGAR” turned out to be its cast. Once again, Leonardo Di Caprio rose to the occasion and gave a superb portrayal of a complex and some would say, difficult personality. As usual, Di Caprio managed to inject a good deal of sympathy and poignancy into a historical figure that has a negative reputation over the years. I had been impressed by Arnie Hammer’s solid portrayal of the Winklevoss twins in last year’s “THE SOCIAL NETWORK”. But he really outdid himself as Hoover’s right hand man, Clyde Tolson – especially in the scenes featuring the pair’s relationship. Judi Dench gave her usual solid performance as Hoover’s strong-willed mother, Anna Marie Hoover. But in the scene featuring Mrs. Hoover’s disapproval of her son’s sexual lifestyle, she was brilliant and slightly scary. Naomi Watts gave a solid and slightly melancholic performance as Hoover’s faithful secretary, Helen Gandy. “J. EDGAR” also featured solid support from the likes Josh Lucas as the introverted Charles Lindbergh, Dermot Mulroney as the ineffectual New Jersey State Police superintendent Herbert N. Schwarzkopf, Lea Thompson as Lela Rogers (Ginger’s mother) Geoff Pierson as the intense Mitchell Palmer and Jeffrey Donovan as Attorney General Robert Kennedy. However, I was a little confused by Donovan’s slightly exaggerated take on Kennedy’s Boston accent, considering that Donovan is also a native of Massachusetts.
I noticed that “J. EDGAR” did not earn enough to make a profit at the box office. In a way, I can see why. I feel that it was a solid movie that failed to live up to any potential it could have achieved – especially at the hands of a first-rate director like Clint Eastwood. But thanks to his direction, the movie’s production designs and a first-rate cast led by the superb Leonardo Di Caprio, “J. EDGAR” still proved to be a somewhat entertaining and solid film.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: armie hammer, clint eastwood, dermot mulroney, early 20th century, geoff pierson, great depression, history, jeffrey donovan, josh lucas, judi dench, lea thompson, leonardo dicaprio, michael o'neill, mid 20th century, movies, naomi watts, old hollywood, politics, progressive era | Leave a comment »
Ten Favorite CIVIL WAR Movies and Miniseries
Below is a list of my favorite movies set during the American Civil War:
1. “North and South: Book II” (1986) – An almost excellent miniseries adaptation of John Jakes’ 1984 novel, “Love and War”, despite having a few problems with some of the plotlines and characters. If you like over-the-top period pieces, this is your story. The miniseries starred Patrick Swayze, James Read and Lesley Anne-Down.
2. “Gettysburg” (1993) – Movie adaptation of Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the three-day battle at Gettysburg during the war. First class. Starring Tom Berrenger, Jeff Daniels and Martin Sheen.
3. “Glory” (1989) – Movie about the famous all black 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment during the war. Superb and highly recommended. The movie starred Matthew Broderick, Oscar winner Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher and Cary Elwes.
4. “Lincoln” (1988) – Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore starred in this excellent, two-part television adaptation of Gore Vidal’s 1984 novel about the 16th president.
5. “Cold Mountain” (2003) – Love story about a Confederate deserter trying to return home to North Carolina and the love of his life. Beautiful love story. Starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Oscar winner Renee Zellewiger.
6. “The Blue and the Gray” (1982) – A three-part miniseries about two related families – one from Pennsylvania and one from Virginia during the Civil War. Pretty good. The miniseries starred John Hammond and Stacy Keach.
7. “Class of ’61” (1993) – TV movie about two West Point graduates during the first months of the Civil War and the people in their lives. The movie starred Dan Futterman, Clive Owen, Andre Braugher, Laura Linney and Josh Lucas.
8. “The Beguiled” (1971) – Intriguing Civil War melodrama about a wounded Union soldier convalescing at girls’ school in Mississippi. The movie starred Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman.
9. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – Three men search for missing Confederate gold in this Spaghetti Western set in New Mexico, during the Civil War. Great movie that starred Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef.
10. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) – The best thing about this Oscar winner is its first half, which featured the trials and tribulations of Georgia belle, Scarlett O’Hara, during the war. The movie starred Oscar winners Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel, along with Clark Gable, Olivia DeHavilland and Leslie Howard.
What are your favorite Civil War movies?
Filed under: Essay, Movies, Television | Tagged: andre braugher, ann rutherford, antebellum, barbara o'neil, beau billingslea, billy drago, brian kerwin, butterfly mcqueen, cary elwes, charles napier, civil war, clark gable, cliff de young, clint eastwood, clive owen, clu gulager, cooper huckabee, dan futterman, denzel washington, eileen atkins, eli wallach, evelyn keyes, forest whitaker, geraldine page, gone with the wind, gregory peck, hal holbrook, hattie mcdaniel, history, james gammon, james read, jay o. sanders, jean simmons, jeff daniels, josh lucas, jude law, kathleen beller, kevin conway, kirstie alley, kurtwood smith, laura linney, lee horsley, lee van cleef, lesley anne down, leslie howard, lewis smith, lloyd bridges, martin sheen, mary tyler moore, matthew broderick, morgan freeman, nicole kidman, north and south, old west, olivia de havilland, oscar polk, parker stevenson, patrick swayze, philip casnoff, philip seymour hoffman, politics, ray winstone, renee zellweger, richard anderson, rory calhoun, ruby dee, sam elliot, sam waterston, slavery, sophie ward, stacy keach, stephen lang, steven culp, television, thomas mitchell, tim scott, tom berenger, travel, vivien leigh | Leave a comment »
“KELLY’S HEROES” (1970) Review
When one thinks of acclaimed movies about World War II, titles such as 1962’s ”THE LONGEST DAY” or 1998’s ”SAVING PRIVATE RYAN” come to mind. But an offbeat movie about a group of U.S. Army soldiers that go AWOL behind enemy lines to rob Nazi gold from a bank in a small French town does not conjure up images of Academy Award statuettes in one’s mind. In fact, I doubt that 1970’s ”KELLY’S HEROES” had ever received a prestigious award or nomination.
”KELLY’S HEROES” began on a stormy night in 1944 France, in which a U.S. Army private named Kelly was ordered by his sergeant to find a German officer for information on the best taverns, restaurants, hotels and whorehouses in the nearby town of Nancy. Do you see where this is going? Instead, Kelly managed to nab a German officer who, in a state of alcoholic bleariness, revealed the location of a cache of Nazi gold being held at a bank in the German-held town of Clermont. Kelly then convinced the rest of the men in his squad and their gruff sergeant – Big Joe – to take advantage of the three-day furlough being offered to go after the gold. After all, their less than competent company commander, Captain Maitland, is rarely around to lead them and he had plans for a trip to Paris. Kelly also recruited an acid-tongued and avaricious supply sergeant named Crapgame and a proto-hippie tank commander named Oddball for support in his little caper. What followed was a hilarious, caustic and epic journey for a group of weary soldiers, determined to benefit somehow from a brutal war.
One aspect about ”KELLY’S HEROES” that struck me as . . . interesting was that the majority of the cast seemed to be between the ages of 30 and 45 during the movie’s production and looked it. Including the film’s main star, Clint Eastwood. The Army uniforms wore by most of the cast seemed historically questionable. One of the characters, namely Oddball, behaved like a slightly aged 1969/70 hippie with a questionable New York accent, instead of a 1940s Army sergeant. There are NO female characters in this movie whatsoever. The pacing threatened to bog down two-thirds into the film. And yet . . . and yet I LOVE this movie. In fact, I never get tired of watching it.
What do I love about ”KELLY’S HEROES”? Well, I could start with the screenplay, written by Troy Kennedy-Martin. It is a first-rate war story/caper that went into detail over Kelly’s discovery about the gold, his recruitment of his squad for the mission, the journey to Clermont . . . everything. Another aspect of the movie I had enjoyed was the witty dialogue. And who had received the cream of it? Who else but the King of Insults, Don Rickles. The movie also had some first-rate action that included a firefight near a field booby-trapped with mines, an attack upon a Nazi fuel depot by Oddball and his tank unit, and the final assault on Clermont that ended with a humorous and ironic twist. My favorite action sequence centered on the tank unit’s attack upon the Nazi fuel depot. There was something surreal and bizarre about Oddball’s tanks blowing nearly everyone to hell, while country-western music blasted from their speakers.
What did I love most about ”KELLY’S HEROES”? The characters, of course. Clint Eastwood portrayed the caper’s brainchild, Kelly – the former officer who was busted down to private. There was nothing particularly unique about Eastwood’s performance. Well . . . I must admit that I found his reactions to the lunatic characters around him rather funny. Especially when he interacted with the likes of Oddball. There are times – especially in this movie – when I feel that Eastwood might be one of the best reactors in Hollywood. Telly Savalas gave Eastwood a run for his money in terms of screen presence as Kelly’s sardonic, yet practical squad leader, Big Joe. After all, Kelly needed Big Joe’s cooperation to convince the rest of the squad to join him in on the caper. Whereas Eastwood reacted to the lunacy around him with facial expressions, Savalas did so with some very funny and caustic remarks.
Don Rickles. What can I say about his performance? He surely earned his moniker as the King of Insult Comedy in this movie. The man seemed to have twice the number of witticisms as the rest of the cast put together. And his performance as Crapgame, the caustic and avaricious supply sergeant was spot on. Donald Sutherland’s portrayal of the loopy tank sergeant, Oddball, is probably my favorite performance in the entire movie. On the surface, Sutherland’s Oddball seemed out of sync in a movie set during World War II. If ”KELLY’S HEROES” had been set during the Vietnam War, his Oddball would fit in beautifully. Ironically, Sutherland’s performance is one of the reasons why I love this movie. I really enjoyed watching Eastwood, Savalas, Rickles and especially Gavin McLeod (who played Oddball’s machine gunner and mechanic) reacting to his lunacy and hippie-style dialogue. A year before he had shot to fame as Archie Bunker in ”ALL IN THE FAMILY”, Carroll O’Connor appeared in this movie as the squad’s gung-ho division commander, Major General Colt. O’Connor literally infused the screen with a raw energy in his portrayal of the aggressive general with a tendency to refer to military action in football terms.
”KELLY’S HEROES” also had the good fortune to be filled with some memorable supporting characters that were portrayed by some first-rate actors. Stuart Margolin first made his presence known as Big Joe’s pragmatic and witty radio operator, Little Joe. Jeff Morris and Harry Dean Stanton provided plenty of comic relief as a pair of Southern-born soldiers that also happened to be friends. Richard Davalos (grandfather of Alexa Davalos of ”ANGEL” and ”DEFIANCE”) gave a memorable performance as the squad’s trigger happy marksman, Private Gutowski. Four years before ”CHINATOWN”, Perry Lopez was hilarious as the slightly dim-witted Private Petuko. Karl-Otto Alberty made a brief, but memorable appearance as the German tank commander in Clermont who ended up standing between our ”Heroes” and the gold inside in the bank. And Gavin McLeod turned out to be a perfect straight man to Sutherland’s loopy Oddball as the latter’s exasperated mechanic and gunner.
While perusing the Wikipedia website, I discovered that ”KELLY’S HEROES” had placed at #34 on the 100 Greatest War Movies list. Frankly, I would heartily agree. In fact, the movie appeared on my list of ten favorite World War II movies of all time. That is how much I love it.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: clint eastwood, donald sutherland, early 20th century, gavin macleod, harry dean stanton, movies, old hollywood, perry lopez, telly savalas, travel, world war 2 | 1 Comment »
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← STAY-AT-HOME DADS: BRAFF’S THE DADDY DIARIES AND PERROTTA’S LITTLE CHILDREN
The Writer’s Responsibility →
11/23/15 ERIC D. GOODMAN INTERVIEW
SONIA LINEBAUGH
Author of At the Feet of Mother Meera: The Lessons of Silence, and the (unpublished) novels The Wisdom Project, The American Year, and the Hardest Thing.
23 NOVEMBER 2015 11/23/15 ERIC D. GOODMAN INTERVIEW
11/23/15 ERIC D. GOODMAN INTERVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
I love traveling by train, ensconced with strangers boarding and debarking according to some mysterious and personal trajectory. So right from the start I was intrigued by Eric Goodman’s Tracks, a novel in short stories about travelers on a train headed from Baltimore for Chicago.
I talked to Eric about Tracks and his travel writing.
SONIA: The psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote that cultural symbols that retain their original numinosity or spell can evoke a deep emotional response. When you were writing Tracks did you think of the train acting as a symbol in this way.
ERIC: Not at all. People more often ask me, why a train? They say no one travels that way anymore. Others think it’s romantic or nostalgic.
SONIA: Movies and mystery stories set on trains are always popular. What do you remember about your first train ride?
ERIC: I was probably four or five, on a day trip through the Midwest with my parents, but I have only a vague impression. I fell in love with trains when I was in Russia for a semester during college. We often traveled by train to Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was in the mid-nineties and trains were the main way for Russians to get around. There were few cars and they were expensive. I was with two other American students and a professor. We traveled on a night train with sleepers, clunky and rattling, but comforting, too, like I was being rocked to sleep. I remember the Russian passengers, the party atmosphere, people sharing cigarettes and vodka. They’d meet in the cabins and we would be invited in for conversation and camaraderie.
SONIA: Did any of those stories influence Tracks?
ERIC: Not directly. Often I’m asked if the stories are true, but I always say I’m romanticizing what’s happening in the same way people take pictures. In fiction, it’s not real, but there’s a truth in everything that’s told. I get my ideas from people I see on the street, or conversations I’ve overheard as a traveler. Other travelers, even armchair travelers, can appreciate that. In the book I make the point that when you have a conversation it can make a difference to the people around you though you might never realize the effect you have.
SONIA: Did you start out with the idea of collecting short stories into a novel?
ERIC: For the first two or three stories I didn’t realize I was writing a collection. When I saw that they were all connected, I went through my file of story ideas and drafts, and rewrote them to make them work with the first few.
SONIA: You do travel writing too. I noticed that some of them read like a train story, especially the one about Paul Simon (Surprise Pilgrimage). You were driving by car, but you tied the songs and the memories they evoked to particular locations, as if they were train stations along your route. In Washington County, Maryland, you related to Beautiful. “The only clouds in the sky were white accents to bright blue.” In Lover, Pennsylvania, you wrote, “listened to Paul sing to his baby son in ‘Saint Judy´s Comet,’ and I thought of my own 15-month old waiting at home.”
ERIC: I never thought to compare it to the train.
SONIA: It was both a homage and an evocation. I could hear the songs in my head… Let’s come back to Tracks.You’ve read several of your stories from the book on the Baltimore station WYPR’s The Signal.
ERIC: Reading on the radio was a very good experience. I was intimidated by the idea, but with just two of us, me and Aaron Henkin, the producer, in the sound room I really enjoyed it. He also found just the right music and sound effects. Now I’ve done about twelve radio readings, eleven of them from Tracks. The readings are different than the stories in the book. I do the abridgments myself. I edit 25-30 pages and down to seven pages. I don’t make them into teasers like some writers do, but into shorter versions of the complete story. It showcases a different kind of writing ability.
SONIA: In one of the radio readings from Tracks, “Mountain of Sand,” a poet reviews his fall from grace after overhearing a woman who looks like an old lover tell the conductor she left her lover because of his ego. The poet is confronted by his own ego and begins to let go of it.
ERIC: I think that’s something a lot of writers become aware of at some point. We all want our writing to be noticed, and there’s a certain amount of ego there. But in the end, it should be about the writing itself or the story being told, not the ego of the writer.
SONIA: It’s an important point for all of us who write.
We talked about the Paul Simon piece which was a solo trip. Do you take your family along on some of your travel writing trips?
ERIC: Mostly my wife goes. Usually we rent an apartment overseas. Sometimes the kids go, especially now that they’re older. I also like to travel alone sometimes so I can explore and get to know people a little. I was an army brat and travel calls to me. I like traveling so much, and writing travel stories is a way to do that. Along the way I’m vetting places for settings and story ideas. Writers are always doing this but it’s intensified when traveling.
Tracks: A Novel in Stories is the 2012 winner of an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
Learn more about Eric D. Goodman and his writings at his website tracksnovel.com. Or see him on December 4 at a Holiday Bazaar at The Historic York Inn / Smyser Bair House, 30 South Beaver Street in downtown York, PA. Watch for Eric at Lit & Art at the Watermark. Watermark Gallery, 100 S. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD.
Sonia L. Linebaugh is a freelance writer and artist. Her book At the Feet of Mother Meera: The Lessons of Silence goes straight to the heart of the Westerner’s dilemma: How can we live fully as both spiritual and material beings? Sonia has written three novels and numerous short stories. She’s a past president of Maryland Writers Association, and past editor of MWA’s Pen in Hand. Her recent artist’s book is “Where Did I Think I Was Going?,” a metaphorical journey in evocative images and text.
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Sunday Mid-Morning Coffee (or Tea) – 37
Just a few noteworthy news satellites that have been careening around the blogosphere this week…
BREAKING NEWS: This week’s episode of “Why Am I Not Surprised” features Slick-Dick Cheney’s pal the Halliburton corporation. the company has become the object of several controversies involving the 2003 Iraq War and the company’s ties to Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney retired from the company during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign with a severance package worth $36 million. As of 2004, he had received $398,548 in deferred compensation from Halliburton while Vice President. Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 and has received stock options from Halliburton. The company has a long history of shoddy workmanship and of defrauding the US Government (and consequently, US taxpayers) by means of repeated and excessive overcharges regarding government contracts. Well, now it has been revealed that Halliburton is partially responsible for the recent catastrophic Gulf Coast oil rig explosion and spill. Halliburton provided well cementing services on the rig and now it looks as if flaws in that process led to the massive failure of the well’s structural integrity. Anyone surprised?
THIS JUST IN: We all understand the nexus between the State of Alaska and the oil industry, but enough is enough already. This week Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski objected to a voice vote request by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on the bill, which would have spiked the maximum liability for oil companies after an oil spill from $75 million to $10 billion. The legislation has significant support from Democrats, and the White House has indicated it backs an increase in liability caps. Republicans are on the side of the oil companies, not the American people.
BREAKING NEWS: This week’s episode of “WTF Took You So Long” features former First Stepford Wife, Laura Bush who admitted on Larry King Live that she is pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage and has been so forever. Should she perhaps have publicly defended her positions at some point while her brain-dead husband of a President was forever advocating legislation in opposition to those beliefs? Please watch the clip…
Then again, Laura Bush is now hawking a book and as we know from Sarah Palin, nothing sells like shock and controversy.
THIS JUST IN: This week’s episode of “Conservatives Caught With Their Pants Down” features Longtime Religious Right leader Rev. Dr. George Rekers. He has been embroiled in a gay sex scandal for the past two weeks, and has now resigned from the board of directors of NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.) For those of you not in the know, it was revealed that Rekers hired a male prostitute to travel with him to Europe. As Queen would say, “another one bites the dust”.
BREAKING NEWS: This week’s episode of “Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them” features Ergun Caner, the President of Liberty University’s (yes, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University) seminary. Talk To Action reports that “Caner has made a name for himself by highlighting his unusual life story: He says he was born into a stridently Muslim family in Turkey, where he learned to hate America and Christians. As Caner tells it, he flirted with jihad before undergoing a life-changing conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. He then persuaded most of his family to convert as well, and they now spread the gospel.” A compelling story but untrue. “Despite his claims about having lived in Turkey, it now appears that Caner was born in Sweden and moved to Ohio when he was 4 years old. His father was a Muslim, but his mother was Lutheran. The couple divorced, and Caner’s mother retained custody. He became an evangelical Christian as a teen; it’s unlike he was ever recruited by jihadists.” Ahhh, the rarefied air of Liberty University!
THIS JUST IN: This week’s episode of “Daddy, Please Make The Crazy Lady Stop Talking!” features Minnesota’s Republican US Senator, Michele Bachmann. During a Tuesday night webcast with Ensuring Liberty, a Tea Party PAC, Rep. Michele Bachmann likened the financial reform bill that is being debated in Congress to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. She said,
Let’s remember really what this is. This has a lot in common with Italy in the 1930s and they way Italy dealt with economics,” she said. “It still continues private ownership of business but government is in control.” She continued, “So government control of the private business, while it’s private ownership, that’s still at the end of the day the federal government virtually having a say over private business. We lose freedoms; we lose economic competitiveness.
OK Michele, now take your medicine and go back to sleep for awhile.
BREAKING NEWS: This week’s episode of “Let’s Blame God” features Rick Perry, the Republican Governor of Texas. Last week the secessionist and Sarah Palin fanboy said the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should not be lamed on the oil industry, calling such spills “acts of God that cannot be prevented.” Gee, who knew that God created that faulty rig.
THIS JUST IN: It wouldn’t be a weekly wrap-up without our favorite wingnut, now would it? So, this week’s edition of “Tea (Party) For Two and Two For Tea (Party)” features Sarah Palin, the ex-quitting Governor of Alaska and Jan Brewer, the present Governor of Arizona. The two members of the G.O.P. “braintrust” appeared together yesterday in Phoenix to denounce President Obama’s criticism of Arizona’s new racist immigrant law. The law requires immigrants in Arizona to carry their registration documents at all times and allows police to question individuals’ immigration status in the process of enforcing any other law or ordinance. Problem is, even legal “brown” skinned citizens and immigrants are likely to be “asked for their papers” even though they are not required to carry them. If they do not have those “papers” with them, they are subject to detainment and arrest. As president Obama said,
You can imagine if you are an Hispanic American in Arizona, your great grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state, but now suddenly if you don’t have your papers, and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re gonna be harassed. That’s something that could potentially happen. That’s not the right way to go.
Like the nativist “Know Nothings” of the 1840’s and 1850’s however, Palin and Brewer have deceived themselves into believing the “us” versus “them” scenario is the only solution to immigration problems. Indeed, in defending the concept of “presenting papers”, the snow-white Palin said, “I think for most American people the reaction to that would be, ‘Why aren’t (police) already doing that?'” What would she say if native Alaskans treated the Idaho transplant similarly? Keep up the good work on that Arizona products and travel boycott!!!
We Didn’t Start The Fire song link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
Posted in Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Michele Bachmann, Republican, Sarah Palin, Songs, Tea Party, Television, TV
Tags: Alaska, Dick Cheney, Ergun Caner, George Rekers, Halliburton, Jan Brewer, Jerry Falwell, Know Nothing Party, Larry King, Laura Bush, Liberty University, Lisa Murkowski, Michele Bachmann, NARTH, news, palin, Queen, Republican, Rick Perry, right wing, Sarah Palin, Songs, Tea Party, Tea-Baggers, Television, TV
Saturday Night Music Byte
Cheap Trick is an American rock band from Rockford, Illinois, formed in 1974. The band consists of members Robin Zander (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Rick Nielsen (lead guitar, backing vocals), Tom Petersson (electric bass, backing vocals), and Bun E. Carlos (drums, percussion).
Cheap Trick created a substantial fan base through its own brand of power pop music with a hard-edged yet melodic pop sound that combines the tunefulness of The Beatles with the speed and energy of punk rock. The Los Angeles Times has remarked that “Cheap Trick gained fame by twisting the Beatlesque into something shinier, harder, more American.”Their biggest hits include “Surrender”, “I Want You to Want Me”, “Dream Police”, and “The Flame.” Cheap Trick also performed a cover version of Big Star’s “In the Street” as the theme song for That ’70s Show from the second season onward and the theme song “Baby Muggles” for The Colbert Report.
As of 2009, Cheap Trick continues to tour with their most well known lineup. They have often been referred to in the Japanese press as the “American Beatles”. The Illinois State Senate has declared April 1 to be “Cheap Trick Day” in the State. The band was also ranked #25 in VH1’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.
Please enjoy Cheap Trick performing their 1978 hit “Surrender” in Budokan, Japan.
Tags: Cheap Trick, Songs, Surrender
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Rick Perry Finally Gives A Correct Response
The FrankenPerry Monster
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry appeared on Fox News a/k/a the GOP Propaganda Network on Tuesday evening and expressed regret over taking part in the Republican debates. When asked if he feels he had made any mistakes in his campaign thus far, Perry responded it was, “probably ever doing one of the debates. All they’re interested in is stirring it up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.”
Finally, an honest answer from Rick Perry. Anyone who has “taken one for the team” and watched the Republican debates knows that Rick Perry is a disaster on stage. He is simply incapable of providing a coherent and on-point answer to any question. He also has a tendency to lose his temper and speak in tongues. Back in September, Fox News’ very own Brit Hume summed it up best when he described one of Perry’s debate performances as follows:
“Perry really did throw-up all over himself at the debate and at a time when he really did need to raise his game, … he did worse…Perry is about one half a step away from total collapse as a candidate…What keeps happening here is these people have a moment, they get into the race as Perry did and zoom to the top and everybody is in love, and then we get a dose of them… and they don’t seem so great.”
Well said Mr. Hume. Very well said.
Rick Perry however, has other things to worry about as his campaign progresses and Americans learn more about him. For instance, his Texas miracle has been called into question. We learned that although Texas has been creating jobs, it leads the nation in jobs that pay only at or below the minimum wage and with no benefits. Perry also boasted that the federal govt. is too bloated and it should look to Texas as a model of how to create employment. Unfortunately for Perry, it was then revealed that Texas’ largest employer is actually the federal govt. (Fort Hood). Also despite Texas’ job growth, the state’s unemployment rate of 8.5 percent is higher than both the rate in Democratic New York and Massachusetts. Indeed Massachusetts’ lower unemployment rate of 7.3 percent was achieved despite the fact that the Bay State has near universal health insurance coverage as the result of its 2006 health reform law which includes personal mandates. On the contrary, Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured residents in the nation.
Speaking of health care, Rick Perry’s adamant opposition to health care reform has also called into question. You see, like flip-flopping Mitt Romney, Perry was also for health care reform before he was against it. The Daily Caller reports that in 1993, while serving as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Perry praised the efforts of then-first lady Hillary Clinton to reform health care, a precursor to Obama’s health care reform efforts. In a letter to Ms. Clinton he wrote, “I think your efforts in trying to reform the nation’s health care system are most commendable” and “Again, your efforts are worthy, and I hope you will remember this constituency as the task force progresses.” Clinton’s health care proposal was of course, a single payer universal health plan. Ouch! That is going to leave a mark which the Tea Baggers will not miss.
An additional problem for Rick Perry’s Texas is that the tax cutting has led to a situation where Texas ranks 44th in expenditures per public school pupil. That has translated directly into Texas’ rank as the 43rd worse state in terms of percentage of high school graduates. This lack of academic achievement has simply provided a steady supply of applicants for all of Texas’ jobs which pay at the minimum wage or below. That probably does not bother Rick Perry all that much however, inasmuch as he was not much of a student himself. He was placed on academic probation while attending Texas A&M.
Perhaps Rick Perry is the actual Ponzi Scheme that he so often references. It appears that Rick Perry’s day in the sun is coming to an end. Republicans are beginning to chant, “Read My Lips, No New Texans!”
The Beverly Hillbillies Theme song link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFI-hhndCek
THE RICK PERRY HILLBILLY
(sung to the theme of “The Beverly Hillbillies”)
Come and listen to a story ‘bout a Gov. named Rick
Just like George Bush, a dumb and backwards hick
The Texans know they earn money for their food
Not cuz Rick’s around, it’s that bubbling crude
(Oil that is. Black Gold. Texas Tea)
As for sick folks Rick just hasn’t got a care
No insurance, all they have is prayer
Washington DC is the place he wants to be
So he threw his name in for the Presidency
(Crazy that is, Bachmann, Newt Gingrich)
(academic probation break)
Well now its time to say good-bye to Rick and all his kin,
He is in New Hampshire raisin’ dough and campaignin’
He doesn’t know squat ‘bout economic policy
But that does not matter to those fools that drink his tea.
(Perry’s a hillbilly, that’s what we’ll call him now, cow polk)
Y’all come back now, y’hear?
Tags: Bachmann, Brit Hume, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ponzi Scheme, Rick Perry, Tea-Baggers
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Google adds song lyrics to search results
At long last, Google has added song lyrics to search results, meaning you won’t have to click through to another site to fill in the blanks or correct a misheard lyric.
Not only will this benefit those searching for lyrics, but artists are to profit too. According to Billboard, the feature is part of a multi-year licensing deal with LyricFind and will provide musicians and publishers with a new source of income.
This new feature is rolling out to users in the US first, but the deal covers international licensing too, so it may be only a matter of time before it’s available to everyone.
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Features » Process Controls & Plant » Industrial Services
Next generation of precision power analyser
Published: 02 November, 2018
The new Yokogawa WT5000 is the first of a new generation of precision power analyser that offers measurement accuracy of ± 0.03% combined with stability, noise immunity and plug-in modular flexibility to meet the measurement needs of today’s developers of energy-efficient systems. PWE reports.
Changing application needs and evolving international standards call for custom measurements and consistent accuracy, and in the WT5000 Precision Power Analyser, engineers have a versatile platform that achieves the world’s highest measuring accuracy: ±0.03% of total at 50/60 Hz. As a result, it has become possible to evaluate the power consumption, loss, and efficiency of electrical and electronic devices. In particular, its wide dynamic current range is indispensable for tests on energy-saving designs.
One of the essential elements for determining the performance of a power measuring instrument is the A/D converter that performs analogue-to-digital conversion. In order to obtain the world’s highest measurement accuracy, the WT5000 uses an 18-bit converter with a sampling frequency of maximum 10 MS/s. As a result, it becomes possible to accurately capture waveforms from the latest high-speed inverter devices. It is very effective for stable measurement results.
While the WT5000 has the same dimensions as existing models in Yokogawa’s WT series, it incorporates up to seven input channels, allowing it to support applications that previously could only have been measured by synchronising several separate instruments. As a result, it offers considerable savings in installation space, communications overheads and cost-effectiveness. Further benefits result from the use of plug-in modular input elements, which can be swapped directly by the user.
The 30 A and 5 A elements, for example, can be switched for applications involving electric vehicles or fuel-cell vehicles, where developers are increasingly required to evaluate a number of different motors. Using the WT5000 equipped with the /MTR1 and /MTR2 options, it is possible to evaluate up to four motors simultaneously with one unit. Since these options allow the input of four channels, flexible measurement of the A, B, C and Z phases of each motor can be carried out.
With a 7 elements input capability, multi-system measurement is increased in harmonic measurements on 3-phase systems, for example. The WT5000 can carry out two harmonic measurement functions simultaneously, each at up the 500th order and up to 300kHz fundamental waveform. This makes it possible to measure the carrier frequency component from the rotational speed of the motor in the inverter drive and also to check the influence of the carrier frequency on the motor drive.
An increasing number of applications require the evaluation of larger-current devices, typical examples being electric vehicles and large-scale solar installations. In these cases, external current sensors are often used. An external current sensor input function is fitted as standard in the input element of both the 30 A and 5 A input elements of the WT5000. For much higher currents (up to 2000 A RMS) dedicated high-current sensors are available. Yokogawa AC/DC current sensor CT series is current output type in order to prevent noise influence.
For further information please visit: http://tmi.yokogawa.com/eu/
Multifunction tester
25 things you may not know about drives
Top five problems with PLCs
A magnet for efficiency!
Less copper, more power
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The Sword to Live Stream ‘Used Future’ Tour Kickoff in Austin, Texas
The Sword's "Used Future" tour is getting underway tonight (March 21) in the band's hometown of Austin, Texas and they're inviting fans around the world to catch the show. You can watch the live stream in the player above at 9:40PM ET / 8:40PM CT, and for those who are not available to watch at that time, the show will be archived for viewing at a later time.
The performance will take place at the Mohawk in Austin and will serve as a solid teaser for the band's upcoming new album, Used Future, which will be released Friday (March 23). The Sword recently unleashed the new song "Deadly Nightshade," that you can check out here. The album is available for pre-order both here and here.
You can catch the Sword on tour at these stops. There are also VIP packages available for the shows at this location.
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Filed Under: The Sword
Categories: Concerts, Metal, News, Rock
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For the last 5 years, the in-house design team at the Faithlife Corporation has illustrated one Bible verse every day. This art has found its way onto t-shirts, magnets, and postcards—and now, a beautiful picture book. In print for the first time, art from Faithlife's Verse of the Day series paired with uplifting devotionals will encourage and inspire you. Bible Verse Wall Art
Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven. Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison— that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. ... Share Your Faith Products
"The house which I am about to build will be great, for greater is our God than all the gods. "But who is able to build a house for Him, for the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain Him? So who am I, that I should build a house for Him, except to burn incense before Him? "Now send me a skilled man to work in gold, silver, brass and iron, and in purple, crimson and violet fabrics, and who knows how to make engravings, to work with the skilled men whom I have in Judah and Jerusalem, whom David my father provided. Christian Gifts
For the entrance of the inner sanctuary he made doors of olive wood, the lintel and five-sided doorposts. So he made two doors of olive wood, and he carved on them carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, and overlaid them with gold; and he spread the gold on the cherubim and on the palm trees. So also he made for the entrance of the nave four-sided doorposts of olive woodread more. Share Your Faith Products
and in the cutting of stones for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship. "And behold, I Myself have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and in the hearts of all who are skillful I have put skill, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of testimony, and the mercy seat upon it, and all the furniture of the tent, the table also and its utensils, and the pure gold lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offering also with all its utensils, and the laver and its stand, the woven garments as well, and the holy garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments of his sons, with which to carry on their priesthood; the anointing oil also, and the fragrant incense for the holy place, they are to make them according to all that I have commanded you." The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, 'You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the LORD who sanctifies you. 'Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. Bible Verse Wall Art
For the entrance of the inner sanctuary he made doors of olive wood, the lintel and five-sided doorposts. So he made two doors of olive wood, and he carved on them carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, and overlaid them with gold; and he spread the gold on the cherubim and on the palm trees. So also he made for the entrance of the nave four-sided doorposts of olive woodread more.
Glory of ChristChrist AtoningThe Effect Of The Word Of GodChrist's Own GloryimagepersonalityThe Beauty Of NatureGod On HighRight Hand Of GodRadiancyGod Sustaining CreationPower Of Christ, ShownHand Of GodGod, Living And Self sustainingRight SidesSalvation, Nature OfKnowledge, Of Jesus ChristCreatorGod's Glory In Jesus ChristMediatorGod, Power OfGod, Glory Of Share Your Faith Products
"Now I am sending Huram-abi, a skilled man, endowed with understanding, the son of a Danite woman and a Tyrian father, who knows how to work in gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone and wood, and in purple, violet, linen and crimson fabrics, and who knows how to make all kinds of engravings and to execute any design which may be assigned to him, to work with your skilled men and with those of my lord David your father. Bible Verse Wall Art
"You shall have no other gods before Me. "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,read more. Christian Gifts
Every home is so much more than just walls and windows. Home is the place where we live, laugh, and love. It's an expression of who we are and what we believe. That's why we are committed to providing beautiful Christian art and inspirational home décor. Our passion is helping you create a place that reflects your faith and enables you to share it with others. So discover new ways to share your heart and God's love today!
He also made two capitals of molten bronze to set on the tops of the pillars; the height of the one capital was five cubits and the height of the other capital was five cubits. There were nets of network and twisted threads of chainwork for the capitals which were on the top of the pillars; seven for the one capital and seven for the other capital. So he made the pillars, and two rows around on the one network to cover the capitals which were on the top of the pomegranates; and so he did for the other capital. The capitals which were on the top of the pillars in the porch were of lily design, four cubits. There were capitals on the two pillars, even above and close to the rounded projection which was beside the network; and the pomegranates numbered two hundred in rows around both capitals. Thus he set up the pillars at the porch of the nave; and he set up the right pillar and named it Jachin, and he set up the left pillar and named it Boaz. On the top of the pillars was lily design. So the work of the pillars was finished. Now he made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference. Under its brim gourds went around encircling it ten to a cubit, completely surrounding the sea; the gourds were in two rows, cast with the rest. It stood on twelve oxen, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east; and the sea was set on top of them, and all their rear parts turned inward. It was a handbreadth thick, and its brim was made like the brim of a cup, as a lily blossom; it could hold two thousand baths. Then he made the ten stands of bronze; the length of each stand was four cubits and its width four cubits and its height three cubits. This was the design of the stands: they had borders, even borders between the frames, and on the borders which were between the frames were lions, oxen and cherubim; and on the frames there was a pedestal above, and beneath the lions and oxen were wreaths of hanging work. Now each stand had four bronze wheels with bronze axles, and its four feet had supports; beneath the basin were cast supports with wreaths at each side. Its opening inside the crown at the top was a cubit, and its opening was round like the design of a pedestal, a cubit and a half; and also on its opening there were engravings, and their borders were square, not round. The four wheels were underneath the borders, and the axles of the wheels were on the stand. And the height of a wheel was a cubit and a half. The workmanship of the wheels was like the workmanship of a chariot wheel. Their axles, their rims, their spokes, and their hubs were all cast. Now there were four supports at the four corners of each stand; its supports were part of the stand itself. On the top of the stand there was a circular form half a cubit high, and on the top of the stand its stays and its borders were part of it. He engraved on the plates of its stays and on its borders, cherubim, lions and palm trees, according to the clear space on each, with wreaths all around. He made the ten stands like this: all of them had one casting, one measure and one form. He made ten basins of bronze, one basin held forty baths; each basin was four cubits, and on each of the ten stands was one basin. Then he set the stands, five on the right side of the house and five on the left side of the house; and he set the sea of cast metal on the right side of the house eastward toward the south. Now Hiram made the basins and the shovels and the bowls. So Hiram finished doing all the work which he performed for King Solomon in the house of the LORD: the two pillars and the two bowls of the capitals which were on the top of the two pillars, and the two networks to cover the two bowls of the capitals which were on the top of the pillars; and the four hundred pomegranates for the two networks, two rows of pomegranates for each network to cover the two bowls of the capitals which were on the tops of the pillars; and the ten stands with the ten basins on the stands; and the one sea and the twelve oxen under the sea; and the pails and the shovels and the bowls; even all these utensils which Hiram made for King Solomon in the house of the LORD were of polished bronze. In the plain of the Jordan the king cast them, in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarethan. Solomon left all the utensils unweighed, because they were too many; the weight of the bronze could not be ascertained. Solomon made all the furniture which was in the house of the LORD: the golden altar and the golden table on which was the bread of the Presence; and the lampstands, five on the right side and five on the left, in front of the inner sanctuary, of pure gold; and the flowers and the lamps and the tongs, of gold; and the cups and the snuffers and the bowls and the spoons and the firepans, of pure gold; and the hinges both for the doors of the inner house, the most holy place, and for the doors of the house, that is, of the nave, of gold. Thus all the work that King Solomon performed in the house of the LORD was finished And Solomon brought in the things dedicated by his father David, the silver and the gold and the utensils, and he put them in the treasuries of the house of the LORD. Bible Verse Wall Art
And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Christian Canvas Art
Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings, in the land of Canaan. These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. ... Share Your Faith Products
"Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. "This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. "You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks. Christian Gifts
During the development of Christian art in the Byzantine Empire (see Byzantine art), a more abstract aesthetic replaced the naturalism previously established in Hellenistic art. This new style was hieratic, meaning its primary purpose was to convey religious meaning rather than accurately render objects and people. Realistic perspective, proportions, light and color were ignored in favor of geometric simplification of forms, reverse perspective and standardized conventions to portray individuals and events. The controversy over the use of graven images, the interpretation of the Second Commandment, and the crisis of Byzantine Iconoclasm led to a standardization of religious imagery within the Eastern Orthodoxy. Share Your Faith Products
"Now I am sending Huram-abi, a skilled man, endowed with understanding, the son of a Danite woman and a Tyrian father, who knows how to work in gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone and wood, and in purple, violet, linen and crimson fabrics, and who knows how to make all kinds of engravings and to execute any design which may be assigned to him, to work with your skilled men and with those of my lord David your father. Share Your Faith Products
Glory of ChristOther BlindingChrist's Own GloryAgeControlling Your ThoughtsUnbelieversPerfection, DivineCommitment, to the worldChrist, Names ForSatan, Kingdom OfSatan, Titles ForThe Light Of ChristDarkness, As A Symbol Of SinCultsRevelation, In Ntevil, origins ofSpiritual Warfare, Causes OfHeart, Fallen And RedeemedBlindingSpiritual Blindness, Results Of Sin
David built houses for himself in the city of David. And he prepared a place for the ark of God and pitched a tent for it. Then David said that no one but the Levites may carry the ark of God, for the Lord had chosen them to carry the ark of the Lord and to minister to him forever. And David assembled all Israel at Jerusalem to bring up the ark of the Lord to its place, which he had prepared for it. And David gathered together the sons of Aaron and the Levites: of the sons of Kohath, Uriel the chief, with 120 of his brothers; ... Christian Canvas Art
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord. The house that King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. The vestibule in front of the nave of the house was twenty cubits long, equal to the width of the house, and ten cubits deep in front of the house. And he made for the house windows with recessed frames. He also built a structure against the wall of the house, running around the walls of the house, both the nave and the inner sanctuary. And he made side chambers all around. ... Bible Verse Wall Art
Glory of ChristChrist AtoningThe Effect Of The Word Of GodChrist's Own GloryimagepersonalityThe Beauty Of NatureGod On HighRight Hand Of GodRadiancyGod Sustaining CreationPower Of Christ, ShownHand Of GodGod, Living And Self sustainingRight SidesSalvation, Nature OfKnowledge, Of Jesus ChristCreatorGod's Glory In Jesus ChristMediatorGod, Power OfGod, Glory Of Christian Gifts
Now King Solomon sent and brought Hiram from Tyre. He was a widow's son from the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in bronze; and he was filled with wisdom and understanding and skill for doing any work in bronze So he came to King Solomon and performed all his work. He fashioned the two pillars of bronze; eighteen cubits was the height of one pillar, and a line of twelve cubits measured the circumference of both.read more. Share Your Faith Products
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. ... Christian Gifts
"Now I am sending Huram-abi, a skilled man, endowed with understanding, the son of a Danite woman and a Tyrian father, who knows how to work in gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone and wood, and in purple, violet, linen and crimson fabrics, and who knows how to make all kinds of engravings and to execute any design which may be assigned to him, to work with your skilled men and with those of my lord David your father.
As a secular, non-sectarian, universal notion of art arose in 19th-century Western Europe, ancient and Medieval Christian art began to be collected for art appreciation rather than worship, while contemporary Christian art was considered marginal. Occasionally, secular artists treated Christian themes (Bouguereau, Manet) — but only rarely was a Christian artist included in the historical canon (such as Rouault or Stanley Spencer). However many modern artists such as Eric Gill, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Jacob Epstein, Elizabeth Frink and Graham Sutherland have produced well-known works of art for churches.[1] Salvador Dali is an artist who had also produced notable and popular artworks with Christian themes.[2] Contemporary artists such as Makoto Fujimura have had significant influence both in sacred and secular arts. Other notable artists include Larry D. Alexander and John August Swanson. Some writers, such as Gregory Wolfe, see this as part of a rebirth of Christian humanism.[3] Share Your Faith Products
He measured the length of the building along the front of the separate area behind it, with a gallery on each side, a hundred cubits; he also measured the inner nave and the porches of the court. The thresholds, the latticed windows and the galleries round about their three stories, opposite the threshold, were paneled with wood all around, and from the ground to the windows (but the windows were covered), over the entrance, and to the inner house, and on the outside, and on all the wall all around inside and outside, by measurement.read more. Bible Verse Wall Art
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Category Archives: Palestinian Labor
UK Labour Party must reject biased antisemitism definition that stifles advocacy for Palestinian rights (Palestinian Unions)
Posted on August 28, 2018 | Comments Off on UK Labour Party must reject biased antisemitism definition that stifles advocacy for Palestinian rights (Palestinian Unions)
UK Labour Party must reject biased antisemitism definition that stifles advocacy for Palestinian rights
Open Letter on August 28, 2018
Activists call for boycotting Israel. (Photo via BDSMovement.net)
Welcoming the significant growth in recent years of progressive politics centred on social justice and internationalism in the UK, especially within the labour movement, we, Palestinian trade unions, mass organisations and networks, representing the majority in Palestinian civil society, call on the British Labour party, trade unions, city councils, universities and civil society at large to reject the IHRA’s false, anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism.
This non-legally binding definition attempts to erase Palestinian history, demonise solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality, suppress freedom of expression, and shield Israel’s far-right regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid from effective measures of accountability in accordance to international law.
The discredited IHRA guidelines deliberately conflate hostility to or prejudice or discrimination against Jews on the one hand with legitimate critiques of Israel’s policies and system of injustice on the other.
Palestinians last year marked 100 years of the Balfour Declaration, which played a significant role in supporting and entrenching the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. This typically colonial British declaration constituted a declaration of war against our people. It facilitated the birth of the exclusionary state of Israel that maintains a regime of apartheid and systematically oppresses the indigenous Palestinian people, stripping us of our fundamental and UN-recognised rights, including the rights to equality and self- determination and our refugees’ right to return to their homes of origin.
We concur with British Palestinian personalities who have asserted that:
[A]ny use by public bodies of the IHRA examples on antisemitism that either inhibits discussion relating to our dispossession by ethnic cleansing, when Israel was established, or attempts to silence public discussions on current or past practices of [Israeli] settler colonialism, apartheid, racism and discrimination, and the ongoing violent military occupation, directly contravenes core rights. First, the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, who remain protected by international laws and conventions; and second, the rights of all those British citizens who stand by our side, in the solidarity of a common humanity.
We recognise the severe pressure being placed on public bodies in the UK, and globally, to adopt this politicised and fraudulent definition of antisemitism. We would assert that those in the UK have a particular moral, political and arguably legal obligation to atone for historic and current British crimes against the Palestinian people and complicity in maintaining Israel’s regime of oppression. We appeal to them to:
1. Consistently uphold the UK Human Rights Act, the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and the right to freedom of expression, including in narrating Palestine’s well-documented colonial history, advocating for Palestinian rights, describing Israel’s regime of oppression as racist or as constituting apartheid, and calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel as nonviolent measures of accountability to bring about its compliance with its obligations under international law and its respect for Palestinian rights.
2. Unequivocally uphold the UN-stipulated rights of the people of Palestine,particularly:
● The right to live free of military occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem;
● The right to full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel who currently suffer under a system of legalised and institutionalised racial discrimination;
● The inherent and legally upheld right of Palestine refugees to return to their homes of origin from which they have been ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and ever since.
3. Officially endorse a military embargo on Israel, as called for by Palestinian civil society, Socialist International, UK political parties (including Liberal Democrats, Greens, and Scottish National Party), the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC), many development NGOs (including Oxfam and Christian Aid), dozens of British MPs, cities across Europe, Amnesty International, globalfigures, among others. In 2017 alone, the UK arms exports to Israel reached $284m, setting a record.
4. Unambiguously condemn all forms of racism and bigotry, including Israel’s more than 60 racist laws, especially its latest constitutional law, the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, that effectively “enshrines Jewish supremacy” and apartheid, as defined by the UN.
Adopting the IHRA definition (with its examples) would not only demonise our present struggle for liberation and self-determination. It would also “silence a public discussion [in the UK] of what happened in Palestine and to the Palestinians in 1948”, as over 100 Black, Asian and other minority ethnicities (BAME) groups in the UK have cautioned. It would also chill advocacy for Palestinian rights, including by vilifying and maligning our nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
Anchored in our own decades-long heritage of popular resistance and inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement and the US Civil Rights movement, the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated BDS movement is supported by an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society. It is also endorsed by progressive movements representing millions worldwide, including a fast-rising number of Jewish millennials.
BDS is rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and adheres to the UN definition of racial discrimination. It therefore “does not tolerate any act or discourse which adopts or promotes, among others, anti-Black racism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, xenophobia, or homophobia”.
Redefining racism against a particular community to serve the political goal of precluding or vilifying the struggle against other forms of racism is immoral and outright racist. It should be condemned by all morally-consistent progressives.
Israel’s utter failure to suppress the impressive growth of BDS across the world in the last few years has prompted it to redefine antisemitism to desperately malign our strictly anti-racist movement.
As leading Jewish British intellectuals and legal experts have stated:
Criticising laws and policies of the state of Israel as racist and as falling under the definition of apartheid is not antisemitic. Calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel to oppose those policies is not antisemitic.
We agree with the analysis of more than forty Jewish social justice organisations worldwide that we live in “a frightening era, with growing numbers of authoritarian and xenophobic regimes worldwide, foremost among them the Trump administration, allying themselves with Israel’s far right government while making common cause with deeply antisemitic and racist white supremacist groups and parties”.
We also echo their appeal:
We urge our governments, municipalities, universities and other institutions to reject the IHRA definition and instead take effective measures to defeat white supremacist nationalist hate and violence and to end complicity in Israel’s human rights violations.
We need no one’s permission to accurately narrate our history, defend our inherent and inalienable rights, or mobilise principled international solidarity with our struggle to achieve them.
But we expect social-justice oriented political parties, like Labour, and progressive trade unions to effectively contribute to ending British complicity in Israel’s system of oppression that denies us our rights, to protect the right to freedom of expression, and to stand on the right side of history. We expect them to help us in the struggle against apartheid and for equal rights of all humans irrespective of identity. Is this too much to expect?
– General Union of Palestinian Workers
– Global Palestine Right of Return Coalition
– Palestinian Union of Postal, IT and Telecommunication workers
– Union of Professional Associations
– Federation of Independent Trade Unions
– Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate
– Palestinian New Federation of Trade Unions
– General Union of Palestinian Teachers
– General Union of Palestinian Women
– General Union of Palestinian Peasants
– Union of Palestinian Farmers
– General Union of Palestinian Writers
– The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE)
– Palestinian Camps Boycott Movement-Lebanon (33 organisations from 11 refugee camps)
– Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO)
– Palestinian National Institute for NGOs
– Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC)
– Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (STW)
– Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
– Union of Palestinian Charitable Organizations
– Women Campaign to Boycott Israeli Products
– Civic Coalition for the Defense of Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem
– Occupied Palestine and Syrian Golan Heights Initiative
– Agricultural Cooperatives Union
Comments Off on UK Labour Party must reject biased antisemitism definition that stifles advocacy for Palestinian rights (Palestinian Unions)
Posted in Academic Freedom, Arab Labor, BDS, International Labor, Labour Party (UK), Palestinian Labor, U.K.
Who Built Zion? Palestinian Labor and the Case for Political Rights (New Labor Forum)
Posted on August 1, 2018 | Comments Off on Who Built Zion? Palestinian Labor and the Case for Political Rights (New Labor Forum)
International Labor & Politics Organized Labor & Worker Organizing
Who Built Zion? Palestinian Labor and the Case for Political Rights
August 2018 Andrew Ross
Photo credit: “Palestinian workers in the Old City of Jerusalem”(2017)
Who built Israel? The pioneers, of course. Men and women unaccustomed to skilled manual labor, who staffed the cement mixers, with shovels in hand or bricks balanced awkwardly on their shoulders, and who made “New Jews” of themselves through their nation-making toil. At least this was the dogma of much-lionized Labor Zionists (Ber Borochov, A. D. Gordon, Yosef Brenner, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Berl Katznelson) who promoted this hard graft as a rite of passage and a requirement for redeeming another people’s land as their own. While drawing on a different ethnic history, they were basically preaching a version of John Locke’s labor theory of value (working a particular plot of soil gave you property rights), which settler colonists had found to be a serviceable doctrine for dispossessing the indigenous populations of North America. How Jewish settlers laid claim to swathes of Palestinian land, then and now, remains the abiding source of conflict, conquest, and resistance in the Occupation’s fifty-first year—and the cumulative toll of the Nakba (the mass expulsion of more than half of the Arab population from their ancestral villages and lands) stretches into its seventieth year.
Who really did build the houses of Zion? The immigrant novices, who, as good socialists, demanded their rights . . . Or was it Palestinian workers who were cheaper and more capable . . .?
But the labor part of this story is murky, and, for a long time, it was obscured by the agrarian romance of the communalistic kibbutz. In the matter of urban settlement, there was even less clarity. Who really did build the houses of Zion? The immigrant novices, who, as good socialists, demanded their rights, along with “European” and not “Levantine” wages, from the Yishuv’s Jewish employers? Or was it Palestinian workers who were cheaper and more capable, with less strident politics, and who had generations of construction experience in the region? And why does this question matter today? Certainly, a revised account can help us rectify the historical record, still skewed by nationalist mythologies, but it might also feed into the fast-evolving debate about civil and political rights in the “one-state” scenario now being mooted for the region. What kinds of rights should accrue from the century or more of toil that Palestinians have devoted to the physical construction of the Zionist pre-state, Israel, the settlements, and the Occupied Territories themselves? And what additional forms of restitution are due to a people who were fashioned into a compulsory workforce after their displacement and occupation?
A Century of Construction
In spite of efforts, early and late, to exclude them from the building trades, Palestinians have always played an essential role in the making of the Zionist “national home.” This has been the case from the turn of the twentieth century when the Jews of Ottoman Palestine, whether Mizrahi and largely assimilated, or Ashkenazi Zionists and fiercely separatist, depended on superior Arab building skills and supplies. The Arab contribution to construction was stepped up during the long modernizing wave of economic expansion under the British Mandate, and it continued after 1948, when the Israeli state utilized their labor to help house the influx of Jewish immigrants. Since 1967, when the West Bank was secured as a reservoir of cheap labor, the Israeli dependency on Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza has proved difficult to shake off. Today, there are more of these workers engaged in construction in Israel or in the West Bank settlements than ever before, and they dominate the low-wage sector of “wet” building jobs (concrete, masonry, painting, etc.). So, too, the last half-century has seen an increasing reliance on stone from the rich limestone deposits of Palestine’s central highlands, as Israel’s quarry owners shut down their operations, or moved them across the Green Line (the 1949 Armistice, or pre-1967, border) to evade environmental and labor regulations.
Today, there are more…[Palestinian] workers engaged in construction in Israel or in the West Bank settlements than ever before…and they have very few legal protections, let alone access to unions…
The stone product gets moved through different checkpoints than those where workers with permits queue for hours in the most humiliating conditions. On the other side of the Green Line, the laborers are vulnerable to abuse and assault from Israelis, both employers and ordinary citizens, and they have very few legal protections, let alone access to unions, though the Histradut (Israel’s main labor federation) has recently carved out a small department to address the myriad sources of exploitation, which these laborers contend with: wage theft, unsafe workplaces, middleman fees, and employer delinquency over social insurance contributions. Similar circumstances apply in West Bank settlements, where Palestinian unions are barred, though the small independent Israeli union, WAC-MAAN (Workers Advice Center), has begun to successfully organize workers in some locations. Whether inside the Green Line or the settlements, the prerogative of employers to recommend that the authorities cancel an employee’s work permit, for whatever reason they think fit, is indicative of the condition of forced labor.
… [W]hat… forms of restitution are due to a people who were fashioned into a compulsory workforce after their displacement and occupation?
From the early-twentieth century to the present day, Zionist efforts to exclude Palestinians from the building trades have taken many forms, though all failed over time. During the Mandate era (September 29, 1923 to May 15, 1948), the policy of “Hebrew Labor” (avoda ivrit) was aimed at the exclusive use of Jewish workers in Jewish-owned businesses. But since many employers, especially in construction, continued to prefer the cheaper and more proficient Arab workers, enforcement of this embargo even when it was backed by force, was only partly successful. Sectors of the construction workforce were Arab-free only in the years immediately after 1948, when the Palestinians who remained in the new Israeli state were under military lockdown, and when the cheap labor of Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries was solicited as a replacement. Within a few years, however, Israeli Palestinians could once again be found on building sites, and, after 1967, they were joined en masse by their West Bank brethren. At the peak of the open borders era (which ended in the early 1990s), up to 40 percent of the workforce in the Occupied Territories was employed inside the Green Line, primarily engaged in construction, and generating a significant share of Israeli Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even after the Israeli authorities imposed a collective punishment for the first intifada (1987-1991) by cancelling most of the Palestinian work permits and importing overseas migrants (from Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Poland, Nigeria, and China) as a new replacement workforce, they were unable to stamp out employers’ abiding preference for Palestinian labor. The numbers of these migrant workers peaked in the early 2000s pre- ceding a drive to round up and deport the “demographic threat” of their Israeli-born children.
. . . Palestinian workers have had a decisive hand in most of the fixed assets on the land that lies between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean coast.
The long inventory of Palestinian labor includes a principal share in building the infra- structure of modernity under the British Mandate (roads, railways, ports, telecom lines, an airport, and other public works), the “first Hebrew city” of Tel Aviv, all the Arab towns and cities that were taken under Jewish control after the Nakba, the ever-expanding metropolis of “unified” and Greater Jerusalem, and the red-tiled hilltop settlements on the West Bank along with their grid of bypass roads, barrier walls, super-highways, and other security structures. All told, Palestinian workers have had a decisive hand in most of the fixed assets on the land that lies between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean coast.
By the first quarter of 2017, the number of West Bank Palestinians employed by Israelis had surpassed the pre-intifada levels, with almost 140,000 inside the Green Line and twenty-four thousand in the settlement colonies, and many more working there without permits.[i] In line with the long-established colonial formula of jobs for peace, key figures in the Netanyahu administration have been pushing for a sizable increase in the number of permits issued. The perceived demand also arises from Israel’s housing shortage. In 2016, the National Economic Council projected a need to build an additional 1.5 million homes before 2040.[ii] Since the gross monthly cost of employing these West Bank commuters is less than half that of an Israeli or migrant worker (in addition to the routine wage theft, the former require no housing and place no social or welfare burdens on Israeli society), this long-term need for housing virtually guarantees a protracted demand for Palestinian builders.[iii]
Toward the Decolonial Future
How can these vital contributions be recognized in the political debate about the future of the lands of historic Palestine? Should claims arising from this long record of labor participation be considered as part of the “final status” settlement between Israelis and Palestinians? Talks about a permanent settlement have been on hiatus for more than a decade, and a return to the table seems to be a remote prospect right now, but if and when they resume, the thorny matters of restitution of property, compensation for losses and moral suffering, and the right to return for refugees will still be on the table.[iv] In recent decades, and following the example of German reparations for wartime Jewish harms and losses, every international instance of conflict resolution has addressed the claims of displaced populations in regard to those several remedies.
This kind of reparative justice is primarily about repaying debts from the past, but how can such remedies assist more directly in securing a different kind of future? As the policies of the Trump and Netanyahu administrations further foreclose any prospect of a practical partition, and as momentum steadily builds behind some vision of a single, democratic state within the same land boundaries as Mandatory Palestine, the presumption that equity earned from building the state translates into political rights within it ought to become more admissible.
Typically, the principle of sweat equity applies only to the value earned from an owner’s personal investment of effort. The toil of a waged laborer on the same building or enterprise is regarded as a more limited contractual matter, altogether separate from property and use rights. But what if the workers in question are not freely contracted, and instead are bound by tight constraints placed on them by the employer group? And what if the land on which they are instructed to work has been forcibly taken from their own people? On an individual basis, evidence of these inequities might support a compensation claim, but the collective plight of the Palestinian worker under Occupation merits a longer view, and a different kind of approach. The overall worth of Palestinians’ aggregate labor contribution to the assets encompassed by the state justifies a claim to territorial sovereignty, full political rights, and citizenship. Israeli policies, at least since 1948, were designed to make those contributions all but compulsory. Under the Occupation, economic development in the West Bank and Gaza has been systematically suppressed. While Israeli wages are three times higher, Palestinians have to buy their consumer goods at Israeli prices, and so most families would go broke without the remittances that household members bring back across the Green Line. That so many Palestinians have had no alternative but to work for their occupiers further strengthens the case for a remedy that includes political recognition as full citizens in a unitary state.
Under UN Resolutions 194 (1948) and 3236 (1974), the forced transfer of Palestinians from their land and homes in 1948 and 1967 established responsibilities for Israel to acknowledge the former owners’ right to return to their property. Far from a single historical event—since it continues to this day in each act of confiscation, demolition, and eviction—the ongoing Nakba (al-Nakba al-mustamera) has extended these liabilities, adding new entries to the list of wrongs that might present grounds for restitution and reparations in any final settlement. One of the longest running injustices, and intimately connected to this “long Nakba,” was the making of a tractable and dependent labor force that is not free in any functional sense of the term.[v]
The sharp constraints placed on Palestinian livelihoods, today, may appear remote in time from 1948, but they are integral to, and inseparable from, the Nakba’s unfinished program of dispossession, expulsion, and asset transfer. Indeed, the prototype for these labor controls was the immediate post-1948 treatment of Israeli Palestinians, whose limited movement was subject to military say-so. It was through the filter of these tight travel constraints that their cut-price labor was first made available to Jewish employers from the early 1950s. Later, in the course of the Occupation, the administration of those constraints was forced on workers from the West Bank and Gaza, and finessed through the growth of a convoluted permit sys- tem, ubiquitous restrictions on movement, mass incarceration, torture, wage theft, advanced surveillance, and the intensive discipline and humiliation served on border-crossers at check- points. Using the strategy of economic pacification (jobs in return for acquiescence, and in some cases, collaboration with Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency), and the tactic of collective punishment (border closures, home demolitions, and permit cancellations as retribution for the intifadas or autonomous acts of resistance), the authorities have been able to fine-tune their management of Palestinians’ existential need to access the Israeli labor market.
At no point was this “need” ever produced by a competitive labor market. Israeli policy- makers blocked economic development in the West Bank and Gaza with the explicit intent of depressing wages, reinforcing dependency, and perpetuating poverty. Political economist Sara Roy has described the result as “de-development.”[vi] The intended outcome was that, for most households, the alternative to working for the occupier would be a starvation wage. A worker whom I interviewed recently at Bethlehem’s cross-border checkpoint put it this way: “If we didn’t have work inside Israel, we would have to eat each other.” Given the high levels of food insecurity and chronic malnutrition among the Palestinian population, and especially in Gaza and parts of the West Bank’s Area C, his comment was a particularly dark joke.
Israeli policymakers blocked economic development in the West Bank and Gaza with the explicit intent of depressing wages, reinforcing dependency, and perpetuating poverty.
Bonded, indentured, enslaved, or ethnically persecuted workers who built other nations have struggled, on a related basis, for some kind of state-level recognition. In the United States, the hard labor of African, Irish, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has often been held up as a justification for earning full inclusion and civil rights, and, in the case of the descendants of slaves, as grounds for economic reparations.
Undocumented immigrants facing deportation today often stake their claim to residence on the basis of their labor contributions. As far as I know, no formal suits of this kind have been filed, and some pledges—like General Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule as recognition of freedmen’s right to own land they had worked as slaves—notoriously went unfulfilled. But, over time, the moral force of the argument for labor-based political equity has contributed to the ultimate civic and legal acceptance of the rights of these populations. For all its historic inequities, and despite the perpetuation of white supremacy, the United States has become a multiethnic society, capable of absorbing a range of immigrant identities.
Bonded, indentured, enslaved, or ethnically persecuted workers who built other nations have struggled…for some kind of state-level recognition.
But the Israeli state is no such thing (it has never defined itself as a “nation of immigrants”); its lawmakers vigorously oppose the granting of any rights to migrant workers, or to their Israeli- born children, let alone to refugees entitled to protection under international conventions. Under the Law of Return (1950), any Jew who sets foot in Israel for the first time immediately enjoys national rights, including permanent residence, citizenship, and full welfare entitlements and services. Despite their longevity on the land, Israel’s own Palestinian minority (20 percent of the population) is treated as second-class citizens and regarded as a “demographic time bomb,” while elementary civil and human rights are denied to residents of the West Bank and Gaza under military occupation. As for the migrants who have spent much of their lives working in Israel, building homes, hotels, museums, and shopping malls in cities and suburban subdivisions, not to mention the segregating landscape of bypass roads, separation walls, and prisons, they are routinely labeled as an “existential threat” to the legally designated “Jewish” state.
Political elites around the world still pay lip service to the policy principle of an autonomous Palestinian state, but the attention of almost everyone else has pivoted away from partition toward the more heady proposition of securing equal rights for all residents of an integrated multicultural state. Advocates of this “decolonial” solution argue that it is civic, and not ethnic, nationalism that is needed to deliver a full-blown democracy in the lands of Israel and the Occupied Territories.[vii] If that scenario ever advances, then the record of labor contributions sketched out here ought to be part of the reckoning. Or as another checkpoint interviewee from the West Bank put it, “I’ve been building homes every day over there for thirty years. In a way, it’s really my country too, isn’t it?”
Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author of many books, including Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. His next book, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, is forthcoming from Verso in 2019.
[i] Although the percentage of the Palestinian work- force employed in Israel in 2017 was lower than at its peak in 1988, the numbers were higher. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Labor Force Survey (January-March 2017), “the number of employed individuals employed in Israel and Israeli settlements was 139,600 in the first quarter 2017…Of these; 68,500 had a permit, 48,700 worked without any permit and 22,400 employed individuals have an Israeli identity card or foreign passport.” An additional twenty-four thousand worked in settlements, while almost 60 percent were employed in construction; http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=1922. Bank of Israel data for the first quarter of 2018 showed unemployment rates in Israel at 3.7 percent, in a steady state of decline from the high levels after 2008. Bank of Israel, “Economic Indicators: Israeli Economic Data” (2017), available at http://www.boi.org.il/en/DataAndStatistics/Pages/Indicators.aspx?Level=1&IndicatorId=1&sId=0.
[ii] National Economic Council, “Future Housing Needs in Israel, 2016-2040” (2016). Cited in Bank of Israel, Annual Report 2016, Chapter 9, “Construction and the Housing Market,” http://www.boi.org.il/en/NewsAndPublications/RegularPublications/Research%20Department%20Publications/ BankIsraelAnnualReport/Annual%20Report%202016/chap-9.pdf.
[iii] The estimate was based on 2011 employer reports, and published by the Interministerial Committee for the Regularization, Monitoring and Enforcement of Palestinian Employment in Israel (the “Eckstein Report”), cited in Shlomo Swirski and Noga Dagan-Buzaglo, The Occupation: Who Pays the Price? The Impact of the Occupation on Israeli Society and Economy (Tel Aviv: Adva Center, June 2017),48.
[iv] See Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai, eds., Compensation to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace (London: Pluto Press, 2013).
[v] Matthew Vickery argues that the conditions under which Palestinians work in the settlements merit the label of “forced labor,” according to ILO definitions. Employing the Enemy: The Story of Palestinian Labourers on Israeli Settlements (London: Zed Books, 2017),112-26.
[vi] Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016).
[vii] Omar Barghouti, “A Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine,” in After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine, ed. Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor (London: Saqi Books, 2012), 194-209; and Jeff Halper, “The ‘One Democratic State Campaign,’” Mondoweiss, May 3, 2018, available at https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/ democratic-multicultural-palestine/.
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Posted in Arab Labor, Labor Zionism, One State, Palestinian Labor
A Call to Action from Gaza: Cover your city with posters of the Great March of Return heroes
Posted on June 25, 2018 | Comments Off on A Call to Action from Gaza: Cover your city with posters of the Great March of Return heroes
Open Letter on June 25, 2018
Palestinian organisations in Gaza are calling upon all people of conscience around the world, to make posters of the fallen heroes of the recent Great March of Return and plaster these all over your cities and towns, especially opposite Israeli and American embassies. This is an action that will greatly benefit the visibility of our cause!
PDF files of the fallen demonstrators can be found here : https://tinyurl.com/y96mb76m
Please send pictures or videos of your action with statement of support for the Right of Return and the Great March of Return to: greatmarchsolidarity@gmail.com
Following the media coverage of the massacre that Israel carried out against us on the first day of our march, we have been receiving less and less media coverage.Yet more and more of us are being killed every day. Gaza has been bombarded night and day too. Since the start of the Great March of Return, over 135 unarmed protesters have been shot dead and more than 14,000 wounded by the occupation forces, including children, medical staff, journalists, and the disabled. Gaza’s health system has been pushed to the brink of collapse, as hospitals struggle to handle an influx of serious and life-threatening injuries.
Help keep the freedom of Palestinians and the right to return in the spotlight!
Great March of Return-Steering Committee
The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)
University Teachers’ Association in Palestine
Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel Al-Aqsa University
One Democratic State Group
Voices Against Israeli Apartheid
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Posted in Great Return March, Palestinian Labor
The Arab American radicals who paved way for BDS (Electronic Intifada)
Posted on September 5, 2017 | Comments Off on The Arab American radicals who paved way for BDS (Electronic Intifada)
The Arab American radicals who paved way for BDS
Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 5 September 2017
The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s by Pamela E. Pennock, The University of North Carolina Press (2017)
One of the earliest boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, victories in the United States came in 1973 when United Auto Workers Local 600 in Dearborn, Michigan, voted to divest its Israeli bonds after a campaign waged by the Arab Workers Caucus and the American Arab Coordinating Committee. The campaign drew comparisons with apartheid South Africa and won the support of many Black autoworkers in Michigan.
Was it just an oddity that decades before Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in 2005, industrial workers in the US heartland were already waging a BDS struggle? Or, far from being a rogue wave, was it an integral part of the oceanic upheavals among workers, students, immigrants and people of color during the heady maelstroms of the 1960s and ’70s?
The Rise of the Arab American Left makes it clear this was no oddity, although it did have certain characteristics unique to the Arab American experience. Given the relative paucity of scholarship on the history of the Arab American left, this book is a must-read for those who wish to learn more about that community’s activism during this period of radical upheaval.
Pennock, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, focuses on radical activists, who she defines as “secular, ideologically leftist and avidly pro-Palestinian.” She concedes that this group – with its support of armed struggle, a revolution for what was then called the “Third World,” and one democratic, secular state throughout all of Mandate Palestine – was a subset of the Arab American population at a time when a majority of Arab Americans held more moderate positions.
“Nevertheless,” she notes, “the issue that most united and galvanized Arab Americans – across differences of generation, social class, religion and national origin – was their shared outrage over the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs through the establishment of the state of Israel.”
The book’s narrative covers the impact Israel’s 1967 War had amongst Arab Americans, the intense period of repression and surveillance that followed the rise of activism in the 1970s and the gradual moderation of activism in the 1980s, when outlooks became less transnational and more focused on domestic civil rights issues.
Natural allies
In the 1960s, organizations such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates and the Organization of Arab Students arose, along with such figures as the academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and civil rights attorney Abdeen Jabara. The Rise of the Arab American Left offers a unique opportunity for readers to learn about these early trailblazers.
One of the book’s most enlightening chapters, aptly titled “Intersections,” documents how Arab Americans began to find “natural allies” in the movements of other oppressed groups with roots in the Third World.
In particular, the book looks at the alliance that developed between Arab American autoworkers in Michigan and activists with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, also based in the auto plants.
The alliance extended to issues related to urban removal as the city of Dearborn attempted to turn the Southend neighborhood, where most Arab immigrants lived, into an industrial zone to act as a buffer between Dearborn and predominantly Black Detroit in the wake of that city’s 1967 rebellion.
Pennock’s singular focus on Dearborn is illuminating and detailed, but she also surveys the national scene, showing how central figures in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, such as James Forman and Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), came to embrace the Palestinian cause, along with the Black Panther Party and other prominent Black activists such as Jack O’Dell of Operation PUSH and Francis Beal of the Third World Women’s Alliance.
In the early 1970s, Pennock observes, the largely white, student-based New Left also “developed a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position.” However, she concludes, that “on the whole, the American Left’s commitment to the Palestinian revolution was soft and somewhat perfunctory; in general, the activists’ understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict was superficial, and their position was rooted in an idealized image of Third World guerrillas.”
For many white activists, the New Left’s embrace of the Palestinian struggle opened a rift that lasted for decades, although it actually delineated an already existing faultline: namely that between the left-liberal wing of the movement and the more radical, Marxist-Leninist wing.
Pennock describes in detail how both black and white radicals embraced the Palestinian cause, while more centrist forces emerging out of the civil rights and student movements failed to break with Zionism.
Political intimidation
Another chapter documents how Arab American activists faced repression and surveillance, with the active assistance of the Israel lobby, as early as the Organization of Arab Students’ 1969 convention when the Anti-Defamation League sent infiltrators posing as media.
In Pennock’s account, both the ADL and the Israel lobby group AIPAC colluded with the FBI and the CIA, leading to the creation of the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism and a concerted political intimidation campaign known as Operation Boulder. The cabinet directed the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Services to monitor Arab Americans, surveillance that included an illegal FBI burglary of the Dallas, Texas, office of the Arab Information Center.
Pennock says the triggering incident was the Black September attack at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics but clarifies that the creation of the cabinet committee was seen as a way to placate AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.
The author notes that “the investigations never detected a single case of terrorist or espionage activity among Arabs living in the United States.” But that, of course, was not the point. Operation Boulder was essentially “a program of political intimidation,” Pennock observes, that was meant to suppress Arab-American activism and to inject “divide and conquer” tactics within the movement.
The direct role of the Israeli government in this surveillance was also strongly suspected, but never proved. Both The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribunepublished articles describing collusion between Israeli intelligence agencies, the Anti-Defamation League and the FBI, with the ADL keeping files on Arab American activists for the FBI.
Eventually, the National Security Agency was also exposed for its electronic surveillance of Abdeen Jabara, wiretapping at least 40 of his telephone conversations even though the FBI admitted that Jabara was not the subject of a criminal investigation.
It’s hard to think of any of this as lost history, given that the same practices prevail today, with groups like Canary Mission and others compiling dossiers on Palestine student activists at US campuses.
If one of the first recorded BDS victories was that of United Auto Workers Local 600 in 1973, then the trajectory continued in 2015 when both the United Electrical Workers and the Connecticut branch of the AFL-CIO adopted pro-BDS resolutions, as did the Black Solidarity Statement and the Movement for Black Lives.
If today’s BDS movement reaches farther, it’s because it stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before.
Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is active with the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.
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Posted in Arab Labor, Black Solidarity, Palestinian Labor, UAW
Sally Howell, Southend Struggles: Converging Narratives of an Arab/Muslim American Enclave
Posted on July 24, 2017 | Comments Off on Sally Howell, Southend Struggles: Converging Narratives of an Arab/Muslim American Enclave
http://lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/63/123
Mashriq & Mahjar 3, no. 1 (2015), 41-64
Sally Howell
SOUTHEND STRUGGLES: CONVERGING NARRATIVES OF AN ARAB/MUSLIM AMERICAN ENCLAVE
This paper explores political struggles that took place in the Southend of Dearborn in the 1970s that coincided with the rise of Arab nationalist and Islamic movements in Michigan and linked these interests to those of Arab- American activists involved in the civil rights movement, labor organizing, and other campaigns for social and economic justice. These struggles launched the careers of activists who cooperated in the 1970s and 1980s to establish several of the nation’s leading Arab- and Muslim-American service, religious, and community-based institutions and played a significant role in transforming Dearborn into the well-known Arab American hub of today. In the Southend, newer and older Arab constituencies joined forces to build an unprecedented institutional infrastructure, both the left-liberal, secular, politically empowered Arab-American establishment of Dearborn and it’s equally engaged, but pious and socially conservative Muslim-American establishment. Thus the Southend struggles provide key insights into the social challenges that came to define Arab-American (and Muslim-American) identities in the half century that followed. In this essay I bring these histories together and explain why more work needs to be done before we can make sense of the political challenges Arabs and Muslims—as distinctive and overlapping communities—have faced in the U.S.
In the 1950s the city of Dearborn, Michigan, led by Mayor Orville Hubbard, began a campaign to declare the Southend neighborhood a “blighted area,” evict its ethnically diverse, working class residents, and turn their properties over to the Ford Motor Company and the Edward C. Levy Company (a local asphalt producer) for development as an “industrial park.”1 Neighborhood residents decided to stand their ground and fight. The Southeast Dearborn Community Council (SEDCC) mounted a long and politically costly effort to save the Southend. In 1973, after 350 homes and several important public buildings had been demolished, community activists finally halted the mayor’s bulldozers in a courtroom action led by a young Lebanese-American attorney named Abdeen Jabara.2
Three years later another legal battle took place that was equally critical to the future of the Southend. This conflict began when a group of Yemeni and Palestinian autoworkers broke into the Lebanese-led American Moslem Society (AMS) and performed the ʿĪd al-ʾAḍḥā prayers. Rather than celebrate the holiday on the nearest weekend, which was the established practice of the thirty-eight-year old congregation, these “trespassing” worshippers insisted on praying on the actual holiday, following the religious norms of their homelands. Shortly thereafter, the two factions went to court over control of the mosque. In 1976, a judge ruled in favor of the new, Yemeni-majority board of directors.3
These Southend struggles brought people together from a remarkable array of backgrounds. They coincided with the rise of Arab nationalist and Islamic movements in Michigan and linked these interests to those of Arab-American activists involved in the civil rights movement, labor organizing, and other campaigns for social and economic justice in Detroit. They created and sustained a relatively safe space in which the tens of thousands of Arab refugees who began arriving in Detroit in the 1970s (from Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq) could establish a foothold in America. They launched the careers of community activists and “culture brokers” who worked together in the 1970s and 1980s to establish several of the nation’s leading Arab- and Muslim-American social service, religious, and community- based institutions. The Southend struggles, in other words, played a significant role in transforming Dearborn into a city that, by 2013, had a population of 97,140, of which 42 percent was Arab.4 Today, Dearborn is home to fifteen mosques, while greater Detroit has over eighty. Roughly 230,000 Arab Americans live in Detroit and its suburbs, and nearly half of them are Muslim.5
The Southend struggles of the 1970s were projects of place making. They produced new identities for the neighborhood, involving its residents in existential conflicts and a search for consensus. According to Arif Dirlik, place making “defuses claims to ‘pure’ identities that may be essential to struggles against existing structures of power” and encourages people to imagine and realize alternatives.6 Contests over space illuminate the flexibility, temporality, and constructed nature of identities, be they religious, ethnic, or geographical in origin. The political struggles that took place in the Southend in the 1970s are important because they explain how the Dearborn of today came into being. The city and its Arab population were transformed by these conflicts in vital ways. Within Michigan, the Southend struggles matter because they allowed Dearborn to persist and grow as the epicenter of both a large, diverse, and politically empowered Arab-American community and an equally large and similarly empowered Muslim-American community. Nationally, the Southend struggles matter because they represent, in highly concentrated form, the seismic changes that took place in Arab-American communities in the post-1965 era. The new immigration regime, coupled with new geopolitical conflicts and opportunities overseas, drew a broader spectrum of immigrants from the Arab countries. Unlike those who came to the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the post-1965 arrivals were much more likely to be Muslim and from sending nations other than Syria/Lebanon. Like their predecessors, they were eager to remain involved in the politics of their homelands, but as American interventions in the Middle East increased during the Cold War, it became obvious to new Arab migrants and their established American co-ethnics that their ability to participate fully and equally as U.S. citizens would depend on how the U.S. pursued imperial policies in the Middle East. In the Southend, the newer and older Arab constituencies joined forces to build an unprecedented institutional infrastructure that addressed these domestic and international changes. For all these reasons, the Southend struggles provide key insights into the political and social challenges that came to define Arab-American (and Muslim-American) identities in the half century that followed.
Because they represent different constituencies, the two narratives presented here—one centered on neighborhood preservation, the other on the takeover of a mosque—are rarely integrated in a single telling. One storyline is deployed to explain the rise of Dearborn’s left-liberal, secular, politically empowered Arab-American establishment. The other is used to explain the rise of Dearborn’s socially conservative, pious, and politically engaged Muslim-American establishment. Arab-American leaders frequently point out that Dearborn is the “largest and most highly concentrated Arab community in North America,” while its Muslim spokespeople refer to it as “the Muslim Capital of the West.”7 These equally real, equally imaginary, spaces overlap in Dearborn. Here, Arab-American history and Muslim- American history move in parallel orbits, intersecting at key moments, but resisting attempts to situate them in integrating frameworks. In this essay I will try to bring the two histories together and explain why more work, especially on the post-1965 era, needs to be done before we can make better sense of the political challenges Arabs and Muslims—as distinctive and overlapping communities—have faced in the U.S.
The institutions that grew out of the Southend struggles—principally, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) and the reformed AMS—gave their support to a variety of Arab and Muslim causes that were often at odds. They contributed to national organizations that, during the 1980s and 1990s, pulled Arab and Muslim networks in different directions, which may be why it has been important to keep the two histories separate for so long. Focusing on the left or the right, the secular or the pious, has inevitably privileged one identity at the expense of the other. In the post-9/11 era, as Arab and Muslim institutions have been driven together by crisis and opportunity, it has become possible (even necessary) to stitch these historical threads together. By doing so in this essay, I hope to illuminate the broader array of circumstances that compelled Arab Americans to work together across their many differences to defend a way of life and an urban space that offered them limited but important refuge. These conditions shaped the Southend in the 1970s, and they are essential to understanding the role of Arabs and Muslims in the city of Dearborn (and elsewhere) in the 2010s.
