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Street Spirit Justice News and Homeless Blues
Christian Church Homes Offers Affordable Homes for Seniors
The “silver tsunami” represents an overwhelming new wave of aging seniors. Every day, about 10,000 Americans become seniors. The 65-and-older population will more than double from 40 million in 2012 to 80 million by 2050. Considering the nation’s economic troubles, countless seniors will need more affordable housing.
by Maureen Hartmann
Christian Church Homes (CCH) provides housing for 5,000 low-income seniors, and administers 60 low-income senior housing residences in six states. It is now the largest nonprofit, low-income senior housing program in Northern California.
In Oakland, CCH manages Westlake Christian Terrace East and West, two independent-living communities for seniors that provide comfortable apartments with on-site social services. The goal is to provide services that enable seniors to remain in their homes, living independently with dignity and a good quality of life for the long haul.
Although these are nonprofit residences for low-income seniors, Westlake Christian Terrace East and West are far larger than many nonprofit housing complexes. Both WCT East and West are highrise apartment buildings and both provide 200 units of housing for seniors.
WCT West is located at 275 28th Street, and WCT East is located nearby at 251 28th Street in downtown Oakland.
Christian Church Homes originally was founded by members of the Disciples of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination. Nevertheless, there are no denominational criteria for admission, nor requirement for religious practice during tenancy.
Recently, Christian Church Homes was in the news when Margaret Salazar, Senior Housing Specialist of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), congratulated CCH President Don Stump on directing the first senior housing program in the nation to be awarded HUD’s preservation funding to renovate their senior housing building at Westlake Christian Terrace East.
At WCT East, CCH provides affordable apartments with on-site services to seniors over the age of 62. The HUD funding will enable CCH to undertake a complete renovation of all 200 residential units, from floor to ceiling — literally.
The 200 units of senior housing will be upgraded with new flooring, new bathrooms and kitchens, new windows and doors, and a two-level “grand lobby.”
CCH President Stump spoke about the vision and mission of CCH to the Westlake Christian Terrace Resident Council on Oct. 25, 2012. Stump told the board and other residents about his recent meeting in Denver with HUD officials. There, Stump got the promise that HUD would make the renovation of Westlake Christian Terrace the top priority out of a thousand construction projects.
Stump said he was pleased that city, state, and federal tax dollars are going toward the needs of low-income seniors. “CCH staff, as well as several consultants, have been negotiating with HUD, the Oakland Housing Authority, and several banks for two years to make this rehabilitation of Westlake come to reality,” he said.
Stump noted that CCH has asked HUD for 100 percent Section 8 vouchers in the WCT East Building. Section 8 is a federal entitlement program through which tenants pay only 30 percent of their income for rent. Stump said that CCH negotiated with HUD for 18 months to get Section 8 for all its residents.
HUD finally granted Section 8 subsidies to the tenants, when CCH paid off its mortgage to HUD, and could re-finance the building. So, as Stump pointed out, after the renovation, rents for the low-income seniors will decrease, and paradoxically, residents will enjoy many improvements in their living conditions.
The Silver Tsunami
Stump described the rapid growth of seniors in America, utilizing a graph and a well-researched set of statistics in the CCH Annual Report of 2012. At present, 11 percent of the U.S. population is over the age of 65. By the year 2050, 20 percent of the country will be over the age of 65.
Some have called it the “silver tsunami,” referring to an overwhelming wave of aging seniors as the Baby Boom generation passes the age of 65 and retires. Every day, about 10,000 U.S. residents become senior citizens. The CCH report shows that the 65-and-older population will more than double, from 40 million seniors in 2012 to 80 million by 2050. In that same period, the 85-and-older population is predicted to quadruple.
A lot of those folks need more affordable housing, considering the nation’s current economic troubles. During this recent recession, many people lost their retirement funds.
As one response to this soon-to-come societal crisis, groups of seniors from CCH residences often travel to Sacramento to speak to legislators about the urgent need for California to construct more senior housing apartment buildings.
Another contemporary issue in senior housing is lack of communication between residents speaking different languages. Stump said that staff members of CCH’s residences are provided with translation telephones, with two receivers. The staff person can pick up one receiver, and speak in English, and a resident can pick up another receiver, and speak in his/her own language.
Since translation is one of the real challenges in working with low-income seniors, CCH gave a small grant of $1000 to the WCT Resident Council to begin solving the problem of communication between different languages in their meetings. The WCT Resident Council uses the same solution of borrowing headphones, and the translator speaking into a microphone, as the United Nations does. Someone sits in the back of the room, and talks into a microphone, translating into Korean or Chinese.
During the recent recession, many seniors lost their retirement funds, and the need for affordable housing is greater than ever. Art by Christa Occhiogrosso
The two-year renovation of Westlake Christian Terrace’s East Building began about Oct. 15, 2012. CCH has raised and designated $20 million for the renovation.
Residents not forced to move
In order to protect their feelings of safety, privacy and dignity in their homes, the senior residents are not asked to move out of the building, even during these major renovations. Instead, by an elaborate system, residents move out of their own apartments into another’s apartment, so that their own apartments are left empty, and can be refurbished.
A resident of the WCT East Building, Linda Saiah, asked Don Stump if the new apartments would have lower cupboards, higher toilets, and bathtub bars. She was concerned about her own safety, and that of other residents. Stump answered in the affirmative.
During Stump’s meeting with the resident council, another woman pointed out that the emergency call buttons in the kitchen and the bathroom were too high. Stump noted that the new call buttons would have a string, which can be pulled from anywhere.
He added that a temporary laundry room would be installed in a vacant apartment on the first floor to replace the second-floor washroom, which is being torn up during the renovation. Eventually, there will be a brand new laundry on the first floor.
An operations manager, and a man who would handle grievances of the residents, Chris Turner, were hired for the two-year remodeling, and were introduced by Stump at the October meeting.
Another woman resident found herself badly affected by the remodeling of the East Building. She had rescheduled hip surgery three times, first in April, then June, then August of this year, when each time the management put off the date of the renovation. She did not want to return to her apartment from the hospital, and while recovering, have to deal with packing her things in her old home, and unpacking them in her new home.
She had to deal with her move on October 17, when the date finally came, in discomfort and pain in her right hip. All this uncertainty about what her circumstances would be after surgery has caused her to put off surgery until the beginning of 2013. Worse, she faced the emotional frustration of not being able to get the stress of surgery over with before the beginning of the year.
Concerns about safety
Another member of the council brought up concerns about the safety of senior residents unable to park at the facility. Due to the unavailability of parking at WCT East, her car had been vandalized, and on one occasion, she had the disturbing experience of being followed home to her residence from her car.
Younger and more able-bodied staff workers had parking spaces reserved on the grounds, while residents who had no spaces reserved had to park off the grounds and walk in the dark to their apartments, taking the chance of being victims of crimes. Residents proposed a policy that at least those spaces left vacant by staff on evenings and weekends be given to residents.
Applying for senior housing
The Christian Church Homes website is a way to begin an application for tenancy at one of the CCH residences. See the website at www.cchnc.org or phone at (510) 632-6712.
If you wish to donate to CCH, contributions may be made by credit card by clicking on “support” on the black bar at the top of the home page. Checks may be sent to: Christian Church Homes, 303 Hegenberger Road, Suite 201, Oakland, CA 94621.The contributions may be earmarked to the East Building of Westlake Christian Terrace, if desired.
Tags: affordable housing, CCH, Christa Occhiogrosso, Christian Church Homes, Dan Stump President Christian Church Homes, Diciples of Christ, in-suite service, Independent living community, Margaret Salazar U.S. Housing & Urban Development, Maureen Hartmann, nonprofit housing complex, Section 8 housing subsidy, silver tsunami, Westlake Christian Terrace East, Westlake Christian Terrace West, www.cchnc.org
January Poetry of the Streets
Gratitude for My Home — and Sympathy for Those Without
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Book Extract: Science and Spiritual Practices: Reconnecting through direct experience by Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist, and researcher into telepathy between humans and animals. He is a critic of materialism and here discusses atheism as a faith like other faiths.
One of the most extreme exponents of the Secular Buddhist movement is Sam Harris, whom I mentioned earlier. After a secular upbringing and experiences with psychoactive drugs as a student, he dropped out of college and went in search of self-understanding to India, where he studied with a series of gurus for more than two years. He then went back to America, resumed his studies and did a PhD in neuroscience, before launching a new career as a militant atheist. With his first book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, he achieved international fame as one of the New Atheists. But he is now going further than other anti-religious crusaders. He has found a new way of attacking religion. Instead of denying spirituality, he wants to take it over, and remove it from the realm of religion. In this book Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion, he writes, ‘My goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion.’
Harris’s principal teacher was Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Tibetan master who lived for more than twenty years on retreat in a hermitage. His title Tulku meant that in the eyes of Tibetans, and in his own eyes, he was a reincarnated master, or more precisely the ‘emanation’ of a deceased master called Nubchen Sangye Yeshe, a ninth-century student of Guru Padmasambhava. Urgyen Rinpoche was a teacher in the Dzogchen tradition, able to transmit the experience of self-transcendence directly to a student. Harris received this transmission from him, and in only a few minutes his life was changed.
However, he denied that there was anything ‘supernatural’, or even mysterious, about this transmission of wisdom from master to disciple.’ Instead, he said, ‘Tulku Urgyen’s effect on me came purely from the clarity of his teaching… I didn’t have to accept Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about karma and rebirth or imagine that Tulku Urgyen or the other meditation masters I met possessed magic powers.’ But if this astonishing Dzogchen transmission is nothing but a matter of clear teaching, then why cannot Harris, or anyone else transmit it through books or online courses? In the Tibetan tradition, transmission involves more than words. It needs a living contact. It is a kind of resonance whereby the master is able to induce something of his own conscious state in the person he is initiating.
Harris rejects many of the beliefs of his own teachers as superstitious. He believes that even the Dalai Lama is fundamentally mistaken, because like many other Tibetans he believes in rebirth and consults oracles. Unlike Harris, he has not plucked ‘the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion’.
Harris’s default position is the materialist theory of consciousness advocated by most of this atheist colleagues. Materialists believe that consciousness is nothing but brain activity. However, Harris says that he is not fully committed to this theory. He admits the possibility of consciousness beyond the brain, which all religions accept, but he remains hostile to all religions:
‘I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were irreducible - or even separate from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine - my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness.’
Harris is a sophisticated atheist and he admits that we do not understand consciousness. But then how can he be so sure that human (and animal) consciousness is all that there is, and that there are no trans-human realms of conscious being? Surely this is no more than an assumption, a belief, an atheist leap of faith.
(Science and Spiritual Practices: Reconnecting through direct experience by Rupert Sheldrake, pub. Coronet 2017)
You can read previous book extracts here.
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About Brent
Thoreau Living History
Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. Schoolteacher, pencil-maker, odd-jobber and surveyor, he was also a writer and philosopher mentored by Ralph Waldo Emerson and a gifted naturalist.
In 1845, the Harvard graduate built himself a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord and embarked on an experiment in living simply and deliberately. Walden, the book he wrote about the two years, two months and two days spent by the pond, is now a beloved classic.
Thoreau was a man of many facets. He was mechanically inclined (tinkering with recipes and machinery in his father's workshop, he helped make "J. Thoreau & Son" pencils the finest in the country), well-read in the literature of ancient India and China as well as Greece and Rome, and a close student of nature who anticipated many insights of modern ecology. His detailed records of local flora and fauna have helped scientists understand how the New England climate has changed between his day and ours. Thoreau was fascinated by Native American cultures as well, and made several trips to the Maine wilderness to learn from Penobscot guides. Born into a family of fierce abolitionists, Henry assisted runaway slaves and his writings helped to galvanize public opinion in the North against accommodation to slavery. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, while the nation was mobilizing for Civil War to decide the issue.
Thoreau is remembered today for his contributions to literature and science, as a proto-environmentalist who first envisioned our National Parks system, and as the author of "Civil Disobedience," which has inspired nonviolent movements for social justice around the world, including those led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today, admirers not only read Thoreau's writings, they also visit Concord to pay their respects to Thoreau country. Visitors to Walden Pond can add rocks to a cairn near the house site and step inside a replica of the cabin. Each July, scholars and enthusiasts gather from around the world to honor Henry's birthday with speeches, research papers, guided walks and canoe trips, food, and music. (For more information, visit the Thoreau Society website.)
Thoreau in 1856
© 2019 Thoreau Living History . Bento theme by Satori
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Specialists In Institutional Fixed Income
Institutional Investment Services
Non-Discretionary Investment Management
Public Funds Investment Education
Tip: Regardless of your net worth, it’s critical to understand your choices when developing an estate strategy.
Federal estate taxes have been a source of funding for the federal government almost since the U.S. was founded.
In 1797, Congress instituted a system of federal stamps that were required on all wills offered for probate when property (land, homes) was transferred from one generation to the next. The revenue from these stamps was used to build the navy for an undeclared war with France, which had begun in 1794. When the crisis ended in 1802, the tax was repealed.¹
Estate taxes returned in the build up to the Civil War. The Revenue Act of 1862 included an inheritance tax, which applied to transfers of personal assets. In 1864, Congress amended the Revenue Act, added a tax on transfers of real estate, and increased the rates for inheritance taxes. As before, once the war ended the Act was repealed.²
Fast Fact: Estate Income. Between 2016 and 2025, the estate tax will generate about $246 billion.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2015
In 1898, a federal legacy tax was proposed to raise revenue for the Spanish-American War. This served as a precursor to modern estate taxes. It instituted tax rates that were graduated by the size of the estate. The end of the war came in 1902, and the legacy tax was repealed later that same year.³
Until 1916. The 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913 — the one that gives Congress the right to “lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” The Revenue Act of 1916 established an estate tax, and in one way or another, it’s been part of U.S. history since then.
In 2010, the estate tax expired — briefly. But in December 2010, Congress passed the Tax Relief Act of 2010 and the new law retroactively imposed tax legislation on all estates settled in 2010.
In 2012, the American Tax Relief Act made the estate tax a permanent part of the tax code.
As part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, estate tax rules were again adjusted. The estate tax exemption was raised to $11.2 million, a doubling of the $5.6 million that previously existed. Married couples may be able to pass as much as $22.4 million to their heirs. The 2017 Act is set to expire in 2025, so it’s possible the estate tax law may be adjusted at least once during the next few years. If you’re uncertain about your estate strategy, it may be a good time to review the approach you currently have in place.
Estate Taxes and Overall Federal Revenues
Estate taxes typically account for less than one percent of total federal revenue.
Chart Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2015
Exemption through the Years
Federal estate taxes exempt a share of estates from federal estate taxes. For the 2017 tax year, if an estate’s worth less than $5.49 million, no federal estate taxes may apply.
Exclusion Amount
Highest Tax Rate
1916 $50,000 10.0%
1918-1923 $50,000 25.0%
1926-1931 $100,000 20.0%
1977 $120,000 70.0%
2002 $1,000,000 50.0%
2010 $0 or $5,000,000 0% or 35%
Chart Source: Internal Revenue Service, 2017
1,2,3. Internal Revenue Service, 2016
Securities offered through ProEquities, Inc. a Registered Broker/Dealer, member of FINRA & SIPC. Any non-securities activities conducted by Time Value Investments, Inc. are independent of ProEquities, Inc.
Time Value Investments, Inc.
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info@timevalueinv.com
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FACTS ON SUMMER, गर्मी पर तथ्य
FCT-3765
The first modern Olympic Games were held in the summer in 1896 in Athens, Greece.
The first day of summer is between June 20th and June 22nd every year. The first day of summer is called the summer solstice, and the day varies due to the Earth’s rotation not exactly reflecting our calendar year.
The last day of summer is September 20th.
Watermelon is one of summer’s best summer treats. Did you know that watermelons are not a fruit, but a vegetable instead? They belong to the cucumber family of vegetables.
The Eiffel tower actually grows in the heat of the summer. Due to the iron expanding, the tower grows about 6 inches every summer.
If you love ice cream, the summer season should be your favorite. July is national ice cream month.
Another interesting fact about summer is that television shows used to only be reruns during the summer months. The idea being that everyone was outside enjoying the weather.
A June fun fact is that the month of June is named after the Roman goddess Juno.
The first women’s bathing suit was created in the 1800’s. It came with a pair of bloomers.
The “dog days of summer” refer to the dates from July 3rd to August 11th. They are named so after the Sirius the Dog Star. This star is located in the constellation of Canis Major.
For a July fun fact, Roman general Marc Antony named the month of July after Julius Caesar.
July is national blueberry month.
The longest day of the year is on the summer solstice.
Mosquitos are most prevalent during summer months. Mosquitos have been on earth for more than 30 million years.
Most theme and water parks are on a summer seasonal schedule. Most amusement parks have a full time season from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
August was named after Julius Caesar’s nephew. He had received the title of “Augustus” which means “reverend”.
The first National Spelling Bee was held on June 17th, 1825.
Ice pops were invented in 1905 by an 11 year old boy.
The word “solstice” is from the Latin solstitium, which is from sol (sun) and stitium (to stop) because it seems as if the sun stops at the solstice.
In the Northern Hemisphere, summer solstice occurs sometime between June 20 and June 22, and between December 20 and December 23 in the Southern Hemisphere.
The word “season” is from the Old French season, which means “sowing/planting” or “seed time.”
Summer babies are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and are less likely to become CEOs.
Warmer weather causes certain diseases to peak during the summer, such as Valley Fever, West Nile Lyme Disease, and food poisoning.
The first Olympic Games in the modern era were the 1896 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the I Olympiad in Athens, Greece.
According to custom, in the United States, a person can wear white pants only during the summer, or between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
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USA.com / Illinois / Christian County / Bulpitt, IL / 62517
62517 zip code is located close to the center of Illinois. 62517 zip code is part of Christian County. 62517 zip code has 0.12 square miles of land area and 0.01 square miles of water area. As of 2010-2014, the total 62517 zip code population is 291, which has grown 29.33% since 2000. The population growth rate is much higher than the state average rate of 3.62% and is much higher than the national average rate of 11.61%. 62517 zip code median household income is $32,000 in 2010-2014 and has grown by 3.78% since 2000. The income growth rate is much lower than the state average rate of 22.70% and is much lower than the national average rate of 27.36%. 62517 zip code median house value is $53,800 in 2010-2014 and has grown by 26.00% since 2000. The house value growth rate is lower than the state average rate of 34.33% and is much lower than the national average rate of 46.91%. As a reference, the national Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate for the same period is 26.63%. On average, the public school district that covers 62517 zip code is worse than the state average in quality. The 62517 zip code area code is 217.
Population 291 (2010-2014), rank #1240
Population Growth 29.33% since 2000, rank #134
Population Density: 2,148.62/sq mi, rank #226
Median Household Income: $32,000 at 2010-2014—3.78% increase since 2000, see rank
Median House Price: $53,800 at 2010-2014—26.00% increase since 2000, see rank
Time Zone: Central GMT -6:00 with Daylight Saving in the Summer
Area: Taylorville, IL
County: Christian County
City: Bulpitt
Fastest / Slowest Growing Cities in IL
High / Low IL Cities by Males Employed
High / Low IL Cities by Females Employed
Best / Worst Cities by Crime Rate in IL
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Expensive / Cheapest Homes by City in IL
Most / Least Educated Cities in IL
62517 Zip Code Map, Border, and Nearby Locations
Taylorville Area
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Mandela first Black Leader of South Africa
OJ Simpson charged with murder
GOP gains control of Senate
Terry Noe, 17, a native Korean living in the United States for only 20 months before this championship, defeated fellow Californian Andy Barnes, 2 up, to win the 47th U.S. Junior Amateur Championship, at Echo Lake Country Club, in Westfield, N.J.
Noe, of Fullerton, Calif., who was playing in his first Junior Amateur, had a relatively easy time in the morning semifinal, beating Mauricio Muniz, of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, 5 and 3. Barnes, meanwhile, defeated a scrappy, 110-pound Charles Howell, of Augusta, Ga., 1 up. Howell, who defeated Ted Oh, of Torrence, Calif., in a quarterfinal marque matchup, 1 up, also was a semifinalist in 1993, and still has more eligibility left. He is just 15 years old.
Noe had been the 1992 South Korean national junior champion, but had played in only two tournaments previously in this country. His father and coach, Hyung, walked with him every step of the way, cheering his son on.
Medalist Michael Henderson, of Raleigh, N.C., who qualified with a record-tying 139, lost in the second round.
Barnes took the lead on the first hole, holing a sand shot for birdie. Noe drew all square with a par on the short par-4 second, then Barnes parred the third to regain the lead. Noe birdied the fifth, then parred the eighth to take a 1-up lead, then moved to 2 up with a par at No. 13. Barnes won the No. 15, before Noe birdied No. 16 to go to dormie 2.
Barnes kept the match alive by winning the par-3 17th with a par when Noe missed a 3-footer. But Noe steadied himself and parred the 18th to win as Barnes couldn't escape the right rough for his first two shots.
"He just outplayed me," said Barnes.
But was it an upset? Maybe so, according to Noe.
"I just wanted to make the cut," Noe admitted.
The championship drew 2,694 entries, breaking the previous record set in 1993.
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How Do I Become a Medical Claims Examiner?
A medical claims examiner verfies the validity of health insurance claims.
Edited By: Nancy Fann-Im
A person who wants to become a medical claims examiner does not need any special training and can pursue several avenues to this career path. Claims examiners review insurance claims to determine whether the policy should pay out, based on the nature of the claim and standards and practices at the insurance company. This work does not require a college degree or certification from a vocational school, although these can be helpful in a tight job market.
One way to become a medical claims examiner is to start working in the insurance industry to build up experience. Regional agencies often hire support and administrative personnel, and some support their employees as they work up the career ladder. Employees can also apply directly to headquarters to work in an office environment with claims examiners and other corporate personnel. As an employee develops experience and learns about the company, it is possible to apply to become a medical claims examiner.
Another option is to go to college for a degree before applying into the insurance industry, which may potentially allow someone to skip some of the steps along the way to become a medical claims examiner. Students can get degrees in business and a variety of other fields, including topics like medicine and nursing that might help them understand insurance claims. Some people go to trade schools to learn medical billing and coding and apply this training to their work as claims examiners.
An insurance company may prefer an applicant to become a medical claims examiner if the person has insurance industry experience, professional training, or administrative experience. Students who have just graduated from high school typically have trouble entering positions like this, although they may be able to apply to work as administrative assistants to start building up experience and skills. People with experience in the medical profession, like former clinic assistants, may also have an advantage on applications for work in the insurance industry.
After someone has become a medical claims examiner, it is important to keep up with policies and procedures at the insurance company. Policy changes should be closely reviewed to make sure they are fully understood. It can also help to monitor appeals and disputes, as these can help claims examiners determine how and why people appeal their decisions. This information may be helpful for formulating solid arguments to back up a denial, which will be useful when the denial is appealed and another staff member needs to review the documentation.
What Does an Insurance Claim Examiner Do?
What Does a Medical Examiner Assistant Do?
What Does a Medical Claims Examiner Do?
What Is a Claim Agent?
What Are the Different Types of Claims Processing?
What Are the Different Types of Medical Courses?
What is Claims Adjudication?
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The 2014 Books in (Mini) Review
2014 may be over, but, like last year, there's still plenty of time to reflect on what made it by far the best year of my life. While it wasn't quite because of any of the books below, they certainly didn't hurt. Because, you know, there were some damned fine reads.
Silver Surfer Omnibus by Stan Lee and John Buscema
I read this in preparation for the newly launched volume of Silver Surfer by Dan Slott and Mike and Laura Allred. What I expected, based on the more modern iterations of the character (especially my all-time favorite limited series, Silver Surfer: Requiem), was not at all what I got. This here is a Silver Surfer full of emotion and not afraid to break down and cry. Also one who can put on a trench coat and go full incognito, odd as that sounds. It was a great, dense read, and a beautiful primer for the newest volume.
The Dark Tower, Book 1: TheGunslinger by Stephen King
Far different than later books in the series, The Gunslinger establishes the overall tone of “Dark Tower” but is obviously by a less-seasoned author. That isn’t to say it isn’t great. It is. But it feels like something that was written for a magazine (which it was) and collected only later (which it was). Not my favorite of the series, but by far the simplest and easiest to read and enjoy.
The Dark Tower, Book 2: The Drawingof the Three by Stephen King
My favorite of the series, Drawing of the Three is an outright asskicker through and through that never stops surprising. It also tackles more themes than any of the other books by allowing us to view the different time periods and conflicts of the individual characters. I only wish the Three of the title wasn’t such a false lead.
Footprints by Joey Esposito and Jonathan Moore
This was a fun book. Seeing the Lochness Monster as a seductress was particularly inspired, but bending Bigfoot into a noir detective role was utterly fantastic. And, surprisingly, fit incredibly well. I do wish the book was in color, but I understand the cost constraints of self-publishing. There was a follow-up issue recently published, but I’m hoping for a full-on second volume.
The Dark Tower, Book 3: The WasteLands by Stephen King
Waste Lands cemented my love for Jake and Oy, but also ended with what could possibly be the most frustrating cliffhanger in all of literature. Thankfully, I didn’t read “Dark Tower” as it was released, so I didn’t have to put up with that longer than it took for me to take Wizard and Glass off the shelf.
The Dark Tower, Book 4: Wizard andGlass by Stephen King
Although it offers some of the best character work of the series, as well as a sweet, if not immediately doomed, romance, Wizard and Glass felt more like filler to me than anything else. It also was the first that seemed to really tie “Dark Tower” to the rest of King’s books, at least overtly. Really, I think it’s the series’ low point, though I know I'm in the minority there. Thankfully, that means it only goes up from here on out.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer'sStone by J.K. Rowling
I had avoided the Potters for year, but finally read the series around 2009 or so because I was forced to write about it almost constantly. I’m glad I convinced myself, though, because although Rowling obviously took influence from past fantasy writers, she presents them in a nice new package and in a very family-friendly way. I read this to my unborn and later newborn, and he never seemed to be confused. So, that’s saying something.
The Last of Us: American Dreams by Neil Druckman and Faith Erin Hicks
I wish this never ended. This was just such a perfect series and prequel to what quickly became my favorite videogame of all time. While some was later repurposed/built upon in the “Left Behind” expansion, I could have sat there and read this over and over. I need more Last of Us.
Dude, You're Gonna Be a Dad! by John Pfeiffer
I read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, so there wasn’t much here that really surprised, but Pfeiffer nicely repackages that for the man here, in a way we can obviously relate (the chapter “dedicated” to men in What to Expect was more Everybody Loves Raymond than anything else). I’d recommend it for any husband or boyfriend or whoever about to take the plunge into fatherhood.
The Dark Tower, Book 5: Wolves ofthe Calla by Stephen King
After an apparently huge break (though not so huge for me), King returned to his infamous series in grand fashion, but reading these all in a row does this book something of a disservice. He explains it off in the afterword, but compared to the first four titles, this one is overloaded with foreign language, mythology and otherworldly nonsense that fail to add much to the series, rather taking away from what had previously been a realistic adventure with touches of fantasy and mysticism. I liked it more than Wizards and Glass, but I wonder what the book would have been like had the pre-accident King written it.
Harry Potter and the Chamber ofSecrets by J.K. Rowling
Chamber of Secrets is a marked step-up from Sorcerer’s Stone, but still not at the heights of the later volumes of the series. Still, it has some fun ideas and introduces us to a ton of key elements in a less breakneck fashion than the first outing.
The Dark Tower, Book 6: Song ofSusannah by Stephen King
Susannah was my least favorite character of all “Dark Tower,” so much of this book just proved frustrating and a chore. It didn’t help that the pregnancy seemed tacked into the series in Wolves, never seeming as a very natural evolution from Wizard, or that King himself began showing heavily within the books, but at least the latter was fun and cool in an in-universe origin story kind of way.
The Killer, vol. 4: Unfair Competition by Matz and Luc Jacamon
I'm rather fond of this series, but Unfair Competition doesn't hold to the heights of previous volumes, which often surprised and kept me on edge while this simply continued along it's somewhat meandering plot. The art was still great, and the plight of the characters real, but it was lacking that certain something that makes this series so memorable.
The Dark Tower, Book 7: The Dark Tower by Stephen King
I suppose my love of this book stems mostly from the fact there are two distinct endings: the happy and the impossibly sad. The latter is the stronger by far, and anyone who chose to dismiss it has done the series a disservice, but that’s only my own opinion. Regardless, it was satisfying in more ways than one, and a welcome end to the tour-de-force that was this series.
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
A bit of an aside placed in the "Dark Tower" canon, this was a fun little tale I'm thankful wasn't in the actual series, as it has little bearing on the overall plot. Supposedly, this is the first of a few similar tales, which I'd gladly welcome.
Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
I loved Black Dossier and enjoyed Century, but these latest Nemo books have been hit and miss from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen team. While Heart of Ice feels like a traditional adventure tale from the turn of the century or so, it’s lacking any of the pizazz and heart that made previous volumes so special. And do we really need to insert references just because they exist?
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
I haven’t seen the film version of 2001 in some time, but what I remember of it is confusion, particularly the final act. Clarke’s book takes a lot of the guesswork away and actually explains what’s happening, and, unless I’m remembering incorrectly (I need to rewatch the movie very soon), the ending is rather different as well. This is a modern sci-fi staple, and it deserves its place.
2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
Not nearly as memorable as 2001, 2010 suffers from walking in the former’s shadow and even goes so far as to include a few excerpts from the blockbuster. It’s also hurt by following the same basic structure as the original, though the continued concept behind HAL proved interesting and, as with 2001, the book remained a quick and engaging read.