FROM VITAL TO EXPENDABLE: HENRY FORD’S MULTIETHNIC WORKER’S RESERVE
I began working in the Southend of Dearborn in 1987, when I was hired to establish a cultural arts program for ACCESS, then a neighborhood-based social service agency. My new colleagues were eager to fill me in on local history and folklore; they had wonderful stories to tell of labor organizing, goon squads, personal encounters with Henry Ford, Depression-era survival strategies, and life in Dearborn’s working- class “melting pot.” Those who lingered with me over cups of coffee in neighborhood haunts, or pored over newspaper clippings collected in family albums, exposed me to what Lucy Lippard aptly designates the “lure of the local.”8 Many of these narratives were passed on to me as preparation for the task of representing the local community in the grants I wrote to support ACCESS’s fledgling arts program. Like the storytellers all around me, I soon became a “culture broker and image-maker”9 in my own right. My job, after all, required me to explain who Detroit’s Arabs were, how they had come to live there, and what their lives were like. At ACCESS, these narratives always began in the Southend itself.
The Southend, I was told, took shape as a home to industrial workers in the late 1910s and early 1920s after Henry Ford began work on what would quickly become the world’s largest industrial complex, the Rouge Factory, along Miller Road.10 In its heyday, the Rouge employed over 90,000 workers who converted iron, coal, and rubber into automobiles. New migrants from the American South, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Mexico, and the Middle East settled in the Southend, as long as they were not black. Ford helped develop housing in Inkster, just west of Dearborn, for his black workers; the rest were encouraged to remain in Detroit.11 The white and off-white migrants who settled in the Southend had a great deal in common, although they had come to Michigan from very different places. They struggled to learn English, to earn enough money to get ahead in the world, and to build the social clubs, churches, and mosques that fostered the cultural forms they had brought with them. They faced the perils of urban life together.
Those who grew up in the Southend in the 1930s to 1950s delight in describing its broad ethnic spectrum. Joe Borrajo, using an allusion common in Dearborn, told me “In the 1950s, Ripley’s Believe it or Not had Dearborn listed in its book as being a very unique demographic area. It had 33 different nationality groups in that particular community. And, little did I know, or any of the guys I ran with (and the guys I ran with were of Mexican background, Italians, Romanian, Southern boys and Lebanese) and we would all go to each other’s homes and taste each other’s foods […] And we went with each other to the different churches that each of us belonged to.”12 Borrajo is himself the child of immigrants; his father was from Yemen and his mother from Yugoslavia. Despite having grown up in an isolated neighborhood during hard times, most former Southenders are conspicuously proud of their neighborhood’s complex ethnic mix. In his detailed examination of census data from 1940, neighborhood historian Rudy Constantine places this number of ethno-national origins carefully at 49.13
The Southend is also notorious for the brutal labor battles that took place there in the 1930s, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) fought to organize the last major automobile manufacturer that resisted unionization, the Ford Motor Company, or “Ford’s,” as it is still known in Dearborn. The Ford Hunger March took place on Miller Road in 1932. The four white men killed by the Dearborn Police in this confrontation are buried in nearby Woodmere cemetery.14 The “Battle of the Overpass,” which took place on Miller as well, in 1937, was a significant turning point in the campaign to unionize Ford.15 And in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the neighborhood’s “militant” UAW Local 600 led a “right to work” campaign that sought, despite tremendous opposition from their national leadership, to disrupt the decentralization and automation of the industry and end its growing reliance on the use of overtime.16 For neighborhood residents, participation in union struggles was not uniformly glorious and heroic, nor was it one-sided. Henry Ford’s best union-buster and all-around-thug, Harry Bennett, recruited several members of his “goon squad” in the Southend.17 This private militia enforced company policy in the neighborhood, at the factory gates, and on the shop floors.
Alan Amen, whose father worked at the Rouge for 34 years, explained to me that the union issue was not as clear-cut to Southend workers in the 1930s as it is today. Both sides promised better pay and working conditions. “You have to remember, Dearborn was Henry Ford: the benefactor, the old man, the guy who took care of you. Organizing in opposition to Ford’s wishes was not an easy task for immigrants who looked at Ford as a, what was he? This guy was the icon of American opportunity.”18 Don Unis, a Dearborn fire fighter who grew up in the Southend, tells a number of “clever fox” stories about his immigrant father and other Lebanese workers from the neighborhood celebrating their skill at escaping work by making the best of chance encounters with Ford himself or, a few years later, with Jimmy Hoffa.19 Many workers in the first immigrant generation were not interested in class struggle but in using personal connections and raw wit to leverage job security.
Stories about the multiethnic past and labor activism already seemed sepia-toned and a bit surreal in the late 1980s. The Southend’s six thousand residents were by then overwhelmingly Arab, immigrant, and disproportionately unemployed.20 When I visited Dix Avenue, the Southend’s commercial strip, for the first few times on my own, I was treated with outright suspicion and occasional hostility. The only non- Arabs left on Dix, it appeared, were INS officials, social workers, cops, and the occasional sex worker. By 1987, a new set of stories had emerged alongside the older ones, and they expressed the same eagerness to connect the local to the national and transnational, to assert the importance of this small, neglected place. These narratives were also about labor organizers and unions, immigration, diversity, and political activism. Yet neighborhood politics and class interests were now rendered in explicitly Arab terms. In the new stories Arabs were the leaders. Arabs defeated Dearborn’s infamous racist mayor, Hubbard. Arab workers, and their compatriots in the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, shut down the Dodge Main assembly line to protest UAW support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Arabs took over (and Arabs lost control of) the city’s oldest mosque. Most importantly, Arabs created the community organizations that now empowered them to tell these stories, like ACCESS and the AMS. In the Southend, Arabs were constructing a new politics that would connect Dearborn to an Arab/Muslim community that was decidedly American, yet global in orientation and impact.
This newer way of talking about the Southend evolved against the backdrop of Arab Detroit as a whole, a community that spread across urban and suburban boundaries in ways the older, Southend- centric, multiethnic, working-class identities could not. The story of Detroit’s “Arab-American community” begins in the Ottoman Province of Syria (today’s Lebanon and Syria) with a handful of Christian villagers who decided to seek their fortunes in “Amreeka,” a world they had learned about from French and American missionaries in the Levant. By 1900, Detroit was already home to a small colony of Syrians, mostly peddlers and their local suppliers.21 Muslim Syrians had joined the migration and were quickly establishing themselves in Highland Park when Henry Ford, desperate to staff his newly minted and hopelessly tedious moving assembly, doubled the daily wage of workers in 1914. The economy of Detroit took off in this period, and the Syrian enclaves in Highland Park and near the Jefferson Avenue Chrysler plant on Detroit’s East side took off along with it. Village clubs and religious associations established in the 1910s developed into a half dozen Syrian-majority churches and mosques in the decades that followed. The Muslim families who migrated with Ford to Dearborn in the 1920s opened their first mosques, the Progressive Arabian Hashmie Society and the American Moslem Society in 1937 and 1938 respectively, near the intersection of Dix Avenue and (today’s) Vernor Highway. A small network of Iraqi and Palestinian Christians also established themselves in Detroit in the early part of the century. Most of these communities, once firmly in place, would sponsor the chain migration of relatives. This steady trickle of arrivals continued until 1965, when the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws, combined with political conflict in the region, encouraged the migration of tens of thousands of Middle Easterners to Detroit.22
The Arabs who settled in Dearborn’s Southend were mostly Muslim and working class, which set their community apart from the Arab Christian enclaves which were, by mid-century, largely middle class and dispersed among the city’s eastern suburbs. In addition to the two mosques, the Southend business district along Dix Avenue was home to Kamel’s, a small neighborhood restaurant, Ozman’s and Abbass’s restaurants, Shaheen’s Supermarket, several Turkish and Arab coffee houses, Berri’s Halal Meats (the first explicitly halal business in Michigan),23 Mr. Saad’s grocery, a cobbler, Louie’s Coney Island, and a plethora of non-Arab businesses: a small theater, a Chinese laundry, a bar, a five and dime shop, a drug store, and a gambling joint known as “the Hole.” This business district, usually referred to as “Dix” by Arabs living in other parts of Detroit, was the “symbolic center and heart” of the city’s Arab communities, and it was known not only for its tight concentration of businesses and people, but also for its “receptivity to and involvement with politics in the home country.”24
Abdo Elkholy, in his 1966 study of the local Muslim community, captures the feel of the Southend:
Members of the Detroit community… came from the old country directly to Detroit, where they established their ghetto-like colony in Dearborn … One cannot but observe the Arabic atmosphere on Dix Street: here are many coffee-houses whose patrons speak Arabic and drink the same strong tea and Turkish coffee in small cups that they drank in the old country and play the same games … The Syrian groceries import food from Syria. The Syrian bakeries and pastry shops provide familiar foods too.25
In the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanese, Palestinians, and a growing Yemeni population co-existed comfortably with their non-Arab neighbors, who were still, far and away, the Southend’s majority population. In the wake of the civil rights movement, however, cracks began to appear in the collective narrative of immigrant struggle and assimilation. Newly arriving Arabs were increasingly viewed as disruptive to the status quo, and, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the pan-Arab alliances that formed in solidarity and defiance quickly threatened earlier bonds that had encouraged Arab inclusion in the Southend’s white working class.
YOU CAN’T FIGHT CITY HALL
By the 1950s, Dearborn’s Southend had become politically expendable. It was an isolated neighborhood with a reputation for horrific pollution, militant autoworkers, and over-crowded housing. As Dearborn’s available landscape filled with homes and shopping malls, schools and “residents only” parks (a Dearborn euphemism for “whites only”), Mayor Hubbard was under pressure to set aside more land for heavy industry. Ford Motor provided over half of the city’s revenues,26 and this gave the auto manufacturer immense clout in city hall. The Ford Leasing Development Company, a division of Ford, constructed upper middle class housing and shopping malls on their land in central and west Dearborn, but zoning ordinances kept their heavy industry away from the city’s white collar precincts. The Southend also lay inconveniently between the gates of the Rouge factory and those of the Edward C. Levy Company, which converted slag and other industrial waste into asphalt for local roads. This combination of factors led Hubbard and the City Council to plan for the gradual rezoning of the Southend as an industrial park.
The Southend’s housing stock, much of it built quickly and cheaply in the 1920s, was deemed run down and inadequate in the 1950s. Iris Becker, a teacher and longtime neighborhood activist, described the conditions under which neighborhood housing was first created: “Some of [the housing] was very fast and part of it was self-built. You know, the people who were foreign-born or came from other places built small homes and some of them were larger. They did a lot of work themselves. Some of it was quality work and some of it was not quality work.”27 A report written about the neighborhood in 1940 by Sociologist Albert Ammerman described the housing as much more likely to be substandard than in other parts of Dearborn, reaching “near slum conditions” in some places and suffering from intense overcrowding. The data he drew on for this report was collected during the Great Depression, when the number of unemployed in Detroit reached over 400,000 workers.28 Many families doubled up during this period, but the boom years that followed (during World War II) did little to alleviate overcrowding as hundreds of thousands of new people flocked to the city to work in wartime industries. Detroit’s factories spilled out jeeps, tanks, and airplanes at record speed, but many new arrivals to the area lived in tents and other forms of temporary housing. In the post-war period, Ford, in particular, began to decentralize automobile production, introducing automation and reducing the size and power of the labor force at the Rouge.29 This too affected the Southend. The generation of neighborhood men who walked to their jobs at Ford’s was quickly passing away. When veterans returned from the war, many of them bought houses elsewhere. The Southend had come to be viewed as an immigrant ghetto. Many residents, despite their warm feelings toward the place, fled it as soon as they had the chance, moving usually into more stable, middle-class parts of Dearborn and its neighboring suburbs.
To make matters worse, the Southend was a residential island in a sea of heavy industry. The mile- long Rouge colossus bordered the community to the west and overshadowed its skyline. To the east, there was the Levy Company, with its uncovered mountains of slag. To the north, a series of trucking facilities, brick manufacturers, and other light industries added noise and exhaust. To the southeast lay Woodmere Cemetery and Patton Park, in Detroit. Just southwest of Dearborn, in Melvindale, was the Darling soap works and several oil refineries. Prevailing winds brought the emissions of the Rouge plant directly over the Southend. Winds from the south brought the sickening smell of offal that had not yet been perfumed to make soap. Winds from the east brought flecks of slag so steadily that in the 1960s, residents’ homes were covered by a thick film of residue.30 In 1971 the Air Pollution Control Division of Wayne County found the Southend’s air to have “on the average twice as many suspended particulates—dust, fly ash, coke, iron oxides (to name a few)—as the federal standards permit for health. On some days, it has more than three times the maximum.”31 Fly ash from the factory slowly ate away the paint on neighborhood cars. Houses were filthy on the outside, and difficult to keep clean inside as well. Drying laundry while keeping it free of soot and ash was an endless battle in the era of the clothesline.32 Neighborhood residents referred to Hashmie Hall, one of the mosques on Dix, as “the coal mine” because its uninsulated windows let in so much soot that the surfaces of the furniture had to be cleaned before each and every use.33 By the 1970s, the roof of the local elementary school began to collapse from the heavy weight of accumulated pollutants.34
It was the Southend’s location between the Ford and Levy facilities that led to the first confrontation between Southend residents and city officials. Levy had begun hauling slag away from the Rouge in 1922, and in 1948 opened a new slag processing facility at 8880 Dix Avenue, just across the border in Detroit, to deal with increased production at Rouge Steel and other nearby factories on Zug Island.35 Their somewhat convoluted entrance on Dix was not convenient to their new facilities, so they began to exploit their back entrance at the end of Eagle Street in the heart of the Southend’s residential area. To facilitate this shift, the city began repaving Eagle with reinforced steel roadbeds designed for multi-ton trucks in the early 1950s, even though city-zoning ordinances prohibited such industrial usage of residential streets. Soon thundering tandem vehicles, spraying slag as they drove past, were a constant nuisance and threat to local residents. The slag itself was stored in large, unprotected berms, directly across the street from neighborhood homes.36 In response, Octavius Germany, head of the Southend’s Homeowners Association, called on a young neighborhood resident, Michael Berry, who had just passed the state bar exam, to see if anything could be done to force the city to intervene on the residents’ behalf. Berry and Germany convened a meeting for affected homeowners at Romanian Hall and laid out a plan to draw media attention to their plight. They organized a series of protests that are best remembered today for the human chains local housewives formed to bar the trucks from their street. These tactics generated sympathetic press accounts, which helped Berry win a temporary injunction to halt the traffic and construction. A young and very green Berry then found himself facing off in court against William Henry Gallagher, among the leading trial attorneys in Michigan, who had the resources of Ford Motor behind him. The judge nonetheless found in Berry’s favor and halted the plans of the city and its corporate patrons.37
This courtroom defeat did not deter the city of Dearborn from its efforts to gradually phase out housing in the Southend. Instead, municipal authorities began to ignore levels of blight that were not tolerated in other parts of the well-resourced suburb, reduce city services, and pressure residents to leave. Neighborhood health hazards, including the trash-filled, stagnant “Baby Creek” and rat infestations, received no attention from city officials. In 1961, led this time by Darrell Donaldson (a Southend resident with roots in Kentucky), Joe Borrajo, and Helen Atwell (a Lebanese American), the Southeast Dearborn Community Council (SEDCC) organized to redress the area’s sagging appearance and endangered environment. According to Donaldson, “We fought absentee landlords—buildings filled with code violations—abandoned cars—etc. We took jars of bugs we gathered from rooming houses and took them to the health department. Mayor Hubbard would never meet with us. We lost every battle.”38 Joining with the International Institute of Detroit,39 residents began a “keep Dearborn clean” campaign to rectify environmental dangers and clean up neglected municipal spaces. Suzanne Sareini, whose family owned a Coney Island on Dix that later became a well-known nightclub, Uncle Sam’s, remembers complaining to business owners on Dix about the shoddy appearance of the business district. With a water hose in hand, she would spray the windows of offending store owners, yelling at them, “If you don’t wash your windows, no one is going to come down here and buy anything from you!”40
The early members of the SEDCC were representative of the neighborhood as a whole and not of any one ethnic constituency. The three presidents who followed Donaldson, for example, were Italian, Greek, and Cherokee in turn.41 Much of the SEDCC’s success was attributed to the multiethnic alliances the group enacted. Ironically, the city justified its plans to rezone the Southend by pointing to the same environmental factors SEDCC activists had long complained about, especially the poor air quality. As one city brochure put it, “one has to drive through the area himself to determine that the location is not best suited for residential use. The South End should have been, and some day will be, an industrial park.”42When, in 1961, the City began refusing to issue building permits to Southend residents, set about condemning homes that needed repairs, purchasing them at below market rates, and tearing them down—all with funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the SEDCC was positioned to fight back.
The first blocks of houses were destroyed in 1962, at a loss of eighty-five homes, and sold to the Levy Asphalt Company and Mercier Bricks. In 1966 another ninety-two families were displaced. Their properties were sold to the Ford Leasing Development Company. Eventually, more than 350 homes were destroyed and their families evicted, while the distance between Ford and Levy shrank, block by block.43What is more, the city posted signs in front of recently acquired homes that said, “Free at your risk, take any part of the house. First come, first served. Hurry.”44 By neglecting the properties they acquired, the city drove down the value of the homes of those who refused to sell, further contributing to the environmental crisis facing the community. Another sign, “Whoever wishes to sell to the city of Dearborn, call City Attorney,” followed by a telephone number, became ubiquitous in the neighborhood. Working with Detroit’s FHA and commercial lenders, the city was able to deny loans and loan insurance to private citizens attempting to make home improvements or purchase neighborhood properties.45
When the city of Dearborn, using strong-arm tactics like these, made an offer on Lebanese-American Katherine Amen’s house, she and her son, Alan, decided to stand their ground. They were joined by the newly committed membership of the SEDCC, which had grown and become more radical in its tactics as the city targeted scores of neighborhood homes and institutions. “[Ford and the city of Dearborn] messed with the wrong people,” remembers Ismael Ahmed, another Lebanese American who entered neighborhood politics in the early 1970s. “A lot of the older workers here were people who had organized the union—old Italian anarchists and Marxists—and a lot of people in the neighborhood who had nothing to lose but their homes.”46 They “shared tactics and strategies” with younger SEDCC activists, who then went out and applied them. If the council received news that a building was ear-marked for destruction, they would occupy the building and organize human chains to stand in front of the city’s bulldozers. Sometimes these tactics worked, but only for the short term. Residents sought support from the Teamsters (who operated the city’s tractors). Alan Amen went on a public speaking tour in West Dearborn and gave tours of the neighborhood to church groups from the west side and urban rights organizations that were forming in Detroit.47
Meanwhile, the businesses along Dix also began to organize. Understanding that without a neighborhood to sustain them they would soon lose everything, several store owners set about repairing shabby storefronts and attracting new business to the area. The South East Community Development Corporation (CDC) was formed in the late 1960s and worked with Congressman John Dingell’s office to leverage low interest loans and grants from the federal government to provide the business district with a facelift and to rebrand the area as “Arabian Village.” Allan Mallad, whose family had long managed a restaurant on Dix, led this effort. In 1970, he and his father, Sam, converted their Coney Island and adjoining stores into a 225 seat night club named Uncle Sam’s, spending a half million dollars on the project. The full service bar and nightclub featured more than Arab food. It also presented live music and belly dancing, which were new to the Southend commercial district. Mallad, an admirer of Mayor Hubbard, remembers adopting the mayor’s personal slogan—“Clean your own doorstep and the whole world will be clean!”—as his own. Mallad’s sister, Suzanne (Sareini), ran a grocery store next to the restaurant that also catered to the “Arabian Village” theme. It was the first truly full service Arab grocery in the area, offering imported goods from the Middle East, fresh Arab breads and sweets, and the spice and grain bins that are ubiquitous in such stores today. Despite their shared goal of cleaning up the neighborhood and investing in its stability and growth, the CDC did not collaborate well with SEDCC activists, whose leftist politics were at odds with those of the entrepreneurs. Instead, Mallad encouraged Ford, his primary employer, to renovate its mile long parking lots and other facilities along Miller Avenue. Mallad’s efforts to transform this corridor into a “gateway” to the neighborhood failed.48
Renewed interest in the neighborhood by these different factions notwithstanding, time was running out for the Southend. A public school was destroyed in 1966. Dearborn bus lines reduced their services to the Southend, cutting it off further from the rest of the city. The neighborhood library and police sub- station were closed. While some of the neighborhood’s older, non-Arab activists began to abandon the struggle and sell to the city, Alan Amen quit his job and took on the fight to save the neighborhood full time. He became vice-president of the SEDCC in 1968 and president in 1970. In 1971 he filed a class action suit against the city, with the support of Wayne County Legal Services, to halt the destruction, and in 1973 he won an injunction to force the city to stop seizing properties and to end their urban renewal campaign.49In the decision’s wording, “Thus far this court has determined that the city of Dearborn through its agents […] has mounted a campaign in the South End and Eugene-Porath areas that constitutes a taking and that many of the sub-plans and clearance projects have been without a public purpose.”50 Among other actions, the city was forced to reimburse homeowners for the full value of their property, to work with the newly minted Environmental Protection Agency to enforce air quality regulations in the area, and to stop intervening in the acquisition of loans and loan insurance for residents. The issue was tied up in the courts for several years, but the neighborhood had won.
“FINALLY GOT THE NEWS HOW OUR DUES IS BEING USED” 51
By the time the fight against city hall ended, roughly twenty-five years after Mayor Hubbard first declared the Southend a “blighted area,” the demographics of the neighborhood and the SEDCC had changed significantly. Many of the activists who supported the council in its early years had lessened their involvement or moved away, leaving the organization firmly in the hands of Amen and Atwell, with many of the community’s older Lebanese families providing manpower and moral support. These families were among the pioneer residents of the neighborhood. They had built Dearborn’s first mosques during the Great Depression: Hashmie Hall, which was Shiʿi, and the American Moslem Society (AMS), which was Sunni. The Shiʿi community, which was larger and more dispersed, had also established a second, more impressive and modern mosque, the Islamic Center of Detroit, a few miles away in 1963. By the early 1970s, Hashmie Hall was a shadow of its former self, whereas the AMS was an important Southend institution with an active Sunday school program and youth group, a new, American-born imam (Mike Karoub), and an active outreach program to local churches and universities. The mosque and the UAW Local 600 had clearly become (and still are today) the most vital institutions on Dix Avenue. Local residents who worshipped in Baptist churches or Roman Catholic parishes could (and did) find similar congregations in other parts of Detroit, but the same was not true for the Southend’s Arabs, who were overwhelmingly Muslim. For Lebanese Sunnis, in particular, the Southend felt like a hard won and irreplaceable home.
Along with the mosque, the area’s increasingly visible Arab businesses began to draw new immigrants to the Southend (initially, Yemenis and Palestinians). Arab student activists from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan were also a growing presence in the neighborhood. In fact, these young activists played a significant role in helping the SEDCC fund and even staff its legal campaign.52 Members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, and the White Panther Party were active in Dearborn, and members of the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), a national student organization founded in Ann Arbor in 1952 to advocate for the development of the Arab region, began to hang out in the coffee houses on Dix, as did members of several far-left factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).53 They got to know the established Lebanese-American population, the new Yemeni autoworkers, and the equally new Palestinians, who were mostly from Beit Hanina and El Bireh, West Bank villages that had recently been occupied by the Israeli military.
To the Arab student activists, the Southend represented an open field for political recruiting. George Khoury, who was prominent among these students, arrived in Detroit in the 1960s to study engineering at Wayne State. Khoury had been active in the OAS, but the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Sinai motivated him to abandon campus-based politics.54 He and his compatriot in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Mohsin Abdul-Munim, headed to Dix to seek a following among local Arab workers. Nabeel Abraham, a Palestinian American who grew up in Southwest Detroit and also became active in student movements and the Palestinian resistance movement in the late 1960s, described the interaction between campus activists and local community members: “I remember as a student activist at Wayne, guys like Hasan Newash—DFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine], oriented completely toward Palestine—started connecting with Dix.”55 Dix, with its coffee houses and Yemeni workers, represented “Arabs.” “We met Ali Bilead [a Yemeni nationalist and labor organizer], and we were impressed. ‘This is a community,’” he continued. “Hasan and the Palestinian activists hadn’t gotten anywhere with Arab students on campus, so they went to the Southend to get in with the people. […] This is the time when we were showing the Battle of Algiers at the mosque.”56
Laurel Wigle and Sameer Abraham capture this moment on Dix:
Late 1968 and the year 1969 saw Palestinian nationalism at its peak. Though the Palestinian sector of the community felt closest to the Resistance, every Arab identified himself with the struggle to liberate Palestine. In place of Nasser’s photo, posters of the fedayeen [freedom fighters] were pinned up in homes, stores, restaurants and many coffeehouses… Talk turned from Nasser and the affairs of Arab states to the activities of the fedayeen. The daily incursions into Israeli occupied territory were followed with great zeal in the news reports… These issues provoked a great deal of intense discussion and debate in the coffeehouses and restaurants.57
Ismael Ahmed, the son of a third-generation Lebanese-American mother with deep local roots and an Egyptian father, became involved with the SEDCC in this period. Connected to the SDS, both Panther parties, and other local Marxist groups, Ahmed entered Arab nationalist politics through his association with Yemeni and Palestinian autoworkers he met at Dodge Main in 1970. He joined forces in the factory with other radical labor organizers who had organized the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in 1968 to fight worsening labor conditions and anti-black racism in the UAW. By this time, it was apparent that the several thousand newly-arrived Yemenis were routinely being assigned the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in the plant, often being given the workload of two men. With poor English skills and little exposure to organized labor tactics, they were easy targets for management, while their UAW representatives looked the other way. They were also desperate for work, relatively isolated from other workers, and the wages they received were, by Yemeni standards, fantastically high.58 DRUM leaders became concerned over the plight of Yemeni workers and argued that Chrysler sought “to make conditions worse for all of us by first attacking conditions for the Arab workers.”59
In 1973, Ahmed brought together these radical black workers, Arab leftists, and Arab autoworkers to form the Arab Workers Caucus (AWC), modeled on, and in solidarity with, DRUM. The AWC sought to improve working conditions in the urban factories DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers operated in, where both black and Arab workers were concentrated. Just as significantly, they sought to compel the UAW to divest its sizable holdings of Israeli war bonds (a bad economic investment undertaken for political reasons that were hardly progressive). Among Arab workers (and many of the radical black workers) the insult of handing over part of their paycheck, via union dues, to support Israeli occupation forces was rich fuel for mobilization. As Ahmed wrote in 1975, “the role of Arab nationalism in building an Arab workers caucus should not be underestimated.”60
Yemeni workers were propelled into action by two dramatic events that took place back to back in late 1973. The first, in August, was the shooting death of a Yemeni farm worker in California during a United Farm Workers (UFW) protest.61 While Naji Daifullah’s death discouraged his co-nationals in California from joining the UFW, in Dearborn, it had the opposite effect. Yemenis organized a large demonstration in support of the UFW in September and sought to become more involved in the AWC. When the October Arab-Israeli War broke out, they joined Palestinian leftists who were active outside the factories and were even more galvanized to take action. 62 The AWC chose to picket the 28 November 1973, B’nai B’rith banquet where UAW president Leonard Woodcock was set to receive an award for his unflagging support of Israel. AWC and DRUM demonstrators demanded that the UAW sell off its Israeli war bonds, then valued at more than $750,000. Over 2,000 (mostly Arab and black) workers on the afternoon shift at Dodge Main walked out to attend the rally. This forced the closure of one of the two Dodge assembly lines and seriously slowed the second. AWC leadership was ecstatic. DRUM and other radical movements within the local black and left communities were also impressed. By working together, they had pulled off something akin to a wildcat strike. Surely this meant Arab Americans were a constituency to be reckoned with.63
The UAW was less impressed. In response to this labor action, it sold off $50,000 of its Israeli bonds (less than ten percent), and both Chrysler and the union soon began targeting Arab workers in retribution for their unsanctioned strike.64 This led to a serious rift between Yemeni workers, now cast as irresponsible hotheads, and Arabs from other national backgrounds. Many Yemenis were permanently laid off and forced to return to their homeland.65 In droves, Detroit’s Yemeni (and other Arab) workers walked away from the AWC and from work-related, class-based political organizing after their pyrrhic victory at Dodge Main. They were not alone. Despite their cathartic success at organized resistance, won by an alliance of Arab and black autoworkers opposed to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and their own mistreatment by the UAW and their corporate employers, the fleeting nature of this victory, compounded by the longer lasting corporate retribution, resulted in a major shift of direction by Detroit’s radical Arab-American leftists. In the Southend itself, where Palestinian activists continued to vie with one another for local support, events in the Middle East (such as King Hussein’s crushing blow to the Palestinian resistance movement in Jordan in 1970) and intense local factionalism, led to a decline in their fortunes. Eventually many of the “locals” (Southend residents) came to suspect that the “revolutionaries” would never accomplish, and perhaps did not have, goals of practical significance. For some of these locals, the mosque began to provide a compelling retreat. For others, SEDCC and its neighborhood-based model of activism provided a more attractive outlet for their political energies.66
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY: A MARRIAGE OF AGENDAS
A slightly different set of campus-based activists were drawn into the mix of Southend politics in the same period. The Association of Arab University Graduates (AAUG), which was established in 1967, provided a forum for Arab scholars in the U.S. who wanted to counter hegemonic representations of the Middle East and its conflicts, with a special focus on Palestine, human rights, and American policies toward the region.67 These scholars were leftists who cared deeply about Palestine, but they were better able than others to connect the dots between the displacement of Palestinian refugees overseas and the sought-after displacement of Southend residents, an increasing number of whom were also Palestinian. Abdeen Jabara and Barbara Aswad, in particular, helped develop this new angle on the Southend struggle, turning it from a class-based, multiethnic campaign into a civil rights campaign on behalf of the neighborhood’s Arab minority. In very real ways, this framing of the struggle would fundamentally reshape Arab-American identity in Dearborn and Detroit for the next generation or more.
Abdeen Jabara, a Lebanese-American attorney from Northern Michigan, belonged to an immigrant family that had come to the U.S. at the same time, from the same region, and along the same routes as many other Lebanese in Dearborn. He grew up attending the AMS when his family came to Dearborn to celebrate Muslim holidays or the weddings of kin and friends. While not a resident of Dearborn, Jabara was also not a stranger there. When he first learned about the SEDCC campaign, he volunteered to work on the Amen class action suit and eventually filed a legal brief on their behalf. The lead attorney on the case was Michael Barnhart, who worked for the Center for Urban Law and Housing, a division of Wayne County Neighborhood Legal Services. Barnhart had actively advised the SEDCC since 1965, long before Jabara’s involvement. Jabara nonetheless acted as a bridge between the civil rights legal community in Detroit and the AAUG, and he was able to leverage financial and personnel support from these outside constituencies for the neighborhood campaign.68
For instance, Jabara introduced anthropologist Barbara Aswad to the Southend when she was hired at Wayne State in 1968. Of Scottish ancestry, Aswad had carried out her field research on the border between Syria and Turkey and later married a Syrian engineer, Adnan Aswad, who was also a founder of AAUG. From her position at WSU, Aswad carried out a landmark needs assessment study of the Southend’s Arab community in 1971 that established a baseline portrait of a population that accounted for only a quarter of Southend residents at the time, but was in the midst of significant change and on the brink of exponential growth.69 Aswad’s study framed the Arab population of the Southend as a newly arrived, fragile, and disadvantaged population, an image very unlike the white, working class, well- established American identity that was more familiar to the Amens themselves, or to other SEDCC activists like Ismael Ahmed, Helen Atwel, Don Unis, and Joe Borrajo, all of whom were American born. Aswad’s team found that 85 percent of the Southend’s Arab residents were foreign born and of rural origins, with a third having lived in the U.S. for fewer than five years. The educational attainment of this population was low relative the rest of the city, with 21 percent having received no formal schooling whatsoever and another 30 percent having no more than an eighth grade education.70 It was this vivid representation of the population as minoritized, recently arrived, economically marginal, and consisting mostly of disenfranchised post-colonial subjects, that became central to the new Arab-American identity with which Dearborn was associated in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ironically, this way of seeing Arabs in the Southend has been retrofitted to explain the Southend struggle itself, which is nowadays depicted as a distinctly Arab-American campaign. While it is true that the victory of the SEDCC had the greatest consequences for Arabs who remained in the Southend, and that the group was led by Arabs in its final days, it is important to remember that the Southend was still a majority non-Arab neighborhood in 1973. Moreover, the SEDCC still had prominent non-Arab supporters, like Donaldson and Iris Becker, local school teachers who had a long history of working closely with the SEDCC. According to Barbara Aswad, most neighborhood Arab Americans did not participate in the SEDCC campaign at all. Instead, they were “waiting to see who emerges the victor, the City or the Council.”71 Nor were the Palestinian student activists involved. Jabara and Aswad were the rare outside activists who clearly understood how the local plight of Southend residents was related to U.S. foreign policy and Arab nationalist causes overseas.
Another somewhat anachronistic way of describing the Southend struggle is the attribution of anti- Arab attitudes and an ethnic-cleansing agenda to city planners and Mayor Hubbard. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin suggest that “Mayor Hubbard had never made it a secret that Dearborn was a ‘white man’s town,’ and the Arabs were considered to be so many ‘white niggers’.”72 In a similar vein, Barbara Aswad links the mayor’s stepped up actions to the growing Yemeni population in Dearborn.73 The newly-arrived Yemenis, as these writers point out, were generally darker-skinned than the Lebanese, and they certainly had fewer English language skills or other socioeconomic advantages. Most Yemeni auto-workers were in the U.S. without their families, and they were widely seen to have a destabilizing impact on the neighborhood. Suzanne Sareini, who sold beer and wine at her Arab grocery store, remembers binge drinking, qat chewing (a stimulant narcotic consumed legally in Yemen that went unregulated in Dearborn until the 1980s), and frequent street-level fighting. “We had a hard time getting people to come down to the Southend. It was like the Wild West down there, with guys throwing punches and bullets flying through the windows,” Sareini recalls today.74 And yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Yemeni population lived mostly in an area south of the mosque, which was not included in the city’s urban renewal plans.75 It is unclear the extent to which city officials were even aware of the diversity of the Arab community at the time.
Alan Amen likewise attributed the mayor’s hostility to the Southend to several factors, race primary among them. “The issue of racism as it played in the Southend of Dearborn had a particular bent when it came to the dark-skinned citizens of the Southend, who were the Arabs. That’s a term used by Orville Hubbard. He referred to what he needed to do with his ‘dark-skinned citizens’ in the Southend. But it’s basically an issue of racism, an anti-black and anti-African American sentiment extended onto people who are dark.”76 Joe Borrajo adds that by the 1950s and 1960s many of the older Lebanese families in Dearborn were doing well enough financially to purchase homes in East Dearborn, a neighborhood that was then largely Irish, Italian, and Polish. “Arabs were confined to the Southend at the time, so we weren’t looked upon as a threat to be concerned about. But when we started moving into the east end, holy jeez, then … that’s when the problem starts.”77
Hubbard’s anti-black racism was well known in Michigan and nationally. In Dearborn, the popular slogan “Keep Dearborn Clean” was a euphemism for keeping it white, and while Ford Motor had depended on black labor, Henry Ford had been equally careful to maintain racially segregated housing for his workers. The most infamous segregationist mayor in the North, Hubbard also expended a great deal of energy trying to keep blacks out of the city. During the housing shortages of WWII, he adamantly opposed the construction of public housing in Dearborn, arguing that “housing Negroes is Detroit’s problem,” and, more evocatively, “When you remove garbage from your backyard, you don’t dump it in your neighbor’s.”78 A generation later, during the 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Hubbard also stood alongside his police force on the Michigan Avenue border and commanded them to “shoot any looters on site.”79 As Amen puts it today, “People knew where they were supposed to live by your color and your level of assimilation and your job.”80 Those who lived in the Southend in the 1950s and 1960s certainly understood their privileged status as white workers. They also sensed their less than privileged ranking in the class divisions of Dearborn, where it was generally felt that “only persons of foreign birth would live in the South End.”81 In Joe Borrajo’s words, “we were all from immigrant backgrounds. We were called ‘culturally deprived.’ The stigma of being from the Southend… We were treated as pariahs in the rest of Dearborn.” Ismael Ahmed recently asserted that the discrimination he experienced growing up in the Southend was class based, and that he felt it “not as an Arab, but as a person of the Southend. Because as you began to go out of the neighborhood, the Southend had this terrible reputation in the city, mainly because it was a low-income neighborhood, I think. We were called ‘factory rats’ then and so forth.”82
This sense of exclusion was a far cry from the violent, anti-black racism of Hubbard and his supporters. Nonetheless, as the Southend became more Arab, existing classist and racist sentiments were projected onto the newly arriving Arabs, who were described in the local press as “arrogant, unclean and sloppy, untruthful and clannish beyond belief”; who were referred to as “camel jockeys” and “sand niggers” in the hate-mail received by the mosque; who were euphemized as “the foreign element” by representatives of the city; and who were told, in a familiar refrain, to “go back where you came from” at the SEDCC.83 “So pervasive” was “the Arabic atmosphere” of the neighborhood that many of the non- Arabs who remained there began to complain of feeling “‘in a foreign country’ in one’s own neighborhood.”84 Yet there is no evidence to suggest that Dearborn stepped up its efforts to replace Southend housing with heavy industry in direct response to the increasing Arabization of the population. The latter trend developed only toward the very end of the Southend struggle. The neighborhood itself was not a majority-Arab enclave when the SEDCC began its fight in the early 1960s. It is more a matter of coincidence that the most heavily Arab-populated areas happened also to be those located nearest to the Amazon entrance to the Levy Company. Yet because the Southend became an Arab majority area in the period immediately following the SEDCC legal case, the memory of the Southend struggle has been Arabized in retrospect. In the 1980s, this narrative twist allowed the earlier-arrived Arab families and the new Arab immigrants to attach themselves to a locality, and a local history, that now belonged uniquely to them.
Additionally, many of the activists who took part in the Southend struggle—a small group from the AAUG, several leaders of the SEDCC, Palestinian and Yemeni leftists, and the leadership of the AWC— came together to found the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in 1974, with George Khoury, Helen Atwell, Ismael Ahmed, and Charles Albert as its first officers.85 Initially, in 1971, a smaller collection of Arab leftists and AAUG supporters opened a storefront organization on Vernor Highway in Southwest Detroit that they called the Arab Community Center for Employment.86There they began to address “the pressing domestic problems plaguing the immigrant community, problems which were largely ignored by them in the past. In so doing, the activists sought to link the social and economic concerns of the immigrant workers to the broader issues of Arab nationalism.”87 The fledgling organization initiated efforts to redress the problems Aswad had identified in her 1971 study via English classes, employment services, and translation services. The volunteers quickly recruited SEDCC members and a few leaders from the growing South Yemeni National Liberation Front and their neighborhood assistance outlet, the Yemeni American Benevolent Association (YABA), who all insisted the group relocate onto Dix Avenue, where they operated out of Hashmie Hall. Ron Amen (Alan’s older brother), George Khoury, Hasan Newash, Ali Bilead, Mohsin Abdel-Munim, Abdeen Jabara, Sobhi Abdel Sater, the Aswads (Barbara and her husband, Adnan), and Don Unis were the activists who joined forces to build ACCESS in its earliest days.88
Ismael Ahmed joined the group in 1973, shortly after the excitement and disappointment of the AWC campaign led him to re-evaluate his goals and to walk away from the radical left. In a 1985 interview with Robert Mast, he describes this transition in the following language:
During those years in the plants, I worked with a lot of Marxist groups. But there was a parting of the ways at a certain point. This was a very rhetorical time among the left. I would work in the community and see that talking about Soviet revisionism didn’t make sense. That’s the last thing on people’s minds. The main difference I had with a lot of the left people was that they called community work reformist. And to me it was the only thing that mattered. So I resigned from the plant and began writing grants for ACCESS. I wanted to help develop it into a community-based organization that not only provided services but took on social issues and built allegiances with other, mainly minority, working-class folks.89
Ahmed was welcomed at ACCESS because the student activists thought he might hold the elusive key to mobilizing Arab workers. He instead steered the organization toward providing much-needed services to Arab workers and immigrant families. These goals were supported in the beginning by small grants from AAUG, the International Institute of Detroit, the Presbyterian Church, and by the gratis use of the YABA building on Salina Street. Inspired initially by the breakfast program of the Black Panther Party, the Saul Alinksy community organizing model, and Latino service organizations in Southwest Detroit, the ACCESS agenda gradually came to be dominated by Ahmed and several SEDCC organizers, whose initial success at landing government block grants distributed by the city of Dearborn turned their heads away from the radical left and toward municipal, state, and federal funding sources.
While they remained sympathetic to revolutionary aspirations and Third World liberation movements of every stripe, Southend activists increasingly focused their efforts on rebuilding the neighborhood and improving the quality of life for its residents. In the years after it defeated Orville Hubbard, the SEDCC was able to leverage a $3.4 million grant from HUD to develop public housing on the site of destroyed neighborhood homes. They also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to explore the aesthetic traditions of their once-diverse community.90 The Community Development Corporation active on Dix was finally able to give the business district a facelift using city block grant dollars, constructing a series of Arabesque arches along the street’s storefronts and officially renaming the district “Arabian Village.” These efforts were not administered by ACCESS, but by its neighborhood rivals. By 1979, Arabs made up roughly three-quarters of the area’s residents. The Southend had lost its multicultural working class profile and was now an enclave of newly-arrived, poor, often unskilled Arab immigrants. ACCESS and the SEDCC came to resemble one another in personnel, form, and intent. They began to compete, not for workers and volunteers, but for government assistance, especially Dearborn block grant funds. ACCESS won this competition, and the SEDCC closed its doors in 1985.91 Today, the ACCESS annual budget tops $18 million. Many of its activities are national in scope, including the Arab American National Museum, which ACCESS launched in 2005. In creating ACCESS, a confluence of organizers discovered the power of language and identity to shape political alliances. They came together to address the immediate concerns of Arabs in Dearborn. Rather than focus principally on nationalist movements in the Arab world, ACCESS turned it energy toward quality of life issues in the Southend, labor movements in Detroit and elsewhere, and the civil rights movement. Pam Pennock argues that this merging of political and social issues was not unique to Dearborn or Detroit. The OAS, AAUG, and other activist organizations of the period were also “creating a transnational, activist, increasingly Arab American identity built upon a leftist, non-sectarian political orientation that championed Palestinian Revolution.”92 What these organizations lacked, however, were the firm links to American public and private funding sources that ACCESS had managed to create out of this long process of struggle and place making.
ISLAM IS THE (OTHER) SOLUTION
Today, stories about the Southend struggles of the 1970s are a tremendous source of power and legitimacy for ACCESS, and they appear often in print, public art, and museum exhibitions. They summarize the complex, messy chain of events that gave rise to the Arab-American community ACCESS serves, administers and, in very real ways, hopes to control. The left/secular/engaged identity formation these narratives sustain is embraced by many of the Arab-American institutions that evolved in the wake of ACCESS and AAUG: for instance, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute, the American Arab Chamber of Commerce, the Arab American Political Action Committee, and the Arab American News, to name just a few. And yet the Southend struggles also contributed to a much more conservative Arab/Muslim identity, one that is equally common in Detroit (and especially in representations of Dearborn) ever since. Because this identity did not emerge out of campaigns waged against the state (city officials) or industrial interests (Ford, Chrysler, and the UAW), but out of conflicts waged among Arab Muslims themselves, it has been much more difficult to narrate in public contexts. This silence should not be interpreted as evidence that the events I am about to describe are less well known in Detroit, or that they are less vital to Dearborn’s Arab/Muslim communities. Instead, it suggests that another kind of public is at stake.
In the 1960s and 1970s, not all recently arrived Arab workers in the Southend spent their spare time and money in the coffee houses and bars on Dix Avenue. Many had chosen to settle there, despite the neighborhood’s shrinking size and apparent neglect, because there was a mosque in the neighborhood, and not just any mosque. The AMS was the oldest mosque in Michigan. Expanded and renovated in the 1950s, it had a sizeable prayer area, classrooms, a simple dome and small, symbolic minarets. It looked and felt like a mosque to those who worshipped there. Although it was one of a handful of mosques in the U.S. that had been built explicitly as a mosque, rather than renovated from an earlier structure, the AMS was not like a Middle Eastern house of prayer. Its American born imam, Mike Karoub, who assumed leadership of the congregation when his father, Hussein Karoub, passed away in 1973, preached in English. The younger Karoub’s left-progressive perspective was of a piece with that of the SEDCC, AWC, and ACCESS. He worked closely with Masjid al-Mu`mineen, Detroit’s oldest black Sunni congregation, and with other black converts throughout the city. He supported women’s rights, civil rights, legal access to abortion, and worker’s rights, while opposing the Vietnam War, Israel, and other U.S.-backed imperial projects. Under his leadership, the AMS was not uniformly open on Friday at noon for prayer, instead holding its communal prayers on Sunday mornings. The Women’s Auxiliary of the mosque held almost as much sway over the institution as did its all-male Board of Directors, and women came and went from the mosque as if it were their second home, wearing the fashions of the period, including shorts, short skirts, and sleeveless dresses. Scarves were donned in the mosque by women only when they entered the prayer hall to pray. Just as importantly, the mosque was kept under lock and key when not in use. If a group wanted to use the mosque outside its regular worship hours, they were asked to pay a small fee to help maintain the building. This was equally true of weddings, funerals, practice sessions for the mosque’s dabka troupe, and for groups who met at the mosque to hold Qurʾanic recitations or other religious programs not overseen by the board or the imam.93
As the demographics of the Southend began to change in the 1970s, the Lebanese families who had sustained the mosque since it was established in 1938 found themselves increasingly on the defensive. The younger Karoub’s leadership style, which had long been problematic for the board’s more conservative members, was odd and offensive to many new immigrants. Some felt that the imam’s Arabic was not strong enough, even though he was fluent and had long edited an Arabic language newspaper. Some felt that his informal religious education, consisting of long tutelage at his father’s feet and a religious studies degree from WSU, was inadequate. Many were uncomfortable with his politics. For Abdo Alasry, the problem was one of spiritual leadership. Alasry arrived in Dearborn from Yemen in 1967, and like many of his fellow nationals, he embraced a conservative lifestyle and religious orientation that were explicitly averse to the leftist politics of the period. He was not impressed with the AMS, the Southend, or the Muslim Americans who lived there. “The institution was very bad. If you looked at it from a [Muslim perspective], lot of people they do not practice Islam. They do not pray. It doesn’t matter. You could not make a difference between them and other people, you know. Lot of them. You might see a few people practicing Islam, but the majority, no. You see gambling places. You see bars. They have alcohol, a lot of places. Also they had some Arab people being killed in this area, too.”94
This perspective was common among the new, post-1965 migrant cohort, most of them recently displaced by the Israeli Occupation, related political instability in Lebanon, or the independence movements and civil wars that beset North and South Yemen in the 1960s and 1970s. Echoing patterns from the early twentieth century, the newcomers who settled in Dearborn were often bachelors or married men whose families remained in the homeland. Their religious expectations were different from those of the already established congregation at the AMS, which was now predominately American born. The new Muslim immigrants endorsed a general turn away from the secular left and toward a more intentional and explicit Islamic practice. They also sought to preserve their culture and identity in ways the AMS founders, who now felt very at home in the U.S., found irrational and extreme. The mosque’s board became nervous, not just about Karoub, but also about the tensions that came with this new demographic reality.
Nihad Hamed, an Egyptian engineer who was the mosque’s president, worked with Imam Karoub to change the mosque’s bylaws in order to protect the status quo. The imam asked for a permanent seat on the board, and the president attempted to have his own term extended from one to four years. Additionally, the women’s auxiliary tried to deny voting rights to new members of the congregation. The board, however, fearing the influence of Karoub and the women’s auxiliary, and in some cases siding directly with the conservative doctrines and social values expressed by the mosque’s newest members, blocked these proposals.95
As these conflicts brewed at the AMS, Muslim revivalists began to visit the coffeehouses on Dix. The most visible of these missionaries were associated with the Tablighi Jamaʿat, a Pakistan-based piety movement that encouraged Muslims to focus on the everyday practice of their faith. Tablighis had first targeted Detroit’s Muslim enclaves in the early 1950s, sending Pakistani missionaries who were welcomed at Masjid al-Mu`mineen, a black Sunni mosque in Detroit. By the 1970s, many African Americans had joined the movement and became missionaries themselves. To them, the Southend’s Arab Muslims represented a curiosity and a prize. According to Alasry:
They start going to the places, to the coffee shops, the stores where the people go. Sometimes they go even to the bar to talk to the people. They do this until 1976, and then some of them start talking to some of the people who are in charge of this mosque, the Lebanese people. Some people told him [Nihad Hamed], “OK, can we have the key for the mosque? Can we have the key so we can open the mosque and go inside and pray?” He said, “Yes, we can issue you a key, but you have to pay the bill.” Because at that time the society was very poor.96
The new Muslim activists convinced the board to let them use the mosque, but it struck them as odd that they should have to pay a fee to pray in the mosque or hold religious classes there. The newcomers also complained about the infrequency of the formal jumʿa congregational prayer at the mosque and the overall laxity of religious observances there. As their complaints gradually escalated into demands, Hamed devised a radical strategy to fend them off. He organized a meeting of the city’s Muslim clerics and scholars and asked them to issue a formal edict—to “make shura,” as Alasry put it—declaring Sunday a legitimate substitute for Friday as the day of congregational prayer for Detroit’s mosques. “Of course, the imams and the scholars are not going to ask for this,” Alasry assured me, “to move the prayer from Friday to Sunday. I think it was the members, because the majority does not have knowledge. They want to have it on their day off. To them, they said, ‘OK. Everybody can come on Sunday, we’ll have the meeting on Sunday.’”97 The Shura Council rejected this suggestion outright,98 and the mosque began (or returned to) hosting formal congregational prayers on Friday in addition to their Sunday lectures.
The issue of rescheduling religious observances for the weekend, however, resurfaced later that year onʿĪd al-ʾAḍḥā. The English-language faction planned to celebrate the holiday on the weekend, as they always had. The Arabic-language faction showed up instead on the ʿīd itself, a Wednesday, and were blocked by Hamed and others on the board. “Today is the eid,” Alasry remembers the newcomers crying. “We have to pray today. Today is eid.” Rather than be turned away, the would-be worshippers broke the lock on the door and went inside to pray.99
Shortly after this incident, another conflict took place that ultimately doomed the Lebanese congregation at the AMS. On a Friday evening, the Yemeni faction was hosting a class upstairs in the mosque, and the Lebanese faction was hosting a dance downstairs in the social hall. The building was not soundproofed, and the loud, raucous music was disruptive to the group gathered upstairs. When the adhānwas called for the evening prayer, the Yemenis expected the music to pause for the prayer itself. When it did not, the upstairs crowd became angry and asked the others to stop the music so the prayer could be conducted in peace. Their request was denied. The Lebanese felt their right to hold a party in the social hall of the mosque was being violated. The Yemenis felt their right to hold a prayer in the mosque was being violated.100 At this point, the newcomers decided to take over the mosque’s board. In 1977 they elected (Hajj) Fawzi Mura`i president of the AMS board. Hajj Fawzi was a Palestinian from Beit Hanina, a West Bank village on the outskirts of Jerusalem where Israel was constructing of one of its earliest and largest settlements. He was a very conservative Muslim, sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights. His election—by a Yemeni-dominated but culturally diverse block of voters—marked the end of nearly forty years of Lebanese control over the mosque.
The new board reflected a very different political position from that of the founding congregation. Dissatisfied with the failures of Arab nationalism and the Arab Left in general, and equally critical of American materialism, social injustice, violence, mistreatment of Arab immigrants, support for Israel, immorality, and hollow religiosity, the new board turned instead to the precepts of the Qurʾan and sunna as a guide for personal and collective reform.101 The two groups attempted to use the mosque jointly, but the new board quickly solicited an imam from Yemen and established a new set of rules for the AMS.102These included gender segregation in all the mosque’s activities, including Sunday school classes and congregational prayers. The hijab had to be worn by women at all times, everywhere in the building. This hijab could no longer be a simple scarf to cover the hair, but also entailed covering all parts of the body except for the hands, face, and feet. All social functions hosted by the women’s auxiliary were banned from the premises. When the women’s group protested these moves, the new imam told them, “I am here to teach you the right way; you have gone astray.”103 When the women protested further, they were banned from the mosque outright.
The two groups went to court over these new, restrictive policies. Representatives of the founding congregation argued that the mosque itself was one room in the larger facility and appropriate religious attire was observed historically in that room alone. They argued that they had built and sustained the mosque for forty years and should be able to determine the facility’s rules. But the judge, siding with the new board, asked the Lebanese faction to turn over their keys to the building. “In the beginning,” Alasry explained, “we were ok with them. We said, ‘You have the key, you can go in anytime. No you cannot make dances, and [wear short dresses]. They may make a wedding with no problem, but not like with dancing as it used to be in a club. Not in a mosque … belly dancing, that is what I mean. That’s why we don’t want it here. We couldn’t. We said, ‘That is not right.’” 104
The women’s auxiliary of the AMS, still in possession of their savings account, was able to open a new, smaller mosque in 1982. Tucked inside a former warehouse on a quiet side street (Chase Road) in northeast Dearborn, this new mosque, the American Muslim Bekaa Center, returned to providing English language sermons at their Sunday lectures and congregational prayers. High school graduation parties, wedding showers, and youth activities were equally at home there. Women at the Bekaa Center did not enter through the back door, segregate themselves from the men in any of the mosque’s functions, except prayer, or allow others to dictate when and how they should cover their hair and bodies. This new mosque was located closer to where the majority of the city’s Lebanese Americans now lived—in east Dearborn rather than the Southend. This shift was not precipitated solely by the city’s efforts to rezone the Southend, or by the loss of the AMS to a more conservative congregation. Many Lebanese and Palestinian families followed their non-Arab neighbors to east Dearborn and other Detroit suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. Their Southend homes were purchased by newly arriving Lebanese, Palestinian, and, increasingly, Yemeni families. Today the Southend is a Yemeni-American enclave, the business district is overwhelmingly Yemeni, and the AMS leadership is Yemeni also.
In the 1980s Detroit’s older Arab communities, which dated back to the early decades of the twentieth century, were reduced to minority status by new Arab migrants, most of whom did not know about or identify strongly with the historical roots of Arabs in the area, and who arrived with, or would soon develop, a powerful subaltern consciousness of their own. The United States, for the newcomers, was a purveyor of economic and military policies that threatened Arabs, Muslims, and people of color around the world. These immigrants saw themselves, and were often seen by others, as people who had no place in mainstream American political and religious culture. Many of them wanted to maintain this separation and they looked to their mosques and churches to help them do so. This stance was especially hard for the older AMC and SEDCC activists to understand. Not only had they struggled to build the very mosque the newcomers now controlled; not only had they fought to protect the neighborhood and infrastructure of communal life that was now so hotly contested, but they had done so as part of a distinctly white, working-class and (originally) multiethnic alliance. The takeover of the AMS was a paradigm shift that established a new regime, one not of incorporation or accommodation but of confident orthodoxy and (initially at least) principled separation from the larger society.
The conflicts that engulfed the AMS in the late 1970s were just as important to the development of the Southend and the city itself as was the fight against Mayor Hubbard. To most of the community organizers who allied with the SEDCC and ACCESS in its early days, the outcome of these intra-mosque battles was one of devastating loss. They were experienced as a foreign takeover by an extremist, backward, un-American faction—by a misogynistic, fanatical Islam. In the several mosques that were later built elsewhere in Dearborn by refugees from the AMS, this is still how many people speak of the Southend and the Arab-Muslim identity it represents.
To the mosque’s new leaders and the tens of thousands of new migrants who joined them in Detroit in the 1980s and 1990s, the story of the AMS takeover is told as a cautionary tale of a very different kind. It depicts a mosque and a larger Muslim community that had strayed far from its roots and was successfully redeemed from error. This tale of victory against unrestrained assimilation is told today in hopes of keeping mosques relevant, vital, and on the straight path. I have heard it told by scores of mosque leaders across Detroit—by Palestinian and Yemeni Americans, by Syrians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and African Americans—and it is a staple narrative at mosque fund raising events. More recently, I have also been told the story by members of the original AMS congregation who have made peace with the Southend’s new Arab-Muslim identity. “The new mosque they got, it is beautiful,” Hussein El Haje told me in 2005, in reference to the AMS’s latest renovation effort. Now over 1,000 worshippers can pray there at one time. As a young man in 1938, El Hage helped dig the foundation of the original mosque. For him “it is beautiful to see a thousand people praying together. But sometimes they say things about our community [the founding Syrian-Lebanese congregation], and I don’t like that.”105
The Muslim-American establishment in Detroit today rivals that of the secular Arab establishment. Groups like CAIR-Michigan (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), the Michigan Muslim Community Council, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Muslim Family Services, the Huda Clinic, and the region’s mosques (which now number more than eighty) arguably exceed the secular Arab-American establishment in terms of influence, dollars raised, and services provided. This is a remarkable accomplishment, given that this infrastructure of religious institutions is supported primarily by the Muslim community itself. The same could be said of the Muslim-American establishment nationally, which has gained prominence in the post-9/11 era, as Islam has become one of the key sites of inclusion and exclusion in American public culture. Like Arab-American identity, and other minoritized ethnoracial formations, Muslim-American identity is the product of a complex cycle of trauma, crisis, and incorporation,106 and the true value of narratives about the Southend is that the traumas described in these stories were not necessarily of the larger, geopolitical kind. The fights over control of housing stock and prayer spaces predated the Iranian Revolution, the Israeli invasion and occupation of South Lebanon, the Palestinian Intifadas, the 9/11 attacks, and the decade of American wars in the Middle East that followed. Arab and Muslim identities in Detroit have always evolved in relation to momentous events that occur overseas, but the traumas of the Southend were local; they warranted local responses and created local identities in the process.
Urban space is a site of contest between strangers, especially those whose lives have been shaped by migration and faith. Today’s scholars are eager to theorize this contest as a locus of creativity and dynamism as well as a generator of racial, class, ethnic, and religious hierarchies. Ayse Caglar and Nina Glick Schiller, for example, encourage us to upend our more traditional focus on how migrants are changed by cities and look instead at “how migrants actively contribute to the restructuring and repositioning” of the cities they inhabit.107 Dearborn and its Arab/Muslim populations have certainly been “transformed together” over the past century of dwelling, conflict, and narrative imagining, co-producing a center of belonging through “cooperation, solidarity, the usage of broad networks and resources, [and] shared knowledge.”108 What has been difficult to see in these narrative imaginings is just how tightly they have been woven together into what Gerd Baumann calls a “convergence.” A convergence occurs when different ethnoracial and migrant populations assert their cultural identities vis-à-vis each other and the state, when they “seek the same point of agreement; but each of them does so from its own point of origin and by its own route.”109
Precisely such a convergence occurred in Dearborn in the 1970s, and it is time that the narratives that account for the city’s remarkable Arab/Muslim persona also converge. In reality, Detroit’s Arab and Muslim establishments are not now and have never been far apart, even when the struggles of the Southend were waged most heatedly. Once the AMS takeover was accomplished and the mosque moved on to new crises and controversies, activists from the SEDCC and ACCESS quickly came to its aid. They supported the mosque in 1980 when it began broadcasting the call to prayer from loudspeakers on its roof and was taken to court, this time by the city. They supported it a few years later when the mosque broke ground on a large expansion project and the SEDCC stepped in to integrate the new mosque design with the Arabian Village facades. Similarly, ACCESS is predominantly staffed by and provides services to an immigrant, Muslim-majority constituency.
In fact, it is rare to encounter a prominent Arab organization in Detroit today that is not led (or significantly influenced) by Muslims or a high profile Muslim organization that is not led (or significantly influenced) by Arabs. The AMS is no longer the isolationist congregation that it was in the 1980s, but an integral part of Detroit’s religious landscape and of the public life of Dearborn itself. Likewise, ACCESS is no longer predisposed to wage battles against the state and global capital. Today, like much of the Arab-American establishment, ACCESS runs on support from government agencies (state and federal), corporations (like Ford and Chrysler), and charitable foundations. ACCESS and ADC have long been welcoming to devout Muslims and include hijab-wearing women on their boards and in executive positions. Similarly, Ron Amen, who was once kicked off the board of the Islamic Center of America for his role in founding ACCESS (then rumored to be a hotbed of atheism and communism) is today the board president of this very large and prominent mosque.
The Southend of Dearborn is an urban space whose Arab and Muslim histories continue to converge today as scholars narrate its history on paper, artists paint it into murals, religious leaders teach it to their followers, and activists call it to the attention of a new generation of community organizers. The story of Arab/Muslim Detroit does not begin in the Southend, but it cannot be told without referencing this distinctive space and the many struggles that took place there. The Southend was home to Detroit’s working class Arabs, to its most viable and influential mosques, and to its most visibly Arab commercial district from the 1930s-1980s. When threatened with displacement and dispersal, its residents knew that something more than their homes was at stake. They fought to protect the Arab and Muslim identities the Southend made possible. This Arab/Muslim space continues to draw new migrants to Dearborn. Despite its persistent marginality, the Southend remains a compelling space. It is a space of fragile power, amassed over decades of political and cultural struggle, but it is a space of power nonetheless.
1 Kathy Horak, “A Reversal of Fortunes,” Dearborn Press and Guide, 3 August 1978:1.
2 This landmark battle was first documented in Barbara C. Aswad, “The Southeast Dearborn Arab Community Struggles for Survival Against Urban ‘Renewal’,” in Aswad, ed., Arabic Speaking Communities in American Cities (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1974) 53-84; and more recently in Barbara C. Aswad, “How a Dearborn Community Gained the ACCESS it Needed,” Dearborn Historian, 51:1 (2014), 9-18.
3 This landmark case was first documented in Nabeel Abraham, “Arab Detroit’s ‘American’ Mosque’,” in Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 279-311; see also Sameer Abraham, Nabeel Abraham, and Barbara Aswad, “The Southend: An Arab Muslim Working-Class Community,” in Abraham and Abraham, eds., Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab- American Communities (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983) 163-185; and Sally Howell,Old Islam in Detroit: Reimagining the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30-42, 104-127.
4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Selected Social Characteristics in the United States, 2010 American Community Survey 1- Year Estimates” for Dearborn, Michigan (DP02),http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_1YR_DP02&prodType
=table (accessed on 18 July, 2015).
5 For Muslim and mosque estimates see Howell, “Old Islam,” 5; for Arab estimates see Kim Schopmeyer “Arab Detroit after 9/11: A Demographic Portrait,” in Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 29-65.
6 Arif Dirlik, “Place-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place,” in Roxann Prazniak and Arif Dirlik, eds.,Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) 39.
7 For the origins and veracity of the Arab American claim, see Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, “Introduction: Qualities/Quantities,” Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000) 39-44. The Muslim American claim is from Hassan Qazwini, American Crescent (New York: Random House, 2007) 112.
8 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997).
9 Anne McClintock, “’No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,” in Anne McClintock, Amir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 100. For more on the early days of the ACCESS Cultural Arts Program see “The Art and Artistry of Arab Detroit: Changing Traditions in a New World” in Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 487-514; and Sally Howell, “Cultural Interventions: Arab American Aesthetics between the Transnational and the Ethnic,” in Diaspora, 9:1 (2001), 59-82.
10 Heather Barrow, “’The American Disease of Growth:’ Henry Ford and the Metropolitanization of Detroit, 1920- 1940,” in Robert Lewis, ed., Manufacturing Suburbs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 200-220.
11 Joe Darden, Richard Hill, June Thomas, and Richard Thomas, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
12 Joe Borrajo interview, Dearborn, Dec. 2, 2000.
13 Arabs, at 653, were the fourth largest group in the neighborhood, following “Americans” (mostly Southerner whites), Romanians, and Italians. Rudolph Constantine, personal communication (March 17, 2015).
14 Another young man died several weeks later of his injuries. As a black man, he could not be buried in this white’s only cemetery. Steve Babson, Working Detroit (New York: Adema Books, 1984), 92-93.
16 Sugrue, “Urban Crisis,” 158-162.
17 Allie Saide was the Arab American member of Bennet’s team, which included representation from each of the major ethnic groups in the neighborhood; Don Unis interview, Dearborn, Nov. 17, 2000; Constantine, personal communication.
18 Alan Amen interview, Dearborn, Nov. 1, 2000.
19 See, for example, Donald Unis, “Dumb like a Fox,” in Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 103-106.
20 Aswad, “Community Struggles.”
21 See Alixa Naff, Becoming America: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
22 Howell, “Old Islam,” 30-42, 104-127.
23 Ronnie Berri interview, Dearborn, Feb. 14, 2013.
24 Nabeel Abraham, “From Campus to Coffeehouse: The Spread of Palestinian Diaspora Politics (1968-1978)” (unpublished manuscript, 12 April 2002); Laurel Wigle and Sameer Abraham, “Arab Nationalism in America: The Dearborn Arab Community,” in David W. Hartman, ed., Immigrants and Migrants: The Detroit Ethnic Experience(Detroit: New University Thought Publishing, 1974), 279-302.
25 Abdo A. Elkholy, The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and Assimilation (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), 55.
27 Quoted in Barrow, “American Disease,” 208.
29 Babson, “Working Detroit.”
30 Amen, interview.
31 Quoted in Aswad, “Community Struggle,” 79.
32 Constantine, personal communication; Amen, interview.
33 Chuck Alawan interview, Dearborn, August 2005.
35 Edward C. Levy Co., “Our Legacy,” http://Edwclevey.com/our-legacy (accessed 13 May 2015).
37 This legal victory launched the political career of Berry, who went on to serve as Wayne County Road Commissioner and was a leader in Michigan’s Democratic Party from the 1970s-1990s. See Susan Griffen, Michael Berry(Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2007), 41-43; Amen, interview.
38 Darrel Donaldson, “Letter to parents and community leaders” (6 August 2000).
39 Borrajo, interview.
40 Suzanne Sarieni interview, telephone, February 24, 2015.
42 Horak, “Reversal.”
43 Aswad, “Community Struggle,” 71.
44 Katherine AMEN et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF DEARBORN, a municipal corporation, et al., Defendants. United States District Court Eastern District. Michigan Southern District, 14 August 1973.
46 Ismael Ahmed, interviewed in Detroit Lives, ed. Robert Mast (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 28.
48 Alan Mallad interview, telephone, 25 February 2015; Sareini, interview.
49 Amen, interview, is the source of much detail for the entire paragraph. Published accounts of the Southend struggle can also be found in Aswad, “Community Struggles” and “How a Dearborn;” and in Janice Terry, “Community and Political Activism Among Arab Americans in Detroit,” in Michael Suleiman, ed., Arabs in America: Building a New Future (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 241-256.
50 Amen v. Dearborn.
51 This chant was used by DRUM and AWC in the late 1960s and 1970s. See Finally Got the News (Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner. Icarus Films, Detroit, 1970).
52 Abraham, “From Campus to Coffeehouse,” 2002.
53 Ahmed, interview.
54 George Khoury interview, Dearborn, October 22, 2000.
55 Nabeel Abraham interview, Dearborn, Dec. 11, 2000.
57 Wigle and Abraham, “Arab Nationalism,” 279-302.
58 Abraham, “From Campus to Coffeehouse,”
59 SPARK bulletin sited in Dan Georgakus and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998), 31.
60 Ismael Ahmed, “Organizing an Arab Workers Caucus,” MERIP Reports 34 (1975), 19.
61 Mary Bisharat, “Yemeni Farmworkers in California,” MERIP Reports 34 (1975), 22-26.
62 Ahmed, “Organizing,” 19.
63 This walkout and demonstration followed an equally large rally that took place in the Southend several weeks earlier. The first march, which was also attended by over 2,000 people, began at the AMS and proceeded down Dix to the UAW Local 600. The mosque was critically involved in this campaign. Ahmed, “Organizing,” 19; Abraham, Abraham, and Aswad, “The Southend,” 179.
64 Ibid; and Ahmed 1994.
65 Nabeel Abraham, National and Local Politics: A Study of Political Conflict in the Yemeni Immigrant Community of Detroit, Michigan (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1978), 136; Ahmed, “Organizing,” 19; and Ahmed, interview.
66 Abraham interview; Terry, “Community.”
67 Pamela Pennock, “Third World Alliances: Arab American Activists at American Universities, 1967-1973,” Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies 4 (2014), 55-78; and Michael Suleiman, “‘I Come to Bury Caesar, Not to Praise Him’: An Assessment of the AAUG as an Example of an Activist Arab-American Organization,”Arab Studies Quarterly 9: 3, 4 (2007), 75–95.
68 Abdeen Jabara interview, Dearborn, October 27, 2000; Abraham, “From Campus to Coffeehouse.”
71 Ibid, 75.
72 Georgakus and Surkin, “Detroit I do Mind Dying,” 63.
74 Sareini, interview
78 See especially Sugrue, “Urban Crisis,” 76-77.
79 David Good, Orvie: The Dictator of Dearborn: The Rise and Reign of Orville L. Hubbard (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987).
81 Quoted in Kathy Horak, “A Home Away From Home for Middle Easterners,” Dearborn Press and Guide, 20 July 1978:1.
82 Ahmed interview, 12.
83 Quoted in Kathy Horak, “Residents Express Fear, Anger, and Understanding,” Dearborn Press and Guide, 17 August 1978:1; and Aswad, “How a Dearborn,” 10. See also Kathy Horak, “The Gradual Move to the East End,” Dearborn Press and Guide, 10 August 1978:1.
84 Abraham, Abraham, and Aswad, “The Southend,” 167.
85 Articles of Incorporation, Michigan Department of Treasury, Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), May 22, 1974.
86 Terry, “Community,” 248.
87 Abraham, “National and Local Politics,” 128.
89 Ahmed, interview, 29.
90 Helen Atwel interview, Dearborn, December 1, 2000.
91 The battle between the two organizations became bitter and involved back-room meetings with the mayor, the trashing of the SEDCC’s offices by angry ACCESS “thugs,” and worse.
92 Pennock, “Third World Alliances,” 61.
93 Howell, “Old Islam,” 175-182.
94 Abdo Alasry interview, Dearborn, 2008.
95 Alasry, interview; Nihad Hamed interview, Farmington Hills, 2005; Abraham, “’American Mosque.’”
96 Alasry, interview.
98 Alex Balooly interview, Dearborn Heights, 2008.
99 Alasry, interview; Hamed, interview; Abraham, “’American Mosque.’”
100 Abraham, “’American Mosque.’”
101 See Larry Poston, Islamic Da`wah in the West: Muslim Missionary Activity and the Dynamics of Conversion to Islam(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
102 Alasry, interview; Abraham, “’American Mosque;’” Howell, “Old Islam.”
103 Quoted in Abraham, “’American Mosque,’” 292.
104 Alasry, interview.
105 Hussein El Haje interview, Dearborn, 2005; Howell, “Old Islam,” 208-217.
106 For a fuller discussion of this cycle, see Andrew Shryock, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally Howell, “The New Order and Its Forgotten Histories,” In Abraham, Howell, and Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 381-394.
107 Ayse Caglar and Nina Glick Schiller, “Introduction: Migrants and Cities,” in Glick Schiller and Caglar eds., Locating Migration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 2.
108 Dimitris Papadoulous, Niamh Stevenson, and Vassilis Tsianoa. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 220.
109 Gerd Baumann, The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities (New York: Routledge, 1999), 126.
Sally Howell is Associate Professor of History and Arab American Studies at University of Michigan-Dearborn; Email: sfhowell@umich.edu
© Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies 2015
Copyright (c) 2015 Sally Howell
Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
CHASS
NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY RALEIGH, NC 27695 919.515.2011
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Posted in Black Solidarity, Palestinian Labor, UAW
Israel’s other “demographic threat” (Electronic Intifada)
Posted on July 18, 2017 | Comments Off on Israel’s other “demographic threat” (Electronic Intifada)
Israel’s other “demographic threat”
Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 18 July 2017
The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others, Mya Guarnieri Jaradat, Pluto Press (2017)
Beginning with the first intifada in the 1980s and during the 1990s, Israel initiated a policy of replacing Palestinian day laborers from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip with migrant workers.
Nearly 50 percent of Israel’s construction workers were Palestinian at the time, and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza made up more than 40 percent of Israel’s agricultural workers. The 2000s also saw a dramatic increase in Eritrean and Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel.
In The Unchosen, journalist Mya Guarnieri Jaradat examines Israel’s treatment of migrant workers and asylum seekers. Her findings lead her to the conclusion that Israel’s claims of being a democratic state are belied by its callous mistreatment of both groups.
She further concludes that this mistreatment mirrors Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians and contradicts Israel’s claim that its policies towards Palestinians are based on “security concerns.”
She writes that the experiences of African refugees and migrant workers – many from the Philippines and Thailand – expose the fact that the Israeli government “considers all non-Jews to be a demographic threat.” As a result, the experiences of these new “Others” shed more light on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Just as Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens of the state calls into question its ability to be at once Jewish and democratic,” Jaradat notes, “so also does its handling of migrant workers and asylum seekers, exposing a fundamental contradiction in the phrase ‘Jewish and democratic.’”
A demographic threat
She first encountered this issue not as a journalist, but when she joined a “left-leaning volunteer program.” The book opens with her experience working with Filipino women in charge of “black market kindergartens” that are necessitated by the lack of daycare for the children of migrant workers.
Her writing is notable for its empathy, a trait clearly discernible in the extensive interviews she conducted with migrant workers and asylum seekers. An interview with Sunday Dieng, 26, an asylum seeker from Sudan, for example, reads as follows:
Dieng had been an orphan for more than half his life; for over a decade, he’d been unable to find a country to call home. We discussed the 14 months he spent in an Israeli jail. I asked him about the conditions. Did he get enough food?
He smiled. Later, I understood his reaction – my question was ridiculous. Prison isn’t about breaking the body. It’s about the spirit.
Insights such as these appear throughout the author’s narrative, along with detailed factual background that further illuminates the situation faced by migrant workers and asylum seekers.
Some of the stories shock the conscience, such as the Israeli farmer who failed to provide housing for his migrant Thai workers and instead dug holes in the ground for them to sleep in.
Until 2012, when Israel and Thailand signed a bilateral agreement, most Thai workers came to Israel heavily in debt to labor management agencies because they had to pay exorbitant fees just to find work – in some cases as much as $10,000.
Their debt bondage meant they were susceptible to super-exploitation, such as being paid less than the minimum wage in violation of Israeli law and having “service fees” deducted from their paychecks.
Even with the new bilateral agreement that resulted from pressure from labor rights groups, Jaradat found that while “this all looked good on paper … on the ground, little has changed for Thai workers.”
Israel’s restrictions on migrant workers reflect the government’s fear of them as a demographic threat, the author argues.
Israeli policy prevents migrant workers from bringing a member of their immediate family with them. Migrant workers are not allowed to have children or even romantic relationships. Until an Israeli high court ruling in 2011, infants as young as three months old could be separated from their mothers and deported.
African asylum seekers, who, at the peak, numbered as many as 60,000 in Israel at one time, faced infiltration laws originally used against Palestinian refugees. Refugees were not allowed to apply for asylum and were held in prisons and desert tent camps for terms that arbitrarily ranged from days to years.
Although Israel signed the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, in the more than 60 years since, it has granted refugee status to fewer than 200 people, according to the author.
A xenophobic society
The Unchosen is about much more than the heartbreaking accounts of migrant workers seeking a decent life and refugees escaping genocidal wars and brutal authoritarian regimes. It also documents the resistance waged by both migrant workers and asylum seekers and the gradual awakening of Jewish Israelis to the nature of their government.
For a small group of Israelis, the author notes, witnessing the treatment of Israel’s new “Others” “opened the door to questioning everything about Israel. For some, these issues became their ‘breaking point with Zionism,’” which she defines as a “state where Jews have the majority and hegemony.”
The author herself relates to this questioning. Working with leftist Israeli groups seeking to reform Israel’s treatment of migrant workers and refugees, she questioned why no one was making the connection with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“Why weren’t we talking about the first expulsion” of the Palestinians in 1948, she asked herself. Why wasn’t the connection being made between night raids on migrant worker homes and night raids on Palestinian homes?
She approached the leader of a group called Israeli Children and got this reply: “I do see a connection … But I don’t want to talk about it. One of the big reasons this fight is succeeding is because we’re trying not to be political.”
Ultimately, however, the “fight” was not succeeding. As the years wore on, in the author’s view, Israeli society turned ever more right-wing and xenophobic.
In 2015, an Eritrean refugee was mistaken for a Palestinian assailant during an attack that killed one Israeli soldier and injured several bystanders. The Eritrean man, Haftom Zarhum, was shot by a security guard, and then a lynch mob kicked and spat on him, contributing to his death.
Jaradat was aware that every year her husband, a Palestinian from the West Bank, needed to apply for a permit just to live with her in Israel. She reached a final conclusion: she got out.
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Posted in Palestinian Labor
Video: Checkpoint 300 (Electronic Intifada)
Posted on June 8, 2017 | Comments Off on Video: Checkpoint 300 (Electronic Intifada)
Video: Checkpoint 300
The Electronic Intifada 8 June 2017
“This is our life: difficult and full of problems.”
So says one of the thousands of Palestinian laborers who queue before dawn each day to pass through Checkpoint 300, separating the occupied West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
The Israeli military checkpoint is the main crossing point for Palestinians from all over the southern West Bank who work in Israel.
Palestinians in the West Bank must hold an Israeli permit to cross the checkpoint. They are not allowed free movement into Israel.
There are around 100 fixed checkpoints like Checkpoint 300 in the West Bank.
Video by Ahmad Al-Bazz, Haidi Motola and Anne Paq/Activestills.
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Posted in Arab Labor, Palestinian Labor
Self-organization in the 2016 Palestinian Teachers Strike (New Politics)
Posted on June 1, 2017 | Comments Off on Self-organization in the 2016 Palestinian Teachers Strike (New Politics)
Published on New Politics (http://newpol.org)
Home > New Politics Vol. XVI No. 3, Whole Number 63 > Self-organization in the 2016 Palestinian Teachers Strike
Self-organization in the 2016 Palestinian Teachers Strike
From February 14 to March 13, 2016, 35,000 Palestinian teachers in the West Bank government-run school system were on strike. The teachers’ goal was to hold the Palestinian Authority to the terms of a 2013 agreement between the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT) and the Ministry of Education, an agreement the Palestinian Authority had reneged on for three years running. (Ma’an News, Feb. 16, 2016)
The strike was enormous, mobilizing mass demonstrations involving up to 20,000 teachers and supporters who flooded the streets of downtown Ramallah with signs and bullhorns. (Ma’an News,Feb. 22, 2016) According to Murad Tamimi, the International Relations Coordinator for the GUPT, “I’ve never seen anything like it; I thought it could be the end of the P.A.” These mobilizations were met with unprecedented repression on the part of the Palestinian Authority, which set up checkpoints to intercept teachers traveling to Ramallah and used violence and intimidation to try to suppress the movement. (Ma’an News, Mar. 11, 2016) The strike ended when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced his support for honoring the 2013 agreement, a statement that the teachers accepted. (Ma’an News, Mar. 12, 2016)
How did the Palestinian teachers mobilize on such an unprecedented scale? The answer lies in the form of organization that the teachers used to mobilize: democratically elected strike committees that took the lead of the strike away from the official union apparatus.
Moral and Material Grievances
Teachers in the Palestinian government-run schools work under horrendous conditions that make education nearly impossible. According to one teacher from Hebron who participated in the strike, his current salary is 3,900 shekels ($1,000) per month, although he has worked as a teacher for 23 years. At the same time, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that the average budget of a West Bank family is 5,091 shekels ($1,333). (Ma’an News, Mar. 1, 2016) It is no surprise, therefore, that most teachers have a second job. The absolute insufficiency of teachers’ salaries was a major theme in all of the speeches, signs, slogans, and messages teachers used to represent themselves in their mobilizations.
The Scope of the Strike
The strike was a spontaneous reaction on the part of the teachers after three years of petitioning the Palestinian Authority to honor the 2013 agreement, which, however insufficient, stipulated yearly wage increases to keep up with the cost of living. According to strike committee member Wasfi al-Bargouthi, “The strike happened accidentally. [The strike] was not planned. After the teachers announced the strike, the strike committee began to organize, committees at schools, meetings, and many things. No one planned [the strike]. It was an explosion without leaders.” (interview with the author, July 27, 2016)
On Monday, February 15, 4,000 teachers marched to the Prime Minister’s office, where they were met with stony silence. (Ma’an News, Mar. 11, 2016) Protests escalated, and the next day, 20,000 teachers and supporters demonstrated in Ramallah. After that, protests were met with repression by armed security forces, and ultimately 22 teachers as well as two school principals were arrested. (Ma’an News, Feb. 18, 2016)
The repression on the part of the Palestinian Authority included the official use of police violence and checkpoints, repressive techniques associated with the Israeli occupation forces. In addition to the official repression, there are indications that threats were made to bus and taxi drivers that their licenses would be revoked if they facilitated teachers reaching the protests. (Ma’an News, Mar. 2, 2016) This repression is deeply embarrassing for the Palestinian Authority. The authorities claimed that the checkpoints were “not to deny teachers entry to Hebron,” but were there to “ambush fugitives.” (Ma’an News, Mar. 1, 2016) The official story does little to obscure the naked fact that the Palestinian Authority brought a new level of repression down against the population it supposedly represents.
The GUPT Caves In
The teachers organized and sustained the strike by forming strike committees elected from the ranks of the teachers. The formation of the committees during the 2016 strike was a direct response to the default of the GUPT in its formal role representing the teachers. According to Anwar Awad, a teacher from Nablus,
The general union didn’t do right by the teachers. They put them down, humiliated the teachers, and didn’t give them their rights, so [the teachers] started this kind of strike. And because the government has a policy not to give the union anything and make it so weak, [the teachers] tried to do something on their own, away from the union or any official body or institution. (Interview with the author, July 22, 2016)
The strike committee method was transmitted by veteran activists of past strikes. Nabeel Samarra, a former teacher, veteran activist, and one of the renegade school principals who spent time in jail during the strike, relates his role in the 2016 strike: “We held a big meeting, and we said every school should choose one teacher … and form a committee in each governorate.” (Interview with the author, July 27, 2016)
Anwar Awad was part of a committee formed in response to the meeting in Ramallah:
We chose one representative from each of the 150 schools in Nablus, and then we chose five to represent the governorate. The five were not decision-makers. They had to go back to the 150 and discuss with the 150. So we have 150 representatives. If they want to do something they go to the 150 and discuss it, then they go to the other governorates and take the decision. The 150 representatives met whenever there was anything coming from the government. (Awad interview)
The committees facilitated the mobilization of teachers to carry out various roles in the strike movement. The committees formed subcommittees to deal with negotiations, legal affairs, and communications. Everything was posted on Facebook or other social media for the rank and file teachers to engage with and was widely disseminated through professional, social, and family networks. (Awad interview)
The Role of Political Leadership
The political leadership of veteran activists was essential to the organization of the strike committees. According to Omar Assaf, a veteran teacher activist and historian of the teachers movement, the committees have a history stretching back decades: “The strike committees have their roots in the underground committees organized during the period of direct military occupation from 1967 to 1993.” (Omar Assaf Interview with the author, July 29, 2017)
During the period of direct Israeli rule, such committees were underground, constituted by self-selected activists. The Palestinian political parties that make up the Palestine Liberation ORganization (PLO) actively facilitated the creation and extension of underground unions among other popular organizations. During this period the union activists framed their mobilizations in terms of nationalist demands directed against the Israeli occupation, as well as demands for union rights and material gains. As Omar Assaf relates,
We had three main demands during that period. We wanted a curriculum that reflected Palestinian history, culture, and identity, with adequate libraries, sports, and other programs for Palestinian youth. We wanted the right to have a legal union, a human right, and finally we wanted higher salaries, smaller class sizes, and shorter hours of work. (Assaf interview)
While the PLO was encouraging these struggles as part of the nationalist project, it was simultaneously preparing their absorption into the hoped-for project of state-building.
During the Oslo period, these formerly underground activists found themselves in conflict with the Palestinian Authority. The teacher activists confronted the officialdom of the GUPT, part of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), which was founded in 1965 with links to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Along with the PLO, the PGFTU returned to the Occupied Territories and, according to Assaf, “established from above unions for everyone: women, teachers, etc. The political parties were apportioned seats based on their political importance in the PLO. There was no democratic representation. The sector and the leader didn’t correspond.” Of course, this is not an anomaly in the history of nationalist movements in the Middle East or elsewhere.
The current GUPT, part of this Oslo apparatus, is no more democratic today than in 1994. The union’s general secretary and central committee are elected by 10,000 teachers, electors hand-picked by the current GUPT leadership and ultimately the PLO. Furthermore, the union is funded by the PLO rather than by dues collected from its membership. The union’s general secretaries tend to receive lucrative diplomatic appointments from the PLO after serving their time. All of these factors make it difficult for Palestinian teachers to see their interests reflected in the activities of the GUPT.
During the Oslo period, many activists remained outside of the GUPT but continued organizing committees when conflicts erupted. Unlike during the period of direct military rule, these committees could function in the open with broader participation and elections. One of those activists, Naim Aruri, recalls an important teachers strike in 1997:
So the first meeting was here in the park in 1997. [The activists] contacted each school and said you have to send one representative per school. One from each school in each governorate. A democratic way. They chose a committee for each city or governorate. Through the governorate committees they chose the top committee.
This expanded committee structure developed a further innovation. Regular elections were held to fill open positions on the committee so that “if one of us got arrested, we would just elect someone else.” (Interview with the author, July 27, 2016)
Accepting the Unacceptable
The strike committees are the crucial component that enabled teachers not only to mobilize for the 2016 strike but also to demobilize without feeling defeated. On February 16, the GUPT under General Secretary Ahmed Suhail met with the officials of the Palestinian Authority and brokered a deal that would secure an implementation of the 2013 agreement by the end of 2016. The teachers, through the strike committees, flatly rejected the agreement and maintained the strike. However, on March 13, after a month of the strike, President Mahmoud Abbas announced his plan to settle the strike under the same conditions, and on that day, the strike committees accepted those conditions. For the teachers, the element of victory lay in the fact that they had presented such a visible force in the face of the Palestinian Authority, and that the strike committees could be called upon again to organize another round of struggle. As Anwar Awad puts it,
The most important thing is that we sent a message and our voice was spread all over, especially to the government, our voice as teachers. The other thing, the Palestinian people and other people heard about the teachers’ rights and they know that the teachers need rights. … If the government does not apply what it promised, we will do different activities, including strike as well as going to the court and pressing charges.” (Awad interview)
Likewise Naim Aruri sees the movement as a success in spite of the demobilization. According to him,
You have to try to do something. The union is against you, the P.A. is against you. In spite of that we succeeded to do something to tell the Palestinian people these are our problems, and we need this and that. The majority of the Palestinian people and the students themselves supported us. Many of them were with us. (Aruri interview)
Wasfi al-Barghouti adds,
The biggest demonstration ever in this country took place in this strike. There were 20,000 people in the streets of Ramallah! No one was paid. No one was forced. And many teachers came even though it cost them money! The security forces set up checkpoints and threatened us! But our teachers were brave and we continued until we told them to finish.” (al-Barghouti interview)
Omar Assaf, speaking today as an adviser and ally of the teachers, states, “Until you establish a true union, the problem will continue. Democratic, independent, and unified. I think the movement is active because the teachers’ situation is bad and the union does nothing. And the teachers write on Facebook and Twitter. It’s not finished.” (Assaf interview)
Reviewing the Movement,
The Palestinian Authority’s reneging on the 2013 agreement provided the trigger for the mobilization in 2016. The unwillingness or inability of the GUPT to impose the conditions written into the 2013 agreement created a situation in which it was possible for the teachers to act through the strike committees, sustain their movement, and finally demobilize.
The reaction of the Palestinian Authority to the strike has been to reshuffle, but ultimately strengthen, the union bureaucracy. On March 14, the PLO appointed a new Central Committee of the GUPT, led by General Secretary Said Irziqat. On October 2, the Palestinian Authority announced that teachers engaged in any new strike action would be subject to layoffs. (Ma’an News, Oct. 3, 2016) The minister of education has visited the GUPT offices repeatedly since the strike, aiming to enlist the union itself in monitoring and disciplining teachers who are engaged in organizing. (Murad Tamimi interview with the author, July 15, 2016) Even after the strike, teachers have faced continued intimidation including violence. (Ma’an News, Apr. 7, 2016) During my interview with Nabeel Samarra, our volunteer translator, an English teacher from Ramallah, broke off halfway through the interview and excused himself because the content had become too alarming for him to translate.
The teachers’ relationship to the GUPT and the Palestinian Authority is only one facet of changes between Palestinian society and the Palestinian Authority. Elections to municipal positions were to be held in October 2016, however these elections were called off by the Palestinian Authority at the last minute when it appeared that their favored candidates would be challenged by Hamas-linked candidates as well as by a joint list of the left-wing parties. (Ma’an News, Oct. 2016) Official avenues of contestation are being closed off, and dissident voices are being disciplined.
The future is far from certain, but everyone involved in the strike anticipates more conflicts over the same issues. The teachers do not feel defeated, and they don’t feel that the story is over. As Anwar Awad said, “We have the committees ready to go; they are just sleeping.” Of course, a real solution to the problems the teachers face is wrapped up in all of the political problems of the Palestinian situation, beginning first and foremost with the Israeli occupation. The importance of the strike committees is in demonstrating that self-organization on a class basis is a latent force that can shake the foundations of oppressive power structures, potentially shifting the balance of forces that seem so overwhelmingly arrayed against the majority of ordinary Palestinians, both within their own society and in conflict with the Israeli occupation. Viewed from this angle, the experience of the strike committees will be to the credit of future struggles of all sorts.
Note: This article is made possible by the generosity of my hosts, the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh, first and foremost among them my dear friend Murad Tamimi, whose connections, translation, and insights made this research possible.
Source URL: http://newpol.org/content/selforganization-2016-palestinian-teachers-strike
[2] http://newpol.org/taxonomy/term/1096
[3] http://newpol.org/category/topic/labor/teacher-unions
[4] http://newpol.org/category/places/middle-east/israelpalestine
[5] http://newpol.org/category/issue/63
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Posted in Neoliberalism, Palestinian Labor, Palestinian Teachers Strike
May Day: Palestinian trade unions call for intensifying BDS
Posted on April 28, 2017 | Comments Off on May Day: Palestinian trade unions call for intensifying BDS
By Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS)
On May Day, we Palestinian trade unions are proud to stand with the trade union movement internationally as we collectively resist attacks on our working conditions, cuts to public services and job losses. We lend our voices to the mass rallies taking place internationally uniting trade unions, immigrants and refugees, social movements, and environmentalists fighting for a better future and dignified living.
We also remind the world that Palestinian workers continue to endure and resist Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid on a daily basis, including resistance to Israel’s shameful prison system. We salute our political prisoners on hunger strike to protest Israel’s grave and ongoing violations of Palestinian human rights. We will continue to refuse Israel’s vision of a truncated network of Palestinian Bantustans and associated industrial zones, under which we relinquish our rights and become a pool of cheap labour for the Israeli state. That is why in July 2005, when over 170 Palestinian organizations urged the world to adopt a campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel in the manner of South African Apartheid, this historical call was signed by all the main Palestinian trade union federations. We believe that trade union campaigns targeting corporate and state complicity with Israeli violations of international law are a vital and effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
Trade unions today are taking the lead in defending the Palestinian people’s rights to self-determination, non-discrimination and equality, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. BDS principles and tactics have been formally endorsed by national trade union federations in South Africa, UK, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Basque Country, Brazil and other countries across Latin America, in addition to scores of national and local unions. This gives us great hope in the potential of working people to shut down corporate and state support for Israel’s crimes. It also reminds us of the incredibly inspiring international trade union campaigns which helped to expose and confound South Africa’s former apartheid regime. We salute all trade unions implementing effective BDS campaigns and divesting their pension funds from corporate occupation profiteers like G4S and HP, among others.
We also take this opportunity to call on trade unions yet to join the BDS movement to: implement boycotts of Israeli and international companies that are complicit with violations of Palestinian rights, divest trade union funds from companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid, and apply pressure on governments to cut military and trade relations with Israel. We reiterate our call for a boycott of Histadrut, Israel’s general trade union, for its complicity with Israel’s violations of international law and its refusal to take a clear stand in support of comprehensive human rights for Palestinians.
We look forward to working alongside trade unions around the world to develop and strengthen our struggles for human rights, social and economic justice. We stand shoulder to shoulder with working people worldwide and thank you for the solidarity you continue to show to the struggle for Palestinian workers’ rights.
General Union of Palestinian Workers
Palestinian New Union
Federation of Independent Trade Union
Postal, IT and Telecommunications Workers Union
/ By
Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS)
Comments Off on May Day: Palestinian trade unions call for intensifying BDS
Posted in Arab Labor, BDS, Palestinian Labor
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Music should be some kind of nourishment.
— Chuck D
MechaniCrash is inspired by rock, funk, blues and soundtracks, with a little hip-hop and electronic in for good measure.
The band only currently exists in the studio and online (...and in my mind...). It's really just about making new music as often as possible, and getting people to listen. That's it... MechaniCrash is a sample-heavy effort, so there are many tracks that have samples that prohibit their sale, but you can still listen to them. I'll make new music as often as I can, and put it here. The joy in the activity comes from the music being heard.
Sampling , and Audrey Hepburn...
I finished a new song today called "It's Called For...". It features a lot of samples of Audrey Hepburn, in the film "Charade".
I've written often about my struggles with sampling. I am no singer. I can create the whole song, but have no vocals to provide. I grew up in the 1980's where Hip Hop artists used samples as a palate of pop-culture references that furthered the meaning of the song. Since then, the world has clamped down on sampling from obviously owned works. I used samples to fill in the gaps left by my lack of vocal ability. It took me a while to realize that sampling was a non-starter if I intended to release the song. In the mean time, I sampled a lot, making pop-culture references, and developing a style dependent on samples. It wasn't until I tried to press a vinyl single that I realized that I had hit a wall. I couldn't sign the wavers necessary to release my songs with the samples I used. I didn't have the legal right. I was at a stalemate. Then I had an epiphany. Many films and TV shows are in the public domain. I could use these.
I rehash this story because one of my earlier songs was a song called "Own Me". In it I heavily sampled Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's". It was an early song. It was a rough song... but it was a good song. It has fallen into a category of songs I shouldn't publish because of its sampling of works I do not have rights to use. It wasn't even making much of a pop-culture reference, as it isn't a famous line or anything... except for the pop-culture reference of her distinctive voice.
The new song, "It's Called For..." is using Audrey Hepburn again, sampled from a movie called "Charade", which is in the public domain, and thus free to use. I was able to sample her being every bit of Audrey hepburn, with a little bit of cary grant for good measure... and I can release it...
It's called For...
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A brave new world... with wasps!
It's been more than a year since my last entry, or my last recording. The year has been a busy one, as my wife and I prepared for the arrival of our son, who was born in February. Obviously my priorities shifted in the year leading up to his birth. I was pleased with "The Witness", and was well prepared for it to be my last recording for a while. Our time was beginning to shift toward prepping for the baby's arrival. Much to my surprise, he's a pretty chill baby. The first month is always an adjustment, but honestly, he has settled into a predictable rhythm quite early. They wife and I discussed taking advantage of his chill-nature, and the reclaiming of small bits of ourselves and our creativity. We traded days of baby-duties with each other in order to allow us to have just a little bit of time to pursue some creative outlets. Mine is MechaniCrash. I was back in the studio this weekend, and blew off the cobwebs with a new track.
This song is called "Stay Away From Wasps", and it is a funky little guitar-driven song with samples from a 1959 public domain film called "The Wasp Woman". There isn't anyone particularly famous in it. I was more sucked in by the subject matter. It is about a woman who heads up a cosmetic company. She was formerly a model, and as she approaches 40, is disappointed by the effect her aging is having on her appearance. She is approached by a guy who convinces her that the key to returning her youth is injections of royal jelly from wasps. Needless to say, mayhem ensues, culminating with her in a full wasp-head (Think Vincent Price in "the Fly"), eating her friends. the samples I chose aren't nearly as dramatic, but everyone speaks in that droll sort of cadence that people in the 50's used to use.
Also of note is that all of the guitar work on this track was done on a new guitar that I haven't had a chance to record with until now. It is a Fender Limited Edition guitar called the "Meteora". Its a strange Telecaster with a radically different body. It's a pretty high-spec guitar, and played every-bit like one. It was really fantastic... and it kinda looks like a wasp...
The song "Stay Away From Wasps" can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube, or here on this site!
Stay Away From Wasps
"The Witness"... my 2018 RPM Challenge Album
It is the end of February, and I have participated in my third RPM Challenge, finishing an entire album during the month of February. For my friends who draw, it is sort of the music-version of "Inktober". February is usually a rough month for me. Typically I have at least one week-long business trip. This shortens the already-short month to a down and dirty 21 days to write and record ten songs OR thirty-five minutes of music.
It has been four years since the first time I participated , and I have recorded roughly 30 songs between that batch and this batch. The difference in my knowledge, abilities and confidence made this version of the challenge much more about creative choices than technical execution. This is a nice piece of evolution on which to reflect.
I solved my technical issue of copyrights-on-samples by using only public domain sample-sources. I fully implemented my new AKAI MPCX as both a sampler and a drum machine, the latter really upping my beat-game. And... I have progressed as a guitarist, doing more competent solos, and guitar work in general.
Most importantly, I like the results. One wants to think one is getting better at one's hobbies, but when the attempt is to create something with some artistic merit, It is very satisfying to catch myself humming some of these songs. Music is so visceral... the technical details often don't add up to a song someone actually likes.
So... check out the album "The Witness". You can get it here, listen on Soundcloud, or buy it on iTunes today, or it should be up on Spotify in a couple of days.
Another year, another dozen...
It is New Year's Day, 2018. It's a good day to reflect.
I'm approaching 50 recordings in the four years since taking on the "MechaniCrash" project. I'm still having fun, and pushing myself creatively. I'm incrementally a better musician and producer than I was a year ago... at least a little bit.
I had a moment of moral enlightenment last year, and moved from sampling anything to only sampling things in the public domain. Even the images I use for album-art are of my own creation, or in the public domain.
My trusty old Roland SP-808 Zip-disk-driven sampler finally shit the bed, and was replaced by the magnificent Akai MPC-X, a machine that I am absolutely not worthy of. I can already do everything I was doing on the old Roland, and seem to only be using 0.05% of the machine's ability.
Yesterday I finished the 12th recording of 2017. Besides recording, I expanded distribution. You can now find some MechaniCrash songs on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play, and Pandora. I pressed a vinyl single that can be ordered here.
Two of this year's songs ("20th Century Regrets", and "I'll Try It") included donated drum-tracks from my friend Krister Friday, from Chicago. Thanks Krister! Keep sending me beats!
All in all, not a bad year. Now what?
Hear all of the 2017 MechaniCrash songs here, or on a SoundCloud playlist here:
MechaniCrash 2017 Soundcloud playlist
Look for MechaniCrash songs on iTunes, Spotify, and wherever-else...
I'll Try It
Like To Pick... flowers?
Today I post/publish another song, "Like To Pick", after what feels like a bit of a drought, but in actuality isn't. This is the tenth song I've recorded this year... not too bad for it not being my day-job, and not too droughty.
It feels like a drought because eight of those songs were recorded in February. I recorded one in August/September, and that song, "Kathleen" is the culprit. It was a tough song. I just couldn't get it to a place where I loved it. It took three times as long to record as a typical MechaniCrash song, and even after all of that, I was left unsatisfied with it. I forced my way through it, to finish it, and posted it anyway. I really believe that the way forward in any creative endeavor is to finish things. There is so much to gain by even finishing work you are less than satisfied with, to gain the experience. I have also learned, especially when applying this to my much-more-dominant visual art skills, that the ones that I loathed the most were often ones that others loved... so I finished and published "Kathleen".
Starting "Like To Pick", with "Kathleen" finally birthed, was absolutely refreshing. It went quickly, and I like it a lot. So, here, for your listening pleasure (...possibly) is "Like To Pick". It has a lot of recently acquired guitars ( a 70's Greco Bass, a Korean Danelectro reissue, and a project guitar I made from parts...) on it, and has samples from the 1958 film "The Screaming Skull". I only sample from public domain sources these days... lol.
Like To Pick
Sampling and Marketing!
I got my first vinyl single pressed ("The Strong" b/w "Fez"), and delivered in a rainbow of colored vinyl. It is a truly satisfying thing. I plan to send some out as a promotional device. I printed up some cards to help turn the vinyl single into the centerpiece of a promo kit. I also added a "DPK (Digital Press kit) page to the site. Why? MARKETING! My friend "big Fat Greg Morris" hooked me up with some logos and stuff, and it all looks way more pro than the effort deserves.
My trusty Roland SP808 sampler (powered by Zip Discs) died in February after nearly 20 years of service. Its place in my studio has finally been filled by the mighty Akai MPCX Professional. Fucking-hell this thing a beast. It seems to do a bit of everything, and thus might take a minute to wrap my head around.
With the addition of the Akai, which, despite it's depth, is proving to be rather intuitive and yielding some immediate results, I am back in the studio and getting back to a regular recording cadence. I was off for a few months, and am feeling fresh and ready. It might take a bit longer to get the first few songs out, but I have no deadline. Full speed ahead.
...looks like fucking NASA in that room...
The vinyl single The Strong/Fez is now ready!
Vinyl ambitions...
It's been about a month since my last post, and my last recording. The past six months have been an intense period of recording. I initially started recording, and sharing recordings online, as a creative exercise. The purpose was to become better at it by forcing myself to finish recordings, and to make them available to be heard. This would also make them available to be critiqued too, but that would be part of the process. 40 songs later, I decided that I should evolve to more challenges. I decided that my next big thing would be to actually create a physical product. No band I have ever played with has ever produced a physical offering (record, CD, etc...) of a song that I participated in its recording. After finishing my last recording in February, I decided to piece together an album, and press it!
Well... long story short... I prepared the files, designed the album at, and was all ready to go. I uploaded everything to the record-presser's site. The last stage was a form to certify ownership of the materials uploaded. Then it hits me right in the face. I use samples heavily. Samples from recognizable pop-culture references. I never cared if they were others intellectual property because I wasn't selling or distributing anything. I thought of it as found pieces in collage hanging in my home that only my friends would see. Because pressing a record was a bit of an afterthought, I had prepared a work that wasn't mine to reproduce, even if intended just to give away. I stopped. The image above is the in-progres art for the unreleasable album.
An interesting sidebar is that my beloved Roland sampler, mainstay of my recording arsenal for 20 years fatally broke down before I finished my February recording project. The situation forced me to complete several songs without samples. To my surprise, they turned out quite well. I realized I was probably using recognizable samples, and the cultural frames of reference they contained, as a bit of a crutch to distract from too much attention on my actual playing. These sample-free songs forced me to rethink my sampling approach.
In the end, I decided to only press a vinyl single of two songs that have no intellectual property issues. Those files have been sent, and the order delivered!
I also decided to move forward with a new sampling mandate. Creating the next block of songs would be done in a manner that only samples public domain sounds, or sounds I created myself, or otherwise own. The goal would be to create a body of work that I own enough to reproduce, distribute, and even sell, if I want. This is a meaningful evolution of my process, and I look forward to the challenge.
RPM 2017: "20th Century Regrets"
Last week I completed the "2017 RPM Challenge". As I have mentioned in the past, this whole "MechaniCrash" project started with the 2014 RPM Challenge. I described the challenge like this in an earlier blog post:
This is a thing where a couple of audiophile/musicians were having a discussion about the recording realities of modern mass music. They observed that in the 60's, studios like Motown or Stax would send a group of musicians into a studio for a week with nothing pre-written and no multi-track recording abilities, and end up with an album that we are all still listening to today. In contrast, a typical modern pop single could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, and involve 100 people. Meanwhile, there are thousands of us amateur musicians and bands with home studios that make the equipment that Motown used seem like it was made by Fred Flintstone.
The RPM Challenge is for us, with our closets full of guitars and multi-track home studios, to get off our collective asses and record something. It wasn't a contest, but a challenge... to record an album (at least 10 songs or 30 minutes of music) in one month. By the way, they picked February, the shortest month. They ask you to not even think about it until 12:01am on February 1st, and that you send them a CD of your efforts with a postmark dated and time-stamped before noon on March 1st. All they offer for your efforts is a spot on the page's "jukebox" streaming player... oh.. and the enormous satisfaction of actually recording an album in a month.
I did the challenge in 2014, resulting in the concept of the "fake band" called MechaniCrash, and the album "Time Crash". Time Crash was hacky and rough, but the product of a fun and rewarding creative exercise. I skipped the 2015 and 2016 challenges, as I generally have very travel-heavy Februarys, but this year was oddly free of travel, so I jumped in again. The result was the album called "20th Century Regrets". You can find it in the FREE MUSIC section of the site. The completion of the challenge marks the 39th song recorded since the start of the "2014 RPM Challenge".
Let me just say... this challenge is hard. It is like having a second job. In retrospect, I don't know how I actually completed the first challenge. This time I was plagued by equipment issues as both my digital recorder and sampler went bad during the month. These things were almost insurmountable, as I had to pause and rebuild big parts of my recording infrastructure. The resulting album just barely hits the minimum requirements of 10 songs or 35 minutes of music, clocking in at 8 songs and 36 minutes of music. These problems forced some deviation from my normal methodology, creating some new sounds, and made the finish line feel like much more of an accomplishment than the first time.
Cheers to three years and 39 songs under my belt, and more to come.
What I did on my Christmas vacation... or "Tattered"
I have had roughly two weeks off work for Christmas, and I spent a meaningful chunk of my leisure time in my little makeshift recording studio. I recorded two songs during the break. I spoke about "Absolute Gentleman" in a post a few days ago. The new song is called "Tattered". It's just a song... but it represents the last song in the "album" with the working title "MechaniCrash IV". "MechaniCrash IV" has 11 songs and is about 55 minutes of music, perfect size for a vinyl record.
My intention was to record an album's worth of music, and spring for a pressing of about 50 copies, and give them to my friends. As I have said before, there is no money to be made here. All of the songs are posted here for free download anyway. The completion of this particular body of work, on the last day of the year at that, causes me to reflect again on the point of this exercise.
I have no delusions as to the quality of my music. I am a bit of a hack, getting a little bit more proficient at playing and producing with each effort. More to the point is the fact that I gain a lot of spiritual comfort from my recording activities. I have a very stressful job, and really loose myself in making music. Its hard to do while thinking of anything else. It is also a very satisfying means of personal expression.
I think the real point is twofold:
To put my music out there, accessible to friends and public, and critique. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it... etc...
To finish songs, and complete a body of work to the best of my ability. Finishing things is important.
I will now be taking a break from active recording, as the beginning of the year can be a very busy time in my industry. I will focus on taking these tracks, and creating a finished vinyl record. I need to determine an order, accounting for the end of side-one, and the beginning of side two, accounting for flow, strong starts and strong finishes to each side. I need art for the cover (which I should probably do), and a logo too (which I may farm out...lol). I need to decide on a real title for the body of work. This tactile product will be the completion of this album. Giving it to people, getting it out in the world, will add a new dimension to the "fake band" project.
Tattered
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It's called For... 4:02
It's All So Explosive 4:21
Stay Away From Wasps 4:05
Liquid Gold 4:10
Like To Pick 4:22
Soul Cries 4:29
Orange 2:12
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Mother tongue: the lost inheritance of diaspora
AuthorMedia DiversifiedPosted on November 13, 2017 February 1, 2018 CategoriesCulture, MediaTagsAfrica, Ghana, identity, language
Derek Owusu talks about what it means not to speak the language of your ancestors
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
I wonder what kind of person I would be if I could speak Twi. How my thoughts would run, how I would interact with my surroundings. For a long time, I underestimated the impact language had on shaping who I am. I used to think of it just as a way of simple communication between groups, not as something containing the history, culture, self-perception and mythology of a people.
My mother came to the United Kingdom at the age of 18. She had no plans to move back to Ghana, her past in West Africa being darkened by the military rule of Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings and the poverty of her small town, Jamasi. She was thinking, I’m sure, that the UK was a gateway to a new and better life. Who can blame her? Dreams had been sold all over the continent after the nightmare of colonialism so it’s no surprise that she sleepwalked into London, had me, and only then realised, when she experienced racism
Mate Masie: Symbol of wisdom, knowledge and prudence Jean MacDonald – Well-Tempered Web Design
and couldn’t find a place to live that was accepting of single mothers, that Abrokyire (abroad) wasn’t all that people said it was.Still, the way my mother sees it, she suffered so I don’t have to. England was still better than Ghana. She definitely had this in mind when she named me. And I suspect it’s also one of the reasons why she didn’t teach me Twi, her mother tongue. At the time, a connection with her homeland would have been the last thing on her mind, the weight of Rawling’s regime still heavy on her back. So of course creating a new identity was appealing, especially with a newborn who she probably perceived as not having one yet. I was to become British, which to me is not an identity but a nationality only. It’s cold and lacks the warmth of familiarity, depth and general acceptance. It can be taken away with enough racist backing and paperwork. Who I am, I feel, should go beyond place of birth and the amalgamation of toned-down Ghanaian behaviours and London idiosyncrasies.
So I wasn’t taught Twi. I only managed to pick up bits and pieces by listening closely to conversations being had around me. But for as long as I can remember, whenever I’ve been asked by uncles, aunties, or random older people who find out I’m Ghanaian, whether I can speak Twi or not, my response has always been, “I can understand it but I can’t speak it”. They respond with an “ooh okay” and then give me that meek Ghanaian smile and end the conversation. In that moment it’s hard not to feel only half Ghanaian, instead of the full Ghanaian I’d like to see myself as. A bond could have been developed between us but spoken English would not have been a sufficient agent. It’s easy to say that the outsider feeling is self-imposed but try interrupting two Ghanaians speaking Twi, flowing together, with English, and the palpable rupturing of the conversation says it all.
Whenever I’ve tried to speak Twi in the past, the person I’m speaking to would correct me, appreciate it, but only after they had finished laughing. It’s not their job to teach, but it’s a shame that some discourage.
I’m starting to feel that even if I learn my history and immerse myself in Ghana’s culture, because I can’t speak one of its main languages, I’ll never be able to fully understand a way of life and thought that is my inheritance. Because elements of cultures are codes that almost seem meaningless if you don’t have the key.
It’s strange to think of language and cultural barriers existing in the home you grew up
AKOMA NTOSO
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in. These are ideas you apply to people who are not from the same place as you are. But I often struggle to “see” what my mum is trying to say or why she behaves a certain way. From very young, I struggled to understand the scolding I’d receive for using my left hand (I wiped with my right but still took a beating) and today I’m saddened by my mother’s laid back and dismissive attitude towards mental health. In our culture, she says, “these things are not there”. It’s hard to connect with her on a level I know exists but I struggle to define—there’s probably a word for it in Twi—; I see it when she speaks to my dad, aunts, and uncles, something existing in the language and perspective that I cannot grasp.
It’s common for people to say that you can’t translate a joke without the humour disappearing, but I also think it’s impossible to translate a word that describes a feeling or way of thinking without the word becoming meaningless to the person you’re trying to communicate with. And so along with the word, the behaviour isn’t understandable either.
Often, people change depending on the language they’re speaking. My dad, confident and fluent in both, can go from reserved and relaxed while speaking Twi to boisterous and excited when speaking Ga. It’s hard to not wonder about the difference in thought processes of a person who can think in multiple languages. The language you think in will have huge effects on your self-perception and so will definitely impact your personality. If I managed to master Twi at this stage of life and made the conscious effort to form my thoughts with it, within a few years, wouldn’t I begin to be someone else? Wouldn’t I be more Ghanaian, now being able to “flow” and connect with speakers better; reference feelings I may have had but couldn’t before articulate, live by the myths that are woven into the language? Ghana being my country of origin has usually been enough for me to call myself Ghanaian. But it’s hard not to feel like I’m deceiving myself when I go to Ghana and realise there is more to being Ghanaian than just acknowledging my past and declaring myself “home”.
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Derek Owusu is a writer, mentor and host on literature podcast, Mostly Lit. He discovered literature at the age of 23 while studying exercise science at university and soon after dedicated his life to reading and writing.
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14 thoughts on “Mother tongue: the lost inheritance of diaspora”
saposexualmusings says:
Reblogged this on SapiosexualMusings and commented:
This is an insightful piece.
KenyanCoffee says:
i believe you can learn Twi if you put your mind and heart to it
Wunmi says:
I never comment on articles, but this really resonated with me. Thank you for writing this – you’ve really captured what it’s like to feel the loss of something you never really had! I particularly relate to the idea that an identity based on nationality feels so flimsy compared to a cultural identity. And language really does seem to be a skeleton key to accessing, understanding and belonging…
I’m Nigerian-British, and years ago I tried to confront my (otherwise wonderful!) parents about why they didn’t see the importance in passing on the vital cultural capital of language. They looked puzzled, as if it didn’t occur to them that teaching me the native language could be as important as teaching values and providing me with other opportunities. They said it ‘felt more important to teach you values’ – is if they were mutually exclusive. I think denial is easier than the accepting that a huge mistake has been made.
roopdhillon2014 says:
This is such a universal story! Just replace Twi with Punjabi and Ghana with either India or Pakistan and its the same experience
Rupinderpal Dhillon says:
This is so universal! Just replace Twi with Punjabi and Ghana with either India or Pakistan and its exactly the same story!
Bless you for having the gift of communicating what so many of us are thinking. I am a second-generation Chinese American but I can relate to everything you are saying. Thank you for sharing your thoughts so eloquently!
Suối Mây says:
Reblogged this on suongquynh.
Paul McGranaghan says:
Tá sé seo tábhachtach agus tráthúil. D’aimsigh mé é seo ar suíomh Gaelach, agus scaipfidh mé é trí mo mheáin sóisialta.
Thank you so much for articulating what many of us who don’t speak our parents’ languages are experiencing.
In my family’s case it’s particularly complicated: My father was a member of the minority of Turks in Bulgaria. In theory, his native language was an old form of Turkish more closely related to the language spoken during the Ottoman times than modern Turkish. However, given that my das was born long before Bulgaria’s independence, he has always considered his native language to be Bulgarian. Turkish was taught in schools to children of the ethnic minority, but it started to feel “foreign” and even at home Bulgarian was spoken.
When my dad left Bulgaria for Germany for political reasons and met my German mother they only communicated in German, and my father didn’t teach me or my siblings either Bulgarian or his “native” language. He had become extremely disappointed with everything Bulgarian after experiencing discrimination. Like your mother, he was under the impression that his children were fully German because we were born and raised there and even had a German mother. As anyone with a similar background knows, though, we are never fully accepted. A different name and a parent with an accent is enough to show that we are different.
We were always upset that we didn’t get to learn Bulgarian or Turkish, and while I, as the oldest, understand some, it’s painful not be able to communicate fully with cousins and extended family that are now residents of Turkey, Bulgaria, and other countries. A common language would be much needed to be able to have the same kind of family bonds that would be had if we lived at “home.”
effefosua says:
Your article is deep. Bless you for that. My parents are also from Ghana. I was born and raised in Germany. I was thaught Twi and forbidden to ever respond in German to them as a child but allowed to speak it with my siblings. As a child I did not really like or appreciated it but now as a grown person I am grateful. However I still get reminded by some aunties, uncles and my Ghanaian people, that my Twi is just about “okay”. Apparently there is a “German” touch to it. Lol. So yeah. Life goes on. Give it a try. Education has no end or expiring date.
Here is a nice song that expresses the same feeling you have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aHVnAYPlEo
My parents are also from Ghana, and they also decided not to teach me Twi. Almost all of their friends in the States made the same decision, and once I was old enough to articulate my anger about the situation, we have fought about it many times. My mother and her friends often tell me, Oh you can understand it. Just go to Ghana for a year and you’ll be able to speak it! As if going to Ghana for a year is feasible when you have no savings and your job is here. It’s very frustrating, and I’m so glad you were able to articulate the pain that I feel, the loss that I feel for not having their language as a part of my life. I did a genetic test and discovered that my family has been in Ghana in an almost unbroken line since the beginning of time. The fact that I don’t know the language that every single one of my ancestors spoke is ridiculous, and I really don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to fix it.
This really strikes a chord. I’m French-Malian, though only grew up using French, my ‘mother-tongue’ and always felt my siblings and I were missing a huge part of our identity by not being able to speak our ‘father-tongue.’ I am now losing my French because I communicate mainly in English. I’m about to give birth and while I want to speak French to my child rather than English, I also worry about not being able to fully share my Malian heritage with my child. As you say, language opens doors to parts of yourself that are not accessible in another language, and I want to be able to give my child the fullness of experience which I didn’t have access to.
Amran says:
Reblogged this on The World of Amran.
Marika Sherwood says:
Yes, I feel I am almost a different person when I speak my mother-tongue, Hungarian. My son has never forgiven me for not teaching/raising him in that language. And ‘home’ is Budapest, though we emigrated in 1948, my 11th year of life.
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Insight 205: Afghan Trading Networks, Geopolitics and Everyday Diplomacy: Transcending West Asia’s Northern and Southern Tiers
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Central Asian transnational commercial networks play an important role in connecting much of West Asia. Since the traders who form such networks are multi-lingual and able to inhabit multiple cultural spaces, they are helpfully thought of as “everyday diplomats” skilled especially in the art of negotiation. This article focuses on commercial networks made up of Afghans. It identifies two major corridors of Afghan mobility in West Asia: one connecting West Asia’s Northern Tier to East Asia and the other connecting its Southern Tier to Turkey and Central Asia.
By Magnus Marsden
On 1 January 2018, the attention of security experts came to focus on a category of actors that had hitherto rarely been popularly associated with global jihadism. Abdulkadir Masharipov — a citizen of Uzbekistan who was fluent in Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Arabic, and had ties to Uyghur communities in Central Asia and Turkey — played a leading role in the attack on Istanbul’s Reina nightclub that resulted in the deaths of 39 people. He was eventually apprehended by police after having dropped off his four-year-old son in a house in Zeytinburnu, an Istanbul neighbourhood that had long been home to Central Asians. Masharipov had purportedly received military training in Afghanistan.
Transnational communities and networks of Central Asia are playing an important role in creating transregional connectivity across multiple West Asian contexts, yet in ways that contrast with the connectivity illustrated by Masharipov. Like Masharipov, the traders who form such networks are multi-lingual and able to inhabit multiple cultural spaces. The principal concern of such actors, though, is commerce rather than religious militancy. Mobile merchants offer a distinct lens into Central Asia’s connections to adjacent regions.
Among such networks, those made up of Afghans are especially prominent. There are two major corridors of Afghan mobility in West Asia: one connects post-Soviet Eurasia to China via the Muslim-majority republics of Central Asia; the other binds Turkey, the Hijaz, and Central Asia in a triangle. Afghan merchants simultaneously connect West Asia’s Northern Tier to East Asia and its Southern Tier to Turkey and Central Asia.
A strong case exists for treating Central Asia’s transnational actors as “everyday diplomats” — a term that emphasises the capacities that particular groups and networks of persons have in the skills of diplomacy, especially those of negotiation and cultural/linguistic versatility. Nation-states beyond Central Asia have increasingly recognised how the diplomatic skills of sections of their populations can add another dimension to their foreign policy agendas and another layer through which interstate relations are formed.[1] The Central Asian states could similarly capitalise on the pursuit of informal diplomacy along human-commercial routes. Yet, in order to do so, one-sided stereotypes that circulate about traders from the region need rigorous contesting. These states also need to develop a vision of West Asian transregional connectivity that embraces the region’s Northern and Southern Tiers.
Afghans in West Asia’s Northern tier
A regional context in which Afghan traders have demonstrated themselves as being especially adept operators is the former Soviet Union — West Asia’s Northern Tier. Mobile Afghans in Central Asia are largely viewed by officials from the region and beyond either as costly refugees or terrorists/criminals. In recent years, policy relating to Afghan traders has been confused. States in the region have introduced policies specifically targeting the commercial activities of Afghan traders. Less frequently, policy makers have sought to encourage Afghan merchants to invest in the commercial and agricultural sectors of their countries, as in Uzbekistan today.
Afghan commercial networks in the post-Soviet space were established by Soviet-sympathising Afghans who studied in Soviet universities, technical institutes and party schools during the 1970s and 1980s. These students engaged in petty trade on the side. They dealt in foreign currency and clandestinely sold Indian-made cloth and jeans from Hong Kong to Soviet citizens. On home visits to Afghanistan, they transported air conditioning units made in Azerbaijan as well as Russian-made tea pots. Such goods also found their way to Pakistan along established smuggling networks. The trading activities of these Afghan students built on a deep knowledge of the historical trade in Muslim Central Asia and Eurasia. Various Afghan networks — including those made up of Sikhs and Hindus — had been active in the trade between British India and Central Asia/the Russian Empire, stretching as far as the city of Murmansk, close to the Arctic Circle.[2]
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Afghan traders helped to ensure that the populations of the Soviet Union’s successor states received basic foodstuffs. They re-exported to Central Asia foodstuffs imported from Iran and Pakistan. In the same years, they also cornered the wholesale market in Chinese commodities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Doing so involved establishing trade routes between China and the post-Soviet states, interacting with officials and negotiating market access with other influential trading communities.
Many of the Afghans who moved to the former Soviet space after the 2001 US-led invasion of the country and officially registered themselves as refugees found informal employment in the region’s “container markets” as “sellers” for the established Afghan merchants. Such activities continue to be important for the region’s economies today, although in some settings new legislation has curtailed the scope of Afghan businesses.
After the Eurasian Customs Union was launched in 2015, Afghans began shipping goods to Russia and Belarus using Kazakhstan’s port and rail network. They are now diversifying their range of activities: supplying raw material (such as Russian wood) to Afghanistan and investing in China’s café culture in the city of Yiwu.
Afghan merchants operating in this expansive context communicate with one another in Farsi and Pashto. But they are always fluent in both Central Asia’s Turkic and Persian languages, as well as Russian and often also Mandarin or Cantonese. Their skills in informal diplomacy have occasionally been latched upon by authorities in the countries where they work. An Afghan trader in Ukraine was said to have helped in August 2015 to secure the release of a Ukrainian citizen captured by the Taliban. In Yiwu a trader from Afghanistan was elected as representative of the city’s 13,000 or so foreign traders. He is now a regular feature at official meetings organised by the city’s municipal government and widely featured on Chinese television.
For such networks to function, merchants cultivate and sustain close relationships with regional officials. Such relationships help to insulate traders at times of political sensitivity. As a trader remarked during a conversation with me in Yiwu in January 2018, “We Afghans have lots of experience of states grabbing our money. That’s why the only people who invest in China are those who know officials in high places who are ready to inform them of new policies coming our way.”
Although the Central Asian states frequently depict Afghans as terrorists or criminals, the region’s public widely regard them as successful and adaptable traders — “instead of reciting the Qur’an into the ears of new-borns, Afghans drizzle honey and raisins in their mouths to foster a love of money”, a Tajik who works in one of Dushanbe’s universities once remarked to me. Indeed, most Afghan traders in West Asia’s Northern Tier seek actively to reject the association of Afghanistan with radical Islam. They largely lead secular lives in which the shared ideal of “living well” is achieved through the demonstration of commercial success and participation in public forms of entertainment. This personal ethics of the good life is combined with a strong collective and cultural commitment to Afghan national identity. This aspect of the traders’ identity is reinforced by the policies towards migrants in the post-Soviet states: state officials monitor, fashion ties with and channel available support to “migrant communities” through formally established “diaspora associations”.
Afghans in West Asia’s Southern Tier
A second key human-commercial corridor brings to light the activities of traders originally from the border regions of Afghanistan and Central Asia, who currently live and work in two of West Asia’s greatest religious, commercial and political centres: Istanbul and Jeddah. Most of these traders claim descent from families who lived in the Bukharan emirates of Central Asia until they emigrated across the border to Afghanistan in the 1920s against the backdrop of persecution by the Bolsheviks. These Bukharan émigrés lived in Afghanistan until the early 1980s.[3] They were active in the country’s industrial and commercial sectors — especially in the fur and carpet businesses — and also played a leading role in the development of modern industry in the country.[4] Elite Central Asian families became close to Afghanistan’s urban elite and achieved high-level positions in government. Some of these elite families began to leave Afghanistan for Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States after the 1973 coup d’état that resulted in the overthrow of Afghanistan’s monarchy.
After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, thousands of less wealthy émigré families fled to Pakistan, fearing that their lands and capital would be confiscated by the communist regime in Kabul. While community elders supported various anti-Soviet mujahidin organisations, many migrated so that their children could evade conscription into the Soviet army. In Pakistan, they continued to be active in the Central Asian carpet manufacture and trading industry. In the late 1980s, hundreds of these families moved from Pakistan to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where Central Asians had lived in the Bukhariyyah neighbourhood since at least the 1850s and were followed by a later flow of Central Asians in the 1920s.[5]
The Central Asian émigrés who arrived in Jeddah in the 1980s rapidly established themselves there as well as in Mecca and Medina. They initially filled niches in the economy that had been vacated by earlier waves of Central Asian migrants, such as restaurants selling the Saudi “national” dish, ruz al bukhari (bukhari rice). They then became active in the import from Turkey and then China of machine-made prayer carpets and cheap ready-made clothing, both items purchased by hajjis and overseas labourers as gifts to take home.
The kafala system — whereby foreign businesses must be registered in the name of a Saudi sponsor — means that conducting business in Saudi Arabia is inherently risky for foreigners. The most successful of Afghanistan’s Central Asian émigré merchants in Saudi Arabia moved their capital to Turkey. Initially, they bought homes in Istanbul’s Central Asian neighbourhood, Zeytinburnu. Increasingly, they invested in new developments that have sprung up under the regime of President Tayyip Erdoğan. Rising living expenses in Saudi Arabia, partly arising from the “family tax” introduced in 2016, resulted in many Saudi-based Afghans closing their business in the kingdom. Those with sufficient capital secured access to Turkish residency permits and sometimes citizenship.
These merchants regularly emphasise their ties to Turkic communities in Central Asia: doing so legitimises their collective and individual citizenship claims in Turkey. Associations established by Afghans in Istanbul are frequently formulated in relationship to an explicitly ethno-linguistic Turkic identity, most conventionally that of “Afghan Turk”. Many Afghans in Zeytinburnu say, however, that they came to emphasise the Turkic aspects of their identity after moving to Turkey: “Back in Afghanistan we knew we were Uzbek but we only ever spoke Farsi. I learned more Uzbek in Istanbul than in my homeland”, a representative of one such cultural association remarked to me in August 2017.
Afghan traders in West Asia’s Southern Tier are culturally and linguistically versatile. They are at home across the Muslim societies of South and Central Asia, the Hijaz and the Arabian peninsula more generally, as well as Turkey. They speak Arabic, Farsi/Persian, Central Asian Turkic languages and modern Turkish. Those who travel to China for trade also often speak fluent Mandarin and/or Cantonese. Most are fluent in Urdu.
There are, however, some limits to the type of worlds across which they traverse. In contrast to the Afghan networks in West Asia’s Northern Tier, the émigré traders in the Southern Tier often remark that their people chose to live in Saudi Arabia because there are few greater blessings than living close to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. They also say they are most happy in countries where they can “hear the call to prayer”. Indeed, some émigré families that are commercially active in Western Europe often arrange for their elderly parents to live in Zeytinburnu.
There exist two core axes of Afghan mobility in West Asia that are disconnected and characterised by contrasting cultural and political priorities and outlooks. It is increasingly likely, however, that changing political and economic circumstances in West Asia will lead to reconfigurations in the dynamics and geographies of these human-commercial channels. Policy towards foreign traders in Saudi Arabia has already resulted in some of these traders permanently moving to Turkey but also seeking new commercial opportunities in Eurasia (especially in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the latter being a country where ethnically Turkic Afghans benefit from a citizenship policy directed at diasporic Kazakh communities).
In the context of such geopolitical shifts and the effects these are having on the geographical location of traders, commercial networks that were hitherto disconnected in political and geographical terms will gradually fold into one another, regardless of the ideological differences among those who make them up. Afghan traders will be well positioned to act as a driving force behind a form of transregional connectivity that builds off but transcends the geopolitics of West Asia’s Southern and Northern Tiers.
Afghanistan’s foreign relations are constrained today as in the past by the country’s interstitial between multiple geopolitical forces. As an Afghan merchant based in China since 2004 told me in Yiwu in August 2018: “The Chinese offered to build a high-speed rail route that would deliver passengers to Urumqi from Kabul in eight hours. When the Americans heard of the plan they blocked it.” Against this backdrop, the Afghan state stands to learn a great deal about how to manoeuvre in a complex neighbourhood from the forms of everyday diplomacy practised by its traders. These traders’ networks, activities and strategies form a sound basis for a sustainable and grounded vision of regional connectivity.
Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Sussex Asia Centre at the University of Sussex.
[1] See Alan Christelow, Algerians without Borders: the Making of a Global Frontier Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), and Yolacan, Serkan, “Azeri Networks Through Thick and Thin: West Asian Politics from a Diasporic Eye,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, forthcoming.
[2] See for example, Dale, Stephen, Indian Merchants and the Eurasian Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
[3] See for example, Audrey Shalinsky, Long Years of Exile (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1993).
[4] Mohammad Khan Jalallar, Rumi Tomato: Autobiography of an Afghan Minister, ed. Babur Rashidzada (USA: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).
[5] Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage in Mecca (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2015).
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Home Spangdahlem
Staff Sgt. Joe W. McFadden (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Joe W. McFadden)
The daughter of U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Michael Rivera Vega, center, a noncommissioned officer in charge of medical logistics with the 52nd Medical Support Squadron, learns tricks from players with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team during an exhibition game in the Skelton Memorial Fitness Center at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, Dec. 4, 2013. More than 1,000 Airmen and their families attended the event which was part of an international tour that visited 12 overseas military installations. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Joe W. McFadden/Released)
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education. digital futures. change
Britain is now one of the most unequal countries in the developing world and the gap between rich and poor continues to increase. In his recent Salford Lecture Alan Milburn, Chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, set out five policy levers to reverse this trend. Several of his proposals require action by universities. What, then, should we be doing?
Firstly, its important to understand the key issues, stripped of Westminster rhetoric. The Social Mobility Commission has made a significant contribution to synthesising this evidence. For universities, the key indicators are inter-generational; we are the gatekeepers for the professions and a wide range of high-value jobs, and who we let in – and keep out – has a significant effect on access to opportunity. In Britain, only one in eight children from low income families achieves a high income as an adult; a much higher inter-generational replication of circumstances than countries such as Finland, Australia and Canada.
Looked at from another angle, the Commission found that more than 50% of those in elite professional positions – judges, senior military officers, senior public servants and diplomats, members of the House of Lords – attended independent schools, in comparison with 7% of the population as a whole. As Milburn put it in his presentation, “few people believe that the sum total of talent in Britain resides in just seven per cent of pupils in our country’s schools – or for that matter less than one per cent of students in our universities. The institutions that matter appear to be a cosy club. The data is so stark, the story so consistent, that is hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain is deeply elitist”.
This is why fair access –widening participation – continues to be so important. At our university 43% of our entering students come from working-class backgrounds and 22% live in disadvantaged areas. One in ten of our students was eligible for free school meals at the time of taking GCSE exams. Enabling social mobility in this way is a core part of our mission and our planning for the future, and must remain so.
Secondly – and this is a key insight from Alan Milburn’s work – the nature of inequality is changing.
All current polices for widening participation are based on the notion of a “poverty line”. There’s a significant literature on whether this should be an absolute or a relative measure and on how it should be set. But whether the $2-a-day benchmark for absolute poverty applied across Asia and Africa, or the eligibility criteria for free school meals that is extensively used as a proxy for relative poverty in Britain, these are thresholds, and if families are above the threshold then they are not considered poor.
Of course, providing the opportunity of breaking through the threshold of absolute or relative poverty remains essential. But the Commission’s work has shown that, now, the nature and extent of inequality in Britain is significantly affecting families in work and with incomes above the poverty line:
“Although entrenched poverty has to be a priority – and requires a specific approach – transient poverty, growing insecurity and stalling mobility are far more widespread than politicians, employers and educators have so far recognised. Too often – in political discourse and media coverage – these issues are treated as marginal when in fact they are mainstream. Poverty touches almost half of Britain’s citizens at some point over a nine-year period and one third over four years. The nature of poverty has changed. When Labour came to office in 1997, less than half of the children growing up in poverty lived in a household where one adult worked. Today by contrast child poverty is overwhelmingly a problem facing working families, not the workless or the work-shy. Two-thirds of Britain’s poor children are now in households where an adult works. In almost three-quarters of those households someone already works full-time. The principal problem seems to be that those working parents simply do not earn enough to escape poverty”.
Again, there are specific implications for universities. One of the consequences of the new student fee regime that was introduced in 2011 has been a sharp decline in access by part-time students, who are invariably older and who need either to re-qualify because they have been cut out of the labour market by shifts in the structure of the economy, or because they did not have the opportunity for further study after leaving school. Today, it is close to impossible for many older students to fund their continuing education.
This autumn, more students may be starting at British universities than ever before. But this is a world for 18-year-olds. Many talented but older people will remain trapped in low-value employment, at or below the minimum wage, or in zero hours contracts and part-time positions, particularly in the new and expanding service industries. It is a significant shortcoming in current student funding policies that older, part-time students are now largely excluded from educational opportunities. In turn, this omission will depress Britain’s economic competitiveness in developing a skilled workforce.
What should we be doing? We have little direct influence over national higher education policy, which is why its important for us to continue to make the argument in partnership with other universities, and to support work by organizations such as the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. But we are able to work with others across Manchester and the Northwest in ensuring that pathways into education are aligned with the imperatives of social mobility. This is why our developing partnerships with Further Education Colleges are so important, ensuring that people can get access to flexible opportunities that recognize their aptitude and potential and counter the pervasive elitism of British society.
Beyond this, we need to look far more closely at our curricula, at what we recognize as knowledge and why, at how we enhance learning, and at how we enable part-time and “interrupted” learning. I’ve found that, across our university, people are full of ideas about these things; hopefully, policy advocacy by Alan Milburn and others will help put in place the policy and funding frameworks that will make the realization of these ideas a practical possibility.
Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reports are available here.
October 6, 2014 martinjohnhall21 Leave a comment
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Opinion: School funding workgroup is stacked against counties
By Bill Valentine, Allegany County | July 7, 2019
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Funding Formula Workgroup, has now been created to make recommendations for the distribution of funds by local school districts and between state and local governments. This workgroup will also make recommendations for specific funding formulas. I am greatly troubled by the make-up of the workgroup, which has only two members to represent interests of the county governments that pay the local costs of schools.
Opinion: Smaller class sizes allow teachers to connect with students and achieve more
Fighting with legislature over Maryland’s future a priority for Hogan’s second term
Opinion: If you value educators, pay them fairly
$725 million in new Kirwan school funding passes Senate, House committees
Big jump in school construction funding stalled in Senate
Time is ticking down on the largest school construction bill in Maryland history.With just five days until the end of the General Assembly session April 8, the Senate has yet to pass HB727, dubbed the Build to Learn Act, which would provide an additional $2.2 billion for school construction, divvying up the bulk of the funding to the state’s largest counties.
Senators want to double number of ‘green’ schools
Currently, 27% of the state’s schools carry the green school certification. A bill before the General Assembly would seek to increase that number to 50%.
State universities lax in charging out-of-state tuition, auditors find
In the college application process, one little box is worth thousands of dollars: the one linked to in-state tuition. Checking that box for the University of Maryland College Park, for example, saves you $24,600 — the difference between paying in-state tuition of $8,651 for the current academic year versus $33,272 for out-of-state students. Some students, however, may be getting an in-state tuition break who shouldn’t be.
School standardized tests to get shorter next year
Here’s some good news for Maryland’s public school students – the state Department of Education plans to cut the time they spend taking standardized tests. The new Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) is being developed to replace the PARCC exams that have been used for the past four years to measure progress in areas such as language arts, math, science and social studies.
Opinion: Kirwan Commission disregards achievements of charter schools
As we begin national School Choice Week, here’s an open letter to Brit Kirwan, chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, which completed its preliminary report on Friday with no mention of charter schools.
Legislative leaders shelve new school funding another year
The most expensive and most controversial issue facing the new legislature — increasing the formulas for school funding — has been shelved for another year.
The House speaker and Senate president told the Kirwan Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education in a letter that there was not enough time for the legislature to take up both its policy changes and its funding decisions in the 90-day session that starts in three weeks.
Kirwan Commission to recommend billions more to raise teacher pay
The commission will be proposing a major bump in teach pay, raising pay for all Maryland public school teachers by 10% between 2020 and 2022, with a minimum teacher salary of $60,000 phased-in by 2024. The commission is also proposing a new career ladder for teachers and additional certifications for teachers under the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. This will raise average teacher pay in Maryland from the current $69,557 to $93,137 by 2029. In the final year of phase-in, the additional state spending is $1.3 billion, according to preliminary costs estimates by the Department of Legislative Services.
Kirwan recommendations will fail if same mistakes are made as with Thornton, consultant says
Thornton failed to deliver the improvement in student performance that its authors envisioned because no one was held accountable, says consultant Marc Tucker. Maryland now ends up with one of the most expensive state systems in the United States but only average student performance. Kirwan will not succeed and be any better than its predecessor unless there is a strong oversight body to make sure it will succeed.
Campaigns debate school funding, but Kirwan education commission provides no guidance
How much it will cost to expand pre-Kindergarten to most 3- and 4-year-olds in Maryland or to substantially raise teacher salaries have become heated arguments in the race for governor. But the state Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education that is supposed to be determining the price tags for these and other big public school changes appears to be months away from decisions on revising funding formulas that was the basic charge of the commission.
New polls support more pre-k, need for higher teacher pay
The Kirwan education commission Thursday morning is set to take up the final detailed recommendations for much more pre-Kindergarten in Maryland and higher salaries and a new career ladder for teachers — both programs with “significant fiscal impact.” Two new polls out this week seek to bolster the argument that spending more money on these recommendations has broad support and is needed.
State Roundup, July 17, 2019
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Laos Travel Culture and more
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Life With The H’mong In Remote Northern Vietnam by Peter
ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ
Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao
Flag Emblem
Motto: ສັນຕິພາບ ເອກະລາດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ເອກະພາບ ວັດທະນາຖາວອນ
“Peace, independence, democracy, unity and prosperity”
Location of Laos (green)in ASEAN (dark grey) – ]
and largest city Vientiane
17°58′N 102°36′E
Recognised national languages French
Laos (( i/ˈlaʊs/, /ˈlɑː.ɒs/, /ˈlɑː.oʊs/, or /ˈleɪ.ɒs/) Lao Language: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ, pronounced [sǎː.tʰáː.laʔ.naʔ.lat páʔ.sáː.tʰiʔ.páʔ.tàj páʔ.sáː.són.láːw] Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao), (French:République démocratique populaire lao), officially the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and People’s Republic of China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east,Cambodia to the south, and Thailand to the west. Its population was estimated to be around 6.5 million in 2012.
A third of the population of Laos live below the international poverty line which means living on less than US$1.25 per day. Laos is a low income economy, with one of the lowest annual incomes in the world. In 2013, Laos ranked the 138th place (tied with Cambodia) on the Human Development Index (HDI), indicating that Laos currently only has lower medium to low development. According to the Global Hunger Index, Laos currently ranks as the 25th hungriest nation in the world out of the list of the 56 nations with the worst hunger situation(s) in the world. Laos has had a poor human rights record most particularly dealing with the nation’s acts of genocide being committed towards its Hmong population.
Laos traces its history to the kingdom of Lan Xang, which existed from the 14th to the 18th century when it split into three separate kingdoms. In 1893, it became a French protectorate, with the three kingdoms, Luang Phrabang, Vientiane and Champasak, uniting to form what is now known as Laos. It briefly gained independence in 1945 after Japanese occupation, but returned to French rule until it was granted autonomy in 1949. Laos became independent in 1953, with a constitutional monarchy under Sisavang Vong. Shortly after independence, a long civil war ended the monarchy, when the Communist Pathet Lao movement came to power in 1975.
Laos is a single-party socialist republic. It espouses Marxism and is governed by a single party communist politburo dominated by military generals. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Vietnam People’s Army continue to have significant influence in Laos. The capital city is Vientiane. Other large cities include Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Pakse. The official language is Lao. Laos is a multi-ethnic country with the politically and culturally dominant Lao people making up approximately 60% of the population, mostly in the lowlands. Various Mon-Khmer groups, the Hmong, and other indigenous hill tribes, accounting for 40% of the population, live in the foothills and mountains. Laos’ strategy for development is based on generating electricity from its rivers and selling the power to its neighbours, namely Thailand, China, and Vietnam. Its economy is accelerating rapidly with the demands for its metals.
It is a member of the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), East Asia Summit and La Francophonie. Laos applied for membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1997, and on 2 February 2013, it was granted full membership.
In the Lao language, the country’s name is “Muang Lao” (ເມືອງລາວ) or “Pathet Lao” (ປະເທດລາວ), both of which literally mean “Lao Country”. The French, who united the three separate Lao kingdoms in French Indochina in 1893, named the country as the plural of the dominant and most common ethnic group (in French, the final “s” at the end of a word is usually silent, thus it would also be pronounced “Lao”).
In 2009 an ancient human skull was recovered from the Tam Pa Ling cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos; the skull is at least 46,000 years old, making it the oldest modern human fossil found to date in Southeast Asia. Archaeological evidence suggests agriculturist society developed during the 4th millennium BC. Burial jars and other kinds of sepulchers suggest a complex society in which bronze objects appeared around 1500 BC, and iron tools were known from 700 BC. The proto-historic period is characterised by contact with Chinese and Indian civilisations. From the fourth to the eighth century, communities along the Mekong River began to form into townships called muang.
Lan Xang
Pha That Luang in Vientiane is the national symbol of Laos.
Statue of Fa Ngum, founder of theLan Xang kingdom
Laos traces its history to the kingdom of Lan Xang (Million Elephants), founded in the 14th century, by a Lao prince Fa Ngum, who with 10,000 Khmer troops, took over Vientiane. Ngum was descended from a long line of Lao kings, tracing back to Khoun Boulom. He made Theravada Buddhism the state religion and Lan Xang prospered. Within 20 years of its formation, the kingdom expanded eastward to Champa and along the Annamite mountains in Vietnam. His ministers, unable to tolerate his ruthlessness, forced him into exile to the present-day Thai province of Nan in 1373, where he died. Fa Ngum’s eldest son, Oun Heuan, came to the throne under the nameSamsenthai and reigned for 43 years. During his reign, Lan Xang became an important trade centre. After his death in 1421, Lan Xang collapsed into warring factions for the next 100 years.
In 1520, Photisarath came to the throne and moved the capital from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to avoid a Burmese invasion. Setthathirat became king in 1548, after his father was killed, and ordered the construction of what would become the symbol of Laos, That Luang. Setthathirat disappeared in the mountains on his way back from a military expedition into Cambodia and Lan Xang began to rapidly decline. It was not until 1637, when Sourigna Vongsa ascended the throne, that Lan Xang would further expand its frontiers. His reign is often regarded as Laos’s golden age. When he died, leaving Lan Xang without an heir, the kingdom divided into three principalities. Between 1763 and 1769, Burmese armies overran northern Laos and annexed Luang Phrabang, while Champasak eventually came under Siamese suzerainty.
Chao Anouvong was installed as a vassal king of Vientiane by the Siamese. He encouraged a renaissance of Lao fine arts and literature and improved relations with Luang Phrabang. Under Vietnamese pressure, he rebelled against the Siamese. The rebellion failed and Vientiane was ransacked. Anouvong was taken to Bangkok as a prisoner, where he died.
A Siamese military campaign in Laos in 1876 was described by a British observer as having been “transformed into slave-hunting raids on a large scale”.
French Laos
Protectorat français du Laos
Monarchy, Protectorate of France, constituent of French Indochina
← ← ← 1893–1953 →
Flag Royal Arms
Capital Vientiane (official),Luang Prabang(ceremonial)
Languages French (official), Lao
Religion Theravada Buddhism,Roman Catholicism
Political structure Monarchy,Protectorate of France, constituent of French Indochina
– 1868-1895 Oun Kham (first)
– 1904-1954 Sisavang Vong (last)
Historical era New Imperialism
– Protectorate established 1893
– Kingdom of Laosproclaimed 11 May 1947
– Independence 9 November 1953
– Geneva Conference 21 July 1954
In the late 19th century, Luang Prabang was ransacked by the Chinese Black Flag Army. France rescued King Oun Kham and added Luang Phrabang to the ‘Protectorate’ of French Indochina. Shortly after, the Kingdom of Champasak and the territory of Vientiane were also added to the protectorate. King Sisavang Vong of Luang Phrabang became ruler of a unified Laos and Vientiane once again became the capital. Laos never had any importance for France other than as a buffer state between British-influenced Thailand and the more economically important Annam and Tonkin. During their rule, the French introduced the corvee, a system that forced every male Lao to contribute 10 days of manual labour per year to the colonial government. Laos produced tin, rubber, and coffee, but never accounted for more than 1% of French Indochina’s exports. By 1940, around 600 French citizens lived in Laos. Most of the French who came to Laos as officials, settlers or missionaries developed a strong affection for the country and its people, and many devoted decades to what they saw as bettering the lives of the Lao. Some took Lao wives, learned the language, became Buddhists and “went native” – something more acceptable in the French Empire than in the British. With the racial attitudes typical of Europeans at this time, however, they tended to classify the Lao as gentle, amiable, childlike, naive and lazy, regarding them with what one writer called “a mixture of affection and exasperation.”
Prince Phetsarath declared Laos’ independence on 12 October 1945, but the French under Charles de Gaulle re-asserted control. In 1950 Laos was granted semi-autonomy as an “associated state” within the French Union. France remained in de facto control until 22 October 1953, when Laos gained full independence as a constitutional monarchy.
King Sisavang Vong of Laos
Pathet Lao soldiers in Vientiane, 1972
In 1955, the US Department of Defense created a special Programs Evaluation Office to replace French support of the Royal Lao Army against the communist Pathet Lao as part of the UScontainment policy.
In 1960, amidst a series of rebellions, fighting broke out between the Royal Lao Army and the Pathet Lao. A second Provisional Government of National Unity formed by Prince Souvanna Phouma in 1962 proved to be unsuccessful, and the situation steadily deteriorated into large scale civil war between the Royal Laotian government and the Pathet Lao. The Pathet Lao were backed militarily by the NVA and Vietcong.
Laos was also dragged into the Vietnam War since parts of Laos were invaded and occupied by North Vietnam for use as a supply route for its war against the South. In response, the United States initiated a bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese positions, supported regular and irregular anticommunist forces in Laos and supported South Vietnamese incursions into Laos.
In 1968 the North Vietnamese Army launched a multi-division attack to help the Pathet Lao to fight the Royal Lao Army. The attack resulted in the army largely demobilising, leaving the conflict to irregular forces raised by the United States and Thailand.
Massive aerial bombardment against Pathet Lao and invading NVA communist forces was carried out by the United States to prevent the collapse of Laos’ central government, the Royal Kingdom of Laos, and to prevent the use of theHo Chi Minh Trail to attack US forces in South Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam. As of 2008, Laos is the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in the world. An average of one B-52 bomb-load was dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973.[25] Due to the particularly heavily impact of cluster bombs during this war, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the weapons and assist victims, and hosted the First Meeting of States Parties to the convention in November 2010.[26]
In 1975 the Pathet Lao, along with the Vietnam People’s Army and backed by the Soviet Union, overthrew the royalist Lao government, forcing King Savang Vatthana to abdicate on 2 December 1975. He later died in captivity. Between 20,000 and 70,000 Laotians died during the Civil War.[27][28][29][30]
On 2 December 1975, after taking control of the country, the Pathet Lao government under Kaysone Phomvihane renamed the country as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and signed agreements giving Vietnam the right to station armed forces and to appoint advisers to assist in overseeing the country. Laos was requested in 1979 by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to end relations with the People’s Republic of China, leading to isolation in trade by China, the United States, and other countries.
The conflict between Hmong rebels and the Vietnam People’s Army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), as well as the SRV-backed Pathet Lao continued in various pockets in key areas of Laos, including in Saysaboune Closed Military Zone, Xaisamboune Closed Military Zone near Vientiane Province and Xieng Khouang Province. The government of Laos has been accused of committing genocide, human rights and religious freedom violations against the Hmong in collaboration with the Vietnamese army, with up to 100,000 killed out of a population of 400,000. From 1975 to 1996, the United States resettled some 250,000 Lao refugees from Thailand, including 130,000 Hmong.
Mekong River flowing throughLuang Prabang
Rice fields in Laos
Laos is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, and it lies mostly between latitudes 14° and 23°N (a small area is south of 14°), and longitudes 100° and 108°E. Its thickly forested landscape consists mostly of rugged mountains, the highest of which is Phou Bia at 2,818 metres (9,245 ft), with some plains and plateaus. The Mekong River forms a large part of the western boundary with Thailand, whereas the mountains of the Annamite Range form most of the eastern border with Vietnam and the Luang Prabang Range the northwestern border with the Thai highlands. There are two plateaux, the Xiangkhoang in the north and the Bolaven Plateau at the southern end. The climate is tropical and influenced by the monsoon pattern.
There is a distinct rainy season from May to November, followed by a dry season from December to April. Local tradition holds that there are three seasons (rainy, cold and hot) as the latter two months of the climatologically defined dry season are noticeably hotter than the earlier four months. The capital and largest city of Laos is Vientiane and other major cities include Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Pakse.[citation needed]
In 1993 the Laos government set aside 21% of the nation’s land area for habitat conservation preservation. The country is one of four in the opium poppy growing region known as the “Golden Triangle”. According to the October 2007 UNODC fact book Opium Poppy Cultivation in South East Asia, the poppy cultivation area was 15 square kilometres (5.8 sq mi), down from 18 square kilometres (6.9 sq mi) in 2006.
Laos can be considered to consist of three geographical areas: north, central, and south.
A clickable map of Laos exhibiting its provinces and prefecture.
Laos is increasingly suffering from environmental problems, with deforestation a particularly significant issue, as expanding commercial exploitation of the forests, plans for additional hydroelectric facilities, foreign demand for wild animals and nonwood forest products for food and traditional medicines, and a growing population all create increasing pressure.
The United Nations Development Programme warns that: “Protecting the environment and sustainable use of natural resources in Lao PDR is vital for poverty reduction and economic growth.”
In April 2011, The Independent newspaper reported that Laos had started work on the controversial Xayaburi Dam on the Mekong River without getting formal approval. Environmentalists say the dam will adversely affect 60 million people and Cambodia and Vietnam—concerned about the flow of water further downstream—are officially opposed to the project. The Mekong River Commission, a regional intergovernmental body designed to promote the “sustainable management” of the river, famed for its giant catfish, carried out a study that warned if Xayaburi and subsequent schemes went ahead, it would “fundamentally undermine the abundance, productivity and diversity of the Mekong fish resources”. Neighbouring Vietnam warned that the dam would harm the Mekong Delta, which is the home to nearly 20 million people and supplies around 50% of Vietnam’s rice output and over 70% of both its seafood and fruit outputs
Milton Osborne, Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy who has written widely on the Mekong, warns: “The future scenario is of the Mekong ceasing to be a bounteous source of fish and guarantor of agricultural richness, with the great river below China becoming little more than a series of unproductive lakes.”
Illegal logging is also a major problem. Environmental groups estimate that 500,000 cubic metres (18,000,000 cu ft) of logs find their way from Laos to Vietnam every year, with most of the furniture eventually exported to western countries.
A 1992 government survey indicated that forests occupied about 48% of Laos’ land area. Forest coverage decreased to 41% in a 2002 survey. Lao authorities have said that, in reality, forest coverage might be no more than 35% because of various development projects such as dams, on top of the losses to illegal logging.
Thongsing Thammavong
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, along with China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam is one of the world’s five remaining socialist states. The only legal political party is the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). The head of state is President Choummaly Sayasone, who is also the General Secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. The head of government is Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong, who is also a senior member of the Politburo. Government policies are determined by the party through the all-powerful eleven-member Politburo of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and the 61-member Central Committee of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. Important government decisions are vetted by the Council of Ministers. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam maintains significant influence over the Politburo of Laos and the one-party communist state apparatus and military.
Laos’s first, French-written and monarchical constitution was promulgated on 11 May 1947, and declared Laos to be an independent state within the French Union. The revised constitution of 11 May 1957 omitted reference to the French Union, though close educational, health and technical ties with the former colonial power persisted. The 1957 document was abrogated on 3 December 1975, when a communist People’s Republic was proclaimed. A new constitution was adopted in 1991 and enshrined a “leading role” for the LPRP. In 1990, deputy minister for science & technology Thongsouk Saysangkhi resigned from the government and party, calling for political reform. He died in captivity in 1998.
In 1992 elections were held for a new 85-seat National Assembly with members, nominated by the one-party communist government, elected by secret ballot to five-year terms. The elections were widely disputed and questioned by Lao and Hmong opposition and dissident groups abroad and in Laos and Thailand. This National Assembly, which essentially acts as a rubber stamp for the LPRP, approves all new laws, although the executive branch retains authority to issue binding decrees. The most recent elections took place in April 2011. The assembly was expanded to 99 members in 1997, to 115 members in 2006 and finally to 132 members during the 2011 elections.
Hmong conflict
The government of Laos has been accused of committing human rights violations and genocide against that country’s Hmong ethnic minority.
Some Hmong groups fought as CIA-backed units on the Royalist side in the Laos civil war. After the Pathet Lao took over the country in 1975, the conflict continued in isolated pockets. In 1977, a communist newspaper promised the party would hunt down the “American collaborators” and their families “to the last root”.
As many as 200,000 Hmong went into exile in Thailand, with many ending up in the USA. A number of Hmong fighters hid out in mountains in Xiangkhouang Province for many years, with a remnant emerging from the jungle in 2003
In 1989, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with the support of the United States government, instituted the Comprehensive Plan of Action, a programme to stem the tide of Indochinese refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Under the plan, the status of the refugees was to be evaluated through a screening process. Recognized asylum seekers were to be given resettlement opportunities, while the remaining refugees were to be repatriated under guarantee of safety.
Hmong girls in Laos in 1973
After talks with the UNHCR and the Thai government, Laos agreed to repatriate the 60,000 Lao refugees living in Thailand, including several thousand Hmong people. Very few of the Lao refugees, however, were willing to return voluntarily. Pressure to resettle the refugees grew as the Thai government worked to close its remaining refugee camps. While some Hmong people returned to Laos voluntarily, with development assistance from UNHCR, allegations of forced repatriation surfaced. Of those Hmong who did return to Laos, some quickly escaped back to Thailand, describing discrimination and brutal treatment at the hands of Lao authorities.
In 1993, Vue Mai, a former Hmong soldier who had been recruited by the US Embassy in Bangkok to return to Laos as proof of the repatriation programme’s success, disappeared in Vientiane. According to the US Committee for Refugees, he was arrested by Lao security forces and was never seen again.
Following the Vue Mai incident, debate over the Hmong’s planned repatriation to Laos intensified greatly, especially in the United States, where it drew strong opposition from many American conservatives and some human rightsadvocates. In a 23 October 1995 National Review article, Michael Johns, the former Heritage Foundation foreign policy expert and Republican White House aide, labelled the Hmong’s repatriation a Clinton administration “betrayal”, describing the Hmong as a people “who have spilled their blood in defense of American geopolitical interests.” Debate on the issue escalated quickly. In an effort to halt the planned repatriation, the Republican-led US Senate andHouse of Representatives both appropriated funds for the remaining Thailand-based Hmong to be immediately resettled in the United States; Clinton, however, responded by promising a veto of the legislation.
In their opposition of the repatriation plans, both Democrat and Republican Members of Congress also challenged the Clinton administration’s position that the government of Laos was not systematically violating Hmong human rights. US Representative Steve Gunderson (R-WI), for instance, told a Hmong gathering: “I do not enjoy standing up and saying to my government that you are not telling the truth, but if that is necessary to defend truth and justice, I will do that.” Republicans also called several Congressional hearings on alleged persecution of the Hmong in Laos in an apparent attempt to generate further support for their opposition to the Hmong’s repatriation to Laos. Democratic Congressman Bruce Vento, Senator Paul Wellstone, Dana Rohrabacher and others also raised concerns.
Although some accusations of forced repatriation were denied, thousands of Hmong people refused to return to Laos. In 1996 as the deadline for the closure of Thai refugee camps approached, and under mounting political pressure, the United States agreed to resettle Hmong refugees who passed a new screening process Around 5,000 Hmong people who were not resettled at the time of the camp closures sought asylum at Wat Tham Krabok, a Buddhist monastery in central Thailand where more than 10,000 Hmong refugees had already been living. The Thai government attempted to repatriate these refugees, but the Wat Tham Krabok Hmong refused to leave and the Lao government refused to accept them, claiming they were involved in the illegal drug trade and were of non-Lao origin.
Following threats of forcible removal by the Thai government, the United States, in a significant victory for the Hmong, agreed to accept 15,000 of the refugees in 2003. Several thousand Hmong people, fearing forced repatriation to Laos if they were not accepted for resettlement in the United States, fled the camp to live elsewhere within Thailand where a sizeable Hmong population has been present since the 19th century.
In 2004 and 2005, thousands of Hmong fled from the jungles of Laos to a temporary refugee camp in the Thai province of Phetchabun. These Hmong refugees, many of whom are descendants of the former-CIA Secret Army and their relatives, claim that they have been attacked by both the Lao and Vietnamese military forces operating inside Laos as recently as June 2006. The refugees claim that attacks against them have continued almost unabated since the war officially ended in 1975, and have become more intense in recent years.
Lending further support to earlier claims that the government of Laos was persecuting the Hmong, filmmaker Rebecca Sommer documented first-hand accounts in her documentary, Hunted Like Animals, and in a comprehensive report which includes summaries of claims made by the refugees and was submitted to the UN in May 2006.
The European Union, UNHCHR, and international groups have since spoken out about the forced repatriation. The Thai foreign ministry has said that it will halt deportation of Hmong refugees held in Detention Centres Nong Khai, while talks are underway to resettle them in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States
For the time being, countries willing to resettle the refugees are hindered to proceed with immigration and settlement procedures because the Thai administration does not grant them access to the refugees. Plans to resettle additional Hmong refugees in the United States have been complicated by provisions of President George W. Bush’s Patriot Act and Real ID Act, under which Hmong veterans of the Secret War, who fought on the side of the United States, are classified as terrorists because of their historical involvement in armed conflict.
On 27 December 2009, the New York Times reported that the Thai military was preparing to forcibly return 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers to Laos by the end of the year: the BBC later reported that repatriations had started. Both United States and United Nations officials have protested this action. Outside government representatives have not been allowed to interview this group over the last three years. Médecins Sans Frontières has refused to assist the Hmong refugees because of what they have called “increasingly restrictive measures” taken by the Thai military. The Thai military jammed all cellular phone reception and disallowed any foreign journalists from the Hmong camps.
The Constitution that was promulgated in 1991 and amended in 2003 contains most key safeguards for human rights. For example, Article 8 makes it clear that Laos is a multiethnic state and is committed to equality between ethnic groups. The Constitution also has provisions for gender equality and freedom of religion, for freedom of speech, press and assembly. On 25 September 2009, Laos ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, nine years after signing the treaty. The stated policy objectives of both the Lao government and international donors remain focused toward achieving sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. The government of Laos, however, frequently does not abide by its own constitution and the rule of law, since the judiciary and judges are appointed by the communist party in Laos, and there is no independent judicial branch. Human rights violations remain serious according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Centre for Public Policy Analysis and other independent human rights organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
However, Amnesty International has raised concerns about the ratification record of the Laos Government on human rights standards and its lack of co-operation with the UN human rights mechanisms and legislative measures which impact negatively on human rights. It has also raised concerns in relation to freedom of expression, poor prison conditions, restrictions on freedom of religions, protection of refugees and asylum-seekers and the death penalty.