2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke
The final Odyssey I own was also the weakest of the bunch, as very little seemed to actually “happen” in 2061 compared to its predecessors. Sure, there were some fun set pieces, but the central premise surrounding the diamond mountain was telegraphed from the start and led to nothing quite remotely interesting aside from what seemed to be setup for 3001 (which I totally need to buy).
The Walking Dead Omnibus Vol. 1 by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore Charlie Adlard
The issues that started it all are as good a read now as they were then, and comparing them to the show makes the book all that more fun. However, reading it over, I wish Tony Moore had stayed on the book past the six issues, as I much prefer his art to Charlie Adlard’s, which, though now prolific, is more lax with details and shadows.
Labels: Diversions, Hobby Hole, review
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Maren Morris Brings Surprise Guest Brandi Carlile to CMA Fest
Mike Thiel
Mike Thiel for Taste of Country
Brandi Carlile surprised CMA Fest fans at Nissan Stadium in Nashville Sunday night (June 10) with an unannounced duet of "Common" with country star Maren Morris.
It was the final night of CMA Fest; a four-day star-studded country music festival in its 48th year. The fest kicked off with the CMA Awards Wednesday (June 5) and ended Sunday night (June 10) with arguably the festival's most impressive lineup of Morris, Keith Urban, Luke Bryan, Chris Janson, Old Dominion, Trisha Yearwood and David Lee Murphy, all performing at Nissan Stadium.
Morris shared a 30-minute set in a stunning jumpsuit, opening softly with "The Bones" from her 2019 sophomore album GIRL. Much as she does at her solo concerts, Morris wasted little time getting to the front row of fans, making her way to the bottom of the two-tier stage within the first few songs.
"Girl," "Rich" and the song that broke her career, "My Church," were all on tap for the live performance, as well as the aforementioned "Common" which Morris performed with Carlile on the satellite stage (a small stage set up in the crowd about 50 yards from the main stage). The two yearned back and forth with the heavier lyrics of "Common:" "When it's over, when it's done / When we're standing at the gates / Will we see that all along / We're a different kind of sane?"
Fans throughout the crowd turned on their cellphone lights, illuminating the duo and many of those fortunate enough to be close-up were recording or taking photos throughout the song.
Carlile, who is also featured on the recorded version of "Common," recently formed a supergroup with Morris, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby. Named the Highwomen, the quartet made their debut at a Loretta Lynn tribute show in Nashville earlier this year.
See Pictures From CMA Fest 2019, Day 3
Source: Maren Morris Brings Surprise Guest Brandi Carlile to CMA Fest
Filed Under: brandi carlile, Maren Morris
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July-December, 2010 International Religious Freedom Report
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The constitution and other laws and policies protect religious freedom and, in practice, the government generally enforced these protections.
The government generally respected religious freedom in law and in practice. There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom by the government during the reporting period.
There were reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice.
The U.S. government discusses religious freedom with the government as part of its overall policy to promote human rights.
The country has an area of 76,000 square miles and a population of 12.8 million. Islam is the predominant religion, practiced by approximately 94 percent of the population. Most citizens belong to one of several Sufi brotherhoods and practice a syncretic form of Islam that incorporates indigenous cultural beliefs and values. There is also an active Christian community, constituting 4 percent of the population, which includes Roman Catholics, Protestant denominations, and syncretic Christian-animist groups. The remaining 2 percent practices exclusively indigenous religious beliefs and values or no religion.
The country is ethnically and religiously diverse. Although there is significant integration of all groups, Muslims are concentrated in the north, Christians are in the west and south, while groups who practice indigenous religious beliefs live mainly in the east and south.
Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom
Please refer to Appendix C in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for the status of the government's acceptance of international legal standards //2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/appendices/index.htm.
The constitution specifically defines the country as a secular state and provides for the free practice of religious beliefs, provided that public order is maintained.
Unlike members of other religious groups, Muslims may choose Islamic-based laws under the family code to govern marriage and inheritance. Civil court judges preside over civil and customary law cases, but many disputes among Muslims are settled informally by the decision of religious leaders, particularly in rural areas.
The government provides direct financial and material assistance to religious organizations, primarily to maintain or rehabilitate places of worship or to underwrite special events. All religious groups have access to these funds, and there is often competition among religious groups to obtain them.
The government encourages and assists Muslim participation in the annual Hajj, providing hundreds of free airplane tickets to citizens for the pilgrimage. The government provides similar assistance for an annual Catholic pilgrimage to the Vatican and the Holy Land.
Religious organizations are independent of the government and administer their affairs without government interference. The civil and commercial codes require any group, religious or otherwise, to register with the minister of interior to acquire legal status as an association. Registration enables an association to conduct business, own property, establish a bank account, and receive financial contributions from private sources. Registered religious groups and registered nonprofit organizations are exempt from many forms of taxation. The government generally approves applications for registration, and the Ministry of Interior must have a legal basis for denying applications.
Religious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) must obtain authorization to operate from the Ministry of Women, Family, and Social Development. The government monitors foreign religious NGOs to ensure that their activities adhere to their stated objectives.
The government allows up to four hours of voluntary religious education per week in public elementary schools. Parents may choose either the Christian or Muslim curriculum. An estimated 700,000 students participated in religious education during the reporting period.
Private schools may also provide religious education. The Ministry of Education provides partial funding of schools operated by religious institutions that meet national education standards. Long-established Christian schools with strong academic reputations receive the largest share of this government funding. The majority of students attending Christian schools are Muslim. In addition to the national curriculum, Christian schools offer religious education to Christian students and moral education to non-Christians. Non-Christian students were not required to take Christian religious courses.
In addition to secular public schools, the government also operates Islamic schools, which are growing in popularity and include an estimated 60,000 students. By the end of the reporting period, the government had opened 200 of the 600 Islamic schools planned. All of these schools are bilingual, teaching in French and Arabic. This program has removed thousands of children from street begging and exploitation under the guise of some Qur'anic schools in the country.
The government observes the following religious holidays as national holidays: Tabaski (Abraham's sacrifice), Tamkharit (Muslim New Year), the Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, Korite (end of Ramadan), Easter Monday, Ascension, Pentecost, Feast of the Assumption, All Saints' Day, and Christmas.
The government provided facilities to ease access and parking at the Saint-Lazarre cemetery in Dakar, resolving concerns expressed in 2008 about its plan to expropriate part of the cemetery to erect office buildings.
There were no reports of abuses, including religious prisoners or detainees, in the country.
Section III. Status of Societal Actions Affecting Enjoyment of Religious Freedom
On June 21, an evangelical Christian church in Pikine Tally Bou Bess, a suburb of Dakar, was reportedly attacked by a group of youth during a worship service. Two days prior to the attack, neighbors had complained that the church's celebrations were noisy. The attack resulted in slight damage to church property, but no one was injured. Following the attack, the pastor filed a formal complaint with local police. The case was pending at the end of the reporting period.
During the reporting period, Christian and Muslim leaders worked together to promote and maintain a public dialogue.
Through the embassy's speakers program, International Visitor Leadership Program, U.S. Government Program Alumni Association, and other public outreach tools and events, the embassy promoted religious pluralism and dialogue between religious groups. Embassy officials also met with religious leaders to promote tolerance and mutual understanding as well as enlist their support for development and human rights goals.
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Tuesday Quick Hits: Biker Gangs, Uber Labor and the Cult of Duggar
Quick hits for a short week. Here are some articles I’ve been meaning to write posts about, but haven’t had the time.
First, when that daylight gunfight erupted in Waco, Texas, plenty of astute observers looked at the pictures of bikers mulling around amidst law enforcement and wondered if the scene would look different if the gun-toting gang members were black. Well, a leaked report examined by The Intercept sheds a little more light on the demographics of these bike gangs, and some of its membership may surprise:
A year before the deadly Texas shootout that killed nine people on May 17, a lengthy report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detailed the involvement of U.S. military personnel and government employees in outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. A copy of the report was obtained by The Intercept.
The report lays out, in almost obsessive detail, the extent to which OMG members are represented in nearly every part of the military, and in federal and local government, from police and fire departments to state utility agencies. Specific examples from the report include dozens of Defense Department contractors with Secret or Top Secret clearances; multiple FBI contractors; radiological technicians with security clearances; U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees; Army, Navy and Air Force active-duty personnel, including from the special operations force community; and police officers.
It’s unclear what incentive drives these people to join outlaw biker gangs. Maybe they pay better than Uber? On that topic, Naked Capitalism has a piece on a surprising Wall Street Journal article about the “sharing” economy. One would assume the WSJ would be an ally of Uber, but the report doesn’t seem to pull any punches as it unpacks the myth of the sharing economy, calling out Uber specifically. From the WSJ article:
In the minds of critics, perhaps the worst offender in how it controls its labor force is Uber. Uber sets the prices that its drivers must accept, and has lately been in the habit of unilaterally squeezing drivers in two ways, both by lowering the rates drivers are paid per trip and increasing Uber’s cut of those wages….
Boosters of companies like Uber counter that they allow for relatively well-compensated work, on demand. When I asked them for comment, Uber officials pointed to previously released data suggesting just that. The most recent report, a collaboration between Uber and economist Alan Krueger, paints a fairly rosy picture of Uber’s job-creation abilities. Uber has said in the past that world-wide it is hiring 20,000 new drivers a month, and in this report it claims that in major American cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., drivers are averaging more than $17 an hour.
But this data doesn’t reflect what Uber drivers actually make, for the simple reason that it doesn’t include drivers’ expenses. Work by investigative journalist Emily Guendelsberger, for example, shows that Uber drivers in Philadelphia, a fairly typical city for the service, are probably earning only a fraction of that. According to Ms. Guendelsberger’s admittedly limited sample of 20 drivers, including herself, it was around $10 an hour after expenses.
Exploiting labor is as American as apple pie. And it’s even easier to exploit if you own the labor directly. I’m not talking about slaves, I’m talking about the products of procreation, exemplified by the cult of Duggar. This extended work camp referred to as a “family” recently came under fire after revelations that one of its cult members enjoys molesting girls, presumably including his sisters. Luckily this family has a presidential contender willing to go to bat for them:
Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a statement on Facebook Friday addressing the revelations that eldest son Josh Duggar admitted to sexually molesting “girls,” presumably his own sisters, as a teenager.
The former Arkansas governor largely defended the actions of the family since the abuse and said he wanted to “affirm” support for the family. “Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, ‘inexcusable,’ but that doesn’t mean ‘unforgivable,’” Huckabee’s statement said. The Duggar family endorsed former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in the 2012 election, but have backed Huckabee for the Republican presidential nomination this time around.
Huckabee continued, “No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things. The reason that the law protects disclosure of many actions on the part of a minor is that the society has traditionally understood something that today’s blood-thirsty media does not understand—that being a minor means that one’s judgement is not mature.”
I’m sure Huckabee would say the same thing if this family was black, right? And I’m sure Huckabee will make reforming laws that charge minors with adult crimes a major plank in his bid for the presidency, right? Here is an article from last year about minors in New York:
Every year, almost 50,000 16- and 17-year-olds are prosecuted as adults in New York State, and more than three-quarters of these charges are for misdemeanors like shoplifting and marijuana possession. Some 70% of the children arrested are black or Latino, as well as 80% of those incarcerated.
As Cuomo reminded us, now is the time for a change. The New York State Legislature needs to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility, and they need to do it this year.
Teens are far from perfect, and they certainly are not always innocent. That’s part of growing up. A teen’s brain develops well into his or her 20s, and as cognitive skills improve, so does impulse control. As a result, teens are often unable to focus on the consequences of their behavior.
Yeah, I won’t hold my breath in hopes that Huckabee sees minority teens in the same glowing light as the cult of Duggar.
Not at all surprised at all the biker cops. Government agents, I have gathered in my reading, can be found inside and outside most terrorist, protest, and citizen activist groups in this country and around the world. It’s part of agitprop – they often operate as agents provocateur in addition to being mere spies and moles. Look up COINTELPRO sometime.
Many of the spokespersons in the so-called “911 Truth” Movement are government agents – Richard Gage, James Fetzer, Alex Jones come to mind. It’s Stalin’s old strategy – the best way to control the enemy is to lead the enemy.
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Posted on September 19, 2018 by Afrocentric Vibes
A 10-city U.S. stadium tour has been announced featuring Michelle Obama to promote her memoir “Becoming” that will feature what organizers called “intimate and honest conversations” with audiences.
The former first lady will kick off the tour in her Chicago hometown on Nov.13, the day “Becoming” is released in the U.S. and in 28 languages around the world.
Event promoters Live Nation said the tour would also take Obama to Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, New York and other cities and stadiums with seating capacities of up to 23,000 that are also used for concerts by some of music’s biggest acts.
Becoming: An Intimate Conversation with Michelle Obama
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former first lady of the United States
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As first lady of the United States of America – the first African American to serve in that role – she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the United States and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her – from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it – in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations – and whose story inspires us to do the same.
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72 Beautiful Galaxies
Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe
High Redshift Galaxy Rotation Curves
Spiral galaxies rotate, and the velocity of rotation versus distance from the center is known as the rotation curve. Our own Sun takes about 240 million years to rotate about the galaxy’s center.
M64, image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
Almost always the rotation curves flatten out far from the center. This was not expected. If the mass is concentrated as the light in a galaxy, the velocity should continue to decline as one goes further out, according to Newtonian dynamics.
The flattening can be interpreted as due to the presence of dark matter, or alternatively, due to deviation from Newtonian dynamics and general relativity when accelerations are very low.
Now researchers have looked at a sample of over 100 distant, high-redshift galaxies and they find the rotation curves look much more like one would expect with only Newtonian gravity. So is dark matter not important at higher redshifts? Read more at:
Distant Galaxy Rotation Curves Appear Newtonian
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The Curiously Tangential Dwarf Galaxies
(Originally posted at darkmatterdarkenergy.com)
There are some 50 or so satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, the most famous of which are the Magellanic Clouds. Somewhat incredibly, half of these have been discovered within the last 2 years, since they are small, faint, and have low surface brightness. The image below shows only the well known ‘classical’ satellites. The satellites are categorized primarily as dwarf spheroidals, and most are low in gas content.
Image credit: Wikipedia, Richard Powell, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic
“Satellite galaxies that orbit from 1,000 ly (310 pc) of the edge of the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy to the edge of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way at 980×103 ly (300 kpc) from the center of the galaxy, are generally depleted in hydrogen gas compared to those that orbit more distantly. The reason is the dense hot gas halo of the Milky Way, which strips cold gas from the satellites. Satellites beyond that region still retain copious quantities of gas.” – Wikipedia article
In a recent paper “The tangential velocity excess of the Milky Way satellites“, Marius Cautun and Carlos Frenk find that a sample of satellites (drawn from those known for more than a few years) deviates from the predictions of the canonical Λ – Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmology. (Λ refers to the cosmological constant, or dark energy).
“We estimate the systemic orbital kinematics of the Milky Way classical satellites and compare them with predictions from the Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model derived from a semi-analytical galaxy formation model applied to high resolution cosmological N-body simulations. We find that the Galactic satellite system is atypical of ΛCDM systems. The subset of 10 Galactic satellites with proper motion measurements has a velocity anisotropy, β = −2.2 ± 0.4, that lies in the 2.9% tail of the ΛCDM distribution. Individually, the Milky Way satellites have radial velocities that are lower than expected for their proper motions, with 9 out of the 10 having at most 20% of their orbital kinetic energy invested in radial motion. Such extreme values are expected in only 1.5% of ΛCDM satellites systems. This tangential motion excess is unrelated to the existence of a Galactic ‘disc of satellites’. We present theoretical predictions for larger satellite samples that may become available as more proper motion measurements are obtained.”
Radial velocities are easy, we get those from redshifts. Tangential velocities are much tougher, but can be obtained from relatively nearby objects by measuring their proper motions. That is, how much do their apparent positions change on the sky after many years have passed. It’s all the more tough when your object is not a point object, but a fuzzy galaxy!
For a ‘random’ distribution of velocities in accordance with ΛCDM cosmology, one would expect the two components of tangential velocity to be each roughly equal on average to the radial component, and thus 2/3 of the kinetic energy would be tangential and 1/3 would be radial. But rather than 33% of the kinetic energy being in radial motion, they find that the Galactic satellites have only about 1/2 that amount in radial, and over 80% of their kinetic energy in tangential motion.
Formally, they find a negative velocity anistropy, β, which as it is defined in practice, should be around zero for a ΛCDM distribution. They find that β differs from zero by 5 standard deviations.
One possible explanation is that the dwarf galaxies are mainly at their perigee or apogee points of their orbits. But why should this be the case? Another explanation: “alternatively indicate that the Galactic satellites have orbits that are, on average, closer to circular than is typical in ΛCDM. This would mean that MW halo mass estimates based on satellite orbits (e.g. Barber et al. 2014) are biased low.” Perhaps the Milky Way halo mass estimate is too low. Or, they also posit, without elaborating, do the excess tangential motions “indicate new physics in the dark sector”?
So one speculation is that the tangential motions are reflective of emergent gravity class of theories, for which dark matter is not required, but for which the gravitational force changes (strengthens) at low accelerations, of order , where H is the Hubble parameter, and the value works out to be around 2 centimeters per second per year. And it does this in a way that ‘spoofs’ the existence and gravitational affect of dark matter. This is also what is argued for in Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which is an empirical observation about galaxy light curves.
In the next article of this series we will look at Erik Verlinde’s emergent gravity proposal, which he has just enhanced, and will attempt to explain it as best we can. If you want to prepare yourself for this challenging adventure, first read his 2011 paper, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton”.
Leave a comment The Curiously Tangential Dwarf Galaxies
Two Trillion Galaxies
Two trillion! That’s 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies. A trillion is a million times a million.
For a long time astronomers have said that our observable universe has about 100 billion galaxies. Two trillion is 2,000 billion, or 20 times larger.
It’s still smaller than the U.S. national debt at about $19 trillion, but those are just dollars, not galaxies. There are only 7 billion people on Earth, this number is 300 times larger.
Why so many?
Galaxies are not static. They evolve.
So what’s the twist, why were astronomers so wrong for so long? Well, it’s because now we can see galaxies much further away than before, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and other advanced telescopes. In fact we are now detecting many galaxies that were formed in the first billion years of the universe’s history.
And the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
A team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham, the Leiden Observatory, and the University of Edinburgh, have built extremely detailed 3D maps of distant galaxies in order to estimate the density of these. They have used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and various ground-based telescopes.
When we look at distant galaxies we are also looking back into the past, since light travels at a finite speed. The researchers, lead by Prof. Christopher Consilice at the University of Nottingham, found the density of galaxies when the universe was a few billion years old to be about 10 times higher than at present (after correcting for the expansion of the universe). He noted that “we are missing the vast majority of galaxies because they are very faint and far away”.
These earlier galaxies were smaller, less massive, much less so. Large galaxies today like the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy have masses of around a trillion times the Sun. These galaxies were much more like the two dozen satellite galaxies found around the Milky Way, such as the Magellanic Clouds.
The Large Magellanic Cloud has a mass of about 1% of our Milky Way Galaxy. Image credit: NASA (C141 flight)
The main conclusion of the study? We know that galaxies undergo mergers. Apparently there have been many more mergers than previously assumed. Large galaxies such as our Milky Way have been formed by multiple successive mergers.
NGC 3921 is actually two galaxies in the process of merging. Note the strange and twisted orientation of the spiral arms, and the appearance of two disk like structures.Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
So while there were originally trillions of galaxies in the early universe, in today’s universe the number has been reduced by mergers to order hundreds of billions.
Mergers will continue, in fact the Andromeda Galaxy is headed our way, and it’s twice as big as we are!
https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2910-a-universe-of-two-trillion-galaxies – Royal Astronomical Society press release
Leave a comment Two Trillion Galaxies
Pisces A and B: Dwarf Galaxies with Young Stars
Pisces A and Pisces B as seen by Hubble Telescope; Image credit: NASA / ESA / E. Tollerud (STScI)
The galaxies Pisces A and B are dwarf (very small) galaxies outside of our Local Group, but relatively nearby. Note their blue colors, indicating recent young star formation. The Local Group includes Andromeda, the Milky Way and another 50 or so smaller galaxies.
These two dwarfs are in a region of low density at the edge of the Local Void, an area with few galaxies. It appears they have recently moved out of the Local Void into a higher-density region. Their evolution and star formation may have sped up as this occurred.
Pisces A is nearer, around 18 million light-years away, and B is at 29 million light-years distance. Their masses are approximately 10 million and 30 million solar masses, respectively. By comparison, our Milky Way’s mass is 30 to 100 times larger.
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The Antenna galaxies
This is a pair of colliding galaxies, presenting an absolutely stunning image. Each of the two spiral galaxies is not so different from our Milky Way. They have spent hundreds of millions of years in a violent cosmic dance. Stars are being ripped from the respective galaxies and flung out into an arc between the two.
Gas clouds are in reddish colors, and the star-forming regions are seen in blue. The Antennae are in starburst mode, which is a phase of very rapid star formation. There are also many prominent dust lanes (dark areas).
Antenna galaxies
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgement: B. Whitmore ( Space Telescope Science Institute) and James Long (ESA/Hubble)
This is a composite image based on both visible and near-infrared data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
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M31 – Andromeda Galaxy
“Our beautiful neighbor, M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy, is the best known galaxy apart from our Milky Way. M31 is a spiral galaxy, similar to, but larger than, our own galaxy. It has about two or three times the number of stars as the Milky Way.
M31 is visible to the naked eye on Moonless nights. Its existence has been known for over 1,000 years, but its nature as a galaxy separate from our own was not confirmed until around 1920, with the “Great Debate” between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. Curtis was an advocate of many nebulae being external galaxies in their own right, and was proven correct.
Image credit: Andromeda Galaxy (with h-alpha)” by Adam Evans – M31, the Andromeda Galaxy (now with h-alpha), Uploaded by NotFromUtrecht. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy are gravitationally bound together in our Local Group, along with about 50 other galaxies, which are almost all small dwarf galaxies.
The distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is around 2.5 million light-years (thus we are seeing it as it was 2.5 million years ago). The mass is estimated at over a trillion solar masses, and it has a star count of approximately a trillion stars. It is moving toward us at 300 kilometers per second (1/1000 of the speed of light). It[…]”
Excerpt From: “72 Beautiful Galaxies” iBook
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M63 – Sunflower Galaxy
“M63 is an Sb spiral in the direction of Canes Venatici. It was discovered in 1779 by Pierre Mechain, a friend of Charles Messier, who composed the Messier catalog. The nickname of this galaxy, the “Sunflower” galaxy is reasonably obvious, since it has a shape and coloration similar to a sunflower and exhibits beautiful yellow colors as well as blue. The latter are regions with recent ongoing star formation. Its spiral arms were first noticed in the mid-19th century.
The Sunflower galaxy is 37 million light-years distant, and is part of a group of galaxies together with M51.”
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
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Pompeo says ‘handful more weeks’ before US responds to Khashoggi killing
November 2, 2018 WorldShahid Mehmood
02 Nov, 2018 10:10 am
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday it would be a “handful more weeks” before the United States had enough evidence to impose sanctions in response to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Pompeo, in an interview with KMOX radio in St. Louis, said President Donald Trump had made it clear Washington would respond to the killing. He said the administration is “reviewing putting sanctions on the individuals that we have been able to identify to date that … were engaged in that murder.”
“It’ll take us probably a handful more weeks before we have enough evidence to actually put those sanctions in place, but I think we’ll be able to get there,” Pompeo said.
“We’re going to find the fact pattern,” he said. “The president said we will demand accountability for those who were involved in the commission of this heinous crime.”
While insisting the United States did not condone Khashoggi’s killing, the top U.S. diplomat said the United States had “deep and long-term strategic relationships” with Saudi Arabia and “we intend to make sure that those relationships remain intact.”
Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence minister, Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, said on Wednesday that the outcry in the United States demonizing Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s killing threatened to disrupt strategic ties between the two countries.
“We value our strategic relationship with the United States and hope to sustain it. We hope the United States reciprocates in kind,” Prince Turki, a royal family member, said in remarks at the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, a non-profit advocacy organization.
Khashoggi, who lived in the United States and wrote columns for the Washington Post, went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to collect some documents, but he never reappeared. Riyadh initially denied any role in his disappearance, but under pressure from Turkish authorities it eventually identified 18 suspects in the case.
Saudi Arabia said they will face justice in the kingdom. Ankara has repeatedly called for them to be extradited to Turkey for trial.
Turkey pressed Saudi authorities on Thursday to tell them the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s body, which has not been recovered.
China summons Myanmar ambassador after bomb kills four Chinese
Russia says has begun drawdown of forces in Syria
Exclusive: Assad linked to Syrian chemical attacks for first time leftright 6/6leftright
At least 19 dead in India as boat capsizes in Ganges
Hamas sentences three Palestinians to death over commander's killing
City of Oxford strips Aung San Suu Kyi of human rights award
Seven mine workers missing after accident in northern Mexico
China tests its own 'Mother of All Bombs'
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Suspect in Sentinel High School Shooting Caught in Missoula’s South Hills
Police have arrested a 17-year-old juvenile who is a suspect in a shooting near a Missoula High School that occurred more than a month ago. Police Public Information Officer Travis Welsh says the young man was arrested Tuesday afternoon up in Missoula’s South Hills.
“Approximately 1:55 p.m. today, August 8, Dylan Conat was taken into custody," Welsh said. "If you recall, Mr. Conat was related to the shooting incident that took place at Sentinel High School on June 24th, and there had been a warrant out for his arrest now for several weeks. Following new leads on his movements detectives learned that Conat was currently located at an apartment in the 2300 block of 55th street."
Two males, ages 16 and 17 were shot outside the Sentinel High School Gymnasium in June and a gun was found. Welsh says no weapon was involved when police confronted Conat this week.
“Surveillance was established and Mr. Conat was taken into custody without incident, thankfully, when he was observed leaving the residence on foot," Welsh said. "There is no information about a weapon at the time of his arrest. There are still unanswered questions and we have those questions and we are certainly looking for answers.”
Because he is a juvenile, photographs of Conat have not been released. The two young men who were gunned down were not from Missoula. One was shot in the face and has had difficulty relaying what happened, the other, was shot in the chest and claims Conat robbed them and asked them about drugs before shooting.
Categories: Missoula News
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Motley Crue Recording New Music
Tenth Street Entertainment
The plot thickens! While Motley Crue's touring career may be over, the band is not finished making new with music. Vince Neil just revealed in a new tweet that he's planning to return to the recording studio in a few weeks to record four brand new Motley Crue songs.
The news comes just weeks after Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx were spotted together in a studio with producer Bob Rock, with photos and videos also showcasing Lee's playing. "It's that new shit!!!," Lee proclaimed in one of his social media posts. Now, with Neil confirming that he's working on Motley Crue music, it appears as though a reunion musically is afoot. See Neil's tweet below.
What remains to be seen is where the music will be used. The band has been working toward the release of film adaptation of their popular group biography The Dirt, so it's possible that the music will tie into the project. Sixx appears to have confirmed that it will be for the film, per the tweet below.
Stay tuned to see what's coming from Motley Crue.
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Source: Motley Crue Recording New Music
Filed Under: Motley Crue, vince neil
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Hayden Panettiere’s Boyfriend Arrested on Domestic Violence Charges
Jamie McCarthy, Getty Images
Former Nashville star Hayden Panettiere's boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, has been arrested and charged with domestic violence against the star.
According to TMZ, the couple went out drinking in Hollywood on Wednesday night (May 1), and when they got home, they had an argument that turned physical. It's not clear who called the police, but officers responded to the scene around 2AM on Thursday (May 2) to find redness and marks on the actress' body, and they took Hickerson into custody after interviewing both him and Panettiere.
A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson confirmed to People that Hickerson was arrested on a domestic violence charge. He was released later Thursday after posting a $50,000 bond.
See These Country Stars Before They Were Famous!
It's the latest in a series of run-ins that have caused speculation about Panettiere's wellness. In October of 2018, police responded to a home in South Carolina about a report of an assault and battery after Hickerson got into an altercation with his father. Panettiere was reportedly "intoxicated" and "frantic" when they arrived. One of the officers witnessed Hickerson chasing his father through the kitchen "in an agitated state." Hickerson's father, David, appeared to have blood on his face, but he told police he had fallen.
A source told Us Weekly after that incident that the actress' relationship with Hickerson, who's an aspiring actor, "is not a healthy situation." Hickerson denied that in a statement to Access, saying, “Just to be clear, Hayden’s friends and family are not worried about her at all."
Panettiere has been the subject of a number of recent tabloid reports speculating that she has a dysfunctional relationship with Hickerson and that she has been drinking too much. In February of 2019, Us reported that the former Nashville star has not been seeing much of her daughter, Kaya, since splitting with the child's father, boxer Wladimir Klitschko, in August of 2018.
“She knows the child being with her is not best for [Kaya right now],” a source told the magazine. “It’s a sad situation."
The 4-year-old is living with her father in his native Ukraine, where he is raising her with help from his mother.
Neither Hickerson nor Panettiere has responded to People's requests to comment on the domestic violence charges.
See Inside Hayden Panettiere's Quirky Nashville Mansion
Source: Hayden Panettiere’s Boyfriend Arrested on Domestic Violence Charges
Filed Under: Nashville
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Houston clinic offers free health services
HOUSTON Just this month, the San Jose Clinic opened a newer, bigger building, but can it keep up with the demand? We show you how the clinic is fighting to meet that need.
Bertha's swollen feet hurt. She's also fighting diabetes and high cholesterol - two potentially dangerous conditions this medical doctor sees a lot. Her name is Sister Rosanne Popp. And besides seeing patients like Bertha, who don't have health insurance, she's seeing something else.
"Now we have another whole layer of people who are in a sense more difficult because they don't know how to access services. They've never been poor before, they've never been uninsured before," said Sister Popp.