In October 1999, 30 young people were arrested for attempting to display posters calling for peaceful economic, political and social change in Laos. Five of them were arrested and subsequently sentenced to up to 10 years imprisonment on charges of treason. One has since died due to his treatment by prison guards, while one has been released. The surviving three men should have been released by October 2009, but their whereabouts remains unknown.
Laos and Vietnamese (SRV) troops were reported to have raped and killed four Christian Hmong women in Xieng Khouang province in 2011, according to the US and Southeast-based non-governmental public policy research organisation The Centre for Public Policy Analysis. CPPA also said other Christian and independent Buddhist and animist believers were being persecuted
The Centre for Public Policy Analysis, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Lao Veterans of America, Inc. and other non-governmental organisations (NGO)s have reported egregious human rights violations, religious persecution, the arrest and imprisonment of political and religious dissidents as well as extrajudicial killings, in Laos by government military and security forces. Human rights advocates including Vang Pobzeb, Kerry and Kay Danes and others have also raised concerns about human rights violations, torture, the arrest and detention of political prisoners as well as the detention of foreign prisoners in Laos including at the infamous Phonthong Prison in Vientiane. Concerns have also been raised about the high-profile abduction of Laotian civic activist Sombath Somphone in Laos by Lao security forces and police in December 2012.
About 80% of Laos population practices subsistence agriculture.
The Lao economy depends heavily on investment and trade with its neighbours, Thailand, Vietnam, and, especially in the north, China. Pakxe has also experienced growth based on cross-border trade with Thailand and Vietnam. In 2009, despite the fact that the government is still officially communist, the Obama administration in the US declared Laos was no longer a Marxist–Leninist state and lifted bans on Laotian companies receiving financing from the US Export Import Bank. In 2011, the Lao Securities Exchange began trading. In 2012, the government initiated the creation of the Laos Trade Portal, a website incorporating all information traders need to import and export goods into the country.
Subsistence agriculture still accounts for half of the GDP and provides 80% of employment. Only 4.01% of the country is arable land, and a mere 0.34% used as permanent crop land the lowest percentage in the Greater Mekong Subregion Rice dominates agriculture, with about 80% of the arable land area used for growing rice. Approximately 77% of Lao farm households are self-sufficient in rice.
Through the development, release and widespread adoption of improved rice varieties, and through economic reforms, production has increased by an annual rate of 5% between 1990 and 2005, and Lao PDR achieved a net balance of rice imports and exports for the first time in 1999. Lao PDR may have the greatest number of rice varieties in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Since 1995 the Lao government has been working with the International Rice Research Institute of the Philippines to collect seed samples of each of the thousands of rice varieties found in Laos.
Morning market in Vientiane
The economy receives development aid from the IMF, ADB, and other international sources; and also foreign direct investment for development of the society, industry, hydropower and mining (most notably of copper and gold). Tourism is the fastest-growing industry in the country. Economic development in Laos has been hampered by brain drain, with a skilled emigration rate of 37.4% in 2000.
Laos is rich in mineral resources and imports petroleum and gas. Metallurgy is an important industry, and the government hopes to attract foreign investment to develop the substantial deposits of coal, gold, bauxite, tin, copper, and other valuable metals. In addition, the country’s plentiful water resources and mountainous terrain enable it to produce and export large quantities of hydroelectric energy. Of the potential capacity of approximately 18,000 megawatts, around 8,000 megawatts have been committed for exporting to Thailand and Vietnam
The country’s most widely recognised product may well be Beerlao which is exported to a number of countries including neighbours Cambodia and Vietnam. It is produced by the Lao Brewery Company.
View from near the sanctuary on the main upper level of Wat Phu, looking back towards the Mekong River
The tourism sector has grown rapidly, from 80,000 international visitors in 1990, to 1.876 million in 2010. Tourism is expected to contribute US$679.1 million to gross national product in 2010, rising to US$1.5857 billion by 2020. In 2010, one in every 10.9 jobs was in the tourism sector. Export earnings from international visitors and tourism goods are expected to generate 15.5% of total exports or US$270.3 million in 2010, growing in nominal terms to US$484.2 million (12.5% of total) in 2020.
Hmong girls on the Plain of Jars
The official tourism slogan is “Simply Beautiful”. The main attractions for tourists include Buddhist culture and colonial architecture in Luang Prabang; gastronomy and ancient temples in the capital ofVientiane; backpacking in Muang Ngoi Neua and Vang Vieng; ancient and modern culture and history in The Plain of Jars region (main article: Phonsavan); Laos Civil War history in Sam Neua; trekking and visiting hill tribes in a number of areas including Phongsaly and Luang Namtha; spotting tigers and other wildlife in Nam Et-Phou Louey; caves and waterfalls near Thakhek; relaxation, theIrrawaddy dolphin and Khone Phapheng Falls at Si Phan Don or, as they are known in English, the Four Thousand Islands; Wat Phu, an ancient Khmer temple complex; and the Bolaven Plateau for waterfalls and coffee. The European Council on Trade and Tourism awarded the country the “World Best Tourist Destination” designation for 2013 for this combination of architecture and history.
Luang Prabang and Wat Phu are both UNESCO World Heritage sites, with the Plain of Jars expected to join them once more work to clear UXO has been completed. Major festivals include Laos New Year which is celebrated around 13–15 April and involves a water festival similar but more subdued than that of Thailand and other South-East Asian countries.
The Lao National Tourism Administration, related government agencies and the private sector are working together to realise the vision put forth in the country’s National Ecotourism Strategy and Action Plan. This includes decreasing the environmental and cultural impact of tourism; increasing awareness in the importance of ethnic groups and biological diversity; providing a source of income to conserve, sustain and manage the Lao protected area network and cultural heritage sites; and emphasising the need for tourism zoning and management plans for sites that will be developed as ecotourism destinations.
Laos is known for its silk and local handicraft product, both of which are on display in Luang Prabang’s night market, among other places. Another speciality is mulberry tea.
Buddhist monks collecting alms at dawn in Luang Prabang
The term “Laotian” does not necessarily refer to the Lao language, ethnic Lao people, language or customs, but is a political term that also includes the non-ethnic Lao groups within Laos and identifies them as “Laotian” because of their political citizenship. Laos has the youngest population of any country in Asia with a median age of 21.6 years.
Laos’ population was estimated at 6.5 million in 2012, dispersed unevenly across the country. Most people live in valleys of the Mekong River and its tributaries. Vientiane prefecture, the capital and largest city, had about 740,010 residents in 2008. The country’s population density was 27/km2.
The people of Laos are often considered by their altitudinal distribution (lowlands, midlands and upper high lands) as this approximates ethnic groups.
Lao Loum (lowland people)
Lao Theung (midland people)]More than half of the nation’s population, 60%, is ethnic Lao—the principal lowland inhabitants, and the politically and culturally dominant people of Laos. The Lao belong to the Tai linguistic group who began migrating southward from China in the first millennium AD. 10% belong to other “lowland” groups, which together with the Lao people make up the Lao Loum.
A Ho (Hani) woman and her child, Phongsaly Province
In the central and southern mountains, Mon-Khmer tribes, known as Lao Theung or mid-slope Laotians, predominate. Other terms are Khmu, Khamu (Kammu) or Kha as the Lao Loum refer to them as indicating their Austroasiatic origins. However, the latter is considered pejorative, meaning ‘slave’. They were the indigenous inhabitants of northern Laos. Some Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai minorities remain, particularly in the towns, but many left after independence in the late 1940s, many of whom relocated either to Vietnam, Hong Kong, or to France. Lao Theung constitute about 30% of the population.
Lao Soung (highland people)
Hill people and minority cultures of Laos such as the Hmong, Yao (Mien), Dao, Shan, and several Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples have lived in isolated regions of Laos for many years. Mountain/hill tribes of mixed ethno/cultural-linguistic heritage are found in northern Laos which include the Lua and Khmu people who are indigenous to Laos. Today, the Lua people are considered endangered. Collectively, they are known as Lao Soung or highland Laotians. Lao Soung account for only about 10% of the population
Leaders of ethnic minorities in Laos
Ong Keo
Ong Kommadam
Pa Chay Vue
Buddhist Monks in front of Wat Sen, Luang Prabang
Buddhist shrine in Vientiane
The official and dominant language is Lao, a tonal language of the Tai linguistic group. However, only slightly more than half of the population can speak Lao, the remainder speaking various ethnic minority languages, particularly in rural areas. The written language is based on Khmer writing script. Languages like Khmu and Hmong are spoken by minorities, particularly in the midland and highland areas. A number of Laotian sign languages are used in areas with high rates of congenital deafness.
French is still commonly used in government and commerce and over a third of Laos’ students are educated through the medium of French with French being compulsory for all other students. Throughout the country signage is bilingual in Laotian and French, with French being predominant. English, the language of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has become increasingly studied in recent years.
Male life expectancy at birth was at 60.85 and female life expectancy was at 64.76 in 2012. Healthy life expectancy was at 54 in 2007In 2008, 43% of the population did not have access to an improved water resource, by 2010 this had been reduced to 33% of the population Government expenditure on health is at about 4% of the GDP. Its amount was at US$18 (PPP) in 2006.
Of the people of Laos 67% are Theravada Buddhist, 1.5% are Christian, and 31.5% are other or unspecified (mostly practitioners of Satsana Phi) according to the 2005 census. Buddhism has long been one of the most important social forces in Laos. Theravada Buddhism has coexisted peacefully since its introduction to the country with the local polytheism.
The adult literacy rate exceeds two thirds. The male literacy rate exceeds the female literacy rate In 2004 the net primary enrolment rate was at 84%. The National University of Laos is the Laos state’s public university. The total literacy rate is 73% (2010 estimate).
An example of Lao cuisine
Lao women wearing sinhs.
Lao dancers during New Year
Theravada Buddhism is a dominant influence in Lao culture. It is reflected throughout the country from language to the temple and in art, literature, performing arts, etc. Many elements of Lao culture predate Buddhism, however. For example, Laotian music is dominated by its national instrument, the khaen, a type of bamboo pipe that has prehistoric origins. The khaen traditionally accompanied the singer in lam, the dominant style of folk music. Among the variouslam styles, the lam saravane is probably the most popular.
Sticky Rice is a characteristic staple food and has cultural and religious significance to the Lao people. Sticky rice is generally preferred over jasmine rice, and sticky rice cultivation and production is thought to have originated in Laos. There are many traditions and rituals associated with rice production in different environments, and among many ethnic groups. For example, Khammu farmers in Luang Prabang plant the rice variety Khao Kam in small quantities near the hut in memory of dead parents, or at the edge of the rice field to indicate that parents are still alive.[97]
Sinh is a traditional garment worn by Laotian women in daily life. It is a hand-woven silk skirt which can identify the woman who wears it in a variety of ways. In particular, it can indicate which region the wearer is from.
Polygamy is officially a crime in Laos, though the penalty is minor. The constitution and Family Code bars the legal recognition of polygamous marriages, stipulating that monogamy is to be the principal way to contract a marriage in the country. Polygamy, however, is still customary among some Hmong people
All newspapers are published by the government, including two foreign language papers: the English-language daily Vientiane Times and the French-language weekly Le Rénovateur. Additionally, the Khao San Pathet Lao, the country’s official news agency, publishes English and French versions of its eponymous paper. Laos currently has nine daily newspapers, 90 magazines, 43 radio stations, and 32 TV stations operating throughout the country. As of 2011, Nhân Dân (The People) and the Xinhua News Agency are the only foreign media organisations permitted to open offices in Laos—both opened bureaus in Vientiane in 2011.
The Lao government heavily controls all media channels to prevent critique of its actions. Lao citizens who have criticised the government have been subjected to enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and torture.
Internet cafes are now common in the major urban centres and are especially popular with the younger generation.
Since the founding of the Lao PDR only very few films have been made in Laos. One of the first commercial feature length films was Sabaidee Luang Prabang, made in 2008 Australian filmmaker Kim Mordount’s first feature film was made in Laos and features a Laotian cast speaking their native language. Entitled The Rocket, the film appeared at the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and won three awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. Recently a few local production companies have succeeded to produce Lao feature films and gain international recognition. Among them are Lao New Wave Cinema’s At the Horizon, directed by Anysay Keola, that was screened at the OzAsia Film Festival and Lao Art Media’s Chanthaly directed by Mattie Do, which was screened at the 2013 Fantastic Fest.
The largest stadium in Laos, New Laos National Stadium.
The martial art of muay Lao, the national sport,[citation needed] is a form of kickboxing similar to Thailand’s muay Thai, Burmese Lethwei, Malaysian Tomoi, and Cambodian Pradal Serey.
Association football has grown to be the most popular sport in Laos. The Lao League is now the top professional league for association football clubs in the country. Since the start of the League, Lao Army FC has been the most successful club with 8 titles, the highest number of championship wins.
Buddha Shrine Promthep Cape photo for Wed by jackie
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https://moviemeter.in/login/?action=logout&redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Fmoviemeter.in%2F&_wpnonce=98a113ec35
Height: 5' 7" (1.7 m)
Vanessa Kirby born 18 April 1988, is an English stage, TV, and film actress. From 2016 to 2018, Kirby portrayed Princess Margaret in Peter Morgan’s Netflix series The Crown, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Television Series in 2018. She starred as Estella in the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, Joanna in Richard Curtis’ romantic comedy About Time and Mission Impossible: Fallout. She is known mostly for her stage work, having won acclaim and awards for various productions, including Streetcar Named Desire with Ben Foster which transferred to New York; with Variety in 2016 called her “the outstanding stage actress of her generation, capable of the most unexpected choices”.
Action, Adventure
Trailer: Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
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Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy
6. Contraband Pilots
Barbara Tomblin
The University Press of Kentucky
Chapter 6 Contraband Pilots We must have men of undaunted courage and great coolness, for much is at stake. —Gustavus Vasa Fox Of all the important contributions by African Americans to the Union Navy’s North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons and Potomac Flotilla, none proved as valuable as that made by skilled black coastal pilots. Suddenly called on to enforce a blockade of almost 3,500 miles of southern coastline, much of it deprived of functioning lighthouses and stripped of navigational markers, the Navy Department quickly realized a need for experienced, loyal pilots. At the beginning of the Civil War, senior Union Navy commanders looked first to officers of the U.S. Coast Survey for assistance in piloting vessels in and out of harbors, surveying coastal waters, and other navigational missions. When the Blockade Strategy Board met in the summer of 1861, it recommended that a Coast Survey vessel be assigned to each of the principal blockading squadrons to complete surveys of portions of the coast not already done. In addition to providing or generating charts of the coast and adjacent waters, Coast Survey superintendent Alexander D. Bache and other Coast Survey personnel produced descriptions of coastal areas, obstructions to navigation, lighthouse locations, tides and currents, and other related information. The commanders of both the North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons benefited from the services of Coast Survey officers and men, and some 400 U.S. Navy officers who had served with the Coast Survey before the war fought for the Union, among them David D. Porter, John Dahlgren, Charles H. Davis, S. Phillips Lee, Stephen Rowan, John Rodgers, Benjamin F. Sands, C. R. P. Rodgers, Foxhall Parker, Alexander C. Rhind, and Charles Flusser, to name just a few.1 1 70 Bluejackets and Contrabands Early in the war Coast Survey personnel accompanied Union naval expeditions buoying channels and waterways, piloting naval vessels across bars, and conducting topographical surveys of the numerous islands along the southern coast. There were, however, too few Coast Survey officers to serve as pilots for every blockading vessel. Faced with the demands of a burgeoning fleet, the Navy Department anxiously sought qualified pilots who knew the rivers and creeks of the southern coast. John Dahlgren’s discovery in late April 1861 that the rebels had removed buoys from Kettle Bottom in the Potomac River only added to their concern . Dahlgren asked the Navy Department for a “supply” of Potomac River pilots and told Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that he would pay them $50 to $80 per month, according to the value of their service. In response to Dahlgren’s request for Potomac River pilots, Welles sent him six men: Captain Mitchell, J. T. Hilton, C. C. Pearson, H. Hayne, Robert Walter, and a man named Roberts. Dahlgren quickly sent Walter and another pilot, Stephens, to Lieutenant John Glendy Sproston and ordered him to take command of the USS Powhatan and proceed down the Potomac to replace and protect the buoys at the Kettle Bottom shoals.2 Not all these new pilots proved competent, as Commander John Gillis discovered. “Two of the pilots we received from Powhatan proving inefficient, and admitting they were only capable for vessels of 10 or 12 feet from Maryland Point up,” Gillis wrote to Welles on April 27, 1861, “I took the lead in this vessel, and will convoy the transport to Washington.” The following day Gillis arrived safely in Washington with the two transports and some 800 troops, but in other cases, the ignorance of pilots jeopardized or limited federal gunboat operations in the South’s narrow, shallow rivers and streams. When Lieutenant Alexander Rhind mounted an expedition in the gunboat E. B. Hale with twenty men from the Crusader and attempted to ascend the Paw Paw River in late April 1862, the “ignorant” pilot ran it aground. Rhind got the Hale off and attempted to retrace his steps and pass through the South Edisto River, but finding the pilot “ignorant of the channel,” he gave that up and returned by the Dawho to North Edisto. Anticipating a rebel attack in the narrow river, Rhind, according to Du Pont, “made all his crew lay down flat, put on all steam, and rushed by, receiving as he expected, very heavy volleys which struck the poor little craft all over.” The Hale escaped “without having a single man hurt,” Rhind reported, but the little Hale received numerous hits from rifles balls and canister and one solid shot that struck its thirtytwo...
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Years of musical knowledge and understanding had passed between Angus and Malcolm Young by the time High Voltage announced the arrival of a new Australian take on rock. The brothers’ hours of performing and working together and obsessing over Chuck Berry and early heavy rock ’n’ roll insured that the songs on this album would be locked-down and and road-tested. With Bon Scott on board, this 1976 American release (technically a compilation of two Australian albums) reduced rock ’n’ roll down to rhythm, riffs and raunch. Scott sounds positively feral on “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer” while “T.N.T.” and “Live Wire” laid down the template for the band’s future: primal, monstrous riffs and sneering lyrics riddled with innuendo.
High Voltage AC/DC
It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)
Rock 'N' Roll Singer
T.N.T.
Can I Sit Next to You Girl
Little Lover
She's Got Balls
℗ 1976 J. Albert & Son (Pty.) Ltd.
More By AC/DC
The Razors Edge
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)
Ted Nugent (Bonus Tracks)
Dark Room (Deluxe Edition)
Absolute Hits (Remastered)
No End In Sight: The Very Best of Foreigner (Remastered)
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Grace Church Welcomes Jacob Reed to Bach at Noon Tuesday 5 January at 12:20 p.m.
Join us to begin the Winter term of Bach at Noon as Grace Church welcomes organist Jacob Reed as guest artist for Bach at Noon on Tuesday 5 January at 12:20 p.m.
Trio Sonata No.2 in c minor BWV 526
I. Vivace II. Largo III. Allegro
An Wasserflüssen Babylon BWV 653b (a 5, con doppio pedale)
Concerto in d minor BWV 596 (after Vivaldi, L’estro armonico, No. 11, RV 565
I. [Allegro] – Grave [Adagio e Spiccato] – Fuga [Allegro]
II. Largo e Spiccato
III. [Allegro]
Jacob Reed is a junior at Yale University, where he studies organ with Professor Thomas Murray in addition to double-majoring in music and mathematics. Over the past several years, he has given recitals across the United States, Europe, and Canada, as well as playing church services regularly.
In 2015, Jacob studied under Bine Bryndorf and Hans Davidsson at the Royal Danish Academy of Music Summer Campus; in 2012 and 2014, he studied with teachers Ton Koopman, Olivier Latry, Jon Laukvik, Margaret Phillips, Louis Robilliard, and Leo van Doesselaar at the International Summer Academy for Organists in the Netherlands. He was a 2013 U.S. Presidential Scholar, and was selected as a 2013 YoungArts National Finalist by the National YoungArts Foundation—one of 152 finalists out of nearly 10,000 applicants, and the only organist among the 19 classical musicians selected.
Jacob has also performed frequently as a soloist, accompanist, and chamber musician on piano, harpsichord, cello and viola da gamba. In high school, he played continuo for the University of North Carolina Baroque Ensemble for three years; he is now an instrumentalist and vocalist for the Yale Collegium Musicum, and harpsichordist for the Yale Baroque Opera Project.
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16-Year-Old Andrew Barth Feldman Is the Next Star of Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway
November 12th, 2018 | By Andy Lefkowitz
Andrew Barth Feldman, a 16-year-old high-school junior who triumphed at the 2018 Jimmy Awards, will make his Broadway debut in the title role of Dear Evan Hansen on January 30, 2019. Feldman will succeed current star Taylor Trensch, who will play his final performance on January 27, 2019.
"As a real-life high school student, I relate to the character of Evan Hansen immensely. And as a performer, it's obviously been a dream of mine to sing Pasek & Paul's amazing score—I'm so excited to get to make my Broadway debut in this show that means so much to me and my peers."
Feldman is currently a student at Lawrence Woodmere Academy in Woodmere, NY. He took home the 2018 National High School Musical Theatre Award (Jimmy Award) for Best Performance by an Actor for his take on Jason Robert Brown's "I Love Betsy" from Honeymoon in Vegas. Dear Evan Hansen will mark his first gig on the Broadway stage.
The current cast of Dear Evan Hansen also includes Jennifer Laura Thompson, Michael Park, Lisa Brescia, Phoenix Best, Sky Lakota-Lynch, Alex Boniello and Mallory Bechtel.
The winner of six 2017 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Dear Evan Hansen features a Tony-winning book by Steven Levenson, a Tony-winning score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and direction by four-time Tony nominee Michael Greif.
Check out Feldman's Jimmy Award-winning performance below.
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August 25, 2013 May 14, 2015 Metamodernism 1 Comment post-modernism
Confessions of a Metamodernist Christian
I remember one day in college that changed my perspective on church forever. I was standing in a Christian bookstore talking to an acquaintance when the conversation veered on to what was wrong with the Church in America. Not a hate-fest per se, just a “man, we wish things could change and grow and allow for imperfections a lot more.” The guy then started describing a church that he was starting that would be different. He went on to try and recruit me to his leadership team for this church.
He talked a lot about doing things differently, but it didn’t feel right to me. As he went on, I began to realize that while he was presenting himself as an out-of-the-box thinker, that wasn’t really true. He had moved his box to an unorthodox position, but he was still very much stuck in that box. Which is not necessarily bad – true out-of-the-box thinkers can be very annoying to be around. But thinking you are one when you really aren’t? More than a little awkward.
I think that has been my experience with the emerging church. They all move their boxes to new or different places, but still want to stay firmly in that box. Which, again, is not necessarily wrong – boxes give us social norms to understand and utilize in many ways. But it is awkward to watch an emerging Christian criticize a fundamentalist for their unhealthy focus on literal interpretations of certain scriptures and then turn around and get mad at you for bringing in a completely different take that is neither fundamentalist or emerging. Its kind of like the cool kid that thinks he is cool because he thought he was avante-guard and then he runs into a true avante-guard person and get flustered at being exposed for not really being that avante-guard. Wasn’t that the plot of a sitcom or two in the 80s?
Anyways, for a long time now, I have known that I don’t really fit in with traditional churches or emerging churches. Probably because they are two sides of the same coin – one modern, and the other post-modern. Post-modernism replaced modernism, and then died itself a while back. I probably was post-modern back when it was alive and well, but the growing dissatisfaction I had with the emerging church was an indication that I was distancing myself from a dying philosophy. So lately I have been trying to figure out exactly what I am. Help has come from Wikipedia of all places.
Of course, you never would have heard me call myself a “post-modern Christian.” People argue all the time over what post-modern is anyways, and it seems there is little general agreement out there. Basically, I think most people use it to either mean “cool” or “heretic.” Note this quote from Wikipedia: “Despite the name some people eschew the label ‘postmodern Christianity’ because the meaning of the term ‘postmodern’ is frequently debated, even between those who use the label. Therefore some say it has almost no determinate meaning and, in the United States, serves largely to symbolize an emotionally charged battle of ideologies.”
But anyway, I know that for most of my life, I have had a trouble really identify as either modern or post-modern. Post-modernism has added some great ideas to Christianity. Existential Christianity has some interesting thoughts on the authority of the Bible, for instance: “An existential reading of the Bible demands that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject, studying the words that God communicates to him personally. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of ‘truths’ which are outside and unrelated to the reader. Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him internally…. Existentially speaking, the Bible doesn’t become an authority in a person’s life until they authorize the Bible to be their personal authority.” In other words… free will.
But of course, post-modernism has that whole “no absolute truth” thing that is disturbing to me as a spiritual person and a scientist. So there is that. But you also can’t run to modernism, where everything has to be proven scientifically. Science is completely valid, but any good scientist will tell you that it is an incomplete picture of reality.
Deconstruction is also another post-modern concept that I love (and often get in trouble for): “The notion of a ‘deconstructive’ approach implies an analysis that questions the already evident deconstruction of a text in terms of presuppositions, ideological underpinnings, hierarchical values, and frames of reference. A deconstructive approach further depends on the techniques of close reading without reference to cultural, ideological, moral opinions or information derived from an authority over the text such as the author.” So we have to look at an idea apart from influences to see what it really says. Good at times, but there are times where cultural influence and other issues are important to examine.
But like I have stated, there are many things about post-modernism that I don’t like (and many post-modernists would probably agree with me, since they apparently argue a lot with each other and never really come to consensus on what they really are anyways). And apparently post-modernism began to die in the 1990s and finally kicked the bucket sometime in the last decade or so. So what is a recovering semi-post-modernist to do?
Some have created a movement called post-post modernism… but it makes much less sense than post-modernism. Is it a back to modernism movement? Is it extreme post-modernism? In my opinion, a better term is metamodernism: “Van den Akker and Vermeulen define metamodernism as a continuous oscillation, a constant repositioning between positions and mindsets that are evocative of the modern and of the postmodern but are ultimately suggestive of another sensibility that is neither of them: one that negotiates between a yearning for universal truths on the one hand and an (a)political relativism on the other, between hope and doubt, sincerity and irony, knowingness and naivety, construction and deconstruction.”
Wow. You know what, that has been me all along. I have been torn between being drawn to the good in both modernism and post-modernism while being repulsed by the problems in both. I don’t like black and white extremism. I like grays and ambiguous spaces where many ideas interact and a lot of faith is needed because things are less certain and easy.
So, I guess this is me, confessing to being a metamodernist Christian and not really knowing what all that means.
I recently discovered an article by John Hundley called “Modern, Postmodern and Metamodern: How should we then teach?” It is a little lengthy for an average blog post, but I think it discusses many issues that I have been wrestling with while making a case for a metamoderist approach to education in a secularist university system. Oh, and Hundley just so happens to be a Christian. Take this paragraph for example: “The secular metamodern philosophy of history holds tightly to the idea that all thinking individuals have preconceived ideas and worldviews and opinions, and that these color everything they do, including science. Metamodern historians are not saying—as the postmoderns did—that there is no objective truth. What they are saying is that there is no way to scientifically prove that objective truth in the writings of the ancient past. It all gets colored by our perceptions, which are, in turn, colored by our preconceived ideas about the way the world works. These ideas are, problematically, very different from the preconceived ideas of the ancients.”
Like any other philosophy, there are many disagreements on what metamodern means, and just like in post-modernism, you don’t have to follow everyone else’s definition to still be a part. If modernism and post-modernism are black and white opposites, metamodernism is the area in between that looks gray at first, but turns out to be a swirl of the best of the blacks and whites. You don’t have to give up your black or white leanings (or your personal mixture of both) to be in the mix – you just have to realize how they all have equal ground on the global stage.
Ever wonder how many Church culture wars could be avoided if churches took this approach to heart? Maybe the ultra-fundamentalist complementarian right-wingers would give us egalitarians a bit of a break?
Yeah, that might be a bit of a pipe-dream, but you never know.
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High School Musical 2 is the best one and you can't change my mind
By Meadow McCarthy
Although all of the High School Musical movies are iconic, there can only be one “The Best High School Musical Movie.” All three are strong contenders for the top, and the competition is close. However, there is one that truly outshines the others and upon rewatching proves itself the top every time. From the most iconic music to the most iconic acting, High School Musical 2 has many qualities that the other two movies simply do not have. With a change of directors, the quality of the production jumps to an all time high.
The movie opens on an iconic number, the title of which is stated simply upon asking “What time is it?” This song and dance number sets the tone for the rest of the movie, and from start to finish, the tone is kept. From “What Time Is It?” to “I Don’t Dance” to “Bet On It” to “Work This Out” to “HumuHumuNukuNukuApua’a” to “You Are the Music In Me” the quality in songwriting and performance stands much superior to the other movies.
High School Musical 2 is the best for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important and the most glaringly obvious- High School Musical 2 is the only movie not centered in an actual High School. Sure, the characters are high school aged, and some of the cheese of the movie wouldn’t exist if the characters were any older. But the location of the film is a golf course/ country club. These locations are ones that most people would associate with adults and rich kids. While some of the beloved characters fit that stereotype, most don’t, which is what really makes this movie so groundbreaking. Never has the audience seen before a whole herd of middle to lower class high school kids take over an entire country club for a whole summer on screen.
The colors are vibrant, the songs are bops, the country club is dominated, and the acting is amazing. The performance of the whole cast is completely superior in every way to the performance in the other movies. From Troy angrily frolicking around the golf course to Chad refusing to dance even as he dances across a baseball field, the choreography adds a whole new layer of drama that the viewer doesn’t see from the other movies. The cast really throws their whole selves into the production, truly showing the audience that they are living their best lives, and that they were correct to be so excited for summer.
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Budget cuts threaten federal green plan for oilsands and coal: scientist
Posted on October 19, 2012 by Mike De Souza
Published by Postmedia News on Tuesday Jun 12 2012
OTTAWA – Budget cuts to a team of smokestack pollution specialists at Environment Canada could jeopardize the Harper government’s efforts to crack down on pollution from industries such as the oilsands and coal-fired electricity generation, warns a University of Guelph professor, who worked with the special unit of federal scientists.
Environment Minister Peter Kent has suggested, through a spokesman, the government could replace his department’s expertise by relying on outside sources such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
But Bill Van Heyst, an associate professor in environmental engineering who specializes in air quality, said the Environment Canada scientists provide a level of independence as well as unique expertise on Canadian industrial practices that the government would have trouble finding elsewhere as it attempts to boost environmental monitoring efforts in the oilsands region.
“If you don`t have a legitimate background in air quality or air quality testing then it`s really easy to make mistakes, and those mistakes are going to make everybody look, in the long run, really bad,” Van Heyst said in an interview with Postmedia News.
A spokesman for Kent said the government doesn`t believe the team`s work would be critical to new environmental policies affecting the oilsands and coal electricity generating sectors. He also said that the department`s enforcement branch would intervene “if we suspect that the information we are receiving (from company reports) is incorrect.”
Van Heyst said he has worked with some privately funded smokestack sampling companies that also have expertise, but warned these specialists face obstacles when hired directly by a private company from industry.
“The thing with using non-government specialists is you could have a company saying they’re running at 100 per cent capacity, but really only running at 70 per cent,” said Van Heyst. “The stack testers from a private engineering company wouldn’t know that. Whereas I think with the Environment Canada team, there’s that level of government authority there and they would have the process knowledge to verify capacity. It adds weight. It adds credibility to stack testers being there.”
Kent’s office has estimated it would save $718,000 annually by eliminating its internal research capabilities on industrial emissions measurements. It also estimated it would need to spend about $115,000 to obtain and analyze data from other external sources, such as the EPA.
Van Heyst recognized the credibility of the EPA’s research capabilities, but noted its expertise would not come cheap. In his work, he said his university would have paid Environment Canada tens of thousands of dollars from his own research funds a few years ago on a project that analyzed the impact of emissions from crematoriums for animals.
“If you have to pay the EPA, you’re just looking at huge costs to bring in another team,” Van Heyst said. “This (Environment Canada) team has a track record. They have a history of working together. They know industry in Canada. They know our extremes in terms of temperature, winter conditions. The EPA may not be as aware of some of the extreme climate conditions that we have to go through, because they simply don’t come across them as frequently.”
All seven members of the smokestack sampling team at Environment Canada have received notices their jobs will be eliminated as part of millions of dollars in proposed federal cuts to scientific research and monitoring of Canada’s air, wildlife, water and oceans.
Kent has warned Parliament in a recent report that budget cuts put his department at risk of losing the scientific expertise it needs to counter ecological threats and protect Canada`s ecosystems. But he also has suggested that changes in the government`s scientific capacity were part of a shift of its resources to the West, highlighting the new oilsands monitoring efforts.
Van Heyst said the soon-to-be disbanded team was in the best position to lead the monitoring efforts on air quality.
“I don`t think people realize the abilities that this team has to offer Canada and the fact that if you lose that, it`s going to be gone for another five to 10 years, because you`re not going to be able to build a group back up with the knowledge and experience that this group has right now,” said Van Heyst, explaining that members of the team sometimes work up to 16 hour days out in the field supporting government efforts to crack down on pollution.
“It`s not like a lot of government employees where they start at nine and finish at 4:30 pm. They actually work until what needs to be done that day is done.”
Kent, who was not immediately available for an interview, is also expected to introduce final regulations this month to crack down on pollution from coal-fired power plants.
Van Heyst explained the Environment Canada team would have more expertise on different industrial practices in Canada`s coal-fired electricity sector, when compared to the U.S. plants.
“It makes sense that you need to have a credible stack-testing teams who knows how to quantify and if this type of source has never been quantified before, this group has the knowledge to develop new methods that will withstand scientific scrutiny,” said Van Heyst.
“That`s what separates (Environment Canada`s team) from any other stack-testing company – it`s the ability to actually come up with new methods.”
This entry was posted in Air pollution, Science by Mike De Souza. Bookmark the permalink.
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Four strange details about Keystone XL pipeline debate
Posted on September 13, 2014 by Mike De Souza
A scarecrow stands guard to prevent birds from landing on an oilsands tailings pond near Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Here are four unusual details about the debate surrounding TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline proposal:
1) The Nebraska state senator who introduced a pro-pipeline bill remembers names of energy companies, but forgot the name of an environmental group he met with during a trip to Alberta’s oilsands.
In an August interview with the Toronto Star, Smith described his bill, LB 1161, as a balanced piece of legislation that was drafted after listening to concerns from all parties.
In the interview, Smith said he recalled speaking to representatives from TransCanada as well as officials from energy company, Devon, during a trip to Alberta’s oilsands. But when asked if he recalled meeting with environmental and sustainable development research group, the Pembina Institute, on the last day of that trip, he said:
“You threw out a name, there, I do not recall the name,” Smith said. “It sounds right, but the final day, we did meet for a round table discussion with the environmental interests from the area.”
You can listen to the entire interview below:
Smith is the state chairman from Nebraska of the American Legislative Exchange Council – an educational charity also known as ALEC. It connects corporate representatives with U.S. politicians on committees that develop model policy and legislation and estimates it can contribute to up to 1,000 model resolutions or bills introduced in state legislatures every year.
Records obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy revealed that the trip to Alberta – described as an “Oil Sands Academy” for politicians – was organized by ALEC.
The Obama administration delayed its decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline because of “uncertainty” surrounding a court challenge to LB 1161.
2) A TransCanada employee was listed as a member of an ALEC committee.
Beth Jensen, a government and community relations director of Alberta-based TransCanada, was listed as a member of an ALEC committee of industry representatives and elected officials in 2010. The committee discussed property rights legislation, including a model bill to allow states to use powers of eminent domain — the power of a government to expropriate property for public use — to takeover federal land, according to internal documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, which is a Wisconsin-based watchdog group.
A spokesman for TransCanada, Shawn Howard, said the company wasn’t involved in drafting the resolutions, adding that Jensen retired in July after a 40-year career.
He also said he couldn’t “speak to every meeting (Jensen) attended,” explaining that she met regularly with community leaders and others in the U.S. Midwest to inform people of the company’s activities and to identify issues that would need to be addressed.
During her employment with TransCanada, Jensen co-founded a non-profit group called Nebraskans for Jobs and Energy Independence that promotes the TransCanada project. She was also listed as a vice-president of this group in 2011, according to forms obtained by Bold Nebraska.
When asked about Jensen’s role, TransCanada declined to confirm she was on the ALEC committee.
“No one I’ve asked believes she was but since she’s retired I haven’t been able to ask her so I can’t confirm one way or the other,” said Howard.
After being sent a copy of an ALEC committee list featuring Jensen’s name, Howard added:
“When it comes to Beth’s activities, her role put her on the road quite a bit and she attended many events with legislators, elected officials, community leaders, opinion leaders and others that senior management would not have been aware of,” he said. “We have over 5,000 employees and about 40 per cent of them are in the U.S., so it wouldn’t be reasonable to assume that our senior management would know about all the meetings someone participated in.”
TransCanada has sponsored “ice cream social” events at the last two annual conventions of ALEC.
3) A lobby group representing large oil and gas companies spent $40,000 on an “educational session” to teach U.S. politicians about the Keystone XL pipeline.
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry lobby group whose membership list includes TransCanada Pipelines among other energy companies, is an active member of ALEC, spending $10,000 per year in fees, which includes participation and voting rights on the energy, environment and agriculture committee. Spokeswoman Sabrina Fang said that the institute also spent about $40,000 for an educational session on the Keystone XL pipeline for ALEC members.
“We have supported building KXL since the beginning and we will continue to advocate for the pipeline because it will create thousands of new American jobs and enhance our energy and national security,” Fang said.
4) A tobacco company says it didn’t sponsor a pro-pipeline resolution
An internal ALEC document, released through freedom of information legislation, tracking proposals in U.S. state legislatures, showed that the council was monitoring four different resolutions in support of the Keystone XL pipeline this year. Nick Surgey, the research director for the Center for Media and Democracy, said there were also 10 resolutions introduced in state legislatures in 2013.
According to the minutes obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, the model resolution itself was introduced in 2011 at two separate committees of ALEC focusing on natural resources and international relations. In the case of the latter, the name of tobacco giant, Philip Morris International, was listed on the meeting’s agenda below the Keystone XL resolution. Minutes from the meetings of both committees show that private sector members and elected members adopted the resolution unanimously.
A spokeswoman for ALEC, Molly Fuhs, said the agenda that listed Philip Morris International below the resolution was incorrect and was changed prior to the meeting. Philip Morris International also said it didn’t sponsor the motion.
Under ALEC’s procedural rules, Fuhs said that the tobacco company’s representative was not eligible vote on the Keystone XL pipeline issue. She declined to explain what those rules were.
Pam Roach, a Republican state senator from Washington, listed as a sponsor on the minutes, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
This entry was posted in pipelines and tagged ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Barack Obama, Beth Jensen, Center for Media and Democracy, Keystone XL, Molly Fuhs, Nick Surgey, oilsands, Pembina Institute, Philip Morris International, Shawn Howard, tarsands, TransCanada by Mike De Souza. Bookmark the permalink.
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Home / Region + Country Categories / Africa / WORLD REFUGEE DAY: Salesian Missions Highlights Educational Programs Assisting Refugees around the Globe
WORLD REFUGEE DAY: Salesian Missions Highlights Educational Programs Assisting Refugees around the Globe
MissionNewswire
To mark World Refugee Day 2014, Salesian Missions is proud to highlight Salesian programs around the globe that provide life-changing education, medical care and support for refugees and internally displaced people in need.
Each year, June 20 marks World Refugee Day, a day that honors the plight of millions of refugees and internally displaced people around the globe. The UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, noted that at the end of 2013, 51.2 million people had been forced from their homes worldwide, the highest figure of displacement since the World War II era. Almost 80 percent of those displaced are women and children.
The day, first established in 2001, is held annually and is coordinated by the UNHRC. The focus of World Refugee Day is to honor the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children forced to flee their homes under threat of persecution, conflict and violence.
Each year, World Refugee Day reflects on specific struggles faced by refugees. UNHCR noted that 2013 was an unprecedented year with conflicts in Syria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, amongst others, that have pushed their organization and their partners to their limits. To honor those families torn apart by conflict, UNHCR is continuing their 2013 campaign theme, “1 family torn apart by war is too many.”
“We are seeing here the immense costs of not ending wars, of failing to resolve or prevent conflict,” said High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres in a recent statement about World Refugee Day. “Peace is today dangerously in deficit. Humanitarians can help as a palliative, but political solutions are vitally needed. Without this, the alarming levels of conflict and the mass suffering that is reflected in these figures will continue.”
Globally, Salesian missionaries are assisting close to the 400,000 refugees and internally displaced persons who lives have been affected by war, persecution, famine and natural disasters such as floods, droughts and earthquakes. Below are highlights of programs for refugees developed by Salesian Missions and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Salesian Missions, headquartered in New Rochelle, NY, is the U.S. Development Arm of the international Salesians of Don Bosco.
AFGHAN REFUGEE SCHOOL CHILDREN IN PAKISTAN:
In Pakistan, a Salesian Missions program served Afghan refugee school children and their families in Quetta, the capital of the Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. The program, which began in 2012, centered on reinforcing primary education systems at six schools in highly volatile Quetta, Pakistan. The focus of the program included everything from teacher training and resource improvements for child learning, to infrastructure improvement and web-ready computer labs.
The goal of the Quetta program was to mainstream struggling Afghan refugee schools so they could become a part of the Pakistani education community and benefit from its shared institutional resources. Close to 2,200 students ages 4 to 13 benefited from Salesian Missions’ comprehensive approach to strengthening their education.
COLOMBIAN REFUGEES:
In recent years, more than 450,000 people have fled the violence of Colombia to neighboring Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama and Costa Rica. Salesian Missions’ New Beginnings initiative, which started in 2011, worked with more than 1,000 Colombian refugees in these four countries and provided vocational and human development training as well as job placement services.
Many of the Colombian refugees that came to the program had no marketable skills. They couldn’t find jobs and the lack of training made it difficult to start their own business or join with others to form cooperatives. Without jobs, it was hard for them to find stability for their families and build new lives. The New Beginnings program allowed these victims of violence and chaos to start over and build a stable, hopeful future for themselves and their families.
Through the program, each refugee student received 260 hours of technical training as well as 40 hours of human development workshops. These training programs coupled with the job placement services worked to assist Colombian refugees to start over and build successful lives in their new communities.
DR CONGO REFUGEES
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by intense civil war and internal conflict since the outbreak of fighting in 1998. Close to 1.5 million people have been internally displaced or have become refugees in neighboring countries after having fled the country to escape the continued violence. Salesian missionaries have been working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than 100 years, ensuring that the most vulnerable children are not forgotten. At the Don Bosco Ngangi Center in Goma, located in the eastern part of the country on the Rwanda border, the missionaries run programs for more than 3,500 children and 1,500 refugees.
In addition to offering educational programs, the Don Bosco Ngangi Center has a medical clinic that consists of outpatient services and separate medical wards for general medical cases, pediatric care and cholera treatment. With two doctors and four nurses on staff, the clinic is able to treat a complex array of life threatening illnesses and injuries, although often with limited medical supplies and equipment.
The medical clinic also has a nutritional center for severe cases of pediatric starvation. Currently, this center provides intensive nutritional support to 150 severely malnourished infants, toddlers and children in the Goma area.
REFUGEES IN KENYA
As of the end of May, Kakuma refugee camp, located in northern Kenya near the Uganda and South Sudan borders, is caring for 155,477 refugees from 20 different countries, according to UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. The majority of refugees at the camp, more than 44 percent, are from South Sudan and arrived after escaping conflict and violence.
Salesian missionaries at Kakuma refugee camp operate the Holy Cross Parish and the Don Bosco Vocational Training Center where 1,044 young men and women are receiving critical employment and life skills. There are many courses available and those studying welding, carpentry and bricklaying often utilize their new skills helping to build infrastructure within the camp.
Salesian missionaries at the camp also operate the Helping Children to be Children program, which gathers refugee children and leads them in games, songs and classes held outdoors on the camp grounds. Children are also offered the opportunity to draw and learn to speak English. Close to 3,000 children benefit from this Salesian program, which currently has no steady funding and is run primarily by refugee volunteers.
SRI LANKAN REFUGESS IN INDIA
Since 1983, ethnic violence in Sri Lanka has forced tens of thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils from their homeland in search of safety and a new life in Tamil Nadu, India. According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, there are close 140,000 Sri Lankan refugees in 65 countries, with almost 70,000 in refugee camps in Tamil Nadu. Since 2010, Salesian Missions has been providing their New Beginnings program for young male and female Sri Lankan refugees who have been living in refugee camps in 15 target districts in India. The program, created by Salesian Missions and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, has served more than 2,500 Sri Lankan refugees.
The New Beginnings program provides market-conscious vocational and technical skills training that results in livable wage employment with the goal that trainees are better able to support themselves and their families. After training, New Beginnings graduates have at least one market-demand technical skill, as well as have received workplace readiness training to enhance positive attitudes, hygiene and personal presentation as well as the importance of team work. Results-oriented job placement assistance helps graduates transition from the classroom to work in the local labor market.
Training provided through the New Beginnings program also serves no fewer than 40 percent women and young girls in order to promote gender equality and generate opportunities for women whether they prefer to seek work at a local company or join a women’s company collective that allows them to remain home with young children while still engaged in meaningful employment.
UNHCR – 2013 Global Trends Report
AfghanistanColombiaColombian refugeesCongoDemocratic Republic of the CongoKakuma Refugee CampKenyaRefugee Camps & Internally Displaced PopulationsSri LankaSri Lankan Tamil refugees
KENYA: Salesian Missionaries Provided Technical Training to 3,774 Youth in 2015
WORLD WATER DAY: Salesian Missionaries Ensure Safe, Clean Water for Teachers and Students
SOUTH SUDAN: Salesian Summer Camp Provides Activities for 270 Marginalized Youth
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Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a 1981 collection of short stories that includes one short story in the collection with the same title. Carver was an American writer whose legacy lives on as he's listed among the mo...Read More
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk ...
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a 1981 collection of short stories that includes one short story in the collection with the same title. Carver was an American writer whose legacy lives on as he's listed among the most influential writers of the twentieth century. ("SparkNotes: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Context," 2017). In this paper, we will discuss how the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” centers around the theme of love as love exists in every relationship no matter what happens. A precise analysis of the relationships in Carver’s story will illustrate if indeed it is true there is love in every relationship. Focus on the story’s plot and its characters will clearly show the elusive nature of love which is the central theme of the story.
The Theme of Love
Carver focuses on the elusive nature of love as his primary theme. This is evident in the story as the nature of love remains elusive throughout despite efforts by characters to define it. Mel, a character in the book tries over and over to pinpoint the meaning of love, but unfortunately, his examples do not build up to any coherent conclusion. For instance, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who almost died in a car crash. However, the conclusion of the story merely throws off everyone since the old man is distressed as he can’t be able to see his wife. When he finally asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange he and the other characters have ended up loving more than one person. His efforts to clarify the nature of love finally devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. Mel seems much more sure about what love is not and tells Teresa (his wife) several times that if abusive love implies true love, then she “can have it.” Nick and Laura firmly believe that they know what love is, but they barely provide a clear definition or explain why they’re so inclined in their convictions. The couple merely shows their love for each other by holding hands and blushing. However, these actions only support the mystery of love rather than unmask it. Teresa of all the friends is most certain about what love really means. She claims again and again that Ed, her abusive ex-boyfriend had true love for her even if he had a strange way of showing it. She says the threats, beating and stalking by Ed may be disturbing, but they serve as proof of this love. However, just like the others, she cannot translate her certainty into a clear elaboration of the true nature of love ("SparkNotes: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Themes, Motifs, and Symbols", 2017).
Main Characters in the short story
Mel McGinnis is a 45-year-old cardiologist whose significant other is known as Teresa (alias Terri). Together, they live in Albuquerque. In the story, Teresa (Mel’s second wife) is described by the narrator as bone-thin with a pretty face, brown hair and dark eyes. Mel is described as tall and rangy with curly soft hair. Terri and Mel have two friends; Laura and Nick. Nick, aged 38 years is the narrator of the story. Laura is a 35-year-old legal secretary who is married to Nick.
Analysis of the characters
Mel McGinnis - Mel is a cardiologist who has been married to Teresa for four years, and he talks more than anyone else in the story. He now hates his ex-wife, Marjorie who is the mother of his two children. Despite making huge proclamations about knowing what love really is, he ultimately reveals that he’s alarmed and thrown off by the elusiveness of devotion and love.
Terri – Teresa is Mel’s wife. She used to live with Ed, an abusive boyfriend who even tried killing her. Despite Ed threatening her and Mel before finally taking his life, Teresa firmly believes that Ed truly loved her. Ostensibly, everyone else disagrees with how she defines love. Nevertheless, her ideas are clearer than any other characters in the story.
Nick –This is the story’s narrator. Although Nick and Laura met at work, he never says for sure what he does. Nick is thirty-eight years old and has been married to Laura for around eighteen months. In the story, he does not say much in the story, but he makes some keen observations on the amount of remaining gin, the sound of beating hearts and changing light that gives rhythm to the story.
Laura – This is Nick’s wife aged thirty-five and is a legal secretary. She scarcely speaks in the story except to mention that she and Nick understand love and that she’s hungry at the end of the story. However, her gentle physical interactions with Nick such as touching knees, and holding hands give readers an inkling of what love means to her
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a short story about four friends – Laura, Nick, Mel and Teresa (Terri). Mel’s house is the setting, around a table with a bucket of ice at its middle. A bottle of gin is placed inside the bucket. As the title suggests, the four soon start talking about love. In the recent past, Terri has had an abusive relationship, one she claims was derived from love. Her former boyfriend Ed, "loved her so much he tried to kill her." Ed would beat Terri and drag her around the living room by her ankles thus knocking her onto things along the way. Surprisingly, Terri believes that Ed loved her and he showed this by way of domestic abuse. Mel is strongly opposed to this “love” no matter what Terri tries to say. Ed also stalked Mel and Terri when they started seeing each other and sent threat messages to Mel at work. Mel was so scared, and at one point, he even bought a gun and made out a will. He even wrote to his brother who resides in California, saying that "if something happened to him," he should look for Ed. However, Ed would eventually commit suicide after two attempts. Terri still sees this as an act of love. Ed tried killing himself first when Terri left him. He drunk rat poison, but was immediately rushed to hospital, and survived. In his second attempt, (which was successful), he shot himself in the mouth. Someone heard the shot from his room and called the manager. Mel and Terri argued for long about whether she could be in the hospital bedroom with Ed when he passed away. Terri won and was with Ed when he kicked the bucket; as she puts it, "He never came up out of it."
After a short while, Mel starts telling a story of an elderly couple struck by a drunk teenager driver, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Luckily, the couple survived the car accident simply because they were wearing seat belts. Mel was called to report to the hospital as he sat down to dinner that night. As soon as he arrived, he noticed how badly the elderly couple had been injured. According to Mel, the couple had "multiple fractures, internal injuries, hemorrhaging, contusions, and lacerations." (Carver, 2017). As a result, they had bandages and casts from head to toe. Mel tries to drive a point about the husband's consternation when both the latter and his wife moved into the intensive care unit. Mel would visit them daily, and when he put his ear to the husband's mouth-hole, he would tell Mel he was disillusioned since he could not see his wife through his eye-holes. Mel would then stray from the topic and talk more about Ed, hatred toward his ex-wife, his personal thoughts about love, and life as a knight. According to Mel, even though one loves a person, and something were to happen to them, the survivor can grieve but love again after some time. After the couples finish the second bottle of gin, they discuss going to dinner, but none makes a move to proceed with their plans.
Apart from being one of Carver’s most famous stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is often regarded as the epitome of the dirty-realism school. As a result, Carver is considered a writer of the “dirty realism” school along with other prowess writers including Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff.
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Thomas Bracken
Thomas Bracken was an Irish born poet, journalist and politician who spent much of his life in New Zealand following his migration as a boy to Australia. He was passionate about the interests of the Maori people, the indigenous population of the islands, and is famous for writing God Defend New Zealand. His words were set to music and then adopted as the New Zealand’s national anthem. It is a fairly common phrase nowadays, used almost anywhere by those that love where they live, but he was thought to have been the first to write down the words “God’s Own Country” when referring the country he loved. He was born on the 21st...
Thomas Bracken Poems
God Defend New Zealand
Not Understood
Pax Vobiscum
Spirit Of Song
Thomas Bracken Bio
Thomas Bracken was an Irish born poet, journalist and politician who spent much of his life in New Zealand following his migration as a boy to Australia. He was passionate about the interests of the Maori people, the indigenous population of the islands, and is famous for writing God Defend New Zealand.
His words were set to music and then adopted as the New Zealand’s national anthem. It is a fairly common phrase nowadays, used almost anywhere by those that love where they live, but he was thought to have been the first to write down the words “God’s Own Country” when referring the country he loved.
He was born on the 21st December 1843 in a small Irish town named Clones. Mortality rates were quite high at that time and he had lost both parents by the time he was 12 years old. The orphaned Thomas luckily had an émigré uncle living in the Australian province of Victoria and so was shipped out there. He took up an apprenticeship with a pharmacist at first but soon opted for the outdoor life, working with sheep as a drover and shearer. It was the time of the gold rush and he also had a spell fossicking gold. These experiences prompted him to write down tales of the stockmen and gold diggers, mostly in verse form.
Some of this work was published when,he moved to Dunedin,NZ at when he was 25. One of his collections received favourable attention and Bracken was awarded the a prize for his poetry. He was able to secure a position as a journalist for the Guardian in Otago and, in addition, he had work published in other publications. In 1875, inspired by his surroundings, he jointly established a new paper with his main aim being:
As editor of the Advertiser, Bracken boosted sales to an impressive 7,000 copies and worked tirelessly to get local writers to contribute their own work. He wrote a great deal of material himself, often of a humorous or satirical nature. He sometimes used pseudonyms such as Paddy Murphy or Didymus but the name Thomas Bracken was becoming well known throughout both New Zealand and Australia.
Bracken was a great champion of the Maori people and the poem has been interpreted by many as a being as much an anthem for them as the immigrant population. It is reproduced below and the message in his words is quite clear:
Bracken had a number of collections of poetry published. He took his passion for the rights of the Maoris into politics and was openly critical of the government’s apparent breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. He became a member of parliament for Dunedin Central in 1881 and, apart from a short break when he lost the seat, he served for six years and then retired from politics.
It seems that his tireless efforts on behalf of other people prevented him from making a good living for himself and he often found himself not only in poor physical health but also financially struggling. He had been living in Wellington for a short time but returned to his home in Dunedin as his health deteriorated further. After his death a lookout was named in his honour with sweeping views across the city.
Thomas Bracken died on the 16th February 1898 at the young age of 54.
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Celiac: Not Just a GI Disease
In Autoimmune/Allergy Medicine, Bacterial/Viral Infections, Detoxification Medicine, Gastrointestinal
Celiac: Not Just a GI Disease2006-10-132015-10-13https://ndnr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ndnr-logo-with-web1-300x169-copy.pngNaturopathic Doctor News and Reviewhttps://ndnr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/15087947_ml.jpg200px200px
Christine Doherty, ND
In the world of the 10-minute diagnostic workup, Celiac disease often requires thinking outside the box. Too often, celiac is considered a cause of chronic diarrhea, end of story. Often, celiac disease is boiled down to being just a gastrointestinal disease, but it has many extra intestinal manifestations, symptoms of which are frequently – but not limited to – the neurological, endocrine and immune systems. There are challenges in recognizing who should be tested, and no clear consensus exists as to which tests firmly establish the diagnosis. Even the definition of the gluten-free diet and which foods to include or exclude can be controversial. In July 2006, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a campaign to increase awareness and diagnosis of celiac disease to establish guidelines as to when and how patients should be tested and treated. Here is a review of current recommendations.
About Celiac Disease
The reality is that celiac disease can occur at any age; it affects all races; and it is the most common human genetic disease. Technically, it is not an allergy, but rather a genetically mediated autoimmune disease. Approximately 40% of Americans carry the celiac HLA DQ2 or DQ8 genes; thankfully, only 1% of the population ever has a triggering event that leads to activation of these genes and development of celiac. Celiac disease damages the villi in the small intestine, which compromises nutrient absorption. Many symptoms of celiac actually are symptoms of the multiple nutritional deficiencies secondary to malabsorption. The other major cause of symptoms is the autoimmune element, which accounts for the broad range of presentations of this disease, as any part of the body is fair game, with a special emphasis on the GI tract, nervous system and endocrine system.
According to the NIH’s recommendations, patients with the following conditions should be tested for celiac: chronic diarrhea, chronic constipation, thyroid disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, type 1 diabetes, liver disease, collagen vascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, osteoporosis, migraines, infertility, obesity, GERD, irritable bowel syndrome, anemia, recurrent apthous stomatitis, chronic fatigue, pruritic dermatitis and psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety. Due to the hereditary nature of this disease, all first-degree relatives, symptomatic or not, should be tested, because some patients are asymptomatic and are only detected through family screening. For pediatrics, the following conditions warrant screening for celiac: dermatitis, dental enamel hypoplasia, iron deficiency anemia refractory to oral iron supplementation, Type 1 diabetes mellitus, autoimmune thyroiditis, Down’s syndrome, Turner syndrome, Williams syndrome and selective IgA deficiency. Children with recurrent GI symptoms, such as diarrhea, abdominal distention, chronic constipation and vomiting, should also be screened.
Testing for Celiac
Testing involves serological tests followed by a biopsy of the small intestine. The challenging and ever-changing part of the celiac diagnostic workup is the serology. Most labs offer celiac panels that include antigliaden IgA and IgG, Endomysial IgA, and Tissue Transglutaminase IgA and a total IgA. There should soon be an in-office finger-stick test that will measure Tissue Transglutaminase IgA, IgG and IgM, and Anti Gliaden IgA from a drop of whole blood or serum. The gold standard for diagnosis still involves following positive serology with a multi-sample, small intestinal biopsy looking for characteristic villous damage. The North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition recommends children older than the age of three who have been on a gluten-containing diet for at least a year and who have any of the conditions listed earlier be screened with a TTG IgA and, if positive, be followed up with a small intestinal biopsy. The clinical response to the gluten-free diet is the final part of the diagnosis.
Implementing Corrective Actions
Once the diagnosis has been established, the next step is assessing the systemic and nutritional damage, followed by implementing the gluten-free lifestyle. I purposely use the word “lifestyle” because there are factors beyond diet that will affect a patient’s recovery. The first step is education as to what contains gluten, which, at first glance, seems like everything. Currently, wheat, spelt, kamut, triticale, barley and rye contain gluten. Oats don’t contain gluten, but are often contaminated in the fields and silos; therefore, they have not been considered safe. There now are sources of gluten-free oats, however. Where things get complicated is the hidden sources of gluten, often listed in ambiguous terms on labels. In January 2006, a new labeling law took effect that covers major allergens, including wheat, but not gluten. You still have to read the label for rye, barley or any source of malt that contains gluten. Practically speaking, many products on grocery store shelves are still not compliant with this labeling law, and it may take several years until this is a reliable source of information. There is also the issue of cosmetics, play-dough for children, and environmental exposure and contamination at home and at work. Several books cover these topics in depth, my favorite of which I have listed at the end of this article. I recommend patients read these books once they have a positive serology, and I answer any practical questions during office visits.
Monitoring recovery is usually done by rechecking the antilgiaden antibodies and the TTG IgA. I have learned that if a patient who was recovering well takes a turn for the worse, even if he swears he has not changed his diet, you must check for contamination. Time and again I have seen trace contamination ruin patients’ recoveries. Because of the intestinal damage, celiacs are more prone to other food allergies; often, these other allergies will need to be discovered and eliminated from the diet if the gluten-free diet alone is not resolving all symptoms. It is key to monitor and treat nutritional deficiencies aggressively the first year. Depending on the severity and length of their illness, often the adrenals are compromised. Once this is addressed, patients feel an improved quality of life. It is also beneficial to correct gut flora imbalances and heal their increased intestinal permeability.
About the Gluten-Free Diet
I have only dealt with celiac disease in this article, but naturopaths know many patients who benefit tremendously from a gluten-free diet that do not have celiac disease. Do these people have “seronegative” celiac, a gluten allergy, a wheat allergy, gluten intolerance or IgE-mediated wheat allergy? The body can react negatively to gluten in many ways. I try my best to rule out celiac, because of its implications to other family members and the up to 33 times higher mortality rate from intestinal and immune cancers than the general population. Without treatment, celiacs can develop complications like osteoporosis, anemia and seizures. The level of compliance with a life-long gluten-free lifestyle is much better when people are diagnosed with celiac disease, as opposed to just attempting a clinical trial of the gluten-free diet. It is important to do testing before beginning the gluten-free diet, because the diagnosis is inaccurate within weeks of a patient going gluten-free.
For more information, visit www.celiac.nih.gov for educational materials and services, current NIH research about celiac disease and additional information and resources, including an e-newsletter. My favorite book for doctors is “Celiac Disease, A Hidden Epidemic” by Peter H. Green, M.D. (It is too upsetting and technical for most patients.) My current favorite guide to the gluten-free lifestyle for patients is “Living Gluten Free for Dummies,” by Danna Korn. It is thorough, accessible, funny and very helpful.
Christine Doherty, ND, graduated in 1998 from Bastyr University and is in private practice in Milford, NH. She served on the New Hampshire osteoporosis advisory council from 2000 to 2003, and she is a medical advisor to the magazine Living Without, for people with food allergies and intolerance. She is the medical advisor to the southern New Hampshire gluten intolerance group and is a past vice president of the New Hampshire Association of Naturopathic Doctors. She speaks nationally on celiac disease at lay and medical conferences, has celiac herself and has worked with hundreds of celiac and gluten-intolerant patients from all over the world.
Celiac, diet, Gluten Free, Nutrition, Wheat
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Jewish Students Association celebrates Passover Seder
Mary Steurer | Wednesday, March 28, 2018
To celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover, the Jewish Students Association of Notre Dame hosted a traditional Seder meal Tuesday night in the Coleman-Morse Center.
Senior Jonah Shainberg, co-president of the club, said the ritual feast is held to mark the beginning of the holiday.
“Passover celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt to freedom under the leadership of Moses,” he said in an email. “It is one the most important Jewish holidays and is celebrated over the course of a week each year.”
Kayla August, assistant director of evangelization at Campus Ministry, said she works with the Jewish Students Association every year to plan the event.
“I get to help them share their faith life and their tradition with the community,” she said.
Senior Alicia Twisselmann, co-president of the Jewish Students Association, said the organization also partners with the Jewish Federation of St. Joseph Valley, which helps lead the ceremony and provides the Passover meal.
For the service, guests were given Seder plates set with a number of traditional foods, each symbolizing a special aspect of Passover.
During the meal, presiders read the Haggadah, a Jewish text that is recited each Passover Seder. The Haggadah guides individuals through the Passover story and contains instructions for ceremonial customs, several prayers and psalms.
Twisselmann said reading the Haggadah helps promote understanding of Passover culture and tradition.
“It’s important to tell the story of Passover, to make sure we remember it,” she said. “It’s mentioned in the Seder that we need to tell the story, and the more we tell the story, the better we are.”
For attendees who were not of Jewish faith, Twisselmann said she hopes they “gained an appreciation for Jewish culture and of [its] rich history.”
She said she believes that the celebration non-Catholic holidays at Notre Dame can help encourage inclusion for all religions.
“It fosters a really good dialogue here on campus. A lot of the time people haven’t encountered any faiths other than Catholicism until now,” she said. “Having people get a chance to see how other people live and how other people celebrate is a good way to get a feel for a culture.”
Shainberg said despite Notre Dame’s Catholic tradition, he believes the University supports those of all faith backgrounds.
“I believe this campus fosters spirit — without limitation — and has made me identify more strongly with my faith than I ever have before,” he said. “We’ve had wholesome Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah celebrations at Notre Dame that will remain special memories for me in the years to come.”
August said she values interfaith events at Notre Dame because they sponsor diversity in the community.
“It’s just a privilege because not only do I get to share my faith and cultivate leadership, but I get to learn so much from the students too,” she said. “We all have different ways of praying and worshiping, and we can all come together over a meal and over traditions that mean a lot to us.”
Tags: Campus Ministry, Jewish Students Association, Passover, Seder
About Mary Steurer
Mary is a sophomore from St. Louis living in Howard Hall. If her journalism career doesn't work out, her Plan B is to start a petting zoo.
Campus Ministry hosts Diwali celebration
Notre Dame Campus Ministry held the annual celebration of Diwali, the Festival of Lights,...
Campus Ministry to sponsor pilgrimage to World Youth Day
Prayer service celebrates life of Martin Luther King Jr.
Lenten program ministers to Spanish-speaking community
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Hidden Figures Revealed women's summit to focus on personal branding
What if you could make a profit by tapping into your personality and natural abilities coupled with your education and start moving toward greater profitability, personal fulfillment and a more polished professional image and professional skills? Attendees will leave with an immediately implementable custom blueprint to get started. Learn this and more at the two-day "Hidden Figures Revealed Summit" on September 15-16, 2017. Here, event host Mona Austin describes what to expect"
SISTERHOOD CONFIDENTIAL presents "Hidden Figures Revealed," a personal and professional development summit for women that offers a step-by-step method that has taken me from the Hollywood Hills to the White House as a journalist. I equip established or aspiring professional women to maximize their talent through the use of digital media and personal branding and the principles of work/life balance. It does not matter if you are executive level, a retiree, inexperienced or fresh out…
PHOTOS: L.A. Screening of When Love Kills: THE FELICIA BLAKELY STORY
Actresses Bresha Webb and Essence Atkins at the Los Angeles premiere screening of When Love Kills Actress Angela Bassett at the Los Angeles premiere screening of When Love Kills When Love Kills Director Tasha Smith with actresses Tisha Campbell-Martin and Vanessa Bell Calloway at the Los Angeles Screening of When Love Kills Comedian & TV Host Loni Love at the Los Angeles premiere screening of When Love Kills TV personality Safaree at the Los Angeles premiere screening of When Love Kills
Bootsy Collins to release mixed bag of styles with diverse posse of collaborators on first CD in 6 years this October
The funk runs deep and rich on 'World Wide Funk,' Bootsy Collins' first studio album since 2011's Tha Funk Capital of the World, out October 27, 2017. Populated with musical friends old and new, and recorded in his Cincinnati home's Bootzilla Re-hab studio, 'World Wide Funk' marks both a reckoning and significant reboot for the Rhinestone Rock Star Monster of a doll baby baba! Blue-chip rappers like Doug E. Fresh, Big Daddy Kane, DJ Quik, Dru Down, and Chuck D, along with guitar shredder Buckethead, join a Bootsy-curated posse of fresh new artists on a record that embraces everything from the classic P-Funk sound Bootsy pioneered to the closest Collins has ever come to radio-active, boots on the ground, friendly fire in a musical-P-rated-adventure. From the maximalist funk of the body-slamming title track, to the soulful pop-R&B of "Heaven Yes," to the experimental "groovegrass" of "Boomerang" (featuring Nashville slide-gu…
Harlem Week to pay tribute to James Mtume starting on August 23
Whether his contribution to music comes as composer, producer or performer; James Mtume has carved an indelible impression from all sides. Yet for all the decades he has been putting out innovative sounds, he has it with his activism. A brilliant and informed orator, Mtume has spoken internationally as well as being a major
His is a rich and storied past as an activist during the turbulent 60's era movements, his years performing with Miles Davis, on into his his chart-topping R&B years as a band - Mtume. In that span he has also composed hits with guitarist/partner Reggie Lucas such as "The Closer I Get to You," (Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway) leaving an imprint in music that is distinct. political commentator voice and activist via the airwaves, such as his popular New York talk show, Open Line, formerly on WBLS FM.
With Kiss This World GoodbyeKiss This World Goodbye (1978), In Search of the Rainbow Seekers (1980), Juicy Fruit (1983), You, Me and He (1984), and T…
ACTING DHS SECRETARY ELAINE DUKE: “BORDER WALLS WORK. YUMA SECTOR PROVES IT.”
“Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle should come together like they did 10 years ago and give the men and women of DHS the resources we need to defend our homeland. This starts with fully funding the construction of a wall along our Southern border.”
Homeland Security Secretary: Border Walls Work. Yuma Sector Proves It. Editorial USA Today August 22, 2017
President Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall along our Southern border will save countless innocent lives. Our Border Patrol agents have seen firsthand the success of a border wall in Yuma, Ariz. — which serves as a prime example of how investments in personnel, technology and a border wall can turn the tide against a flood of illegal immigration and secure our homeland.
For years, Yuma sector was besieged by chaos as a nearly unending flood of migrants and drugs poured across our border.
The bipartisan Secure Fence Act of 2006 — supported by then-Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others — mandated the construction of…
DA BRAT RETURNS TO PRISON TO MOTIVATE INMATES AND GARY CONSIDERS ADOPTING A CHILD OF HIS OWN ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF RICKEY SMILEY FOR REAL, TUESDAY, AUGUST 22 AT 8 P.M. ET
WASHINGTON, D.C. - August 21, 2017 - Da Brat goes back to prison - but this time, it's as a visitor and a motivaitonal speaker; Garycontemplates adopting his own childafter having such an enjoyable experience helping Beyonce during her pregnancy; and Brandon and Beonka might be headed towards a final ending in their relationship on the latest episode of TV One's Rickey Smiley For Real, airing Tuesday, August 22 at 8 p.m. ET. In 2011, Da Brat was released from prison after serving two and a half years for assault. In recent months, she has been trying to find a way to return and give a motivational speech to other women behind bars. Now, she finally has her chance, and the experience is both humbling and surreal. "I know it is not an easy thing being away from your family and your kids. When you mess up you've gotta get that punishment and it's a rude awakening," says Da Brat. "But I'm grateful that it happened to me because I might have been dead. My …
Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights Statement on Violence in Charlottesville
Cheryl Lowery, Idil Hussein and Rev. Joseph E. Lowery Comment on Charlottesville March
Atlanta, GA - Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights issued the following statement on the violent attack by white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA:
"Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of brave foot soldier, Heather Heye, and all of the victims of the Charlottesville car attack as well as the state troopers who died as a result of the violence. The disgraceful hatred displayed by the KKK, Neo-Nazi and other white supremacists groups in Charlottesville is reminiscent of marches my mother, father and other civil rights leaders participated in during my childhood, says Cheryl Lowery, president and CEO, Lowery Institute."I know first-hand how evil these hate groups can be. During their fight for civil and human rights my parents received constant bomb threats and were shot at by the KKK during a march in Alabama," adds the daughter of Joseph and…
Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery statement on the passing of Dick Gregory
Atlanta, GA - Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, co-founder with Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and former president, issued the following statement on the passing of Dick Gregory:
"I would like to offer my sincere condolences to Dick Gregory's wife, Lillian, his children, and the entire family. We have lost a true warrior in our long journey towards justice. "Dick was not just a comedian, author, entrepreneur and a dedicated foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement; he was a friend and will be missed by many. His unique brand of social satire helped opened the eyes of people of all races around the world. Dick's keen understanding of the need for black people to have a voice led him to run for Mayor, President, and gave him the audacity to make significant sacrifices in his career in order to stand against, and call out hatred and oppression. When the people asked, 'Who will bell the cat?' Dick G…
Hidden Figures Revealed women's summit to focus on...
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Bootsy Collins to release mixed bag of styles with...
Harlem Week to pay tribute to James Mtume starting...
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DA BRAT RETURNS TO PRISON TO MOTIVATE INMATES AND ...
Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & H...
Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery statement on the passing...
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UPDATE 2-Lee Iacocca, auto executive who saved Chrysler from bankruptcy, dies at 94
Lee Iacocca, the charismatic U.S. auto industry executive who gave America the Ford Mustang and was celebrated for saving Chrysler from going out of business, has died at the age of 94, Fiat Chrysler said.
Iacocca died Tuesday at his home in Bel-Air, California of complications from Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Lia Iacocca Assad told the Washington Post.
“The company is saddened by the news of Lee Iacocca’s passing. He played a historic role in steering Chrysler through crisis and making it a true competitive force,” Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said in a statement.
“He was one of the great leaders of our company and the auto industry as a whole. He also played a profound and tireless role on the national stage as a business statesman and philanthropist,” the company said.
During a nearly five-decade career in Detroit that began in 1946 at Ford Motor Co, the proud son of Italian immigrants made the covers of Time, Newsweek and the New York Times Sunday Magazine in stories portraying him as the avatar of the American Auto Age. One of the first celebrity U.S. chief executives, his autobiography made best-seller lists in the mid-1980s.
Iacocca was a cracker-jack salesman. He encouraged his design teams to be bold, and they responded with sports cars that appealed to baby boomers in the 1960s, fuel-efficient models when gasoline prices soared in the 1970s, and the first-ever, family-oriented minivan in the 1980s that led its segment in sales for 25 years.
“I don’t know an auto executive that I’ve ever met who has a feel for the American consumer the way he does,” late United Auto Workers Union President Douglas Fraser had said. “He’s the greatest communicator who’s ever come down the pike in the history of the industry.”
Iacocca also had some duds, such as the Ford Pinto, an economy car that became notorious for exploding fuel tanks. “You don’t win ’em all,” he said of the Pinto.
Iacocca won a place in business history when he pulled Chrysler, now part of Fiat Chrysler, from the brink of collapse in 1980, rallying support in U.S. Congress for $1.2 billion in federally guaranteed loans and persuading suppliers, dealers and union workers to make sacrifices. He cut his salary to $1 a year.
Iacocca was often described as a demanding and volatile boss who sometimes clashed with fellow executives.
“He could get mad as hell at you, and once it was done he let it go. He wouldn’t stay mad,” said Bud Liebler, vice president of communications at Chrysler during the 1980s and 1990s. “He liked to bring an issue to its head, get it resolved. You always knew where you stood with him.”
Iacocca often spoke of his immigrant roots and how America rewards hard work. When he was tapped by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 to be chairman of a campaign to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, he said he accepted the job as a way of honoring his parents.
The campaign raised more than $350 million, more than double the initial $150 million goal.
MARKETING SUCCESSES
Iacocca began his career just as post-war prosperity kicked the Auto Age into high gear. By the 1970s, many new suburban homes came with a two-car garage.
Lido Anthony “Lee” Iacocca was born in the Pennsylvania steel town of Allentown on Oct. 24, 1924. His father, Nicola, owned a hot dog stand he called The Orpheum Wiener House – a foretaste of his son’s later marketing creativity.
In high school he was freshman class president, “a big shot,” he had thought. But when he stopped shaking his classmates’ hands, he lost re-election. “It was an important lesson about leadership,” Iacocca wrote.
He was a diligent student, made the debating team and was a star in Latin class. Sophomore year he survived rheumatic fever, an illness that later kept him out of the military during World War Two, and graduated 12th in a class of more than 900.
Iacocca enrolled in Lehigh University, earning his engineering degree in fewer than four years and received a fellowship at Princeton for his master’s degree.
After joining Ford, he realized right away he was better at marketing than engineering. Ten years later, when his district had the worst sales in the country, he came up with a marketing campaign, “56 for ’56” – buyers could get a 1956 Ford with 20% down and three years of monthly installments of $56.
The plan took off like a rocket and Ford executive Robert McNamara, who would become secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration, made it part of Ford’s national sales strategy.
Iacocca’s relationship with the Mustang was cemented when both Time and Newsweek featured him and the car on their covers in April 1964. By 2013, about 9 million Mustangs had been sold.
Gene Bordinat, Ford’s design executive at the time, said of Iacocca’s contribution to the Mustang’s popularity: “We conceived the car and he pimped it after it was born.”
It was cheap to produce and generated big profits. For years, it was Iacocca’s signature achievement.
The low moment in Iacocca’s career though came in 1978, when Henry Ford II fired him. He asked why, reminding his boss that the company had earned record profits of $1.8 billion two straight years. Ford replied: “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”
The firing made national news. Iacocca never forgave Ford, and he described his former boss as a spendthrift and dictator.
CHRYSLER FACED TWO HEADWINDS
Iacocca’s exile from Detroit board rooms was brief. Within weeks he accepted the presidency of Chrysler, even though its market share was shrinking and losses were deepening.
In 1979 Chrysler was facing twin blows of spiking interest rates and a second oil shock that doubled the price of gasoline. When the U.S. economy plunged into recession, sales at every automaker plummeted.
Iacocca searched for a merger partner but when no takers emerged, he turned to the government for up to $1.5 billion in loan guarantees. He pounded on the doors in Washington, assisted by dealers and union officials who knew their brethren would be out of work if Chrysler folded.
Asking for federal help was controversial, and one editorial cartoon depicted a child asking what the U.S. Capitol was called. “The Chrysler Building” came the answer.
Iacocca won the loan guarantees but they required broad sacrifices, of plant closures, pay cuts for factory workers and layoffs of white-collar staff.
He put his personal reputation on the line, and in the end, it was a tour de force of leadership. Factoring in positions at Chrysler, its dealerships and suppliers, he saved more than 500,000 jobs. “People saw him in the trenches,” Liebler said. “When we needed the loan guarantees and he was pounding the halls of Congress, the dealers were with him … he worked his head off day and night, and everyone who was involved in any way with Chrysler knew it.”
About that time, Chrysler’s introduction of the smaller, fuel-efficient “K Cars” gave it a boost. In a series of no-nonsense television commercials, Iacocca barked, “If you can find a better car, buy it!”
He paid the loans back seven years early, and in 1983, a cartoon showed frantic executives of the troubled U.S. airline industry shouting into a phone, “Get me Lee Iacocca!”
But Iacocca’s star faded in the late 1980s as Chrysler floundered again. Chrysler struggled through the 1990-1991 economic downturn, losing $800 million in 1991. Iacocca refused to cut new product spending, and by 1992, the new Jeep Grand Cherokee and LH sedans led to a $732 million profit, while Ford and General Motors Co were in the red.
With Chrysler profitable again, Iacocca stepped down at the end of 1992. He lived out his latter years in stylish Bel-Air, California.
In retirement, Iacocca invested in the casino business and a line of imported olive oil, and he joined corporate boards.
He penned “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?,” a 2007 book critical of American leadership, especially President George W. Bush.
Iacocca had two daughters with his first wife, Mary, who died of diabetes in 1983, prompting him to start a family foundation to fight the disease.
After Mary’s death he married twice more. His second was brief and ended in annulment, while his third ended in divorce. (Reporting by Bill Trott; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Diane Craft and Lisa Shumaker)
The staff at this Vancouver bar were just voted Best in... Books for Kids: Captain Rosalie tells a compelling wartime story
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Michael Matt of The Remnant: "Our Pope has Lost the Faith"
Great movie set, horrible theology...
It's a new year, and we're ready to make a prediction: By the time Dec. 31, 2019 rolls around, "Pope" Francis will still not be a Catholic, and the semi-traditionalist publication The Remnant will, after numerous articles and videos denouncing him, still hold that he's nevertheless the Pope of the Catholic Church. We are quite confident in this prediction because, alas, it is not unwarranted but solidly grounded in newly-released evidence. On Dec. 31, 2018, the editor-in-chief of The Remnant, Mr. Michael Matt, posted a brief New Year's Eve reflection about the sorry state of our world, our society, and the Vatican II Sect. At one point he observes:
Our families are broken beyond repair, our priests are predators, our Pope has lost the Faith, our governments are the embodiment of Satan at work. Could there be greater chastisement than us without God? (Michael J. Matt, "What Catholics Believe [Two New Year's Resolutions from Michael Matt]", The Remnant, Dec. 31, 2018; underlining added.)
Notice the underlined part: "our Pope has lost the Faith." It is hard to grasp to what -- please pardon the directness -- idiotic statements intelligent people can be led as a consequence of their obstinate refusal to countenance the notion that the Faith-wrecking and soul-destroying enemy of Jesus Christ currently occupying the Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City is not at the same time His Vicar. But we'll return to that in a moment. After encouraging his readers to implore the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Matt adds:
...let us resolve to go back to the basics, to study and teach what Catholics have believed for Millennia--to cement it into our lives and into the lives of our children--so that we may steel ourselves with the armor of the Old Faith and survive what's to come. Nothing else, it seems to me, really matters as much as recourse to the Queen of Heaven, an unyielding commitment to Tradition and total immersion in the old Faith.