It's estimated one in three people in Harris County don't have health insurance. The San Jose Clinic is braced for seeing up to 15,000 patients a year - three times the amount of patients they were able to treat at their former facility in downtown Houston.
The new building opened this month and is state of the art. Over 600 volunteers from doctors to nurses to technicians keep it open, all volunteering to treat people who can't afford to go to the doctor.
"It's one thing to not have a medical home when you have the flu, but what if you had a chronic condition? What if you had lupus and you need medical care and medicines every month?" said Stacie Cokinos, Executive Director of the San Jose Clinic.
The new surroundings are vast when compared to the old clinic, and what's offered here is comparable to any medical facility in the Medical Center.
The new San Jose Clinic has a pharmacy and can treat not only primary medical care but also provide specialty care such as dentistry and cardiology. The clinic interacts with several surrounding hospitals.
"So if somebody needs specialized services such as open heart surgery, specialized pace makers, things such as that, we're able to at least get them into the system," said cardiologist Dr. Devinder Bhatia.
While the doctors and nurses are essential, so are the volunteers like Urania Garza. At 78 years old, she still helps out, volunteering for over 25 years. She first went to the San Jose Clinic in the 1930s for immunizations. Coming here is a hard habit to break.
"We're kind of looking around, maybe there is something we can do here," said Garza.
By tripling their amount of patients, the San Jose Clinic remains ready to help and provide healthcare with dignity to those who need it most.
The San Jose Clinic is the only full-time free clinic in the greater Houston area devoted exclusively to serving the uninsured. The archdiocese owns the San Jose Clinic and it is completely funded by private donations.
James Harden joins Houston Dynamo and Dash ownership group
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Category Archives: Domain Communication Office
"The Domain", Airl, asteroid belt, asteroids, Domain Communication Office, Domain Expeditionary Force, Domain officer class, Domain Officers, space stations
DOMAIN COMMUNICATONS OFFICE
“Without a defined nomenclature communication was not possible beyond the rudimentary understanding between men and dogs, or between two small children. The lack of a common vocabulary of clearly defined words that all parties can use fluently, was the limiting factor in communication between all people, groups, or nations. “
“Airl continued to stay in communication with the Communications Officer on the asteroid belt space station, from which she received much of this information. Since Airl was an officer / pilot / engineer of The Domain, and not a historian, she had to get this information from records of reconnaissance missions conducted by other officers of The Domain Expeditionary Force.”
“However, the following dates and events have been extrapolated from the accumulated information in the data files of The Domain — at least those that are accessible to me through the space station communications center.”
“The Domain Communications Office has authorized me to provide you with some information in an effort to provide a more accurate and complete understanding of these things and thereby enable you to discover more effective solutions to the unique problems you face on Earth.”
“The Domain has been able to return some IS-BEs of the Lost Battalion to active duty on a limited, part-time basis. For example, two young girls who occupy biological bodies on Earth are now, at the same time, working as active members of The Domain Expeditionary Force on the asteroid space station as operators of a communication switchboard. These operators relay messages between The Domain Expeditionary Force and The Domain Command Headquarters.”
“At that time I was a member of a mission sent to investigate the loss of a Domain base located in the Himalaya Mountains. An entire battalion of officers, pilots, communications and administrative personnel disappeared and the base destroyed.
“You and I were unable to communicate in your language because I, personally, have not been exposed to your language. However, now that I have scanned the books and material you provided me this data has been relayed to our space station in this region and processed by our communications officer through our computers. It has been translated into my own language and relayed back to me in a context that I can think with. I have also received additional information from the files stored in our computers about the English language and Domain records concerning Earth civilization.”
“Airl described the abilities of an IS-BE officer of The Domain to me, and she demonstrated one to me when she contacted — telepathically — a communications officer of The Domain who is stationed in the asteroid belt. [i] (Footnote)
The asteroid belt is composed of thousands of broken up pieces of a planet that once existed between Mars and Jupiter. It serves as a good low-gravity jumping off point for incoming space craft traveling toward the center of our galaxy.
She requested that this officer consult information stored in the “files” of The Domain, concerning the history of Earth. She asked the communications officer to “feed” this information to Airl. The communications officer immediately complied with the request. Based on the information stored in the files of The Domain, Airl was able to give me a brief overview or “history lesson”.
— Excerpts from the Top Secret transcripts published in the book ALIEN INTERVIEW
[i] “…asteroid belt…”
“The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. More than half the mass within the main belt is contained in the four largest objects: Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea. All of these have mean diameters of more than 400 km, while Ceres, the main belt’s only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that multiple unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident.”
"prison planet", "The Domain", "Tree of Life", "Tree of Life" detection device, Ahura Mazda, amnesia, amnesia force screens, amnesia stations, Annunaki, Cyrus II, divine rulers, Domain Central Command, Domain Communication Office, Domain Expeditionary Force, Domain officer class, Domain Officers, Domain Search Party, electric shock, electronic traps, electronics, false memories, faravahar, force screens, hypnosis, hypnotic commands, invasion forces, IS-BE, lost battalion, memory, Oannes, Vedic Hymns
DOMAIN SEARCH PARTY
“559 BCE —
The Commanding Officer of The Domain Battalion who was lost in 5,965 BCE was detected and located by a search party sent to Earth from The Domain Expeditionary Force. He was incarnated as Cyrus II of Persia during this time. [i] (Footnote)
A unique system of organization was used by Cyrus II [ii] (Footnote) and the members of that Battalion who followed him from India through his progression of human lives on Earth. In part, it enabled them to build the largest empire in the history of the Earth to that date.
The Domain Search Party who located him traveled around the Earth searching for the lost Battalion for several thousand years. The party consisted of 900 officers of The Domain, divided into teams of 300 each. One team searched the land, another team search the oceans and the third team searched the space surrounding Earth. There are many reports made in various human civilizations concerning their activities, which humans did not understand, of course.
The Domain Search Party devised a wide variety of electronic detection devices needed to track the electronic signature or wavelength of each of the missing members of the Battalion. Some were used in space, others on land, and special devices were invented to detect IS-BEs under water.
One of these electronic detection devices is referred to as a “tree of life”. [iii] (Footnote)
The device is literally a tool designed to detect the presence of life, which is an IS-BE. This was a large electronic screen generator designed to permeate wide areas. To the ancient humans on Earth it resembled a sort of tree, since is consists of an interwoven lattice of electronic field generators and receivers. The electronic field detects the presence of IS-BEs, whether the IS-BE is occupying a body, or if they are outside a body.
A portable version of this detection device was carried by each of the members of The Domain Search Party. Stone carvings in Sumeria show winged beings using pinecone-shaped instruments to scan the bodies of human beings. They are also shown carrying the power unit for the scanner which are depicted as stylized baskets or water buckets, being carried by eagle-headed, winged beings. [iv] (Footnote)
Members of the aerial unit of The Domain Search Party, led by Ahura Mazda, were often called “winged gods” in human interpretations. Throughout the Persian civilization there are a great many stone relief carvings that depict winged space craft, that they called a “faravahar”. [v] (Footnote)
Members of the Aquatic Unit of The Domain Search Party were called “Oannes” by local humans. [vi] (Footnote) Stone carvings of the so-called Oannes are shown wearing silver diving suits. They lived in the sea and appeared to the human population to be men dressed to look like fish. Some members of the lost Battalion were found in the oceans inhabiting the bodies of dolphins or whales. [vii] (Footnote)
On land, The Domain Search Party members were referred to as “Annunaki” [viii] (Footnote) by the Sumerians, and “Nephilim”, in the Bible. Of course, their true mission and activities were never disclosed to homo sapiens. Their activities have been purposefully disguised. Therefore, the human stories and legends about the Annunaki, and the other members of The Domain Search Party have not been understood and were badly misinterpreted.
In the absence of complete and accurate data, anyone observing a phenomenon will assume or hypothesize explanations in an attempt to make sense of the data. Therefore, although mythology and history may be based on factual events, they are likewise full of misunderstood and misinterpreted evaluations of the data, and embellished with assumptions, theories and hypotheses which are false.
The space unit of The Domain Expeditionary Force are shown flying in a “Winged-Disc”. [ix] (Footnote) This is an allusion to the spiritual power of the IS-BEs, as well as to the space craft used by The Domain Search Party.
The Commander of the lost Battalion, as Cyrus II, was an IS-BE who was regarded as a messiah on Earth by both the Jews, and the Muslims. In less than 50 years he established a highly ethical, and humanitarian philosophy which pervaded all of Western Civilization.” [x] (Footnote)
— Airl: Officer, Pilot and Engineer of The Domain Expeditionary Force — Excerpted from the Official Transcript of the U.S. Army Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, 509th Bomb Group, SUBJECT: ALIEN INTERVIEW, 27. 7. 1947, 1st Session
[i] “…Cyrus II of Persia…”
Cyrus the Great (c. 590 BC or 576 — August 529 BC or 530 BC), also known as Cyrus II of Persia and Cyrus the Elder, was a Persian emperor. He was the founder of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenid dynasty. The empire expanded under his rule, eventually conquering most of Southwest Asia and much of Central Asia, from Egypt and the Hellespont in the west to the Indus River in the east, to create the largest state the world had yet seen.
During his twenty-nine year reign, Cyrus fought against some of the greatest states of his time, including the Median Empire, the Lydian Empire, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Cyrus did not venture into Egypt, as he himself died in battle, fighting the Massagetae along the Syr Darya in August 530 BC. He was succeeded by his son, Cambyses II, who managed to conquer Egypt during his short rule.
Beyond his nation, Cyrus left a lasting legacy on Jewish religion (through his Edict of Restoration), politics, and military strategy, as well as on both Eastern and Western civilization.
The only known example of his religious policy is his treatment of the Jews in Babylon. The Bible records that a remnant of the Jewish population returned to the Promised Land from Babylon, following an edict from Cyrus to rebuild the temple. This edict is fully reproduced in the Book of Ezra. As a result of Cyrus’ policies, the Jews honored him as a dignified and righteous king. He is the only Gentile to be designated as a messiah, a divinely-appointed king, in the Tanakh (Isaiah 45:1-6).
Some contemporary Muslim scholars have suggested that the Qur’anic figure of Dhul-Qarnayn is Cyrus the Great. This theory was proposed by Sunni scholar Abul Kalam Azad and endorsed by Shi’a scholars Allameh Tabatabaei, in his Tafsir al-Mizan and Makarem Shirazi and Sunni scholar Abul Ala Maududi.
During his reign, Cyrus maintained control over a vast region of conquered kingdoms, achieved partly through retaining and expanding Median satrapies. Cyrus’ conquests began a new era in the age of empire building, where a vast superstate, comprising many dozens of countries, races, religions, and languages, were ruled under a single administration headed by a central government.
In 1992, he was ranked #87 on Michael H. Hart‘s list of the most influential figures in history. On December 10, 2003, in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi evoked Cyrus, saying:
“I am an Iranian, a descendant of Cyrus the Great. This emperor proclaimed at the pinnacle of power 2,500 years ago that he ‘would not reign over the people if they did not wish it.’ He promised not to force any person to change his religion and faith and guaranteed freedom for all. The Charter of Cyrus the Great should be studied in the history of human rights.”
Many of the forefathers of the United States of America sought inspiration from Cyrus the Great through works such as Cyropaedia. Thomas Jefferson, for example, had two personal copies of the book, “which was a mandatory read for statesmen alongside Machiavelli’s The Prince.”
In a recent segment of ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, Ted Koppel mentioned Cyrus the Great, when he was talking about the new documentary film being made in his honor, and had this to say of him:
“Cyrus the Great is genuinely one of history’s towering figures. America’s own founders such as Thomas Jefferson were influenced by Cyrus the Great in the field of Human Rights.”
[ii] “… unique system of organization used by Cyrus II…”
“During his reign, Cyrus maintained control over a vast region of conquered kingdoms, achieved partly through retaining and expanding Median satrapies. Further organization of newly conquered territories into provinces ruled by vassal kings called satraps, was continued by Cyrus’ successor Darius the Great. Cyrus’ empire demanded only tribute and conscripts from many parts of the realm.
Cyrus was distinguished equally as a statesman and as a soldier. By pursuing a policy of generosity instead of repression, and by favoring local religions, he was able to make his newly conquered subjects into enthusiastic supporters. Due in part to the political infrastructure he created, the Achaemenid empire endured long after his demise.
The rise of Persia under Cyrus’s rule had a profound impact on the course of world history. Persian philosophy, literature and religion all played dominant roles in world events for the next millennia. Despite the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE by the Islamic Caliphate (Arab Empire), Persia continued to exercise enormous influence in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age.”
[iii] “… tree of life….”
“Trees of life appear in folklore, culture and fiction, often relating to immortality. These often hold cultural and religious significance to the peoples for whom they appear.
The Sumerian (or Persian) Tree of Life was represented by a series of nodes and criss-crossing lines. It was an important religious symbol among these peoples, often attended to by Eagle Headed Gods & Priests, or the King himself.
In Chinese mythology a carving of a Tree of Life depicts a phoenix and a dragon – in Chinese mythology the dragon often represents immortality. There is also the Taoist story of a tree that produces a peach every three thousand years. The one who eats the fruit receives immortality.
An archaeological discovery in the 1990s was of a sacrificial pit at Sanxingdui in Sechuan, China. Dating from about 1200 BCE, it contained 3 bronze trees, one of them 4 meters high. At the base was a dragon, and fruit hanging from the lower branches. At the top is a strange bird-like (phoenix) creature with claws. Also from Sechuan, from the late Han dynasty (c 25 – 220 CE) is another tree of life. The ceramic base is guarded by a horned beast with wings. The leaves of the tree are coins and people.
In Egyptian mythology, in the Ennead system of Heliopolis, the first couple, apart from Shu & Tefnut (moisture & dryness) and Geb & Nuit (earth & sky), are Isis & Osiris. They were said to have emerged from the acacia tree of Saosis, which the Egyptians considered the tree of life, referring to it as the “tree in which life and death are enclosed”.
The Egyptian’s Holy Sycamore also stood on the threshold of life and death, connecting the two worlds.
In Germanic paganism, trees played a prominent role, appearing in various aspects of surviving texts and possibly in the name of gods.
The tree of life appears in Norse religion as Yggdrasil, the world tree, a massive tree with extensive lore surrounding it. Perhaps related to the Yggdrasil, accounts have survived of Germanic Tribes honouring sacred trees within their societies.
In Norse Mythology it is the golden apples from Iðunn’s tree that provides immortality for the gods.
The Tree of Life is mentioned in the Books of Genesis, in which it has the potential to grant immortality to Adam and Eve. (However, it is not immediately obvious, nor is it universally accepted, that the Book of Genesis account and the Book of Revelation account speak of the same Tree of Life.)
A Tree of Life, in the form of ten interconnected nodes, is an important part of the Kabbalah. As such, it resembles the ten Sephirot.
The Tree of Life appears in the Book of Mormon in a revelation to Lehi (see 1 Nephi 8:10-12). It is symbolic of the love of God (see 1 Nephi 11:21-23), and sometimes understood as salvation and post-mortal existence.
Etz Chaim, Hebrew for “Tree of Life”, is a common term used in Judaism. The expression, found in the Book of Proverbs, is figuratively applied to the Torah itself.
Among pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, the concept of “world trees” is a prevalent motif in Mesoamerican mythical cosmologies and iconography. World trees embodied the four cardinal directions, which represented also the fourfold nature of a central world tree, a symbolic axis mundi connecting the planes of the Underworld and the sky with that of the terrestrial world.
Depictions of world trees, both in their directional and central aspects, are found in the art and mythological traditions of cultures such as the Maya, Aztec, Izapan, Mixtec, Olmec, and others, dating to at least the Mid/Late Formative periods of Mesoamerican chronology.
Directional world trees are also associated with the four Year bearers in Mesoamerican calendars, and the directional colors and deities.
World trees are frequently depicted with birds in their branches, and their roots extending into earth or water (sometimes atop a “water-monster”, symbolic of the underworld).
The central world tree has also been interpreted as a representation of the band of the Milky Way. Fragment of a bronze helmet from Urartu, with the “Tree of Life” depicted.
In ancient Armrenia around 13th to 6th century BC, the Tree of Life was a religious symbol, drawn onto the exterior walls of fortresses and carved on the armour of warriors. The branches of the tree were equally divided on the right and left sides of the stem, with each branch having one leaf, and one leaf on the apex of the tree. Servants (some winged) stood on each side of the tree with one of their hands up as if they are taking care of it. This tree can be found on numerous Urartu artifacts, such as paintings on the walls of the Erebuni fortress in Yerevan, Armenia.
The symbolism of the tree is mentioned in the 135th hymn of the 10th book of Rig-Veda, and in the 15th chapter of Bhagavad-gita (1-4).
In the Japanese religion of Shinto, trees were marked with sacred paper symbolizing lightning bolts, as trees were thought to be sacred. This was propagated by the fact that after they passed (died), ancestors and animals were often portrayed as branches on the tree.
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights has a story, ‘The Tale of Buluqiya’, in which the hero searches for immortality and finds a paradise with jewel-encrusted trees. Nearby is a Fountain of Youth guarded by Al-Khidr. Unable to defeat the guard, Buluqiya has to return empty-handed.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a similar quest for immortality. In Mesopotamian mythology, Etana searches for a ‘plant of birth’ to provide him with a son. This has a solid provenance of antiquity, being found in cylinder seals from Akkad (2390 – 2249 BCE).
One of the earliest forms of ancient Greek religion has its origins associated with tree cults.
In mystical traditions of world religions, sacred texts are read for metaphorical content concerning the relationship between states of mind and the external experience of reality. As such, the tree is a manifestation/causal symbol – the Tree of Life representing the coveted state of eternal aliveness or fulfillment, not immortality of the body or soul. In such a state, physical death (which cannot be overcome) is nevertheless a choice, and direct experience of the perfect goodness/divine reality/god is not only possible, but ever present.
Once the ego (surface consciousness) experiences shame, having been tempted to absorb or believe in duality (such as eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), we are protected from living eternally in that limiting, fallen, experience by the cherubim guarding the gate of return to paradise. The cherubim are symbolic of the perfect knowledge of self or true nature, with the power of purification and return to being.“
[iv] “… the carvings show cone-shaped instruments, and electronic detection devices which are stylized as baskets or water buckets, being carried by eagle headed, winged beings….”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Excellent photographs of these can be viewed at the following website:
http://www.crystalinks.com/godswaterbuckets.html
[v] “… faravahar…”
“The faravahar or farohar (transliteration varies) is one of the best-known symbols of Zoroastrianism.
The winged disc has a long history in the art and culture of the ancient Near and Middle East. Historically, the symbol is influenced by the “winged sun” hieroglyph appearing on Bronze Age royal seals. While the symbol is currently thought to represent a Fravashi (c. a guardian angel) and from which it derives its name, what it represented in the minds of those who adapted it from earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian reliefs is unclear. Because the symbol first appears on royal inscriptions, it is also thought to represent the ‘Divine Royal Glory’ (khvarenah), or the Fravashi of the king, or represented the divine mandate that was the foundation of a king’s authority.
This relationship between the name of the symbol and the class of divine entities reflects the current belief that the symbol represents a Fravashi. However, there is no physical description of the Fravashis in the Avesta and in Avestan the entities are grammatically feminine.
Prior to the reign of Darius I, the symbol did not have a human form above the wings. In present-day Zoroastrianism, the faravahar is said to be a reminder of one’s purpose in life, which is to live in such a way that the soul progresses towards frasho-kereti, or union with Ahura Mazda.”
[vi] “…Oannes…”
“Oannes was the name given by the Babylonian writer Berossus in the 3rd century BC to a mythical being who taught mankind wisdom. Berossus describes Oannes as having the body of a fish but underneath the figure of a man. He is described as dwelling in the Persian Gulf, and rising out of the waters in the daytime and furnishing mankind instruction in writing, the arts and the various sciences.
Once thought to be based on the ancient Babylonian god Ea, it is now known that Oannes is in fact based on Uan (Adapa) – the first of the seven antediluvian sages or Abgallu (in Sumerian Ab=water, Gal=Great, Lu=man), who were sent by Ea to deliver the arts of civilization to mankind in ancient Sumerian mythology, at Eridu, the oldest city of Sumer.”
[vii] “Some members of the lost Battalion have been found in the oceans inhabiting the bodies of dolphins or whales.”
Dolphins have long played a role in human culture. Dolphins are common in Greek mythology and there are many coins from the time which feature a man or boy riding on the back of a dolphin. The Ancient Greeks treated them with welcome; a ship spotting dolphins riding in their wake was considered a good omen for a smooth voyage. Dolphins also seem to have been important to the Minoans, judging by artistic evidence from the ruined palace at Knossos. In Hindu mythology, the Ganges River Dolphin is associated with Ganga, the deity of the Ganges river.
Dolphins are often regarded as one of Earth’s most intelligent animals, though it is hard to say just how intelligent dolphins are, as comparisons of species’ relative intelligence are complicated by differences in sensory apparatus, response modes, and nature of cognition. Furthermore, the difficulty and expense of doing experimental work with large aquatics means that some tests which could yield meaningful results still have not been carried out, or have been carried out with inadequate sample size and methodology. Dolphin behavior has been studied extensively by humans however, both in captivity and in the wild.”
[viii] “… The Anunnaki…”
“The Anunnaki are a group of Sumerian and Akkadian deities related to, and in some cases overlapping with, the Annuna (the ‘Fifty Great Gods’) and the Igigi (minor gods), meaning something to the effect of ‘those of royal blood’ or ‘princely offspring’ or “heaven and earth”.
The Annunaki appear in the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish. In the late version magnifying Marduk, after the creation of mankind, Marduk divides the Anunnaki and assigns them to their proper stations, three hundred in heaven, three hundred on the earth. The Anunnaki were the High Council of the Gods, and Anu’s companions. They were distributed through the Earth and the Underworld.“
[ix] “… flying on a “Winged-Disc”. “
“The winged sun is a symbol associated with divinity, royalty and power in the Ancient Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia). The symbol has also been found in the records of ancient cultures residing in various regions of South America as well as Australia.
In Ancient Egypt, the symbol is attested from the Old Kingdom (Sneferu, 26th century BC), often flanked on either side with a uraeus. In early Egyptian religion, the symbol Behedeti represented Horus of Edfu, later identified with Ra-Harachte. It is sometimes depicted on the neck of Apis, the bull of Ptah. As time passed (according to interpretation) all of the subordinated gods of Egypt were considered to be aspects of the sun god, including e.g. Khepri.
From roughly 2000 BC, the symbol spread to the Levant and to Mesopotamia. It appears in reliefs with Assyrian rulers and in Hieroglyphic Anatolian as a symbol for royalty, transcribed as literally, “his own self, the Sun”. From ca. the 8th century BC, it appears on Hebrew seals, by now as a generic symbol for “power”. The symbol evolved into the Faravahar (the “visual aspect of Ahura Mazda”) in Zoroastrian Persia.”
[x] “… he established a high standard of ethical, and humanitarian philosophy…”
“Up to the time of the conquest of Media by Cyrus the Great, Median emperors ruled their conquered territories as provinces, through client kings and governors. One of the keys to the Achaemenid success (as with most enduring great empires) was their open attitude to the culture and religion of the conquered people, so ironically the Persian culture was the one most affected as the Great King endeavored to melt elements from all his subjects into a new imperial style.”
"The Domain", asteroid belt, asteroids, Domain Communication Office, Domain Expeditionary Force, Domain Officers, Earth
DOMAIN BASE IN ASTEROID BELT (IMAGE ANALYSIS)
This video, created by Joe White at ArtAlienTV provides a detailed analysis of the illuminated features on the surface of CERES, the largest object in the asteroid belt, using the most recent images provided by NASA. As Joe points out the images from NASA have been deliberately “smudged” and converted to low-resolution images. What is NASA trying to cover up and why? The answers may be found the book Alien Interview.
The following quotes about The Domain station or base on the asteroid belt are excerpted from the book Alien Interview:
“Airl is currently stationed at a base in the asteroid belt which she refers to as a “space station” in the solar system of Earth. ”
“The asteroid belt near Earth is a very small, but important location for The Domain in this part of space. Actually, some of the objects in our solar system are very valuable for use as low-gravity “space stations”. They are interested primarily in the low gravity satellites in this solar system which consists mainly of the side of the moon facing away from Earth and the asteroid belt, which was a planet that was destroyed billions of years ago, and to a lesser degree, Mars and Venus. Doom structures synthesized from gypsum or underground bases covered by electromagnetic force screens are easily constructed to house the Domain forces.”
“The Domain also established secret installations or space stations in the Earth solar system. This solar system has a planet that is broken up — the asteroid belt. ”
“The moon of Earth and the asteroid belt have become a permanent base of operations for The Domain Forces. “
"The Domain"asteroid beltCeresOccator Craterspace station
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James Franco as Bruce Nauman
The Artist-Actor Puts On A Good Face in Alison Chernick's New Video Series
Most of us know 32-year-old actor James Franco as that adorable kid from the TV show Freaks and Geeks, who went on to leading roles in Spider-Man, Milk, and the soon-to-be-released mountain climbing adventure 127 Hours, from director Danny Boyle. What many perhaps don't know is that Franco now identifies himself as a visual artist. He's enrolled at the respected Rhode Island School of Design, and, through the end of October, his short films, drawings, photographs and sculptures are on view at New York's Clocktower Gallery. Recently there's been something of a convergence between Franco's artistic interests and his acting choices. While at work on a book of short stories, he starred as poet Allen Ginsberg in the recently released Howl, and, in a self-referential move, appeared in a number of episodes of General Hospital as the artist "Franco," turning a soap opera into performance art. Considering such extra-curricular activities, and capitalizing on the concept of celebrity itself as a ready-made artwork, Alison Chernick cast the Renaissance man in today's film, James Franco as Bruce Nauman, a contemporary update of Nauman's Art Make-Up video piece from 1967, shot on location at the Standard Hotel, New York. The themes the artist was exploring seem perfectly in sync with Franco's own hall-of-mirrors aesthetic: "make-up," the stuff an actor smears on his face, assumes a double entendre as a verb-to make up, the very essence of any creative act. The video is the first in a new series by Chernick in which contemporary artists are enlisted to star in remakes of seminal video artworks, prompting a dialogue between the original artwork and the artist reinterpreting it.
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Click to copyhttps://apnews.com/5006cf0bce3448049f8947087fcd5666
South Sudan’s orphans are finding solace through song
By SAM MEDNICKDecember 22, 2017
In this photo taken Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, children sing in the church choir during Sunday service in Jiech, Ayod County, South Sudan. Upheaval in the country has had a "staggering impact on children," according to the U.N. children's agency, with more than 16,000 missing, separated from their families or unaccompanied, and some children in the largely Christian nation are finding solace through song, especially during the holidays. (AP Photo/Sam Mednick)
JIECH, South Sudan (AP) — It’s been four years since the shy 12-year-old last saw his family.
“Fighting came to my town and everyone scattered,” Dak Juong said. He remembers a grueling 10-day walk to safety among thousands of panicked strangers. “I don’t know if my parents are dead or alive.”
Since South Sudan descended into civil war four years ago this month, upheaval in the world’s youngest nation has had a “staggering impact on children,” according to a new report by the U.N. children’s agency. More than 16,000 are missing, separated from their families or unaccompanied.
Some children in the largely Christian nation are finding solace through song, especially during the holidays.
Juong considers himself one of the lucky ones after being taken in by a foster father and introduced to church.
“Singing helps cut out the worry of my parents,” the boy said, draped in an oversized, ripped football jersey. “You forget what’s wrong.”
Landlocked and barren, this one-road, rebel-held village has become a refuge for children fleeing the war. One organization, Africa Development Aid, counted more than 380 orphans in Jiech earlier this year.
During a visit this month, The Associated Press saw hundreds of idle children. Teenagers played football with tin cans or balls of yarn, while young children crafted makeshift military trucks and guns in the mud
The AP spoke with several children who had been separated from their families. While authorities try to pair them with local families, the head of the opposition government in the village, Martin Kueth, worries about their mental health.
The church has had a calming effect, he said.
“I do nothing all day. I just go to football and prayer,” said 17-year-old Albino Geng, who hasn’t attended classes in three years because fighting shut down many schools. More than 2 million children, or 65 percent of people aged 6 to 17, are out of school, according to the government.
“Singing builds them up and makes them forget their problems and they feel like they’re not neglected,” said Kizito Kuku, an aid worker with Confident Children out of Conflict, a local organization helping children work through their trauma.
This month in the capital, Juba, the group hosted its annual holiday celebration with a 25-youth choir.
“Singing gives me strength and makes me forget all the things that have happened,” said 16-year-old Hannah Konga, one of the soloists.
On her first visit to South Sudan earlier this month, the princess of Jordan and the U.N. refugee agency’s adviser on gender issues, Sarah Zeid, warned that the country’s enormous needs are often overlooked when it comes to children.
Children’s creativity needs to be nurtured so they can envision a different future, she told the AP. “If you can’t dream the impossible, how are you ever going to see beyond your current reality?”
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You are here: Home > Fort Chip trapper says he’s standing up for Treaty rights after officials tear down cabin in national Park
Fort Chip trapper says he’s standing up for Treaty rights after officials tear down cabin in national Park
National News | January 15, 2016 by Brandi Morin Attributed to: | Comments Off on Fort Chip trapper says he’s standing up for Treaty rights after officials tear down cabin in national Park
Robert Grandjambe Jr says Parks Canada tore down a hunting cabin on his traditional trap line
Brandi Morin
Robert Grandjambe Jr. lives to hunt, fish, trap and practice the traditional lifestyle of his ancestors. The 31 year old has been doing it since he was a young boy. And it’s a legacy the Mikisew Cree man from Fort Chipewyan, Alta., is determined to carry on as long as he can.