We agree: That is a really great idea! In this post, we're going to do our part in assisting The Remnant's leadership and readership with getting to know traditional Roman Catholic teaching -- specifically, concerning the Papacy. For those rolling their eyes now or breathing a sigh of annoyance, make no mistake about the importance of this, for "without exception, all doctrines which the Church proposes must be accepted" (Pope Pius IX, Encyclical Quartus Supra, n. 7). This isn't optional. So, let us examine the question: Can the Pope lose the Faith? Here is some of what the true Popes have taught on the matter over the centuries (all underlining added): Pope Pelagius II
(For) you know that the Lord proclaims in the Gospel: Simon, Simon, behold Satan has desired to have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I have asked the Father for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren [Lk 22:31-32]. Consider, most dear ones, that the Truth could not have lied, nor will the faith of PETER be able to be shaken or changed forever. For although the devil desired to sift all the disciples, the Lord testifies that He Himself asked for PETER alone and wished the others to be confirmed by him; and to him also, in consideration of a greater love which he showed the Lord before the rest, was committed the care of feeding the sheep [cf. Jn 21:15ff.]; and to him also He handed over the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and upon him He promised to build his Church, and He testified that the gates of hell would not prevail against it [cf. Mt 16:16ff.]. (Apostolic Letter Quod ad Dilectionem; Denz. 246)
Pope St. Leo IX
The holy Church built upon a rock, that is Christ, and upon Peter or Cephas, the son of John who first was called Simon, because by the gates of Hell, that is, by the disputations of heretics which lead the vain to destruction, it would never be overcome; thus Truth itself promises, through whom are true, whatsoever things are true: “The gates of hell will not prevail against it” [Mt 16:18]. The same Son declares that He obtained the effect of this promise from the Father by prayers, by saying to Peter: “Simon, behold Satan etc.” [Lk 23:31]. Therefore, will there be anyone so foolish as to dare to regard His prayer as in anyway vain whose being willing is being able? By the See of the chief of the Apostles, namely by the Roman Church, through the same Peter, as well as through his successors, have not the comments of all the heretics been disapproved, rejected, and overcome, and the hearts of the brethren in the faith of Peter which so far neither has failed, nor up to the end will fail, been strengthened? (Apostolic Letter In Terra Pax; Denz. 351)
Pope Pius IX
All who defend the faith should aim to implant deeply in your faithful people the virtues of piety, veneration, and respect for this supreme See of Peter. Let the faithful recall the fact that Peter, Prince of Apostles is alive here and rules in his successors, and that his office does not fail even in an unworthy heir. Let them recall that Christ the Lord placed the impregnable foundation of his Church on this See of Peter [Mt 16:18] and gave to Peter himself the keys of the kingdom of Heaven [Mt 16:19]. Christ then prayed that his faith would not fail, and commanded Peter to strengthen his brothers in the faith [Lk 22:32]. Consequently the successor of Peter, the Roman Pontiff, holds a primacy over the whole world and is the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians. (Encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, n. 16) Now you know well that the most deadly foes of the Catholic religion have always waged a fierce war, but without success, against this Chair; they are by no means ignorant of the fact that religion itself can never totter and fall while this Chair remains intact, the Chair which rests on the rock which the proud gates of hell cannot overthrow and in which there is the whole and perfect solidity of the Christian religion. Therefore, because of your special faith in the Church and special piety toward the same Chair of Peter, We exhort you to direct your constant efforts so that the faithful people of France may avoid the crafty deceptions and errors of these plotters and develop a more filial affection and obedience to this Apostolic See. Be vigilant in act and word, so that the faithful may grow in love for this Holy See, venerate it, and accept it with complete obedience; they should execute whatever the See itself teaches, determines, and decrees. (Encyclical Inter Multiplices, n. 7) So the fathers of the fourth council of Constantinople, following the footsteps of their predecessors, published this solemn profession of faith: ‘The first condition of salvation is to maintain the rule of the true faith. And since that saying of our lord Jesus Christ, You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church [Mt 16:18], cannot fail of its effect, the words spoken are confirmed by their consequences. For in the apostolic see the catholic religion has always been preserved unblemished, and sacred doctrine been held in honour. Since it is our earnest desire to be in no way separated from this faith and doctrine, we hope that we may deserve to remain in that one communion which the apostolic see preaches, for in it is the whole and true strength of the christian religion.’… To satisfy this pastoral office, our predecessors strove unwearyingly that the saving teaching of Christ should be spread among all the peoples of the world; and with equal care they made sure that it should be kept pure and uncontaminated wherever it was received. It was for this reason that the bishops of the whole world … referred to this apostolic see those dangers especially which arose in matters concerning the faith. This was to ensure that any damage suffered by the faith should be repaired in that place above all where the faith can know no failing…. For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles. Indeed, their apostolic teaching was embraced by all the venerable fathers and reverenced and followed by all the holy orthodox doctors, for they knew very well that this see of St. Peter always remains unblemished by any error, in accordance with the divine promise of our Lord and Saviour to the prince of his disciples: I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren [Lk 22:32]. This gift of truth and never-failing faith was therefore divinely conferred on Peter and his successors in this see so that they might discharge their exalted office for the salvation of all, and so that the whole flock of Christ might be kept away by them from the poisonous food of error and be nourished with the sustenance of heavenly doctrine. Thus the tendency to schism is removed and the whole church is preserved in unity, and, resting on its foundation, can stand firm against the gates of hell. (First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, Ch. 4)
...it can never be that the church committed to the care of Peter shall succumb or in any wise fail. (Encyclical Satis Cognitum, n. 12)
These quotes should suffice to make the point. (More are available at our topical page on the Catholic Papacy). In light of all this evidence, one is tempted to point out that evidently Francis isn't the only who has lost the Faith. One of the biggest problems of our day is that, good intentions and personal piety aside, we have hordes of self-styled traditional Catholics who really do not adhere to, or even know about, just what the traditional Catholic teaching is on a subject as important as the Papacy. In any case, what have we learned here with regard to the question of whether the Pope can lose the Faith? It's not looking too good for the Remnant camp, is it? Catholic magisterial documents are filled with teaching to the effect that the Pope cannot lose the Faith but is the invincible "citadel and bulwark of the Catholic Faith" (Pius IX, Encyclical Qui Nuper, n. 3), and that that is the whole point of the Papacy to begin with. Being a divine institution enjoying God's special protection, the Papacy cannot fail. (It can, however, be vacant.) While it may be possible that a Pope can lose the Faith as a private individual -- something the Church has not ruled out -- it absolutely cannot happen that the Pope could lose the Faith as Pope (for example, by promulgating heresy as part of his magisterium). But even if as a private individual the Pope could lose the Faith, once the matter becomes public, he would immediately cease to be Pope. That is the clear position of the Church since at least the First Vatican Council (1870) and also that of St. Robert Bellarmine, who "appeared even up to our times as a defender of the Roman Pontiff of such authority that the Fathers of the [First] Vatican Council employed his writings and opinions to the greatest possible extent", as Pope Pius XI noted in his 1931 decree Providentissimus Deus, in which he proclaimed the good Cardinal Bellarmine a Doctor of the Church. The problem is that Michael Matt and his semi-traditionalist buddies take the position that Francis has lost the Faith and continues to be Pope, and that his heresies can and do infect his official and magisterial acts, at least ostensibly: Their convenient and unfalsifiable copout is that when his heresies or other errors do infect his magisterium, then it's not really his magisterium -- for that very reason. In other words, Francis' official teachings are spotless because whenever they're not, they're not really his official teachings. Thus they make a mockery of the idea of the papal magisterium as the proximate rule of Faith all Catholics can (and must) safely follow, even when it is not protected by infallibility, as explained by Cardinal Johann Franzelin in a book printed by the Holy See's own publisher:
The Holy Apostolic See, to which the safeguarding of the deposit of faith and the attendant duty and office of feeding the universal Church for the salvation of souls have been divinely entrusted, can prescribe theological pronouncements — or even pronouncements to the extent they are connected with ones that are theological — as teachings to be followed, or it can censure them as teachings not to be followed, not solely with the intention of infallibly determining truth by a definitive pronouncement, but also necessarily and designedly apart from that aim, either without qualification or by way of limited supplements, to provide for the safety of Catholic doctrine (cf. Zaccaria, Antifebronius vindicatus, vol. II, diss. V, chap. 2, no. 1). Although infallible truth of doctrine may not be present in declarations of this kind (because, presumably, the intention of determining infallible truth is not present), nevertheless, infallible safety is present. I speak of both the objective safety of declared doctrine (either without qualification or by way of limited supplements, as mentioned) and the subjective safety of declared doctrine, insofar as it is safe for everyone to adopt it, and it is unsafe and impossible for anyone to refuse to adopt it without a violation of due submission towards the divinely established magisterium. (Cardinal John Baptist Franzelin, Tractatus de Divina Traditione et Scriptura, 2nd ed. [Rome: Ex Typ. S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1875], Thesis XII, Principle VII; our translation; italics removed; underlining added. The entire work is available in English, translated by Ryan Grant, as On Divine Tradition [Sensus Traditionis Press, 2016].)
In 1950, Pope Pius XII reinforced this teaching by rebuking those who would use the excuse that they can dissent from the ordinary papal magisterium on the grounds that "it's not infallible":
Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: “He who heareth you, heareth me” [Lk 10:16]... (Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Humani Generis, n. 20; underlining added.)
Now, if this Catholic teaching on the doctrinal safety and binding nature of papal teaching were applied to the Vatican II Church, then sheer absurdity would follow because one would then be obliged to hold contradictory positions. For example, one would then have to hold both that
"This [imperfect] communion exists especially with the Eastern orthodox Churches, which, though separated from the See of Peter, remain united to the Catholic Church by means of very close bonds, such as the apostolic succession and a valid Eucharist..." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion", n. 17);
and that
"...neither any one of these [heretical-schismatic] societies by itself, nor all of them together, can in any manner constitute and be that One Catholic Church which Christ our Lord built, and established, and willed should continue; and ... they cannot in any way be said to be branches or parts of that Church, since they are visibly cut off from Catholic unity" (Pope Pius IX, Apostolic Letter Iam Vos Omnes).
So, which is it? The recognize-and-resist traditionalists have an easy man-made solution to this: Stick to the old, junk the new. In other words, refuse submission to (the person recognized as) the Roman Pontiff on an "as needed" basis -- as determined by you, of course, or at least by your nearest semi-trad newspaper editor or retired lawyer. The problem is just that this is the very definition of schism: "Schismatics are they who, though baptized as Christians, refuse to be subject to the Pope" (Fr. Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, vol. 1 [New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1935], p. 291; see also Canon 1325 §2). Schism is serious business and expels one from the Church of Christ: "For not every sin, however grave it may be, is such as of its own nature to sever a man from the Body of the Church, as does schism or heresy or apostasy" (Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis, n. 23). In his New Year's Eve post, Matt showcases how much he values the traditional Catholic teaching on submission to the Pope and the hierarchy in communion with him:
Let us look on the faces of the occupiers no more, lest the very sight of these demons should cause our faith to fail us. God will deal with them in His good time. Our task now is to survive them.
That doesn't sound like the "absolute obedience and ... joyous and constant adherence to this Chair of Peter" demanded by Pope Pius IX (Apostolic Letter Per Tristissima; excerpted in Papal Teachings: The Church, n. 419), does it? Matt is frustrated and annoyed to no end because he is engaged in the impossible endeavor of squaring the theological circle. He is desperately trying to be a Catholic in a non-Catholic church and is even on record admitting that the Vatican II Sect is not the Catholic Church (see video here, at 16:42 mark, and see our commentary on it here). The semi-trads know it's a fake church, with fake sacraments, fake saints, fake annulments, and a fake magisterium -- except for the "Pope", of course, who couldn't possibly be fake because then the gates of hell have prevailed, right? Yet the exact opposite is the case: It is only if all this soul-destroying fakery had come from true Popes that the gates of hell would have been victorious, not if it came from charlatans! This important fact is humorously illustrated in the following set of memes:
So Michael Matt warns against "these demons" who try to "cause our faith to fail", and by this he means the Vatican II hierarchy, including the man he recognizes as Pope. But wait a minute! Isn't that the same hierarchy Matt & Co. will point to when arguing against Sedevacantism that we must have a visible hierarchy?! See what their "visible hierarchy" gets them in the end -- nothing! (Nay, it's worse than nothing because "nothing" would at least not entice them to lose the Faith!) And why is that? Because their hierarchy, however visible it may be, is not Catholic, and thus it cannot salvage the visibility of the Church at all! If it is necessary to constantly struggle against the "Pope" exercising his office lest one be influenced by what he teaches and decrees -- lest, in other words, one actually submit to him as "the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians" (Pope Pius IX, quoted above) -- then the church one is in cannot be the Catholic Church. How many more clues does God have to send to the semi-trads to make them realize that just as a non-Catholic church isn't the Catholic Church, so a non-Catholic hierarchy isn't the Catholic hierarchy and a non-Catholic "pope" isn't, well, the Catholic Pope?! Trying to be a Catholic while recognizing Francis (or any of his Novus Ordo predecessors) as the legitimate Catholic Pope is an exercise in Sisyphean absurdity, and Matt's candid comment only serves to underscore it. It is truly tragic to see how after all these years, The Remnant is still trying to keep the true Faith by denying the true Faith. In a manner of speaking, they are still trying to borrow their way out of debt. This undertaking is guaranteed to fail. By recognizing Francis as Pope, they think they are keeping themselves safe from schism, when the exact opposite is the case. In fact, one must wonder whether the following words of Pope Pius VI do not also apply to the recognize-and-resist traditionalists of our day:
How, in fact, can it be said that communion with the visible head of the Church is maintained, when this is limited to announcing the fact of the election merely, and at the same time an oath is taken which denies the authority of his primacy? In his capacity as head, do not all his members owe him the solemn promise of canonical obedience, which alone can maintain unity in the Church and avoid schisms in this mystical body founded by Christ our Lord? (Pope Pius VI, Apostolic Letter Quod Aliquantum; excerpted in Papal Teachings: The Church, n. 73)
Granted, the resistance trads have not taken an oath denying the Pope's authority but the substance of Pius' critique is equally applicable: It seems that they believe submission to the Roman Pontiff consists in nothing (or little) more than accepting his election and saying so. It will not do to say that all the Catholic doctrine laid out in this post is not applicable to our day for some reason. After all, Catholic doctrine is not relative to a particular era in ecclesiastical history. Being the truth, it has perennial validity, and to deny it is Modernism. The very people who are at other times so fond of arguing that we must stick to what has been believed "always, everywhere, and by all", may want to remember that this applies to the Papacy, too. It is now 2019 AD, and the "anything but Sedevacantism" bug does not show any signs of abating. However, people would do well to consider their last end and ask themselves whether they really want "Because I didn't want to be a sedevacantist" to be the answer they give at their Particular Judgment. Our Blessed Lord asked rhetorically: "For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?" (Mk 8:36). Losing one's soul is not worth it even for obtaining the entire world in exchange. As St. Thomas More (played by Paul Scofield) so famously remarked to Richie Rich in A Man for All Seasons: "But for Wales?!", we must now ask the recognize-and-resist trads the same question: But for Bergoglio?! In this post, we have done nothing but responded to Michael Matt's call "to go back to the basics, to study and teach what Catholics have believed for Millennia." The Remnant's editor concludes his New Year's Eve post thus: "Happy and Holy New Year. And for God's sake, keep the old Faith." Yes, Mr. Matt, keep the Old Faith indeed. Or rather, acquire it first. Image source: youtube.com (TheRemnantVideo; screenshot) License: Fair use
Michael Matt of The Remnant: “Our Pope has Lost the Faith”
Talk about losing the Faith…
Michael Matt of The Remnant:
“Our Pope has Lost the Faith”
Great movie set, horrible theology…
It’s a new year, and we’re ready to make a prediction: By the time Dec. 31, 2019 rolls around, “Pope” Francis will still not be a Catholic, and the semi-traditionalist publication The Remnant will, after numerous articles and videos denouncing him, still hold that he’s nevertheless the Pope of the Catholic Church.
We are quite confident in this prediction because, alas, it is not unwarranted but solidly grounded in newly-released evidence.
On Dec. 31, 2018, the editor-in-chief of The Remnant, Mr. Michael Matt, posted a brief New Year’s Eve reflection about the sorry state of our world, our society, and the Vatican II Sect. At one point he observes:
Our families are broken beyond repair, our priests are predators, our Pope has lost the Faith, our governments are the embodiment of Satan at work. Could there be greater chastisement than us without God?
(Michael J. Matt, “What Catholics Believe [Two New Year’s Resolutions from Michael Matt]”, The Remnant, Dec. 31, 2018; underlining added.)
Notice the underlined part: “our Pope has lost the Faith.”
It is hard to grasp to what — please pardon the directness — idiotic statements intelligent people can be led as a consequence of their obstinate refusal to countenance the notion that the Faith-wrecking and soul-destroying enemy of Jesus Christ currently occupying the Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City is not at the same time His Vicar. But we’ll return to that in a moment.
After encouraging his readers to implore the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Matt adds:
…let us resolve to go back to the basics, to study and teach what Catholics have believed for Millennia–to cement it into our lives and into the lives of our children–so that we may steel ourselves with the armor of the Old Faith and survive what’s to come. Nothing else, it seems to me, really matters as much as recourse to the Queen of Heaven, an unyielding commitment to Tradition and total immersion in the old Faith.
We agree: That is a really great idea! In this post, we’re going to do our part in assisting The Remnant‘s leadership and readership with getting to know traditional Roman Catholic teaching — specifically, concerning the Papacy. For those rolling their eyes now or breathing a sigh of annoyance, make no mistake about the importance of this, for “without exception, all doctrines which the Church proposes must be accepted” (Pope Pius IX, Encyclical Quartus Supra, n. 7). This isn’t optional.
So, let us examine the question: Can the Pope lose the Faith? Here is some of what the true Popes have taught on the matter over the centuries (all underlining added):
Pope Pelagius II
(For) you know that the Lord proclaims in the Gospel: Simon, Simon, behold Satan has desired to have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I have asked the Father for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren [Lk 22:31-32].
Consider, most dear ones, that the Truth could not have lied, nor will the faith of PETER be able to be shaken or changed forever. For although the devil desired to sift all the disciples, the Lord testifies that He Himself asked for PETER alone and wished the others to be confirmed by him; and to him also, in consideration of a greater love which he showed the Lord before the rest, was committed the care of feeding the sheep [cf. Jn 21:15ff.]; and to him also He handed over the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and upon him He promised to build his Church, and He testified that the gates of hell would not prevail against it [cf. Mt 16:16ff.].
(Apostolic Letter Quod ad Dilectionem; Denz. 246)
The holy Church built upon a rock, that is Christ, and upon Peter or Cephas, the son of John who first was called Simon, because by the gates of Hell, that is, by the disputations of heretics which lead the vain to destruction, it would never be overcome; thus Truth itself promises, through whom are true, whatsoever things are true: “The gates of hell will not prevail against it” [Mt 16:18]. The same Son declares that He obtained the effect of this promise from the Father by prayers, by saying to Peter: “Simon, behold Satan etc.” [Lk 23:31]. Therefore, will there be anyone so foolish as to dare to regard His prayer as in anyway vain whose being willing is being able? By the See of the chief of the Apostles, namely by the Roman Church, through the same Peter, as well as through his successors, have not the comments of all the heretics been disapproved, rejected, and overcome, and the hearts of the brethren in the faith of Peter which so far neither has failed, nor up to the end will fail, been strengthened?
(Apostolic Letter In Terra Pax; Denz. 351)
All who defend the faith should aim to implant deeply in your faithful people the virtues of piety, veneration, and respect for this supreme See of Peter. Let the faithful recall the fact that Peter, Prince of Apostles is alive here and rules in his successors, and that his office does not fail even in an unworthy heir. Let them recall that Christ the Lord placed the impregnable foundation of his Church on this See of Peter [Mt 16:18] and gave to Peter himself the keys of the kingdom of Heaven [Mt 16:19]. Christ then prayed that his faith would not fail, and commanded Peter to strengthen his brothers in the faith [Lk 22:32]. Consequently the successor of Peter, the Roman Pontiff, holds a primacy over the whole world and is the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians.
(Encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, n. 16)
Now you know well that the most deadly foes of the Catholic religion have always waged a fierce war, but without success, against this Chair; they are by no means ignorant of the fact that religion itself can never totter and fall while this Chair remains intact, the Chair which rests on the rock which the proud gates of hell cannot overthrow and in which there is the whole and perfect solidity of the Christian religion. Therefore, because of your special faith in the Church and special piety toward the same Chair of Peter, We exhort you to direct your constant efforts so that the faithful people of France may avoid the crafty deceptions and errors of these plotters and develop a more filial affection and obedience to this Apostolic See. Be vigilant in act and word, so that the faithful may grow in love for this Holy See, venerate it, and accept it with complete obedience; they should execute whatever the See itself teaches, determines, and decrees.
(Encyclical Inter Multiplices, n. 7)
So the fathers of the fourth council of Constantinople, following the footsteps of their predecessors, published this solemn profession of faith: ‘The first condition of salvation is to maintain the rule of the true faith. And since that saying of our lord Jesus Christ, You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church [Mt 16:18], cannot fail of its effect, the words spoken are confirmed by their consequences. For in the apostolic see the catholic religion has always been preserved unblemished, and sacred doctrine been held in honour. Since it is our earnest desire to be in no way separated from this faith and doctrine, we hope that we may deserve to remain in that one communion which the apostolic see preaches, for in it is the whole and true strength of the christian religion.’…
To satisfy this pastoral office, our predecessors strove unwearyingly that the saving teaching of Christ should be spread among all the peoples of the world; and with equal care they made sure that it should be kept pure and uncontaminated wherever it was received. It was for this reason that the bishops of the whole world … referred to this apostolic see those dangers especially which arose in matters concerning the faith. This was to ensure that any damage suffered by the faith should be repaired in that place above all where the faith can know no failing….
For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles. Indeed, their apostolic teaching was embraced by all the venerable fathers and reverenced and followed by all the holy orthodox doctors, for they knew very well that this see of St. Peter always remains unblemished by any error, in accordance with the divine promise of our Lord and Saviour to the prince of his disciples: I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren [Lk 22:32].
This gift of truth and never-failing faith was therefore divinely conferred on Peter and his successors in this see so that they might discharge their exalted office for the salvation of all, and so that the whole flock of Christ might be kept away by them from the poisonous food of error and be nourished with the sustenance of heavenly doctrine. Thus the tendency to schism is removed and the whole church is preserved in unity, and, resting on its foundation, can stand firm against the gates of hell.
(First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, Ch. 4)
…it can never be that the church committed to the care of Peter shall succumb or in any wise fail.
(Encyclical Satis Cognitum, n. 12)
These quotes should suffice to make the point. (More are available at our topical page on the Catholic Papacy).
In light of all this evidence, one is tempted to point out that evidently Francis isn’t the only who has lost the Faith. One of the biggest problems of our day is that, good intentions and personal piety aside, we have hordes of self-styled traditional Catholics who really do not adhere to, or even know about, just what the traditional Catholic teaching is on a subject as important as the Papacy.
In any case, what have we learned here with regard to the question of whether the Pope can lose the Faith? It’s not looking too good for the Remnant camp, is it?
Catholic magisterial documents are filled with teaching to the effect that the Pope cannot lose the Faith but is the invincible “citadel and bulwark of the Catholic Faith” (Pius IX, Encyclical Qui Nuper, n. 3), and that that is the whole point of the Papacy to begin with. Being a divine institution enjoying God’s special protection, the Papacy cannot fail. (It can, however, be vacant.)
While it may be possible that a Pope can lose the Faith as a private individual — something the Church has not ruled out — it absolutely cannot happen that the Pope could lose the Faith as Pope (for example, by promulgating heresy as part of his magisterium). But even if as a private individual the Pope could lose the Faith, once the matter becomes public, he would immediately cease to be Pope. That is the clear position of the Church since at least the First Vatican Council (1870) and also that of St. Robert Bellarmine, who “appeared even up to our times as a defender of the Roman Pontiff of such authority that the Fathers of the [First] Vatican Council employed his writings and opinions to the greatest possible extent”, as Pope Pius XI noted in his 1931 decree Providentissimus Deus, in which he proclaimed the good Cardinal Bellarmine a Doctor of the Church.
The problem is that Michael Matt and his semi-traditionalist buddies take the position that Francis has lost the Faith and continues to be Pope, and that his heresies can and do infect his official and magisterial acts, at least ostensibly: Their convenient and unfalsifiable copout is that when his heresies or other errors do infect his magisterium, then it’s not really his magisterium — for that very reason. In other words, Francis’ official teachings are spotless because whenever they’re not, they’re not really his official teachings. Thus they make a mockery of the idea of the papal magisterium as the proximate rule of Faith all Catholics can (and must) safely follow, even when it is not protected by infallibility, as explained by Cardinal Johann Franzelin in a book printed by the Holy See’s own publisher:
The Holy Apostolic See, to which the safeguarding of the deposit of faith and the attendant duty and office of feeding the universal Church for the salvation of souls have been divinely entrusted, can prescribe theological pronouncements — or even pronouncements to the extent they are connected with ones that are theological — as teachings to be followed, or it can censure them as teachings not to be followed, not solely with the intention of infallibly determining truth by a definitive pronouncement, but also necessarily and designedly apart from that aim, either without qualification or by way of limited supplements, to provide for the safety of Catholic doctrine (cf. Zaccaria, Antifebronius vindicatus, vol. II, diss. V, chap. 2, no. 1). Although infallible truth of doctrine may not be present in declarations of this kind (because, presumably, the intention of determining infallible truth is not present), nevertheless, infallible safety is present. I speak of both the objective safety of declared doctrine (either without qualification or by way of limited supplements, as mentioned) and the subjective safety of declared doctrine, insofar as it is safe for everyone to adopt it, and it is unsafe and impossible for anyone to refuse to adopt it without a violation of due submission towards the divinely established magisterium.
(Cardinal John Baptist Franzelin, Tractatus de Divina Traditione et Scriptura, 2nd ed. [Rome: Ex Typ. S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1875], Thesis XII, Principle VII; our translation; italics removed; underlining added. The entire work is available in English, translated by Ryan Grant, as On Divine Tradition [Sensus Traditionis Press, 2016].)
In 1950, Pope Pius XII reinforced this teaching by rebuking those who would use the excuse that they can dissent from the ordinary papal magisterium on the grounds that “it’s not infallible”:
Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: “He who heareth you, heareth me” [Lk 10:16]…
(Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Humani Generis, n. 20; underlining added.)
Now, if this Catholic teaching on the doctrinal safety and binding nature of papal teaching were applied to the Vatican II Church, then sheer absurdity would follow because one would then be obliged to hold contradictory positions.
For example, one would then have to hold both that
“This [imperfect] communion exists especially with the Eastern orthodox Churches, which, though separated from the See of Peter, remain united to the Catholic Church by means of very close bonds, such as the apostolic succession and a valid Eucharist…” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion”, n. 17);
“…neither any one of these [heretical-schismatic] societies by itself, nor all of them together, can in any manner constitute and be that One Catholic Church which Christ our Lord built, and established, and willed should continue; and … they cannot in any way be said to be branches or parts of that Church, since they are visibly cut off from Catholic unity” (Pope Pius IX, Apostolic Letter Iam Vos Omnes).
So, which is it?
The recognize-and-resist traditionalists have an easy man-made solution to this: Stick to the old, junk the new. In other words, refuse submission to (the person recognized as) the Roman Pontiff on an “as needed” basis — as determined by you, of course, or at least by your nearest semi-trad newspaper editor or retired lawyer.
The problem is just that this is the very definition of schism: “Schismatics are they who, though baptized as Christians, refuse to be subject to the Pope” (Fr. Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, vol. 1 [New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1935], p. 291; see also Canon 1325 §2). Schism is serious business and expels one from the Church of Christ: “For not every sin, however grave it may be, is such as of its own nature to sever a man from the Body of the Church, as does schism or heresy or apostasy” (Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis, n. 23).
In his New Year’s Eve post, Matt showcases how much he values the traditional Catholic teaching on submission to the Pope and the hierarchy in communion with him:
That doesn’t sound like the “absolute obedience and … joyous and constant adherence to this Chair of Peter” demanded by Pope Pius IX (Apostolic Letter Per Tristissima; excerpted in Papal Teachings: The Church, n. 419), does it?
Matt is frustrated and annoyed to no end because he is engaged in the impossible endeavor of squaring the theological circle. He is desperately trying to be a Catholic in a non-Catholic church and is even on record admitting that the Vatican II Sect is not the Catholic Church (see video here, at 16:42 mark, and see our commentary on it here).
The semi-trads know it’s a fake church, with fake sacraments, fake saints, fake annulments, and a fake magisterium — except for the “Pope”, of course, who couldn’t possibly be fake because then the gates of hell have prevailed, right? Yet the exact opposite is the case: It is only if all this soul-destroying fakery had come from true Popes that the gates of hell would have been victorious, not if it came from charlatans!
This important fact is humorously illustrated in the following set of memes:
So Michael Matt warns against “these demons” who try to “cause our faith to fail”, and by this he means the Vatican II hierarchy, including the man he recognizes as Pope. But wait a minute! Isn’t that the same hierarchy Matt & Co. will point to when arguing against Sedevacantism that we must have a visible hierarchy?! See what their “visible hierarchy” gets them in the end — nothing! (Nay, it’s worse than nothing because “nothing” would at least not entice them to lose the Faith!) And why is that? Because their hierarchy, however visible it may be, is not Catholic, and thus it cannot salvage the visibility of the Church at all!
If it is necessary to constantly struggle against the “Pope” exercising his office lest one be influenced by what he teaches and decrees — lest, in other words, one actually submit to him as “the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians” (Pope Pius IX, quoted above) — then the church one is in cannot be the Catholic Church.
How many more clues does God have to send to the semi-trads to make them realize that just as a non-Catholic church isn’t the Catholic Church, so a non-Catholic hierarchy isn’t the Catholic hierarchy and a non-Catholic “pope” isn’t, well, the Catholic Pope?! Trying to be a Catholic while recognizing Francis (or any of his Novus Ordo predecessors) as the legitimate Catholic Pope is an exercise in Sisyphean absurdity, and Matt’s candid comment only serves to underscore it.
It is truly tragic to see how after all these years, The Remnant is still trying to keep the true Faith by denying the true Faith. In a manner of speaking, they are still trying to borrow their way out of debt. This undertaking is guaranteed to fail. By recognizing Francis as Pope, they think they are keeping themselves safe from schism, when the exact opposite is the case. In fact, one must wonder whether the following words of Pope Pius VI do not also apply to the recognize-and-resist traditionalists of our day:
How, in fact, can it be said that communion with the visible head of the Church is maintained, when this is limited to announcing the fact of the election merely, and at the same time an oath is taken which denies the authority of his primacy? In his capacity as head, do not all his members owe him the solemn promise of canonical obedience, which alone can maintain unity in the Church and avoid schisms in this mystical body founded by Christ our Lord?
(Pope Pius VI, Apostolic Letter Quod Aliquantum; excerpted in Papal Teachings: The Church, n. 73)
Granted, the resistance trads have not taken an oath denying the Pope’s authority but the substance of Pius’ critique is equally applicable: It seems that they believe submission to the Roman Pontiff consists in nothing (or little) more than accepting his election and saying so.
It will not do to say that all the Catholic doctrine laid out in this post is not applicable to our day for some reason. After all, Catholic doctrine is not relative to a particular era in ecclesiastical history. Being the truth, it has perennial validity, and to deny it is Modernism. The very people who are at other times so fond of arguing that we must stick to what has been believed “always, everywhere, and by all”, may want to remember that this applies to the Papacy, too.
It is now 2019 AD, and the “anything but Sedevacantism” bug does not show any signs of abating. However, people would do well to consider their last end and ask themselves whether they really want “Because I didn’t want to be a sedevacantist” to be the answer they give at their Particular Judgment. Our Blessed Lord asked rhetorically: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Mk 8:36). Losing one’s soul is not worth it even for obtaining the entire world in exchange. As St. Thomas More (played by Paul Scofield) so famously remarked to Richie Rich in A Man for All Seasons: “But for Wales?!”, we must now ask the recognize-and-resist trads the same question: But for Bergoglio?!
In this post, we have done nothing but responded to Michael Matt’s call “to go back to the basics, to study and teach what Catholics have believed for Millennia.” The Remnant‘s editor concludes his New Year’s Eve post thus: “Happy and Holy New Year. And for God’s sake, keep the old Faith.”
Yes, Mr. Matt, keep the Old Faith indeed. Or rather, acquire it first.
Image source: youtube.com (TheRemnantVideo; screenshot)
License: Fair use
in Novus Ordo Wire Francis, Heresy, Michael Matt, Papacy, Schism, Sedevacantism, St. Robert Bellarmine 0
Like Sheep without a...
Francis Watch, Episode 38:...
Francis Watch, Episode 40: Amazon Synod, Tweaking the Our Father, and the Declaration of Truths July 3, 2019
India will now give the death penalty to child sex offenders — guess who’s against it: https://t.co/kEuezKiv53 Brilliant logic: Death sentence is no effective deterrent, but “stringent punishments” are! #catholic #mccarrick #popefrancis #tcot #trcot
View tweet on TwitterIn reply to ܟܪܺܣܛܝܳܢܳܐ
@Servus_Iesus Now you’ve insulted animals. No animal does such a thing!
Video: Woman Violently Pushes Novus Ordo Priest Off Stage During ‘Mass’ Live Broadcast - https://t.co/8wEO3ZDUAF #catholic
“Uncle Ted” #McCarrick reportedly involved in plan to fly thousands of Vietnamese orphans to United States - https://t.co/jbKi766qDC #catholic
Funny! Uber-NovusOrdo Massimo Faggioli discovers the evils of schism, when his sect teaches that schismatics are used by the Holy Ghost as means of salvation: https://t.co/uKDmYhb4dr #catholic #popefrancis
Mark Shea is frightened about the future of the Vatican II Sect….
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The Hundred-Foot Journey Is Simply Delightful
It’s fun when a story that is well off my radar becomes a movie and it ends up being both delightful and enjoyable to watch. The Hundred-Foot Journey is definitely one such movie. It is the story of an Indian family that is displaced from their home due to political unrest. As such they begin a journey through Europe to find a new home. After a near death experience the family inadvertently finds that home in a town in the French countryside. The family patriarch “Papa”, played by Om Puri, becomes enamored with and purchases a dilapidated restaurant for his family to start anew.
The fundamental problem is this restaurant is across the street from a high class French restaurant operated by Madame Mallory, played by Helen Mirren. A mere 100 feet from door to door. She is not amused by this at all, and a feud begins between the two restaurants. However, that’s hardly the grand sum total of the movie. Instead it becomes something so much more… in a very unencumbered way that really helps to make this shine.
At the core of the movie is the story of Papa’s son Hassan. From a young age Hassan was trained by his mother to be a chef. His true passion for the works is shown throughout the movie. Early on in the movie this is shown through his tasting of some raw sea urchin, and again later in a scene involving an omelet. Along the way he meets and falls in love with a woman, Marguerite, who also happens to work for Madame Mallory.
Much of this might all seem like spoilers, but really this movie doesn’t hold a lot of surprises. That is not to say that it’s predictable, but it has no sudden turns or suspenseful moments. As the story about the survival, growth, and evolution of this family are portrayed on the screen it’s very easy to be drawn in. Though initially the characters seem a little over the top, as time goes on you realize that’s by design. Over time it helps drive them toward a more realistic feel.
I’m entirely sure as to the appeal of this movie across a wide range of audiences. It’s definitely not a movie made for children. Much of the theater goers were of the “Above 50” crowd. That’s not a bad thing at all, not all movies are for everyone. As I said I found this movie to be both unexpected and enjoyable. If it seems at all interesting to you, it’s worth going to see. My one concern is the choice of release date – it doesn’t feel like a summer movie and would probably have been better served being released in the fall.
Author ToddPosted on August 8, 2014 August 8, 2014 Categories Disney Movie News, Disney Movie Reviews, Movie NewsTags Movie, Movie ReviewLeave a comment on The Hundred-Foot Journey Is Simply Delightful
Move It Movement At LEGOLAND Florida
Move it Movement Coming to
LEGOLAND Florida This Weekend
LEGOLAND Florida plays host for a second consecutive year to Cartoon Network’s MOVE IT MOVEMENT Tour on August 9 & 10. The summertime traveling event targets youth 6-14 and their parents, presented in partnership with the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition and in support of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative.
LEGOLAND Florida is hosting Cartoon Network’s MOVE IT MOVEMENT final tour stop.
Move It Movement Activities will include:
NBA/WNBA FIT & NBA Hoop Troop — kids can demonstrate their fitness level by testing their basketball skills and shoot against the clock for prizes;
The PGA of America Driving Range — updated to reflect the new PGA Sports Academy and its goal of developing young social and competitive golfers, kids are invited to drive the ball for accuracy and distance with The PGA driving range. Top scores are posted on the PGA Sports Academy leaderboard;
NFL PLAY 60 — kids can practice a variety of football-themed activities, including running patterns and passing skills;
Subway® Fresh Fit for Kids™ Football Sled Challenge – At the challenge, kids can learn the importance of piling the veggies on their favorite Subway sandwich, as they push a custom Subway football sled across the finish line.
Let’s Move!/PALA+ booth — a station set aside specifically for registration materials, nutrition tips and further information promoting participation with Let’s Move! and the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award.
The first 500 guests each day will also have the opportunity to win a pair MOVE IT MOVEMENT sunglasses after completing their ‘passport’ to each of the MOVE IT MOVEMENT stations around the park.
For more information, please visit Florida.LEGOLAND.com.
Author ShelleyPosted on August 8, 2014 August 7, 2014 Categories LEGOLAND FLORIDA, Special EventsLeave a comment on Move It Movement At LEGOLAND Florida
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Murphy wins NC-3 Republican runoff
By Joel Williams
State Rep. Greg Murphy defeated Dr. Joan Perry to win the Republican primary runoff for North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Murphy received 59.7% of the vote while Perry received 40.3%. In the April 30 Republican primary, Murphy received 22.5% of the vote and Perry received 15.4%.
Murphy will face Allen Thomas (D) and Tim Harris (L) in the September 10 special election. That special election will fill the vacancy left by Walter Jones (R), who died on February 10, 2019.
Murphy and Perry split support from outside groups and members of Congress. Murphy received the support of Rep. Mark Meadows, the House Freedom Caucus, and the National Rifle Association. Perry received the support of all 13 Republican women in Congress, Winning for Women Action Fund, and FreedomWorks for America. Earlier this week, Rudy Giuliani recorded robocalls on behalf of Murphy, and Newt Gingrich recorded robocalls on behalf of Perry.
Joel Williams is a staff writer at Ballotpedia and can be reached at joel.williams@ballotpedia.org
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One-Fourth of Forest Loss Permanent; Global Deforestation Not Slowing Down
U of A researchers have found that more than a fourth of forest loss from 2001 to 2015 is permanent
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – More than a fourth of global forest loss from 2001 to 2015 is permanent – meaning these areas likely will not return to forest again – and can be attributed primarily to commodity agriculture, such as palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia, according to a new study published today in Science, one of the world’s top academic journals.
The study was conducted by reseachers at The Sustainability Consortium; a global organization jointly administered by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University; the World Resources Institute, a global research organization; and the University of Maryland.
The study revealed a geographic shift in deforestation, which is permanent forest loss, from Brazil to Southeast Asia over the past 15 years, but the overall rate of deforestation globally had not slowed down.
Deforestation for commodity production constituted 27 percent of global tree-cover loss. This driver was attributed predominantly to commodity-driven agriculture, especially palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia. Areas that experienced this type of deforestation were large swaths of South America, areas of the U.S. Central Plains, the rangeland of eastern Australia and scattered areas of west and central Africa.
“Since 2010, leaders of nearly 450 companies signed commitments to achieve zero deforestation in their supply chains by 2020,” said Christy Slay, director of technical alignment for The Sustainability Consortium and co-author of the study. “Consumers and environmental organizations are demanding it, and companies know it is the socially responsible thing to do. Yet companies find it difficult to determine the source of their supply beyond the location of their direct supplier. Our findings, now incorporated into the consortium’s commodity mapping tool, will help companies predict where agriculture and wood fiber products are sourced and what deforestation risk is present.”
The authors used nearly 4,700 satellite images to train a computer model to identify unique patterns that revealed the causes of recent tree cover loss. Using a 10-by-10 kilometer grid for the entire globe, the computer model helped identify the most likely causes of forest disturbance – commodity production, forestry, shifting agriculture, wildfire and urbanization.
Forest loss, as opposed to deforestation, applies to areas cleared of forest that have experienced regrowth or have the potential for regrowth.
The major drivers of forest loss:
27 percent — commodity production
26 percent — forestry operations
24 percent — shifting agriculture
23 percent — wildfires
0.5 percent — urban development
“Although many changes to tree cover were temporary, such as when a forest recovered from a wildfire or when timber farms were replanted, patterns seen in the imagery showed that a significant proportion of global forests are not growing back,” said Philip Curtis, consultant for The Sustainability Consortium and the study’s lead author.
The study’s findings will be publicly available on Global Forest Watch, the leading global forest monitoring tool run by the World Resources Institute.
About The Sustainability Consortium: The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) is a global organization transforming the consumer goods industry to deliver more sustainable consumer products. We are dedicated to improving the sustainability of consumer products. Our members and partners include manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, service providers, NGOs, civil society organizations, governmental agencies and academics. Each member brings valuable perspectives and expertise. TSC convenes our diverse stakeholders to work collaboratively to build science-based decision tools and solutions that address sustainability issues that are materially important throughout a product’s supply chain and lifecycle. TSC also offers a portfolio of services to help drive effective implementation. The Sustainability Consortium has more than 100 members and there are over 2,000 users of TSC tools worldwide; it convenes more than 200 global organizations annually over an average of 75 networking opportunities. Formed in 2009, TSC is jointly administered by Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas. It also has a European office at Wageningen University and Research, and a Chinese office in Tianjin, China. For more information visit www.sustainabilityconsortium.org.
About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.
Sam M. Walton College of Business
Erika Ferrin, director of marketing, communication and development
The Sustainability Consortium
480-965-7752, erika.ferrin@sustainabilityconsortium.org
Philip Curtis, independent scientist, consultant
814-470-7367, philip.curtis@philipcurtisconsulting.com
Christy Slay, director of technical alignment
479-575-4638, christy.slay@sustainabilityconsortium.org
Matt McGowan, science and research communications officer
479-575-4246, dmcgowa@uark.edu
Commodity Mapping Tool
Connect with the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer coordinator at the University of Arkansas for opportunities to participate in social events, mentor students or more.
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Here's the history behind the Presidential Train Car that will transport George H.W. Bush
USA Today December 6, 2018
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Former President George H.W. Bush will travel to his final resting place in a one-of-a-kind train.
The Union Pacific Locomotive No. 4141 was made to honor the 41st president, who died Nov. 30, the transport company states on its website.
Instead of the usual yellow paint, the custom-painted train is different shades of blue, featuring the colors of the Air Force One used during Bush's presidency to symbolize national pride and strength.
The locomotive’s rear panel features elements from Air Force One’s wings and tail, including the American flag and sweeping lines of forward motion to represent progress, the website states.
Bush's casket will travel the railroad route through Texas cities Spring, Magnolia and Navasota before stopping at College Station on Thursday, where he will be buried at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Dec. 5: George H.W. Bush returns to Houston church he spent 50 years worshipping for final goodbye
Dec. 5: George H.W. Bush funeral: These are the moments you missed
The rail route from Spring to College Station is roughly 70 miles and takes about 2 hours and 30 minutes.
More about the 4141 train
On Oct. 18, 2005, the George Bush Locomotive was unveiled during a ceremony near his presidential library on the Texas A&M University campus in College Station.
The Union Pacific locomotive marked the sixth train painted in colors other than the usual “Armour Yellow” paint.
Dec. 5: George H.W. Bush state funeral: 'America's last great soldier-statesman'
Dec. 5: Silence, straight-ahead stares and candy mark rare full meeting of presidents' club at Bush funeral
Since production, the locomotive has delivered shipments across all 23 states served by Union Pacific.
"The powerful locomotive continues to lead the way today, a fitting tribute to celebrate President Bush’s lifelong service to our country," the website states.
The diesel-electric locomotive measures 15 feet, 11 inches tall and weighs 420,000 pounds with a full tank of diesel fuel that holds 4,900 gallons. It's equipped with a 4,300 horsepower engine and can travel up to 70 miles per hour.
Presidents on trains
Before aircraft, if a president needed to travel anywhere in the United States, he went by train. Presidents used trains to travel for business, to campaign and even to get to their final resting places.
Follow Monica Lopez on Twitter: @CallerMonica
This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Here's the history behind the Presidential Train Car that will transport George H.W. Bush
Barack Obama Statue Added to South Dakota's 'City of Presidents' — and Daughter Sasha Is with Him
PHOTOS: Power outage in New York City causes partial blackout
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NKoreans mark key holiday, oblivious to tensions
JEAN H. LEE
Associated Press April 15, 2013
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Oblivious to international tensions over a possible North Korean missile launch, Pyongyang residents spilled into the streets Monday to celebrate a major national holiday, the birthday of their first leader, Kim Il Sung.
Girls in red and pink jackets skipped along streets festooned with celebratory banners and flags and parents pushed strollers with babies bundled up against the spring chill as residents of the isolated, impoverished nation began observing a three-day holiday.
There was no sense of panic in the North Korean capital, where very few locals have access to international broadcasts and foreign newspaper headlines speculating about an imminent missile launch and detailing the international diplomacy under way to try to rein Pyongyang in. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry toured the region for four days through Monday to try to tamp down emotions and coordinate Washington's response with Beijing, North Korea's most important ally.
Foreign governments have been struggling to assess how seriously to take North Korea's recent torrent of rhetoric — including warnings of possible nuclear war — as it expresses its anger over continuing U.S.-South Korea military maneuvers just across the border. Officials in South Korea, the United States and Japan say intelligence indicates that North Korean officials, fresh off an underground nuclear test in February, are ready to launch a medium-range missile.
North Korea's own media gave little indication Monday of how high the tensions are.
The Rodong Sinmun, the Workers' Party newspaper, featured photos and coverage of current leader Kim Jong Un's overnight visit to the Kumsusan mausoleum to pay respects to his grandfather. There was only one line at the end of the article vowing to bring down the "robber-like U.S. imperialists."
Kim Jong Un's renovation of the memorial palace that once served as his grandfather's presidential offices was opened to the public on Monday, the vast cement plaza replaced by fountains, park benches, trellises and tulips. Stretches of green lawn were marked by small signs indicating which businesses — including the Foreign Trade Bank recently added to a U.S. Treasury blacklist — and government agencies donated funds to help pay for the landscaping.
Braving the cold, gray weather, people lined up in droves to lay bouquets of fake flowers at the bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and his son, late leader Kim Jong Il, in downtown Pyongyang. It's a scene repeated for every major holiday in North Korea, where loyalty to the Kims and to the state are drummed in citizens from an early age.
They queued at roadside snack stands for rations of peanuts, a holiday tradition. Cheers and screams from a soccer match filled the air.
"Although the situation is tense, people have got bright faces and are very happy," said Han Kyong Sim, a drink stand worker.
Monday marked the official start of the new year according to North Korea's "juche" calendar, which begins with the day of Kim Il Sung's birth in 1912. But unlike last year, the centennial of his birthday, there are no big parades in store this week, and North Koreans were planning to use it as a day to catch up with friends and family.
But while there has been almost no sense of crisis in Pyongyang, North Korea's official posture toward the outside appears to be as hardline as ever.
On Sunday, it rejected South Korea's proposal to resolve tensions through dialogue. North Korea said it has no intention of talking with Seoul unless it abandons what it called the rival South's confrontational posture. South Korea's unification ministry spokesman, Kim Hyung-suk, called that response "very regrettable" on Monday, but said that the South remains open to dialogue.
A top North Korean leader, Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, also told a gathering of high officials Sunday that the North must bolster its nuclear arsenal further and "wage a stronger all-out action with the U.S. to cope with the prevailing wartime situation," according to footage from the North's state TV.
South Korea's defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, told a parliamentary committee in Seoul on Monday that North Korea still appears poised to launch a missile from its east coast, though he declined to disclose how he got the information.
Many observers had predicted North Korea would launch the missile ahead of Monday's holiday, because similar past launches have come ahead of key national commemorations.
The leadership may have shied away from doing that because reports of a launch drew too much scrutiny and prompted U.S. and South Korean forces to go on alert, said Kim Jin Moo, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in South Korea. The North may choose instead to launch it once tensions have calmed down a bit, he said.
"I think they didn't launch the missile because they may be worried it would be shot down," Kim said, adding that later "North Korea may abruptly fire the missile early one morning."
Kerry, during his trip, warned North Korea not to conduct a missile test, saying it will be an act of provocation that "will raise people's temperatures" and further isolate the country and its people. In Tokyo on Sunday, Kerry said the U.S. was "prepared to reach out" but Pyongyang must first lower tensions and honor previous agreements.
North Korea has also pulled workers from the Kaesong factory complex on its side of the Demilitarized Zone, the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement, in a pointed jab at South Korea. South Korean-run factories provided more than 50,000 jobs for North Korea, where two-thirds of the population struggle with food shortages, according to the World Food Program.
North Korea has issued no specific warnings to ships and aircraft that a missile test is imminent, and is also continuing efforts to increase tourism.
Associated Press writer Eric Talmadge in Pyongyang and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. Follow Lee, AP's bureau chief for Pyongyang and Seoul, at www.twitter.com/newsjean.
Photo finish decides 10k open water race at world titles
Intercontinental Cup 2019: Fajr Ibrahim - India have a different mentality now
A new photo of Trump with Kim Jong Un was hung in the White House next to one of him with Queen Elizabeth
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Jan 14, 2018 News Hour Correspondent -
Panic broke out on The Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737-800 when it skidded off the runway at a Turkish airport
The Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737-800 with 168 passengers and crew had flown from Ankara and landed at Trabzon on the Black Sea coast late on Saturday.
Panic broke out on a passenger jet when it skidded off the runway at a Turkish airport and plunged down the side of a cliff overlooking the sea.
The Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737-800 with 168 passengers and crew had flown from Ankara and landed at Trabzon on the Black Sea coast late on Saturday, reports BBC.
Everyone on board was evacuated safely, provincial governor Yucel Yavuz said. No injuries were reported. The cause of the accident is being investigated, officials said. State-run Anadolu news agency said there was panic on board as the plane went out of control.
“We tilted to the side. The front was down while the plane’s rear was up. There was panic, people shouting, screaming,” passenger Fatma Gordu was quoted as saying.
Mr. Yavuz said the airport was closed for several hours while investigations took place.
In a statement, Pegasus Airlines said the plane “had a runway excursion incident” as it landed at Trabzon.
AviationBoeing 737-800The Pegasus AirlinesTurkeyWeirdo
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Home Crown Honours Three Plants for Sustainability Achievements
Crown Honours Three Plants for Sustainability Achievements
Crown Holdings, Inc., a leading supplier of metal packaging products worldwide, has recognised three of its facilities for outstanding sustainability achievements from 2015 to 2016.
First introduced in 2012, the biennial Chairman’s Sustainability Awards program honours exemplary contributions made by the employees based in the Company’s international network of 146 facilities.
The Chairman’s Award Program consists of three categories:
• Crown’s Economic Sustainability Award recognises actions and projects that display a significant, measurable reduction in the Company’s use of resources that enhance Crown’s competitiveness, including energy, water, freight and fuel.
2016 Category Winner: Crown’s beverage can plant in Hanoi, Vietnam implemented a holistic and comprehensive effort to save energy, including an innovative metering system to reduce electricity use. The program introduced unique sensors that adjust vacuum blower speed to can density as well as LED lamps, more efficient air conditioners and new compressors. Since 2014, the Hanoi facility has decreased energy usage per can by 13.8%, even as can production has increased by 18.2%. The program also helped the plant achieve external recognition through ISO 50001 certification.
• Crown’s Environmental Sustainability Award recognises Crown facilities that demonstrate excellence in protecting the environment by minimising the impact of the Company’s operations, reducing material consumption and improving recycling or reuse.
2016 Category Winner: Crown’s beverage can facility in Agoncillo, Spain was recognised for its initiative to repair plastic pallets used throughout the plant instead of disposing or replacing them, which has saved the plant 525,000 tons of waste. In addition to offering environmental and economic benefits and a scalable idea that can be implemented in other Crown locations, the outsourcing of the repair work to a company that hires disabled workers allows the plant to make a meaningful contribution to its local community.
• Crown’s Social Sustainability Award recognises plants that exhibit a significant impact on the well-being of their workforce and/or the local community.
2016 Category Winner: Crown’s CMB Engineering canmaking equipment facility in Shipley, United Kingdom was acknowledged for its employee safety program called “Cool To Be Safe.” Since 2012, the program has helped reduce workplace injuries by more than 80%. As an extension of CROWN Europe’s Human Factor Training program, the initiative focused on having employees examine how their behaviours can impact their personal safety and those around them, and how those actions can be modified to become a safer person at work and at home.
“We continue to be impressed by the dedication of our employees to raise the standards by which we operate and to seek opportunities to conserve resources, enhance safety and productivity and support their local communities,” said Timothy J. Donahue, President and Chief Executive Officer at Crown Holdings, Inc. “We congratulate the winners of the 2016 Chairman’s Sustainability Awards and believe they serve as outstanding examples of the Company’s commitment to continuous improvement and to making sustainability an integral part of how we do business. They also advance our progress towards the ambitious sustainability goals we set to achieve by the end of 2020.”
www.crowncork.com
Crown Sustainability
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Chile On Hell Is A Hard Rocking Music History Lesson From Anthrax
Posted on August 29, 2014 by philspicks
Courtesy: Megaforce Records
2014 is almost over. But even as the year’s last months start to wind down, things haven’t cooled down in terms of the year’s new live recordings. As the year’s final months wind by, critics everywhere will begin firming up their annual “Best Of” lists for publication later in December. Most critics will focus mainly on the year’s best overall movies and music. And then there will be those critics and writers that will focus on specific lists such as the year’s best new pop albums, rock albums, hard rock albums, etc. It would seem that among all of the lists that are compiled, one category that doesn’t necessarily receive the attention that it deserves is that of the year’s best new live recordings in terms of DVDs and Blu-rays. This critic’s personal list of the year’s best new live recordings is already firming up quite well. There are still at least a couple of spots left open on that list, though. And one of those spots will most definitely be taken up by veteran hard rock/metal band Anthrax’s new live DVD Chile on Hell. This new live recording is one that any long-time Anthrax fan will appreciate and enjoy first and foremost for its set list. While this concert is not necessarily what one would call a “career-spanning” show, it is one that both the band’s original fans and its newest fans alike will appreciate. The next aspect of the DVD that audiences will appreciate is the band’s stage presence. Some might consider this something minor. But in reality, it is just as important in keeping audiences at home fully engaged. And last but most definitely not least of all worth noting is the concert’s collective audio and video mix. The two together present a certain raw look and sound that are just as impressive as any more spit shined and perfected recordings that are currently available to audiences. Each of the factors noted here play their own important role in the overall enjoyment of Chile on Hell. Altogether, they make this DVD a dark horse candidate for a spot on at least this critic’s list of the year’s best new live recordings.
Far too often, the term career-spanning is tossed around when it comes to live recordings. Sadly, very far too few of those recordings live up to such hype. That isn’t to say that no recording lives up to that label. Rather, far too few live recordings live up to said label. Thankfully, neither Anthrax nor Megaforce Records make any attempt to call Chile on Hell one of that mass of overly hyped recordings. Rather, they let the recording speak for itself. And the statement made is loud and crystal clear as audiences will see in the show’s set list. The nearly two-hour show includes some of the material included on Worship Music and the band’s recently released EP Anthems. But by and large, the set list presented in Chile on Hell takes audiences back to the band’s earlier days. To be more exact, the band largely reaches back to its 1985 and 1987 albums Spreading The Disease and Among The Living for this concert. 1990’s Persistence of Time of also represented here courtesy of the song ‘In My World.’ Such a mix of classics and more recent songs will bring in both the band’s original fan base and its newer and possibly younger fan base at the same time. One could argue that in presenting such a set list, the band is paying respect to its original fan base while teaching a valuable music history lesson to those younger and newer fans. Even if this was not the original intent on the part of the band or of Megaforce Records, it is one of the results. It makes the set list even more solid as the DVD’s center.
The set list and the potentially latent function of said list are together a solid starting point in the success and enjoyment of Chile on Hell. Just as important as the set list and its effects is the band’s stage presence. It goes without saying that the band’s stage presence in this stage is full-on. Front man Joey Belladonna and founding guitarist Scott Ian exude so much energy; so much in fact that even audiences at home will find themselves wanting to sing along and head bang with them. Such a powerful translation even on-screen is quite a statement. Belladonna’s band mates add their own energy through their performances. Whether through Charlie Benante’s pounding drumming, the spot on shredding of Shadows Fall guitarist Jonathan Donais (who replaced Rob Caggiano) or even bassist Frank Bello, the band collectively keeps the audience in attendance at the recording fully engaged from start to finish. And home viewing audiences will feel that energy themselves, leading them to be fully engaged throughout, too. That the band’s stage presence could translate so well and have such impact even on home viewers is a tribute to the band itself. And coupled with the show’s set list, the overall effect of the show is made even stronger, thus making the recording in whole all the more enjoyable for all of the band’s legions of fans.
The set list arranged for Anthrax’s show in Chile and the band’s stage presence combine to make Chile on Hell an impressive addition to any Anthrax fan’s personal collection. The recording’s collective audio and video mix is the final touch to the whole presentation. The video doesn’t have the spit shined look of so many other live recordings before it. Rather, it has a grainier, more raw look. Yet that look actually plays into the overall presentation. That is because it actually serves to help heighten the energy exuded by both the band and the audience. Staying on that topic, audiences will enjoy the camera attached to the end of guitarist Scott Ian’s guitar. That angle and the others used throughout the concert are used at just the right moments to make for a wonderful impact. And despite being recorded at an indoor venue, the concert’s audio mix turned out impressive in its own right, too. Balancing audio levels at indoor venues always has and always will present its own challenges. In the case of this concert, those charged with balancing the concert’s audio levels both at the show and in post-production are to be commended for their efforts. The end result of their work is a concert recording in which neither the vocals nor the music overpowered the other. And together with the equally professional work on the concert’s video mix, it proves to be a concert experience that any of Anthrax’s legions of fans will enjoy no less with each watch.
Those charged with handling the audio and video mix for Chile on Hell are to be highly commended for their high quality of work in this concert. The band and its label are to be commended, too. The set list serves a dual purpose. And the band’s stage presence will keep audiences fully engaged from start to finish. All three of these factors come together to make Chile on Hell a concert that while bare bones, is one that any hard rock fan and any Anthrax fan will appreciate and enjoy. The DVD will be available Tuesday, September 16th via Megaforce Records. Fans can find out more about this upcoming live recording and keep up with all of the latest updates from Anthrax online at http://anthrax.com, http://anthraxarmy.com, http://twitter.com/anthrax, and http://www.facebook.com/anthrax. To keep up with the latest sports and entertainment reviews and news, go online to http://www.facebook.com/philspicks and “Like” it. Fans can always keep up with the latest sports and entertainment reviews and news in the Phil’s Picks blog at https://philspicks.wordpress.com.
This entry was posted in Celebrities, Concerts, Internet, Music and tagged Anthrax, celebrities, charlie benante, Dry Kill Logic, entertainment, facebook, Frank Bello, internet, Joey Belladonna, Jonathan Donais, Megaforce Records, music, Phils Picks, Rob Caggiano, scott ian, Shadows Fall, Twitter, Wordpress by philspicks. Bookmark the permalink.
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Tag Archives: PinkHistory
On This Day in Pink History… 17th July 2002, Pink performed on Good Morning America
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, Missundaztood, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory on July 17, 2019 by pink history.
Pink met Carey Hart at the 2001 X Games in Philadelphia. She said she would never date a motocross racer… however four years later on 13th July 2005, Pink asked Carey to marry her during a Mammoth Lakes motocross race. She was assisting the race and wrote “Will you marry me? I’m serious!” on a pit board. He initially didn’t notice and continued on for another lap. When he did notice, he veered off the track and he said YES! But then Pink made him finish the race because she didn’t want to marry a loser!
They married in Costa Rica in early 2006, however, in 2008 Pink confirmed that she and Carey had separated. In April 2009, Pink stated that the couple had gone to marriage counseling and were back together – they were never divorced. In November 2010, the couple announced they were expecting their first child and on 2nd June 2011, Willow Sage Hart was born.
Carey has appeared in several of Pink’s music videos (Just Like a Pill, So What, Just Give Me a Reason and True Love), and has also travelled with her on tours. They have matching ‘Tru Luv’ tattoos, and also Carey has a several tattoos of Pink.
The best surpise ever, when your husband walks on stage in front of thousands of fans… wearing your stage costume…!
Supercross 2014 Interview
Click image for more photos
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, Carey Hart, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory on July 13, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in Pink History… 7th July 2006, Pink was on the NBC Today Show
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, I'm Not Dead, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer on July 7, 2019 by pink history.
In summer 2012, Pink was back with her new single, Blow Me (One Last Kiss), from her up-coming album, The Truth About Love. Written by Pink, Greg Kurstin, Dann Gallucci, Eric Judy and Isaac Brock, and produced by Kurstin, the song was critically acclaimed and named as “classic Pink”.
Speaking to Billboard Magazine in August 2012, Greg Kurstin revealed that he and the singer had trouble coming up with a name for the track.The producer had been working with Pink on an intense nine-day songwriting session that yielded six songs. One particular track, an empowering breakup anthem in the vein of “So What,” seemed like it might be written and recorded within a day-it just needed a title. “She kept coming back to ‘Let’s throw in the towel,’ and it was one of those things where we had to say, ‘Is that line really the song?'” Kurstin recalled. “So then I came back with ‘Blow me … one last kiss’ and we got really excited. Most of the time with Pink she’s so strong writing lyrics I don’t really interfere. I let her do her thing. That could’ve been the only time I did that.”
Blow Me (One Last Kiss) first appeared on the Australian Singles Chart in mid July 2012, debuting at number 1. The song peaked at number 8 on the New Zealand Top 40 chart. It also debuted at number 13 on the Canadian Hot 100 chart. In Ireland, the song debuted at number 23 on the Irish Singles Chart. In the United Kingdom, the song debuted at number 3 with sales over 70,000 in September 2012 behind Ne-Yo’s Let Me Love You (Until You Learn to Love Yourself) and The Script’s Hall of Fame. Despite of not reaching No.1 in the Singles Chart it did reach No.1 In the UK iTunes Chart, it debuted at number one in Scotland.
In the United States, the song debuted at number 58 on the BillboardHot 100 and peaked at number 5. As of August 2013, Pink is placed joint-third with Lady Gaga (12) behind Rihanna (24) and Beyoncé (14) for most top ten hits for a female artist since 2000. The song also topped the German Airplay Chart, becoming Pink’s tenth consecutive single to do so and increasing her (previously broken) record for the most consecutive number 1 singles in Germany. The song also appeared on the South African Airplay Chart, reaching a peak position of number 2. On Billboard’s Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart, it gave Pink her fourth number-one single on this chart. It has sold 2,164,000 copies in the US as of July 2013.
There are two versions of the music video for Blow Me (One Last Kiss). The original version is black & white with splashes of colour. The second version is the same, except that it is in colour. The video features opening titles in French and begins with Pink having a picnic with her love interest (Sebastian de la Forza). The two lean in for a kiss, which is interrupted by him taking a phone call. Pink splashes him with red wine, and walks away through the trees. She meets another man on his motorbike (Alexander Ercheverria) and goes home with him. He draws a portrait of her. Pink watches through the window as many female guests arrive for a party the man has organised. During the party, she dances with one of the women until she is interrupted by the man who brought her home. Pink wears a black suit with her hair pushed back and dances with the woman (Mosh). The man gets down on one knee and proposes. Pink accepts by giving him her hand but is disappointed to find out the proposal was meant for her dance partner. During their wedding ceremony, Pink is dressed completely in black, as if she is attending a funeral. A flying bike appears above the guests (Andreas-Holm Hansen), which is carrying a heart-shaped balloon. The balloon pops, and red liquid covers the guests as Pink sings and dances cheerfully. She joins the driver of the flying bike, and they fly away together at the end of this video clip across the countryside, into the sunset, under a bridge, over trees and up close to a big hill on the high flying bicycle with eagle wings.
MTV’s James Montgomery assured Pink’s fans that she hasn’t changed, while crediting the video for its angry and funny nature, saying “While your heroine might be saying she’s a changed woman, the ‘Blow Me’ video proves that she’s not. It’s just as angry as her previous clips, and nearly as funny too.”
The single also came with a b-side, The King is Dead but the Queen is Alive.
PinkHistory’s favourite performances of Blow Me (One Last Kiss)
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer, the truth about love on July 3, 2019 by pink history.
According to Pink’s official Facebook page, the music video for True Love was planned to premiere on July 1, 2013. The video was leaked online on June 30, on the website Direct Lyrics; however, a few hours later the video was released to her official VEVO account, a day earlier than planned.
The video directed by Sophie Muller (who also directed videos for Trouble and I Don’t Believe You) features Pink, her husband Carey Hart and her 2-year-old daughter Willow. It is the fourth music video that Hart appears alongside P!nk. The video is a melody of flashing and swirling colors. Pink stated that she had no time for a dramatic music video, (like her previous videos for Just Give Me a Reason and Try, which show Pink’s emotional and dramatic side) due to her being on her sold-out worldwide tour, backstage footage of which is featured in the video. Lily Allen was filmed separately, and during her short part in the song she is shown cutting vegetables and throwing them into a blender.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, Carey Hart, lily allen, music, music video, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer, the truth about love, true love, Willow Sage Hart on June 30, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in Pink History… 29th June 2002, Pink played at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on the Party Tour
Get the Party Started
Missundaztood
Medley: I Love You / You’re All I Need to Get By
Janie’s Got a Gun
You Make Me Sick
Just like a Pill
Lonely Girl
Janis Joplin Medley: Summertime/Piece of My Heart/Me and Bobby McGee
My Vietnam
Eventually
Don’t Let Me Get Me
Thanks to CLD from pinkspage for uploading the video and providing the setlist
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, concerts, Missundaztood, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer on June 29, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in Pink History… 24th June 2006 Pink performed at B96 Summer Bash in Chicago
Cuz I Can
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, I'm Not Dead, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer on June 24, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in Pink History… 20th June 2012, Pink announced her new single, Blow Me (One Last Kiss)
Pink announced her new single from her upcoming album in June 2012 with a short video message to fans.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer, the truth about love on June 20, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in #PinkHistory… 20th June 2003, Feel Good Time was released
Feel Good Time was released in June 2003 as the lead single from the international edition of Pink’s third studio album Try This. The song features William Orbit and was also used on the soundtrack of the 2003 film Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. The single peaked at number sixty on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and number three on the UK Singles Chart, and has been certified gold by the ARIA.
The song was originally written by and recorded by Beck and William Orbit with the intention of being a Beck track, but after Pink wanted to cover the song, Beck gave the song to her. Beck’s vocals and a guitar were removed and replaced with Pink’s vocals. Beck’s original was later posted on Orbit’s website. Feel Good Time uses audio samples from Fresh-Garbage by Spirit.
Feel Good Time was nominated for the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, feel good time, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer, try this on June 20, 2019 by pink history.
On This Day in Pink History… 17th June 2001, Pink performed at Wango Tango
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged alecia moore, aleciamoore, concerts, music, p!nk, pink, pink history, PinkHistory, singer, wango tango on June 17, 2019 by pink history.
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She was once the smallest baby born in Texas. Now, she works in the NICU of the hospital that saved her life
Posted 10:41 PM, March 21, 2019, by CNN Wire, Updated at 10:42PM, March 21, 2019
When Tammy Lewis was born, she was 3½ months early and weighed in at only 1 pound 4 ounces. Her family faced the harsh reality their newborn’s survival rate was 5-10 percent.
(Baylor Scott & White Health)
But Lewis beat the odds and now, 34 years later, she works in the same NICU that saved her life.
“I was the smallest surviving baby in the state of Texas, at the time,” Lewis said. “I was born at 24 weeks. Normal gestation is 40 weeks.”
Lewis spent the first 3½ months of her life in the NICU at Scott and White Hospital, now named McLane Children’s Medical Center Baylor Scott & White. She was a micro-preemie and had tubes hooked up to her to help her tiny lungs breathe.
Years later, she works alongside some of the same doctors and nurses who treated her as an infant.
“I wanted to be able to give back to the patients and families in the same situation that I was in,” said Lewis.
When deciding what career she wanted to pursue after high school, it was between teaching and the medical field.
“Once I started researching the medical field, I talked to a program director and immediately fell in love with it,” said Lewis.”This is where God was leading me to be.”
in 2009, Lewis started working as a respiratory therapist at McLane, in Temple, Texas, which serves central Texas. It’s home to a level four NICU, which is the highest level of care.
In her daily job, she connects ventilators and breathing tubes, just like the ones that helped her breathe as a baby.
“As I work, I get daily remainders of how blessed I am to be here today,” she said.
Lewis has two children, 6 and 3, but neither was a micro-preemie. “My oldest threatened to be a preemie at 37 weeks.”
As she treats patients, she brings hope to the families as she shares her story of survival and motherhood with them.
“You see parents get rough news and need some brightness and hope in the day,” she said. “There are success stories and I am one of them.”
The hospital features her on its “Hall of Hope,” where it highlights babies with difficult journeys who have survived. Lewis said workers in the NICU become like a part of the patients’ families, because they work so closely monitoring the infant, all with the goal of getting the babies healthy enough to go home.
“There are lots of long hard days that everyone puts in and it’s very rewarding to see them grown up.”
A highlight of her work, Lewis said, is seeing those babies come back to visit. She said that process has come full circle for the doctors and nurses who took care of her.
“It doesn’t get much better than to take a 1 pound baby and then watch it grow up to a little human being.”
World’s smallest surviving baby goes home after 5 months in hospital
Baby died after suffering nearly 100 fractures, blows to the head, autopsy reveals
Beth Chapman, of ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter,’ dead at 51
Cleveland Clinic performs its first in utero surgery on fetus, repairs spina bifida before baby’s birth
Raising an intersex child: ‘This is your body. … There’s nothing to be ashamed of’
Oscar-nominated ‘Midnight Cowboy’ actress Sylvia Miles dies
Missing pregnant woman found dead with baby removed from womb: police
Steamy romance novelist Judith Krantz dies at 91
A woman who carried her twin sister’s babies gave birth to her two healthy twins
Sandra Bland’s own video of 2015 Texas traffic stop surfaces
Sentencing of Chanel Lewis moves forward despite allegations of jury misconduct
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Facebook Blocks Franklin Graham for 2016 Post on Transgender Bathroom Bill
By Tyler O'Neil 2018-12-31T00:49:46
During Christmas week, Facebook suspended the account of Christian evangelist and philanthropist Franklin Graham — son of the late evangelical giant Billy Graham — for a 2016 post about North Carolina's bathroom bill. Facebook blocked him for 24 hours, but rescinded the ban and apologized. Even so, the action is likely to spark an uproar across the Christian community.
"I think it was a personal attack toward me," Graham, president of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and Samaritan's Purse, told Fox News on Sunday morning. He noted that the post in question was defending North Carolina's House Bill 2, "a good law... to protect women and children." The bill would have prevented men from masquerading as transgenders to access women's spaces — but transgender activists claimed it would have violated the rights of transgender people.
"If you disagree with their position on sexual orientation, then you can be classified as [having posted] hate speech or that you are a racist," Graham declared.
"Facebook's a private company and they can certainly do what they want," the evangelist added. "But the president of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke before Congress — I think it was April — he said Facebook is a platform for all ideas. Well, it's obvious his staff hasn't got that memo."
Graham encouraged Facebook to "have a standard that doesn't move."
When asked for the Christian response to this censorship, the evangelist jumped immediately to forgiveness.
"First of all, I accept Facebook’s apology and I appreciate them stepping up and doing that," Graham said. "But I think as Christians we don’t back down and we don't change who we are and what we say and what we do. We represent the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ, and Jesus said, 'I am the way, the Truth, and the Life and no man comes to the father but by me.' All truth is in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I would encourage Facebook and for Christians to stand on God’s word and His truth."
"I’m certainly against hate speech," Graham insisted. He clarified, "I’m certainly against people using Facebook to incite violence against somebody like that... that’s terrible. But just having a different opinion other than somebody at Facebook, and then to be labeled as hate speech… that's sad."
SPLC Leads Soros-Funded Groups in 'Orwellian' Attempt to Ban 'Hate Speech' on Social Media
Facebook defines "hate speech" as "a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics," including gender identity.
Graham's original post responded to Bruce Springsteen's decision to cancel his North Carolina concert over the notorious "bathroom bill," H.B.2. "Bruce Springsteen, a long-time gay rights activist, has cancelled his North Carolina concert. He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms is going 'backwards'… Well, to be honest, we need to go back! Back to God," Graham posted.
Graham being blocked over this specific post seems rather odd, since he did not attack anyone in particular for "protected characteristics." He merely defended a law, H.B.2, that transgender activists opposed. While the law prevented men who identify as women from using public restrooms and locker rooms, it did in fact also prevent perverted men from doing so. Graham did not suggest that men who suffer from gender dysphoria are perverts — he did not discuss "transgender women" at all.
Facebook rightly apologized for the ban. "A page admin for Franklin Graham’s Facebook page did receive a 24-hour feature block after we removed a post for violating our hate speech policies," the company said in a statement. "Upon re-reviewing this content, we identified that the post does not violate our hate speech policy and has been restored."
Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have encouraged tech companies like Facebook to define "hate speech" as broadly as possible, to push all "hate" off the Internet. The SPLC is notorious for branding mainstream conservative and Christian organizations "hate groups" if they disagree with progressive views on issues from sex and gender to immigration and Islam's relation to terrorism. Their "hate group" labels inspired at least one terrorist attack in 2012.
Redefining "hate speech" along the new Orwellian lines that "speech is violence" can lead tech companies to silence anyone — even an evangelist as prominent as Franklin Graham, whose page has 7.5 million "likes" on Facebook.
This is not the first time prominent Christians have been blocked on the site. Jenna Lynn Ellis, a spokeswoman for the James Dobson Family Institute, had her article removed from Facebook "because it looks like spam and doesn't follow our Community Standards." Robert Gagnon, a prominent scholar on the topic of biblical sexuality, has been blocked numerous times because he espouses traditional Christian doctrine on sexuality.
In August, Facebook deleted videos posted by the conservative video nonprofit PragerU and "shadow banned" the organization's page. While Facebook later apologized, the employee who personally carried out the censorship was given a slap on the wrist.
Responding to these and many other episodes, Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, sent an ultimatum to big tech companies. Unless Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter adopt a free speech charter and stop censoring conservative and Christian voices by December 31, 2018, he pledged to lead his 60-million-strong Christian organization to pressure Congress to drop Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, unleashing a torrent of lawsuits.
The Inside Story About Facebook's Censorship of PragerU
In the wake of Franklin Graham's suspension, Johnson is almost certain to follow through on this, and even more.
This episode should open the eyes of all Christians everywhere, but it should also chill non-believers and anyone else who prizes a platform on social media. If someone as mainstream as Franklin Graham can be blocked for a post two years in the past, no one is safe. Facebook may be censoring Christians and conservatives today, but who's to say they won't be censoring LGBT activists tomorrow? Indeed, many on the far Left have also complained about censorship.
Watch Graham's interview below.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
60-Million-Strong Christian Group to Big Tech: Stop Censorship or Face Torrent of Lawsuits
https://pjmedia.com/video/franklin-graham-blocked-on-facebook-for-2016-post-on-transgender-bathroom-bill/
Related: Facebook, Christianity, transgender, evangelical, 2018
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Sports The Big Three
Published in the September 13, 2017 Issue
Bella Alarie ’20, Matt Bowman ’14, Kelly Shon ’14
Beverly Schaefer
Women’s basketball standout BELLA ALARIE ’20 tested her skills against some of the world’s best young players at the Under-19 FIBA World Cup in July. Alarie started all seven games for the United States and grabbed a team-high 12 rebounds in the tournament final, an 86-82 loss to Russia. Princeton head coach Courtney Banghart also spent part of her summer with USA Basketball, serving as an assistant coach for the under-23 women’s national team, which won the inaugural Four Nations Tournament.
The hardest-working pitcher in baseball? MATT BOWMAN ’14 could stake a claim to that title. Through Aug. 20, the St. Louis Cardinals reliever had appeared in 61 games, tying for the most outings in the major leagues. He had a 3.83 earned run average and two saves.
Steven King/Icon Sportswire via AP Images
KELLY SHON ’14 added her name to the history books at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship June 30, shooting an 8-under-par 63 to tie the tournament’s single-round record. Shon’s 9th-place tie at the Women’s PGA was her best finish in a major.
Field Hockey: Reaching New Heights
After climbing in Nepal, goalie Baylis ’20 excels at Princeton
2017 Football Preview: Injury Clouds Title Hopes
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Tag Archives: East Malaysia
Seizure of 15,000 Bibles in Malaysia Stuns Christians
Imports confiscated for using “Allah,” a forbidden word for non-Muslims.
FRESNO, Calif., November 7 (CDN) — Malaysian port and customs authorities have seized at least 15,000 Bibles in recent months because the word “Allah” for God appears in them.
Some 10,000 of the Bahasa Malaysia-language Bibles, which were printed in Indonesia, are in Kuching, capital of Sarawak in East Malaysia, and another 5,000 copies are in Kelang near Kuala Lumpur.
The Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) on Wednesday (Nov. 4) called for the immediate release of the confiscated Bibles. At the same time, CFM Executive Secretary Tan Kong Beng told Compass that the federation is striving for amicable relations with government authorities.
“We are open to and desire further discussion with officials so that this problem can be resolved,” the CFM official said.
The CFM officially represents the three major Christian groups in the country: The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Malaysia, the Council of Churches of Malaysia, and the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship Malaysia.
A strong Christian community in Indonesia, estimated 37 million by Operation World, has long produced large amounts of literature for export to Malaysia. In 2005 the government of Malaysia agreed to allow the use of “Allah” in non-Muslim literature, according to CFM.
“The government and CFM have exchanged letters on this matter previously,” reads the CFM statement, “and we have a written agreement in December 2005 that Bahasa Malaysia Bibles can be distributed so long as the symbol of the cross and the words ‘A Christian publication’ are printed on the front page.”
With the exception of the temporary suspension of publication of the Roman Catholic Herald newspaper in 2007 and the ongoing court battle over the weekly’s use of “Allah,” few problems were encountered in the policy. This past March, however, authorities suddenly began seizing CDs, Sunday school materials, and Bibles containing the word “Allah.”
Church leaders were stunned that no one had informed them of a change in policy. Quiet negotiations failed to resolve the situation, and several lawsuits began working their way through the court system. These suits challenge the right of the Minister of Home Affairs to restrict the use of “Allah” and to limit freedom of religion.
“To withhold the use of the Bahasa Malaysia Bibles is an infringement of Article 11 of the Federal Constitution, which gives every Malaysian the right to profess his/her faith as well as to practice it,” according to the CFM.
A government official in Malaysia was unavailable for comment. Officially, the government says only that use of the word “Allah” by non-Muslims could create “confusion” among Muslims.
The Kuala Lumpur High Court in Malaysia was scheduled to determine the legality of the word “Allah” in non-Muslim literature on July 7 but postponed the decision. The Herald newspaper had been allowed to use the term until a final court decision was to be handed down, but the Kuala Lumpur High Court on May 30 overturned that brief reprieve.
The Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, has cited examples from Malay dictionaries going back to the 17th century that use “Allah” as the vernacular translation for God. He has also noted that “Allah” is an Arabic term derived from the same roots as the Hebrew Elohim, and that the word pre-dates Muhammad, Islam’s prophet.
The Herald has a circulation of 13,000 and an estimated readership of 50,000. The newspaper is sold in Catholic churches and is not available from newsstands.
While the issue is tied up in the courts, many are hoping for a more harmonious solution to the problem. Both Indonesia and Malaysia use variations of Malay as their national languages, and all translations of the Bible in both countries used “Allah” for God until Malaysian authorities decided in the past few years that it was an Islamic term that should be used only by Muslims. In so doing, Malaysia effectively shut off the importation of Christian literature from Indonesia.
Malaysia’s population is about 60 percent Muslim, 19 percent Buddhist and 9 percent Christian. About 6 percent are Hindu, with 2.6 percent of the population adhering to Confucianism, Taoism and other traditional Chinese religions.
Posted in Buddhism, China, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Indonesia, Islam, Malaysia, Roman Catholicism, Taoism | Tagged 17th, 2005, 2007, A Christian publication, adhering, Allah, allow, amicable, Arabic, article 11, authorities, Bahasa Malaysia Bibles, Bibles, Buddhist, capital, Catholic Bishops' Conference of Malaysia, CDs, century, CFM, Chinese, Christian, Christian Federation of Malaysia, Christianity, Christians, church, cited, community, confiscated, Confucianism, constitution, copies, Council of Churches of Malaysia, countries, country, Courts, cross, customs, decision, derived, determine, dictionaries, East Malaysia, editor, Elohim, examples, executive secretary, export, faith, federal, federation, forbidden, freedom of religion, front page, God, government, groups, Hebrew, Herald, high court, Hindu, immediate, importation, imports, Indonesia, infringement, Islam, Islamic, Kelang, Kuala Lumper, Kuching, languages, Lawrence Andrew, leaders, legality, limit, literature, Malay, Malaysia, Malaysian, materials, Minister of Home Affairs, Muhammad, Muslim, muslims, national, National Evangelical Christian Fellowship of Malaysia, newspaper, newsstands, non-Muslims, Operation World, Persecution, port, postponed, practice, pre-dates, printed, produced, profess, prophet, relations, release, religions, Rev, Roman Catholic, Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholics, roots, Sarawak, scheduled, seized, seizure, striving, stuns, Sunday School, suspension, symbol, Tan Kong Beng, Taoism, temporary, term, traditional, translation, translations, use, vernacular, Word | Leave a comment
MALAYSIA: COURT SET TO RULE ON USE OF ‘ALLAH’ AMONG NON-MUSLIMS
Posted on August 1, 2009 by particularkev
Judges to determine whether Malaysians of other faiths can use the Arabic word.
MUMBAI, India, July 6 (Compass direct News) – With the Kuala Lumpur High Court in Malaysia scheduled to determine the legality of the word “Allah” in non-Muslim literature tomorrow, what is at stake goes beyond the sanctioned name for God among non-Muslims in the majority-Muslim nation.
Such a limit on free speech in Malaysia is especially biting for Muslim converts to Christianity; already the Malaysian government does not recognize their conversions and marriages and still considers their offspring to be legally Muslim. With non-Muslims increasingly feeling the sting of discrimination and Muslim elites feeling a need to assert a national Islamic identity, the skirmish over “Allah” is clearly part of a greater cultural war.
Malaysian authorities and Malaysia’s Roman Catholic Church have continued to lock horns over use of the word “Allah” in the Malay-language edition of the Herald, the church’s newspaper, as they await the ruling. The newspaper had been allowed to use the term until a final court decision, but the Kuala Lumpur High Court on May 30 overturned that brief reprieve.
The Catholic newspaper has provided a panoply of historical uses of “Allah” among Christians in Malaysia. The Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, quotes examples from a Malay-Latin dictionary dated 1631, and the Dutch-Malay Dictionary of 1650 lists “Allah” as the vernacular translation for God.
“This is testified by the fact that we have a Malay-Latin Dictionary printed in 1631, in which the word ‘Allah’ is cited,” Andrew said. “To have a word in a dictionary means that that particular word has already been in use in the community prior to the dictionary. The word for ‘God’ in Latin is ‘Deus’ and in Malay, it is ‘Allah.’ Upon the arrival of the Dutch…a Dutch-Malay Dictionary was produced in 1650 where the word for ‘God’ in Dutch was ‘Godt,’ and in Malay, ‘Allah.’”
According to church sources, the Malay term for “God,” Tuhan, came into vogue only after deadly May 13, 1969 communal riots as part of a national unity campaign.
Andrew noted that “Allah” is an Arabic term derived from the same roots as the Hebrew Elohim, and that the word pre-dates Muhammad, Islam’s prophet. Besides ignoring history, Andrew says, the government also conveniently ignores its universal use among Christians in the Middle East.
“Since the status quo remains, we will not use the word ‘Allah’ in our publication” until the court says otherwise, Andrew said. “In fact we have not been using it since our January edition.”
Since 1970, the government of Malaysia has consistently championed Islam as a parallel source of identity and nationalism among the politically dominant Malay-Muslim majority. Dress codes, cultural norms and the Malay language underwent a rapid Islamization in tandem with discriminative actions against minority groups.
Christians were particularly hard-hit by the effort in the name of national unity. Licences are rarely issued for church buildings in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur. New evangelical congregations had to meet at either hotels or warehouses for their Sunday services while Islamic semiotics and terminologies swamped the intellectual and official discourse. Conversion of Christians to Islam were particularly trumpeted by the media.
These efforts have largely failed. Local churches continued to grow, and the number of secret Muslim converts to Christianity began to rise.
At the same time, pandemic corruption and political authoritarianism have gradually led to a sense of disenchantment with political Islam among many. This erosion in Malay-Islam dominance has led to political bankruptcy, as evidenced by disastrous results for the ruling coalition during March 2008 general elections.
Given these political realities, Malay elites believe they can ill afford to be seen as soft on minority “encroachment,” and observers say this need to ingratiate Islamists lies at the root of the tussle over non-Muslim use of the word “Allah.” Officially, however, the government says only that use of the word among non-Muslims could create “confusion” among Muslims.
Arabicization of Malay Language
The debate over “Allah” follows an effort by the government to promote the Arabicization of the Malay language at the expense of Sanskrit and Malay terms. When a Malaysian student has to refer to a pig in an essay or test, the required term is the Arabic khinzir.
Other Malay terms such as pokok (tree) and bunga (flower), long used to refer to loan principal and interest respectively, have been expunged from school texts in favor of the Arabic kaedah (base) and faedah (benefit).
Some sources indicate that the Arabicization of the Malay language, however, has come with unintended consequences, such as making Christian mission work and translation easier. Since the Malay vocabulary has its limitations, Christians can use time-tested Arabic-derived terms to provide meaningful context.
For a long time, the only Malay Bible available in Malaysia was the Indonesian “Al Kitab,” which, included the word “Allah.” As Bahasa Malaysia (official name of the Malay language in Malaysia) and Bahasa Indonesia are very similar, the “Al Kitab” can be easily understood by a native speaker of Malay. As a result, the “Al Kitab” was viewed as an unwelcome missionary tool by Malaysian authorities. Its legal status was heatedly contested behind closed doors during the 1981-2003 reign of then-Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad.
Significant Christian indigenous populations in East Malaysia use Bahasa Malaysia as a language of wider communication. The Malay-language content of the Herald reportedly serves just that need: using the national language with universal terms across a multi-lingual Babel of tribal Catholic communities in East Malaysia.
Posted in Buddhism, China, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Indonesia, Islam, Malaysia, Roman Catholicism, Taoism | Tagged 1631, 1650, 1969, 1970, actions, adhering, Al Kitab, Allah, allowed, Arabic, Arabicization, arrival, assert, authoritarianism, authorities, available, Babel, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, bankruptcy, base, believe, benefit, Bible, biting, brief, Buddhist, buildings, bunga, campaign, capital, championed, Chinese, Christian, Christianity, Christians, church, churches, circulation, city, closed, Coalition, communal, communication, communities, community, Confucianism, confusion, congregations, consequences, considers, consistently, content, contested, context, continue, conveniently, conversion, conversions, converts, corruption, court, create, cultural, dated, deadly, debate, decision, derived, determine, Deus, dictionary, disastrous, discourse, Discrimination, disenchantment, dominance, dominant, doors, dress codes, Dutch, Dutch-Malay, easier, East Malaysia, edition, editor, efforts, elections, elites, Elohim, encroachment, erosion, essay, estimated, Evangelical, evidenced, examples, expense, expunged, fact, faedah, failed, faiths, feeling, Final, flower, free speech, general, God, Godt, government, gradually, greater, groups, grow, heatedly, Hebrew, Herald, high court, Hindu, historical, History, horns, hotels, identity, ignoring, increasingly, indigenous, Indonesian, ingratiate, intellectual, interest, Islam, Islamic, Islamists, Islamization, issued, judges, kaedah, Khinzir, Kuala Lumper, language, largely, latin, led, legal, legality, legally, licenses, limit, limitations, lists, literature, loan, local, lock, Mahathir bin Mohamad, majority, Malay, Malay-Islam, Malay-Latin, Malaysia, Malaysian, Malaysians, marriages, meaningful, media, meet, Middle East, minority, mission, missionary, Muhammad, multi-lingual, Muslim, muslims, name, nation, national, nationalism, need, new, newspaper, newsstands, non-Muslims, norms, observers, official, offspring, overturned, pandemic, panoply, parallel, part, Particular, pig, pokok, political, politically, population, pre-dates, Prime Minister, principal, prior, produced, promote, prophet, provide, provided, publication, quotes, rapid, rarely, readership, realities, recognize, refer, reign, religions, reprieve, required, respectively, results, rev. Lawrence Andrew, riots, rise, Roman Catholic, Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholics, root, roots, rule, ruling, sanctioned, Sanskrit, scheduled, school, secret, semiotics, sense, serves, services, significant, skirmish, soft, sources, status, status quo, sting, student, Sunday, swamped, tandem, Taoism, term, terminologies, test, testified, texts, time-tested, tool, traditional, translation, tree, tribal, trumpeted, Tuhan, tussle, unintended, unity, universal, unwelcome, uses, vernacular, viewed, vocabulary, vogue, War, warehouses, wider, Word, work | Leave a comment
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Tag Archives: Maria Tec
BAPTIST PASTOR STILL MISSING AFTER TIJUANA KIDNAPPING
More than a week has passed since San Diego pastor Manuel Jesus Tec was kidnapped Oct. 21 in Tijuana, and his family still has not talked with or heard from him, reports Baptist Press.
Originally, the kidnappers demanded a $1-million ransom for Tec’s release, but in two calls Monday night, Oct. 27, the kidnappers lowered that figure to $500,000 and subsequently to $200,000.
“Last night, we also heard a recording of his voice saying he was OK, and he asked us to do all that the kidnappers told us to do because his life was at risk,” Tec’s 30-year-old son Johnny said Oct. 28.
“We are totally hopeful and faith-filled,” Johnny Tec said. “Mom is holding up pretty good. We’ve been having prayer meetings every night here at the house. We give credit to the prayers of so many people out there. We’re hearing from places all over the world where people are praying for us. I don’t know how they found out, but we’re hearing from people all over the U.S. and Mexico, from Japan, the Philippines and even Africa.
“Only God can give us joy in the middle of a storm like this,” Tec said. “But that’s what we’ve been experiencing — the comfort of God and the hope that He will bring our dad back soon.”
Pastor Manuel Tec, 59, was kidnapped after crossing the border from San Diego into Tijuana with wife Maria and his younger son Giovanni. Gunmen stopped the car around 5 a.m. and forcibly abducted Tec, but left his wife and son free and unhurt.
The kidnappers contacted the Tec family for the fourth time Sunday night, Oct. 26, “trying to be intimidating,” Johnny Tec said. He said the kidnappers have not allowed him or his mother to talk to Manuel since abducting him.
The Tecs first heard from the abductors on Oct. 21, the day of the kidnapping, when the kidnappers called the family three times — at 5:15 a.m., 11:45 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. to voice their demands.
“Every time they called, they got more aggressive and more graphic in their threats,” said Tec, adding that the family is in the dark as to why his father was targeted for kidnapping.
“He wasn’t famous so we don’t know why anyone would want to kidnap him. He was friendly, well-liked and popular with his church members and those who knew him. But we don’t know why someone would want to kidnap him for money, especially $1 million.”
Tec added that the kidnappers have instructed the family, “Keep cooperating with us and your dad will be OK.”
“They said to come up with the money -– that this wasn’t a game. They’ve also said they know all of the Tec brothers and sisters and would go after the entire family,” Johnny said.
Manuel and his wife have three sons and two daughters. Though he lives in Tijuana, the pastor travels regularly to his new church plant in San Diego, Iglesia Familiar y Vida. A graduate of the Dr. G.H. Lacy Baptist Seminary in Oaxaca, Mexico, Manuel has pastored numerous Baptist churches south of the border since 1981, his son Johnny said.
“We just say ‘gracias’ to Southern Baptists everywhere for praying during this crisis we’re going through,” Johnny Tec said. “Let Baptists know that their prayers are being heard. We can feel how God has strengthened us. We think God is setting the stage for one more of His miracles that will leave us all in awe. Something grand is going to come out of this to show the world the power of prayer and God.”
Tijuana increasingly has become known as a dangerous border town, with a growing number of kidnappings and murders — often with doctors and other white-collar professionals as targets. The escalating violence is blamed on gangs and drug traffickers. Authorities recently rounded up some of the kidnapping gangs.
“It’s getting worse,” Johnny Tec said. “A lot of people are fleeing the city because the violence has skyrocketed over the past five years. Tijuana’s an unsafe place to be, with a lot of evil on the streets. Ten people a day are showing up dead on the streets of Tijuana.”
Tec said demanding a $1 million — or even a $200,000 ransom — for a Baptist minister makes no sense.
“The first ransom proposals down here seem to always be for $1 million, no matter who they pick out,” said Tec, adding that the latest ransom demand of $200,000 is still “well out of our possibilities.”
Tec said his family has “come to the crossroads,” however, where it may have to begin bargaining with the kidnappers.
Posted in Africa, Baptist, Christianity, crime, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Southern Baptist, USA | Tagged abducted, abducting, abductors, Africa, aggressive, authorities, awe, Baptist, bargaining, blamed, border, brothers, calls, car, church, church plant, churches, city, comfort, contacted, cooperating, credit, crisis, crossing, crossroads, dad, dangerous, dark, dead, demanded, doctors, Dr. G. H. Lacy Baptist Seminary, drug traffickers, entire, escalating, evil, experiencing, faith-filled, family, famous, Father, figure, fleeing, forcibly, free, friendly, Game, gangs, Giovanni Tec, God, gracias, graduate, grand, graphic, gunmen, heard, hope, hopeful, house, Iglesia Familiar Amor y Vida, instructed, intimidating, Japan, Johnny Tec, joy, Kidnapped, kidnappers, kidnapping, life, lowered, Manuel Jesus Tec, Maria Tec, members, Mexico, middle, miracles, missing, money, mother, mum, murders, numerous, Oaxaco, passed, Pastor, pastored, people, Philippines, popular, possibilities, power, prayer meetings, prayers, praying, professionals, proposals, ransom, recording, release, risk, San Diego, sisters, skyrocketed, son, south, Southern Baptists, stage, stopped, storm, streets, strengthened, talk, talked, targeted, targets, threats, Tijuana, town, travels, unhurt, unsafe, USA, violence, voice, well-liked, white-collar, wife, world, worse, younger | Leave a comment
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Follow us on.. Facebook Twitter Google Plus
The Town Trail
20The North Gate
View the Trail Map
Next Location
22The South Quay
The Mill Bridge
POINT 21 THE MILL BRIDGE
The ‘bridge’ is in fact a tidal barrage built originally in the Middle Ages to power the town’s corn mill. It is recorded that this mill was granted to the Knights Templar as early as 1199. In around 1830 an impressive 5 storey mill was built (a similar mill still stands at nearby Carew), but it was destroyed by fire in 1956 and demolished. Only the base remains – and provides a viewpoint to the Castle and is the proposed site for the statue of Henry VII.
To your right is the NORTH QUAY where the renovated CORN STORE now houses a shop and café surrounded by modern flats. Further along the north shore is Rocky Park, a limestone quarry which gave its name to a modern housing development.
From this vantage point many of the great 18th and 19th painters, including JMW Turner, Paul Sandby and Charles Norris painted Pembroke Castle. More information can be found in Pembroke Museum.
The tidal flow to the quay is now controlled by a barrage, which enables water to be kept in the Castle Pond for much of the time. It also provides a circular walk around the pond which brings you to the western side of the Castle.
Contact: 01646 683092
Email: enquiries@pembroketowntrail.wales
© Pembroke Town Council
Site by Modern Print & Design
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Scholars Recognized by Goldwater Foundation
Jessica Badger (2007) was awarded the Goldwater Scholarship, and John Rhoden (2007) received an Honorable Mention.
Jessica Badger (2007) was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2006-07 academic year. One of this year’s 323 recipients, she was selected from a field of 1,081 mathematics, science and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. John Rhoden (2007) was one of 128 recipients to be named honorable mention.
A Fayetteville native, Jessica is majoring in microbiology and works with Dr. Amy Grunden. Last summer, she worked in chemistry and biochemistry labs at the University of Montana, on an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates award. She plans to return there to continue her research this year. After graduation, Jessica hopes to specialize in proteomics in graduate school, before becoming a professor.
John is studying chemical engineering and is currently a member of Dr. Jason Haugh’s lab in the Department of Chemical and Biomolceular Engineering. His research interests center around the fundamentals of wound-healing processes at the molecular level. He has spent summers with a cardiovascular simulations lab at Duke, and last spring he studied engineering—in Spanish—at Valencia Polytechnic University. After graduate school, John plans to teach and do research in a university setting.
Goldwater Scholarship selections are made by the board of trustees of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, a federally endowed agency established in 1986 to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering.
Twenty-seven NC State students have received the coveted Goldwater Scholarships since the program’s inception, including seven Park Scholars
~posted 2006.03.28
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What is Endodontics
Your endodontic treatment
Referring your patient
Dr. Vijay John
Dr. Michael Yoon
Dr. Peter Spili
Level 6, 766 Elizabeth St
F. 03 9349 7602
Peter obtained all of his tertiary qualifications from the University of Melbourne. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science (with Honours) degree in 1985, and then received his Bachelor of Dental Science degree in 1989. He practised as a general dentist in Melbourne for 11 years with a special interest in Endodontics and Restorative Dentistry. He then went on to receive his Master of Dental Science degree in Endodontics and Graduate Diploma in Clinical Dentistry in 2004. During his specialist training he also completed a minor thesis on the prognostic consequences of endodontic instrument fracture. This led to a successful and commonly-cited publication in the Journal of Endodontics entitled: “The Impact of Instrument Fracture on Outcome of Endodontic Treatment”.
Peter has been a clinical demonstrator for Undergraduate Endodontics and an external examiner for the Postgraduate Endodontic Programme at the University of Melbourne. Peter has lectured Australia-wide and is a member of the Australian Society of Endodontology, Australian and New Zealand Academy of Endodontists, and the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons. He has also served as a former member of a number of other ADA dental specialty societies and study clubs, and attended numerous national and international conferences and lectures.
Peter’s interests outside of endodontics include spending time with his wife and two young daughters. When he is not with them, you can usually find him busily working in his garden, or fervently following his AFL side, Collingwood.
© Melbourne Endodontics
design by Orasy
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a pop science book club
I’m Curious About…
Science in Politics
by Nelson Noven
On April 22 last year, more than one million people worldwide took part in the first March for Science, a protest that brought scientists and non-scientists together in support of fact-based evidence and against science funding cuts and climate change denial. The story of that day is documented in a new book called Science Not Silence: Voices from the March for Science Movement by Stephanie Fine Sasse and Lucky Tran.
I was not able to attend the first March for Science, but I did march in the second. April 14, 2018 was a 71-degree day in New York City. My family and I joined the crowd at Washington Square Park and walked down Broadway to chants of “Science Not Silence,” “What do we want? Science! When do we want it? After peer review!” and inexplicably, “No coffee? No science!”
The crowd (highly under-totaled by the right-wing media) was mostly well received by passersby, which included cheerful residents in the surrounding buildings waving at us from their windows, construction workers, and even a rooftop double-decker bus tour guide… all except one middle-aged lady in fancy clothes who walked down the line giving us an enthusiastic thumbs down. I watched as she boo-ed the staff of Mount Sinai hospital who works hard every day to save people’s lives. It’s hard to believe that anyone living in modern society with electricity and running water and not being dead of Polio could be anti-science. But then if that were the case, we wouldn’t need to march.
A couple women in front of me with sketchpads were drawing the scene they saw as they walked the march, which was pretty cool. I took a few sketches, too, but not while I was walking:
0 comments on “March for Science 2018”
Fahrenheit is a celebration of today’s best popular science books, helping curious minds find newly published books on physics, life sciences, science communication, and even the science of science. Nelson Noven helps you find the most accessible books for non-scientists and sort the facts from the pseudoscience.
Follow Club via Email
Follow Fahrenheit on WordPress.com
Nelson Noven is a member of The Planetary Society
Nelson Noven was a World Science Festival Volunteer 2018
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The Pearl District: A Century of Preservation and Change Tour
Transformed from an outdated and tired industrial area into one of Portland’s premier residential and retail neighborhoods, the Pearl is truly one of the city’s gems. A century ago, the area went through a similar transformation—from a working class housing neighborhood at the edge of a marsh, to an area primarily used for industry and warehousing. Many of Portland’s best known architects in the early 20th century designed buildings in what is now the Pearl, but while most now have new uses inside they still retain exterior details that harken back to a century ago.
Space is Limited. Pre-Registration is Required.
$20.00 – General Public
$12.00 – AHC Members
About the Architectural Heritage Center
The Architectural Heritage Center’s mission is to “inspire people to conserve the art, craft, and context of historic buildings and places to promote our cultural heritage as a vital element of livable, sustainable, communities.” We seek to preserve the historic character and livability of our built environment, and to promote sustainability through the re-use of period homes and buildings.
Owned and operated by the non-profit Bosco-Milligan Foundation, we empower people in the Portland region to preserve both landmark buildings and the regular “vernacular” vintage homes and storefronts that collectively define our neighborhoods, traditional downtowns, culture, history, and quality of life.
Cover image: Pacific Coast Biscuit Co., Photo Courtesy of Portland Archives & Records Center.
Start Date: July 18, 2019 6:00 pm
End Date: July 18, 2019 8:00 pm
Venue: Location Revealed After Registration
Name: Architectural Heritage Center
website: http://visitahc.org/
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If you have attended a Major League Baseball game in the last 15 years, pregame infield practice, known simply as infield, may be unfamiliar. All but abandoned by the early 2000s, the ritual lives on at the C.W.S. and at college stadiums all over the country. On Monday night, the routine will be repeated before Virginia takes on Vanderbilt in the first game of the finals.
To figure out who shoots first, players usually throw or roll a baseball to a certain object (usually at close range) and whoever is closest shoots first. The first person then gets to choose the first hole and tees off. To tee off (and for most shots) players hit the ball like they were playing baseball, but depending on the distance from the hole the player may choose to ‘putt’ the ball instead of hitting it. To putt the ball, the player places the ball on the cup (the end of the fungo bat), and can toss the ball from the cup in hopes of getting a more accurate shot.[1] In shooting or putting, the player must have one foot where the ball landed during the entire duration of their swing or putt, failure to keep the foot planted results in a loss of a stroke. Scorekeeping is identical to traditional golf; the player with the fewest strokes essentially wins the hole.[2] Players traditionally play nine or eighteen holes of fungo golf, and at the end the person with the fewest strokes in the set number of holes wins the game.[3]
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Competition Commission & Competition Tribunal Budget & Strategic Plans 2008/09
Chairperson: Mr B Martins (ANC)
The Competition Commission identified its strategic priorities which had necessitated the restructuring of the Commission and its policies. It showed its staff turnover figures over the past five years and identified this as a priority challenge.
The Competition Tribunal indicated that it was difficult to plan strategically because they were a reactive organisation and could hear only cases placed before them. Their underspending was largely due to the organisation needing to retain reserves for use in the event of unforeseen litigation. The proposed change in merger thresholds and filing fees meant that the Tribunal would rely more heavily on funding from the Department of Trade and Industry.
Competition Commission presentation
Mr Shan Ramburuth (Competition Commissioner) said that the Competition Commission (CC) had begun their strategic planning process at the end of 2006. The process had been very participatory and had included staff, external stakeholders, labour, business and the Department of Trade and Industry.
Mr Ramburuth identified the strategic priorities of the CC:
1) Increase staff morale and motivation as staff turnover was a huge problem. 15% to 20% of staff left the organisation annually. The reason was that staff constituted of recently graduated lawyers and economists who were in the process of testing different jobs and then moving on. The CC was however devising strategies to live with this problem. These included recruiting new people at a pace that kept up with the exit of old staff from the organisation and growing their own people in the CC. They were losing staff to the private sector, other regulators and even international competition authorities. The focus was therefore on salaries and fast recruitment. With regard to the slide on staff morale, Mr Ramburuth said that they had approached the Department to get salaries of CC staff in line with market-related salaries. The Department was reportedly viewing the request favourably. They were also focusing on training and staff development. In this regard their graduate recruitment programme was important. After one year some of these graduates were retained in the organisation while others moved on.
2) Clarify the Commission’s approach and methodology. The CC has developed a framework for prioritising sectors. They had in the previous year focused on their enquiry into banks. This report was being finalised and the report would be released at the end of April. This would be processed based on recommendations to the CC and the Minister. The report would enable the CC to launch a formal enquiry into such matters as ATM fees, cost of transactions and governance of banks’ regulatory systems. It would also allow the CC to persuade National Treasury and the Department of Finance to fix the regulatory framework around banks (and move away from the current self-regulation of banks). Other priority sectors included:
- Infrastructure and construction, including bid-rigging
- Agro-processing, specifically food processing and forestry
- Intermediate industrial products.
3) Align the organisational structure and work processes to strategic priorities.
4) Establish the Commission as a centre of information, knowledge and expertise. It was also necessary to use intelligently the information that they already had at their disposal.
5) Ensuring effective advocacy and communication. Although they were already doing this, this process had to be stepped up. They already gave government departments and other competition bodies advice on competition matters, but were hoping to increase work in this area. They hoped to ensure compliance with the Competition Act by using moral persuasion. The CC aimed to give consumer organisations a greater voice in competition proceedings. This made the CC more sensitive to the needs of consumers. Consumer participation was important at the investigation and hearing stages. The CC aimed to build strategic alliances with government, practitioners, trade unions and other regulators.
Mr Ramburuth said that total expenditure had increased steadily since 2003 and would increase more significantly due to the projects identified in their strategic plan. The largest increase in expenditure would be on fees to lawyers and economist consultants. While most of the cases they were involved in were uncontested, these could become very expensive when cases were contested. Not all cases cost huge amounts but cases like the Telkom case cost R1.5 million. Two such cases could wipe out their entire budget. The problem was that one could not predict how many cases would be contested within a given year. One could also not predict how people would behave, for example if a party would contest various points in different courts (which would increase the cost of the matter). The CC would be channeling more into enforcement, policy and research in future. Funds allocated to corporate services would be increased, as this referred to the cost of running the organisation.
The CC derived their income from fees and department funding. The income referred to filing fees from applications for the approval of mergers. The Department would top up that amount dependant on the CC’s budget submission. It was evident from the graph that the portion paid by the Department would increase over the next few years. This was because merger thresholds (above which transactions would become notifiable), would be raised. Thus, fewer transactions would become notifiable, which would in turn mean that the value of fees to CC would decrease.
It was difficult to predict how much funds would be required during a given financial year, as it depended on how many mergers were contested. Last year they had more mergers than predicted, which meant that they received more fees than anticipated. They have therefore an accumulated surplus which was carried over to the following year.
Competition Tribunal presentation
Mr David Lewis (Chairperson: Competition Tribunal) said that the Competition Tribunal (CT) was unusual as it was an adjudicative body. It was effectively a court. It therefore had no control over their work content or workflow as they had to deal with whatever matter the Competition Commission or other bodies put before them. Their demand was therefore derived from the activities of other organisations.
He referred to the members of the CT, saying that the terms of three of the members were expiring at the end of March. These members had however been reappointed by Cabinet. The members consisted of eight lawyers and three economists. Three members were full time and the rest were employed on a part time basis. It was difficult to get the balance right. Their staff consisted of thirteen people in three areas: corporate services, research and registry.
The CT was very exposed to the public and their staff members were often lost to the private and public sectors. Very often legal representatives appearing before the Tribunal earned more than the CT members themselves. The CT therefore had to find ways to make working there an attractive option. They offered good experience to young lawyers who were aware that working for them as researchers would look good on their curriculum vitae. It was unfortunate that these people were then lost to the private sector.
Mr Lewis said that huge amounts of time went into dealing with matters even if they were uncontested mergers. Even though there were only eight complaints by the Commission these still took up huge amounts of time. The ratio of hearing days to working days was very high, especially if one considered the amounts of written work, reading and preparation that had to be done.
It was difficult for them to plan strategically because the CT could not decide to target a certain sector of the economy, as they had to hear any case which was put before them.
The CT had to work in accordance with strict time frames as set out in the Act. Their decisions were already of a high calibre and were referred to in international courts. All their decisions were placed on their website, which was widely used.
Much of the CT’s good corporate image was due to the transparency with which they conducted their work. They had a code of ethics in terms of which they were required to declare their interests so as to prevent a situation where there were potential conflicts of interests.
Mr Lewis referred to their slide on “Financial Management” and said that they derived their income from filing fees (33,6%) as well as funding via the Department of Trade and Industry (54,7%). Because of the proposed changes to the threshold they were expecting to receive less for filing fees and would in the next few years rely more heavily on the Departmental funding. This would continue until the situation corrected itself in the following period.
They were not a prosecuting body like the CC was, but still had to maintain large amounts in their budget for potential litigation. This was if the CT became a party to litigation, there would be serious consequences if they did not provide for it in their budget.
The CT had spent 83,9% of their budget. They could not predict the amount of fees they would earn each year because of the fact that they were a reactive organisation. Their expenditure on salaries of part timers depended on the number of cases heard and the number of days a case took to complete.
Recently the CT had heard a number of interesting cases, for example the Mittal Steel case, which focused on the excessive steel prices. On the matter of excessive fines imposed on companies acting in contravention of the Act, Mr Lewis said that these figures were miniscule compared to the profits derived from the contravening activity. The hearings on the bread companies had evoked much interest from the public, especially consumers and unions. There were now similar cases before them involving the milk, scrap metal and cigarette industries.
Mr L Labuschagne (DA) referred to the CC’s statement that they aimed to build strategic alliances. He pointed out that they had not mentioned building alliances with business. He asked why this was the case.
Mr Ramburuth answered that the CC were not averse to building alliances with business umbrella bodies such as industry associations. The problem was that these industry associations, while carrying out their functions in this capacity, often also doubled up as cartels. However the CC attempted to obtain buy-in at the level of the industry associations.
Mr Labuschagne asked if the CT could provide the Committee with the curricula vitae of its members.
Mr S Rasmeni (ANC) felt that the call for the curricula vitae of the CT members was unnecessary, as this was a sensitive issue.
The Chair said that this was not a sensitive issue and this was in fact public knowledge to which members of the public should have access.
Mr Lewis said that they were happy to provide the curricula vitae to the Committee. These were already on their website and in their Annual Report.
Mr Labuschagne asked if the appeals of CT decisions were heard by the Appellate Division. He asked if the CT was represented by counsel in these proceedings.
Mr Lewis replied that they were not represented in appeals to the Competition Appeal Court. Sometimes however friends of the court would be asked to defend the decisions of the CT.
Ms M Ntuli (ANC) referred to the CC graduate training programme and asked if there was no way to keep these people in the organisation after the programme had been completed. If this was not done, the Department would be paying for training while other companies would reap the benefits.
Mr Ramburuth responded that the CC had introduced the programme in the spirit of the skills development legislation. They aimed to assist recent graduates by giving them experience. The CC was however unable to absorb all of them. One could however consider that these graduates were not lost to the entire country, but would proceed to contribute to other organisations.
Ms Ntuli referred to the CT investigation into the banking sector. She asked what would happen after the completion of the investigation, as it was likely that banks would continue conducting business as usual.
Mr Thulani Kunene (Acting Deputy Commissioner: CC) responded that the CC had put together an external panel that was conducting this investigation. They would identify competition issues and make recommendations to the CC. The report was due at the end of the month. If it emerged from these investigations that collusion was occurring, there would probably be recommendations that the CC address banking governance and it was likely that this would necessitate changes to the relevant legislation.
Mr Rasmeni added that banks were still involved in cartel activities and asked what the CC was doing about this. He asked if they were to be part of the Financial Sector Coalition Conference and if so, what role they would be playing.
Mr Ramburuth said that the CC had been invited to participate and that he would be addressing the Conference.
Ms Ntuli referred to the fact that property was becoming increasingly expensive. She said that the price differences between houses in townships, rural and urban areas were unfair.
Ms Ntuli referred to the Tiger Brands company that was fined for violating competition laws. She said that since paying the penalty, the company had simply started to recover this amount from the consumers by increasing the price of bread. She asked how the CC would deal with this.
Mr Ramburuth replied that this was not a straightforward issue, since it was not illegal to raise prices. The Competition authorities did not set prices, but removed the behaviour by businesses which distorted and manipulated prices. Once this happened, prices ought to settle at a competitive place. The sequence of events which had emerged since the imposition of the penalty on bread companies was indeed unfortunate. The Commission had communicated with the bread companies that had said that it was regrettable but they had to raise the bread prices so soon after the imposition of the fine. They had outlined the reasons for the increase as being the increase in the prices of wheat and transportation costs. The CC had analysed this in detail and had publicly stated that they were not convinced of these reasons. There was now the situation where the already high price of bread was being increased by different companies by the same amount at the same time. Mr Ramburuth believed that the shareholders bore most of the cost of the fine and it was therefore important to call on them to hold their management accountable.
Mr Kunene added that the CC had intervened to ensure a competitive environment. This however did not mean that that there would be no price increases, as prices reflected the prevailing market conditions.
Mr Lewis said that even if the fines were passed on to consumers by some companies, the CT would want the situation where other companies would see this as an opportunity to keep their price steady, thereby increasing their portion of the market. While food prices all over the world were increasing, the fact that the CC was of the opinion that the bread price was increasing by the same amount at the same time should be setting off alarm bells with them. There should ideally be different prices for different brands, but consumers accepted this as they were used to paying a single price for items and services due to past regulation by government and co-operatives. It was necessary for consumers to institute class action suits to fight cartel activities (although this was not possible in the case of bread). This would also be addressed by the fact that shareholders would be paying for these fines. Shareholders were already indicating their unhappiness at having to bear the loss resulting from the fine.
Mr D Dlali (ANC) referred to agro-processing as a priority sector of the CC and said that it appeared as if these companies were simply passing the cost of their penalties to the consumers. How could the CC ensure that this money was ploughed back where it was meant to be.
Mr Dlali pointed out that the cost of milk, cement, steel and fertiliser were becoming excessive. Red meat was also no longer affordable to all.
Mr Kunene replied that the CC had teams who were tracking the price trends in the cement and steel industries. They were conducting investigations where it was found to be necessary.
Ms Ntuli asked how the CT would prevent the situation where they trained staff, who then simply left to work for other organisations.
Mr Lewis replied that they were not able to retain staff by offering salaries which were competitive with the private sector. Instead they offered a stimulating environment in which to work. They offered employees training and enabled them to attend conferences both nationally and internationally.
Mr Dlali referred to the Strategic Priorities of the CC and asked how they aimed to establish the CC as a centre of information, knowledge and expertise when they were unable to retain their staff.
Mr Ramburuth agreed that it would be difficult to establish the CC as a knowledge centre if there was a high staff turnover. The CC therefore focused on knowledge management systems, which would enable new staff to access information and get up to speed as quickly as possible. This would also serve to preservethe institutional memory of the organisation.
Mr Dlali referred to the CC’s review of Human Resources (HR) policies in an attempt to increase staff morale. He asked which loopholes had been identified that had necessitated this review.
Mr Kunene responded that the CC had re-looked at its HR policies because their strategic planning priorities redefined the way in which they did their work. They were therefore not filling gaps, but merely aligning their Human Resources requirements to their policies.
Mr Dlali referred to the CC’s aim to give a voice to civil society. He asked how this was possible when the consumers did not know about the organisation (except when high profile cases were involved). Consumers should be able to approach the organisation to lodge complaints involving competition issues.
Mr Rasmeni said that communication only occurred with big businesses. He asked how far the CC and CT went to communicate with the rank and file citizens. He also asked if they had a relationship with Community Development Workers.
Mr Ramburuth replied that the profile of the CC was increasing and that they were moving from the business pages to the main section of newspapers. They had interacted with media, individual organisations and associations. As these changes were occurring, people were making more requests to the organisation. In addition, the CC was also proactively targeting those associations that they had identified as needing this intervention. They were interested in obtaining the participation of civil society organisations in the investigative and hearing stages of the process.
Mr Dlali asked why the CT’s personnel costs were so high compared to other budget items.
Mr Lewis replied that this made sense as their staff was their only real asset. They did not have items such as machinery or cars in their budget.
Mr Dlali noted that the CT had underspent on their budget by 83%. He asked how they expected the Committee to approve additional funds if they were unable to spend their money.
Mr Lewis explained that they had to ask for more than they foresaw they would use in order to make provision for potential litigation. He was very concerned that a single large case could in fact wipe out even existing reserves.
Mr Rasmeni referred to mergers and acquisitions between companies and asked if these practices were good for the economy or not. He asked what drove these processes.
Mr Ramburuth replied that mergers were bad if they led to higher levels of concentration of particular types of companies delivering the same service/product and thereby lessening competition. Mergers were good if they increased the efficiency of a particular industry.
Mr Lewis added that mergers were bad when they lessened competition. They were good if they were part of a natural process of restructuring.
Mr Rasmeni referred to bid-rigging and said that this was particularly prevalent in the public sector. He asked to what extent the CC was acting to curb malpractice in the public service.
Mr Kunene replied that the CC had conducted workshops on bid-rigging and had invited public sector participants (especially state owned enterprises) as well. They had provided information on how to recognise bid-rigging and how to set out bid requests so as to minimise the possibility of this practice occurring.
Mr Ramburuth added that the CC was not an anti-corruption body, but worked with the Public Services Commission. Parliamentary Committees too had an important role to play. It was easy to collude against government as they were paying for the services/products from taxpayers’ money. This should be examined by those exercising oversight over local government expenditure in particular.
Mr Rasmeni noted that Mr Lewis also served on the board of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC). He asked if this did not divert his attention from the work of the CT, especially as the Tribunal was faced with huge workloads.
Mr Lewis replied that he was a non-executive member of the IDC. This had only been relevant to the work of the CT as far as potential conflicts of interest were concerned. If these did occur he simply declared the interest or where appropriate, recused himself from the case at hand. It however did not present a problem in terms of time.
Mr Dlali referred to the fact that the terms of three CT members had expired. He asked if the extension had been automatic or if they advertised the positions to allow others to apply.
Mr Lewis responded that the Department had recommended their reappointment to the Minister. They only advertised if a bulk re-appointment was being done. This was largely because of the type of work they were doing, as it took a long time to learn. It was therefore important to hold onto existing expertise.
A committee member noted that not only private companies were overpricing their goods and services. State owned enterprises like Telkom and Eskom were running riot with their tariffs.
Mr Lewis replied that regulators had the authority over maximum pricing. There was nothing preventing them from charging less than this maximum amount. It was not clear whether they would charge less in order to be competitive or if they would charge the maximum amount allowed.
Mr Dlali said that the use of consultants was a huge problem in government, as officials simply used consultants to avoid doing the work.
Mr Ramburuth agreed that consultants should not do the work of the staff, but assured the Committee that they were not referring to the appointment of ‘HR consultants’, but to legal and economic experts. They were case-related consultants. For example, they might need an expert in the steel industry to write a report on an area in that particular industry.
Mr Dlali asked what the presenters thought of introducing some form of price control.
Mr Lewis replied that they did not generally favour price control. Instead they wanted to see a situation where the markets were sufficiently competitive to ensure that prices would settle at a point which consumers could bear. Sometimes however price control might be necessary but this would not be the role of a competition authority.
Mr Ramburuth said that they were opposed to all forms of collusion. However it could be argued that it was better to have government set prices than private individuals. Although the CC opposed price control, it could be acceptable in exceptional circumstances.
The Chair concluded the meeting by saying that the Committee would call on the CC and CT if they required additional information. Even though they would have liked the opportunity to interact further, one had to bear in mind that these interactions were ongoing. The Committee would also be available to provide assistance to these organisations where possible.
080319pcdefence_0.mp3
Competition Commission presentation on Strategic Plan 2008-2011
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Here's what the children in the California torture house did to cope with the abuse
Across the U.S.A.
Caught on video
Energy future
Rare exclusive
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“The nightmare is finally over”: Child pornography charge dismissed against California teacher
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Silke Jasso, June 10, 2019 12:12 pm
A child pornography charge has been dismissed against a California teacher who could have faced a nasty prison sentence if convicted.
In 2015, police arrested Daniel Glenn on a felony charge of possession of child pornography, but that charge was dismissed this month by prosecutors. Glenn’s attorney told the Modesto Bee, “He is clearly innocent of these charges, and for him, the nightmare is finally over.”
RELATED: This teacher proved that he was a sicko with a stunning remark to his student-lover
Glenn was a teacher at Mark Twain Junior High School before his arrest. Police said that a student, who was under the age of 16, sent Glenn inappropriate photos. When authorities investigated, they allegedly found child pornography on the educator’s computer. But, Glenn’s attorney said that “he had not collected any porn.”
Modesto Police Department
Glenn’s lawyer also said that he believes the prosecution would have been unsuccessful in a trial, saying, “They did the right thing and saved the county the expense of going to trial to get to the same place.” He resigned from the school in 2015, and in a statement, the district said, “We support our justice system and the decision made. We acted appropriately to protect students. Our investigation revealed inappropriate communications that go far beyond professional boundaries.”
The evidence that police found on Glenn’s computer was not related to the student who sent him inappropriate images. If convicted, he was facing a year in prison, according to a 2015 article from the Modesto Bee. The girl, who was previously a student of Glenn’s, reported the images.
The 40-year-old teacher was in the district for 11 years, though he wasn’t always at Mark Twain Junior High School. At the time of his arrest, one parent told the Bee that she knew the girl and said, “I warned him that [she] was a troubled child, and he needed to be careful. He just blew me off.” Another member of the community stood by Glenn and said that they believed the allegations were intended to “ruin his reputation.”
About the author: Alex Thomas, Rare Staff
Alex is from Delaware. He lives in DC.
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Myelination and Demyelination
Myelination and Demyelination pp 179-186 | Cite as
Retardation of Brain Myelination by Malnourishment and Feeding Low Protein Irradiated Diet in Rats
Mohammad Habibulla
Hema Krishnan
The effect of feeding low protein diet, and the low protein irradiated diet on the deposition of myelin in the brains of rats over two generations showed that malnourishment lowered the CNP enzyme activity when compared to the normal (high protein) diet fed control rats during early postnatal period. Irradiated low protein diet, when fed within 21 days of irradiation (15 Krads Gamma radiation, 60Co rays), produced still lower CNP enzyme activity. This also enhanced other effects of retarding the brain development, by lowering the protein and lipid contents of the brain during a period from the 4th to 25th day of postnatal development. This suggests the possibility that feeding irradiated low protein food to malnourished developing mammals could cause serious problems like mental retardation.
Lipid Content Neutral Lipid Total Soluble Protein Early Postnatal Period Postnatal Development
Davison, A.N. and Dobbing, J., Myelination as a vulnerable period in brain development, Brit. Med. Bull. 22 (1966) 40–44.Google Scholar
Davison, A.N. and Dobbing, J., The developing brain, in Applied Neurochemistry ( A.N. Davison and J. Dobbing, eds.), Blackwell, Oxford (1968) pp. 253–286.Google Scholar
Dickerson, J.W.T. and Dobbing, J., Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. 166 (1967) 381.Google Scholar
Dickerson, J.W.T., Dobbing, J. and McCance, R.A., The effect of undernutrition on the development of brain and cord in pigs, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. 166 (1967) 396–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbing, J. and Widdowson, E.M., The effect of undernutrition and subsequent rehabilitation on myelination of rat brain as measured by its composition, Brain 88 (1965) 357-366.Google Scholar
Dobbing, J., The influence of early nutrition on the development and myelination of brain, Proc. Roy. Soc. B. 159 (1964) 503-509.Google Scholar
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© Plenum Press, New York 1978
1.Neurobiology Laboratory, School of Life SciencesJawaharlal Nehru UniversityNew DelhiIndia
Habibulla M., Krishnan H. (1978) Retardation of Brain Myelination by Malnourishment and Feeding Low Protein Irradiated Diet in Rats. In: Palo J. (eds) Myelination and Demyelination. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 100. Springer, Boston, MA
Publisher Name Springer, Boston, MA
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Post-NAFTA North America
Post-NAFTA North America pp 38-73 | Cite as
The Governance of Economic Openness through Trade Regimes: NAFTA as a Model of US Open Regionalism for the Americas
Isidro Morales
Part of the International Political Economy Series book series (IPES)
NAFTA was not only conceived to increase trade and investment flows among the partners; it was also devised as a disciplinary regime aiming to reduce non-tariff and non-trade barriers affecting cross-border trade and investment decisions. In other words, NAFTA has established a rules-based trade and investment regime under which economic openness and the mobility of both trade and capital are to be maintained and activated at the trilateral level. By so doing, this regime has instituted the empowerment of market actors vis-à-vis government bureaucracies, and of institutional actors at the inter-state level (i.e. panels and NAFTA-based institutions) in order to ensure the legal sustainability of the regime. The latter play a major role for building confidence and facilitating conflict resolution amongst private parties and government agencies. The common denominator of these ADSMs is that they attempt to protect the rights and interests of private actors, mainly firms involved in trade or business across the region, against discretionary or unjustified policies enacted by public agencies that could breach or impair the Agreement. This was highly desired by Canada and Mexico due to market access problems they have traditionally had with the US. But this was also particularly relevant for the US vis-à-vis Mexico, mainly concerning the pre-NAFTA investment and trade regimes that prevailed in the latter country, in which investors and markets were highly subordinated to government policies.
Trade Regime Issue Area Dispute Settlement Mechanism Final Award Diplomatic Protection
© Isidro Morales 2008
1.Area of Public Administration and GovernmentInstituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de MonterreyMexico
Morales I. (2008) The Governance of Economic Openness through Trade Regimes: NAFTA as a Model of US Open Regionalism for the Americas. In: Post-NAFTA North America. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London
DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582859_3
eBook Packages Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies Collection
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Incredibly, the President's Incredibly Incredible Claims are Claimed to Be Credibly Incredible...What?
Written by Carl Peterson
Incredibly, the President's Incredibly Incredible Claims Are Credibly Claimed to Be Credibly Incredible...What?
It happened without my noticing. Maybe I was working too hard, preoccupied like most Americans on the whirling hamster wheel. Get up go to work come home eat dinner relax go to bed get up go to work etc etc.
Anyway, since the advent of El Niño, that is, the Infant, I mean, our lawfully elected, sane, selfless, svelte, smart, even-keeled, veracious, , stolid--thick-maned, candid, sane, knight templar-of-the-truth compassionate, kind, gentle, clairvoyant, astute, perspicacious, empathetic, large-souled, gracefully aging, sane, spitting-image-of-Adonis, or, if you like, Fabio--Honest Abe, Brainiac and long-fingered, sane president--I have been watching a lot more televised political news than I used to. I began to realize about two years ago that it must have been while I had not been paying attention, a certain pair of words had become veritable workhorses in the lexicon of televised political journalism.
At first I thought it was just one or two television political reporters who misunderstood the ways those words were usually used, and were trying to raise the level of excitement conveyed in their reporting. I noticed that instead of the common intensifiers typically being employed the last time I was paying attention, some televised political reporters and commentators were regularly using the word incredibly to replace very, highly, and extremely--as in, incredibly important, incredibly well-respected, and incredibly unusual. They were also using the word incredible instead of the words in a long list that included good, great, nice, remarkable, pleasant, wonderful, competent, knowledgeable and okay.
Then I realized that it wasn't just a few television political journalists and personalities who were putting incredible and incredibly to work in these new ways: turned out that on MSNBC for example about two-thirds of the reporters, pundits, presenters and personalities didn't often find that things were very, highly, or extremely; they were now almost always incredibly. And they didn't see that things could be good, great, wonderful, extreme, or even fantastic. They just had to be incredible.
Now, I get that this whole thing might have started with the imperative that corporate televised political news must be as exciting and entertaining as possible, and the old, well-worn intensifiers and insufficiently hyperbolic adjectives had become too boring to successfully compete in the relentless inter-network battles for viewership, but there is a special problem when television journalists are reflexively slinging around incredible and incredibly: These two words have roots in the Latin word credibilis, which translates into English as credible, or believable. So, incredible means, literally, not believable. That is its first definition in most American English dictionaries. Its usual second definition is extraordinary or a word similar to that in meaning, and it is this second definition of incredible that TV political news personnel are overusing.
In the dictionaries, incredibly as an intensifier is often defined as meaning extremely, or extraordinarily, but given its root in the concepts of believability/unbelievability, the word never loses its connotation of an assessment of the truth, and reality. So, if you say that someone--let's refer to the president in this example--is incredibly intelligent, you might just be meaning to express that the president is extremely intelligent. But at the same time that root of credibilis has some questions: Are you being sarcastic? Do you mean to say that it is not believable that the president is intelligent? In our everyday, non-journalistic usages, it's not a problem, it's fun to play with the multiple meanings of words in this way, but the sine qua nons of journalism are accuracy, clarity and credibility. Journalistic slinging around of incredible and incredibly undermines these fundamentals by raising the doubts naturally attendant to hyperbole and by the perplexity evoked when journalists seem to be saying that what they are saying is not believable. Incredible and incredibly are just fine on Access Hollywood, but this country is having big trouble right now putting its finger on reality. We don't need journalists contributing to the problem.
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Mary K. W. Jones
Senior Vice President, Public Affairs & General Counsel at Deere & Co.
Deere & Co.
1968 - Cordova, IL
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Samuel R. Allen
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at Deere & Co.
Dennis R. Schwartz
Treasurer at John Deere Foundation
Thomas C. Spitzfaden
Treasurer & Vice President at Deere & Co.
Rajesh Kalathur
President, John Deere Financial & Chief Information Officer at Deere & Co.
James Jenkins
Former Senior Vice President & General Counsel at Deere & Co.
Gregory R. Noe
Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, International at Deere & Co.
Frances B. Emerson
Vice President, Corporate Communications & Global Brand Management at Deere & Co.
James M. Field
President, Worldwide Construction & Forestry Division & Power Systems at Deere & Co.
Max A. Guinn
Former President, Worldwide Construction & Forestry at Deere & Co.
Mara L. Sovey
Former Manager-State & Governmental Affairs at Deere & Co.
Deere to realign leadership responsibilities
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Mary K. W. Jones sold $1.7M worth of shares in Deere & Co. in February 2018
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Truman State University is a public liberal arts and sciences university located in Missouri, United States. It is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. It is located in Kirksville, in the northeastern portion of Missouri. The University is named after President Harry Truman, the only president born in Missouri. Until 1996, the school was known as Northeast Missouri State University, but the Board of Trustees voted to change the school's name to better reflect its statewide mission. In the 2012 U.S. News & World Report College Rankings, Truman again placed eighth in the Midwest among regional universities, the highest ranking in this category for a school in Missouri .
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HNI Corp. is engaged in the manufacturing and trading of office furniture. It operates through two segments: Office Furniture and Hearth Products. The Office Furniture segment manufactures storage products, desks, credenzas, chairs, tables, bookcases, freestanding office partitions and panel systems. The Hearth Products segment develops and markets gas, electric, wood and biomass burning fireplaces, inserts, stoves, facings and accessories. The company was founded by C. Maxwell Stanley, Clem Hanson and H. Wood Miller in 1944 and is headquartered in Muscatine, IA.
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100% renewable energy for 139 nations detailed in new Stanford report
Mark Z. Jacobson and 26 of his colleagues have compiled a report that shows exactly how 139 nations could transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 without throwing millions of people out of work.
Steve Hanley Posted on 24 August 2017 4 Comments
Average daily global sunlight via Stanford University and Mark Jacobson
CleanTechnica
Mark Z. Jacobson, the famed professor at the Stanford School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences, and 26 of his colleagues have compiled a report that shows exactly how 139 nations could transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 without throwing millions of people out of work. In fact, they contend that the changeover would actually spur job growth while dramatically reducing carbon emissions.
Charting The Pathway To 100% Renewable Energy
The new report is an outgrowth of a similar project from 2015 that laid out the steps all 50 states in the US would need to take in order to transition to 100% renewable energy. Why 139 countries? Because that group is responsible for 99% of all global carbon emissions. The report was published August 23 by Joule, an online resource that focuses on news about renewable energy.
Changing conventional wisdom is hard, but it can be done. People laughed at the Wright Brothers and their silly idea that we could fly from place to place. Today, there are more than 100,000 commercial airline flights a day worldwide. Television? Forget it. Smartphones with more computing power than an Apollo mission? Will never happen.
Change happens very slowly, but when it gets started, it builds momentum with amazing speed.
Jacobson’s group developed roadmaps that assess the renewable energy resources available to each country; the number of wind, water, and solar energy generators needed to get to 80% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% by 2050; how much land and how many rooftops these power sources would require; and how the proposals for each country would reduce energy demand and cost when compared to a business-as-usual scenario.
“Both individuals and governments can lead this change. Policymakers don’t usually want to commit to doing something unless there’s some reasonable science that can show it’s possible and that’s what we’re trying to do,” says Jacobson, who is also a member of the board for the Solutions Project, a US-based nonprofit that works to educate the public and policymakers about a transition to 100% clean, renewable energy. “There are other scenarios. We’re not saying there’s only one way we can do this, but having a scenario gives people direction.”
By the way, due to the progressive and influential work Jacobson has been leading, he is in one camp with Elon Musk — he’s getting trolled by anti-renewable forces on the interwebs and in the flesh. Also see these two articles:
100% Clean, Renewable Energy Is Possible, Practical, Logical — Setting The Record Straight
The Attacks On Cleantech Leaders Have Begun — Expect More
The Analytical Framework
The researchers examined several aspects of each country’s economy, including its electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industrial, and agriculture/forestry/fishing sectors. Their analysis revealed that those countries with lots of available land will find the transition to renewable energy the easiest. Countries like Singapore, which has little open land and is surrounded by oceans, may need to look to offshore wind energy to meet its goals.
Moving away from fossil fuels will bring with it ancillary benefits. For example, eliminating the use of oil, gas will cut about 13% from the world’s energy budget because mining, transporting, and refining those fuels are all energy-intensive activities. The greater efficiency of electric motors versus internal combustion engines could reduce global energy demand by another 23%.
Some benefits are hard to quantify, but less international squabbling over access to fossil fuels will definitely be a plus for all concerned. The authors also suggest that making the transition from fossils fuels to renewables will result in a net gain of 24 million employment opportunities worldwide.
“Aside from eliminating emissions and avoiding 1.5º C global warming and beginning the process of scrubbing carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere, transitioning eliminates 4 to 7 million air pollution deaths each year and creates over 24 million long-term, full time jobs by these plans,” Jacobson says. “What’s different between this study and other studies that have proposed solutions is that we’re not just trying to examine the climate benefits of reducing carbon but also the air pollution benefits, jobs benefits, and cost benefits.”
Responding To Critics
Critics of the report point out that the recommendations ignore the potential of nuclear power, as well as so-called clean coal and biofuels. The authors respond that nuclear plants take 15 to 20 years to design and build and bring with them “robust evidence” of a risk of weapons proliferation risk, meltdown risk, and waste management risks, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Clean coal has been condemned recently as a myth, and the production of biofuels creates 50 times as much carbon pollution as renewables, according to the report.
Jacobson and his colleagues highlight the inherent efficiency advantage of electric motors compared to internal combustion engines as the foundation of their recommendations. By their calculations, ICEs are less then 7% efficient by the time the costs of finding and extracting fossil fuels, transporting them, distributing them, and burning them are totaled and compared to the total amount of work produced. They go on to advocate for underground heat storage for homes and businesses, pointing to Denmark, where such technology is common. They also presume that electric airplanes will become commonplace in the future as more and more companies invest in that technology.
Cuanto Cuesta?
So how much is all this going to cost? Trillions. But Jacobson and his colleagues say keeping the existing fossil-based economy will cost 4 times as much, particularly when the economic value of better health and longer lifetimes is factored in. Over time, those benefits will more than equal the initial investment needed to go 100% renewable. In the final analysis, how do you put a price on preserving a world that is fit for human habitation?
In a preview of the report, Mark Dyson of the Rocky Mountain Institute writes, “This paper helps push forward a conversation within and between the scientific, policy, and business communities about how to envision and plan for a decarbonized economy. The scientific community’s growing body of work on global low carbon energy transition pathways provides robust evidence that such a transition can be accomplished, and a growing understanding of the specific levers that need to be pulled to do so. Jacobson et al.’s present study provides sharper focus on one scenario, and refines a set of priorities for near-term action to enable it.”
In other words, an actual plan as opposed to political rhetoric or dogma. Combined with the suggestions made by the authors of the new book Drawdown, the Jacobson report marks the end of hand wringing and the beginning of actual strategies to address the most serious existential threat humanity has faced since The Flood.
More : 100% renewable energy, electric airplanes, Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford
Australia urged to aim for 100% renewables by 2030s
Frydenberg calls for advice on $110m Port Augusta solar thermal funds
George Darroch 2 years ago
The DOI is here, for anyone interested.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2017.07.005
It appears that Sci-Hub doesn’t have any access yet.
It’s a real pity that academic research that our countries pay for is locked away by large commercial publishers, and that academics keep using them.
Mike Westerman 2 years ago
Joe 2 years ago
Can we get Joshie F and his COALition mates to have a read…before we piss away that $1Billions to Adani.
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Tag: Swanwick Baptist Church
There’ll always be an England (part 3)
This is the third and (for now) last in a series of posts describing the paternal ancestry of my grandfather Frederick England, the first two of which can be found here and here. This part mainly focuses on his grandfather Thomas England’s children, including Frederick’s father Thomas England Jr. (1878-1944).
The funeral of Cllr. Thomas England at Swanwick Baptist Church on 24 February 1918 would have been one of the largest family gatherings the Englands had held for many years. The extensive list of mourners reported in The Derbyshire Courier (2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5) gives some indication of the family’s size at this time, but also raises some puzzling questions. Among those present were his older brothers George and James, his older sister Mary and younger half-sisters Alice and Elizabeth, plus a fourth sister, ‘Mrs. Watson,’ who I have yet to identify. His two other known sisters, Hannah and Ann, had both died decades earlier, and while this Mrs. Watson could have been his half-brother William Grice’s widow Mary, I can find no proof that William died before 1918 nor that Mary later remarried and took the name ‘Watson.’ The identity of the second mystery mourner, ‘Mrs. T. England (widow),’ is even more obscure. Thomas’s wife Mary Ann had died in 1913 according to the same headstone beneath which Thomas was interred. This newspaper report is the only evidence I have ever found of him marrying for a second time between 1913 and 1918, and although it’s possible the they could have made a mistake I think this is unlikely given how detailed and comprehensive the rest of their account is. The idea of Thomas remarrying in his mid-sixties is perhaps surprising but at present I can think of no other explanation for this enigmatic widow’s presence at his graveside. Hopefully further research will reveal more in time.
Swanwick Baptist Church, c. 2010 (via Geograph). Thomas and Mary Ann’s headstone is the light grey cross-shaped one directly behind the darker one on the right.
Also present at the funeral were, of course, all of Thomas’s surviving children with the exception of one, to whom I will return later. His five daughters Lucy Ann, Emma Jane, Lottie, Nellie and Amy all attended with their husbands and families. The eldest, Lucy Ann, had married an electric crane driver from Northamptonshire named John George Smith with whom she’d had one daughter. John had died not long afterwards however, and by the time of her father’s funeral she was married to another man named Herbert Hoskin. Thomas’s second daughter Emma Jane had at least six children with Frederick James Fido, and Lottie, who was recorded as a dressmaker’s assistant in the 1911 census, had married George Whylde in 1913. Both husbands were local coal miners. Lottie’s death at the age of ninety two in 1987 makes her the longest lived of Thomas’s children, as well as the only one whose life overlaps with my own. Nellie, unmarried at the time of the funeral, went on to marry a lorry driver named Walter Syson three years later but it is unknown whether or not she had any children. Thomas’s youngest daughter Amy had four boys and two girls with Bertie Crownshaw, a baker from Sheffield, but sadly, as is the case with the rest of Thomas’s daughters, little else is known about her. The only son of Thomas’s named in the list of mourners is his third, John James England. According to one of his descendants, John had been a boot boy at the Royal Alfred Hotel in Alfreton when he was ten before securing an apprenticeship as a sawyer’s labourer. By 1911 he was working at a chemical works (possibly Kempson & Co. of Pye Bridge, his father’s company) and had married Bertha Ellen Sparham, with whom he had five children. He is remembered fondly as a very “quiet, gentle man.”
So where were Thomas’s other sons? His eldest George William England had, like his father, been a coal miner since he was a boy, and by his early twenties was working as a hewer, one of the most dangerous occupations in an industry comprised largely of dangerous occupations. Hewers were responsible for loosening rock at the coalface with picks, working deep underground in sweltering conditions. By the time George started working in the 1890s there were still no restrictions on the number of hours a miner could be obliged to work per day, wages could be cut arbitrarily and safety measures were still minimal. But while the average miner’s working conditions could be said to have improved little since George’s grandfather’s fatal accident in 1850, the organised labour movement had grown in strength by then and was starting to demand a better deal.
In 1893 when George was sixteen the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain called a strike against a proposed 25% pay cut, in which George’s union, the Derbyshire Miners’ Association (according to The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4), were participants. The strikers held out for many weeks, and eyewitnesses at Swanwick Colliery recalled seeing pit ponies, which perhaps had not seen daylight for years, grazing freely above ground (Stone, 1998). Unlike earlier strikes in the area though this one was a success, and the management agreed not to reduce any wages. Industrial action by miners would of course continue throughout the twentieth century, including the National Coal Strike of 1912 which began in Alfreton and soon spread across the country. Their core demands were expressed in a popular chant, which could be heard at pits from Kent to Clydeside:
Eight hours work, Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep and
Eight bob a day
The miners’ victory that year led to the passing of the Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) Act 1912, one of the first minimum wage laws passed anywhere in the world and a huge milestone in the history of workers’ rights. Many of the basic freedoms we enjoy at work today owe a great deal to the efforts of people like George, his brothers, their wives and workmates.
At the time of the strike George had been working at Birchwood Colliery in Alfreton for about seven years, about thirty minutes away from where he lived at 118 Prospect Street with his wife Amy (née Kinnings) and four children. By 1915 he had been promoted to the position of colliery stallman, an overseer’s role which perhaps could have been the start of a promising career had disaster not struck later that year. On Thursday 17 June, George was working alongside fellow stallman Henry Jenkins when at around 12.30 midday they heard a crash. Henry, on hearing George cry out, ran to his aid only to discover that he had been almost completely buried under the fallen pit roof, fracturing his spine and inflicting several other internal injuries. He was quickly pulled out and conveyed to his house on Prospect Street but it was too late, he died of his injuries almost three weeks later on 5 July. The coroner’s inquest which followed returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ but noted that a slight crack in one of the pit’s supporting posts had been detected before the accident and that nothing had been done about it. His funeral took place on Thursday 8 July at Alfreton Cemetery. At the following Monday’s meeting of Alfreton Council his father Thomas received a vote of condolence from the other councillors. He was, he said “passing through troubled waters, ” having lost his son-in-law (John George Smith), his wife and his son in such a short space of time (The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4). Sadly, 1916 would see no reversal in the England family’s fortunes.
‘The late Mr. G.W. England’. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4, via The British Newspaper Archive).
Edwin England, Thomas’s youngest son, was born on 8 November 1893. His three older brothers were all at least ten years older than him and had already started their first jobs by the time he came along. It therefore seems likely he would have been closer to his sisters growing up, all of whom were nearer to him in age. From the 1911 census we know Thomas and Mary Ann had a total of thirteen children together, but sadly only nine of them appear to have survived infancy. Of the four who died the only name we know is that of Ernest Edward England, who was born in early 1892 and died on 27 November that same year. Although infant mortality rates were much higher back then I believe the timing of Ernest’s death must have had an impact on how Edwin was raised, even his name sounds like it may have been intended as a tribute. Having gone through the experience of losing a son the year before would surely have made Edwin’s birth and survival feel even more special, and it’s easy to imagine him as the youngest boy in the family becoming something of a favourite. Unlike his older brothers, when Edwin started work his father would have been successful and influential enough to help him out, and perhaps it was Thomas’s recommendation which had secured him a clerk’s job at Birchwood Colliery by the time he was eighteen (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2).
While as a young man Edwin may have seemed poised to follow in his father’s footsteps, there was of course a key difference between him and his father. When Thomas had turned twenty one it had been 1871 and Britain was at peace. When Edwin reached the same age the year was 1914. On 4 August that year Britain declared war on Germany, and Edwin, as the only England brother not employed in a reserved occupation would have faced enormous social pressure to enlist in the army. On 9 June the following year he enrolled as a private in the 9th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters at Nottingham, and a month later he left Liverpool on a ship bound for the North Aegean. On 7 August he disembarked with his battalion at Sulva Bay, Gallipoli.
Men of the 9th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, refilling mess tins and bottles at a well. Gallipoli, August 1915 (via the Imperial War Museum).
The events of that famously ill-fated campaign to capture the Dardarnelle Straits from the Ottoman army hardly need repeating here, but the 9th Battalion are said to have “maintained stout hearts and a soldierly spirit” despite heavy losses. Edwin apparently escaped the battle “without a scratch” (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2) before his battalion were evacuated to Egypt via Crete in December. In July 1916 they were redeployed to France, and on 26 September 1916, at the Battle of Thiepval Bridge, the first large offensive of the Battle of the Somme, Edwin was killed in action near the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle. He likely fell during the capture of the German Hessian and Zollern trenches however his body was never recovered. He was twenty two. His memory is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France, and on his parents’ headstone in the churchyard of Swanwick Baptist Church.
Edwin England, 1893-1916. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 7 November 1916, p. 4, col. 3 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
‘A Pye Bridge Loss’. News of Edwin’s death reaches Derbyshire. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
Unlike George and Edwin, Thomas England’s second son Thomas England Jr. would go on to outlive their father by several decades, however his name is conspicuously absent from the list of mourners at his funeral. Apparently, his wife Maud did attend (identified as “Mrs. T. England (daughter-in-law)” in The Derbyshire Courier, 2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5), which makes Thomas’s unexplained absence even stranger. There are a number of possible explanations for this of course, but before exploring these let us first take a look at his early life. To avoid confusion with his father I will from this point on refer to Thomas Jr. as ‘Tom,’ as this is the form he used on two of his sons’ baptism records and therefore was probably the name by which he was best known.
Born on 28 July 1878, by the time he was thirteen Tom had already left school and was listed as an ‘errand boy’ in the 1891 census. He would likely have started down the mines not much later, as by 1901 he is recorded as a coal miner. It is unknown which pit he was based at then but he would probably have been working for the Babington Coal Company at Birchwood Colliery alongside his brothers George and Edwin. At around this time, just up the road from the England family home on Park Street was a china shop at number 16 King Street run by a widow named Mary Ann Ling, who lived above it with her daughters Maud and Olive. Maud (b. 17 April 1881, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 22 July 1950, 119 Holbrook Street, Heanor, Derbyshire) would undoubtedly have helped her mother out from time to time at the shop, and it was perhaps here where Tom met her for the first time. It’s tempting imagine a romance blossoming between them over the counter during Tom’s frequent visits as an young errand boy, but that’s maybe a little fanciful. Their wedding, which took place on 16 November 1901 at Alfreton, has already been described elsewhere but I’ve reproduced their marriage certificate below which gives their names, their witnesses, and their fathers’ names and occupations.
Thomas England and Maud Ling’s marriage certificate with missing left quarter, 1901, Alfreton, Derbyshire.
Tom and Maud appear to have left Alfreton shortly after getting married. They had one son there in 1902 but the rest of their children were all born in Langley in south Derbyshire, including my grandfather Frederick England. Their names were:
Albert (b. 6 September 1902, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 17 October 1948, The City Hospital, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire)
Arthur (bp. 15 December 1904, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1905, Derbyshire)
Harry (bp. 23 January 1908, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. 26 January 1958, 7 Grace Crescent, Heanor, Derbyshire)
Frederick England (b. 23 July 1912, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 24 September 1980, Codnor, Derbyshire)
Herbert Kenneth (b. 30 April 1915, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 27 March 1984, Derby, Derbyshire)
Norman (b. 23 April 1921, Langley, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1983, Nottinghamshire)
In the 1911 census the family were living in a three-room house at 15 ‘Odessa Yard’ in Langley. I initially had some difficulty locating the present-day site of this address but after checking the house numbers which came before and after the Englands in the census schedule I now believe they were actually based at 15 Laceyfields Road. Like his older brother George, Tom was a coal hewer, and we know from an article in The Nottingham Evening News (12 Nov 1910, p. [4], col. 4) that he was employed by the Butterley Company Ltd. at the New Langley Colliery (Thomas had been a witness to a recent pit fatality and was giving evidence during the inquiry). In 1912 he would most likely have participated in the National Coal Strike, as well as the General Strike of 1926. By then though he was no longer working as a hewer but an ‘onsetter’ (according to an application for a copy of his son Frederick’s birth certificate dated 4 August 1926). Onsetters were in charge of loading the cages at the bottom of the shaft which conveyed miners to the surface, as well as giving the appropriate signals to the winding engineman. Their equivalent above ground was known as a ‘banksman,’ which is the occupation Tom gave the following decade in both his son Frederick’s marriage certificate from 1938 and in the recently-released 1939 register.
An onsetter signals for the cage to be raised up the shaft, Denaby, Derbyshire, c. 1910 (Elliot, 2014, xii).
By this time he was sixty one years old and living at 98 Holbrook Street in Heanor with his wife Maud and their son Kenneth (Frederick and his wife Mary also stayed with them for a period in the late 1930s before moving across road to number 119). Tom died in 1944 while his sons Frederick and Norman were away fighting in Europe. Unusually for the time he chose for his remains to be cremated rather than buried, which was perhaps appropriate for a man who had already spent so much of his life below ground.
Although I know a great deal about my grandfather Frederick from my mother, and over time have managed to piece together almost as much about his grandfather Thomas England Sr., many of the details of Tom’s life are still shrouded in mystery. I have neither the wealth of anecdotal information about him which I have for his son, nor the extensive news coverage on his activities which I have for his father, and that has somehow always made him even more intriguing to me. This curiosity has been fed by the two major pieces of anecdotal information I do have about him: that he was an excellent fiddle player and a heavy drinker.
The former has always struck me as unusual. Given the time and place in which he grew up, if Tom was musically inclined one would probably have expected him to gravitate towards the local colliery brass band, or perhaps some form of sacred music (which I’m sure his father would have preferred). In contrast to these more traditional, community-based forms of music-making, to me playing the fiddle feels more individualistic, more romantic and possibly a little wilder. This image of him seems to fit well with the fact that he was also known to enjoy a drink. Although it was fairly common for miners to be heavy drinkers at this time, the very fact that this is one of the few pieces of information about him which has been passed down to me suggests his habit was somehow exceptional he may have suffered from alcoholism (Maud apparently had to hide money around the house to stop him spending it on drink). This is pure speculation, but based on the few details I have about him, Tom seems like very different character to his father Thomas England Sr., the respected town councillor, Freemason and deacon, so perhaps his absence from his father’s funeral was due to some kind of falling out? Alternatively Tom may just have been sick or unable to get out of work that day, and his drinking habit could have developed later (perhaps triggered by the deaths of his parents and two brothers in the space of five years). Like so much else about his life, the truth is now lost to us and we must make do with what have the faculty to imagine.
Tom England (far right), with (L-R) his sister-in-law Ethel May England, mother-in-law Mary Ann Bestwick, c. 1935.
Tom England (far left) with Maud (seated) at his son Harry’s wedding to Ethel May Buxton, 1935.
Although I fully intend to return to Tom’s sons in future posts, because their stories are inextricably tied up with those of several living persons I am ending my in-depth history of the England family here in order to to preserve their privacy. In the posts to come I’ll be turning my attention to the family of my grandfather Frederick’s mother, the Lings, a family so different to the Englands with their deep roots in the Derbyshire coalfield it’s a surprise their paths ever crossed.
Baker, Chris. “Sir Ian Hamilton’s Fourth Gallipoli Despatch.” The Long, Long Trail. Accessed 2 March, 2016. http://www.1914-1918.net/hamiltons_gallipoli_despatch_4.html.
Elliot, Brian. Tracing your coalmining ancestors: a guide for family historians. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014.
Stone, G. Strike action at Swanwick Colliery during the Nineteenth Century. Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1998.
Author Robert JonesPosted on 5 March, 2016 15 September, 2017 Categories England family, Ling familyTags Albert England, Alcoholism, Alfreton, Amy England, Arthur England, Battle of the Somme, Battle of Thiepval Bridge, Derbyshire, Edwin England, Emma Jane England, England family, Ernest Edward England, Ethel May Buxton, Ethel May England, Family history, Frederick England, Gallipoli, George William England, Harry England, Heanor, Herbert Kenneth England, John James England, Julia Mary Mills, Langley, Lottie England, Lucy Ann England, Mary Ann Bestwick, Mary Ann Buxton, Mary Ann England, Mary Ann Hall, Mary Ann Ling, Mary Ann Munks, Maud England, Maud Ling, Mining, Music, Nellie England, Norman England, Sherwood Foresters, Strikes, Swanwick Baptist Church, Thomas England, Tom England, Trade unions, William Grice, Working conditions, World War I, World War II2 Comments on There’ll always be an England (part 3)
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Home NEWS & FEATURES Electrifying Transportation
Electrifying Transportation
by Nancy Nusser
Ford's first electric models include a battery-powered version of its Focus sedan. Photo courtesy of Ford
By mid-October, Ford is expected to choose 10 U.S. cities for the launch of its first fully electric passenger cars, and Richmond may be among them.
"We're on the shortlist," says Buck Ward, executive director of the Sustainable Transportation Initiative of Richmond (STIR), a coalition largely of business and education leaders that's been collaborating with Ford. "We're trying to do everything we can to get noticed," Ward says.
For the time being, details about the launch are being kept under wraps. But Ford is expected to introduce fully electric versions of its Focus and Transit Connect, a small delivery vehicle, according to Alleyn Harned, program coordinator for Virginia Clean Cities, which is leading a government-industry partnership to prepare for the adoption of electric cars not only in Richmond but throughout the state.
It's not clear how many vehicles Ford would try to sell in Richmond. But just to get the launch, Richmond must demonstrate that it has a market of about 1,000 potential customers for the vehicles, says David Berdish, Ford's Chicago-based manager of sustainable business.
Wherever it takes place, the Ford launch will be part of a larger move by several carmakers —including Nissan and GM — to begin mass marketing their first fully electric vehicles in cities across the United States by 2011.
Transportation experts say that a transition from gas- to battery-powered vehicles is inevitable because the electric versions are cleaner and cheaper. "You can drive an electric vehicle about 40 miles for a nickel," says Harned. And while a gas-fueled car produces about 5.5 tons of CO2 per year, an electric one only creates about 2 tons per year, he says.
Richmond is smaller than most cities being considered for the Ford launch. But it's still a contender because it has a large population of students, expected to be among the first adopters of electric vehicles. City residents' driving patterns — short distances within the city rather than commutes — are well suited to electric cars.
But perhaps most important, Berdish, a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, has taken a personal interest in bringing Ford's electric cars here. "I've been lobbying really hard for Richmond," he says.
And he's been collaborating with a group of high-powered and equally determined regional leaders. Members of STIR include Gary Rhodes, president of J. Sargeant Reynolds; Kim Scheeler, CEO of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce; Mary Doswell, senior vice president for alternative energy solutions at Dominion Resources; and Byron Marshall, the city's chief administrative officer.
STIR sees electric cars as part of a broader plan for more efficient and greener transportation that would include everything from more bike paths to improved public transportation.
For the time being, traffic in Richmond is still manageable, Rhodes says. "But we have to have a plan or we will become like Northern Virginia," he says, referring to the bumper-to-bumper traffic that clogs roads outside of Washington.
"Ford is extremely important," says Ward, referring to the possible launch in Richmond. But, he says, "This [transition to electric-powered vehicles] is going to happen one way or another. STIR is about making Richmond a national leader."
STIR is part of Virginia Clean Cities, which is already in the middle of efforts to refine a plan for a transition to electric cars in Northern Virginia, Charlottesville, Hampton Roads and Richmond. The government-industry partnership includes numerous state departments and agencies, utilities such as Dominion, and members of the transportation industry.
Gov. Bob McDonnell endorsed the collaboration in June, saying, "I am committed to having Virginia state government lead the way. … The easier we make it for electric cars to operate in the Commonwealth, the more we will encourage private citizens and businesses, and local governments and agencies, to purchase these vehicles."
One of the major players in that effort is Dominion, which must make sure that the power grid can handle the extra demand electric cars would bring. For example, Dominion has to ensure that the grid can accommodate demand if everyone chooses to recharge their car batteries at the same time, say, around 7 p.m. after they've returned home from work. Dominion will also work with government agencies to build free public charging stations, one of which already exists in New Kent County.
Doswell says that Dominion is already involved in preparations throughout the state and in Richmond. "We'll be trying to work parallel to Ford so that we will have charging facilities in place when the cars arrive."
Harned says that adoption of electric cars is likely to be gradual in Richmond and elsewhere in the state. In a few years, there probably will be thousands of electric cars in Virginia, probably tens of thousands in a decade, he says.
In a recent interview, City Council President Kathy Graziano said that Richmond could be perfect for electric cars because its residents — unlike New Yorkers and San Franciscans, who use public transportation — drive within the city.
But Graziano warned that any plan for improving transportation must include mass transit not only in Richmond but also in the surrounding counties. She says Richmond is the only metropolitan area of its size in the nation without adequate public transportation into its suburbs.
In Washington, commuters take the Metro from the city to Arlington County and other suburbs. For decades in San Francisco, travelers have used the transit system to go under the San Francisco Bay and out to adjacent cities.
But Richmond was once ahead of the curve. While San Francisco was the first city in the United States to adopt cable cars, Richmond was the first to install an entire system of streetcars powered by electricity. At the end of the 19th century, an electric trolley system designed by Connecticut-born Frank Sprague began shuttling Richmonders around the city. It replaced horse-drawn public transportation.
In subsequent decades, Richmond suburbs and landmarks were built around the trolley system. Amusement parks were built at the end of trolley lines at Lakeside Park, Forest Hill Park and Westhampton Park, which is now the University of Richmond.
Richmond's former trolley-car suburbs once again might share a transportation legacy powered by electricity. If chosen by Ford for the fleet rollout, Richmond could boast anew of a forward-thinking, cleaner approach to its transportation future.
Find info and get ideas on where to eat around Richmond.
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No Photo ID? No Vote.
The New York Times has done a hit piece on asking people to provide ID to vote, which is a simple, common sense measure that anyone who cares about the integrity of our elections should support. The Times builds the whole dishonest piece around a woman named Eva Charlene Steele:
“Eva Charlene Steele, a recent transplant from Missouri, has no driver’s license or other form of state identification. So after voting all her adult life, Mrs. Steele will not be voting in November because of an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register.
“I have mixed emotions,” said Mrs. Steele, 57, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a small room in an assisted-living center. “I could see where you would want to keep people who don’t belong in the country from voting, but there has to be an easier way.”
…It was during a registration drive at her assisted-living center, Desert Palms, that Mrs. Steele learned she could not vote. Disabled, with a son, an Army staff sergeant, on active duty, she left Missouri recently to stay with her brother and subsequently moved into the center.
Lacking a driver’s license, she could get a new state identity card, but she said she had neither the $12 to pay for it nor, because she uses a wheelchair, the transportation to pick it up.
Setting aside the fact that it’s hard to see how someone could make it to the age of 57 years old in the United States without having some kind of photo ID, there are two years between elections in this country, and I just don’t believe anyone who tells me that they can’t get their hands on $12 to get an ID card in that period. You can work 3 hours at minimum wage, collect that much money, and still have the cash left over to get a cheeseburger.
Moreover, the “right to vote” doesn’t just mean you get to go to polls and pick the candidate you want. There are built in assumptions that go along with it. For example, you assume that illegitimate votes won’t be allowed. So, what about the right the American people have to not see their votes cancelled out by fraud? If we have a case where fraudulent votes decide an election, then we could see the majority of voters in an election disenfranchised by the actions of a few dishonest people.