“It’s a gift,” said Grandjambe. “Living off the land, being healthy, maintaining a culture and giving food to the elders, giving back to my community.”
Grandjambe is the real deal. He knows the ways of the land and life within the land. Sometimes for weeks at a time, he will descend into the woods via sled and dog team to hunt for the likes of Martin fox, wolverine, wolf, lynx, fisher, beaver, muskrat or any kind of fur bearing animal he can find living in the boreal forest.
He recently started hunting in a new area, located within his trap line group of 1204, and started to put down permanent roots to accommodate his aims.
The hunting cabin Grandjambe Jr. was building that was torn down by Parks Canada
But in December, Parks Canada tore down the frame of the hunting cabin he was constructing along Pine Lake in the Wood Buffalo National Park.
It’s an area that happens to sit in the traditional lands of Treaty 8.
Grandjambe said he got a call from a Park employee telling him to check his email.
He was shocked to learn the access to his cabin had been blocked, the cabin torn down, fifth wheel trailer and building materials suddenly gone.
For months prior, he said he had been trying to negotiate with the Park, which along with the nearby Salt River and Smith’s Landing First Nations, had expressed opposition to the location of the cabin.
But communication broke down, on every end.
In a letter addressed to Grandjambe in August 2015, Parks Canada gave several reasons stating its concerns with the cabin’s location. They included the fact the cabin was beside a recreational trail, was adjacent to a popular swimming beach and public recreation facility, restrictions on harvesting within 800m from the lake and his lack of consultation with the two nearby First Nations.
Grandjambe belongs to the 1204 trap line in which boundaries extend to Pine Lake. It’s an area that was set apart by the Canadian government for First Nation families to hunt and trap in long before he was born.
According to Matthew Lepine, leader of the 1204 trap line who lives near Pine Lake, it was an ideal location to build a cabin because it was in his trap line area and near a fresh water source to house him during the hunting/trapping seasons.
“Robert’s every right to build a cabin in there!” said Lepine. “I’m a land user. I’m an elder. I’m trying to figure out why they’re trying to defy this one fella who is trying to keep our tradition of trapping alive. This is crazy. It’s our traditional land and we want to use it and we want to stay there.”
Lepine said Treaty rights should take precedent and believes the situation is a symptom of a longer, on-going issue.
“When you go back years, they’ve (government) always been trying to get rid of the Aboriginal people from the park. They think, ‘If we get rid of them, we’ll have the whole park to ourselves’,” said Lepine.
Grandjambe agrees.
“Our Treaty rights super cede their regulations. Indigenous Peoples always managed our own lands. Why is Parks Canada manipulating and telling us what to do? They can call it a recreational trail but who was here first? Was it the hikers or was it the First Nations?”
First Nation, Métis Nation and Inuit people aren’t permitted to have a recreational cabin on the lake, but are allowed to have a hunting cabin in the park. But there are numerous recreational cabins situated around the lake owned by non-Aboriginal people and Grandjambe doesn’t understand why he isn’t allowed to have one too.
“The locals (Aboriginals) from the area are unable to purchase or establish the cabins. I scratch my head- I have to relocate? They don’t want Indigenous people in that part of the territory. It’s a recreational area. It’s for friends, families and relatives of Parks staff that own these cabins and they want it for their own recreational pleasures,” said Grandjambe.
Parks Canada said they do recognize individual Treaty harvesting rights and that harvesting cabins can be, in certain circumstances, incidental to those harvesting rights.
“But the issue at play here is the location of the harvesting cabin,” said Park warden Stuart Macmillan. “In order to manage the park, we zone areas of the Park for certain uses. A very small portion of the park is zoned for recreational use. It amounts to less than 1 per cent. Where Robert chose to build his harvesting cabin wasn’t compatible to that area.”
He said they don’t view the situation as violating Treaty rights because ninety-nine per cent of the park is available for exercising Treaty rights.
“This is where consultation comes in. We have a cabin application process which we use to facilitate consultations with Aboriginal groups around the park. Through this process we address issues that may arise with respect to the exercise of Treaty rights,” said Macmillan.
He said Park officials made numerous attempts to engage with Grandjambe and didn’t receive a response. The Park offered alternative locations for Grandjambe to consider building a cabin.
“It would’ve been much better for us to have worked together. For Robert to have come and worked with us from the outset. Unfortunately, Mr. Grandjambe did not engage us in that process.”
However, Grandjambe and Lepine both dispute the claim and other than a few telephone conversations between Grandjambe and Park officials, said they both weren’t properly engaged by Parks Canada.
Grandjambe said his Chief, Steve Courtorielle showed support for him leading up to the cabin removal but hasn’t heard from him since it was tore down.
Chief Courtorielle did not respond to APTN National News request for comment on the matter.
Grandjambe said he thinks the Smith Landing and Salt River First Nation may have had personal motives for backing the Parks removal of his cabin. His uncle, whose son is the Chief of Smith Landing also has a trap line in the area, and Grandjambe said he doesn’t want others encroaching near his territory.
In the meantime, Grandjambe’s building material and trailer is being held in storage in Fort Smith. Parks Canada said he is free to pick them up anytime.
But for now, Grandjambe is weighing his options. He is determined to stand up for his rights while struggling to keep a lifestyle that is now a rare kept endeavour, alive.
“As Indigenous people we have to stand up and we have to figure out, like stop taking it from the government,“ he said. “We have to govern our territories. The genesis of it all…it’s happened for as long as I can remember with Parks Canada, it’s really manipulating.”
And he won’t stop hunting, trapping and utilizing the abundant resources of the land while he’s waiting.
“I can’t stop hunting. I want to sustain myself and be an example. It’s healthy, it’s a good lifestyle.”
One day when he has a family of his own he hopes to pass on the knowledge to the next generation.
“If you want to keep our culture and keep a society alive that is genuine and pure and back to our traditional roots,” he said.
bmorin@aptn.ca
Follow @songstress28
Tags: Alberta, Brandi Morin, Edmonton, Trappers, Treaty Rights
View all posts by Brandi Morin →
First Nations leaders cite deplorable health conditions, urge action
Aklavik woman died from seizure while in police custody, family believes
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Seize the Day! The National Tour of Disney’s Newsies Opens in Boston
June 22nd, 2015 | By Broadway.com Staff
"The King of New York" is carrying the banner all the way to Massachusetts! The national tour of Disney's Newsies opens in Boston on June 23. The hit Broadway musical will play the Boston Opera House through July 5.
Featuring a Tony-winning score with music by eight-time Oscar winner Alan Menken and lyrics by Jack Feldman, with a book by four-time Tony winner Harvey Fierstein, Newsies is the rousing tale of Jack Kelly, a charismatic newsboy and leader of a ragged band of teenaged "newsies," who dreams only of a better life far from the hardship of the streets. But when publishing titans Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst raise distribution prices at the newsboys’ expense, Jack finds a cause to fight for and rallies newsies from across the city to strike for what’s right.
The musical is directed by Tony nominee Jeff Calhoun and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, who won a 2012 Tony Award for his work. The score for Newsies includes such fan-favorite songs as "Santa Fe," "Carrying the Banner," "Seize the Day," "King of New York" and "Once and for All."
The cast of Newsies features Dan DeLuca as Jack Kelly, Steve Blanchard as Joseph Pulitzer, Stephanie Styles as Katherine, Angela Grovey as Medda Larkin, Jacob Kemp as Davey and Zachary Sayle as Crutchie.
Don’t miss your chance to see this high-energy and unforgettable musical; buy your tickets today!
Tags: Curtain Up
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News 27 Feb 2011 13 Nov 2018
American Senators Suggest to Arm Libyan Rebels
As Libya violently suppresses protests, American lawmakers wonder what the West can do to help.
With close to 100,000 people fleeing the country, Libya’s regime is under mounting pressure from demonstrators and defectors who have effectively taken control of the eastern part of the country. North Africa’s veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi has been deserted by officers and diplomats while the United Nations Security Council strongly condemned the violent crackdown of anti-government protesters.
This weekend, the Security Council agreed to impose an arms embargo on Libya, freeze government assets and install a travel ban for Colonel Gaddafi and his family. A resolution also referred the situation unfolding in Libya to the International Criminal Court where Gaddafi and members of his inner circle may face charges of war crimes.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Sunday that Gaddafi “must go,” echoing a call by Barack Obama a day earlier. Last week, the American president condemned the bloodshed as “outrageous” and “unacceptable.”
Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who is a prominent member of the Libyan administration, suggested that the leader’s resignation would not end the violence. He told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview that millions of people across Libya and in the capital of Tripoli remain loyal to the regime. “Nobody is leaving this country,” he said. “We live here. We die here.”
Earlier in the week, his father pledged to “die a martyr” in Libya. He has blamed foreign “agents” for stirring the unrest and promised to open up armories to civilians. His son has warned that “civil war” would certainly ensue if Gaddafi’s regime collapsed.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut characterized the regime’s response to the unrest as a “slaughter” on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday. He and Senator John McCain of Arizona have together visited different countries in the region, including Egypt and Tunisia where longtime rulers were toppled by popular demonstrations earlier this month.
Asked what the West can do to protect protesters and possibly hasten Gaddafi’s demise, Lieberman suggested imposing a no-fly zone to prevent Libyan air forces from attacking their own people and supporting a provisional civilian government with humanitarian assistance and arms.
France already favors a no-fly zone as was imposed by Western powers over northern Iraq in 1992 to prevent Saddam Hussein from bombing the Kurdish people living there. Britain hasn’t endorsed such proposals yet, fearful of antagonizing the Gaddafi regime while many Britons remained trapped in the country as of this weekend. Some 150 British oil workers were rescued by special forces on Sunday from installations south of the city of Benghazi.
In Geneva, Switzerland, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that America was “ready and prepared to offer any type of assistance” to a post-Gaddafi government.
Neither Lieberman nor McCain would explicitly commit to military intervention. “I’m not ready to use ground forces,” McCain told NBC’s Meet the Press. The best thing America could do, he added, was make clear that “anyone who continues or is engaged in these kinds of barbarous acts is going to find themselves on trial in a war crimes tribunal.”
According to the former Republican presidential contender, Gaddafi’s days were numbered. “The question is how many people are going to be massacred between now and when he leaves,” he said on CNN. “We ought to shorten that time frame as much as possible. I believe we can.”
Libyan Civil War
Can the BJP Move India to the Right?
Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee Talk 2012
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Home / Sports / Skerritt deflects blame for WI debacle
Skerritt deflects blame for WI debacle
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – Cricket West Indies president Ricky Skerritt says he was hurt by the Caribbean side’s performance at the ICC World Cup in England but has contended it was “unrealistic” to expect them to win the showpiece, especially since very little strategic planning had been undertaken in the years preceding.
Pointing to an erratic selection policy that saw a constant turn-over of players, a losing culture which left the squad without a series win in five years and a world-ranking of number nine, Skerritt said while he had hoped for an “above par performance”, it would have always been difficult for West Indies to suddenly catapult themselves into the top tier of a global tournament.
However, the former St Kitts and Nevis cabinet minister, who toppled three-term incumbent Dave Cameron for the top CWI post only three months ago, said the cricket body would waste little time in rolling out a strategic plan aimed at building a quality side to compete for the 2023 World Cup scheduled for India.
“The good work by Dr [Kishore] Shallow (CWI vice-president) and myself and others has begun – it began just on the cusp of the World Cup but none of it was geared towards realistically expecting West Indies to win the World Cup,” Skerritt told i95.5FM sports programme yesterday.
“We expect to win the 2023 World Cup and that’s the work that we’ve started now. I think the team did the best under the circumstances. They had some difficulties and there were at least three games that they could’ve won and maybe if the South Africa one hadn’t been rained out, anything was possible but this was not a team that had been in the business of winning and had been prepared for winning a World Cup.
“This was a team that was strung together by so many mixes and matches, and so many changes and tops and turns, and ups and downs over the last five, six years. It was just not possible for that team to go to England and win a World Cup.
“We were hoping as West Indians … and we’re tired of losing – that goes without any further discussion – but we will continue to lose unless we have a plan and implement a plan that has us better prepared for winning.”
There were high hopes for West Indies especially after they trounced Pakistan in their opening match at Nottingham but they quickly faded with six defeats in their next seven matches.
Thursday’s 23-run victory over Afghanistan at Leeds saw them finish the tournament with just two wins and five points, good enough for ninth in the 10-team standings and representing their worst-ever performance at a World Cup.
“Any loss for a West Indies team is a heartfelt loss for me … and thousands of fans but the reality is that West Indies cricket team has been at the bottom of the barrel for some time and we went into this tournament ranked at number nine in the ODI rankings, so anything that bordered on winning a significant amount of games would’ve been hopeful and perhaps not realistic,” Skerritt argued.
“I expected, at the very least, a par performance based on our rankings and based on what the team had been achieving over several years. However, I was really hoping for an above par performance and I think we generally did give an above-par performance and could’ve done much better if we had been able to get over the hump on a few occasions when we were very close [to winning].
“As you know, we beat Pakistan – ranked number six in the world – who we haven’t beaten for many years and we threatened Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, all of whom rank above us. That indicated hopeful above-par performances and we showed that we’re close. We have a lot of work to do but we’re moving upwards.”
He added: “I’m not accepting mediocrity – that’s why I’m in this job. That’s why I campaigned and competed against the status quo but you have to understand you reap what you sow. And you don’t suddenly go from number nine ranking to a number three or four ranking in the space of a few weeks of an international global high-quality tournament like that. It just does not happen.
“You get upsets – you have competitions where you have lower-ranked participants upset higher-ranked and we did it with Pakistan.”
Skerritt pointed out that the high-performing teams in the World Cup were those who had been planning strategically since the end of the last tournament in 2015, and stressed the Windies needed to follow suit.
“We’ve not developed players to create a safety net of alternatives of the highest quality, we’ve not prepared for tournaments like World Cups well in advance, we’ve been chopping and changing and turning and twisting,” he contended.
“And just getting two or three new players into a squad weeks before you go on a tour doesn’t suddenly make you the best team in the world. You have to get that team together, playing together for over a period of two years or more.
“If you look at how India built their team, if you were following how the rest of the world does it, you would understand what we say when we say that we’re going to do it different. Within the next few weeks, a whole programme will start towards the next World Cup in 2023 and if things go according to plan, by 2021 you will begin to see the team shaping and you will have a pretty good idea.”
He added: “So the whole building of a team and making a team ready to perform at the highest standard is something that takes a little more science and a little more time than just changing selectors.” (CMC)
← Terrific tyros
‘Bright spots amid the disappointment’ →
5 thoughts on “Skerritt deflects blame for WI debacle”
Skerritt you numb-skull.Right now I would say you’re in this just for the recognition but time will tell I guess.
Alex Alleyne
So you spend all that money and send all those players over there only for a plane ride. You should be removed from office ASAP.So I
The team play reflects your rule.
Anytime a Boo don’t have no faith in his workers the job will go by the wayside. You just send a bunch of players way across the planet expecting them to fail when other high ranked cricket people had WI to do well. Don’t see why yo should still have a job after all. You were the one that did all the full & change.
roger parish
RICKY SKERRITT you is nothing shorter than a JACK A*****,, and by the way you talk in this interview or clip, says you shouldnt be there,, you came in and you change up a team that was winning, that is coaching team batters etc, there is no way NURSE, BRATHWAITHE should be there, and you got BRATHWAITHE as a death bowler, NONSENSE, iwould have had DWAYNE BRAVO there and KEMO PAUL, nothing was wrong with those two guys, you let stupid HILLARY BECKLES who picked a loosing team here in the caribbean when he say he want every one playing to be from the UWI, stupid, you is to blame, PYBUS should have carried thst team along with the staff you fired,, JACK A******
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13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl Review
April 6, 2017 April 6, 2017 beautybrainsxo
Image: Anderian Raffioks/The Star
Mona Awad shakes the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance and introduces a young woman whose life is stolen by her struggle to conform in her debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
Lizzie has never liked the way she looks—even though her friend Mel says she’s the pretty one. She starts dating online, but she doesn’t like to send pictures, she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. And so she decides to lose the weight. She counts almonds consumed, miles logged, and pounds dropped. She grows up and gets thin, receiving validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, and her reflection in the mirror. The novel follows her life in 13 glimpses as she goes from a teenage to an adult, but no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?
Originally I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book because I heard it had been dubbed as literary fiction, and I’m not super big on that genre. However, I had to read it because I was doing a mock editorial pitch for it at school a few weeks ago and it had to be a Canadian novel (specifically it had to have gone through a Canadian editorial process), published between 2015 and 2017, and it had to be a fairly new author. This book was a Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist, so I knew for a fact that it had definitely gone through a Canadian editorial process. Also the content sounded interesting enough, so I decided to give it a try.
To give you an idea of what the content sounds like, here is and excerpt from the first glimpse into Lizzie’s life when she was still a teenager:
The universe is against us, which makes sense. So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while. But it doesn’t matter how long we talk about it or how many times Mel assures me she’s a fucking whale beneath her clothes; I know I’m fatter. Not by a little either. Mel has an ass, I’ll give her that, but that’s all I’ll give her.
If I win the fat argument then Mel will say, so what I’m way prettier than she is, but I think face wise we’re about the same. I haven’t really grown into my nose yet or discovered the arts of starving myself and tweezing. So I’ll be honest with you. In this story, I don’t look that good, except for maybe my skin, which Mel claims she would kill for.
In the end I really ended up liking this novel. There was some really shocking points in the book, and I think what also added to the shock factor was that yes the book is fiction, but this situation is what a lot of women go through throughout their life. I’m thankful to say that I never really went through this as a young adult. I do remember I kind of cut out snacking a few months leading up to High School Prom, but that’s honestly it.
I would definitely recommend this book. I would say the target reader for this book is someone who enjoys contemporary fiction, and has an interest in feminism. The earliest age group that the book is appropriate for is probably young adults, as there is some strong language and sexual references.
I can’t wait to see what issue Mona Awad tackles in her next book!
Have you read the novel? What did you think?
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Tag Archives: Fiction
No Return by Zachary Jernigan : Review
On Jeroun, there is no question as to whether God exists–only what his intentions are.
Under the looming judgment of Adrash and his ultimate weapon–a string of spinning spheres beside the moon known as The Needle–warring factions of white and black suits prove their opposition to the orbiting god with the great fighting tournament of Tchootoo, on the far side of Jeroun’s only inhabitable continent.
From the Thirteenth Order of Black Suits comes Vedas, a young master of martial arts, laden with guilt over the death of one of his students. Traveling with him are Churls, a warrior woman and mercenary haunted by the ghost of her daughter, and Manshep, a constructed man made of modular spheres possessed by the foul spirit of his creator. Together they must brave their own demons, as well as thieves, mages, beasts, dearth, and hardship on the perilous road to Tchootoo, and the bloody sectarian battle that is sure to follow.
On the other side of the world, unbeknownst to the travelers, Ebn and Pol of the Royal Outbound Mages (astronauts using Alchemical magic to achieve space flight) have formed a plan to appease Adrash and bring peace to the planet. But Ebn and Pol each have their own clandestine agendas–which may call down the wrath of the very god they hope to woo.
Who may know the mind of God? And who in their right mind would seek to defy him? Gritty, erotic, and fast-paced, author Zachary Jernigan takes you on a sensuous ride through a world at the knife-edge of salvation and destruction, in one of the year’s most exciting fantasy epics.
I want to start this by saying that this was a difficult book for me to read, and even more so for me to write this review, so please bear with me.
No Return by Zachary Jernigan is certainly an interesting read; filled with excellent world building, descriptive writing, dynamic characters and with fantastically written fantastic scenes, realistic and brutal, Jernigan has shown himself to be a talented and creative writer.
Jernigan’s novel was refreshingly unique, setting itself apart from many of the other novels, with a complex world, races, and magic system. Jernigan manages to describe and explore them thoroughly even though the novel is quite short. He manages to keep the writing simplistic, not going into too much detail and explanation, which works quite well as there’s a lot going on within the novel. Jernigan’s novel is an interesting sci-fi and fantasy hybrid.
The thing I was asked to take note of by the author was any feminism/to look at it through a feminist perspective, and it’s something I’m struggling with. His female characters were well-written, and they were by no means inferior to the male characters. They’re strong (physically, and politically), well-written, and compared to many other female characters in literature, quite well done. The line just goes fuzzy however, with the sexualization of the text.
There were quite a few sections in this novel where I had a difficult time getting through, and in a few of those instances, had to put the book down for a few days before attempting it again to get through those parts. I personally have a preference to not read sexually explicit scenes, especially descriptive ones… And to say there were a couple of those in No Return would be an understatement. They’re just not scenes I enjoy read, or have any interest in reading… If I wished to, I would go pick up an erotica novel.
To be fair though, I had been warned about these scenes prior to agreeing to read and review it.. These scenes, (again, for me… What holds true for in these matters by no means dictates that others would agree) detracted from the story, and stopped me from thoroughly enjoying the novel. Without them, or at least, without them being quite as numerous as they are, I believe I would have absolutely loved the book. However, as they are predominant throughout the novel, I don’t think it’s something that I can easily recommend to anyone.
The ending of this novel will leave readers wanting to know more about the world, and the characters in general, though the novel can be read as a standalone. However, I believe Jernigan will be writing a sequel as well. Will I read it? Probably. Jernigan has shown himself to have a unique flair, setting his novel apart from the rest of the genre.
2 Comments | tags: Fantasy, Fiction, No Return, Reviews, Science Fiction, Zachary Jernigan | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Interview with Sandy Lains
Earlier this week, I got a chance to interview Sandy Lains, author of The Magic Deep Within. She was kind enough to answer my relatively simple questions fully to give a bit more insight into her story and why she wrote it, and the interview in full is posted below.
ARamone: How did you get your start as a writer? Was there anyone who really seemed to inspire you with it?
Sandy Lains: I’ve always had this bud of creativity within me — words waiting to explode from my fingertips. I studied English in university, though never really did anything with it… It wasn’t until my wife Jeanette was going through some of my old creative writing pieces that I got back into it. She’s been a real doll, and a great help over these past few months with helping my creative juices flow.
A: Do you have a favourite genre of book?
S: Well, it’s hard to say exactly… There are so many great genres out there, but I think I’m going to have to say capture bondage erotica. This particular one I’d love to write in, but for some reason I’ve never quite been able to capture the right mix between pain and arousal to make the writing truly believable. I’m dabbling with it in my next book though, so fingers crossed!
A: How did you get the idea for The Magic Deep Within? What motivated you to write it?
S: Well deary, this might come as a bit of a surprise, but a lot of this particular stories protagonist is based on my own life. Now, I know what you’re thinking “But you’re a lesbian!”. Yes, I am. But on a metaphorical level, the entire Wench’s series is about the suppression of sexuality that our culture inflicts on young women. As a girl growing up, I experienced this due to my father being involved heavily with the Catholic church. Once I went off to college I met Jeannette, and she’s opened my world up to wondrous possibilities I had never even imagined. I want my books to let women know that sex, love and the pursuit of physical pleasure is not a sin, but rather a beautiful form of expression.
A: What do you enjoy most about writing?
S: I enjoy the chance to explore my inner being, and to dig deep into who I am, and into the world around me. It allows me to express my thoughts, and put them into a relatable character so my readers can experience and understand as well.
A: Which of your characters would you like to meet in person? Why?
S: Now, you know of this character, as you’ve read the story…, But I would love to meet the protagonist of The Magic Deep Within, Cassandra. I really feel a deep connection with her, and we have so many commonalities. I feel like her journey for self-actualization and her growth into a beautiful and strong woman closely mirrors my own. In the sequel, we see a bit more of her growing into her own skin, and just finding her inner power, she’s an inspiration really.
Meeting her, and y’know, shaking her hand and saying “Y’all are a fantastic woman, keep it up girl!” Especially after the challenges and trials she’s had to overcome, it’s an inspiration really. To meet her, and to say “Thank you” is all I could ever want.
A: Do you have any other projects you’re working on at the moment?
S: My second installment in the Wench’s series, actually. Due to some very talented reviewers, I’ve decided to broaden the scope and really flesh out this next one. I’m glad to say the cast has been expanded and the overall magnitude has been increased ten-fold. I look forward to seeing how my readers respond to the increase of action and the darker overall story.
A: Are there any authors who inspire you?
S: E. L. James is a big one, her story is fantasy and really just a great victory for the erotica genre. She’s really opened it wide to readers, so they can sink themselves deep into it. Vicki León is another. She’s really been a champion in earning the genre some much needed recognition. I especially appreciate her ability to ground the genre by using true historical references to remind people that sexual taboos have been around for centuries, and really haven’t been as socially unacceptable until recently in mankinds 2 million year old life cycle.
A: If you were to send a message to young women today about their sexuality, what would you say?
S: Take a lover early and often. Kiss and touch without the fear of rejection and self doubt. Love your every curve, cherish every kiss and try not to blink for fear of the moments you might miss.
A: And finally, if you were any flavour of ice cream, what would you be?
S: White and salty ;)
2 Comments | tags: Cassandra, E. L. James, Erotica, Fiction, Sandy, Sandy Lains, Short story | posted in ARamone, Interviews
Interview with Karen Dales
About a week ago I met up with a friend of mine, Karen Dales, the award-winning author of The Chosen Chronicles. We talked about a variety of different things, including some of her upcoming projects, and her favourite novels.
As always, for convenience: K = Karen Dales, and R = Rebecca Lovatt (myself).
R: I’m here with Karen Dales, award-winning author of the Chosen Chronicles. Karen, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
K: Well, I’m a full-time author, and a freelance editor. I have three books currently published in the Chosen Chronicles. My fourth book – which is not part of the series – has been sent off to an agent, and I’m working on the next book in the Chosen Chronicles called Thanatos. I’m a mom, a wife and I am owned by two cats.
R: Owned by cats, yeah.. That’s typically how it works. Can you tell us anything about your current projects? The one you just finished, and Thanatos?
K: I can talk a bit about each. The one I just finished is actually a historical romance, set in early Edo period Japan. I had to do a lot of research for that one, I don’t really want to go into too much information with that until I see what the agent is going to say, and what we can do with that one. But it’s interesting, because I’m so used to having written in the paranormal/dark-fantasy/horror genre that to do the historical fiction as a historical romance – it was an interesting experience, because you write in a different way than you would with horror. The endings have to be different, there are more things you have to stick to.
With the Chosen Chronicles, and with Thanatos, you don’t have to be stuck with happy endings all the time. So, that was one thing I had to kind of wrap my head around with the historical romance, because they need to have that happy ending. With the three books that are currently out in the Chosen Chronicles, there isn’t this “riding off into the sunset” type of book or the “We’re all happy together and we’re going to be together forever.” It’s not a Disney ending, so even with my historical fiction, it isn’t a Disney ending, but it’s at least a happy ending. Whereas the other ones, I’ve had people go: “You did what to the characters?!” because I leave them hanging with some not-so great news.
I think that’s just something with the horror genre, you kind of leave them hanging. Though, I’ve always been a classic like Poe, Hitchcock, so yeah – lots of fun, and it’s an interesting experience working in two different genres that way.
R: Were there any challenges that you faced, switching between the two genres?
K: With the Chosen Chronicles, I could work from a lot of different angles. And the story itself – while it has some romantic elements, it’s not the primary plot – one thing I had to do with the romance is to make the relationship the primary plot and everything else secondary, which is kind of different. At first, I wanted what was going with the characters that weren’t the romance interesting. The other fact is that because the historical romance novel is set in Edo Japan – and even now – they don’t have a word for our concept of love. So, I had to write this romance without that word, without using “love”.
R: I imagine that would be a bit difficult.
K: Yeah, I actually at one point had to go back and do a word search, and find if I used the word “Love” in that context, pull it out, and change it to something completely different. So it was like, how do you write a romance novel without using that word?
So, I had to bring about different aspects about how love is considered in that culture, or how it’s expressed in that culture. So it was just really interesting.
R: I don’t read romances, though I do imagine that would be quite interesting to read, just with that difference in it.
K: Yeah, because I read romances – I am part of Romance Writers of America, in the Toronto branch. I don’t read Harlequins, but I’ve read other historical romances, but the characters talk about how they love each other, and they have this feeling. But within my book, how do they express it? There’s not so much “I’m going to jump your bones”, though there is sex, I’m not going to deny that. But you can do that, but it’s just more how do you get the characters to express those deep feelings using other words?.
R: I’m sure people will find that quite interesting to read.
K: Though, that’s if it ever gets to print, which I hope it will.
R: Good luck with it, and what was your main source of inspiration for that story?
K: That was actually a dream. I woke up from the dream, and most of the idea was fully formed, I just had to flesh it out. That was just kind of freaky weird. I don’t know if that’s common with writers, but it’s just I woke up, it didn’t fade, and it just kind of stuck. And as I was more cognitive that it could turn into a story, everything just went poof and blossomed into something more. At that point I was pretty much just like “okay, I have to write it out.” Which was very different from the origins of the Chosen Chronicles. With the Chosen Chronicles, I was playing an online role-playing game with other people. So very different ways for the ideas to come to be, it was interesting. You never know how the inspiration is going to hit you, but I’ll take it whatever way it comes.
R: Going back to the Chosen Chronicles, vampires are something that are very common in YA fiction now, and each retelling brings something new to them. What would you say that your vampires bring to them, overall?
K: Something new? Well, one thing about the Chosen Chronicles is that I’m developing a new mythos or origin story to them, which is something a lot of people don’t read when they read vampires stories. With Bram Stoker, that origin idea came from Vlad the Impaler, even though we know he wasn’t a vampire, but the concept is that he was. Stoker pulled upon that historical figure, but he still he never really went on about how he became one. With Anne Rice, she does go into how vampires came to be, but I really haven’t found anything else that has.
With my Chosen Chronicles, I’ll be drawing a lot on history/pre-history and mythology specifically of the British isles. So, there’s a lot of history that has to go into them, to make sure than when you read them, you can go “Wow, this could really make sense, and maybe these type of people are really walking amongst us.” So, it’s a fine-line of keeping it within the realm of fiction, and could it possibly.. Which is different, and giving it an origin story within our own world and mythology and really helps. Like, with Anne Rice she pulls upon the Isis and Osiris mythology which is great. And, I’ll be doing something similar with the Celtic mythology.
R: Seems like it’ll be cool! I’m sure that’ll be interesting to read.
Now, moving on.. What’s the hardest part of the writing process for you?
K: Finding the time to write. Between family – who when I’m home, they think that since I’m home, they can get attention. Even though, I’m in my office telling them I need to work and do my writing. They want me to spend time with them. So, when my son is home from school, I find it difficult to find any time, because he wants to spend time with me. Which, I know I should appreciate because it’s not going to last. But that’s the big thing – finding the time to write.
Another big factor is that because I’m also a freelance editor, I’m under time pressure to get editing stuff done. So I have to get that done sometimes before I can get to my writing. So, I try not to take too many editing jobs done. After we finish up here that’s what I’ll be getting back to, you know, the review process — crossing things out with that red highlighter, there being red marks everywhere,and all that.
R: Yeah, I’ve come to learn that editing is a very meticulous process.
K: A lot of people don’t realize that when you’re editing, you’re not just reading it going through being like “Ooh, I like this, I don’t like that.” You actually have to analyze every little detail. Especially when you have historical elements, you want to make sure it’s as accurate as possible. So, I get a bit nit-picky about facts… And making sure what’s said on page 13 matches up with what’s said on page 200.
R: Yup. So, you’re a fairly common sight at conventions here in Toronto, but do you ever have people recognize you outside of the convention scene?
K: I haven’t had that situation yet, which I like. One thing about being an author is that people won’t necessary recognize you in person because your fact is not on the cover, or even in the book. So, you have that anonymity, which is fine. But if someone came up to me, and said “I love you books”, that would be great. But it’s not like being on TV where everyone will recognize you.
I’d like to get to that point sometime though! It would be interesting.
R: Fair enough, and next question: Who is your favourite author?
K: Oh… No. You didn’t… You just did. Jeez. Can we go by genre? Do you get this reaction a lot by authors? Like.. How dare you? What did you just do to me?
R: Yep, always an interesting reaction when I ask that one, along with “What’s your favourite book?”
K: Oh Jeez. I don’t think you have enough room on your recording device for me to list them all.
R: I’ve got an hour or so on here..
K: Oh, well, okay then.. For historical fiction, there’s two of them that I really enjoy. Jean Auel, and Diana Gabaldon, I really enjoy the first parts of their series. In terms of vampire novels/paranormal, Bram Stokers Dracula, there are a lot of other amazing ones out there, but I think Stoker is a really important one to me, and it’s such a horrific story – the sex without the sex, the horror, which is pretty tame by today’s standards is still horrific. In terms of general horror, The Watch, now I edited that book, and every time I went through it, I was still scared, knowing what was coming.
For Science Fiction, I enjoy the classics, Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, more than modern science fiction.
As for fantasy, I would have to say Tad Williams’ books, especially The War of the Flower. In it, he actually has an apology to readers because there’s a part that he wrote before 9/11 occurred, and it’s almost like he had foreseen 9/11 happening, and he translated it into his fantasy novel. So, when you read that apology and get to that part of the book, it hits you even harder, because it’s so close to what had actually happened in real life, but it was all in imagination beforehand.
Violette Malan’s books are all great as well, I could keep listing more, but that would take forever.
R: Fair enough, and thanks.. I did have to ask that evil question.
K: Yes.. Well, please don’t ask that again. <laughing>
R: Nah, that should be my first question in every interview
K: And everyone will go: “I hate you for asking that.” I’m sure a couple would be like “Oh, well have you read my book? It’s fantastic. My favourite!”
R: So yeah, if you could have lunch with any of your characters, would you? And if so, which one would it be?
K: Oh goodness, in terms of the Chosen Chronicles I’d have to be careful because I could be lunch. But I think I would have to choose Nodos, for one, I wouldn’t be his lunch, and two, he has so much knowledge, being so incredibly old. He’d be fun to take out somewhere and let him not have a bite. As for the historical romance, I think my female protagonist. She’s definitely someone I’d like to have lunch with.
R: Same question, but any author living or dead.
K: Well, a lot of my friends are authors, so perhaps one I haven’t gone out with… I would say Asimov – but I would probably get so lost while he’s talking about things that I’d get bored, because he was so scientifically oriented… I would probably say Mary Shelly. She’d be an interesting one, with her having written Frankenstein, and it being such an interesting way of looking at humanity, and not just humanity, but with our relationship with God in such a horrific sense, and that story came to her in a dream. For her to have written, and become so popular in a time when female writers weren’t so well accepted. So she’d be really cool to talk to.
R: Definitely, now that you mention it. Also, your books are available both in paperback and e-book, but what’s your preference between the two formats?
K: It depends on the book, I do have a Kindle, and I have a lot of books on it – classics, because it’s easier that way. When I’m going places, I like to have my Kindle, but I still prefer physical real books, I’ll never stop loving those books, but when I’m being introduced to a new author, I might not want to spend a lot of money on their books until I get to know them. So, I use the Kindle as a system for that – cheap and easy reading. But for good story telling, I usually get the physical book. Especially if written by friends of mine.
They’re entirely different experiences; reading text on a screen, and paper. Because text on a screen can easily disappear with the breaking of the deceive, or something happening with Amazon. They’re borrowed books, on the kindle. If there’s a mass-market book, I’ll most likely get they physical one. I do understand why people enjoy the e-readers, it makes things easier for carrying and the like, and if I go somewhere I don’t have to carry a huge suitcase of books with me. It’s like carrying around a little computer. They’re great, they’re wonderful, but they’re not physically real. But we’re sitting here in a library, and we see all these books around us, and that’s not something you can take away. It’s always going to be here, or in someone’s hand. You don’t get that with e-books, you can’t ogle the artwork as much, or go to someone’s bookshelf, but, when we first sat down I couldn’t take my eyes off that bookshelf, you can’t do that with an e-reader.
R: I have to say I agree with you fully, and every book has its own story to tell – the cracked spines, folded corners on pages.
K: Yeah, you can tell which ones are really well-loved by the people who read them, and I think that’s awesome. I have books that are well read, and I know if my device breaks down, or I can’t access the internet, those books will still be there.
But I’m very careful with the books I read, especially when it comes to self-published ones, because you never know how they’ll be. So, I tend to just get them on my Kindle, wait until they’re on sale, or free.
R: That’s reasonable, and a good way to do it. Do you by any chance have any advice you can give to aspiring authors?
K: Learn your craft, that is so important. Just because you read doesn’t mean you can write. Take courses, whether it’s through community centers, night classes, college or university, take courses; join writer’s groups, something where you can get feedback. So long as the writer’s group is someone who knows what they’re doing – that’s important,
The other thing is: keep writing, don’t ever give up, never surrender, and just keep going. Yes, in this day and age you can self-publish, but the traditional route is still the best and most lucrative way. Keep working hard, and keep honing your craft.
One thing that I was told when in university at York, was that that most authors don’t perfect their craft enough to get published properly until they’re about 40. I think that age can probably be dropped down a bit, but a lot of that comes down to life experience because if you’re living behind a computer screen your entire life and not interacting with the world around you, and not only the places, but the situation, and the types of people you will interact with in order to create believable characters, situations and worlds. So, whether you’re writing in a fictional setting that is historical, modern, fantastic or futuristic you have to know your stuff. In order to do so, you must have experience that you can draw from accordingly. So, when you have all these teenagers writing YA stories about romance, that’s fine. There’s really no life-experience you need to draw upon, because we’ve all been a kid.
If you want to write something that’s for adults, you need to experience being an adult first, and that’s important.
R: Alright, thank you… I do have one last question for you, I ask this to everyone.. but if you could be any flavour of ice cream, what flavour would you be?
K: Strawberry! That’s an easy question.
R: Thanks so much Karen for taking the time to do this!
K: You’re welcome,and thank you too!
11 Comments | tags: Chosen Chronicles, Fiction, Historical romance, Interviews, Karen, Karen Dales, Romance Writers of America, Vampires | posted in Interviews, RLovatt
Adventure Hunters by Cody L. Martin – Review
Artorius, Regina, and Lisa, three adventurers explore ruins and ancient buildings looking for treasures. When they come across a collection of war machines, they race to find the Lambda Driver, the key to restoring the machines. They must find it before their ruler, King Ryvas, does. If Ryvas finds it first, he will unleash their destructive power on the neighboring kingdom. – source
Adventure Hunters is an interesting concept, with a unique and creative world. However, his world is unrefined and his writing needs more work. Cody L. Martin has potential as an author, there is no doubt of his creativity, and passion for fantasy. Martin however, needs more practice in the art of description.
One of the main issues of this novel was the redundancy, and overuse of description. There were instances in the novel where Martin would spend a page or so describing a character, only to have one of our three protagonists sum them up in a few short sentences later; wasting the readers time and detracting from the story. As well, he describes things the characters aren’t able to see and have no affect on their location, actions, or the progress of the story — on the very first pages he describes on of the main characters (Artorius) in precise details down to the colour of his underclothes. Unnecessary, and a headache to read.
Hopefully with time and discipline Martin will be able to fine-tune his writing abilities in order to more ably express his thoughts and ideas in the written form. The potential is there, but with more editing and the cutting out extraneous details he could have a compelling tale.
For the time being, Martin’s Adventure Hunters is not one I would recommend to anyone.
1 Comment | tags: Adventure Hunters, Books, Cody L. Martin, Cody Martin, Fiction, Reviews, Self-published | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
The Cupid War by Timothy Carter: Review
Ricky Fallon had decided not to kill himself after all–moments before accidentally slipping off a bridge and plunging to his death. Now he’s a Cupid in the afterlife, helping high school students fall in love. The job would be cool if it weren’t for the dorky pink bodysuits, his jerky boss, and attacks from joy-sucking shadowy entities called Suicides.
When Fallon discovers a dangerous new Suicide in human form, a terrific battle erupts. Before the Suicide can become too powerful, Fallon has to convince his fellow Cupids of the extraordinary threat, protect the girl he’s falling for . . . and foil the Suicides’ evil scheme to spread despair to all humanity. – Source
The Cupid War by Timothy Carter is an interesting read. Carter, who is known for writing far-fetched fiction lives up to that expectation in The Cupid War. Following the tale of Fallon, a new Cupid who must work to earn Love and try to save students from sharing his fate. What he finds is unexpected, impossible, and some of it? Quite nice.
First, I need to start off by saying I don’t read YA novels, at least not on anything approaching a regular basis. Neither do I read romance or anything that could almost be classified as a romance novel, (trust me.. I’ve turned down a ridiculous amount of books that whilst they sounded interesting, romance is just not something I read). So, it is a bit peculiar that I accepted a book that is not only a young adult fiction, but well.. It has cupids, and the picture on the cover is a heart and thus (to me at least) obviously romance. Nevertheless, I don’t regret choosing to read The Cupid War, even if it really isn’t my type.
Carter’s characters are fun and dynamic, and develop realistically throughout the story, and reacted in a believable way when thrown into peculiar and challenging circumstances. Character relations were also well done, especially with Trina and Fallon who were enjoyable to read, and watch as their friendship blossomed. Though, some parts were written a bit better than others, as parts of The Cupid War did feel rushed at times, especially during the action scenes… However, it was a fun read and has some really great (quirky and strange) ideas like Love being a food, or the great battle for souls between Suicides and Cupids.
The Cupid War is a fun and amusing read, easy to get through and a definite change compared to what I usually read. Starting off as a strange and humorous read, it progresses and becomes a much more engaging and deeper book, with a bit more of a mature feel to it. Fans of Carter as well as new readers won’t disappointed by this latest novel.
Also, check back in the next few days for my interview with the author, Timothy Carter!
3 Comments | tags: Cupid, Fiction, love, The Cupid War, Timothy Carter, Young-adult fiction | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
The Use of Description
Well… It’s been a while since I last did one of these — a general post about stuff.
Lately, I’ve been asked the question “What makes a book good?” a lot, and I’ve given some small, non-committal answer each time. I figured though, that I would do this properly and give my opinion on the topic (for there is no one answer to this question, but many… varying from person to person). This post will specifically talk about description. I may do more in the future, though I also may not.
The main thing that this post will focus on is the description. Reading over the reviews I’ve written over the past year, one of the points I seem to make reference to is the author’s use of description in the novel. Whether I’m saying there’s too much, too little, the description is excellently done, or in contrast — poorly.
But I’ve come to realize something, I’m a fan of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which is pretty much the epitome of “too much description” and I love it! So more and more I’m thinking it isn’t so much the amount of description, as it is the timing and placement of it. If a piece of description is put in such a time that it detracts from the story, then it will seem like the author is using too much description — whereas if the same amount of description had been put elsewhere, it would be quite fine.
An example of description at the wrong place/wrong time:
Mary closed her eyes, drops of sweat beading upon her brow, waiting for the inevitable bang that would mark the end of her 22 years of life. Hearing the safety on the gun ‘click’ her knees — hidden under her sky-blue dress with finely inlaid roses braided across the seams. She had bought it only yesterday, thinking to show it off to Jayne — began to shake, and she sent her last prayer to the Gods above.
The roar of a bullet, the ripping of flesh and cotton, and a final breath of life. Mary had paid good money for that dress, but now as strong arms caught her lifeless body, blood spread across the fine fabric, like a tulip blooming against the morning sky. There she lay, and there she died, in the hands of her best-friend her lover, and her killer. He was notably dressed less finely than she, in his “Joss Whedon Kills” t-shirt (probably for the irony), and jeans. Overall, he made a very ineloquent killer.
Description shouldn’t be a bad thing. While we should hopefully have some idea of what the characters look like (before this point), describing the clothing of Mary and the killer is out of place and detracts from the impact of the scene. Using the same passage as above, but with a few passages cut, it creates a different feel to it.
Mary closed her eyes, drops of sweat beading upon her brow, waiting for the inevitable bang that would mark the end of her 22 years of life. Hearing the safety on the gun ‘click’ her knees began to shake, and she sent her last prayer to the Gods above.
The roar of a bullet, the ripping of flesh and cotton, and the final breath of life. Strong arms caught Mary’s lifeless body, blood spreading across the fine fabric of her dress, like a tulip blooming against the morning sky. There she lay, and there she died, in the hands of her best-friend, her lover, and her killer.
The original paragraphs didn’t necessarily have too much information; it was just not where it should be. Perhaps have Mary’s dress described before the event, or even after. Of course, giving too much information is entirely possible; the calibre, make, specs of the gun could be given, the price Mary got the dress, the way her hair was tied up, any number of things added to that could just be too much.
It’s all well and good to give readers information so that they can visualize the characters, but there shouldn’t be an info-dump either. It’s a matter of balance, finding when and where to use descriptive text and how much. The best descriptions aren’t the ones that are shining in the neon light, but the ones that may not be noticed fully, but become embedded into the reader’s mind.
I’m not an expert, I don’t write (the two example paragraphs are pretty much the extent of the creative writing I’ve done in the past year), and I know there are exceptions to every rule. There will be some people who agree fully with what I’ve said, and people who will disagree with every point. This is just my opinion on the matter from what I’ve noticed in my readings.
The point of this post was to answer the question: What do I think makes a good novel? For me, description plays a huge role, but no individual aspect can account for the greatness of a novel. The world you create — whether it’s modern-day Manhattan or K’ricck village on planet M’thut, you have to work to make it realistic and recognizable to the reader. The characters; they have to be people we want to spend hours of our time with, and be able to empathize with, we have to understand their motives and even if we don’t agree with them, you have to make us want them to succeed. Also, the importance of a good plot can not be emphasized enough — intriguing characters, a phenomenal world, and rich, eloquent description count for nothing if there’s no plot, or the plot has more holes than a strainer.
There really is no one thing that makes a story “good”, it’s an amalgamation of the many components, blended together to make not just a book, but an experience, worth having and spending the time with. Achieve that, and you will have something many will enjoy.
That’s my thoughts on it really, I could go into further detail on just about anything, the worldbuilding, characters, and plot.. This post really just focused on description more than anything, but it’s one of the biggest things for me.
Do you agree? Disagree? Or should I just stop rambling and get back to reading? ;)
7 Comments | tags: Arts, Fiction | posted in RLovatt, Thoughts
City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte
“Once a city of enormous wealth and culture, Prague was home to emperors, alchemists, astronomers, and, as it’s whispered, hell portals. When music student Sarah Weston lands a summer job at Prague Castle cataloging Beethoven’s manuscripts, she has no idea how dangerous her life is about to become. Prague is a threshold, Sarah is warned, and it is steeped in blood.
Soon after Sarah arrives, strange things begin to happen. She learns that her mentor, who was working at the castle, may not have committed suicide after all. Could his cryptic notes be warnings? As Sarah parses his clues about Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” she manages to get arrested, to have tantric sex in a public fountain, and to discover a time-warping drug. She also catches the attention of a four-hundred-year-old dwarf, the handsome Prince Max, and a powerful U.S. senator with secrets she will do anything to hide.
City of Dark Magic could be called a rom-com paranormal suspense novel—or it could simply be called one of the most entertaining novels of the year” – Description from Goodreads
City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte — the pseudonym of authors Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch — had an interesting concept. Flyte obviously did their research of Beethoven’s life, and the twist with his “Immortal Beloved” was an interesting take on it.
However, that’s unfortunately about the best I can say about City of Dark Magic, It was through sheer force of will that I finished this novel. The writing seems to be at an amateur level at best; the plot scattered and in general, just a mess. There’s little to no character development throughout the story, and the dynamics between characters seems to fall flat.
With an antagonist who seems entirely power hungry, and just killing for the sake of killing, and a protagonist who is nothing special except for having a nose sensitive enough to smell things like danger, evil and pheromones, and has an extensive knowledge of Beethoven’s music, there wasn’t really much to the characters, nothing that makes you feel sympathy for their quest, or takes you on an emotional ride through their trials and triumphs.
While the book and the writing does seem to improve somewhat about half-way through; there are still sections in which it seems the authors forgot what genre they were writing, with segments which seem like they’d be better suited for an erotica novel — coupled with their style and word usage making the book feel like it was intended for young readers — made those scenes awkward to read and completely unnecessary.
(Note: I have absolutely no issue with sex in novels, but when it’s out of the blue and goes into great detail where it’s completely out of place, it’s probably best to leave it out.)
A lot of what was hinted at and referenced through the novel also fell short and were quite disappointingly executed, seeming rushed at best, or not given more than a few words of mention when they were finally shown.
This isn’t a book I would recommend at all, but perhaps others will see what I failed to in this novel, and will enjoy it.
City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte will be released November 27th.
I received a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
5 Comments | tags: Books, City of Dark Magic, Fiction, Magnus Flyte | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio : Review
Meet Baroness May Dugas, the most dangerous woman in the world.
Standing trial for extortion, the story of May Dugas unfolds as she tells her version of the events which lead her to the trial in 1917. From leaving home, searching for a way to earn enough money to support her family.
Branded as a crafty blackmailer and ruthless seductress. To many, though, May was the most glamorous woman to grace high society. Was the real May Dugas a cold-hearted swindler or simply a resourceful provider for her poor family?
As the narrative bounces back and forth between the trial taking place in 1917 and May’s devious but undeniably entertaining path to the courtroom—hoodwinking and waltzing her way through the gilded age and into the twentieth century—we’re left to ponder her guilt as we move closer to finding out what fate ultimately has in store for our irresistible adventuress.
Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio is a historical fiction, based off of the events of a real trial, which I admittedly didn’t know when I first read the book. The story is May’s retelling of her life choices and events which lead to her famous trial, telling an amusing story, but one which makes you consider the evidence placed against her, and the way May explains what happened.
Parlor Games is very well-written, and engaging. May’s life makes for an entertaining tale, as do the people she meets throughout the story. However, I did find myself losing interest with it half-way through, as it picks up a repetitive nature. Telling mostly of her sleeping with a variety of men and coercing them to give her money and buy her things — and then complaining when after using them, things don’t go exactly her way. May Dugas overall doesn’t make for a sympathetic character, or one that can hold your attention for very long.
The ending itself was also very abrupt, and seemed incongruous with the rest of the story, almost as if May (as the story is told in such a way that it’s something she’s writing), just grew bored with writing and wrote the end for the sake of their being an end.
While I may not particularly be a fan of the story of May Dugas, Biaggio’s writing style and voice is one that I found enjoyable, and I will probably be reading more of her books in the future.
Q&A with Maryka Biaggio, author of Parlor Games (brokenpenguins.wordpress.com)
This Girl Just Wants to Have Fun (brokenpenguins.wordpress.com)
4 Comments | tags: Book Review, Fiction, historical fiction, Literature, Maryka Biaggio, May Dugas, parlor games | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Kiss of Death by Debbie Viguié : Review
In the wake of a failed attempt to defeat the vampire Richelieu, Susan and her friends are weakened and divided. Raphael must set aside his animosity and join with his enigmatic sire Gabriel to discover a powerful weapon before Richelieu claims it. Meanwhile, Susan and her cousin Wendy translate a 12th century diary belonging to their ancestor, Carissa, to learn the origin of their family’s connection with the vampires. As Carissa’s story of love and betrayal unfolds, they discover the secrets of the present will only be revealed by solving the mysteries of the past – Description from Goodreads
Kiss of Death is the second book in the Kiss Trilogy by Debbie Viguié. Set shortly after the events in the first book; Susan and her friends are recovering from their encounter with Richelieu — an evil vampire. Now, after uncovering his plans, Gabriel and Raphael must do what they can to stop Richelieu before it’s too late. Meanwhile, Susan, Wendy learn more of the past through an ancient diary, telling the story of their ancestor, and their friend Gabriel.
Debbie Viguié’s Kiss of Death takes place alternately between modern-day and the twelfth century in a compelling tale as the girls learn of their history and how it’s interwoven with vampires. Telling of betrayal, friendship, love and hate, Kiss of Death is a great read with fascinating characters.
I don’t typically read young adult stories involving vampires, in the past few years they’ve mostly become formulaic and not at all resembling how they used to be portrayed as — monsters. However, having read many of Viguié’s books in the past and enjoying her style, I decided to give this one a try, and was pleasantly surprised. The vampires in this novel are ones that burn and turn to ash in sunlight, are harmed by holy water and crosses and definitely hate the scent of garlic. Merging the classic vampires with the modern-day version — the handsome, human loving kind gave these a bit more of a unique twist, and it was enjoyable to read about them.
Kiss of Death and the rest of the Kiss Trilogy is an attempt to make Christian themes accessible for non-Christians, as well as for Christians who enjoy reading fantasy; telling a tale of redemption, and the struggle between good and evil. From a non-religious standpoint, I did find it to be interesting, and the religious aspects were not overpowering in the story, while still playing a central theme.
Overall, Viguié’s Kiss of Death was a great action-packed, and compelling read, with enough back story provided that it easily stands alone and can be read without having read the first in the trilogy. Though, I am sure that the first one was a great read as well.
The third book in the Kiss Trilogy — Kiss of Revenge will be released in 2013.
REVIEW: “Kiss of Death” by Debbie Viguie (shouldbereading.wordpress.com)
Leave a comment | tags: Book Review, Debbie Viguie, Fantasy, Fiction, Kiss of Death, Kiss Trilogy, Vampire, Viguié, Young Adult | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Crown Thief by David Tallerman : Review
Meet Easie Damasco: Thief, swindler and lately, reluctant hero.
But whatever good intentions Damasco may have are about to be tested to their limits, as the most valuable – and dangerous – object in the land comes within his light-fingered grasp. Add in some suicidally stubborn giants, an old enemy with dreams of empire and the deadliest killers in two kingdoms on his heels, and Damasco’s chances of staying honest – or even just surviving – are getting slimmer by the hour.
First off, before beginning the review of this novel I want to say a couple of things. One, I made a bit of a mistake when getting this book to review as I didn’t realize it was a sequel — so some of what I say may not be entirely correct. Second, there is a possibility for there to be spoilers in this review. So, just a bit of a warning for anyone who hasn’t read the first book (Giant Thief by David Tallerman)
Tallerman’s Crown Thief is an engaging, fast paced and riveting tale. Jumping right into the story where the first book left off, Crown Thief follows the story of Easie Damasco and his travels with the Guard Captain Alvantes, briefly accompanied by mayor Estrada and Saltlick, an amiable giant and friend to Damasco.
With Damasco and Alvantes continuously being thrown into perilous situations, the story is action packed and rarely has a dull moment. With its easy to read style, interesting and enthralling characters who go through a considerable amount of character development react realistically to their changes of circumstance and the flow of events, to the point of even being able to form an uneasy camaraderie in their time of need, Tallerman has created an interesting fantasy adventure.
There were a couple of points which while I didn’t entirely like they didn’t completely subtract from the story. One of which was that there seemed to be a overbearingly repetitive nature in the way that Easie would moan on about how boring travel is whenever the opportunity presented itself, especially when revisiting locations they had been to before. Also, while not so much of a deal, things seemed a bit too convenient for Easie where he’d get injured in a manner that’d kill most people, or at least break a few bones but he would walk away with a few bruises at most.
Besides for that however, the giants were an interesting addition to the story, as they’re rarely seen in literature these days (from what I’ve noticed). While being a subdued and gentle race, they proved themselves to be great assets and not just an unnecessary addition to the story.
Overall, I enjoyed Crown Thief by David Tallerman very much. It was an interesting read, very quick and easy to get through. Ending with a bit of a cliffhanger, it leaves you wanting for more.
Crown Thief is set to be released September 25th.
Thank you to Netgalley and Angry Robot for sending me a copy of this novel in exchange for a review.
David’s website: http://davidtallerman.net/
1 Comment | tags: Books, Crown Thief, David Tallerman, Easie Damasco, Fantasy, Fiction, NetGalley, Reluctant hero, Reviews | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Past of a Marked Man by Jennifer Hirtler : Review
If I could not live my life honorably without being reviled, then I would not. If they feared me, I decided, they should have a reason. – Kagnos, Past of a Marked Man
In the lands of Tavigoth, one city sets itself apart as being the city of death; a dangerous city ruled by thieves and assassins, the city of Kuz. But even in a city such as that; there is one man who is more dangerous than the rest. Kagos, the old Lord of Kuz,
Set on a mission to make an account of the life of Kagnos, young priest Mitchell embarks on a dangerous journey, entering a life filled with deceit, murder, and most of all – pain, as his path takes him to find some of the people from the dredges of the past, Jack the Candle Maker – the one who trained Kagnos, and Cherryl, a man who was once Kagnos’s apprentice, and lost everything.
Hidden beneath the rumours of being a murderer with no soul or consciousness lay a truth even more darker — one of pain, betrayal and fear. Kagnos, cursed by Garilect assassins as a young boy after the murder of his parents has lived being constantly feared by those around him. Tortured by a life of reflection and ridicule, and his name whispered in fear across all of Tavigoth, we see his story unfold from his childhood and see the truth of who the assassin really is. A man who did what he must, living by the rules he set, and enforcing them upon his people, killing the bad — or the worst of the good, and doing everything in his power for those he cared about.
Past of a Marked Man by Jennifer Hirtler shows us a world rife with conflict, blending good and bad until one can’t be told from another through the stories of Cherryl, Vera, Kagnos and Mitchell. As each of their stories grow, and they become more dynamic characters, the moral paradoxes of their actions — while on the surface may seem bad — become reasonable. While it’s easy to judge someone for their crimes, they’re all good people.
While I found the beginning to be a bit slow, and the main character Mitchell to be a wimp (which while understandable, did annoy me), the story was gripping and intriguing from the start, and got better as it progresses. Although at some points it did seem a bit more descriptive than need be, slowing the pace down, Past of a Marked Man was definitely better than sleep and had a satisfying conclusion. With the multiple story lines all resolving in their own ways; it made a good read.
Ms. Hirtler gave me a copy of Past of a Marked man to review, and I’m glad she did. This was a wonderful and enjoyable read, and an excellent début novel. For me, having a bunch of unusual names (Serit’ha, Tavigoth, Garilect, Phinae, etc) made it a bit difficult to remember everything at first, but by the end most of them got easier to remember.
With Greek mythology, and having Gods and Goddesses taking apart in lives and setting paths, as well as having running themes of forgiveness it sets for an insightful story with a great depth.
Leave a comment | tags: Adventure, Assassins, Book Review, Fantasy, Fiction, Jennifer Hirtler, Story | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
The Summoner by Gail Z. Martin : Review
Thrown into chaos, the aristocracy of the Winter Kingdoms must defend itself against magic, and with the clock ticking, the fate must rest on the shoulders of our heroes.
Matris “Tris” Drayke, a Prince of Margolan must flee from his older brother Prince Jared and his evil sorcerer Foor Arontala, after the slaughter of his family. Now a fugitive, Tris must travel with his friends and seek justice, and a way to save the kingdom. Along his quest for retribution, he must learn to control his powers before they control him, and call upon the armies of the dead
Kiara Sharsequin, the Goddess Blessed Warrior Princess of Isencroft must find a way to save her self, her kingdom and her father from Foor Arontala — a dark wizard, and from King Jared, to whom she is betrothed. Searching for the answers, she must set out upon a Journey; one of hardships, self discovery and truth.