We see people on the left getting so upset because they believe electronic voting makes fraud more likely — which incidentally, is ironic since it was liberals who demanded more electronic voting machines after the 2000 punch card voting debacle in Florida — but then they turn right around and flip out over a security measure as basic as showing a picture ID.
Know why they really are upset? It’s because they believe they’re benefitting from fraud. They think there are activists out there voting multiple times for Democrats. They’re hoping that there are illegal aliens pulling the lever for Democrats….and that’s sad. I don’t believe these wacky conspiracy theories that the left likes to circulate about the 2000 and 2004 elections being rigged. They’re ridiculous. But, if I believed they were true, I wouldn’t want to win elections like that. No matter who the candidates are or what office they’re running for, I’d rather lose than see Republicans cheat to win. Unfortunately, as you can see by their reaction to voter identification, a lot of Democrats don’t feel the same way.
Also see,
Buckeye State Bunco in the ’04 Election? It Didn’t Happen
The Two Year Old’s Tantrum That Never Ends
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Home > smh > ihmri > 634
Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute
Scanning mutagenesis of α-conotoxin Vc1.1 reveals residues crucial for activity at the α9α10 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor
Reena Halai, University of Queensland
Richard J. Clark, University of Queensland
Simon T. Nevin, University of Queensland
Jonas Jensen, University of Queensland
David J. Adams, University of QueenslandFollow
David J. Craik, University of Queensland
Halai, R., Clark, R. J., Nevin, S. T., Jensen, J. E., Adams, D. J. & Craik, D. J. (2009). Scanning mutagenesis of α-conotoxin Vc1.1 reveals residues crucial for activity at the α9α10 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284 (30), 20275-20284.
Vc1.1 is a disulfide-rich peptide inhibitor of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors that has stimulated considerable interest in these receptors as potential therapeutic targets for the treatment of neuropathic pain. Here we present an extensive series of mutational studies in which all residues except the conserved cysteines were mutated separately to Ala, Asp, or Lys. The effect on acetylcholine (ACh)-evoked membrane currents at the α9α10 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR), which has been implicated as a target in the alleviation of neuropathic pain, was then observed. The analogs were characterized by NMR spectroscopy to determine the effects of mutations on structure. The structural fold was found to be preserved in all peptides except where Pro was substituted. Electrophysiological studies showed that the key residues for functional activity are Asp5-Arg7 and Asp11-Ile15, because changes at these positions resulted in the loss of activity at the α9α10 nAChR. Interestingly, the S4K and N9A analogs were more potent than Vc1.1 itself. A second generation of mutants was synthesized, namely N9G, N9I, N9L, S4R, and S4K+N9A, all of which were more potent than Vc1.1 at both the rat α9α10 and the human α9/rat α10 hybrid receptor, providing a mechanistic insight into the key residues involved in eliciting the biological function of Vc1.1. The most potent analogs were also tested at the α3β2, α3β4, and α7 nAChR subtypes to determine their selectivity. All mutants tested were most selective for the α9α10 nAChR. These findings provide valuable insight into the interaction of Vc1.1 with the α9α10 nAChR subtype and will help in the further development of analogs of Vc1.1 as analgesic drugs.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M109.015339
IHMRI home
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PHOTO: Russian Aquaculture
Russian Aquaculture harvested over over 17,000 tonnes of fish last year
In total, Russia’s largest aquaculture company harvested 17,032 tonnes of salmon and trout.
Russian Aquaculture harvested 10,067 tonnes of salmon and 7,864 tonnes of trout between August 2018 and June 2019, the company reported on its site.
The company farms salmon in the Barents Sea in the Murmansk region, while its trout operations are in lakes of the Republic of Karelia. Both regions are in the northwest of Russia. Among the owners of the company are Maksim Vorobyov, the brother of the governor of Moscow.
The total is up from 2017’s 12,500 tonnes of fish.
Currently, the company owns the rights to 49 sites for salmon and trout farming and the potential amount for both these areas is 50,000 tonnes a year.
In March, SalmonBusiness reported Russian Aquaculture’s plans to reduce dependence on Norwegian fry imports by building its own facility. In June, AKVA group Denmark, a wholly owned subsidiary of AKVA group, won a tender to build a EUR 12 million smolt plant for the salmon farmer.
In March, the deputy head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Fisheries Vasily Sokolov announced that the Russian government is drawing up plans to make salmon production account for 37 per cent of all aquaculture by 2030.
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Garnerville, NY Man Drives off a Winner with 2018 Corvette Convertible Stingray at Resorts World Catskills
“Life in the Fast Lane” grand prize winner drives home thrill of playing at luxury casino resort
MONTICELLO, N.Y. (July 12) – The list of grand prize winners continues to grow at Resorts World Catskills, New York’s newest and closest integrated commercial casino resort to Manhattan. A loyal patron, Ariel Pagala was chosen as the Grand Prize winner in the “Life in the Fast Lane” promotion and won a 2018 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible Stingray. In addition to our grand prize winner, other Player’s Club members won approximately $15,000 in prizes and free play on the final drawing day.
But the summer winning doesn’t end there. Resorts World Catskills is currently hosting its “Imagine a Million” promotion through Sept. 15, 2018, giving guests the chance to win their share of millions of dollars in prizes each day they play and luxurious VIP experience packages, including a 7-night cruise, two-night stay in a sumptuous Palace Suite, and personal chef experience with celebrity chef Scott Conant. One lucky winner will receive the ultimate prize and take home $1 million, guaranteed.
“We are thrilled for Ariel and all of the guests who participated in the ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ promotion,” said Tara Gregson, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Resorts World Catskills. “Each month is filled with an exciting promotional calendar, providing more ways for our players to win. And with the ‘Imagine a Million’ promotion upon us, there are even more opportunities to leave Resorts World Catskills a winner.”
Gaming isn’t the only way to hit it big at Resorts World Catskills. The luxury resort also offers guests experiences in excitement, entertainment and luxury that are unmatched in the region. With a strong line-up of local and nationally recognized acts, Resorts World Catskills is playing a part in bringing entertainment back to the region and helping to restore the Catskills as a premier getaway and true destination, which includes The Fray, performing in the RW Epicenter on August 31.
Resorts World Catskills is an all-season integrated resort destination that features more than 100,000 square feet of Las Vegas style gaming including 2,150 slot machines and more than 150 live table games. In addition to its expansive gaming area, the casino resort also includes 10 varied bar and restaurant experiences, a 332 all-suite hotel, which includes 27 premium accommodations consisting of garden suites, penthouse suites and two-story villas, the Crystal Life Spa, two fitness centers, and the 2,500 seat RW Epicenter. The exclusive third floor VIP gaming area is designed for top-tier players and features a private lounge. Valet and free garage parking are available.
For more information about Resorts World Catskills or to make a reservation, please call 1-833-586-9358 or visit www.rwcatskills.com.
If you or someone you know needs help, help is available. Call 1-877-8-HOPENY or Text HOPENY (467369.)
About Resorts World Catskills
Located in the heart of New York’s Catskill region, Resorts World Catskills offers guests unmatched experiences in excitement, entertainment, and luxury. The integrated casino resort includes an 18-story all-suite hotel and a casino and entertainment complex featuring 100,000 square feet of gaming action including 150 live Las-Vegas style table games, 2,150 state-of-the art slot machines, a poker room and private gaming salons. The casino resort destination also offers more than 10 varied bar and restaurant experiences, which includes an Italian steakhouse created by celebrity chef Scott Conant, and year-round live entertainment at the 2,500-seat RW Epicenter, casino bars and lounges. Upon completion, the hotel will feature 332 luxury suites, including 27 premium accommodations consisting of garden suites, penthouse suites and two-story villas. Additional hotel amenities include the Crystal Life Spa, two indoor pools, and two fitness centers.
The destination resort in which Resorts World Catskills is located will also include an entertainment project providing additional entertainment, food and accommodations. In early 2019, a Rees Jones-redesigned golf course and The Kartrite Hotel and Indoor Waterpark will also be added to this destination resort.
Charles A. Degliomini, 845-807-0001
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Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #5 – Review
By Lee Thacker 8 March 2019 7 March 2019
Leave a Comment on Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #5 – Review
“Are you suggesting that my TARDIS, my sentient TARDIS which travels through the Time Vortex itself to any point in time and space that she wants… listens to an Earth podcast about history?”
After a very promising four part opening tale, Titan’s Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor continues in triumphant fashion, with writer Jody Houser having captured perfectly the tone and style of the latest series – every last nuance of the Doctor’s dialogue is captured to a tee, particularly her penchant for inspiring speechifying, to the extent that you can virtually hear Jodie Whittaker’s delivery of the lines the Doctor’s been given.
Houser is someone who clearly does their homework and takes it seriously, as we’ve been delivered an instalment that would fit perfectly on our screens, alongside the episodes that we saw in 2018. Callbacks – whether intentional or not – help to build the link between the comics and the series itself, such as the Doctor’s menacing of a sheep tying into ‘It Takes You Away’, when she warned of the Woolly Rebellion taking place in 2211. Also reminiscent of that tale is the Doctor’s overly eccentric manner of finding out where they’ve landed, with all manner of strange contortions and quirks in evidence. It might be tempting to think Houser used an advance script of ‘It Takes You Away’ as a template for the landing sequence, so closely does it resemble the equivalent scene. Hopefully, it’s simply a case of pure coincidence, rather than lack of originality.
The setting itself also evokes other Series 11 stories, such as ‘The Witchfinders’, as issue #5 is also set in a small, rural village with strange happenings afoot, hinting at alien intervention rather than devilry or witchcraft. Like ‘Demons Of The Punjab’, this adventure focuses on a more obscure period of history, rather than going for the more flashy or showy events, such as the destruction of Pompeii, or those celebrity historicals where the Doctor meets people like Winston Churchill or Queen Victoria. In fact, it’s so far off the beaten track that there’s a need for a whacking great chunk of exposition early on, to explain exactly what the setting and context is.
READ MORE: Star Trek: The Q Conflict #2 – Review
It’s a bit of a shock that the Doctor’s ‘fam’ know all about the period and location, given that it’s such a highly unusual one to have selected. However, fair play and much respect for Houser to have chosen to set the story somewhere the readers may well not have heard of, as it goes all the way back to those early ’60s Reithian BBC values of informing and educating the audience, which makes it incredibly faithful to the parent TV show. Given the rise of podcasts to something that’s now an everyday thing and taken for granted, I’ll forgive Houser for using one focusing on hidden history as being the reason for Yaz, Ryan and Graham being so informed, especially as it’s funny to see the Doctor being unable to do her usual showing off, and being upstaged by a podcast. Still a slight stretch of credulity, but I’ll allow it.
We find ourselves right in the middle of the Guelders Wars of the 16th Century in the Low Countries. The Habsburgs cast a shadow which hangs heavy over events, even though they don’t appear, as there are rumours running rife of them being in league with demons. Team TARDIS run – literally – into one of the local villagers, Magda, who is terrified of the Habsburgs and the otherworldly soldiers which are supposed to be fighting for them. Magda is our jumping on point for the story, as she befriends the Doctor, and provides all the background detail we need to know. She’s also very similar to the character of Willa in ‘The Witchfinders’, and serves a very similar function.
The Doctor does her usual snooping about to find out what’s going on, as well as why the TARDIS should have brought them all to this particular place and time. After a bit of standard Sonic Screwdriver jiggery-pokery, she realises that the stories of the demons have some truth to them, as she finds a local barn filled with Stilean Flesh Eaters, a nasty breed of aliens, who are closer to vampires than carnivores. The issue ends on what is quite a surprising cliffhanger, with the Doctor placed in far more jeopardy than we’ve seen in some of the TV stories from last year, leaving us wondering just how she’s going to get out of her predicament, given what’s actually happening to her while she’s busy doing her galactic tourguide routing, and being totally distracted in the process.
READ MORE: Life is Strange #4 – Review
Artist Rachael Stott is doing a cracking job in capturing the likenesses of the regulars, without the need for every frame to just be a copy of standard reference photos of the actors. Every little wrinkling up of the nose or scrunching up of the face by the Doctor is faithfully recreated her, giving the character a feeling of life and realism, rather than just lazily cycling through the same half-dozen or so expressions, which another artist could have simply fallen back on doing. Stott also deserves credit for doing her best to create a believable looking setting – historicals must be far more difficult to deal with, because you can at least make things up if it’s set in the far flung future; however, Stott doesn’t appear to be phased or intimated by this challenge, and ends up doing a more than creditable job.
Given that we’ve had a reasonably strong set-up, the next issue will hopefully see the story start to run in exactly the same way the Doctor talks here about loving so much. Houser and Stott’s run as creative team certainly has legs, and it looks as if they’re going to be here for a marathon stint, not just a sprint to the finishing tape.
Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #5 is now available from Titan Comics.
Tags: Comics Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor Titan Books
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OIA Rendezvous Has More Hopeful Tone
Posted by SGB Media | Oct 5, 2009 | Outdoor, Outdoor Trade, Uncategorized, Update
The 14th annual OIA Rendezvous again attracted the leaders of the outdoor industry to gather in one place for three days of seminars, discussions and business at San Diego’s Coronado Island. Based on the increased attendance, this year’s Rendezvous showed signs of an improving economy. Over 315 people arrived in San Diego for the event, matching the record attendance set two years ago in Vancouver, WA. In addition, the mood was dramatically different compared to the dire feelings of a year ago.
Last year in Boston, the usual energy exhibited by attendees at Rendezvous was marred by the crash of the stock market the day before the event officially opened. Many attendees recounted the alarms that went off as every cell phone in the room rang at basically the same time during OIA’s annual board meeting. This year, most attendees felt that a page had turned and the overall theme seemed to be the search for opportunities following the turmoil the industry has experienced over the past year.
As usual, OIA staff found a series of quality keynote and session speakers to provide some rhythm to the back-to-back breakout sessions.
The event opened with the inspiring Kevin Carroll, who was abandoned by his mother at the age of six and left alone with his eight-year-old brother and younger brother in a trailer for days before they eventually found refuge and loving support with their grandparents. Soon after this experience, Carroll discovered the power of play and used it to transform his life. He joined the Air Force, earned a Masters degree, and eventually became a trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers and then went on to become a creativity guru at Nike. Carroll’s experience fit in perfectly with the prevailing mentality at Rendezvous this year. In spite of the difficulties the outdoor industry has faced over the past year, many are quickly discovering the power that recreation and play have in tough economic times. The country may also be coming to the same conclusion as more families are camping, paddling and hiking – together.
Along a similar theme OIA invited Eric Weihenmayer to speak as well. Weihenmayer lost his sight as a teen but was able to see past his disability and become one of he few people in the world to summit the highest peak on each continent.
Weihenmayer has also completed difficult rock climbing ascents and ski descents from some of the tallest mountains in the world.
He has taught at the Braille without Borders school for the blind in Tibet and led an expedition of blind children up to 21,000 feet above sea level in order to prove to them that they too could climb. Weihenmayer’s accomplishments and charitable acts make him a true inspiration for the industry.
While the keynote speakers were more about inspiration in the face of adversity, the breakout sessions focused on how the industry can capture opportunity in this difficult market. Speakers tackled issues such as social media, diversity in the workplace, life after the “Great Recession,” and minimum advertized pricing policies.
Several breakout sessions were dedicated to social media. Paul Kirwin, the founder of Channel Signal a new media monitoring company – left attendees with more actionable items and tangible real-world examples of the impact of social media. He dug into several case studies about how social media goes viral among different user groups including an in-depth case study on Sigg’s recent difficulties with BPA (see BOSS_0934). One attendee told BOSS that the presentation “scared the hell out of me it made me realize how much I don’t know and how many people are talking about my company online.”
Andrea Anderson, an attorney at Holland & Hart, outlined some o the legal risks brands take in the social media sphere. In particular, she pointed to the importance of having an online policy for employees citing 107 lawsuits against individuals and their employers in 2007 that involved comments made online. These lawsuits resulted in over $100 million in verdicts.
Creative thinking also took center stage at several sessions. Chris Waugh, a member of the Ideo team in San Francisco, took attendees through the creative “design” process. He views the word “design” in a broader aspect, pointing out that everyone is in control to “design” their own lives. Waugh’s philosophy to “fail early and often” encourages creativity regardless of the outcome. He points to the importance of testing theories in low- or no-cost environments before implementing them company-wide.
Kelly McDonald, the founder and CEO of McDonald Marketing a firm that focuses on marketing to different ethnicities and cultures in the U.S. market spoke about the complexities and diversities in the U.S. landscape today. She redefines diversity along a much broader axis that includes gender, religion, age, sexual preference, political differences and several other factors. She also pointed out that the U.S. is now the second largest Hispanic country in the world there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than the entire population of Canada. McDonald also identified several hot market segments, including the Boomer generation, Hispanics, African Americans, and Millenials.
Jonathan Lansner, a business columnist for the Orange County Register and David J. Lynch, a global business writer for USA Today, offered the journalists’ broad-market and local perspectives on the current economic situation and prospects for a future recovery. They pointed to several different expectations the business community has now versus pre-recession. Today there are lower growth expectations, the conspicuous consumption of 2005 is gone, and the central bank has fundamentally changed the way it does business it will now proactively attempt to burst asset bubbles before they become so big that they are a global problem.
In the end, the main take-away from the 2009 Rendezvous was hope. Many of the attendees have lived through what they believe to be the worst-case scenario — and they survived. Now many are looking at new opportunities for growth. While today’s market is vastly different that it was a year ago, most of the companies represented at Rendezvous have been nimble enough to aggressively react to these changes and are now seeing light on the horizon.
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Home › Music & Movies › The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers - Special Extended DVD Edition
The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers - Special Extended DVD Edition
The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers Special Extended DVD Edition.
Four disk set. Excellent condition. Some minor scuffs on outer box.
Not seen in theaters, this unique version of the epic adventure features over 40 minutes of new and extended scenes integrated into the film by the director. DVD set consists of four discs with hours of original content including multiple documentaries, commentaries and design/photo galleries with thousands of images to give viewers an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the film. Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship continue their quest to destroy the One Ring and stand against the evil of the dark lord Sauron. The Fellowship has divided and now find themselves taking different paths to defeating Sauron and his allies. Their destinies now lie at two towers - Orthanc Tower in Isengard, where the corrupted wizard Saruman waits and Sauron's fortress at Baraddur, deep within the dark lands of Mordor.
Audio Commentary
DVD ROM Features
Interactive Menus
Production Sketches
Scene Access
The extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was perhaps the most comprehensive DVD release to date, and its follow-up proves a similarly colossal achievement, with significant extra footage and a multitude of worthwhile bonus features. The extended version of The Two Towers adds 43 minutes to the theatrical version's 179-minute running time, and there are valuable additions to the film. Two new scenes might appease those who feel that the characterization of Faramir was the film's most egregious departure from the book, and fans will appreciate an appearance of the Huorns at Helm's Deep plus a nod to the absence of Tom Bombadil. Seeing a little more interplay between the gorgeous Eowyn and Aragorn is welcome, as is a grim introduction to Eomer and Theoden's son. And among the many other additions, there's an extended epilogue that might not have worked in the theater, but is more effective here in setting up The Return of the King. While the 30 minutes added to The Fellowship of the Ring felt just right in enriching the film, the extra footage in The Two Towers at times seems a bit extraneous--we see moments that in the theatrical version we had been told about, and some fleshed-out conversations and incidents are rather minor. But director Peter Jackson's vision of J.R.R. Tolkien's world is so marvelous that it's hard to complain about any extra time we can spend there.
While it may seem that there would be nothing left to say after the bevy of features on the extended Fellowship, the four commentary tracks and two discs of supplements on The Two Towers remain informative, fascinating, and funny, far surpassing the recycled materials on the two-disc theatrical version. Highlights of the 6.5 hours' worth of documentaries offer insight on the stunts, the design work, the locations, and the creation of Gollum, and--most intriguing for rabid fans--the film's writers (including Jackson) discuss why they created events that weren't in the book. Providing variety are animatics, rough footage, countless sketches, and a sound-mixing demonstration. Again, the most interesting commentary tracks are by Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and by 16 members of the cast (eight of whom didn't appear in the first film, and even including John Noble, whose Denethor character only appears in this extended cut). The first two installments of Peter Jackson's trilogy have established themselves as the best fantasy films of all time, and among the best film trilogies of all time, and their extended-edition DVD sets have set a new standard for expanding on the already-epic films and providing comprehensive bonus features. --David Horiuchi
This item is non-returnable.
As with all items from Onyx's Garage, this item may have small signs or use or wear. Please refer to images to assess condition.
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Legend 1986 VHS
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Home For Children Picture Books
The Littlest Bunny in Nashville
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The Big Penguin Party
I Love Texas
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Private teacher training providers escape Ofsted clutches
Sun 22nd Oct 2017, 5.00
The bosses of the two biggest teacher-training organisations in the country have warned against using private providers which aren’t subject to the “acid test” of Ofsted inspections.
Emma Hollis, the executive director of the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT), said at a conference on Monday there was a “real danger” that companies advertising for new recruits might only meet initial teacher-training standards “in the broadest sense”.
All organisations that provide teacher training are overseen by Ofsted, but a number of private companies fall outside its remit as a result of a loophole separating assessment from course provision.
One such private recruitment agency, Castles Education, this year launched a two-year mentoring programme in schools, which allows graduates to work in a school and gain qualified teacher status via an assessment put on by an accredited provider at the end.
The idea is to encourage graduates in English, maths and science who might not otherwise be ready for a PGCE into secondary and primary teaching, said a spokesperson.
All training routes, no matter what they are, should be Ofsted-inspected
They said the programme meets many of the initial teacher-training requirements. For instance, it has “rigorous selection criteria” in place, which it demonstrates by accepting just 11 per cent of the 350 graduates who applied this year.
But although Castles Education, which does not count itself as a teacher-training provider, meets the initial teacher-training criteria, it is “not expected to, as we are not the awarding body” for QTS, the spokesperson said.
The company is now seeking an awarding body for its first graduating cohort in 2019.
But Hollis believes all programmes should be inspected by Ofsted to make sure they meet ITT requirements, such as ensuring applicants have cleared criminal checks, a degree, and have worked in two schools before gaining QTS.
If Ofsted does not oversee them, these routes will “lack the acid test of a rigorous inspection process”, she claimed.
Her words were echoed by James Noble-Rogers, the executive director of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), who believes new providers are welcome in the market but should be “properly accredited and regulated”.
Another company, Premier Pathways, also offers a fully-funded two-year training programme leading to QTS. It is now on its third cohort of 135 for 2019, said a spokesperson, who said the company is “essentially” operating a teaching apprenticeship.
At the end of the programme, the teacher is assessed and given QTS by the University of Buckingham’s School of Education.
As the university is inspected by Ofsted, trainees on Premier Pathway’s programme are inspected too, a spokesperson said.
But the route used by these companies, of having an accredited body signing off on QTS at the end, was not designed for people just starting out in the profession.
The “assessment-only” option for QTS launched in 2009 to allow teachers trained overseas to easily convert their qualifications into one recognised by English schools.
“It was for people who already had a lot of experience in independent schools or overseas,” Noble-Rogers said.
The Department for Education also describes assessment-only routes as being for “experienced” unqualified teachers.
But Premier Pathways reject the notion they are an assessment-only route and pointed towards the PGCE completed by particpants over the two years, delivered in partnership with the university.
“We believe our students benefit from far more HEI pedagogy than any other route currently available,” a spokesperson said.
“All training routes, no matter what they are, should be Ofsted-inspected,” Noble-Rogers insisted.
Jan rowe
What evidence do premier pathways have that allows them to assert that their trainees benefit from more HEI pedagogy than any other available? I’m increasingly disturbed by private providers making unsubstantiated claims of this sort. Do advertising standards authority rules not apply to teacher training? I’ve seen others claiming ‘ we are the best’. Consumer law needs enforcing in my opinion. Why isn’t it?
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Science Fiction HQ
Book review: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
/ By Paul
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
In trilogies, a series comes to an end with the third book. Off course. That’s the point, right? And yes, even the mind bending, convention shattering Imperial Radch series comes to an end with Ancillary Mercy. Why? Because, like I said, it’s the third book and trilogies have only three books. But is it done? No. Definitely not. Or at least, I don’t want it to be done. Is Ancillary Mercy that good? Yes, it is. Both Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword were excellent, my opinion. But Ancillary Mercy is the best.
And that makes sense. Ancillary Mercy is the conclusion that Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword have been building up to.Continue reading
Book review: Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Sword is the second book in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. The First book, Ancillary Justice (which we also reviewed, check it here), received loads of critical praise and won a bunch of awards. These include the most prestigious awards in Science Ficiton. Ann Leckie received not only the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, but also the BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Award. As you might expect, Ancillary Justice’s sequel was highly anticipated.Continue reading
Only one year until new Ann Leckie book
If you are like me, you are craving for a new book by Ann Leckie from the moment you put down the conclusion to her epic Imperial Radch trilogy. Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy are all equally fantastic novels and I just can’t wait where Ann’s imagination takes us next.
New Ann Leckie books to come
Well, we have to wait just a little longer. A year to be more precise. Ann Leckie has signed with Orbit Books for two more books. The first of those will be released in the fall of 2017. And gues what, it will be set in the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy. I guess it’s inevitable that when a series is this succesful, it continues beyond the original series. And I think it’s great. It would be a shame to drop a universe so rich and full of potential. I doubt the book will be a continuation of the story line set in the Imperial Radch trilogy, but there is a whole universe to explore.Continue reading
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. What we know.
The wait is almost over. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will hit the cinemas on December 16th. I don’t know about you, but I am really excited to see what this new exploration of the Star Wars universe brings. A fresh perspective on the attack on the Death Star from Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. And, let’s not forget it is the first of the Star Wars Anthology Series. A series of four (until now) announced stand alone Star Wars movies The extended Star Wars Universe is brought to the big screen. It’s a great time for to be a fan.
National Geographic’s MARS. Any good?
Last Sunday National Geographic broadcasted the first episode of six part miniseries Mars. Mars is part drama/adventure/Sci Fi and part documentary. They call it a scripted-documentary hybrid (whatever the heck that means). About half consists of interview with people trying to get us to the Red Planet. The other half takes place in 2033. It is essentially a fictionalized preview of the first human mission to Mars. Question is: is it any good?
First Impressions: HBO’s Westworld
On October 2, HBO’s new massive budget series Westworld premiered. I was looking forward to this from the day it was announced, but also a bit anxious. I have watched the first three episodes by now and the big question is (as with any high profile Sci Fi production): can it deliver? Can something that we can’t compare to real world examples be made into a convincing visual experience?
In short, yes it can.
So stop reading, run to your preferred watching gizmo, don’t delay and dive in!
Michael Crichton: an overview of his work
While reading about the new HBO series Westworld, I found out that it is based on the 1973 movie Westworld which was created, written and directed by the great Michael Crichton. I have been a longtime admirer of the man and big fan of his work. Because he sadly passed away at 66 in 2008 I thought to pay tribute to the man and his work by writing about him and giving you an overview of his work.
Well, not all of his work. I’ll focus of the science fiction related part of his work. Michael Crichton was a very prolific writer on many topics and maybe he is best known by the general (non-Sci-Fi enthusiast) public for creating one of the longest running dramas in TV history: medical drama ER. But, as said, I’ll go into his excellent science fiction work.
Book series overview: The Expanse
The Expanse book series is an exhilarating Space Opera by James S.A. Corey.
The Expanse book series is not just regular a series of books. It is a friggin’ swarm of cool material. There are the main books (five published, four more to come), the novellas (three published, two more planned) and two short stories. And let’s not forget that the series is adapted for TV, which opens a whole new host of possible Sci-Fi pleasures. But, let’s start with the main story: the books.
Humanity has explored and colonized the entire solar system. There are two main colonies – Mars and Ceres Station (a space station on the largest asteroid in the system) – which have become sovereign powers independent from Earth. Ceres Station is home to the Belters: humans raised in low-gravity conditions. Earth and Mars have been exploiting the inhabitants of The Belt, which now is a powder keg of social unrest and dissatisfaction.Continue reading
Book Review: Ancilliary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice is the first book of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy. An intelligent and thought provoking Space Opera. A real SciFci must read!
Mindblowing
OK, I’ll just get it right of my chest: this Ann Leckie blew my mind! Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice is the first book of an epic trilogy with story angle I have not seen before. To put it in one sentence: Ancillary Justice tells the story of a multibody form of artificial intelligence (AI) that ends up trapped in one of its many bodies and goes out to get revenge in a world where gender distinction is not embedded in language and sociopolitical status determines just about everything. Yep… crazy cool.Continue reading
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The Forefront
Division of Biological Sciences
The art and science of funding research
Posted on November 25, 2015 by Stephen Phillips
A proposal writing workshop led by experienced faculty members helped postdoctoral fellow Eun Ji Chung, PhD, win an NIH career development award after being turned down the first time around. Chung is shown outside the William Eckhardt Research Center, which opened this fall. The building houses the Institute for Molecular Engineering and portions of the Physical Sciences Division.
Eun Ji Chung, PhD, had a vision—a nanoparticle delivered intravenously that would detect atherosclerosis, the potentially deadly build-up of plaque in arteries, administer therapy and signal whether the treatment has succeeded.
The young biomedical engineer is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Matthew Tirrell, PhD, dean and founding Pritzker Director of the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. In 2013, she applied for a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to develop the so-called “theranostic” nanodevice. The five-year, $900,000 grant provides for two years of mentored research followed by three years of self-directed work. Chung’s project to open a new front in preventing and treating heart disease would launch her career as an independent investigator.
But, like roughly 78 percent of applicants for these awards across NIH agencies that year, Chung missed the cut. Undeterred, she enrolled in the new Career (K) Award Writing Workshop offered by UChicago’s Institute for Translational Medicine. For three months, Chung and three other postdoctoral researchers turned down for funding were put through their paces for 90 minutes a week by neuroscientist Harriet de Wit, PhD, and physician-scientist Steven White, MD. Between them, the faculty members count decades of experience winning federal awards. White had also just completed a stint chairing the NHLBI study section overseeing the grant Chung sought.
“Eun Ji is a superb young scientist,” he said. “There’s little I can tell her about her area of science she doesn’t know.”
What the faculty members could offer were insights into how to craft a compelling proposal: cueing the postdocs to what study sections look for, advising them on fixes to parts of their applications dinged first time round and generally serving as proxies for real-life agency reviewers.
“The grasp the class gave me of the intricacies and nuances of grant writing was invaluable,” Chung said. Last November, Chung’s re-tooled proposal was approved. Development of the nanodevice is underway.
And the Pathway to Independence Award lived up to its title. Chung fielded offers from multiple institutions before accepting an assistant professorship in biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, starting next September.
Eun Ji Chung, PhD, is developing a nanodevice to detect and treat atherosclerosis. The five-year, $900,000 grant she received for the project supports two years of mentored research followed by three years of self-directed work.
Moment of opportunity
Chung’s work exemplifies the emerging possibilities in biomedical research. Employing principles from physics and engineering to harness the remarkable properties of matter at the molecular scale, nanomedicine scarcely existed 15 years ago. It’s not an outlier; new technologies and approaches abound. For example, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system confers exquisite control in manipulating basic biology to pinpoint the function of genes and proteins, as well as to potentially devise new therapies. Meanwhile, high-throughput sequencing, digital imaging and cloud computation herald a massive quickening in our ability to acquire and analyze biological data.
To prepare for biology in the age of big data, members of the incoming Biological Sciences Division graduate class convened at the University-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., in September for an inaugural pre-term boot camp on computation and statistics. Attendance at the weeklong intensive was mandatory for most students. “The University is making a big investment,” said Victoria Prince, PhD, dean for graduate education and professor of organismal biology and anatomy. “We’re building on this by developing new courses on campus. Quantitative methods are integral to modern biology; students need to be ready for the exciting times ahead.”
Financial challenges
But Chung’s story also demonstrates the financial backdrop to these unfolding opportunities.
In 2013, she found herself among more than 2,000 applicants turned down for career development funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which doled out almost $33 million less for these awards that year compared to 2005.
NIH funding for biological and medical research is the fiscal backbone of the basic, translational and clinical biomedical research performed by the nation’s universities. Accounting for inflation, it has declined in spending value by 22 percent since 2003, according to the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. At the same time, more investigators than ever are chasing fewer dollars. From 1998 through last year, the number of grant applications more than doubled.
Competition for awards is correspondingly stiff. In 2001, almost one in three applications won NIH funding. Last year, slightly more than one in six proposals were approved. The situation is especially bleak for first-time applicants competing against senior colleagues for scarce funds. Despite dispensations intended to level the playing field, their rate of success in securing RO1 grants in 2014 was approximately one in seven.
Also hard hit is basic science. In 1990, basic science accounted for almost three-quarters of NIH research spending; this year it is projected to make up a little over half. Amid an emphasis on translational research offering the prospect of more immediate returns, funding for fundamental research has fallen more than 13 percent since 2006, after inflation is factored in.
The fallout is being felt at UChicago as it is on every other research campus. Although it rebounded slightly in fiscal 2015, NIH funding for University research declined by 14 percent from fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2014, before inflation is taken into account.
“The potential through sequencing, computation, imaging and other technologies for breakthroughs that improve health, prolong life and reduce suffering has never been greater,” said Kenneth S. Polonsky, MD, the Richard T. Crane Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine. “Yet the government’s commitment to funding the work needed to produce these breakthroughs has never been weaker.”
As a result, the University is not only helping researchers master the skills they need to flourish in a new scientific landscape but also those necessary to navigate a new financial one. Along the way, it is extending a hand to strapped investigators, tapping new sources of funding and taking its message about the importance of robust government support for research to lawmakers.
University of Chicago students, from right, Naomi Pacalin, Derek Wong and Alex Yoo, work on research projects in the Institute for Molecular Engineering.
Smarter proposals sooner
The writing workshop that helped Chung beat the odds forms part of a phalanx of institutional initiatives to help faculty build the strongest case for federal support in an environment where little can be left to chance.
This requires turning what has long been something of an art into a science, moving beyond an impressionistic grasp of what makes a winning proposal toward a more data-driven understanding.
A key tool in this endeavor is the 11-person Federal Funding Working Group convened in July by the Office of the Provost and slated to report to senior institutional leaders this fall. Comprising administrators and academic leaders from multiple divisions, the panel is tasked with identifying ways to boost faculty competitiveness for federal awards, with a particular eye toward improving the University’s standing relative to peer institutions.
“We’re analyzing data on proposal submissions and awards over years to identify trends and drivers, and categorize the reasons behind unsuccessful submissions,” said Jessica Lawrence, director of pre-award services and co-chair of the group. “We want to identify where we’ve been successful, where we haven’t and the reasons behind both.”
Complementing this exercise is an expanded role in proposal preparation for University Research Administration (URA), the University’s grant management unit. This will allow faculty to farm out the administrative components of applications — project budgeting, logistics and regulatory compliance — to concentrate on the scientific content, said Michael R. Ludwig, associate vice president for research administration and URA director. “The traditional role of our office is to vet proposals for compliance. We’re trying to provide more centralized support from the start of an application. We want to handle the administrative parts of proposals, so faculty can focus on technical writing about their projects.”
Matchmaking in D.C.
Another prong in the effort to enhance faculty members’ competitiveness for awards involves helping them “get to know their customer — the agency from which they’re seeking funding,” said Eric D. Isaacs, provost of the University of Chicago.
Based in Washington, D.C., Kate Von Holle serves as director of federal research development — the University’s dedicated liaison to the NIH and other funding agencies.Th e role, created in 2013, places UChicago among a select but growing cadre of campuses retaining such representatives.
Von Holle funnels news of funding opportunities back to campus and relays updates on new directives that might affect grant eligibility. She also helps faculty navigate agencies’ idiosyncrasies — brokering meetings for them with key personnel — and generally serves as matchmaker between agencies and researchers seeking funding.
Kate Von Holle, the University’s director of federal research development in Washington, D.C., helps match researchers to funding opportunities with federal agencies.
“I try to meet as many faculty as possible to get a sense of what people are doing and how I can help,” said Von Holle, who has already had discussions with more than 100 faculty members. “I also have meetings on the agency side to understand their priorities and how they might manifest in funding opportunities.”
One beneficiary of this networking is Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD, professor of medicine and human genetics.
Rzhetsky employs artificial intelligence tools to parse research papers, electronic medical records and other datasets for fresh insights into disease. In February 2014, he learned of a prime funding opportunity with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to apply the technique to cancer data. Together with Von Holle, Rzhetsky met with DARPA officials to get a tighter fix on what the agency was looking for.
“Kate organized meetings in which we collected information about how these proposals are written,” he said. “It wasn’t about the science; it was about how to frame the science and what to put in the proposal.” Rzhetsky also drew on expertise from Arete, the University’s research accelerator, with which Von Holle is affiliated, for his submission. “They helped me with the non-scientific components of the proposal, such as the management plan — how the project would be structured and who would do what,” he said.
Last summer, Rzhetsky and his team got the nod — $4.5 million to develop computational algorithms that can mine research literature for testable models of the protein interactions behind cancer toward identifying prospective new therapies.
“Better still,” Von Holle added, “through the meeting process, Andrey met a bunch of new people, some of whom he’s stayed in touch with.”
Such activity forms part of a longer game. Beyond immediate funding opportunities, Von Holle is working to put UChicago investigators on the radar of grant-issuing officials, positioning them as thought leaders and generally raising the University’s profile with those holding the research purse strings.
“I call it ‘socializing’ agencies to the work of the University,” she explained. “The ultimate goal is to get more people interested in and aware of the work happening at UChicago. This kind of influence is a long-term play, but it’s important for the University because there are a lot of other universities active and engaged in D.C., promoting their faculty work.”
A $150,000 bridge grant from the BSD helped neuroscientist Richard P. Kraig, MD, PhD, secure $4.5 million in funding from the NIH and other sources.
Bridge to impact
Here on campus, the University is nurturing research that might otherwise fall through the cracks.
One practical effect of the funding downturn, investigators say, is reticence on the NIH’s part to commit tight funds to research not already substantially advanced toward its goal.
Researchers can find themselves in a chicken-and-egg situation: needing funds to prove the viability of a hypothesis, but unable to secure them for lack of proof. Among the casualties can be potentially transformative work. “Study sections are looking for researchers to confirm the feasibility of their approach,” said Prince. “It rules out a lot of cutting-edge stuff.”
T. Conrad Gilliam, PhD, the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Professor and dean for basic science, estimates that up to one in 10 BSD faculty have received “bridge” funds to ease this quandary and, more generally, sustain them between federal grants. The principle behind the awards is simple: impetus to acquire more data and prove a concept toward securing federal funding. In this way, relatively modest infusions can yield outsize returns.
In 2011, Richard P. Kraig, MD, PhD, the William D. Mabie Professor in the Neurosciences, had a provocative proposal for a new way to treat migraines and multiple sclerosis based on a naturally occurring substance within cells that repairs neural damage. But the NIH deemed it “too far out on the edge,” he recalled.
Putting $150,000 from the BSD to work, Kraig built out his dataset and substantiated the hypothesis, parlaying it into $4.1 million in grants from the NIH plus $100,000 from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and $300,000 from UChicagoTech, the University’s center for technology development and ventures.
“We got the data we needed to establish proof of principle and secure the federal funds,” Kraig said.
Thanks to $3.5 million from the John Templeton Foundation, another mechanism for incubating early-stage research has been Arete’s Big Ideas Generator (BIG) program. Over the past year, this has disbursed small grants for pilot or proof-of-concept studies and $100,000 awards for projects that are further along but need more data.
“We’ve tried to make risky ideas less risky by helping researchers get preliminary data to bring to the NIH,” said Jasmin Patel, MBA’12, Arete’s executive director. Borrowing from Silicon Valley, where venture investors bootstrapping tech startups also provide them with business guidance, Arete has taken a hands-on approach to funding. “It’s about more than giving investigators money,” said assistant director of research innovation Meera Raja, PhD. “We sit down with them to discuss what the project will look like down the road and the opportunities for future funding.”
Now, Arete is adapting the online application system developed for the Templeton-funded awards into a portal for seed funding opportunities University-wide. Awards will remain at the discretion of divisions and departments, but the new web offering will provide a one-stop shop through which faculty can apply for them. “This is about streamlining the application process and making seed awards more easily discoverable for faculty,” Patel said. The service, slated to be operational as early as fall 2016, will also allow officials to better coordinate seed funding across campus and track demand for it more precisely.
Arete also offers a lever for generating bold, often cross-disciplinary projects that can contend for substantial federal funding opportunities through quarterly brainstorming sessions it convenes to spur faculty to come up with creative solutions to tough problems. “The premise is to have a bunch of people propose and debate ideas for big things, then figure out the teams we can pull together to make them happen,” Isaacs said.
Jasmin Patel, MBA’12, is executive director of Arete, which has incubated early- stage research through its Big Ideas Generator (BIG) program. Arete is now adapting the online platform developed for BIG into a portal through which faculty will be able to apply for seed funding awards University-wide.
Diversifying funding
At the same time, the University is cultivating funding sources beyond the federal government.
One such income stream comes from research-driven inventions that may either be licensed to corporations or spun out into start-ups, in many cases involving the faculty investigators themselves.
UChicagoTech brought in $5.8 million from commercializing intellectual property in fiscal 2015 — a significant portion of which was plowed back into the research enterprise.
The University also pursues industry-sponsored research. Over the past 11 years, corporate backing of BSD research tripled to more than $55 million. Funding for clinical trials accounted for 83 percent of industry research support in the BSD in fiscal 2015 and the University is proceeding cautiously beyond trials, emphasized URA’s Ludwig. “Like our peer institutions, we’ve chosen not to accept funding that restricts our ability to publish research findings.”
Still, industry-sponsored clinical and translational research represents an important and growing part of BSD’s research portfolio.
Again, UChicagoTech is helping drive this activity. “We’re the interface between what’s happening in University labs and the business world,” said deputy director Steven Kuemmerle, PhD. At this year’s BIO International Convention in Philadelphia, UChicagoTech delegates met representatives from more than 80 companies, he said. “While we’re out there shopping the University‘s technology, we’re spotlighting UChicago investigators and their capabilities.”
A so-called “master sponsored research agreement” negotiated by UChicagoTech and URA with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in 2012 provides several million dollars for University research in cancer immunology, a promising new paradigm for cancer care that enlists the immune system to fight tumors as it would a virus. The pact grants BMS certain preferred rights to develop any discoveries arising from the funded research.
The gift of philanthropy
Another lifeline for research is philanthropy. Last year, the University publicly launched its biggest capital campaign yet, targeting $4.5 billion in charitable gifts, including a goal of $1.2 billion for medicine and the biological sciences.
“We’re seeing a boom in foundation support,” said Peter H. O’Donnell, MD’03, assistant professor of medicine, who uses philanthropic awards to advance his research into how genes affect patient response to chemotherapy. “They’re real grants, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars. I see them as equivalent to federal grants; they allow you to do your research. They’re a great way to grow your career.”
As a corollary, such funds improve investigators’ prospects for securing federal awards. Agencies look favorably upon philanthropy because of the momentum it builds behind work, Isaacs said. “Philanthropy is important for federal awards because agencies like to see leverage on their dollar.”
Philanthropy is also a potent source of innovation in funding models. Many philanthropic gifts target pain points, neglected niches and areas of acute need in the current funding climate.
For example, the W. M. Keck Foundation, which has previously supported work in molecular biology among other research at the University, expressly solicits novel ideas that would be a hard sell to risk-averse agencies. Among other criteria, the projects they fund must “demonstrate a high level of risk due to unconventional approaches, or by challenging the prevailing paradigm . . . have the potential for transformative impact [and] fall outside the mission of public funding agencies.”
Meanwhile, the $150 million Faculty Scholars program, announced earlier this year by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Simons Foundation, extends support (up to $2 million over five years) to young tenure-track scientists, buying them time away from the grant-writing treadmill to double down on their research during a formative stage in their careers.
“You have to be creative and look at different sources of support in this funding environment,” said O’Donnell, himself a 2010 recipient of the Cancer Research Foundation’s Young Investigator Award, intended “to enable promising young investigators to initiate successful scientific careers.”
The imperative of NIH support
But the University is not taking its eyes off the ultimate prize: restoration of NIH research funding to historic levels.
At over $218 million, funding from the NIH represented more than 45 percent of the $468.7 million the University was awarded for research in fiscal 2015.
The importance of NIH funding extends beyond its sheer magnitude. Faculty affirm the primacy of the federal government as a source of disinterested support for research, particularly basic science —the benefits from which may not be felt for decades — for which there can be scant other funding options.
“Government funding is critical because it serves the entire population,” said Julian Solway, MD, the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics and director of the Institute for Translational Medicine. “The government alone can allocate funding broadly enough to create the portfolio of research we need. The incentives for industry are inadequate, and philanthropy, while tremendously important, tends to be focused on specific areas.”
Dean Kenneth S. Polonsky, MD, left, introduces Senator Richard Durbin to students. The lawmaker was on campus in 2014 for a roundtable discussion on the research funding crisis. Durbin’s American Cures Act would raise funding for biomedical research.
Polonsky recasts NIH’s budget, almost $30.1 billion in 2014, as a percentage of total U.S. health care expenditures — projected to reach $3.1 trillion for 2014. “We’re talking about increasing the amount we spend on research, now around one percent of our total health care investment, and the impact would be profound.”
“We need a robust pipeline of NIH-funded basic discoveries that industry can apply to make medical advances,” he added. “Without basic science discoveries, you choke off the entire ecosystem.”
Spurred by such considerations, the University is flexing its advocacy muscles.
In Washington, Von Holle forms part of a five-person Office of Federal Relations, established in 2008. “We are very engaged in educating a wide variety of groups on the impact of scientific research on human health and the importance of federal funding in supporting the national research efforts,” Polonsky said. “This includes meeting with members of Congress.”
In spring 2014, the University threw its weight behind legislation proposed by Richard Durbin (D-Ill.)to ease the funding crunch. The American Cures Act would peg increases in the budget of the NIH and other federal granting agencies for biomedical research to inflation plus a premium of 5 percent, injecting approximately $150 billion over a decade. To herald its endorsement of his bill, the University hosted Durbin on campus for a roundtable discussion with faculty and students.
In May, Polonsky joined 18 other deans of leading academic medical centers as a signatory to an op-ed in Science Translational Medicine protesting the decline in federal support and calling for a “stable economic platform” for biomedical research.
Grounds for cautious optimism
In the meantime, the prospects for such support are finally looking up.
Following years of gridlock, political will is building behind increased research spending amid a convergence of factors, said Mary Woolley, president of advocacy group Research!America, a member of the Visiting Committee to the BSD and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and a longtime observer of the Washington scene.
In June, the House of Representatives approved the 21st Century Cures Act, which like Durbin’s bill before the Senate would boost NIH’s budget. At the same time, the broad coalition of support coalescing around hiking funding for NIH spans liberal Democrats as well as conservative Republicans who have embraced a well-funded NIH as a tenet of fiscal conservatism — a hedge against incurring greater expense from health care costs down the road.
Woolley also notes an increased sense of urgency around research amid mounting anxiety over Alzheimer’s. “Existential threats are an important driver of NIH funding,” she said. “Concern over HIV/ AIDS was one, the War on Cancer another and, before that, polio.”
Finally, she sees in CRISPR-Cas9 a breakthrough technology with the potential to grip the imagination and energize lawmakers as the Human Genome Project did in the 1990s.
“There remains a lot of work to do on many people’s parts,” Polonsky said. “But sooner or later people will realize we’re doing more harm than good by focusing exclusively on the cost of research.”
“This is not a political philosophy,” he added. “It’s about a belief in science and medicine — the power of scientific discoveries to advance medicine.”
This story was originally published in the Fall 2015 issue of Medicine on the Midway.
21st Century Cures Act
American Cures Act
Andrey Rzhetsky
Eun Ji Chung
Julian Solway
Kenneth Polonsky
Peter O’Donnell
Richard Kraig
Stephen White
Scientists Find a More Likely “Fat Gene”
Making the microbiome part of precision medicine
A New Gold Standard for Anorexia Treatment
Two University of Chicago scientists named AAAS fellows for 2015
An antibody to beat staph at its own game
UChicago Medicine named one of American Hospital Association’s Most Wired Hospitals
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« The Boys Coming In July! (Amazon Prime Video) | Main | Doctor Who Two-Part Special "The End of Time" Coming to U.S. Movie Theaters For One Night Only! »
The UnXplained Hosted & Executive Produced by William Shatner - Coming Next Month! (HISTORY)
HISTORY will premiere the nonfiction series The UnXplained, hosted and executive produced by Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actor William Shatner (Star Trek, Boston Legal) on Friday, July 19 at 10pm ET/PT. The eight-episode, one-hour anthology series will tackle subjects that have mystified mankind for centuries, from mysterious structures and cursed ancient cities to extraterrestrial sightings and bizarre rituals.
“I’m thrilled to be hosting and producing the new HISTORY series The UnXplained said Shatner. “It’s an intriguing show that will offer viewers credible answers to questions about mysterious phenomena, while also leaving other theories left unexplained.”
From Executive Producer Kevin Burns, the creator and producer of HISTORY’s most popular series, including Ancient Aliens and cable’s #1 nonfiction series The Curse of Oak Island, The UnXplained will explore facts behind the world’s most strange and bizarre mysteries. Hosted by Shatner, the series will also feature contributions from top scientists, historians, engineers and researchers – each seeking to shed light on how the seemingly impossible can happen.
The UnXplained joins HISTORY’s Friday night programming block which includes Ancient Aliens, one of the network’s longest running nonfiction series which reached over 80 million total viewers across total day in 2018 and the limited nonfiction series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, where former intelligence officials break boundaries and perceived government taboo by disclosing information about efforts being made to change government policy surrounding UFO phenomena; and the hit scripted series Project Blue Book, from executive producer Robert Zemeckis and recently renewed for season two, based on the true investigations into UFOs and related phenomena conducted by the United States Air Force in the 1950s and 1960s.
The UnXplained is produced for HISTORY by Prometheus Entertainment. Kevin Burns is executive producer for Prometheus Entertainment. William Shatner is an executive producer. Executive producer for HISTORY is Susan Leventhal.
Tags: anthology, Entertainment, HISTORY Channel, Kevin Burns, nonfiction, Prometheus Entertainment, Star Trek, Susan Leventhal, The UnXplained, TV, UFOs, William Shatner
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Emily Blunt Reveals Her Biggest Challenge On Mary Poppins Returns
by Sandy Schaefer
– on Nov 12, 2018
in Movie News, SR Originals
Emily Blunt has revealed the biggest challenge she had to overcome while playing P.L. Travers' Practically Perfect nanny Mary Poppins in Disney's upcoming sequel, Mary Poppins Returns. And while the role was difficult for multiple reasons, Blunt had admitted that the dancing was the hardest part of all.
A sequel 54 years in the making, Mary Poppins Returns is described as being as much an homage to Disney's original Mary Poppins - a film that won five Oscars, including Best Actress for star Julie Andrews - as it is a followup to that classic musical. The film is very much a continuation and not a remake, however, as it picks up with the Banks family in Depression-era London, more than twenty years after the events of the first movie. Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer costar in the film as the now-grown Banks children Michael and Jane, who are still reeling from a personal loss when Mary Poppins (now played by Blunt) re-enters the picture, in order to bring some hope and light back into their lives.
Related: Mary Poppins Returns Went Back to P.L. Travers' Books
Screen Rant visited the Mary Poppins Returns set awhile back and asked Blunt what the biggest challenge on the film was for her. While the Edge of Tomorrow and A Quiet Place star admitted the role was challenging in more ways than one, she singled out the dancing as the element that intimidated her the most, at the start of production:
The dancing, probably. I feel that I just try to approach her as I would any other character and not be caught up in the white noise of, "Oh my God, you are Mary Poppins." I think that has been my main focus, is just to approach her calmly, as I would any other character, how I would play her, with what I have given on the page? I have not watched the [original] since I saw it as a child, cause I... no one is going to outdo Julie Andrews. I think I just want to... this is just going to be my version her. The dancing has been the most daunting prospect for me.
Mary Poppins Returns producer Marc Platt praised Blunt's performance in the film when we interviewed him, saying that she's "not only a consummate actress, who possesses a tremendous craft" but that she also "sings beautifully [and] dances magnificently, [which] was a big surprise". Director Rob Marshall, who previously collaborated with Blunt and Platt on Disney's Into the Woods musical adaptation, likewise praised Blunt's singing and dancing in the film in equal measure, adding that it's "very rare these days" to find actors who can do one as well as the other (like Blunt can).
With a cast that includes Hamilton creator and modern Broadway superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda as Jack the lamp-lighter (a character similar to Dick Van Dyke's Bert the chimney sweep from the original Mary Poppins), Mary Poppins Returns should feature some impressive musical sequencing and dance choreography in general. It's thusly good to know that, as far as the film's creatives are concerned, Blunt was able to hold her own when it came to dancing in the film, in addition to the acting and singing elements of her performance. One imagines the Practically Perfect nanny herself wouldn't have it any other way, of course.
MORE: Mary Poppins Returns Has An Awesome Animated Sequence
Key Release Dates
Mary Poppins Returns (2018) release date: Dec 19, 2018
Tags: Mary Poppins, mary poppins 2
Zachary Levi Thinks He's Too Old to Play Flynn Rider in a Live-Action Tangled
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Claude of France
Claude of France (October 14, 1499 – July 20, 1524) was the daughter of Louis XII of France and Anne of Brittany. Claude had no brothers, but was not allowed to be the Queen of France in her own right after her father died because of the Salic Law. Instead she became the Queen consort of France by marrying the next King of France, Francis I of France.
Henry II of France was Claude's son.
After she got married Claude spent the rest of her life having babies. She died when she was only 24.
Retrieved from "https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Claude_of_France&oldid=4715795"
Kings and Queens consort of France
Dukes and Duchesses of Brittany
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..Hurricane Harvey’s Floodwaters Were So Extreme That They Warped Earth’s Crust…
Straight Arrow Climategate, global warming, Home, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, What Did You Say? September 19, 2017 2 Minutes
…..Wait!…..What? !…………
Hurricane Harvey from The International Space Station.
Hurricane Harvey is set to be one of the costliest natural disasters in American history. It was both unusually wet and extremely slow, and as a result, it dumped a whopping 125 trillion liters (33 trillion gallons) of rain on the US, mostly on Texas – more than four times that unleashed by 2005’s Katrina.
Last week, geoscientist Chris Milliner of NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent out a tweet that contained a rather startling map. As various GPS markers across Houston have revealed, the city actually sank a little as Harvey dumped all of its precipitation on the unfortunate city.
Of course, a lot of the metropolis was underwater, but this isn’t quite what we mean here. There was actually so much rainfall that the Earth’s crust itself was depressed by around two centimeters (about 0.8 inches) for a few days. That may not sound like much until you remember that warping the surface of the planet isn’t actually easy.
A simple calculation by The Atlantic suggests around 125 gigatonnes (275 trillion pounds) of water fell from the sky back then. That’s a difficult number to envisage, so let’s just say that the water weighed the same as 155,342 Golden Gate Bridges. It’s about the same as 77 percent of the total estimated mass of Mount Everest.
Mount Everest, by the way, cannot get much taller. If it did, the crust beneath it would begin to sink in response. So it’s safe to say that a veritable mountain of water landing mostly on Houston had the same effect, except in this case, the land was forced downwards.
Someone asked Milliner if the GPS reading was simply due to the compaction of unconsolidated, sandy soil that was simply sinking under the weight of the water. Not so, says the scientist: The “subsidence is beyond noise level.” Although some soil compaction may be a factor here, if the ground rebounds and moves upwards again as the waters recede that will confirm the crustal warping theory.
Another person asked Milliner about climate change. As we’ve previously reported here, climate change doesn’t “cause” hurricanes, but it certainly makes them wetter and more powerful. Thus, it’s safe to say that Harvey’s record-breaking rainfall was worse than it should have been.
In response to the query, Milliner says: “Unfortunately, [climate change] is very real. You don’t have to believe politicians, just look at the data and science.”
By Robin Andrews
PHOTO CREDIT: RANDY BRESNIK/NASA
…….and so ends another exciting episode of What The Hell Can Possibly Get Worse?…….but that is a catchy phrase….”You don’t have to believe politicians, just look at the data and science.”……… has kind of a ring to it……………………..w
RING RING RING RING RING RING RING RING RING
NASA Geoscientist Chris Milliner
Previous Post ….The Unlikely Return of Cat Stevens……….
Next Post ..Why China Won’t Pressure North Korea as Much as Trump Wants…
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ReIGNITE 2021 takes off with party and Time Capsule!
Published on Thu, 22 Nov 2018 09:38
Local business leaders and supporters crowded into St John’s Waterloo on Thursday November 15th for the burial of a Time Capsule to launch ‘Reignite 2021’, the campaign to renovate the landmark building south of the river. St John’s, which stands opposite the IMAX in Waterloo, was last renovated in 1951 for the Festival of Britain and is now in urgent need of an upgrade.
Representatives from South Bank BID, We are Waterloo, SE1 News, Resonance Radio and many others came to show their support for Reignite 2021. Also present were Baroness Jenny Jones and the many arts and charity organisations based at St John’s, including Southbank Sinfonia, Waterloo Festival and The Bridge at Waterloo.
Eric Parry Architects, whose renovation plans for St John’s were on display on large panels for the first time, were on hand to talk people through the proposed remodelling of the entrance and crypt.
Sparklers were lit as the crowd moved out onto the church’s forecourt for the burial of the Time Capsule, and the sound of bugle rang through the night as the box was carefully buried next to the war memorial.
Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s, explained that the unique Time Capsule box contained a mix of objects “capturing the essence of 2018, for future generations to uncover”. He pointed out that in burying such an object, St John's was also sowing seeds of a new vision for the large church.
“St John’s has helped so many over the centuries,” explained Goddard. “It was an air-raid shelter during the war, a haven for the homeless in the 1980s, and today offers music concerts, art exhibitions and employment courses. Now the church needs a helping hand itself. With our Reignite 2021 campaign, we aim to raise a further £1 million to ensure the St John’s can be renovated in time for the seventieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain.”
The proposed designs for St Johns include a new entrance, disabled access into the crypt, new kitchens and toilets and a remodelled crypt. To find out more, or get involved in the campaign to renovate St John’s, go to www.stjohnswaterloo.org/reignite2021
There will also be a New Year's Caelidh dance fundraiser on January 4th. Tickets available at stjohnswaterloo.org/ceilidh2019
Photo Credit: Eleanor Bentall
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A North-West
The centre of Stockport is undergoing a radical and exciting £1billion programme of investment. Over the next five years, significant investment in a range of regeneration projects will create new jobs, homes, leisure opportunities and improve transport networks across Stockport even further.
£ 1 B
Value of the investment currently taking place across Stockport.
Number of businesses – and counting – in Stockport.
1M sq ft
Commercial space deals April 2017 – March 2018. Investment at an all-time high
People of working age live within 30 minutes of Stockport town centre.
“We have recruited locally but we have staff who travel in from all over the North West, so location was really important.”
“Stockport offers unrivalled access to regional, national and international business markets. Its location has contributed significantly to our ability to grow."
“Stockport has a well-educated and highly skilled workforce and for us this has proved invaluable in helping us grow.”
MAN Diesel & Turbo Ltd
On the doorstep of the Peak District and Manchester city centre and offering high-quality education, vibrant villages, an exceptional location as well as a quality of life sought after by many, Stockport has long been a popular and sought after place to live.
But that’s not all!
An ever growing number of restaurants, bars, events and places to visit, have seen the town centre quickly establish itself as one of the region’s most popular, exciting and attractive places to live for all ages. With 5,000 new homes planned in the coming years as well as a town centre park and much more, Stockport is most definitely the place to be.
adidas, NXP Semiconductors, musicMagpie and Sky are just some of the businesses that have found their ideal home in Stockport!
Offering an exceptional workforce, prime location as well as the opportunity to work with and benefit from the town’s entrepreneurial and highly proactive business community, it’s easy to see why Stockport is one of the fastest growing commercial towns in the north of England.
With deals on over 1,000,000 sq ft of commercial space completed in the last year alone, business investment into Stockport is at an all-time high, as companies of all sizes, from start-ups to international headquarters chose to make the town their home.
Home to award-winning restaurants Where The Light Gets In and The Allotment Vegan; popular events such as Foodie Friday and The Makers Market; a thriving community of bars and microbreweries, lively independent shopping and a growing leisure offer at Redrock, are just some of the things you’ll find in Stockport town centre.
Add to this the news that successful restauranteur Steve Pilling will be opening two new town centre restaurants this year, that The Mobberley Brewhouse and The Wine Company are both coming to town with many more due to follow, there’s something for everyone to enjoy outside of work in Stockport town centre.
Just outside of the town centre you’ll also find the vibrant villages of Heaton Moor, Bramhall and Cheadle, to name just a few!
Connectivity is key ... and no matter how you travel you’ll find first-class links in Stockport.
The town centre is on the doorstep of regional, national and international networks by road.
The mainline train station, right next to Stockport Exchange, offers direct links to Manchester and London by rail as well as easy access to routes across the UK. And just 15 minutes from Manchester Airport, international travel couldn’t be any easier.
To make sure that the town’s already exceptional connectivity continues to improve, multi-million pounds are being invested into improving transport links even further, making it even easier for you to travel around Stockport where for business or pleasure.
For further information www.stockportchangehere.org
Transport Interchange from A6
The future of Transport Interchange
Tim Gilber and Chris Collier at Squound
Street Food at the Market Place
Hat Works and Underbanks
Pizza Express and Zizzi
Matt Nutter, Head Chef at The Allotment Vegan Restaurant
New and improved transport interchange
Stockport Exchange, Railway Road, Stockport, SK1 3SW
#stockportexchange
Web design and build by 90degrees
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Diversifying the Board Prioritizing and Practicing Inclusivity
A democracy fares best when it is proportionally representative of its constituents. That's why a government that mainly consists of, say, old white men cannot necessarily relate to the plights of a diverse voter base.
For all intents and purposes, the board of a condominium, cooperative or homeowner's association is a democratically- elected entity, and as such it should strive for proportional representation of the residents it seeks to govern. America is a melting pot of languages and ethnicities and, as a result, a multifamily building in South Florida is bound to include a broad array of language and cultural demographics.
This all raises several questions: How important is it for a board to accurately represent the demographics of its owners or shareholders? How likely are boards across various markets to be adequately representative? Who is most likely to run for board positions in general? Who is best positioned to encourage increased board diversity, and how can they go about it?
Defining Diversity
In order to frame the discussion, it’s worth reviewing what diversity means today, and how the term has evolved over time.
“Fifty years ago, when people in the U.S. spoke of diversity on corporate boards of directors, they were likely most commonly referring to either race or gender,” says James Erwin, Founding Partner of Erwin Law, LLC, in Chicago. “Now, the term encompasses a significantly broader spectrum of factors: gender identity, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and age, among others. Associations are managed by boards, and the directors that sit on those boards should consider these diversity factors in their management decisions.
“The larger an association, the more likelihood that diversity will play a role in the operations of the association,” Erwin continues. “For starters, because the board is supposed to represent the entire association constituency, the greater the diversity among its directors, the more likely they will be to actually reflect the various perspectives of the ownership that they represent.”
Language often figures into the diversity of both boards and resident demographics. As a board member, you might find yourself talking to a Chinese couple who just moved to the community and are in the process of learning English, or you might be an administrator in a predominantly Hispanic community where Spanish is spoken more often than English. A language barrier among residents and between the residents and the board and management company can pose a challenge to both communication and community cohesion – so having board members fluent in more than just English can be hugely beneficial to everyone in the building or association.
“Communicating often and with as many outlets as possible is good,” says Jane Bracken, PCAM, Vice President of Association Services at BB&T Association Services, with locations throughout Florida. “In this day and age, managing diversity means getting your point across in as many ways as possible. Many associations have ways to put their information on a web page, or some are now even starting to use social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn in order to communicate to their owners.”
Beggars Verses Choosers
Perhaps the biggest impediment to recruiting a diverse board is simply the fact that too few individuals are willing to step up and serve on their boards. When the candidate pool is that shallow, associations can find themselves taking on whoever shows up.
“We often find ourselves in a ‘take whoever we can get’ situation,” says Bart Steele, Assistant Vice President with Premier Property Solutions in Boston, “because many people either have no interest in joining a board, or they are intimidated due to lack of knowledge about what the board specifically does, and thus stay out. In my opinion, this would probably change were board members to get paid for their time.”
The means by which a board is elected can also be a hurdle in promoting diversity. “In the condo realm, a piece of paper goes out 60 days before an election announcing that the members can run, but there may not even be a discussion, let alone a ‘meet the candidates’ night,” laments Shari Wald Garrett, Esq., an associate at Law Firm Siegfried, Rivera, Hyman, Lerner, De La Torre, Mars & Sobel, P.A., which has offices throughout Florida. “In these scenarios, whoever gathers the most friends to vote for them is going to be who sits on the board. Or some owners could just be picking the first six names on the sheet, or their neighbors, or a name that they like. And neither board nor management can endorse a candidate.
“Let’s say that I sat on a board and I thought that it was too heavily sided toward a particular demographic, and that there was another rising population that was not being represented,” Garrett continues. “The board can’t say, ‘We need more of the latter,’ because then it’s discriminating. An individual board member can suggest, based on that board member’s own individual capacity, that another resident run [for a seat on the board], but the member cannot do so in any board capacity, and it is out of management’s hands.”
There are resources to help managers and boards deal fairly and equitably with a diverse building population. “Use your professionals, that is what they are there for,” says Bill Worrall, Vice President of The Continental Group, a property management company based in Hollywood, Florida. “You will find someone else with experience who can provide feedback and support with virtually every scenario. If you don’t work with a management company, try to find a local professional organization or association and become a member. You may find support their as well.”
Unit owner and board-recognized committees are a great resource as well. “If you manage them correctly, they will deliver their ideas and solutions on behalf of the membership,” Worrall continues. “Use the communities’ feedback to devise solutions.”
Bracken also suggests that managers and boards use the expertise of the Community Associations Institute (CAI), a nationwide organization for community associations which provides bilingual education programs.
Old Guard
In many cases, boards consist heavily of those residents who have lived at a property the longest. As they’ve spent much of their life both emotionally and financially invested in an association, they feel more capable to and concerned with shaping its future.
“My experience in dealing with boards that were established in the Seventies and Eighties or earlier is that they are often more reflective of the shareholders who have lived in the building for many years, and are in the most part older and either ‘old money,’ or those who are now living on more fixed incomes,” says Sandra L. Jacobus, a partner in the Real Estate Transactions and Cooperative and Condominium Housing practice groups at New York City law firm Ganfer Shore Leeds & Zauderer, “In both instances, these board members do not share the concerns and priorities as the new shareholders, who tend to be younger and more affluent, or are at least wanting to spend more money on amenities and favor permitting bank financing in previously ‘all-cash’ buildings, or lowering the amount of the cash requirement.”
In addition to the above, Matthew J. Leeds, who is also a partner at Ganfer Shore Leeds & Zauderer, notes a dearth of women holding board positions. “With one major exception, I have personally found that the constitution of a board has been reflective of the population of the building,” he says. “But that exception is gender. I have observed that overall, boards do not seem to include women in proportion to the makeup of the building. Based on population, you would expect it to consist of about half. I’m not sure if others have had this experience as well.”
Finally, not only gender and tenure, but geographical dominance can lead to a lopsided board. “I am dealing with a situation at an 80-unit association wherein 70 units are situated in a main building, while the remaining 10 are townhouses,” relates Steele. “All four members of this board live in that main building – and the townhouses do not feel represented. Those owners feel screwed – or taxed without representation – when they have to, for example, pay their share of a $150K elevator replacement in the main building, which they’ll never utilize. Thus, I encourage those townhouse owners who complain to run for the board in the next election.”
Mixing It Up
While the board and management may not be able—or willing—to actively push to diversify representation, that doesn’t mean that members of an association are powerless to ensure that everyone has a voice.
“Tackling this problem begins with education, innovation and transparency,” says Erwin. “Boards should make an effort to educate the owners about what the directors do, and how that work affects those owners’ daily lives. Proactively keeping them informed is often the best way to get them engaged in board matters, which will in turn get them to step up and volunteer for the job.”
Much of the responsibility falls to the individual. One cannot lament the homogeneity of their board from the sidelines – because after all, a board will not simply diversify itself. “You, as an individual member of the association, have to market yourself,” urges Garrett. “You have to go door-to-door and get your name out. Everyone has that opportunity, but the onus falls to the owner.”
“I often counsel board members to be open and transparent when dealing with the issue of diversity,” Erwin adds. “If the board clearly lacks diversity, they should make this known to the owners. For example, if a board is made up of mostly elderly folks in a community with a lot of younger owners, the board would be wise to bring this to the attention of the ownership. We often forget that, particularly in larger associations, owners only see the names of the directors, and have no idea whether or not any of them actually represents their personal perspectives. There is nothing wrong with telling the constituency that the board would welcome greater diversity and that a more diverse pool of applicants to the board at the next election is encouraged. In fact, in the instances where I have seen boards circulate such an invitation and notice, the ownership has responded positively and with appreciation for the fact that the directors were honest and open about that lack of diversity.”
Multifamily Holiday Celebrations
Decking the Halls...and Lobbies
Supporting Your Staff
Letting Your Employees Know You Care
Working With Your Support Professionals
How (and When) Boards Should Speak Up
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Location: Lowell, Massachusetts
General Description: In the first half of the 19th century the United States was primarily agriculture, however, the Industrial Revolution in Europe would soon transform the young nation’s social and economic systems. When Francis Lowell visited England in 1810 to investigate the textile mills he found well designed machines to automate the production, but each step of the process was done in separate mills. Since England prohibited the export of machines, he memorized them and brought the technology to America. In 1813 he organized the Boston Manufacturing Company and created a cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts that used power looms and combined all the operations of turning raw cotton to cloth in a single mill. The enterprise was so successful that the company sought to expand the operation. However, the Charles River could not supply sufficient power so they searched for a new location. At the time East Chelmsford with a 32 foot drop over Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River had a gristmill and sawmill powered by the river and a canal to bypass the falls had been dug in 1797. Patrick Jackson, Lowell’s successor, founded the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1822 with plans to dig additional canals and construct a planned industrial city. Jackson also envisioned a working environment drastically different from the horrible conditions of workers in the textile mills in England. His plan was to attract young, single, Yankee women from farms and small rural villages in New England where economic opportunities were becoming very limited to work at the new mills where they could earn a steady wage for the first time in their lives. Boarding houses were built for the women along with churches and social organizations to provide a wholesome environment. The system was so successful that other companies soon copied it and Lowell grew tremendously to be the second largest city in Massachusetts with 33,000 citizens in 1850. The corporations sought to regulate the lives of their workers, exercising paternal control over the social behavior of the women with enforced curfews, strict codes of conduct, and required church attendance. Work hours were 12 to 14 hours long in conditions which were noisy, hot, and full of cotton dust, although still a big improvement over the conditions in England. Even with these problems, the system worked well as young women would generally work for only 3-5 years earning enough money to launch their own careers, pay off the family debt, and even send their brothers to college (at one time approximately 1/3 of the students at Harvard were funded by their sisters working in Lowell). Despite threats of firing and blacklisting, the female workers struck twice in the 1830s to protest wage cuts and working conditions and in the 1840s demanded a 10 hour work day. While Lowell continued to be the center for industrial innovations, competition, especially from the South, continued to put pressure on profits. By 1850, Lowell had 10 corporations with a total of 40 mills employing 10,000 workers producing 50,000 miles of cloth annually. In the decades after the Civil War the work force remained mostly women, although this was changing. Irish immigrants were brought in early to construct and maintain the canals, which eventually consisted of 5.6 miles of canals, but were not allowed to work in the mills until the 1840s and then only in the worst conditions. They settled in an area known as “The Acre” which became an Irish-American enclave. With the advent of steam power it was no longer necessary to locate mills along rivers and textile mills could be built anywhere, especially in the rural South. This increasing competition began to change the business model at Lowell, where the work force changed over from female workers living in boarding houses to low-wage and unskilled immigrant labor that came to America in waves. Following the Irish immigrants in the 1850s were the French-Canadians in the 1870s and 1880s, Greeks in the 1890s, to be followed by Polish, Portuguese, Lithuanians, and Swedes, as well as Jews. The introduction of the electric streetcar in the early 20th century allowed expansion of the city into suburbs further away from the mills. By the 1920s the New England textile industry shifted South and many of Lowell’s mills moved or closed. To keep costs down, owners choose not to install new technology, instead letting the equipment and conditions deteriorate until finally closing the doors. The Great Depression closed nearly all the mills and unemployment was higher than most of the country. World War II did revitalize Lowell with the increased demand for cloth and conversion of some of the old mills into munition factories, but after the war the conditions worsened again. In 1956, Boott Mills closed after over 130 years and the Merrimack Manufacturing Company limped along until 1958. By the mid-1970s Lowell’s population had dropped to 91,000 and 12% were unemployed. The mills were mostly abandoned and falling apart and the river was a cesspool. Urban renewal projects in the 1940s through the 1960s demolished many of the historical enclaves beginning with the Acre in 1939 and Little Canada in the late 1950s. In 1960, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company factories were bulldozed to build warehouses and public housing projects. From a grand beginning, Lowell had hit rock bottom, especially the downtown area. However, some city residents, most notably Patrick Morgan, saw a need to preserve the history of the once great city and in 1974 the Lowell Heritage State Park was formed in the center of Lowell and in 1978 the Lowell Historical Park was formed as the first urban national park. The canal system, many mills, and some commercial structures were saved and today the center of town attracts many tourists. Many of the old mills have been converted into apartments causing a revitalization of the downtown area. It should also be noted that Lowell has continued to attract immigrants over the years including Southeast Asia immigrants after the Vietnam War, Puerto Ricans, and most recently immigrants from Burma.
1) The Visitor Center is located in the old Lowell Mills factory with free parking so long as you get your ticket validated. From there you can explore all that downtown Lowell has to offer. From here you are surrounded by the old factories, many of which are now apartments. They have a very good movie about the history of Lowell and some very good exhibits highlighting the history as well.
2) They have done a very good job creating public parks along the Merrimack Canal that connects the Visitor Center to other locations in the Park.
3) Along the Eastern Canal, a short walking distance from the Visitor Center, is the Boarding House Park where they have rennovated one of the few remaining boarding houses that used to fill this part of downtown. This is a self guided tour that begins with reconstructed parlor/dinning room for up to 12 women living in this house (which is one of four along the same building), the small quarters for the manager of the boarding house, and one bedroom for up to four women. Since we were the first visitors on a rainy day during the week, the Park Ranger was excited to give us a personal tour of the museum, which was great. The rest of the boarding house has been turned into very interesting displays about each of the waves of immigrants.
4) Across the canal from the boarding house is the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. For anyone interested in the history of the textile industry, this is must see. On the first floor they have working looms filling the floor. From these looms they produce cloth that is sold in the museum and Visitor Center. While we were there they were running 16 looms. Once you enter through the glass panels you get a small sense of the noise generated in the room. Just multiply it by 10 and it was already deafening. The second floor of the museum is a set of great displays giving the history of Lowell and examples of each of the machines used to turn raw cotton into cloth, as well as, a model of the layout of a typical mill, and examples of the cloth fabrics that were produced in each time period. A very fascinating place.
5) At the Visitor Center you can either purchase tickets for one of the canal tours or get your name added to the list for the free trolley tours. Of course, you can also walk along the canals or ride the electric trolleys without being on a tour. Since it was raining most of the day that we were there we decided against a canal tour, but did take the trolley tour. During the early 20th century these electric trolleys spanned the entire downtown area and reached into the suburbs. They even created amusements parks to entice passengers during the weekend when the mills were closed. You can still see tracks all over the downtown area.
6) The trolley tour takes passengers over to the Suffolk Mill, which has a turbine exhibit. By being on the tour, they opened up the gates so we actually got to see the turbine in operation. They have cut away part of the floor so you can see down into the turbine and have taken one apart so you can see the inside. Instead of the inefficient water wheels which transferred less than 10% of the water power, these turbines could capture over 90% of the energy in the water. The tour also went down below the turbine so you can see the huge belt on the flywheel, the operation of the governor that automatically adjusted the speed of the turbines, and a working loom that produced over 10″ of cloth in 30 seconds. I recommend the tour since you get to see all the parts in operation instead of just reading about it.
7) Due to the weather we did not walk along the canals to view the locks used to control the water flow in the canals, but I understand on a clear day they are worth seeing as well.
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Salzburgers and Allied Families.
By: P.R, Gnann & Mrs. LeBey, Orig. Pub. 1956, Reprinted & Revised 2003, approx. 4,000 pages in 4 volumes, Hard Cover, Index, ISBN #0-89308-012-8.
The Georgia Colony was chartered by King George to act as buffer between the Spanish settlement and Native American tribes in Florida and Charles Town in South Carolina. These German exiles started arriving in the New World in the 1730’s and slowly started settling up and down the Savannah River. It is estimated that approx. 50% of the population of Effingham & Chatham County areas are directly descended from these early settlers. Since the first immigrants arrived in 1734, as many as 15 generations have followed, many of whom still live on ancestral land. This book has been completely REVISED & UPDATED since its last printing. It is now in 4 volumes with each volume having approx. 1000 plus pages.
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« The Woman In Black (1989) review
The Woman In Black (2012) Review »
Underworld: Awakening
Well I’ve just come back from Underworld: Awakening and I really couldn’t resist the opportunity for me to be topical so I’ll give you some of my thoughts on the film since it’s still fresh in my mind.
When it comes to franchises in any capacity the fourth one can be an eye rolling affair. A lot of times in horror, the fourth edition into any entry can be totally overlooked by common moviegoers only to end up in a five dollar bin with people scratching their heads saying “oh wow they made a fourth one of this?”
Underworld has always been one of these mainstream action-horrors that I really enjoyed for various reasons. This one however leaves me conflicted.
The film starts off with a little recap of the precious movies to give the casual viewer a chance to get an idea of the franchise they are stepping in to. It helps but like the previous three movies Underworld: Awakening is tightly related to the previous ones and is a little less accessible to people who haven’t at least seen the first two.
It seems humans have found out about Vampire’s and Lycans and they aren’t too happy about it. The monsters that are usually the hunters are now pushed to the brink of extinction. Where does that leave the super-vampire hero Celina and her Were-pire lover Michael? Well no place good and in an attempt to go into hiding they are ambushed.
We then jump twelve years later into a world where vampires and Lycans are on the brink of extinction. An evil corporation called Antigen is working on the final cure to make sure they can never spread their infection again. Selene (Kate Beckinsale) wakes up in a cryo-box and fights her way out all the while looking for Michael. She thinks she’s on his trail but it turns out to be a young girl named Eve (India Eisley) who is a lab grown clone of both her and her mate. (Essentially a little girl were-pire.)
Okay, so my problems with this movie basically start and end with the films run-time. 88 minutes. That is some editing tighter than Beckinsale’s pants and it’s officially the shortest of the series. Every problem the film has could have easily been fixed with another 20 minutes. There was a lot of movie in that short run-time and it didn’t help.
I'm not X-23. Did I mention that yet? No? Okay, well i'm not.
Another problem was the fact that they had four writers on the picture which compounded by the run-time made a lot of scenes that were intended to maybe set up plot later on go nowhere. A part that really sticks out is a part where one of the few remaining vampire elders named Thomas (Charles Dance) seems to be trying to, apologize to Eve for previously making her feel unwelcome, it was played as if he might try to use her but then it seems to be forgotten in the very next scene when he wants her gone again.
Characters didn’t have enough time to really develop either. This is bad for established characters like Selene because she isn’t given enough moments but it’s especially bad for all of the new characters this movie introduces. For example Michael Ealy plays a Detective named Sebastian who randomly helps out Selene is given about two minutes to try and give his motivations, while they are on their way to the next scene.
Another complaint comes as a comic book fan. Eve’s origin story is Marvel comics X-23’s (Wolverine’s cloned daughter) origin story. Everything from growing up in a lab to having a project scientist be like a surrogate mother to cutting herself and watching her heal.
My last small comment is Bill Nighy was sorely missed. The way that guy hammed it up in the previous three movies was one of the biggest draws for me. And I mean that sincerely, it was awesome.
Now for what I liked. The action is amazing. I don’t think the 3D really added anything except to the ticket price although, I was a little startled by some glass flying at my face. All of the chorography was just fantastic. Selene has never been more of a badass. She is a cold blooded killer that has been pushed to the edge and has no problem taking out anybody in her quest to find Michael and protect her newfound daughter.