The Summoner is the first book in the Chronicles of the Necromancer by Gail Z. Martin.The story started out a bit slowly; the first chapter and a few other spots seemed to be info-dumps more than anything; telling the reader more than actually showing. However, it quickly picks up the pace and sets the story in motion, continuing with minimalistic details, as Martin focuses more on advancing the story than a detailed analyses of each character. Moving the story at a fast pace and always keeping it interesting.
The Summoner is a cliché. The good guys are all charismatic, likeable, and filled with ideas of heroism and only a small flaw or two to make sure they aren’t too perfect or unrealistic. Meanwhile the bad guys are distinctly unlikable, and pure evil — it being impossible to muster up a bit of sympathy for their cause. This book is a prime example of a formulaic sword and sorcery fantasy novel — a wicked prince and evil magician, haunted inns, ghosts, prophetic moments and magical powers which conveniently save the day every time and if not, a ghost will tell the hero what he must do. Martin doesn’t bring anything new to the table that we haven’t seen before, and as the first book in a series I kind of expected something a bit more special.
Despite this, I enjoyed the book, and I’ll be reading the sequel to it — The Blood King. Martin isn’t flashy or overly elegant with her prose, but she doesn’t need to be. It’s a story we all know, and one that many fantasy readers enjoy. It’s easy to get through, and it lets us revisit familiar territory. The characters don’t brood, or go through the “woe is me” monologues much, they know their paths, and are well aware of the challenges they face. So, despite being a cliché fantasy title, and more on the predictable side, it’s a light read, and enjoyable.
Do I recommend this book? Yeah, sure. Why not? If you like the typical fantasy story with magic and heroes, adventure and battles, then you’ll probably like this book as a light read.
Visit Gail Martin’s website here
Follow her on Twitter! @GailZMartin
Leave a comment | tags: Fantasy, fantasy novel, Fiction, Fiction novel, Gail Z. Martin, Reviews, Summoner, Sword and sorcery, The Summoner | posted in Reviews, RLovatt
Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente
September is a girl who long for adventure. When she is invited to Fairyland by a Green Wind and a Leopard, well, of course she accepts. (Mightn’t you?) But Fairyland is in turmoil, and it will take one twelve-year-old girl, a book-loving dragon, and a strange and almost human boy named Saturday to vanquish an evil Marquess and restore order.
This book has quite a long title, so we’ll refer to it as TGWCFiaSoHOM. Have fun reading that throughout the whole review.
TGWCFiaSoHOM has been called many things: charming, glorious, enchanting. In some ways, that’s quite true; in other ways, which we’ll get to later, it’s quite wrong. We’ll get to how it’s good first.
The book has a rich and diverse array of characters and a wonderful world. Valente went all-out making Fairyland an interesting, strange, and different place, and quite quirky in its own way. From entire cities knitted out of wool to Fairyland having to cope with modernisation, the world is a rich and fun one. It’s like being transported to a real place; like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, it’s similar enough to our world, yet different enough from it, in the amounts to make it a place a reader would want to visit.
To the book’s credit, Fairyland is populated by an equally interesting array of characters, none quite the same as the other. A-Through-L is a wyvary, half-wyvern, half-library (so he says), Saturday is a Marid, and can grant any wish (as long as he’s defeated first), and the villain is one of the most sympathetic I’ve come across in fiction in a while. Almost everyone we meet is different and leaves an impression on us, and it’s these characters, really, who make the world an interesting one, and Valente spared no expense making them as real and as rich as she could.
Unfortunately, this care wasn’t put into every character, and here we come to the book’s only real flaw – though it’s such a large flaw it has a deep impact on the quality of the story. The problem isn’t the writing, which is okay, or the ending, which doesn’t really resolve anything in favour of making way for a sequel instead. No, the biggest flaw of the book is September.
September is a flat character bordering on Mary Sue. Everybody likes her instantly, talks about her all the time, sings praises of her that make it clear sliced bread feels ashamed it doesn’t live up to her wonderful goodness, and anyone who doesn’t like her is bad and evil and how dare you not like this wonderful perfect person. It couldn’t be more clear September is intended as an audience stand-in: basically, designed to be a bland nobody everybody likes so that the reader can step into her shoes and pretend they’re the ones everyone is praising. This is pitiful, because a flat character like this simply doesn’t belong in a book so otherwise good. It’s like having a really health-conscious friend and then finding out they’e been hiding sweets all around the house and snacking on them when nobody’s looking, or finding out they smoke behind everybody’s back. If Valente had put just a fraction of the effort into September she put into all the other characters in this book, it would have been truly good; instead, I was left loving the few pages where September didn’t come up at all, automatically sympathising with the characters who, for a few glorious pages, put September in her place and told her she wasn’t very wonderful after all, and finding more interest in a sentient key than in September. September didn’t make an impression on me so much as merely leave a void where a good protagonist should have been, and no personality I can use to decide if I like her or not.
Some authors deliberately write these characters to make them easy to relate to. The thing is, a well-written character is always relatable, or other characters are. Writing a flat character is lazy, a cop-out; it’s the published equivalent of self-insert fan fiction. Everything, from September’s formulaic background to her utter lack of personality, make her severely disappointing when compared to the rest of the book’s cast. I became more and more disappointed with her as the book went on, and liked the book less and less as a result.
So how was TGWCFiaSoHOM as a whole? Good. I might even say quite good. Would I pick up the inevitable sequels? Here I find myself torn. I want to see A-Through-L again; I want to witness the Marquess’ character arc. I dread seeing September again. It’s not usual that I like one part of a book so much and so hate another part, but it’s true in this case, and I’m not sure how well my time would be spent reading the sequel as opposed to simply asking other people what happens.
Overall reading: 3.5/5
8 Comments | tags: Book Review, Catherynne M. Valente, Fairyland, Fantasy, Fiction, Fiction novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making | posted in ARamone, Reviews
The Benefits of Reading
Growing up, we’re all encouraged to read at one point or another. Whether it be Shakespearian plays, out school textbooks, autobiographies or the classics, books played a role in our lives growing up and for a lot of us, they still do. Why is it though, that in many countries around the world, reading is something that’s enforced at a young age? What benefits do we get from reading the books we’ve come to love and enjoy?
I could list a hundred or so reasons on why reading is good for you, and why it’s so important to read… Though, reading brings something different to all of us, and we all perceive books in a different way. In August of last year, Linda Poitevin wrote a post on the subjective side of reading, stating that “readers are going to take from a story what they want (or need) to experience. What one reader sees, another might miss altogether…only to draw from the story something the author him/herself may never have intended.” (Link to this post can be found here). I have to agree with her fully on that, as we all learn or take things away from books that someone else might not even notice.
Whether we’re reading books to relax, escape, or learn; they give us a window into the different facets of human existence that we might not otherwise get to explore. They open a new world away from our own sorrows and fears, letting us escape from reality for a little while; giving us a bigger perspective on life, the universe, and well, everything (to borrow from Douglas Adams). We can learn from the characters — both the antagonists and protagonists and apply those lessons into our daily lives; do what we can to keep from making the same mistakes, avoid the same fatal flaws, learn to approach problems and challenges in different ways. Reading not only broadens our perspective of the world around us, it gives insight to who we are, and how we can apply that to better ourselves.
In the case of non-fiction books, they allows for a more concentrated delve into a topic that’s filled with an abundance of information, it’s something that you can focus on (provided it’s what you have an interest in), and learn loads of fascinating things about. For example, did you know that in space there’s a gas cloud with enough alcohol in it to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. That probably isn’t a fact you’d find in the pages of Lord of the Rings or I, Robot, but it’s still interesting. (Try singing that song — 400 trillion trillion pints of beer on the wall, 400 trillion trillion bottles of beer). There’s a wealth of information out there, amazing facts that most of us can’t even begin to fathom. Some of that information, if not all, we can learn here on the internet, we can see things that friends and different sources post on websites like Twitter or Facebook, and it’s great. However, while reading a tweet with an interesting fact can be enough to pause and make you think, if you don’t take the time to research that tidbit of information, that sentence that you paused over for a moment, then you’re not going to learn anything.
Fiction allows us to understand and better know ourselves, and the people around us; helping us overcome challenges we may face that can correlate to something we’ve read. While on the other hand, non-fiction takes us deeper into the roots of human understanding and knowledge. Find a book on a topic that interests you, whether it’s Freud’s approach to dreams, medieval philosophy or linguistics, there’s so much out there for you to learn. One thing people don’t seem to understand these days is that you don’t need to go to university or college to become an expert on a topic or to learn about it. Find a local library, discover some new authors, there are so many fountains of knowledge out there, just bursting to be read. It’s all out there, sitting on a piece of paper, waiting to fall into your hands and be read.
The stories we read about all have different morals and lessons behind them. Almost every fantasy (or science-fiction) story will have some sort of grievance between races, or classes, reading those stories give us a glimpse into other cultures and into lives of people who are in circumstances so different from our own; or perhaps their lives have more in common with ours than we’d care to admit. Books are the doorway into different worlds, and every world has its lessons. Those worlds — they consist of exceptions; for every rule, there is an exception. That applies here too, if you think there’s something you can’t do for a certain reason, well that shouldn’t stop you from going for it anyways if that’s what you want. There’s always an exception, and who’s to say that can’t be you?
One of the more obvious benefits of reading is that it helps us to develop our language skills and expand our vocabulary. When we read books, (depending on the size/reading level) there’s typically 10-20 words the average reader will not know the meaning to, by reading the sentence and seeing the usage of the word; it helps to not only teach us the word — plus, if you search up the word or you encounter it later, you’re more likely to learn it quicker. Read to your children, read often, read books over and over. Read when they’re infants and too young to understand; read books filled with words that their growing minds have yet to learn. Read books that will make them ask questions, or that make you ask questions. Read to learn, and read to teach.
Read to develop your cognitive functions, and your skills of deduction. Going back briefly to the developing language skills and vocabulary; in fiction, writers tend to invent a lot of words and terminology, while it may be stinting to newer readers – or those who just don’t read often, it’s something that avid readers become more familiar with and have an easier time in understanding them. Also, in books such as mystery novels, the deduction and improved cognitive development really does play a part as you’re able to pick out the clues, hints and red herrings the author leaves along the way; creating an experience which is much more engaging and worthwhile. Especially while you’re in school, this is a vital factor. Reading often can greatly help you succeed in your education.
Entertainment. Reading is a great way to reduce boredom, allowing your imagination and creativity to flourish. While you relax and read, you allow your mind to be engaged and feel some of the many emotions that let us know we’re alive. It’s like meeting new people every time you open a new book; people that you’ll laugh at, care about, come to love — then cry over, maybe you’ll hate them for a while, grow frustrated and roll your eyes when they do or say something stupid, then come to realize how much you cared about them when they get sick, injured, or even die. Books have a way of becoming like family — the characters, our friends. They’re always there for you, and you can always visit them again; reliving past experiences, going through the same emotions as before. They’ll never leave, or change and become people that you no longer recognize. Characters remain the same fascinating people they were when you first met them, they develop and grow the same ways they did the first time you read their story. They are an escape, they are there to be used, and they are there to prove your insight into yourself, as well as into others.
Our mind creates these vast worlds for us to see with the help of books, it gives us a chance for insight… Why do we read? What do we get from it? There isn’t one firm answer to these questions, but for every page that’s read, for every adventure spanning hundreds of pages, there will always be something for you. A lifelong friend, something to curl up with on the couch for comfort, to show us even in the darkest of moments that there is hope, and there is always more to be discovered.
Reading Good Books isn’t Enough (livelifewithyourkids.wordpress.com)
Book Monster (undiscoveredauthor.wordpress.com)
Books for Reluctant Readers (epricepatel.wordpress.com)
Reading a book really is better the second time round – and re-reading can offer mental health benefits (dailymail.co.uk)
We Give Books Announces Nationwide “Read For My School” Campaign (prweb.com)
4 Comments | tags: Benefits of Reading, Book, Fiction, Learning, Literature, Non-fiction, Reading | posted in RLovatt, Thoughts
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Carrington Wharf Project
Warren Haasnoot
The Carrington Wharf Project restores the historical notion of the wharf as a place positioned at the edge of society both physically and conceptually A place traditionally characterised by its diverse activity and mixing of social demographic, the project develops an empathic fascination with the otherworldliness of transience, drinking, violence and promiscuity. This is the radical antithesis of contemporary market driven architecture that has decayed any notion of a complex social order.
The first stage of the project is to remove the thin crust oc concrete on the surface and reveal the sites dark history. From what was once mud flats submerged at high tide and used by the Awabakal people for fishing, has today becomes testament to the acceleration of the tempo of production brought about by the industrial revolution. The island itself demonstrates white man’s need to reshape the land as it quite literally grew out of the mud. Ship ballasts, which were once used to transform the site are excavated to bring the water back in. The stones are then used to form a new island above the projected flood level that is an anchor or foundation for the new buildings and wharfs.
Because of its industrial harbor, wharfie culture and proximity to the now closed BHP, Carrington developed as a working class suburb with a fearsome reputation that arguably had a greater character, vitality and human spirit than its current condition. The gentrification of the suburb has all but cleaned up the feverish excitement of exuberant sexual promiscuity, lust and cruelty that once existed. The projects assemblage uses existing infrastructure and the outmoded buildings, machines, boats and programmatic characteristics. The proposed Brewery uses the exiting grain silos to store barley and hops used in the production of beer. Storage, loading, consumption and throughput facilities assist in the exportation and trade of alcohol. We glimpse into the innermost depth of human beings through the analogy of intoxication.
Architecture in this instance isn’t purely to provide shelter, commercial return of aesthetic enjoyment but an armature for dialogue between people concerned with the current state of architecture, ethical design and the continual restrictions forced on the profession by irresolute constraints. Further to this is a critique of the resource boom and the moral implications of the quantity of coal that leaves the harbor each day.
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28 Feb 2015 05:34:11 UTC
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<a href="http://archive.today/xyVPj"> <img style="width:300px;height:200px;background-color:white" src="https://archive.fo/xyVPj/5de1bfe040df5ca244f0ba524a2832d7fb5f7f63/scr.png"><br> Poland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<br> archived 28 Feb 2015 05:34:11 UTC </a>
{{cite web | title = Poland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | url = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland | date = 2015-02-28 | archiveurl = http://archive.today/xyVPj | archivedate = 2015-02-28 }}
This article is about the country. For other uses of terms redirecting here, see Poland (disambiguation) and Polska (disambiguation).
Republic of Poland
Rzeczpospolita Polska (Polish)
Anthem: Mazurek Dąbrowskiego
Poland Is Not Yet Lost
Location of Poland (dark green)
– in the European Union (green) – [Legend]
and largest city Warsaw
52°13′N 21°02′E / 52.217°N 21.033°E / 52.217; 21.033
Polish[1]
Regional language
Kashubian[2]
Ethnic groups (2011)
93.52% Polish
1.09% Silesian
0.13% German
0.10% Belarusian
0.09% Ukrainian
0.04% Kashubian
0.03% Romani
0.02% Lemko
4.86% other
Pole ·
Polish ·
Parliamentary republic
- President Bronisław Komorowski
- Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz
- Upper house Senate
- Lower house Sejm
- Christianisation[b] 14 April 966
- Kingdom of Poland 18 April 1025
- Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 1 July 1569
- Partition of Poland 24 October 1795
- Duchy of Warsaw 22 July 1807
- Congress Poland 9 June 1815
- Reconstitution of Poland 11 November 1918
- Invasion of Poland, World War II 1 September 1939
- Communist Poland 8 April 1945
- Republic of Poland 13 September 1989
- Joined the European Union 1 May 2004
- Total 312,679 km2[a] (71st)
120,696.41 sq mi
- Water (%) 3.07
- 30 June 2014 estimate 38,483,957 [3] (34th)
- 2011 census 38,511,824[4] (34th)
- Density 123/km2 (83rd)
319.9/sq mi
GDP (PPP) 2015 estimate
- Total $990.568 billion[5] (21st)
- Per capita $25,703 (49th)
GDP (nominal) 2015 estimate
- Total $593.758 billion[5] (23rd)
Gini (2012) 30.9[6]
HDI (2013) 0.834[7]
Drives on the
a. ^a The area of Poland, as given by the Central Statistical Office, is 312,679 km2 (120,726 sq mi), of which 311,888 km2 (120,421 sq mi) is land and 791 km2 (305 sq mi) is internal water surface area.[8]
b. ^b The adoption of Christianity in Poland is seen by many Poles, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof, as one of the most significant events in their country's history, as it was used to unify the tribes in the region.[9]
Poland i/ˈpoʊlənd/ (Polish: Polska; pronounced [ˈpɔlska] ( listen)), officially the Republic of Poland (Polish: Rzeczpospolita Polska; pronounced [ʐɛt͡ʂpɔˈspɔʎit̪a ˈpɔlska] ( listen)), is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine and Belarus to the east; and the Baltic Sea, Kaliningrad Oblast (a Russian exclave) and Lithuania to the north. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq mi),[8] making it the 71st largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people,[8] Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world,[10] the sixth most populous member of the European Union, and the most populous post-communist member of the European Union. Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions.
Many historians trace the establishment of a Polish state to 966, when Mieszko I,[11] ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a longstanding political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth gradually ceased to exist in the years 1772–1795, when the Polish territory was partitioned among Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. Poland regained its independence (as the Second Polish Republic) at the end of World War I, in 1918.
Two decades later, in September 1939, World War II started with the invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). More than six million Polish citizens died in the war.[12][13][14][15] In 1944, a Soviet-backed Polish provisional government was formed, which, after a period of conflict, falsified referendum and elections, gave rise to a satellite state[16] of the Soviet Union, Polish Republic (Rzeczpospolita Polska), renamed to the People's Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) in 1952. During the Revolutions of 1989, Poland's Marxist–Leninist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy under the name Rzeczpospolita Polska, often referred to as the "Third Polish Republic" (III Rzeczpospolita).
Despite the vast destruction the country experienced during World War II, Poland managed to preserve much of its cultural wealth. There are 14 heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage[17] and 54 Historical Monuments and many objects of cultural heritage. Since the end of the communist period, Poland has achieved a "very high" ranking in terms of human development,[18] as well as gradually improving economic freedom.[19]
2.1 Prehistory and protohistory of Poland
2.2 Piast dynasty
2.3 Jagiellon dynasty
2.4 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
2.5 The Age of Partitions
2.6 Reconstitution of Poland
2.8 Postwar communist Poland
2.9 Present-day Poland
3.1 Geology
3.2 Waters
3.3 Land use
3.4 Biodiversity
4.1 Law
4.5 Law enforcement and emergency services
5.1 Corporations
5.2 Tourism
5.5 Science and technology
5.6 Communications
6.1 Urbanization
6.2.1 Polish
6.2.2 Sign language
6.2.3 Minority languages
6.2.4 Languages having the status of national minority's language
6.2.5 Languages having the status of ethnic minority's language
6.4 Health
6.5 Education
6.5.1 Elementary and secondary
6.5.2 Higher education
7.1 Famous people
7.2 Society
7.3 Music
7.4 Visual arts
7.5 Architecture
7.6 Literature
7.8 Cuisine
7.9 Sports
8 International rankings
Main article: Name of Poland
The source of the name Poland[20] and the ethnonyms for the Poles[21] include endonyms (the way Polish people refer to themselves and their country) and exonyms (the way other peoples refer to the Poles and their country). Endonyms and most exonyms for Poles and Poland derive from the name of the West Slavic tribe of the Polans (Polanie).
The origin of the name Polanie itself is uncertain. It may derive from such Polish words as pole (field).[22] The early tribal inhabitants denominated it from the nature of the country. Lowlands and low hills predominate throughout the vast region from the Baltic shores to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. "Between the Alps, Hungary, and the ocean, lies Poland, which is called in their native tongue Campania" (Latin: "Inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia, sic dicta in eorum idiomate quasi Campania") is the description by Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia imperialia ("Recreation for the Emperor") of 1211. In some languages the exonyms for Poland derive from another tribal name, Lechites (Lechici).
Main article: History of Poland
Prehistory and protohistory of Poland
Main articles: Bronze- and Iron-Age Poland, Poland in Antiquity and Poland in the Early Middle Ages
Reconstruction of a Bronze Age, Lusatian culture settlement in Biskupin, ca. 700 BC
Historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The ethnicity and linguistic affiliation of these groups have been hotly debated; the time and route of the original settlement of Slavic peoples in these regions lacks written records and can only be defined as fragmented.[23]
The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement (now reconstructed as an open air museum), dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, around 700 BC. The Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. Up until the creation of Mieszko's state and his subsequent conversion to Christianity in 966 AD, the main religion of Slavic tribes that inhabited the geographical area of present-day Poland was Slavic paganism. After the Baptism of Poland the new religion accepted by the Polish ruler was Catholicism. The transition to Christianity was not a smooth and instantaneous process for the rest of the population as evident from the pagan reaction of the 1030s.[24]
Piast dynasty
Main articles: History of Poland during the Piast dynasty, Civitas Schinesghe and Gesta principum Polonorum
Map of Poland under the rule of Mieszko I, who is considered the de facto creator of the Polish state, ca. 960–992
Poland began to form into a recognizable unitary and territorial entity around the middle of the 10th century under the Piast dynasty. Poland's first historically documented ruler, Mieszko I, accepted Baptism in 966 and adopted Christianity as the new official religion of his subjects. The bulk of the population converted in the course of the next few centuries. In 1000, Boleslaw the Brave, continuing the policy of his father Mieszko, held a Congress of Gniezno and created the metropolis of Gniezno and the dioceses of Kraków, Kołobrzeg, and Wrocław. The pagan unrest however, led to the transfer of the capital to Kraków in 1038 by Casimir I the Restorer.[25]
Earliest known contemporary depiction of a Polish ruler; King Mieszko II Lambert of Poland being presented with a Liturgical book by Matilda of Swabia, 1025–1031
Prince Bolesław III Wrymouth defeated the King of Germany Henry V in the 1109 Battle of Hundsfeld, writes Gallus Anonymus in his 1118 chronicle.[26] In 1138, Poland fragmented into several smaller duchies when Bolesław divided his lands among his sons. In 1226, Konrad I of Masovia, one of the regional Piast dukes, invited the Teutonic Knights to help him fight the Baltic Prussian pagans; a decision which led to centuries of warfare with the Knights. Elements of what is called now human rights may be found in early times of the Polish state. The Statute of Kalisz or the General Charter of Jewish Liberties (issued in 1264) introduced numerous right for the Jews in Poland, leading to a nearly autonomous "nation within a nation".[27]
In the middle of 13th-century the Silesian branch of the Piast dynasty (Henry I the Bearded and Henry II the Pious, ruled 1238–1241) almost succeeded in uniting the Polish lands, but the Mongols devastated the country and won the Battle of Legnica where Duke Henry II the Pious died (1241). In 1320, after a number of earlier unsuccessful attempts by regional rulers at uniting the Polish dukedoms, Władysław I consolidated his power, took the throne and became the first King of a reunified Poland. His son, Casimir III (reigned 1333–1370), has a reputation as one of the greatest Polish kings, and gained wide recognition for improving the country's infrastructure.[28][29] Casimir also extended royal protection to Jews, and encouraged their immigration to Poland.[28][30]
Casimir III the Great is the only Polish king who received the title of "Great". He built extensively during his reign, and reformed the Polish army and the country's civil and criminal law, 1333–1370
The education of Polish society was a goal of rulers as early as the 12th century, and Polish nobility became one of the most educated groups in Europe.[31][32] The library catalogue of the Cathedral Chapter of Kraków dating back to 1110 shows that in the early 12th-century Polish intellectuals had access to European literature.
Casimir III realized that the nation needed a class of educated people, especially lawyers, who could codify the country's laws and administer the courts and offices. His efforts to found an institution of higher learning in Poland were finally rewarded when Pope Urban V granted him permission to open the University of Kraków.
The Golden Liberty of the nobles began to develop under Casimir's rule, when in return for their military support, the king made serious concessions to the aristocrats, finally establishing their status as superior to that of the townsmen, and aiding their rise to power. When Casimir died in 1370 he left no legitimate male heir and, considering his other male descendants either too young or unsuitable, was laid to rest as the last of the nation's Piast rulers.
Poland also became a magnet for migrants. Germans settled in the towns; the Jewish community began to settle and flourish in Poland during this era (see History of the Jews in Poland); the same applies in smaller number to Armenians. The Black Death which afflicted most parts of Europe from 1347 to 1351 affected Poland less severely.[33][34]
Jagiellon dynasty
Main articles: History of Poland during the Jagiellon dynasty and Renaissance in Poland
Drawing of the Battle of Grunwald against the German Order of Teutonic Knights, 15 July 1410
The rule of the Jagiellon dynasty spanned the late Middle Ages and early Modern Era of Polish history. Beginning with the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila (Władysław II Jagiełło), the Jagiellon dynasty (1386–1572) formed the Polish–Lithuanian union. The partnership brought vast Lithuania-controlled Rus' areas into Poland's sphere of influence and proved beneficial for the Poles and Lithuanians, who coexisted and cooperated in one of the largest political entities in Europe for the next four centuries. In the Baltic Sea region Poland's struggle with the Teutonic Knights continued and included the Battle of Grunwald (1410), where a Polish-Lithuanian army inflicted a decisive defeat on the Teutonic Knights, both countries' main adversary, allowing Poland's and Lithuania's territorial expansion into the far north region of Livonia.[35] In 1466, after the Thirteen Years' War, King Casimir IV Jagiellon gave royal consent to the milestone Peace of Thorn, which created the future Duchy of Prussia, a Polish vassal. The Jagiellons at one point also established dynastic control over the kingdoms of Bohemia (1471 onwards) and Hungary.[36][37] In the south Poland confronted the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars (by whom they were attacked on 75 separate occasions between 1474 and 1569),[38] and in the east helped Lithuania fight the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Some historians estimate that Crimean Tatar slave-raiding cost Poland one million of its population from 1494 to 1694.[39]
Wawel Castle in Krakow; the seat of Polish kings from 1038 until the capital was move to Warsaw in 1596. The royal residence is an early example of Renaissance architecture in Poland
Poland was developing as a feudal state, with a predominantly agricultural economy and an increasingly powerful landed nobility. The Nihil novi act adopted by the Polish Sejm (parliament) in 1505, transferred most of the legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm, an event which marked the beginning of the period known as "Golden Liberty", when the state was ruled by the "free and equal" Polish nobility. Protestant Reformation movements made deep inroads into Polish Christianity, which resulted in the establishment of policies promoting religious tolerance, unique in Europe at that time.[40] This tolerance allowed the country to avoid most the religious turmoil that spread over Europe during the late Middle Ages.[40] The European Renaissance evoked in late Jagiellon Poland (kings Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus) a sense of urgency in the need to promote a cultural awakening, and during this period Polish culture and the nation's economy flourished. In 1543 the Pole, Nicolaus Copernicus, an astronomer from Toruń, published his epochal works, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), and thus became the first proponent of a predictive mathematical model confirming heliocentric theory which became the accepted basic model for the practice of modern astronomy. Another major figure associated with the era is classicist poet Jan Kochanowski.[41]
Main articles: History of Poland in the Early Modern era (1569–1795), Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sarmatism
Warsaw Confederation was an important development in the history of Poland that extended religious freedoms and tolerance, and is the first such document in Europe, 28 January 1573
The 1569 Union of Lublin established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a more closely unified federal state with an elective monarchy, but which was governed largely by the nobility, through a system of local assemblies with a central parliament. The Warsaw Confederation (1573) confirmed the religious freedom of all residents of Poland, which was extremely important for the stability of the multiethnic Polish society of the time.[27] Serfdom was banned in 1588.[42] The establishment of the Commonwealth coincided with a period of stability and prosperity in Poland, with the union thereafter becoming a European power and a major cultural entity, occupying approximately one million square kilometers of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as an agent for the dissemination of 'Western culture' through Polonization in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and Western Russia. Poland suffered from a number of dynastic crises during the reigns of the Vasa kings Sigismund III and Władysław IV and found itself engaged in major conflicts with Russia, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, as well as a series of minor Cossack uprisings.[43] In 1610 Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski seized Moscow after winning the Battle of Klushino.
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest extent after the Truce of Deulino, 1619
From the middle of the 17th century, the nobles' democracy, suffering from internal disorder, gradually declined, thus leaving the once powerful Commonwealth vulnerable to foreign intervention.
From 1648, the Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising engulfed the south and east eventually leaving Ukraine divided, with the eastern part, lost by the Commonwealth, becoming a dependency of the Tsardom of Russia. This was followed by the 'Deluge', a Swedish invasion, which marched through the Polish heartlands and damaged Poland's population, culture and infrastructure. Around four million of Poland's eleven million population died in famines and epidemics in this period.[44]
However, under John III Sobieski the Commonwealth's military prowess was re-established, and in 1683 Polish forces played a major part in relieving Vienna of a Turkish siege which was being conducted by Kara Mustafa in hope of eventually marching his troops further into Europe to spread Islam.
Painting of King John III Sobieski after the Battle of Vienna against the Ottoman Turks, 12 September 1683
Sobieski's reign marked the end of the nation's golden-era. Finding itself subjected to almost constant warfare and suffering enormous population losses as well as massive damage to its economy, the Commonwealth fell into decline. The government became ineffective as a result of large-scale internal conflicts (e.g. Lubomirski Rebellion against John II Casimir and rebellious confederations) and corrupted legislative processes. The nobility fell under the control of a handful of magnats, and this, compounded with two relatively weak kings of the Saxon Wettin dynasty, Augustus II and Augustus III, as well as the rise of Russia and Prussia after the Great Northern War only served to worsen the Commonwealth's plight. Despite this The Commonwealth-Saxony personal union gave rise to the emergence of the Commonwealth's first reform movement, and laid the foundations for the Polish Enlightenment.[45]
Stanisław II August, the last King of Poland acceded to the throne in 1764, reigning until his abdication on 25 November 1795
During the later part of the 18th century, the Commonwealth made attempts to implement fundamental internal reforms; with the second half of the century bringing a much improved economy, significant population growth and far-reaching progress in the areas of education, intellectual life, art, and especially toward the end of the period, evolution of the social and political system. The most populous capital city of Warsaw replaced Gdańsk (Danzig) as the leading centre of commerce, and the role of the more prosperous townsfolk increased.
The royal election of 1764 resulted in the elevation of Stanisław II August, a refined and worldly aristocrat connected to a major magnate faction, to the monarchy. However, a one-time lover of Empress Catherine II of Russia, the new king spent much of his reign torn between his desire to implement reforms necessary to save his nation, and his perceived necessity to remain in a relationship with his Russian sponsor. This led to the formation of the 1768 Bar Confederation, a szlachta rebellion directed against Russia and the Polish king that fought to preserve Poland's independence and the szlachta's traditional privileges. Attempts at reform provoked the union's neighbours, and in 1772 the First Partition of the Commonwealth by Russia, Austria and Prussia took place; an act which the "Partition Sejm", under considerable duress, eventually "ratified" fait accompli.[46] Disregarding this loss, in 1773 the king established the Commission of National Education, the first government education authority in Europe. Corporal punishment of children was officially prohibited in 1783 as first in the world at all schools.[47]
Enactment ceremony of the May 3rd Constitution inside the Senate Chamber at the Warsaw Royal Castle; the constitution was a first of its kind in Europe, 3 May 1791
The Great Sejm convened by Stanisław II August in 1788 successfully adopted the 3 May Constitution, the first set of modern supreme national laws in Europe. However, this document, accused by detractors of harbouring revolutionary sympathies, generated strong opposition from the Commonwealth's nobles and conservatives as well as from Catherine II, who, determined to prevent the rebirth of a strong Commonwealth set about planning the final dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Russia was aided in achieving its goal when the Targowica Confederation, an organisation of Polish nobles, appealed to the Empress for help. In May 1792 Russian forces crossed the Commonwealth's frontier, thus beginning the Polish-Russian War.
The defensive war fought by the Poles ended prematurely when the King, convinced of the futility of resistance, capitulated and joined the Targowica Confederation. The Confederation then took over the government. Russia and Prussia, fearing the mere existence of a Polish state, arranged for, and in 1793 executed, the Second Partition of the Commonwealth, which left the country deprived of so much territory that it was practically incapable of independent existence. Eventually, in 1795, following the failed Kościuszko Uprising, the Commonwealth was partitioned one last time by all three of its more powerful neighbours, and with this, effectively ceased to exist.[48]
The Age of Partitions
Main articles: History of Poland (1795–1918), Partitions of Poland and Congress Poland
Partitions of Poland between the Kingdom of Prussia, Russian Empire and Habsburg Empire in 1772, 1793 and 1795
Poles rebelled several times against the partitioners, particularly near the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. An unsuccessful attempt at defending Poland's sovereignty took place in 1794 during the Kościuszko Uprising, where a popular and distinguished general Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who had served under Washington in America, led Polish insurgents against numerically superior Russian forces. Despite the victory at the Battle of Racławice, his ultimate defeat ended Poland's independent existence for 123 years.[49] In 1807, Napoleon I of France temporarily recreated a Polish state as a satellite Duchy of Warsaw, but after the failed Napoleonic Wars, Poland was again split between the victorious Allies at the Congress of Vienna of 1815.[50] The eastern part was ruled by the Russian tsar as a Congress Kingdom which possessed a very liberal constitution. However, the tsars reduced Polish freedoms, and Russia annexed the country in virtually all but name. Thus in the latter half of the 19th century, only Austrian-ruled Galicia, and particularly the Free City of Kraków, created good environment for free Polish cultural life to flourish.
Tadeusz Kościuszko takes the oath to the King on the Rynek in Kraków against the military intervention of the partitioning powers, 1794
Throughout the period of the partitions, political and cultural repression of the Polish nation led to the organisation of a number of uprisings against the authorities of the occupying Russian, Prussian and Austrian governments. Notable among these are the November Uprising of 1830 and January Uprising of 1863, both of which were attempts to free Poland from the rule of tsarist Russia. The November uprising began on 29 November 1830 in Warsaw when, led by Lieutenant Piotr Wysocki, young non-commissioned officers at the Imperial Russian Army's military academy in that city revolted. They were joined by large segments of Polish society, and together forced Warsaw's Russian garrison to withdraw north of the city.
Over the course of the next seven months, Polish forces successfully defeated the Russian armies of Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch and a number of other Russian commanders; however, finding themselves in a position unsupported by any other foreign powers, save distant France and the newborn United States, and with Prussia and Austria refusing to allow the import of military supplies through their territories, the Poles accepted that the uprising was doomed to failure. Upon the surrender of Warsaw to General Ivan Paskievich, many Polish troops, feeling they could not go on, withdrew into Germany and there laid down their arms. Poles would have to wait another 32 years for another opportunity to free their homeland.
Capture of the Warsaw Arsenal by the Polish army during the November Uprising, 29 November 1830
When in January 1863 a new Polish uprising against Russian rule began, it did so as a spontaneous protest by young Poles against conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. However, the insurrectionists, despite being joined by high-ranking Polish-Lithuanian officers and numerous politicians were still severely outnumbered and lacking in foreign support. They were forced to resort to guerrilla warfare tactics. They failed to win any major military victories. Afterwards no major uprising was witnessed in the Russian controlled Congress Poland and Poles resorted instead to fostering economic and cultural self-improvement.
Despite the political unrest experienced during the partitions, Poland did benefit from large-scale industrialisation and modernisation programs, instituted by the occupying powers, which helped it develop into a more economically coherent and viable entity. This was particularly true in the Greater Poland, Pomerania and Warmia annexed by Prussia (later becoming a part of the German Empire); an area which eventually, thanks largely to the Greater Poland Uprising, was reconstituted as a part of the Second Polish Republic and became one of its most productive regions.
Reconstitution of Poland
Main articles: History of Poland (1918–39), Kingdom of Poland (1916–18) and Second Polish Republic
Chief of State Marshal Józef Piłsudski was the nation's premiere statesman between 1918 until his death on 12 May 1935
During World War I, all the Allies agreed on the reconstitution of Poland that United States President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed in Point 13 of his Fourteen Points. A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three occupying powers, and 450,000 died.[51] Shortly after the armistice with Germany in November 1918, Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic (II Rzeczpospolita Polska). It reaffirmed its independence after a series of military conflicts, the most notable being the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921) when Poland inflicted a crushing defeat on the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw, an event which is considered to have halted the advance of Communism into Europe and forced Vladimir Lenin to rethink his objective of achieving global socialism. Nowadays the event is often referred to as the "Miracle at the Vistula".[52]
Map of Poland during the Interwar period, 1918-1939
During this period, Poland successfully managed to fuse the territories of the three former partitioning powers into a cohesive nation state. Railways were restructured to direct traffic towards Warsaw instead of the former imperial capitals, a new network of national roads was gradually built up and a major seaport was opened on the Baltic Coast, so as to allow Polish exports and imports to bypass the politically charged Free City of Danzig.
The inter-war period heralded in a new era of Polish politics. Whilst Polish political activists had faced heavy censorship in the decades up until the First World War, the country now found itself trying to establish a new political tradition. For this reason, many exiled Polish activists, such as Ignacy Paderewski (who would later become Prime Minister) returned home to help; a significant number of them then went on to take key positions in the newly formed political and governmental structures. Tragedy struck in 1922 when Gabriel Narutowicz, inaugural holder of the Presidency, was assassinated at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw by painter and right-wing nationalist Eligiusz Niewiadomski.[53]
The 1926 May Coup of Józef Piłsudski turned rule of the Second Polish Republic over to the Sanacja movement. By the 1930s Poland had become increasingly authoritarian; a number of 'undesirable' political parties, such as the Polish Communists, had been banned and following Piłsudski's death, the regime, unable to appoint a new leader, began to show its inherent internal weaknesses and unwillingness to cooperate in any way with other political parties.
Main articles: History of Poland (1939–45), Invasion of Poland, Polish contribution to World War II and War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
Polish army's 7TP tanks during military maneuvers shortly before the Invasion of Poland, 1939
The beginning of World War II was marked by the Nazi German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September in violation of the Soviet–Polish Non-Aggression Pact. On 28 September 1939 Warsaw capitulated. As agreed earlier in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Poland was split into two occupied zones, one subdivided by Nazi Germany, while the other, including all of eastern Kresy fell under the control of the Soviet Union. In 1939–1941, the Soviets had deported hundreds of thousands of Poles out to the most distant parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviet NKVD secretly executed thousands of Polish prisoners of war (inter alia Katyn massacre) ahead of the Operation Barbarossa.[54]
Pilots of the 303 "Kościuszko" Polish Fighter Squadron during the Battle of Britain, October 1940
All in all, Poland made the fourth-largest troop contribution to the Allied war effort, after the Soviets, the British, and the Americans.[a] Polish troops fought under the command of both the Polish Government in Exile in the theatre of war west of Germany and under Soviet leadership in the theatre of war east of Germany. The Polish expeditionary corps, which was controlled by the exiled pre-war government based in London, played an important role in the Italian and North African Campaigns.[55][56] They are particularly well remembered for their conduct at the Battle of Monte Cassino, a conflict which culminated in the raising of a Polish flag over the ruins of the mountain-top abbey by the 12th Podolian Uhlans. The Polish forces in the theatre of war east of Germany were commanded by Lieutenant General Władysław Anders who had received his command from Prime Minister of the exiled government Władysław Sikorski. On the east of Germany, the Soviet-backed Polish 1st Army distinguished itself in the battles for Berlin and Warsaw,[57] although its actions in support of the latter have often been criticized.
Polish servicemen were also active in the theatres of naval and air warfare; during the Battle of Britain Polish squadrons such as the No. 303 "Kościuszko" fighter squadron[58] achieved considerable success, and by the end of the war the exiled Polish Air Forces could claim 769 confirmed kills. Meanwhile, the Polish Navy was active in the protection of convoys in the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean.[59]
Grave of a Polish resistance fighter killed during the Warsaw Uprising. The battle lasted 63 days, and resulted in the deaths of 200,000 civilians, 1944
In addition to the organised units of the 1st Army and the Forces in the Nazi-occupied Europe, the domestic underground resistance movement, the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, fought to free Poland from German occupation and establish an independent Polish state. The wartime resistance movement in Poland was one of the three largest resistance movements of the entire war,[b] and encompassed an unusually broad range of clandestine activities, which essentially functioned as an underground state complete with degree-awarding universities and a court system.[60] The resistance was, however, largely loyal to the exiled government and generally resented the idea of a communist Poland; for this reason, in the summer of 1944 they initiated Operation Tempest, of which the Warsaw Uprising that begun on 1 August 1944 was the best know operation.[61][62] The objective of the uprising was to drive the German occupiers from the city and help with the larger fight against Germany and the Axis powers, however secondary motives for the uprising sought to see Warsaw liberated before the Soviets could reach the capital, so as to underscore Polish sovereignty by empowering the Polish Underground State before the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation could assume control. However, a lack of available allied military aid and Stalin's reluctance to allow the 1st Army to help their fellow countrymen take the city, led to the uprising's failure and subsequent planned destruction of the city.
Map of the Holocaust in occupied Poland with deportation routes and massacre sites. Major ghettos marked with yellow stars. Nazi extermination camps marked with white skulls in black squares. The Curzon Line in 1941, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union marked in red
During the war, German forces under direct order from Adolf Hitler set up six major extermination camps, all of which operated in the heart of Poland. They included the notorious Treblinka and Auschwitz killing grounds. This allowed the Germans to transport the condemned Jews away from public eye in the Third Reich or across occupied Europe and – under the guise of resettlement – murder them in the General Government and in brand new Warthegau among other annexed areas. The Nazi crimes against the Polish nation claimed the lives of 2.7 to 2.9 million Polish Jews,[63] and 2.77 million ethnic Poles,[64] including Polish intelligentsia, doctors, lawyers, nobility, priests and numerous others. Since 3,5 million Jews lived in pre-war Poland, Jewish victims make up the largest percentage of all victims of the Nazis' extermination program. It is estimated that, of pre-war Poland's Jewry, approximately 90% were killed.[65] Throughout the occupation, many members of the Armia Krajowa, supported by the Polish government in exile, and millions of ordinary Poles – at great risk to themselves and their families – engaged in rescuing Jews from the Nazi Germans. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the largest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.[65][66] To date, 6,394 Poles have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel–more than any other nation.[66] Some estimates put the number of Poles involved in rescue efforts at up to 3 million, and credit Poles with sheltering up to 450,000 Jews.[65]
At the war's conclusion in 1945, Poland's borders were shifted westwards, resulting in considerable territorial lossess. Most of the Polish inhabitants of Kresy were expelled along the Curzon Line in accordance with Stalin's agreements.[67] The western border was moved to the Oder-Neisse line. As a result, Poland's territory was reduced by 20%, or 77,500 square kilometres (29,900 sq mi). The shift forced the migration of millions of other people, most of whom were Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews.[68] Of all the countries involved in the war, Poland lost the highest percentage of its citizens: over 6 million perished – nearly one-fifth of Poland's population — half of them Polish Jews.[12][13][14][15] Over 90% of deaths were non-military in nature. Population numbers did not recover until the 1970s. An estimated 600,000 Soviet soldiers died fighting Germans on Polish soil during World War II.[69]
Postwar communist Poland
Main articles: History of Poland (1945–1989), Polish People's Republic, History of Solidarity and Polish Round Table Agreement
At High Noon, 4 June 1989 – political poster featuring Gary Cooper to encourage votes for the Solidarity party in the 1989 elections
At the insistence of Joseph Stalin, the Yalta Conference sanctioned the formation of a new provisional pro-Communist coalition government in Moscow, which ignored the Polish government-in-exile based in London; a move which angered many Poles who considered it a betrayal by the Allies. In 1944, Stalin had made guarantees to Churchill and Roosevelt that he would maintain Poland's sovereignty and allow democratic elections to take place. However, upon achieving victory in 1945, the elections organized by the occupying Soviet authorities were falsified and were used to provide a veneer of 'legitimacy' for Soviet hegemony over Polish affairs. The Soviet Union instituted a new communist government in Poland, analogous to much of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. As elsewhere in Communist Europe the Soviet occupation of Poland met with armed resistance from the outset which continued into the fifties.
Despite widespread objections, the new Polish government accepted the Soviet annexation of the pre-war eastern regions of Poland[70] (in particular the cities of Wilno and Lwów) and agreed to the permanent garrisoning of Red Army units on Poland's territory. Military alignment within the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War came about as a direct result of this change in Poland's political culture and in the European scene came to characterise the full-fledged integration of Poland into the brotherhood of communist nations.
The People's Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) was officially proclaimed in 1952. In 1956 after the death of Bolesław Bierut, the régime of Władysław Gomułka became temporarily more liberal, freeing many people from prison and expanding some personal freedoms. A similar situation repeated itself in the 1970s under Edward Gierek, but most of the time persecution of anti-communist opposition groups persisted. Despite this, Poland was at the time considered to be one of the least oppressive states of the Soviet Bloc.[71]
Labour turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union "Solidarity" ("Solidarność"), which over time became a political force. Despite persecution and imposition of martial law in 1981, it eroded the dominance of the Polish United Workers' Party and by 1989 had triumphed in Poland's first partially free and democratic parliamentary elections since the end of the Second World War. Lech Wałęsa, a Solidarity candidate, eventually won the presidency in 1990. The Solidarity movement heralded the collapse of communist regimes and parties across Europe.
Present-day Poland
Main articles: History of Poland (1989–present) and 2004 enlargement of the European Union
Flags of Poland and the European Union; the country became a member of the community on 1 May 2004
A shock therapy programme, initiated by Leszek Balcerowicz in the early 1990s enabled the country to transform its socialist-style planned economy into a market economy. As with all other post-communist countries, Poland suffered temporary slumps in social and economic standards, but it became the first post-communist country to reach its pre-1989 GDP levels, which it achieved by 1995 largely thanks to its booming economy.[72][73]
Most visibly, there were numerous improvements in human rights, such as the freedom of speech, internet freedom (no censorship), civil liberties (1st class) and political rights (1st class), according to Freedom House. In 1991, Poland became a member of the Visegrád Group and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance in 1999 along with the Czech Republic and Hungary. Poles then voted to join the European Union in a referendum in June 2003, with Poland becoming a full member on 1 May 2004. Poland joined the Schengen Area in 2007, as a result of which, the country's borders with other member states of the European Union have been dismantled, allowing for full freedom of movement within most of the EU.[74] In contrast to this, a section of Poland's eastern border now comprises the external EU border with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. That border has become increasingly well protected, and has led in part to the coining of the phrase 'Fortress Europe', in reference to the seeming 'impossibility' of gaining entry to the EU for citizens of the former Soviet Union.
Candles and flowers on the Royal Route, Warsaw following the death of Poland's top government officials including President in a plane crash over Smolensk in Russia, 10 April 2010
Poland has been one of the most prominent voices of establishing a common European Armed Forces, with Poland's Premier along with Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Francois Hollande (collectively also part of Weimar Triangle) taking steps to negotiate such a deal, in hope of drastically reducing dependence on NATO and increasing readiness.[75] Poland has already built several commands of a common battle group with Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, with a total of 12,000 troops ready for deployment. Poland is seeking to build more battle groups with Lithuania and Ukraine. These battle groups have vowed to serve under the European Union, and not NATO.[76] Eurosceptics criticize such moves as further unnecessary integration and a new major step towards a federalized European Union under one government. Military integration is judged to be the most significant step after a monetary union.[citation needed]
On 10 April 2010, the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, along with 89 other high-ranking Polish officials died in a plane crash near Smolensk, Russia. The president's party were on their way to attend an annual service of commemoration for the victims of the Katyń massacre when the tragedy took place.
In 2011, the Presidency of the Council of the European Union responsible for the functioning of the Council was awarded to Poland. The same year parliamentary elections took place to both the Senate and the Sejm. They were won by the ruling Civic Platform. Poland joined European Space Agency in 2012, as well as organised the UEFA Euro 2012 (along with Ukraine). In 2013, Poland also became a member of the Development Assistance Committee. In 2014 the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, was elected President of the European Council.
Main article: Geography of Poland
Topographic map of Poland
Poland's territory extends across several geographical regions, between latitudes 49° and 55° N, and longitudes 14° and 25° E. In the north-west is the Baltic seacoast, which extends from the Bay of Pomerania to the Gulf of Gdańsk. This coast is marked by several spits, coastal lakes (former bays that have been cut off from the sea), and dunes. The largely straight coastline is indented by the Szczecin Lagoon, the Bay of Puck, and the Vistula Lagoon. The centre and parts of the north lie within the North European Plain.
Rising above these lowlands is a geographical region comprising the four hilly districts of moraines and moraine-dammed lakes formed during and after the Pleistocene ice age. These lake districts are the Pomeranian Lake District, the Greater Polish Lake District, the Kashubian Lake District, and the Masurian Lake District. The Masurian Lake District is the largest of the four and covers much of north-eastern Poland. The lake districts form part of the Baltic Ridge, a series of moraine belts along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea.
South of the Northern European Lowlands lie the regions of Lusatia, Silesia and Masovia, which are marked by broad ice-age river valleys. Farther south lies the Polish mountain region, including the Sudetes, the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, and the Carpathian Mountains, including the Beskids. The highest part of the Carpathians is the Tatra Mountains, along Poland's southern border.
Granite outcrop Silesian Rocks at Karkonosze in the Sudetes, south-western Poland
The geological structure of Poland has been shaped by the continental collision of Europe and Africa over the past 60 million years, on the one hand (and the other), by the Quaternary glaciations of northern Europe. Both processes shaped the Sudetes and the Carpathian Mountains. The moraine landscape of northern Poland contains soils made up mostly of sand or loam, while the ice age river valleys of the south often contain loess. The Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, the Pieniny, and the Western Tatras consist of limestone, while the High Tatras, the Beskids, and the Karkonosze are made up mainly of granite and basalts. The Polish Jura Chain is one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth.
Tatra Mountains in southern Poland, average around to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft) in elevation
Poland has 70 mountains over 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) in elevation, all in the Tatras. The Polish Tatras, which consist of the High Tatras and the Western Tatras, is the highest mountain group of Poland and of the entire Carpathian range. In the High Tatras lies Poland's highest point, the north-western summit of Rysy, 2,499 metres (8,199 ft) in elevation. At its foot lies the mountain lakes of Czarny Staw pod Rysami (Black Lake below Mount Rysy), and Morskie Oko (the Marine Eye).[77]
The second highest mountain group in Poland is the Beskids, whose highest peak is Babia Góra, at 1,725 metres (5,659 ft). The next highest mountain groups is the Karkonosze in the Sudetes, whose highest point is Śnieżka, at 1,603 metres (5,259 ft); Śnieżnik Mountains whose highest point is Śnieżnik, at 1,425 metres (4,675 ft).
Tourists also frequent the Bieszczady Mountains in the far southeast of Poland, whose highest point in Poland is Tarnica, with an elevation of 1,346 metres (4,416 ft), Gorce Mountains in Gorce National Park, whose highest point is Turbacz, with elevations 1,310 metres (4,298 ft), and the Pieniny in Pieniny National Park, whose highest point is Wysokie Skałki (Wysoka), with elevations 1,050 metres (3,445 ft). The lowest point in Poland – at 2 metres (6.6 ft) below sea level – is at Raczki Elbląskie, near Elbląg in the Vistula Delta.
Shifting sand dunes in Słowiński National Park located in northern Poland on the Baltic Sea coast. Driven by wind, the dunes slowly move at an annual speed of 3 to 10 metres (9.8 to 32.8 ft) per year
The only desert located in Poland stretches over the Zagłębie Dąbrowskie (the Coal Fields of Dąbrowa) region. It is called the Błędów Desert, located in the Silesian Voivodeship in southern Poland. It has a total area of 32 square kilometres (12 sq mi). It is one of only five natural deserts in Europe. But also, it is the warmest desert that appears at this latitude. Błędów Desert was created thousands of years ago by a melting glacier. The specific geological structure has been of big importance. The average thickness of the sand layer is about 40 metres (131 ft), with a maximum of 70 metres (230 ft), which made the fast and deep drainage very easy.
The Baltic Sea activity in Słowiński National Park created sand dunes which in the course of time separated the bay from the sea. As waves and wind carry sand inland the dunes slowly move, at a speed of 3 to 10 metres (9.8 to 32.8 ft) meters per year. Some dunes are quite high – up to 30 metres (98 ft). The highest peak of the park – Rowokol (115 metres or 377 feet above sea level) — is also an excellent observation point.
Main article: Rivers of Poland
A view of the Vistula River near the Royal Castle in Sandomierz. The river is the longest in Poland, flowing the entire length of the country for 1,047 kilometres (651 mi) from south to north
The longest rivers are the Vistula (Polish: Wisła), 1,047 kilometres (651 mi) long; the Oder (Polish: Odra) which forms part of Poland's western border, 854 kilometres (531 mi) long; its tributary, the Warta, 808 kilometres (502 mi) long; and the Bug, a tributary of the Vistula, 772 kilometres (480 mi) long. The Vistula and the Oder flow into the Baltic Sea, as do numerous smaller rivers in Pomerania.
The Łyna and the Angrapa flow by way of the Pregolya to the Baltic, and the Czarna Hańcza flows into the Baltic through the Neman. While the great majority of Poland's rivers drain into the Baltic Sea, Poland's Beskids are the source of some of the upper tributaries of the Orava, which flows via the Váh and the Danube to the Black Sea. The eastern Beskids are also the source of some streams that drain through the Dniester to the Black Sea.
Poland's rivers have been used since early times for navigation. The Vikings, for example, traveled up the Vistula and the Oder in their longships. In the Middle Ages and in early modern times, when the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was the breadbasket of Europe;[78] the shipment of grain and other agricultural products down the Vistula toward Gdańsk and onward to other parts of Europe took on great importance.[78]
Łebsko Lake is a coastal freshwater lagoon located in the Pomerania region of Poland
With almost ten thousand closed bodies of water covering more than 1 hectare (2.47 acres) each, Poland has one of the highest numbers of lakes in the world. In Europe, only Finland has a greater density of lakes.[79] The largest lakes, covering more than 100 square kilometres (39 sq mi), are Lake Śniardwy and Lake Mamry in Masuria, and Lake Łebsko and Lake Drawsko in Pomerania.
In addition to the lake districts in the north (in Masuria, Pomerania, Kashubia, Lubuskie, and Greater Poland), there is also a large number of mountain lakes in the Tatras, of which the Morskie Oko is the largest in area. The lake with the greatest depth—of more than 100 metres (328 ft)—is Lake Hańcza in the Wigry Lake District, east of Masuria in Podlaskie Voivodeship.
Kurtkowiec is an oligotrophic lake located in south-eastern Poland
Among the first lakes whose shores were settled are those in the Greater Polish Lake District. The stilt house settlement of Biskupin, occupied by more than one thousand residents, was founded before the 7th century BC by people of the Lusatian culture.
Lakes have always played an important role in Polish history and continue to be of great importance to today's modern Polish society. The ancestors of today's Poles, the Polanie, built their first fortresses on islands in these lakes. The legendary Prince Popiel ruled from Kruszwica tower erected on the Lake Gopło.[80] The first historically documented ruler of Poland, Duke Mieszko I, had his palace on an island in the Warta River in Poznań. Nowadays the Polish lakes provide a location for the pursuit of water sports such as yachting and wind-surfing.
The Polish Baltic coast is approximately 528 kilometres (328 mi) long and extends from Świnoujście on the islands of Usedom and Wolin in the west to Krynica Morska on the Vistula Spit in the east. For the most part, Poland has a smooth coastline, which has been shaped by the continual movement of sand by currents and winds. This continual erosion and deposition has formed cliffs, dunes, and spits, many of which have migrated landwards to close off former lagoons, such as Łebsko Lake in Słowiński National Park.
Baltic beaches of the Gdańsk Bay are one of Poland's most popular tourist destinations.[81] The Polish Baltic coast is approximately 528 kilometres (328 mi) long and extends from Wolin island in the west to Krynica Morska in the east
Prior to the end of the Second World War and subsequent change in national borders, Poland had only a very small coastline; this was situated at the end of the 'Polish Corridor', the only internationally recognised Polish territory which afforded the country access to the sea. However, after World War II, the redrawing of Poland's borders and resulting 'shift' of the country's borders left it with an expanded coastline, thus allowing for far greater access to the sea than was ever previously possible. The significance of this event, and importance of it to Poland's future as a major industrialised nation, was alluded to by the 1945 Wedding to the Sea.
The largest spits are Hel Peninsula and the Vistula Spit. The largest Polish Baltic island is Wolin. The largest sea harbours are Szczecin, Świnoujście, Gdańsk, Gdynia, Police and Kołobrzeg. The main coastal resorts are Świnoujście, Międzyzdroje, Kołobrzeg, Łeba, Sopot, Władysławowo and the Hel Peninsula.
Pieskowa Skała castle in Ojców National Park. The nature reserve is located in Małopolska region of Poland
Poland is the fourth most forested country in Europe. Forests cover about 30.5% of Poland's land area based on international standards.[82] Its overall percentage is still increasing. Forests of Poland is managed by the national program of reforestation (KPZL), aiming at an increase of forest-cover to 33% in 2050. The richness of Polish forest (per SoEF 2011 statistics) is more than twice as high as European average (with Germany and France at the top), containing 2.304 billion cubic metres of trees.[82] The largest forest complex in Poland is Lower Silesian Wilderness.
More than 1% of Poland's territory, 3,145 square kilometres (1,214 sq mi), is protected within 23 Polish national parks. Three more national parks are projected for Masuria, the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, and the eastern Beskids. In addition, wetlands along lakes and rivers in central Poland are legally protected, as are coastal areas in the north. There are over 120 areas designated as landscape parks, along with numerous nature reserves and other protected areas (e.g. Natura 2000).
Since Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, Polish agriculture has performed extremely well and the country has over two million private farms.[83][84] It is the leading producer in Europe of potatoes and rye (world's second largest in 1989),[51] the world's largest producer of triticale,[85] and one of the more important producers of barley, oats, sugar beets, flax, and fruits.[51] It is the European Union's fourth largest supplier of pigmeat after Germany, Spain and France.[86] The government continues debating further agricultural reform and pursuing the option of auctioning off large tracts of state-owned agricultural land.[51]
Białowieża Forest an ancient woodland in eastern Poland is now home to 800 wild wisent
Phytogeographically, Poland belongs to the Central European province of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Poland belongs to three Palearctic Ecoregions of the continental forest spanning Central and Northern European temperate broadleaf and mixed forest ecoregions as well as the Carpathian montane conifer forest.
Many animals that have since died out in other parts of Europe still survive in Poland, such as the wisent in the ancient woodland of the Białowieża Forest and in Podlaskie. Other such species include the brown bear in Białowieża, in the Tatras, and in the Beskids, the gray wolf and the Eurasian lynx in various forests, the moose in northern Poland, and the beaver in Masuria, Pomerania, and Podlaskie.
In the forests, one also encounters game animals, such as red deer, roe deer and wild boars. In eastern Poland there are a number of ancient woodlands, like Białowieża forest, that have never been cleared by people. There are also large forested areas in the mountains, Masuria, Pomerania, Lubusz Land and Lower Silesia.