There are some awesome kills that are benefited from this being an R-rated movie. It’s funny how refreshing it can be to see a vampire or werewolf actually act like monsters instead of heartthrobs.
Looking back on this review I realize the things I am saying could be considered being “picky” I think it comes from the fact that I wanted to like this movie as much as I liked the previous ones and while the action didn’t disappoint me at all I just really wish they had given the movie a chance with a longer runtime.
For anyone sitting on the fence about this one, I say if you go into it looking for a kick-ass action movie or as a longtime fan of the series you’ll probably like it enough. For everyone else though the cost of movies these days and the fact that it’s so short (and feels short) really makes it hard to justify. Maybe the DVD will have all the extended scenes the film sorely needs.
This entry was posted on January 21, 2012 at 7:05 am and is filed under Horror Showcase, Updates with tags Action Horror, genre films, horror, horror movie, Kate Beckinsale, Underworld: Awakening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Kosovo Authorities Reject Plan to Exchange Territories With Serbia - Reports
© AP Photo / Darko Vojinovic
BELGRADE (Sputnik) - President of the self-proclaimed republic of Kosovo Hashim Thaci, PM Ramush Haradinaj and Assembly President Kadri Veseli held an unscheduled meeting on Thursday and decided to deny exchanging territories with Serbia for the sake of resolving long-standing conflict, Radio and Television of Kosovo reported.
Media reported citing Haradinaj that the republic's leadership had reached a consensus that there would be no exchange of territories with Serbia at Brussels talks.
A diplomatic source in Brussels told Sputnik earlier on Thursday that the European Union was counting on a global and legally binding agreement between Serbia and Kosovo by the spring of 2019.
READ MORE: Serbia: The Kosovo Conundrum
The next round of negotiations between Thaci and Vucic, mediated by the head of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, is scheduled for September 7 in Brussels. Mogherini said on Wednesday that she expected "difficult, but possible" negotiations on a sustainable agreement between Kosovo and Serbia.
Serbian President Calls Security Council Meeting Over Situation in Kosovo - Reports
Serbia and the self-proclaimed republic of Kosovo are currently engaged in a conflict over their borders. In early August, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that he favored partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines as a means of avoiding further conflicts. According to this plan, Serbia would give up its southern areas, mostly inhabited by Albanians, for Kosovo's territories where the Serbian population prevails. However, Thaci rejected the idea.
In 2008, Kosovo authorities unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, which still regards it as its Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. In 2013, the Brussels Agreement on normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo was signed as the European Union persuaded Serbia to begin cooperating with Kosovo. In 2015, an accord on forming the self-governing association of the Serb-dominated regions of Kosovo was signed.
READ MORE: Vucic Calls on Kosovo Serbs Not to 'React to Provocation' Despite Tensions
The EU-set deadline for the implementation of the above-mentioned agreements by Kosovo expired on August 4. Pristina's failure to stick to the terms of the agreements resulted in an escalation of tensions in the region.
Serbia: The Kosovo Conundrum
Vucic Calls on Kosovo Serbs Not to 'React to Provocation' Despite Tensions
Serbian President Calls Security Meeting Over Situation in Kosovo - Reports
Republika Srpska to Apply for UN Membership If Kosovo Admitted to Organization
territorial dispute, Ramush Haradinaj, Aleksandar Vucic, Hashim Thaci, Serbia, Kosovo
20:12Twitter, Facebook Invite Indian Parliamentarian’s Wrath for ‘Shadow Bans’ Using Algorithms
20:11Indian Traditional Attire Sets This Week’s Fashion Trend With #SareeTwitter
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Sheila Michaels, Who Helped Bring Honorific 'Ms.' To The Masses, Dies At 78
Michaels did not coin "Ms.," but she played a key role in its adoption. She was inspired by a letter to her roommate Mary Hamilton — who, separately, won a battle for the right to be called "Miss."
by Camila Domonoske Jul 7, 2017 4 minutes
Sheila Michaels, who played a key role in bringing the title "Ms." from obscurity into mainstream use, has died at 78, according to the New York Times.
Michaels' lasting impression on the English language was inspired by a letter to Mary Hamilton — a woman who, separately, made legal history by successfully demanding to be called "Miss."
They were roommates and lifelong friends: The black woman who fought to be called "Miss" instead of condescended to as "Mary," and the white woman who pushed to be called "Ms." because it was nobody's business if she was married.
Michaels passed away on June 22 from leukemia, according to the Times. Hamilton died in 2002 of ovarian cancer.
Ms, Miss, Neither
Ms. Sheila Michaels was born in St. Louis. She didn't know her
Equality Rights
Politics And Race
TechLife News2 min readSociety
Google Exec Denounces Employee’s Views on Female Workers
Silicon Valley’s efforts to promote workforce diversity haven’t yielded many results - unless you count a backlash at Google, where a male engineer blamed biological differences for the paucity of female programmers. His widely shared memo, titled “G
The Atlantic8 min readSociety
The (Feminist) Case for Women's Happiness
Jill Filipovic’s new book, The H-Spot, argues for a movement that de-emphasizes women’s equality—and focuses instead on their fulfillment.
NPR2 min readSociety
What Do You Think Are The Greatest Albums Made By Women?
In July, we published a list of the 150 greatest albums made by women, as chosen by a group of women within the NPR universe. Now, we're turning the list over to you.
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NPR6 min read
Roger Stone Barred From Using Social Media As Judge Tightens Gag Order
Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the political consultant not to post, like, retweet or forward following what she ruled was a breach of a gag order from earlier in his case.
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Essays Chinese History-Ming Dynasty
Chinese History-Ming Dynasty
Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty in 1368, this became china's ruling dynasty until 1644. Stability and orderly government characterized this dynasty. A very strong navy and army troops supported the steady government of the Ming dynasty. The Chinese were, therefore, able to rebuild the great wall and the Grand Canal together with other projects. The main role of Zhu in this dynasty was to develop production as well as to restore the state's strength. He strengthened the law of the country and fought against corruption.
At the time of Yongle emperor, so many reforms were done, and this earned him a lot of reputation. He was able to change the capital city to Beijing and ensured that there was a continuous food supplies to the capital from the southern. In addition to this, there was peace in the dynasty for several years after the emperor managed to bring down the Mongols. He also started sea voyages of Zheng He, which he used to expand the influence of Chinese, which was his prime desire. There was also the reformation of the way in which government officials were elected. This gave a tremendous millage to what his father had initially neglected when he was an emperor. This ensured that the government officials serving at his time were literate.
Yongle was a sign of glory, power, and prestige to the Chinese. Although he carried out reforms in the dynasty, he respected and preserved the Chinese culture. He was an emperor of exemplary leadership and is considered to have been a source of blessing due to the benefits in education, economic, and reforms in the military. Although he was a good emperor, he was also cruel and many Jian-wen servants suffered, and even died under his authority. The economy at this time was, however, the largest worldwide. The advance in technology, imperial rule's weakening and the increase in the political influence of merchants, which was increasing, led to the increase in the economy of this dynasty. The manufacturing industries were more advanced as compared to those in the past dynasties and were privatized.
Concubinage was experienced in china during Ming's dynasty, it was seen as the only safer option that a poor woman who could not get a husband could get financial help and support. It was, however, at this time that some people had become literate and women roles had changed. It was until 1644 when the dynasty fell. The Manchu overthrew this dynasty. The organized troops of the Mongol successfully conquered the Ming and the then emperor surrendered and died in a suicide.
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March 25, 2016 2:26 pm December 5, 2018 6:47 pm
March Madness for CMS Men’s Tennis
By Katie Baughman 255 Views 0 Comment CMS, P-P
There's never a dull moment for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men’s tennis team (12-2, 1-0 SCIAC). Between Mar. 11 and Mar. 20, the Stags played in seven matches, finishing the nine-day stretch with an impressive 5-2 record. Although they were handed their first two losses of the season (to Emory University and Bowdoin College, 7-2 in both matches), the team has proven time and time again that its players have the composure and poise necessary to achieve greatness.
CMS had its first match on Friday, Mar. 11, with a decisive 7-2 win over University of Texas-Tyler in the Stag-Hen Invitational Quarterfinals. Lester Yeh CM ’16 set the tone for the match in straight sets in the No. 5 singles over Jose McIntyre (6-1, 6-0). CMS also faced intense competition against Trinity University (10-8, 0-0 Conf.), but ultimately took down the Tigers 6-3 on Saturday, Mar. 12. That same day, the Stags faced Emory (12-2, 0-0 Conf.) in a rematch of the 2015 NCAA finals. The double-header proved too much for the Stags, as Emory handed CMS its first loss of the season 7-2.
Though the Stags couldn’t close out the win, they view the match as a learning opportunity and a chance to improve for their next encounter with Emory later this season. “We ended up losing [to Emory], but it ended up kind of being a good thing: We learned what we needed to do to get better,” team captain Skyler Butts CM ’16 said about the match.
Although the loss came as a disappointment for CMS, both Yeh and Avinash Vemuri CM '19 had thrilling wins in the No. 5 and No. 6 singles (6-3, 6-7, 10-6 and 1-6, 7-5, 10-4 respectively). Over the seven-match span, Vemuri had an impressive 5-2 record.
“In [Vemuri’s] first six matches playing for us, he went on a tear. I attribute that to him being a very hard worker,” Butts said about his teammate.
CMS answered the loss to Emory with three straight wins: The Stags triumphed 6-1 over Universtiy of Connecticut on Thursday, Mar. 17 (2-18, 0-3 Conf.), defeated Whitman College 7-2 later that day (9-6, 6-0 Conf.), and narrowly conquered Amherst College 5-4 in a nail-biting match on Saturday, Mar. 19 (8-2, 0-0 Conf.).
Amherst particularly stood out to Butts as one of the most exciting matches of the season. The day started strong, as No. 3 doubles pair Glenn Hull CM ’17 and Yeh took an 8-6 win over Zach Bessette and Ben Fife. No. 1 pair Butts and Daniel Morkovine also defeated their opponents 9-8 to give the Stags two of the three doubles wins.
“At one point, even though we took a double’s lead, I thought we were going to lose because other than the top two courts, everyone had lost up to that point,” Butts recalled. “It got a little stressful, but [Macey] came through in singles. It was nice to get the win over Amherst; it’s fun to beat the good schools.”
CMS’ jam-packed schedule continues, as the Stags host University of Chicago (12-1, 0-0 Conf.) and Chapman University (1-9, 0-0 SCIAC) Friday, Mar. 25.
“Chicago is a really exciting team for us—we haven’t played them at least since I’ve been here,” Butts said. “We’re excited because they’re one of the contenders for the national championship this year and the next few years. We’d like to see how we stack up to them and maybe use that experience to our advantage.” The team also plays Williams College (4-0, 0-0 Conf.) Wednesday, Mar. 30, before taking on arch rival Pomona-Pitzer (8-6, 1-0 SCIAC) on Friday, Apr. 1. As two of the best teams in SCIAC (CMS holds the No. 1 rank, while P-P is No. 3), Claremont should expect some good tennis from the Stags.
Athenas Place First, Second at Cal Lutheran
PP Women’s Water Polo Participate in Arizona State’s Tournament
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You are here: Home / Agronsky and Company / The USA’s Most Insane Political Discussion of all Time
The USA’s Most Insane Political Discussion of all Time
2016 by JT 1 Comment
“INSIDE WASHINGTON“
Download the Transcript » Watch This Show
(Formerly The Great “Agronsky and Company”
MODERATOR: MARK SHIELDS
WJLA TV PANEL:
COLBY KING, WASHINGTON POST;
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST;
EVAN THOMAS, NEWSWEEK;
NINA TOTENBERG, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
BROADCAST DATE:
SENATOR-ELECT SCOTT BROWN (R-MA): (From tape.) I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham and I drive a truck.
MR. SHIELDS: This week on “Inside Washington,” a political knockout: a Republican wins Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.
SENATOR-ELECT BROWN: (From tape.) People do not want the $1 trillion healthcare plan.
MR. SHIELDS: So what happens to healthcare reform now?
REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH) [House Minority Leader]: (From tape.) This bill is dead.
MR. SHIELDS: The Supreme Court reopens the money faucet in politics. Corporate and union bucks are back big time. President Obama calls for bank reform now.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: (From tape.) If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have.
MR. SHIELDS: And what does Scott Brown’s victory mean for the election year ahead?
JAKE TAPPER: (From tape.) Interesting anniversary present for you guys from the voters.
DAVID AXELROD: (From tape.) I mean, admittedly, we would have preferred a cake.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: (From tape.) This is a stunning and for Democrats an ominous development.
(Musical break.)
MR. SHIELDS: Hello. I’m Mark Shields sitting in today for Gordon Peterson. Republican Scott Brown drove a pickup truck fueled by voter anger and anxiety straight into Washington this week. Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley handily in the special election for Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. Within 24 hours of his victory, the healthcare reform bill in its current form was dying. And another blockbuster story broke Thursday. The Supreme Court struck down parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign law. Corporate and union money will be back in the game big time and on the airwaves in this election year. We’ll get to that in a minute but we want to start with Scott Brown, senator elect.
SENATOR-ELECT BROWN: (From tape.) What I’ve heard again and again on the campaign trail is that our political leaders have grown aloof from the people. They’re impatient with dissent and comfortable in making backroom deals and we can do better. (Applause.)
PRES. OBAMA: (From tape.) We were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are.
MR. SHIELDS: When a Republican comes out of nowhere to win Ted Kennedy’s seat taking down healthcare in the process, it’s clearly cause for worry for the Democrats. Evan, the president admits he lost touch with the voters. What’s the message for him and for Democrats?
MR. THOMAS: Be more honest. He tried to finesse this. Regular voters can figure out that if you’re going to extend healthcare to 40 million people you’re going to have to pay for it someway and they’re just not going to believe it if you say to them nothing will change, this will be okay, no problem for you.
MR. SHIELDS: Nina, your own sense.
MS. TOTENBERG: Well, I wouldn’t panic if I were a Democrat but I would be –
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: If you were a Democrat?
MS. TOTENBERG: – but I would be extremely worried at this point. And I’m not quite sure what the prescription is except to do a quick pivot and what we really know people are terribly upset about are the abuses of Wall Street – you saw the president this week in fact pivot to that. They started doing this earlier, but that’s really – politically that’s where it’s smart for him to spend his time.
MR. SHIELDS: Charles, you wrote about it in your column. Can the Democrats really ignore this jilt?
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: They might. Some of them want to. I think the message was clear. It’s not technique. It’s not the message. It’s not tactics. And it’s not anger. The problem is it’s a center-right country and Obama attempted to govern from the left. It can’t be done. It could be done for a short while but not even a year and if Democrats don’t understand that and pretend it was the message or it was the way it was handled or it’s the economy or the banks, they’re going to miss the story.
MR. SHIELDS: Colby, is that what it was? Was it an ideological defeat for the Democrats and an ideological victory for the Republicans?
MR. KING: I wouldn’t say it that way. I mean, there was no bait and switch on the part of Obama. What he essentially talked about during the campaign he proposed as president in his first year, the major issues. What did seem to happen though is he got too much into the weeds here in Washington. He got very much involved in a very partisan way with the tinkering of the legislative process and lost touch or lost sight of what was really going on out in the country.
This healthcare issue, it is important. The idea of extending healthcare to 30 million people who don’t have it, but when you try to do something like that, you’re telling other people you’re going to have to pay for somebody else’s healthcare. That they didn’t get across very well to people.
MR. THOMAS: Because he tried to finesse it. That’s the point. He tried to finesse it. He kept saying, nothing will change for you. If you like your healthcare, that will be okay but we’re still going to give 30 or 40 million people healthcare. Voters instinctively know that that’s not true. That’s why you had these tea parties. That’s why you’ve had this popular revolt because he was fundamentally dishonest about the process.
MS. TOTENBERG: If we had 5 percent unemployment, he probably would have gotten the plan through. But you can’t refocus people’s attention on an aspirational goal for a society — I think it’s very difficult to do that — when people are hurting so much in the immediate sense and businesses are going down the tubes, small business on a daily basis. You just look in any mall, places you’ve gone for years, they’re gone now. People in every level of life are struggling to even have a job or they’re working part time. Kids coming out of school can’t find jobs. This is a very dire situation and he has – I can’t say he’s ignored it, but he hasn’t focused on it in a way he probably should have.
MR. SHIELDS: Charles, on the question of healthcare, I think you could have argued that the biggest beneficiary was really the insurance companies in the sense that you have a universal mandate, everybody has to buy it and you have subsidies to people who can’t afford it.
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: Right.
MR. SHIELDS: Now, the Democrats are – some people say, and to save the healthcare bill what we ought to do is just have a preexisting condition and so forth. Can you do that? What can you do on healthcare right now?
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: No. No. I don’t think you can do a piecemeal thing because it’s so interconnected. If you do no preexisting conditions, you bankrupt the insurance companies or you’d have to raise premiums. It means all healthy people will not have health insurance and they’ll wait until they get ill and then get health insurance so you don’t have any revenue. It’s so interconnected that it can’t be done.
Healthcare is dead. There’s no way it can be revived. If the administration wants to redo it with the Republicans, it’s going to have to include tort reform, but it will take weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’m not sure that rank and file Democrats want healthcare again and again in the public eye after spending a year and getting massacred on it in Massachusetts.
MR. SHIELDS: But Colby, to come out of this with nothing, I mean, on healthcare, wouldn’t that be the ultimate defeat for Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White House?
MR. KING: I think you have to come out of here with something but it’s not going to be anything like what was originally proposed. But Charles is right here. They cannot spend a lot of time on this issue. It’s not just Massachusetts. You take the state of Maryland. There’s a poll that just came out this week that showed among Maryland voters, 54 percent are saying the economy is most important; healthcare, 11 percent. That’s all for healthcare reform. And you’ll find that probably reflected across the country. So, yes, do something about healthcare, but don’t invest all the time in it because it’s the economy, the economy, the economy.
MR. THOMAS: But that’s a fundamental myth. You know, the mantra is jobs, jobs, jobs. They did a huge stimulus package to do jobs. They did pretty much what the federal government can do about jobs, which is put a lot of money in the economy to try to create some jobs. They did that. They don’t really have many other tools.
MS. TOTENBERG: Oh, yes, they do because people are furious about the banks and president has got a proposal about that.
MR. THOMAS: But that’s not going to create jobs.
MS. TOTENBERG: That doesn’t matter. It appeals to a populist urge.
MR. SHIELDS: Okay. Let’s talk about that. President Obama wants to get tougher on the big banks that take the big risks. That’s one issue that might connect him with voters.
PRES. OBAMA: (From tape.) Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail. Now, limits on the risks major financial firms can take are central to the reforms that I’ve proposed.
MR. SHIELDS: The president is proposing tough new rules for banks that take reckless risks. He wants to ban banks that accept federally insured deposits from investing in hedge funds and other risky investments. Bank shares took a dive on the news. Colby, you’re the banker. What’s the practical impact here?
MR. KING: I think the practical impact will be very important as far as stability of the financial system. I think it’s important that the president takes those steps that have been recommended by somebody like Paul Volcker, something he had resisted doing because of Timothy Geithner, the secretary of the Treasury, who didn’t want to do it. I’ve long advocated putting up that wall between the investment banks and the commercial banks going back to something like Glass-Steagall. They haven’t gone all the way yet but it’s a step in the right direction.
What is not probably going to fly very well are some of the more populist things that he wants to do to the banks, like placing a levy or a tax on their earnings to take back some of the money that was lent to them. That kind of anger is contrived anger to respond to voter angst about the banks. I don’t think that’s going to get him as far as he wants to go because nobody believes it. He spent too much time working with the banks over the last year and all of a sudden he’s going to turn on them because the election results? That’s not going to sell.
MR. SHIELDS: Charles, you agree?
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: I think in principle I agree with Colby. You really have to have a wall between investment banks and the ones that accept deposits as we had for half a century. But I think the president is trying to play the populist here. This is the beginning of the pivot. He got a message from Massachusetts. People are angry and he thinks it’s all about Wall Street. Well, A, he doesn’t – a guy who likes arugula is not exactly a populist type; a guy who mocks a truck in Massachusetts doesn’t quite have it. I’m not sure it’s going to work. And second, I’m not sure that he’s got a program on the banks that’s going to have a populist appeal.
MR. SHIELDS: Evan, as our resident populist, do you feel that this is authentic?
MR. THOMAS: No. No, it’s not. It’s pure politics and it’s going to play as politics. I mean, on substance, I like it.
MR. SHIELDS: You do like the substance.
MR. THOMAS: Whatever Paul Volcker is for, I’m pretty much for. But I think the reason why he went in that direction was 100 percent politics.
MS. TOTENBERG: Well, this has been in the making for a little while to begin with, before the Massachusetts results, but having said that, I think what the bankers who are – you know, the market took a dive – what they have to understand is they made this mess and people are outraged and this is like a societal pressure cooker and if you don’t let there be some steam come off of us, even though it’s going to burn the banks, it could be very damaging to these financial institutions in the long run. It could be far worse. If populist tea party rage about the banks governs, it would be far worse than anything in terms of regulation that Barack Obama has proposed this week.
MR. KING: I agree, but –
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: But Democrats misunderstand what the populism is about. They imagine it’s all about the Wall Street. It’s about big government, an administration that governs Left, an administration that –
MS. TOTENBERG: Oh, come on, Charles. It’s about Wall Street.
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: – that is making all the backroom deals –
MS. TOTENBERG: It is about Wall Street.
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: The tea party is not about Wall Street. It’s about Obama. That’s how we started. That’s how we express ourselves. If you want to have –
MS. TOTENBERG: Some of that’s true.
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: – your head in the sand and believe so –
MS. TOTENBERG: – but we are talking about populist discontent.
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: – you’re going to have a dozen Massachusetts on your hands if you ignore the message.
MS. TOTENBERG: When you’re talking about populist discontent, if you look at the polls data, it’s Wall Street.
MR. SHIELDS: Colby, three out of four voters believe that the government policies have helped Wall Street rather than them; only 20 percent feel that they’ve been helped by the government’s economic policies. I mean, is this an accurate reading?
MR. KING: No. I think it’s an inaccurate reading on the people who say that because if we had not done something about the problems on Wall Street with the financial system, it would have had an awful effect on the people who are most concerned about the problems now. They had to do something. Everybody from Barney Frank to the president to even people on the Right agree something had to be done about the financial crisis.
MS. TOTENBERG: I agree.
MR. KING: The problem is I don’t think – it’s not just a communications question. I don’t think they adequately explained the connection. And now to turn around into just Wall Street is a big bad actor and got us into all these problems and now we just have to beat Wall Street, it doesn’t sell over the long haul. It’s not a substantive argument.
MR. SHIELDS: Evan, quickly – you alluded to the Geithner – Tim Geithner, secretary of Treasury, Paul Volcker tension or conflict. Do you think this means the emergence of Volcker?
MR. THOMAS: No, but the body language is plain to see. I mean, all of a sudden, Volcker, who had been cast out – nobody is talking to Volcker, there he is standing right next to the president – Geithner is kind of off to the side. I mean, clearly.
MS. TOTENBERG: The president offered him secretary of the Treasury. He thought he was too old. I wonder if that might eventually come to pass nonetheless.
MR. SHIELDS: Okay, Nina. Corporate and union money is back. Let’s talk about this week’s campaign finance ruling.
Filed Under: Agronsky and Company, Charles Krauthammer, Colbert King, Disinformation, Mark Shields, Media, Poltics, Rahm Emmanuel, The Village Mindset Tagged With: Agronsky, Capitol Hill, Colbert King, Inside Washington, Media, Nina Totenberg, Politics, Shields
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Dionne Braun says:
2016 at 10
Hehe I am honestly the first reply to this awesome read!
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Blacktip reef sharks are viviparous with a yolk-sac placenta, with a gestation period about 10 months and litter size of 2-4 pups. Size at birth ranges from 33-52 cm. Males mature at about eight years of age and 95-105 cm in length; females mature at about 9 years old and a length of 93-110 cm. Courtship features the one or more males following closely behind a female. Reproductive behavior includes distinct pairing with embrace where the male grasps the female’s pectoral fin between his teeth and mates belly to belly. There is one breeding season in the central and western Pacific, but two seasons in the Indian Ocean. Females rest for 8-14 month between pregnancies to rebuild their energy stores. Blacktip reef sharks are preyed upon by other sharks and large groupers. The is a socially complex species that performs a variety of group behaviors.
But another potential cause is that these sharks are skittish around people. So when too many people move into the area, the reef sharks flee to other coral reefs. Indeed, the researchers found far more sharks at small, isolated reefs than they expected. But this in itself is a danger to the reef sharks. With so many sharks concentrated in a small area, “if you really wanted to, you could fish out a few hundred sharks very easily,” said Friedlander.
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Grey reef sharks were the first shark species known to perform a threat display, a stereotypical behavior warning that it is prepared to attack.[3] The display involves a "hunched" posture with characteristically dropped pectoral fins, and an exaggerated, side-to-side swimming motion. Grey reef sharks often do so if they are followed or cornered by divers to indicate they perceive a threat. This species has been responsible for a number of attacks on humans, so should be treated with caution, especially if they begin to display. They are caught in many fisheries and are susceptible to local population depletion due to their low reproduction rate and limited dispersal. As a result, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed this species as Near Threatened.
Living in warm shallow waters often near coral reefs in the Western Atlantic, from Florida to Brazil, the Caribbean reef shark (Carcharhinus perezi) is the most abundant shark in the Caribbean. It feeds mostly on bony fishes and rarely attacks humans. Despite the shark's abundance in some regions, it has a high mortality rate from bycatch and is sought by commercial fisheries for its fins and meat. It is illegal to catch Caribbean reef sharks in U.S. waters. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the species' status as "Near Threatened."
The Caribbean Reef Shark also finds its food in the reefs such as bony fishes, large crustaceans and cephalopods. This shark is also known to feed on yellow sting-rays and eagle rays quite frequently. A unique feature of these predators is that they are capable of reverting or purging their own stomachs. This helps purge the parasites, mucus or any other objects on the stomach lining.
Typically a solitary animal, juvenile blacktip reef sharks will commonly conjugate in shallow regions during high tide. Vulnerable to larger predators, they will reside in shallower areas until larger in size. Blacktip reef sharks tend to be more active during dawn and dusk, but like most sharks they are opportunistic feeders. Their diet consists of crustaceans, squid, octopus, and bony fish.
WWF works to preserve the coral habitats where reef sharks live through the creation and improved management of marine protected areas, elaboration of fisheries management plans, and the introduction of fishing bans to protect vulnerable species including reef sharks. WWF also promoted the understanding that communities can derive more economic value from reef sharks through tourism than through their capture. We support local communities to set up appropriate ecotourism systems and infrastructure to ensure well-managed and sustainable shark tourism operations.
The Caribbean reef shark has an interdorsal ridge from the rear of the first dorsal fin to the front of the second dorsal fin. The second dorsal fin has a very short free rear tip. The snout of C. perezi is moderately short and broadly rounded. It has poorly developed, low anterior nasal flaps and relatively large circular eyes. Caribbean reef sharks also have moderately long gill slits with the third gill slit lying above the origin of the pectoral fin. Comparison to similar sharks:
Caribbean reef sharks are prohibited from being caught by commercial fishers in U.S. waters, however harvest of these sharks may be permissible in other countries. During the past few decades, an increasingly popular (and even more controversial) commercial aspect of the Caribbean reef shark has emerged. To increase clientele, many dive-boat operations have come to include shark-feeding dives as a part of their agenda, with some of the most popular sites being main habitats of Caribbean reef sharks. Although new regulations prohibit such feedings off the coast of Florida, no such restrictions have been placed on operations in Bahamian or other Caribbean waters.
In older literature, the scientific name of this species was often given as C. menisorrah.[5] The blacktail reef shark (C. wheeleri), native to the western Indian Ocean, is now regarded as the same species as the grey reef shark by most authors. It was originally distinguished from the grey reef shark by a white tip on the first dorsal fin, a shorter snout, and one fewer upper tooth row on each side.[6] Based on morphological characters, vertebral counts, and tooth shapes, Garrick (1982) concluded the grey reef shark is most closely related to the silvertip shark (C. albimarginatus).[7] This interpretation was supported by a 1992 allozyme phylogenetic analysis by Lavery.[8]
Measuring up to 3 m (9.8 ft) long, the Caribbean reef shark is one of the largest apex predators in the reef ecosystem, feeding on a variety of fishes and cephalopods. They have been documented resting motionless on the sea bottom or inside caves, unusual behavior for an active-swimming shark. If threatened, it may perform a threat display in which it frequently changes direction and dips its pectoral fins. Like other requiem sharks, it is viviparous with females giving birth to 4–6 young every other year. Caribbean reef sharks are of some importance to fisheries as a source of meat, leather, liver oil, and fishmeal, but recently they have become more valuable as an ecotourist attraction. In the Bahamas and elsewhere, bait is used to attract them to groups of divers in controversial "shark feedings". This species is responsible for a small number of attacks on humans. The shark attacks usually happen in spring and summer.
Reef's twenty year heritage traces back to two brothers from Argentina, who acted on a simple idea to create a high quality, active lifestyle sandal. From this once modest beginning, the Reef brand and the line of Reef sandals has grown too be one of the largest sandal manufacturers in the world, the Universe actually, and has now evolved into a full fledged apparel brand.
During mating, the male grey reef shark will bite at the female's body or fins to hold onto her for copulation.[13] Like other requiem sharks, it is viviparous: once the developing embryos exhaust their supply of yolk, the yolk sac develops into a placental connection that sustains them to term. Each female has a single functional ovary (on the right side) and two functional uteruses. One to four pups (six in Hawaii) are born every other year; the number of young increases with female size. Estimates of the gestation period range from 9 to 14 months. Parturition is thought to take place from July to August in the Southern Hemisphere and from March to July in the Northern Hemisphere. However, females with "full-term embryos" have also been reported in the fall off Enewetak. The newborns measure 45–60 cm (18–24 in) long. Sexual maturation occurs at around seven years of age, when the males are 1.3–1.5 m (4.3–4.9 ft) long and females are 1.2–1.4 m (3.9–4.6 ft) long. Females on the Great Barrier Reef mature at 11 years of age, later than at other locations, and at a slightly larger size. The lifespan is at least 25 years.[4][20][24]
A heavy-bodied shark with a "typical" streamlined shape, the Caribbean reef shark is difficult to distinguish from other large requiem shark species. It usually measures 2–2.5 m (6.6–8.2 ft) long; the maximum recorded length is 3 m (9.8 ft) and the maximum reported weight is 70 kg (150 lb).[5][6] The coloration is dark gray or gray-brown above and white or white-yellow below, with an inconspicuous white band on the flanks. The fins are not prominently marked, and the undersides of the paired fins, the anal fin, and the lower lobe of the caudal fin are dusky.[2][4]
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Watching J. K. Rowling Get Excited About Fantastic Beasts Will Make You Wish It Was November Already
By Melissa Locker
Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is a new kind of hero, according to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling in a featurette about the forthcoming film, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.
The first two trailers for the film offered enticing glimpses of Scamander’s journey to America to scout out fantastic beasts to fill the pages of the Hogwarts textbook he is writing. But there was one notable problem with the trailers—no beasts. The new featurette takes care of that, showing eager fans a few of the new additions to the magical universe including a praying mantis-like plant creature and what appears to be a magical shrew.
The new featurette also finally lays out more about the film’s action thanks to commentary from Rowling. While Rowling is an accomplished author, Fantastic Beasts marks her screenwriting debut and it looks like she cooked up an incredible story, because of course she did. It appears that Scamander, a self-described magical zoologist, is making his way through America when he crosses paths with a Muggle…er, “No-Maj” and accidentally reveals the existence of magic to him, despite strict laws against doing that in America.
In the trailer, Redmayne says, “Newt feels more at home with creatures than he does with human beings.” So making his way through a society that he doesn’t fully understand is particularly challenging, but portraying Scamander as an outsider is exactly what Rowling had in mind. “My heroes are always people who feel themselves to be set apart, stigmatized or othered,” said Rowling in the video. “That’s at the heart of most of what I write, and it’s certainly at the heart of this movie.”
It’s hard to wait to find out more about this new character, but Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them doesn’t open until Nov. 18.
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The Pentagon is Without a Chief as the U.S. Faces Many Global Threats
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Russians march for murdered hero Nemtsov ahead of presidential vote
Moscow:Several thousand Muscovites marched Sunday in frigid temperatures in memory of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov who was gunned down three years ago, a rare sanctioned opposition gathering ahead of next month's presidential vote.
Ordinary Muscovites and prominent opposition figures including Alexei Navalny thronged the streets in the centre of the Russian capital where the thermometer dipped below minus 14 Celsius (7 Fahrenheit).
"This is not just a march in honour of Nemtsov, this is a protest against the authorities," said Irina Bagayeva, 61. Many carried flags, portraits of Nemtsov, flowers and placards reading "I am not afraid" and "We remember, we won't forgive". Some chanted "Putin is a thief" and "Nemtsov is a hero of Russia".
The gathering came ahead of the March 18 presidential election widely expected to extend President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin rule until 2024, making him the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.
Moscow police, which are often accused of downplaying the popularity of opposition events, said some 4,500 people showed up. Pro-opposition monitors estimated the turnout at more than 7,000.
Nemtsov, one of the most vocal Putin critics, was gunned down shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, while walking across a bridge a short distance from the Kremlin. In 2017, a court found a former security force officer from Chechnya guilty of murdering Nemtsov and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Four other men were found guilty of involvement in the killing. But Nemtsov's family and allies insist the authorities have failed to bring the masterminds to justice and point the finger of blame at Chechnya's Moscow-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov - and the Kremlin itself.
"The Putin regime killed a man but the masterminds have not been found," one of the participants, Mikhail Kononenko, a 20-year-old student, told AFP. - 'When we send Putin packing' - Opposition politicians said that three years after Nemtsov's murder the atmosphere in the country had deteriorated, with tolerance for dissent shrinking even further.
"Those who ordered the assassination are free, no one has looked for them," said Sergei Mitrokhin, a leader of the liberal party Yabloko. Another opposition politician, Ilya Yashin , said the masterminds would be brought to justice "when we send Putin packing".
Many at the Moscow rally said they would not vote in the presidential election because the result was a foregone conclusion. Russia's top opposition leader Navalny, who took part in the march with his wife, has been barred from running for president over a criminal conviction he says is politically motivated.
He faces up to 30 days in prison after being charged over an unauthorised January 28 protest when he urged Russians to boycott the election. - 'No air' - In the second city of Saint Petersburg several hundred people turned out, some carrying placards that read "Down with the evil empire" and "Putin, where is the mastermind?" One of the participants, Sergei Arkhipov , slammed the suffocating atmosphere of Putin's Russia.
"There is no air in the country," said the 55-year-old. "Dissent is being punished." Galina Samoilenko, 38, said she was sad to see that not too many people turned up. "Perhaps people are afraid.
Or maybe they don't care." Smaller commemorative events took place in other cities across Russia. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said a commemorative plaque would be put up on the Moscow block where Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin's government, lived.APP/AFP
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UK Honors Cave Rescue Divers, Twiggy, Monty Python’s Palin
December 28, 2018 admin Business
LONDON British divers who rescued young soccer players trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand are among those being recognized in Britain's New Year's Honors List, along with 1960s model Twiggy and Monty Python star Michael Palin.
Twiggy, a model who shot to stardom during the Beatles era, will become a Dame � the female equivalent of a knight � while Palin, whose second career has seen him become an acclaimed travel documentary maker, receives a knighthood.
Jim Carter, who played the acerbic Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey, was also recognized, as was filmmaker Christopher Nolan, director of Inception and Dunkirk, and best-selling author Philip Pullman, creator of the Dark Materials trilogy.
The list released Friday also named 43 people who responded quickly to the extremist attacks in Manchester and London in 2017.
The honors process starts with nominations from the public, which are winnowed down by committees and sent to the prime minister before the various honors are bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II or senior royals next year.
The 92-year-old monarch has increasingly called on her children and grandchildren to hand out the coveted awards.
Divers Joshua Bratchley, Lance Corporal Connor Roe and Vernon Unsworth will be made Members of the Order of the British Empire for their roles in the risky Thai cave rescue last summer.
Four other British cave divers will receive civilian gallantry awards for their roles in the thrilling rescue of 12 boys and their coach, who were trapped in the cave for more than two weeks.
Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, the first to reach the stranded children and their coach, have been awarded the George Medal, while Christopher Jewell and Jason Mallinson received the Queen's Gallantry Medal.
Twiggy, whose modeling career lasted for decades, burst on the London Mod scene as one of the original It girls. She earned worldwide fame by 17 and went on to a career in theater and films.
It's wonderful, but it makes me giggle, said Twiggy, 69, whose real name is Lesley Lawson. The hardest thing has been keeping it a secret.
Michael Palin
Palin's knighthood recognizes his contribution to travel, culture and geography. He said the news had not sunk in yet but noted I have been a knight before, in Python films. I have been several knights, including Sir Galahad.
I don't think it will (sink in) until I see the envelopes addressing me as Sir Michael Palin, said the 75-year-old.
Source; Voice of America
Organic electronics: Bio-on presents Eloxel, to develop the use of bioplastics in the electronics sector. At his side Kartell, strategic partner
Canadian Convicted of Drug Smuggling in China Faces New Trial
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Countdown Lists
Top 11 Batman TAS Episodes
Cop and a Half
http://channelawesome.com/nostalgia-critic-the-top-11-batman-the-animated-series-episodes/
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/nostalgia-critic/32243-batman-tas-commentary
(The Nostalgia Critic is wearing a Batman mask, but not the full costume. He then speaks like Michael Keaton's Batman)
NC: Hello, I'm Batman. I remember it because I'm Batman. Today, we're gonna look at one of the greatest animated shows that ever hit television: Batman: The Animated Series. By the way, you weigh a little more than 108. (Changes back to his regular voice) Okay, I'm sorry. I can't do Keaton very well. Uh, let's try Christian Bale. (He then speaks in Christian Bale's gravely Batman voice) This cartoon just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good- (Changes back to his regular voice) Okay, that's not going to work. Uh, let's try Val Kilmer. (He then speaks in Kilmer's soft Batman voice for a brief moment) I'll get drive-thru....(Back to his regular voice) Okay, that's definitely not gonna happen. Uh, let's try George Clooney. (pause) Hi, I'm George Clooney. Okay, fuck this shit! (takes off the mask) I'm just doing it as myself!
Footage of Batman: The Animated Series starts playing.
NC (voiceover): Yes, I've gone on record several times stating that Batman: The Animated Series is the best nostalgic show ever, as well as one of the best cartoons of all time. It was dark, it was tragic, it was funny, it was goofy, it was serious. It had something for everybody. But which episodes were the absolute best? Which ones left the greatest impact on us, whether it be action-packed or dramatically heartbreaking? There's a lot to choose from and I promise I'll try to keep my spoilers to a minimum. Oh, except maybe this one: (shows a poster of Batman & Robin) BATMAN & ROBIN SUCKS!
NC: The only downside is, I don't have any more Batman's to imitate. Oh, wait a minute, Kevin Conroy! That's fitting! Hold on, let me just take some testosterone pills here. (He swallows them and a thud is heard; now speaking in a deeper voice) Whoa! My testicles just hit the floor! This is the Top 11 Best Batman: Animated Series Episodes. (pauses) I don't wear hockey pads!
Interlude showing the opening to Batman: The Animated Series is being played with NC's face in Batman's mask Photoshopped over the original face.
#11 Edit
NC (VO): Number 11- “Beware the Gray Ghost”. Though a good episode, a lot of it holds up particularly well because of the celebrity voice they used, but I'll get to that in a second. The episode centers around an old TV show called "The Gray Ghost" that Bruce Wayne used to watch as a kid. Years later, it turns out some psycho is imitating one of the villains from the show, and since all the episodes were destroyed, Batman goes to the star himself, The Gray Ghost, for help.
Simon Trent: I'm just an actor. The Gray Ghost was a part I played.
Batman: The bombings in Gotham are exactly like an episode of "The Gray Ghost". I need you to remember how it was done.
NC (VO): It's a good episode because it's a decent mystery, it's neat to see Bruce Wayne's inspiration, as well as actually some happy flashbacks to his childhood, and it also shows the dramatic downside to both having and losing fame. Although I will admit, it's a little weird to see Batman actually go fanboy for somebody. I mean, when you're a kid, it's one thing, but the idea of Batman, the Dark Knight, having a little shrine in his Batcave dedicated to a TV show? Jesus, Batman! You're a dork!
Batman: As a kid, I used to watch you with my father. The Gray Ghost was my hero.
NC (imitating Batman): Now, give me a lock of your hair. I'm totally gonna smell it every night! (pulls out a pair of scissors)
NC (VO): But what really makes the episode stand out is who they got to play the Gray Ghost. None other than the original TV Batman himself: Adam West. (a picture of Adam West is shown)
Gray Ghost: Like you said, you need my help.
NC (VO): Rather than just make a funny little joke that two Batmans are in the same show, they actually demonstrate a lot of dignity in having these two together, and even cleverly mirror some of the realities that really did go on with the original Batman shows, but never to a point where it's insulting or it's satirical.
Batman: I used to admire what the Gray Ghost stood for.
Simon Trent: I'm not the Gray Ghost!
Batman: I can see that now.
NC (VO): It was a real respect to this team-up, and it shows in just how much effort the writers and directors put into it. We became passionate about the episode because they became passionate about the episode. Two Batmans for the price of one. What's not to like?
A series of explosions is set off.
Adam West Batman: Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!
NC (VO): Number 10- "The Man Who Killed Batman". This one gets overlooked a lot, but it really is a gem. A little twerp named the Squid wants to make a name for himself as a big time gangster. But nobody wants him because he's a timid little screw-up.
Mobster 1: Why did you bring along that loser? He's useless.
Mobster 2: Not as bait for Batman! He'll be too busy kicking the crud out of Sid to notice us.
NC (VO): But it turns out he stumbles upon a bit of luck when he accidentally knocks Batman off a cliff and apparently kills him.
Sid: He came right at me. I was just trying to get away and he went over the side!
Mobster 2: Sid the Squid just offed the Batman!
NC (VO): Suddenly, he’s the most notorious criminal in town, and everybody is in awe of his accomplishment.
Thug: Suddenly, I’m thinking: if I take down the guy who took down Batman, then I’ll be the toughest guy in town.
Sid: Hey, you got my vote, chief!
NC (VO): But again, with that fame comes a price. People start to challenge him to fights, others try to murder him, even the Joker seems mighty pissed off that there’s no more fun to be had with the mythical Dark Knight.
Joker: There’s a certain rhythm to these things. I cause trouble. He shows up. We have some laughs and the game starts all over again. Without Batman, crime has no punch line.
NC (VO): There’s an especially funny scene where the Joker actually throws a funeral for Batman, and, of course, it’s totally keeping in character.
Joker: It’s time to look ahead to a future filled with smiles. Just as soon as we take that man there (pointing to Sid), and slap him in that box there (pointing to a coffin), and roll him into that vat of acid there! (points to a large vat of acid)
NC (VO): And for the record, Harley’s kazoo playing is nowhere near as good as Paw’s kazoo playing. (shows a clip from Suburban Knights Part 7) It’s a classic case of a person who wanted fame and attention, but wasn’t ready for the pain and responsibility that came with it.
Rupert Thorne: No one's that lucky or stupid!
Sid: Yes, I am!
NC (VO): The story is great, the scenes with the Joker are hilarious, and actor Matt Frewer as the Squid really makes a perfect comic foil.
Sid: Oh, (chuckles) sorry about the leather.
NC (VO): It’s a perfectly told tale of what happens when too much recognition comes to the wrong person, at the wrong time.
Sid: I guess I can’t win for losing.
NC (VO): Number 9- “Mad Love”. One of the show’s crowning achievements was the creation of Harley Quinn, who has since become many people’s favorite Batman character. But we’ve never actually known her history. They’ve hinted at it before and dropped clues here and there, but they’ve never given us the straight-up details about how she ended up with the Joker. Well, this is the episode that sets it all straight. It turns out Harley was an intern at Arkham Asylum and was looking to cash in on one of the high profile criminals to write a tell-all book about it.
Harley: You can’t deny there’s an element of glamour to these super criminals.
Dr. Leland: I’ll warn you right now, these are hardcore psychotics. If you’re thinking about cashing in on them, think again.
NC (VO): But when she started interviewing the Joker, he played to her weaknesses and his mind game slowly started to sink in. And just like The Dark Knight, we have no idea if his past story is the real one or a false one.
Joker: My father used to beat me up pretty badly. Every time I got out of line, BAM!
Joker (Heath Ledger): And one night, he goes off crazier than usual.
NC (VO): It’s also the first time we get a very strong indicator that the Joker and Harley have...
NC: Well, made whoopee cushion.
NC (VO): I mean, it was hinted at before, but this scene pretty much cements that they’ve been together.
Harley: Don’t you want to rev up your Harley? (Makes motorcycle noises)
NC (VO): Because of that, we see in more detail just how violent the relationship is between the two of them, and how the Joker is, and always has, used her as just a means to an end.
Joker: You’ve forgotten what I told you a long time ago. You always take shots from folks who just don’t get the joke! (He then pushes Harley through a window and watches her fall) And don’t call me “Puddin”.
NC (VO): It’s actually a pretty tragic look at abusive relationships in general. And no matter just how tormenting one can be to the other, there’s always something that keeps the other coming back for more. Yeah ("Doctors Wear Miniskirts?" and an arrow appear), there’s quite a bit of fan service and I don’t know why the Joker looks like Mickey Mouse (a picture of Mickey Mouse shows up)*, but it’s still a solid episode that finally fills us in with all the questions we had about our favorite henchwoman, and it didn’t disappoint with the answers.
Note: This episode is from The New Adventures of Batman where the art style was drastically changed.
Harley: My fault...I didn’t get the joke.
NC (VO): Number 8- “Birds of a Feather”. This is another one that’s often overlooked. The Penguin, who’s considered one of the more sophisticated of the criminals, decides he wants to change his way and become a civilized bird once he makes parole. And he means it. He actually starts to change his ways and tries to blend in as an average citizen. He finds, though, that nobody’s waiting for him and nobody’s happy for his return, especially Batman.
Penguin: Haven’t you heard? I’ve reformed.
Batman: Wherever you go, I’ll be right behind you.
NC (VO): But it turns out an extremely rich woman named Veronica wants to date the Penguin so she can make the headlines by inviting him to her party.
Veronica: I’ve just snagged the Penguin for my party.
Bruce Wayne: Why?
Piers: For the entertainment, dodo. Can’t you just see their faces when that stuffed capon walks in?
NC (VO): She’s pretty much dating him as a joke, just a means to get attention from other rich people. She quickly finds, though, that he’s not as charming as she thought, and, well, is pretty fucking gross. But the attention she’s getting is far too much for her to pass up. While she’s dating him mostly to make fun of him, the Penguin takes it very seriously, and even starts to fall in love with her. And after an incident where he saves her life, even she starts to see a little bit of good in him.
Veronica: You know, it was quite touching, actually. It’s not often that a man rushes to my rescue. Unfortunately, he wants to see me again.
NC (VO): But like all tragic tales, the truth is revealed at just the wrong moment, which causes the Penguin’s heart to be broken and return back to his villainous ways. The episode is actually very similar to another one called “Harley’s Holiday” where Harley Quinn starts a new life for herself, finds it hard to fit in, and also tragically gets thrown back to her old ways. But this one takes its time a little bit more. It shows how involved the Penguin really got into the relationship, and how close he really was to turning over a new leaf. It’s more detailed, it’s more cruel, and therefore more sad. Not only does the Penguin almost truly reform himself, but Veronica almost does, too. And if it didn’t all spawn from such a cruel joke, maybe both these people could have turned out to be better.
Veronica: I really was growing fond of you. It’s too bad this had to happen.
The Penguin: I suppose it’s true what they say: Society is to blame. High society.
NC (VO): It’s a tale of what could have been and what shouldn’t be done. Ain’t love a bitch?
Batman leaves a theatre.
NC (VO): Number 7- “Two-Face”. Considered one of the most depressing of the Batman villains, Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent is a criminal with a deep and complex backstory. He suffers from an extreme split personality, which causes him to flip-flop from a kind, intelligent politician…
NC: There’s so few.
NC (VO): ...to a bloodthirsty monster who lunges out at random. He has bad dreams, hears the voice in his head, and at the worst case scenario, he actually becomes the other personality.
Therapist: I would like to talk with Big Bad Harv. (There's a flash of lightning and a silhouette of Two-Face's soon-to-be disfigured face appears for a split second)
Harvey: I don’t think he wants to talk.
Therapist: Please try.
Harvey now has an evil look on his face and starts flipping his trademark two-headed silver dollar.
Therapist: Big Bad Harv?
Big Bad Harv (now talking with Two-Face’s voice): Speaking.
NC (VO): What makes this character so good in the show is that the transformation episode isn’t the first time we see Harvey. They’ve actually established him several episodes before. He hangs out with Bruce Wayne, goes on dates, helps out the Commissioner, so he was a completely set-up character that we really got to like. So when this episode came out, it was a genuine shock to see the demons he was battling.
Big Bad Harv: If anyone’s leaving, it’s Mr. Goody-Good!
He then breaks a window.
Big Bad Harv: And maybe you with him! (He grabs the therapist who snaps her fingers and he returns to his normal self, dropping the two-headed silver dollar)
Harvey: (Now speaking in normal voice) Did I do this?
NC (VO): Instead of acid being thrown in his face, we have an explosion that destroys half of his body. To see this character permanently lose himself to the other personality is just gut-wrenching. Throw in a tragic childhood, the fact that he had a fiancée, and on top of that, we even have the guilt that Batman feels for not being able to save his best friend. I mean, just look at some of these dream sequences.
Dream is shown.
Batman: Harvey, please! Let me help you!
Harvey falls into a vat of acid.
Two-Face: Why couldn’t you save me?
The scene cuts dramatically to Bruce’s parents.
Bruce’s Father: Why couldn’t you save us, son?
Bruce wakes up with a fright.
NC (VO): JESUS, MAN! Couldn’t you throw like a happy face in there or something? (A picture of a happy face is shown)
The scene replays, but after Bruce wakes up, we get a brief clip from Bambi.
NC (VO): The angles are great, the shadows are great, the animation is great, it’s just a great episode. “Two-Face” is just another addition to the lost souls that makes this show so friggin’ hardcore.
Two-Face: It’s time, Harvey. It’s time.
NC (VO): Number 6- “Over the Edge”. Now with a title like that, you know some shit has to go down in this episode. And by God, it does! Get a load of this opening: It starts out with Batman and Robin being chased by Commissioner Gordon and his men trying to gun them down right after they arrest Alfred.
NC: And the award (an superimposed award appears) for Best "What the Fuck?!?!?!" Opening goes to…that!
NC (VO): I mean, holy fuck! That’s one hell of a way to start out! But that’s nothing, that’s just the intro! Every "holy shit" moment you can imagine happens right after this. We find out in a flashback that because of a fight with the Scarecrow, Batgirl gets killed, smashes into her father’s car, and Gordon then finds out that she was his daughter the whole time.
Commissioner Gordon: How could you? I worked with you, trusted you. And you never told me?
NC (VO): He quickly discovers who Batman is, goes full force in taking him down, Nightwing is taken to jail, Robin is told to turn himself in; Gordon even makes a deal with Bane to go after Batman, knowing he’ll show up to his daughter’s funeral! Good fuckity hell!
Commissioner Gordon: There’s no place to run, Wayne. I want him alive! Alive to rot away in Arkham, surrounded by the monsters he’s created.
NC (VO): How can anyone not like a setup like this? It’s intense, it’s action-packed, it’s just awesome. Now the problem that most people have with this episode is the ending. And… yeah, I’d be lying if I said I thought it wasn’t a bit of a cop out, too. I don’t know, maybe it’s because we could all see it coming and I guess we sort of thought they throw a better twist on top of it, but, it’s not one of the stronger endings. Despite that, though, the majority of the episode still holds up pretty strong. And it’s still a great ‘what if...?’ story. It’s dark, it’s brooding, and the scenario is pretty extreme. And for those wondering how the ending could have been improved, join me over at pick number five.
NC (VO): Number 5- “Perchance to Dream”. This is if the “Over the Edge” episode was fully realized, though taking sort of an opposite approach. Bruce Wayne wakes up one morning and finds that everything in his life has actually changed for the best. His parents are alive, he’s marrying the woman he loves, and there’s even somebody else who's doing the job of Batman.
Bruce: Selina, does the name Catwoman ring a bell?
Selina: Bruce, you’re beginning to worry me. What’s this all about?
NC (VO): He can’t understand why, and, even though everything is just how he’s always wanted it, and even at one point starts to accept it, there’s still a twinge of darkness that won’t let him leave it alone.
Bruce: No! You’re a lie! It’s all a lie!
NC (VO): Is it madness breaking through sanity, or sanity breaking through madness? Questions keep knocking back and forth in his head until it builds up to the ultimate showdown: Bruce Wayne vs. his alter ego Batman.
Batman: You’re not well, Mr. Wayne. You need professional help.
Bruce: Liar!
NC (VO): The way he finds out that everything isn’t as it seems is clever, but I don’t know, I still sorta question it. Watch the episode to see what I’m talking about. But still, that’s not what makes it good, though. What makes it good is not only his longing to lead a normal life, and his actual enjoyment of it for a little while, but finding out just who is behind all this and how it’s being kept going. In fact, if you listen to the musical theme, the answer is actually given to you very early on.
A clip with the musical score is shown.
NC (VO): Little touches like that are great, and it’s nice to see what Bruce Wayne’s life would have been like had it not been for the one tragic night. It builds up the sadness and brings on the darkness. It’s a dream that could never be and even harder to let go.
NC (VO): Number 4- “Heart of Ice”. Much like how the show created Harley Quinn, they also recreated Mr. Freeze, giving him a very different and much darker backstory. Freeze, in this version, was originally a scientist trying to find a cure for his deathly ill wife who he has cryogenically frozen to save her. Once he goes over budget, though, his boss comes in to shut the experiment down, dooming his chances of ever seeing her again.
Dr. Victor Fries: It’s her only chance!
Ferris Boyle: This is my equipment!
Dr. Victor Fries: No!
NC (VO): Freeze tries to fight them off, but gets knocked into a bunch of various chemicals that do all those creative things that a bunch of (pictures of Jack Nicholson's Joker, the Green Goblin, and Captain Pollution) various chemicals do. In this case, make it impossible for him to live without being in sub-zero temperatures.
Mr. Freeze: It would move me to tears if I still had tears to shed.
NC (VO): Thus, that’s where the freeze suit comes from, and that’s where his cold outlook on the world originates.
Freeze: I can only beg your forgiveness, and pray you’ll hear me somehow. Some place, where a warm hand waits for mine.
NC (VO): The backstory was so good, that now everybody uses it. The comics, the graphic novels, the TV shows. Even Joel Schumacher, to his credit, knew how powerful the image of a frozen loved one looked.
NC: But that still doesn’t excuse that which-shall-never-be... (stutters as the BAT CREDIT CARD appears)
Batman (George Clooney): Never leave the cave without it.
NC (holding a pair of scissors): Don’t tempt me, Clooney!
NC (VO): The imagery this episode creates is always memorable and often duplicated. It’s the kind of surreal imagery people love to use in Batman stories, and this is the episode that started it all. It made Freeze more than just a guy with a cool gun, it made him a Shakespearean tragedy. The music, as well, adds to the macabre wonder that the episode creates. The atmosphere in every respect is so heavy that the lines practically write themselves.
Freeze: To never again walk on a summer’s day with a hot wind in your face, and a warm hand to hold. Oh, yes. I’d kill for that.
NC (VO): A much better alternative than...
Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger): Freeze well!
NC (has a disgusted look on his face): THAT!
NC (VO): Number 3- “Trial”. This episode brings up something that a lot of Batman fans have brought up for a while. With criminals like the Joker, Two-Face and Clayface, is Batman doing more harm than he is good? Half the time, it seems like he’s almost created these villains. Does it turn out all along that Batman is actually the cause of the majority of misery in Gotham City? Well, all the famous villains get together to find out. They take over Arkham Asylum, capture Batman and force the new district attorney to represent him. The only downside is...
NC: Wait, those were all downsides.
NC (VO): ...the district attorney thinks Batman is just as guilty as the rest of them.
Janet Van Dorn: Not only does Batman create these so-called super-criminals, he takes it upon himself to be their judge and jury with no regard for the legal system.
NC (VO): These are actually very good points. They’re issues that have haunted what Batman is and as well as any other superhero does for a long time. With the Joker as judge and Two-Face as the prosecution, the biggest gathering of villains in the show’s history come together to see if they’ve been wronged by Batman’s vigilantism.
Janet Van Dorn: I suppose you, like your friends, claim that Batman drove you to be a criminal?
Mad Hatter: He did.
Janet Van Dorn: You brainwashed and kidnapped a woman who rejected you.
Mad Hatter: He was going to take her away from me.
Janet Van Dorn: You could’ve respected her wishes.
Mad Hatter: I’d have killed her for it!
NC (VO): It’s a great episode not just for the issues they raise in, but also for the fact that all of your favorite villains are in the same room. And the conclusion that villains come to shows us once again why we love these villains and why they’re so friggin’ interesting to watch. It’s a great idea executed perfectly. The visuals are strong, the lighting is stylish, and it’s just so awesome to see all your favorite baddies share the screen together. It’s also great to see the DA go through her own story arc and come to her own unique conclusion while trying to juggle staying alive in a building of crazies. It’s like a trial in Wonderland, you know, (poster of the Alice in Wonderland remake) if it was done right! Trying to play to the sanity in order, with a world that has little to none.
Joker: (Imitates Porky Pig) That’s all folks!
NC (VO): Number 2- “Baby-Doll”. (Footage of the Familiar Faces episode surrounding Baby-Doll is shown) Many of you might remember my crossover review with CR on Familiar Faces with this episode, so you can probably get much more information about it there. But once again, it’s an episode that is seriously overlooked. It’s about an actress from a sitcom who has a rare disease that keeps her from growing taller.
Batman: She was born with systemic hypoplasia, a rare condition that kept her from aging.
Commissioner Gordon: Could you believe she was 20 years old in that clip?
NC (VO): Crushed by the fact that her career never went anywhere, she becomes deranged and psychologically obsessed with getting the cast back together and staying in her fictional sitcom world.
Tammy Vance: Mary Dahl, is this a joke?
Baby-Doll: No, sillies, I’m Baby, ‘member? Together again, forevers and evers.
NC (VO): While this sounds like a funny scenario, and they do point out the silliness of it quite often, it still keeps us grounded in what’s causing it. It addresses the pain that our villain is going through, both with the prejudices of being a little person and being a celebrity, especially an out-of-work celebrity, to a point where you actually feel bad you were laughing at her at earlier scenes. They also acknowledge that she made mistakes that isolated her from her friends and that she feels there’s no other place that’ll accept her anymore except in her own demented imagination.
Baby-Doll: It was hard for me out there. I studied and trained and auditioned, but no one wanted me. Over the years, I remembered how happy I was with all of you around me and the folks at home watching me each week, me. Baby-Doll! (giggles)
NC (VO): They've really dived into what it means to make mistakes, adjusting to them, and having to live with the changes in your identity. Like many great Batman villains, she comes off as being creepy, intimidating, and also kind of funny. But it’s the third act that really becomes the emotional tearjerker. I won’t give too much away here, but let’s just say, it’s one of the most heartbreaking moments in the Batman series. And given the line-up that we’ve had on this show, that’s saying a lot!
Baby-Doll: Why couldn’t you just let me make believe?!?
NC (VO): It’s a great episode with a great villain, and a great ending. It’s easily among one of the best.
Baby-Doll: (cries) I didn’t mean to...
NC (VO): And the Number 1 best Batman: The Animated Series Episode is- “Almost Got ‘Im”. This is just a perfect episode. The setup: what can I say? It’s incredible. The Joker, the Penguin, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and Croc, are all playing poker together. That image alone is fantastic. But it gets interesting when they start betting on who’s come the closest to killing off Batman.
The Penguin: I’ve come the closest.
Ivy: Are you kidding? I was the one who nearly-
Two-Face: Nobody’s come closer to snuffing the Batman than me!
Joker: The fact of the matter is, we each have an "almost got ‘im!" Batman story. I know mine's the best, but let’s hear yours anyway.
NC (VO): So each one tells their own tale about how they almost got ‘im. The stories are creative, the action is strong, and the ways they’ve almost done him in actually are pretty damn entertaining. But it’s the interaction off one another that really makes this one the best.
Two-Face: Half of me wants to strangle ya.
Ivy: And what does the other half want?
Two-Face: To hit you with a truck.
Ivy: We used to date.
Joker & Penguin: Ah!
NC (VO): It’s not sad, it’s not tragic, it’s not really even that dark, it’s just the villains chilling out being the villains. And you know what? That’s pretty fucking cool. Most people realize that the strength of Batman comes from half of him and half from his opponents. So the more real and identifiable they are, the more drawn in we become. This is the episode where the villains seem the most human. They’re not up to anything, they’re not planning any evil schemes, they’re just playing cards. It’s actually nice to see them just relax and be themselves. And the dialogues they have are just great, including one of the funniest moments in any of the shows.
Joker: Anyone else want a go?
Croc: ME! There I was holed up in this quarry, when Batman came nosin’ around.
Ivy: And?
Croc: I threw a rock at him!
Awkward silence. The villains have a WTF look on their faces.
Croc: It was a big rock...
NC (VO): It’s also the first time the show had five of the major villains in one room. This would be upstaged later with the "Trial" episode, but for the time, this was pretty friggin' awesome that we saw this. (A photo of the main villains from the 1966 Batman movie comes up) It’s sort of like when all the villains got together in the Batman movie, it’s just so cool to see them work off each other. The writing is great, the animation is great, the stories are great, and it even builds up to a bit of a twist at the end, to show that the episode actually did serve a purpose outside of just seeing the bad guys shoot the shit. But like I said, it’s the interaction of the bad guys that makes it so perfect, the way they work off each other and even poke fun at each other’s flaws.
The Penguin (VO): Prepare to meet your end within my aviary of doom!
Ivy: Aviary of what?
Joker: Yeesh, Pengers! How corny can you get?
The Penguin: Fah!
NC (VO): It’s just an awesome episode, and it makes these characters seem surprisingly much more three-dimensional than if there was an entire episode dedicated to one of them. It’s just everybody doing what they do and doing it at their best. It’s an absolutely perfect episode.
Catwoman: Hmm...almost got ‘im.
NC: And those are my Top 11 Batman: The Animated Series episodes. One of the greatest shows of all time! Now, for those of you who didn’t see your favorite episodes on the list, here’s my runners-up. (The words "BITE ME!" flash quickly) There you go. I’m the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don’t have to.
Note: The runners-up are: Joker's Favor, Mudslide, The Clock King, Legends of the Dark Knight.
Channel Awesome Tagline: Croc: It was a big rock...
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Untamed Voices
In my last 21st Century Propaganda essay I mentioned several contemporary figures whom I felt I could trust, whether I completely agreed with them or not. Today we live in times where, to paraphrase Yeats, the center does not hold. There is no public square, as Os Guinness has been espousing. And so while the political and cultural edges eat themselves in Ouroboros fashion I thought I would give you bonafide examples of the kinds of conversations that are happening in what might be a developing public square. And for me (and I’m sure I’m not alone) without this dialogue we will slide into new civil wars, and possibly a New Dark Age. These speakers have very definite positions. I’m sure that Camille Paglia’s praise of drag queens would not find a complimentary echo in Paul Vanderklay’s Christian beliefs. But here is the point, the people featured below show evidence of being people willing to discuss ideas openly and even admit faults in an honest way. I am absolutely sure that Vanderklay and Paglia could have a great discussion, even with their differences. And better this rather outcast assemblage of contradictory voices than lockstep ideologies of the indentitarian right or left. So I present to you a few words to challenge your thinking and fuel your own integrity.
Again I have not tried to make sure I represented every position or ethnicity because I believe that kind of thinking leads us into an authoritarian stalemate. These are just people that I have in some way or another learned to trust, even when we disagree. My suggestion: Find people whom you trust, who are open to dialogue. (Better yet go back and read this whole series. Or if that’s too much read the last couple of essays.)
You will also notice that several of these videos are over a hour long. And maybe you find that to be a long slog. But consider this, look at the view counts on each lecture. Some are in the hundreds of thousands. And more than one person has commented on the fact that while the mainstream media still hands out sound bites in the belief in the stupidity of the viewer. Evidently there is a hunger for much more. Welcome to the world of solid food. An escape from the fast food sound bites of the legacy media. Save these for later, and trust me, look at how much time you waste, you have time. Especially since most of these don’t really require your visual participation.
The Living
Challenging Thinkers
These are teachers, professors, thinkers who’s work has been, in different ways, grappling this present moment and often directly challenging the assumptions of the monolithic media and educational systems.
Jonathan Haidt is a American social psychologist and professor at New York University. He is author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind co-written with Greg Lukianoff. This video is from the Think Forum.
Christina Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Her books include: Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys. Dave Rubin is a political commentator and talk show host of YouTube’s The Rubin Report. The following video is from the Rubin Report and is entitled Christina Hoff Sommers: Feminism, Free Speech, Gamergate.
Roger Scruton is an English philosopher and writer specializing in art, aesthetics, and political philosophy. Notable books include: The Aesthetics of Music, Sexual Desire, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, Beauty, Where We Are. The lecture below is called The True, the Good and the Beautiful.
Camille Paglia is an American academic, social critic, renegade feminist and professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her books include: Sexual Personae, The Birds, and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. In the following video Camille Paglia discusses her most recent book, Free Women, Free Men Sex, Gender, Feminism.
Os Guinness is an English author, social critic whose history included time at L’Abri in Switzerland and a PhD at Oxford. Now residing in America he is a dedicated observer of the times. Books include: The Dust of Death, The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future and Fool’s Talk. John Anderson is a former Australian Deputy Prime Minister of Australia among other posts. This video was recorded in Australia from Conversations with John Anderson.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He is an improbably controversial figure and probably as close as anyone to the core of the crisis of the present moment. Samuel Harris is an American neuroscientist, philosopher, author, atheist critic of religion and podcast host. His books include: The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Although Peterson and Harris take radically different views on the nature of God and belief, both have been called members of the Intellectual Dark Web. This is one of several extremely popular debates they have had on the existence of God. It took place in Vancouver.
History is crucial in facing the meaning of this present age. And it is a subject most postmodern folk are entirely deficient in. These are a few prominent historians with valuable insights.
Timothy Garton Ash is British historian, author and commentator. Professor at both Oxford and Stanford Universities. He was present in a special way during the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. His books include: Facts are Subversive, History of the Present, The Magic Lantern, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 and most recently Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. This video is related to his book on Free Speech.
Sir Simon Schama is an English historian specializing in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history and French history. He is also a television presenter and now professor at Columbia University in New York City. Schama certainly has is own unique view of history and it is always worth a listen. In this lecture Simon Schama discusses History Lessons.
Ken Burns is an American documentary filmmaker focusing on American history. His documentary series include: The Civil War , Baseball, Jazz, The War, and The Vietnam War. The following video is called An Evening with Ken Burns.
Suzannah Lipscomb is a British historian, academic and television presenter. She specializes in the Tudor period. Her books include: 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII, Witchcraft, The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc. This video is from The Conference 2013.
Niall Ferguson is a British historian and television presenter. He specializes in economic and financial history. His books include: The House of Rothschild, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred, The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power. This is video from Conversations with John Anderson.
Mostly Millennial YouTubers
Thoughty2 (Arran Lomas) Thoughty2 should be pronounced in a northern English accent so that it sounds like 42, which is reference to Douglas Adams answer to the question of the meaning of life in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arran is an affable, whimsical and sincere commentator on the world as he sees it. This episode is called Why Is Everyone Getting So Offended
Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) The English Sargon is frankly a controversial figure. He was prominent in Gamergate, and has never been adverse to saying exactly what he is thinking. But Carl will also acknowledge his missteps with alacrity and will challenge all comers to give the reasons for why they say what they say. He rides the line between satire and genuine political philosophy. Scabrously opinionated and fair in equal doses. You’ve been warned. In this video he asks, How do we Parley with Silicon Valley?
Tim Pool (Timcast & Subverse) Tim Pool is an American journalist of Korean and European descent who came into prominence by reporting fairly on Occupy Wall Street, which meant he also showed the failings of the movement. Later he was found interviewing the Alt-Right or off in Ukraine during the time of their upheaval. He tries to be scrupulously fair and has spent much of his time critiquing the rather biased mainstream media. He is like a millennial version of Edward R. Murrow (if Murrow played video games). This is from his recent piece entitled: We Are At The Gates Of Civil War… And Nothing Can Stop It
Brave The World (Julia Turansky) Julia was a hardcore atheist anarchist with a heart. She made provocative videos seeking to expose the problems of the state. But after the birth of her child she began to ask deeper questions, eventually becoming a Christian. In this video she explains after 20 Years an Atheist: Why I Turned.
Paul Vanderklay is most assuredly not a millennial. He is a Dutch Reformed pastor living in Sacramento California who has spent quite some time trying to figure out what this moment means for Christians and others. He found YouTube a few years ago and began to ponder online along with others whom he began to interview who also have also been arrested by the crisis of meaning in today’s world. This is one of his shorter videos on Jordan Peterson, Owen Barfield and John Vervaeke.
And The Dead
Some writers and thinkers could see where we would be before we got there. They emphasized different aspects of the age we have slipped into. Some of them have passed away in the last couple of years.
Tom Wolfe was an insightful essayist and novelist who focused his scrutiny upon the nature and foibles of contemporary life. Whether is analyzing the US space program or Ken Kesey’s cosmic space program he was a sharp critic and well worth listening to, even while ensconced in his trademark luxurious white suits year round. This interview is from CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Nat Hentoff was known as both serious jazz critic and as left wing political commentator. As time passed he adopted views that became harder to classify, linking abortion and euthanasia with the slippery slope down to Nazi ideology. And willing to show the authoritarian leanings of those who claimed to be fighting for various indentitarian factions. He spent many decades writing for the Village Voice, yet was eventually pushed aside for being politically incorrect. The following is a short biographical and political piece on free speech and jazz.
Jacques Ellul is perhaps the most underrated and heretical French thinker of the 20th Century. Former Marxist and a Protestant convert he was a sociologist with a rigorous understanding of the issues presented by technology and propaganda. His writing were almost ignored in France, yet through his books The Technological Society and Propaganda he found his way into a subterranean stream of American thinking. My own debt to Ellul is matched only by C.S. Lewis, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Hans Rookmaaker. The following Dutch film is the only full documentary interview on his thinking made during his lifetime. It is called The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul.
Paul Virilio, who only recently passed away, is another French thinker who contradicts the postmodern worldview with his questions about the nature of speed, art and architecture. Of all the people represented here Virilio was seeing furthest into the future. His ideas if seriously engaged will challenge much that you know. In many ways he was the successor to Jacques Ellul. This is advanced level thinking about the issues of today and tomorrow. The following presentation is called Perspective and the Obligation of Seeing and is part of the European Graduate School Video Lectures
Hans Rookmaaker was a Dutch Reformed Art Historian who fought to restore meaning in art and a deeper understanding of reality. He clearly saw the end result of the meaninglessness of modern materialism. My debt to his thinking is immeasurable. The following audio lecture was one of his last before his untimely death in 1977. It is called What Is Reality? More Rookmaaker can be found at the L’Abri Ideas Library.
http://www.labri-ideas-library.org/store/Reality%20-%20Hans%20Rookmaaker.mp3
Hans Rookmaaker
Well this was supposed to be an easy essay to write… But it ended up being much longer than I thought it would. But you know what? These things are important. And I wanted to leave this 21st Century Propaganda series with a few practical solutions. They can be found by listening to these people. By listening. Disagreeing. Wondering. And getting busy. Time for reality. Time to swim against stream in the Anadromous style.
A personal note:
April 16, 2019 | Categories: Alternative Culture, Brave The World (Julia Turansky), Camille Paglia, Christian History, Christina Hoff Sommers, Hans Rookmaaker, Jacques Ellul, Jonathan Haidt, Jordan B. Peterson, Ken Burns, Nat Hentoff, Niall Ferguson, Os Guinness, Paul Virilio, Politics, Propaganda, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Propagandes, Roger Scruton, Sam Harris, Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin), Simon Schama, Solzhenitsyn, Suzannah Lipscomb, technology, The Anadrome, Thoughty2, Tim Pool, Timothy Garton Ash, Tom Wolfe | Tags: Art, Camille Paglia, Christianity, Christina Hoff Sommers, communication, Hans Rookmaaker, Jacques Ellul, Jonathan Haidt, Jordan B. Peterson, Julia Turansky, Ken Burns, Nat Hentoff, Niall Ferguson, Os Guinness, Paul VAnderklay, Paul Virilio, Politics, Propaganda, Roger Scruton, Sam Harris, Sargon of Akkad, Simon Schama, Social Media, Social Networking, Suzannah Lipscomb, tactics, technology, Thoughty2, Tim Pool, Timothy Garton Ash, Tom Wolfe | Leave a comment
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Misjudging Assad at the expense of Syrians
Bernd Debusmann
Sunday 14/05/2017
“It is clear to all of us that the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end.”
That is what US President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said at a meeting of foreign ministers in Rome in April. The assertion echoed a confident prediction in 2011 by former US President Barack Obama’s top Syria expert, Frederic Hof: “Our view is that this regime is the equivalent of a dead man walking. I do not see this regime surviving.”
The two statements, five years and four months apart, highlight the key role of wishful thinking and flawed assumptions in the United States’ policy on Syria and its iron-fisted leader, Bashar Assad. As it turned out, the “dead man walking” outlasted Obama in power and his continued reign is a testimony to the limits of US influence on the bloodletting in Syria.
In the period between the “dead man walking” and the family reign “coming to an end,” more than 450,000 Syrians were killed, half the population was driven from their homes and the war morphed from a local conflict to a geopolitical nightmare of overlapping proxy fights stoked by outside forces, including Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States.
Ever since Assad assumed the presidency on the death of his father, Hafez Assad, in 2000, American politicians have underestimated the Syrian leader’s political skill, ability to keep powerful foreign backers on his side in the conflict and, last not least, his utter ruthlessness — a trait inherited from his father.
Under Obama, the official line on Syria was that there could be no solution to the war and the huge humanitarian crisis it caused as long as Assad held power. Obama repeatedly termed Assad a leader who had lost legitimacy and should step down but as the conflict dragged on, that gave way to tacit recognition, never spelled out openly, that his government would have to be involved in efforts to end the carnage.
In April, the Trump administration moved a step further. Senior aides, including Tillerson, said dealing with the Syrian crisis required accepting Assad as a “political reality.” It is a matter of debate whether those statements encouraged the Syrian strongman to launch a gas attack a few days later on a village in the north-western province of Idlib.
More than 70 people died, including at least 11 children. Horrific video of children gasping for breath in the throes of death prompted Trump to say that his attitude towards Syria and Assad had “changed very much.” Sixty-three hours after the gas attack, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson struck al-Shayrat airfield, from where the aircraft carrying sarin gas had allegedly taken off.
It was the first direct US attack on an Assad regime target, meant as punishment for the use of a chemical weapon prohibited under international law — not as a change of policy from waging aerial war on the Islamic State in Syria to making war on the Syrian government. As Trump’s chief spokesman, Sean Spicer, put it in response to a question about ending Assad’s reign: “We would look… rather silly in not acknowledging the political realities that exist in Syria.”
Those realities include the role of the main players in the geopolitical contest for influence now playing out. While Washington has had little success in finding a way to deal with what some officials call “the problem from hell,” Russia emerged as the leading power broker in Syria after it dispatched combat aircraft in September 2015 to turn the balance of military power in favour of the Assad government.
In May, representatives of Russia, Iran and Turkey met in Kazakhstan to agree on a Russian plan to create “de-escalation zones” intended to stop fighting between government forces and rebels in four specific areas.
The plan went into effect on May 6 and stipulates the beginning of a 6-month ceasefire and an end to Syrian government flights over the safe zones — Idlib province in the north, Homs province in the centre, East Ghouta outside Damascus and southern Syria along the border with Jordan.
The deal followed three rounds of talks in Kazakhstan since December and a telephone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin early in May when he outlined the plan. Trump sent an observer to Astana but the United States was not involved in the discussions.
Unlike in five years of stuttering UN-brokered negotiations on Syria in Geneva, the question of Assad’s future — often a sticking point — did not come up in Kazakhstan.
Firmly backed by Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent China, Assad looks more secure now than he did as a dead man walking. An end to Assad family rule, now in its 46th year, is probably not nearly as near as Western policymakers wish it to be. Pity the people of Syria.
Written By Bernd Debusmann
Bernd Debusmann is a writer on foreign affairs based in Washington. He has reported from more than 100 countries and was wounded twice while covering the civil war in Lebanon.
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China’s new central bank governor will have to deal with debt and an ambitious economic agenda
Home /China, Economy/China’s new central bank governor will have to deal with debt and an ambitious economic agenda
China,Economy |
Written by Hui Feng.
The Chinese government has appointed a new head of its central bank. Yi Gang, currently the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, will take over the leadership from Zhou Xiaochuan, who had been in the position since 2002.
As China’s central bank oversees the stability of the world’s second-largest economy and the world’s largest pile of foreign reserves, this is a change the global economy is watching closely.
A US-trained economist, Yi received his doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois in 1986. He was a professor at Peking University in China following various academic positions in the US, before joining China’s central bank in 1997. Yi is known in academia for his expertise on inflation and price instability.
Yi developed his technocratic career exclusively within the headquarters of the central bank, taking up various leading positions in areas of monetary policy, exchange rate policy, and foreign reserve management. He then became the right-hand man of Zhou, who dominated Beijing’s economic policy-making for a record 15 years.
However Yi’s governorship came as a surprise, given the widely circulated rumours of other powerful contenders, such as Liu He, now announced as a vice premier of China, and Guo Shuqing, the chairman of China Banking Regulatory Commission.
But the appointment makes sense if the reshuffle of president Xi Jinping’s economic team is taken into account, as like-minded liberals lining up in key positions. Yi will actually work directly under Liu, who also trained in the US, ensuring that the government keeps in close consultation with the central bank while the bank does not stray politically.
Problems the new governor will have to confront
Now that the jockeying for the top position at the central bank is over, the new governor is bound to carry on Zhou’s liberal legacy and to tackle some of the more daunting challenges the Chinese economy faces.
First up is the need to further strengthen the central bank, which has been given extra duties in financial legislation and regulation in the latest round of administrative streamlining announced at the People’s Congress. After all, the authority of the central bank in government circles over the last two decades has largely hinged on the bank playing an indispensable role in providing professional expertise.
Yi will also work to defuse the debt bomb that has been lurking behind a series of alarming statistics of the Chinese economy. In particular, China’s total debt has almost doubled between 2008 and mid-2017, to 256% of GDP as the economy slowed down from double-digit growth to a mere 6%.
A distressed financial system could trigger a systemic economic collapse. To reign in this possibility, Yi will have to work closely with authorities in the State Council, China’s cabinet, to contain the risks to a manageable scale.
The bank will have to walk a fine line here. It must contain the shadow banking sector, which is largely beyond the radar of the authorities. At the same time it has to make sure such tightening does not choke financial innovations embodied by the burgeoning internet finance and fintech.
Equally, if not more important, the financial reforms must be taken to facilitate China’s grand economic transition. In the short to medium term, this entails a further aligning of China’s interest rates to China’s market levels.
They also need to bring its exchange rates in line with international market levels, open its financial markets in a gradual and orderly fashion, and push for the use of the Chinese currency in the global market. This is an ambitious project initiated by Zhou with the goal of seeing the renminbi’s international status on par with the greenback.
A more open and liberal financial system in China is of course good news for the world economy as well because central banks need to work together to address increasingly divergent policy priorities among advanced and emerging economies.
Whether or not Yi becomes the next “Mr RMB” (as Zhou is often dubbed), he needs to be the “Dr Reformer” at this critical stage of both the Chinese and global economy.
Hui Feng is a Future Fellow and Senior Research Fellowat Griffith University. This article was first published on The Conversation and can be found here. Image credit: CC by International Monetary Fund (IMF)/Flickr.
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TAGS: people's bank of China RMB
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