A family of white storks. Poland is host to the largest white stork population in Europe[87]
Poland is the most important breeding ground for a variety of European migratory birds.[88] Out of all of the migratory birds who come to Europe for the summer, one quarter of the global population of White Storks (40,000 breeding pairs) live in Poland,[89] particularly in the lake districts and the wetlands along the Biebrza, the Narew, and the Warta, which are part of nature reserves or national parks.
The climate is mostly temperate throughout the country. The climate is oceanic in the north and west and becomes gradually warmer and continental towards the south and east. Summers are generally warm, with average temperatures between 18 and 30 °C (64.4 and 86.0 °F) depending on a region. Winters are rather cold, with average temperatures around 3 °C (37.4 °F) in the northwest and −6 °C (21 °F) in the northeast. Precipitation falls throughout the year, although, especially in the east; winter is drier than summer.[90]
The warmest region in Poland is Lower Silesia located in south-western Poland where temperatures in the summer average between 24 and 32 °C (75 and 90 °F) but can go as high as 34 to 39 °C (93.2 to 102.2 °F) on some days in the warmest month of July and August. The warmest cities in Poland are Tarnów, which is situated in Lesser Poland and Wrocław, which is located in Lower Silesian. The average temperatures in Wrocław are 20 °C (68 °F) in the summer and 0 °C (32.0 °F) in the winter, but Tarnów has the longest summer in all of Poland, which lasts for 115 days, from mid-May to mid-September. The coldest region of Poland is in the northeast in the Podlaskie Voivodeship near the border of Belarus and Lithuania. Usually the coldest city is Suwałki. The climate is affected by cold fronts which come from Scandinavia and Siberia. The average temperature in the winter in Podlaskie ranges from −6 to −4 °C (21 to 25 °F).
Main article: Politics of Poland
President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski
Poland is a democracy, with a president as a head of state, whose current constitution dates from 1997. Poland is a peaceful country. The government structure centers on the Council of Ministers, led by a prime minister. The president appoints the cabinet according to the proposals of the prime minister, typically from the majority coalition in the Sejm. The president is elected by popular vote every five years. The president is Bronisław Komorowski. Komorowski replaced President Lech Kaczyński following the latter's death in an 10 April 2010 air crash. Since 2007 Polish government has been formed by the Civic Platform party. The current prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, was appointed in 2014.
Polish voters elect a bicameral parliament consisting of a 460-member lower house (Sejm) and a 100-member Senate (Senat). The Sejm is elected under proportional representation according to the d'Hondt method, a method similar to that used in many parliamentary political systems. The Senat, on the other hand, is elected under the First-past-the-post voting method, with one senator being returned from each of the 100 constituencies.
A National Assembly sitting on 4 June 2014 in the Sejm's session chamber in Warsaw
With the exception of ethnic minority parties, only candidates of political parties receiving at least 5% of the total national vote can enter the Sejm. When sitting in joint session, members of the Sejm and Senat form the National Assembly (the Zgromadzenie Narodowe). The National Assembly is formed on three occasions: when a new President takes the oath of office; when an indictment against the President of the Republic is brought to the State Tribunal (Trybunał Stanu); and when a president's permanent incapacity to exercise his duties due to the state of his health is declared. To date only the first instance has occurred.
The judicial branch plays an important role in decision-making. Its major institutions include the Supreme Court of the Republic of Poland (Sąd Najwyższy); the Supreme Administrative Court of the Republic of Poland (Naczelny Sąd Administracyjny); the Constitutional Tribunal of the Republic of Poland (Trybunał Konstytucyjny); and the State Tribunal of the Republic of Poland (Trybunał Stanu). On the approval of the Senat, the Sejm also appoints the ombudsman or the Commissioner for Civil Rights Protection (Rzecznik Praw Obywatelskich) for a five-year term. The ombudsman has the duty of guarding the observance and implementation of the rights and liberties of Polish citizens and residents, of the law and of principles of community life and social justice.
Main article: Law of Poland
The Supreme Court building in Warsaw
The Constitution of Poland is the supreme law in contemporary Poland, and the Polish legal system is based on the principle of civil rights, governed by the code of Civil Law. Historically, the most famous Polish legal act is the Constitution of 3 May 1791. Historian Norman Davies describes it as the first of its kind in Europe.[91] The Constitution was instituted as a Government Act (Polish: Ustawa rządowa) and then adopted on 3 May 1791 by the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Primarily, it was designed to redress long-standing political defects of the federative Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and its Golden Liberty. Previously only the Henrican articles signed by each of Poland's elected kings could perform the function of a set of basic laws.
The Constitution of 3 May 1791 has been called the first of its kind in Europe.[91]
The new Constitution introduced political equality between townspeople and the nobility (szlachta), and placed the peasants under the protection of the government. The Constitution abolished pernicious parliamentary institutions such as the liberum veto, which at one time had placed the sejm at the mercy of any deputy who might choose, or be bribed by an interest or foreign power, to have rescinded all the legislation that had been passed by that sejm. The 3 May Constitution sought to supplant the existing anarchy fostered by some of the country's reactionary magnates, with a more egalitarian and democratic constitutional monarchy. The adoption of the constitution was treated as a threat by Poland's neighbours.[92] In response Prussia, Austria and Russia formed an anti-Polish alliance and over the next decade collaborated with one another to partition their weaker neighbour and destroyed the Polish state. In the words of two of its co-authors, Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kołłątaj, the constitution represented "the last will and testament of the expiring Fatherland." Despite this, its text influenced many later democratic movements across the globe.[93] In Poland, freedom of expression is guaranteed by the Article 25 (section I. The Republic) and Article 54 (section II. The Freedoms, Rights and Obligations of Persons and Citizens) of the Constitution of Poland.
Narcyza Żmichowska at the Historical Museum of Kraków, precursor of feminism in Poland
Feminism in Poland started in 1800s in the age of the foreign Partitions. Poland's precursor of feminism, Narcyza Żmichowska, founded a group of Suffragettes in 1842. Prior to the last Partition in 1795, tax-paying females were allowed to take part in political life. Since 1918, following the return to independence, all women could vote. Poland was the 15th (12th sovereign) country to introduce universal women's suffrage. Nevertheless, there is a number of issues concerning women in modern-day Poland such as the abortion rights (formally allowed only in special circumstances) and the "glass ceiling".[94][95] Homosexuality in Poland was confirmed as legal in 1932. Poland recognises gender change.[96] A transgender Pole Anna Grodzka has become a Member of Parliament (MP) in the 2011 parliamentary elections, and is the only transgender MP in the world presently,[97] and one of the first ever in European history.[98] Also in 2011, Robert Biedroń was elected to the Sejm as its first openly gay member of parliament.[99]
LGBT Pride Parade, 2009
March for Life and Family, 2007
A 2010 article in Rzeczpospolita reported that in a 2008 study three-quarters of Poles were against gay marriage or the adoption of children by gay couples in accordance with the Catholic teachings.[100] The same study revealed that 66% of respondents were opposed to Pride parade as the demonstration of a way of life, and 69% believed that gay people should not show their sexual orientation in public.[101] Poland belongs to the group of 'Tier 1'[102] countries in Trafficking in Persons Report. Trafficking women is 'illegal and rare' (top results worldwide).[103]
Poland's current constitution was adopted by the National Assembly of Poland on 2 April 1997, approved by a national referendum on 25 May 1997, and came into effect on 17 October 1997. It guarantees a multi-party state, the freedoms of religion, speech and assembly, and specifically casts off many Communist ideals to create a 'free market economic system'. It requires public officials to pursue ecologically sound public policy and acknowledges the inviolability of the home, the right to form trade unions, and to strike, whilst at the same time prohibiting the practices of forced medical experimentation, torture and corporal punishment.
Main article: Foreign relations of Poland
In recent years, Poland has extended its responsibilities and position in European and international affairs, supporting and establishing friendly relations with other European nations and a large number of 'developing' countries.
Poland is a member of the European Union, NATO, the UN, the World Trade Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Economic Area, International Energy Agency, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, International Atomic Energy Agency, European Space Agency, G6, Council of the Baltic Sea States, Visegrád Group, Weimar Triangle and Schengen Agreement.
In 1994, Poland became an associate member of the European Union (EU) and its defensive arm, the Western European Union (WEU), having submitted preliminary documentation for full membership in 1996, it formally joined the European Union in May 2004, along with the other members of the Visegrád group. In 1996, Poland achieved full OECD membership, and at the 1997 Madrid Summit was invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in the first wave of policy enlargement finally becoming a full member of NATO in March 1999.
President elect of the European Council Donald Tusk arrives with former President and Nobel Peace Prize Lech Wałęsa for the EPP party congress in Warsaw
As changes since the fall of Communism in 1989 have redrawn the map of central Europe, Poland has tried to forge strong and mutually beneficial relationships with its seven new neighbours, this has notably included signing 'friendship treaties' to replace links severed by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The Poles have forged special relationships with Lithuania and particularly Ukraine,[104] with whom they co-hosted the UEFA Euro 2012 football tournament, in an effort to firmly anchor these countries within the Western world and provide them with an alternative to aligning themselves with the Russian Federation respectively. Despite many positive developments in the region, Poland has found itself in a position where it must seek to defend the rights of ethnic Poles living in the former Soviet Union; this is particularly true of Belarus, where in 2005 the Lukashenko regime launched a campaign against the Polish ethnic minority.[105]
Poland is the sixth most populous member state of the European Union and, ever since joining in 2004, has pursued policies to increase its role in European affairs. Poland has a grand total of 51 representatives in the European Parliament and in addition to this, since 14 July 2009, former Prime Minister of Poland Jerzy Buzek, has been President of the European Parliament.[106]
Main article: Administrative divisions of Poland
Poland's current voivodeships (provinces) are largely based on the country's historic regions, whereas those of the past two decades (to 1998) had been centred on and named for individual cities. The new units range in area from less than 10,000 square kilometres (3,900 sq mi) for Opole Voivodeship to more than 35,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi) for Masovian Voivodeship. Administrative authority at voivodeship level is shared between a government-appointed voivode (governor), an elected regional assembly (sejmik) and an executive elected by that assembly.
The voivodeships are subdivided into powiats (often referred to in English as counties), and these are further divided into gminas (also known as communes or municipalities). Major cities normally have the status of both gmina and powiat. Poland has 16 voivodeships, 379 powiats (including 65 cities with powiat status), and 2,478 gminas.
Warmian-Masurian
Kuyavian-
Lower Silesian
Masovian
Subcarpathian
Voivodeship
Capital city or cities
in Polish
Greater Poland Wielkopolskie Poznań
Kuyavian-Pomeranian Kujawsko-Pomorskie Bydgoszcz / Toruń
Lesser Poland Małopolskie Kraków
Łódź Łódzkie Łódź
Lower Silesian Dolnośląskie Wrocław
Lublin Lubelskie Lublin
Lubusz Lubuskie Gorzów Wielkopolski / Zielona Góra
Masovian Mazowieckie Warsaw
Opole Opolskie Opole
Podlaskie Podlaskie Białystok
Pomeranian Pomorskie Gdańsk
Silesian Śląskie Katowice
Subcarpathian Podkarpackie Rzeszów
(Holy Cross) Świętokrzyskie Kielce
Warmian-Masurian Warmińsko-Mazurskie Olsztyn
West Pomeranian Zachodniopomorskie Szczecin
Main article: Polish Armed Forces
Polish Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon; a single-engine multirole fighter aircraft
The Polish armed forces are composed of four branches: Land Forces (Wojska Lądowe), Navy (Marynarka Wojenna), Air Force (Siły Powietrzne) and Special Forces (Wojska Specjalne). The military is subordinate to the Minister for National Defence, however its sole commander in chief is the President of the Republic.
The Polish army consists of 65,000 active personnel, whilst the navy and air force respectively employ 14,300 and 26,126 servicemen and women. The Polish Navy is one of the larger navies on the Baltic Sea and is mostly involved in Baltic operations such as search and rescue provision for the section of the Baltic under Polish command, as well as hydrographic measurements and research; however, the Polish Navy played a more international role as part of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, providing logistical support for the United States Navy. The current position of the Polish Air Force is much the same; it has routinely taken part in Baltic Air Policing assignments, but otherwise, with the exception of a number of units serving in Afghanistan, has seen no active combat since the end of the Second World War. In 2003, the F-16C Block 52 was chosen as the new general multi-role fighter for the air force, the first deliveries taking place in November 2006; it is expected (2010) that the Polish Air Force will create three squadrons of F-16s, which will all be fully operational by 2012.
Crew of a KTO Rosomak armored personnel carrier during a NATO exercise at the Military Training Area near Drawsko Pomorskie
The most important mission of the armed forces is the defence of Polish territorial integrity and Polish interests abroad.[107] Poland's national security goal is to further integrate with NATO and European defence, economic, and political institutions through the modernisation and reorganisation of its military.[107] The armed forces is being re-organised according to NATO standards, and as of 1 January 2010, the transition to an entirely contract-based military has been completed. During the previous period, men were obliged to undertake compulsory military service. In the final stage of validity of this type of military service (since 2007 until the amendment of the law on conscription in 2008) the duration of compulsory service amounted nine months.[108]
Super Seasprite ship-based helicopter flying by the frigate ORP Generał Kazimierz Pułaski during an exercise in the Baltic Sea
Polish military doctrine reflects the same defensive nature as that of its NATO partners. From 1953 to 2009 Poland was a large contributor to various United Nations peacekeeping missions.[107][109] The Polish Armed Forces took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, deploying 2,500 soldiers in the south of that country and commanding the 17-nation Multinational force in Iraq.
The military was temporarily, but severely, affected by the loss of many of its top commanders in the wake the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash near Smolensk, Russia, which killed all 96 passengers and crew, including, among others, the Chief of the Polish Army's General Staff Franciszek Gągor and Polish Air Force commanding general Andrzej Błasik. They were en route from Warsaw to attend an event to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, whose site is commemorated approximately 19 km (12 mi) west of Smolensk.[110][111]
Law enforcement and emergency services
Main articles: Law enforcement in Poland and Emergency medical services in Poland
Poland has a highly developed system of law enforcement with a long history of effective policing by the State Police Service. The structure of law enforcement agencies within Poland is a multi-tier one, with the State Police providing criminal-investigative services, Municipal Police serving to maintain public order and a number of other specialised agencies, such as the Polish Border Guard, acting to fulfil their assigned missions. In addition to these state services, private security companies are also common, although they possess no powers assigned to state agencies, such as, for example, the power to make an arrest or detain a suspect.
Mounted Police officers in the city of Chorzów
Emergency services in Poland consist of the Emergency Medical Services, Search and Rescue units of the Polish Armed Forces and State Fire Service. Emergency medical services in Poland are, unlike other services, provided for by local and regional government.
Since joining the European Union all of Poland's emergency services have been undergoing major restructuring and have, in the process, acquired large amounts of new equipment and staff.[112] All emergency services personnel are now uniformed and can be easily recognised thanks to a number of innovative design features, such as reflective paint and printing, present throughout their service dress and vehicle liveries. In addition to this, in an effort to comply with EU standards and safety regulations, the police and other agencies have been steadily replacing and modernising their fleets of vehicles; this has left them with thousands of new automobiles, as well as many new aircraft, boats and helicopters.[113]
Main article: Economy of Poland
Warsaw is the financial and economic hub of Poland
Poland's high-income economy[114] is considered to be one of the healthiest of the post-Communist countries and is one of the fastest growing within the EU.[115] Having a strong domestic market, low private debt, flexible currency, and not being dependent on a single export sector, Poland is the only European economy to have avoided the late-2000s recession.[116][117] Since the fall of the communist government, Poland has pursued a policy of liberalising the economy. It is an example of the transition from a centrally planned to a primarily market-based economy. In 2009 Poland had the highest GDP growth in the EU - 1.6%.[118][119][120] The country's most successful exports include machinery, furniture, foods and meats,[121] motor boats, light planes, hardwood products, casual clothing, shoes and cosmetics.[122] Germany is by far the biggest importer of Poland's exports as of 2013.[123]
Poland is a member of the Schengen Area and the EU single market
The privatization of small and medium state-owned companies and a liberal law on establishing new firms have allowed the development of the private sector. As a consequence, consumer rights organizations have also appeared. Restructuring and privatisation of "sensitive sectors" such as coal, steel, rail transport and energy has been continuing since 1990. Between 2007 and 2010, the government plans to float twenty public companies on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, including parts of the coal industry. The biggest privatisations have been the sale of the national telecoms firm Telekomunikacja Polska to France Télécom in 2000, and an issue of 30% of the shares in Poland's largest bank, PKO Bank Polski, on the Polish stockmarket in 2004.
The Polish banking market is the largest in East Central and Eastern European region,[124] with 32.3 branches per 100,000 adults.[125][126] The banks are the largest and most developed sector of the country's financial markets. They are regulated by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. During the transformation to a market-oriented economy, the government privatized some of them, recapitalized the rest, and introduced legal reforms that made the sector competitive. This has attracted a significant number of strategic foreign investors (ICFI). Poland's banking sector has approximately 5 national banks, a network of nearly 600 cooperative banks and 18 branches of foreign-owned banks. In addition, foreign investors have controlling stakes in nearly 40 commercial banks, which make up 68% of the banking capital.[124]
Port of Gdynia founded in 1926 is a major container seaport and shipyard located on the Bay of Gdańsk
Poland has a large number of private farms in its agricultural sector, with the potential to become a leading producer of food in the European Union. The biggest money-makers abroad include smoked and fresh fish, fine chocolate, and dairy products, meats and specialty breads,[127] with the exchange rate conducive to export growth.[128] Food exports amounted to 62 billion zloty in 2011, increasing by 17% from 2010.[129] Structural reforms in health care, education, the pension system, and state administration have resulted in larger-than-expected fiscal pressures. Warsaw leads Central Europe in foreign investment.[130] GDP growth had been strong and steady from 1993 to 2000 with only a short slowdown from 2001 to 2002.
The economy had growth of 3.7% annually in 2003, a rise from 1.4% annually in 2002. In 2004, GDP growth equaled 5.4%, in 2005 3.3% and in 2006 6.2%.[131] According to Eurostat data, Polish PPS GDP per capita stood at 67% of the EU average in 2012.[132]
In terms of the clarity, efficiency and neutrality of Poland's legal framework for multinational investors, a 2012 report by the World Economic Forum concluded that the ongoing foreign business disputes may "have damaged Poland's reputation as an attractive location for FDI" from other countries by creating the impression of "substandard reputation for maintaining an efficient and neutral framework to settle business disputes."[133] Ernst and Young's 2010 European attractiveness survey reported that Poland saw a 52% decrease in FDI foreign job creation and a 42% decrease in number of FDI projects since 2008.[134]
Average salaries in the enterprise sector in December 2010 were 3,848 PLN (1,012 euro or 1,374 US dollars)[135] and growing sharply.[136] Salaries vary between the regions: the median wage in the capital city Warsaw was 4,603 PLN (1,177 euro or 1,680 US dollars) while in Kielce it was 3,083 PLN (788 euro or 1125 US dollars). There is a wide distribution of salaries among the various districts of Poland. They range from 2,020 PLN (517 euro or 737 US dollars) in Kępno County, which is located in Greater Poland Voivodeship to 5,616 (1,436 euro or 2,050 US dollars) in Lubin County, which lies in Lower Silesian Voivodeship.[137]
Solaris Bus & Coach is a family-owned bus, coach and tram manufacturer near Poznań
According to a Credit Suisse report, Poles are the second wealthiest (after Czechs) of the Central European peoples.[138][139][140][141][142] Even though since World War II Poland is almost an ethnically homogeneous country, the number of foreign investors among immigrants is growing every year.[142][143]
Since the opening of the labor market in the European Union, Poland experienced a mass emigration of over 2.3 million abroad, mainly due to higher wages offered abroad, and due to the raise in levels of unemployment following the global Great Recession of 2008.[144][145][146] The out migration has increased the average wages for the workers who remained in Poland, in particular for those with intermediate level skills.[147]
Commodities produced in Poland include: electronics, cars (Arrinera, Leopard), buses (Autosan, Solaris, Solbus), helicopters (PZL Świdnik), transport equipment, locomotives, planes (PZL Mielec), ships, military engineering (including tanks, SPAAG systems), medicines (Polpharma, Polfa), food, clothes, glass, pottery (Bolesławiec), chemical products and others.
Warsaw Stock Exchange is one of Central Europe's largest exchanges by market capitalization
Poland is recognised as a regional economic power within East-Central Europe, with nearly 40 percent of the 500 biggest companies in the region (by revenues) as well as a high globalisation rate.[148] Poland was the only member of the EU to avoid the recession of the late 2000s, a testament to the Polish economy's stability.[116] The country's most competitive firms are components of the WIG30 which is traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
Well known Polish brands include, among others, PKO BP, PKN Orlen, PGE, PZU, PGNiG, Tauron Group, Lotos Group, KGHM Polska Miedź, Asseco, Plus, Play, PLL LOT, Poczta Polska, PKP, Biedronka, and TVP.[149]
Poland is recognised as having an economy with development potential, overtaking the Netherlands in mid-2010 to become Europe's sixth largest economy.[150] Foreign Direct Investment in Poland has remained steady ever since the country's re-democratisation following the Round Table Agreement in 1989. However, problems still exist. It is believed that progress of privatization was uneven across sectors due to emergence of interest groups supporting government's push for the reforms based on feasibility rather than efficiency, at the cost of Poland's remaining sectors in need of development and modernisation, such as the extractive industries.[151]
The list includes the largest companies by turnover in 2011, but does not include major banks or insurance companies:
(Thou.
PLN)
1. PKN Orlen SA oil and gas Płock 79 037 121 2 396 447 4,445
2. Lotos Group SA oil and gas Gdańsk 29 258 539 584 878 5,168
3. PGE SA energy Warsaw 28 111 354 6 165 394 44,317
4. Jerónimo Martins retail Kostrzyn 25 285 407 N/A 36,419
5. PGNiG SA oil and gas Warsaw 23 003 534 1 711 787 33,071
6. Tauron Group SA energy Katowice 20 755 222 1 565 936 26,710
7. KGHM Polska Miedź SA mining Lubin 20 097 392 13 653 597 18,578
8. Metro Group Poland retail Warsaw 17 200 000 N/A 22,556
9. Fiat Auto Poland SA automotive Bielsko-Biała 16 513 651 83 919 5,303
10. Orange Polska telecommunications Warsaw 14 922 000 1 785 000 23,805
Main articles: Tourism in Poland, List of World Heritage Sites of Poland, List of Historic Monuments (Poland) and Seven Wonders of Poland
The city of Zamość is a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Poland experienced an increase in the number of tourists after joining the European Union.[153] Tourism in Poland contributes to the country's overall economy and makes up a relatively large proportion of the country's service market.[154]
Kraków was the former capital and a relic of Poland's Golden Age of Renaissance. It contains the place of coronation of most Polish kings. It was named a European Capital of Culture by the European Union for the year 2000. The city of Wrocław, designated as a European Capital of Culture in 2016,[155] is one of the oldest in Poland. During World War II, Wrocław was a fortress (Festung Breslau), and was heavily damaged in the nearly three months long Siege of Breslau. The city has been restored and attracts several million tourists every year. The Poland's capital, Warsaw went through Old Town reconstruction after its wartime destruction and it offers a variety of attractions. Other cities include Gdańsk, Poznań, Szczecin, Lublin and Toruń. There is the historic site of the Auschwitz German concentration camp near Oświęcim.
Table Mountains are a popular destination for hikers form across the country. The mountains are a 42 kilometre (26 mi) long range which forms part of the Central Sudetes in south-western Poland
Poland's main tourist offerings include qualified tourism such as skiing, sailing and mountain hiking, as well as agrotourism, sightseeing walks, countryside excursions, as well as holiday and business trips. It is the 17th most visited country in the world by foreign tourists, as ranked by World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in 2012.[156] Tourist destinations include Baltic Sea coast in the north of Poland, Masurian Lake District and Białowieża Forest in the east, the southern Karkonosze, Table Mountains, Tatra Mountains, in which has the highest peak of Polish (Rysy) and the famous Orla Perć; Pieniny as well as Bieszczady Mountains in the extreme south-east.[157] There are over 100 castles in the country, many along the popular Trail of the Eagles' Nests.[158]
Main articles: Energy in Poland and Coal mining in Poland
Żerań power station in Warsaw
The electricity generation sector in Poland is largely fossil-fuel–based. Many power plants nationwide use Poland's position as a major European exporter of coal to their advantage by continuing to use coal as the primary raw material in production of their energy. In 2013 Poland scored 48 out of 129 states in the Energy Sustainability Index.[159] The three largest Polish coal mining firms (Węglokoks, Kompania Węglowa and JSW) extract around 100 million tonnes of coal annually. All three of these companies are key constituents of the Warsaw Stock Exchange's lead economic indexes.
Renewable forms of energy account for a small[quantify] proportion of Poland's full energy generation capacity.[160] However, the national government has set targets for the development of renewable energy sources in Poland which should see the portion of power produced by renewable resources climb to 7.5% by 2010 and 15% by 2020. This is to be achieved mainly through the construction of wind farms and a number of hydroelectric stations.
Poland is thought to have around 164,800,000,000 m³ of proven natural gas reserves and around 96,380,000 barrels of proven oil reserves. These reserves are exploited by energy supply companies such as PKN Orlen ("the only Polish company listed in the Fortune Global 500"). However, the small amounts of fossil fuels naturally occurring in Poland is insufficient to satisfy the full energy consumption needs of the population. Therefore the country is a net importer of oil and natural gas.
Main article: Transport in Poland
A1, A4 motorways and national road 44 junction near Gliwice
Transport in Poland is provided by means of rail, road, marine shipping and air travel. Positioned in Central Europe with an eastern and a part of northeastern border compromising the longest land border of the Schengen Area with the rest of Northern and Central Europe, Poland has long been, and remains a key country through which imports to the European Union and exports from it pass.
Since joining the EU in May 2004, Poland has invested large amounts of money into the modernisation of its transport networks. The country now has a developing expressways network composed of motorways such as the A1, A2, A4, A8, A18 and express roads such as the S1, S3, S5, S7, S8. In addition to these newly built roads, many local and regional roads are being rebuilt as part of a national programme to rebuild all roads in Poland.[161]
PKP Intercity Pendolino at the Main Train Station in Wrocław
Polish authorities maintain a program of improving operating speeds across the entire Polish rail network. Polish State Railways (PKP) are using new rolling stock, such as Siemens Taurus ES64U4 capable theoretically of speed equal 200 km/h (124 mph). As of December 2014 Poland began implementing high–speed rail connecting major Polish cities. The Polish government has revealed that it intends to connect all major cities to a future high-speed rail network by 2020.[162] PKP Pendolino ETR 610 new test train set the record for the fastest train in the history of Poland, reaching 293 kilometres per hour (182 mph) on 24 November 2013. Old top speed was 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph) since 1985. Most intercity rail operations in Poland are operated by PKP Intercity whilst regional trains are run by a number of operators, the largest of which is Przewozy Regionalne.
14 December 2014 Polish State Railways started passenger service trains PKP Pendolino ED250 operating 200 km/h speed on 80 km line Olszamowice-Zawiercie (part of railway line called CMK from Warsaw to Cracow). Currently its the line with highest railway speed in Poland. Poland its the first country from the 2004 enlargement of the European Union called A10 countries which started passenger railway speed, scheduled traffic over 160 km/h (200 km/h).
LOT Polish Airlines is the world's 12th oldest air carrier still in operation, originally established on 1 January 1929
The air and maritime transport markets in Poland are largely well developed. Poland has a number of international airports; the largest of which is Warsaw Chopin Airport, the primary global hub for LOT Polish Airlines. LOT is 28th largest European airline and one of the world's 12th oldest still in operation, established in 1929, from a merge of Aerolloyd (1922) and Aero (1925). Other major airports with international connections in almost every region are for example John Paul II International Airport Kraków–Balice and Wrocław–Copernicus Airport.
Seaports exist all along Poland's Baltic coast, with most freight operations using Szczecin, Świnoujście, Gdynia and Gdańsk as well as Police, Kołobrzeg and Elbląg as their base. Passenger ferries link Poland with Scandinavia all year round; these services are provided from Gdańsk and Świnoujście by Polferries, Stena Line from Gdynia and Unity Line from the Port of Świnoujście.
Main article: Polish science and technology
Staszic Palace in Warsaw is home to the Polish Academy of Sciences
According to Frost & Sullivan's Country Industry Forecast the country is becoming an interesting location for research and development investments.[163] Multinational companies such as: ABB, Delphi, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Hewlett–Packard, IBM, Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens and Samsung have set up research and development centres in Poland.[164] Over 40 research and development centers and 4,500 researchers make Poland the biggest research and development hub in Central and Eastern Europe.[141][163] Companies chose Poland because of the availability of highly qualified labour force, presence of universities, support of authorities, and the largest market in Central Europe.[163]
World renowned chemist Maria Skłodowska-
Curie and two time Nobel Prize recipient, established Poland's Radium Institute in 1925[165]
Today Poland's tertiary education institutions; traditional universities (found in its major cities), as well as technical, medical, and economic institutions, employ around 61,000 researchers and members of staff. There are around 300 research and development institutes, with about 10,000 researchers. In total, there are around 91,000 scientists in Poland today. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries many Polish scientists worked abroad; one of the most important of these exiles was Maria Skłodowska-Curie, a physicist and chemist who lived much of her life in France. In the first half of the 20th century, Poland was a flourishing centre of mathematics. Outstanding Polish mathematicians formed the Lwów School of Mathematics (with Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus, Stanisław Ulam) and Warsaw School of Mathematics (with Alfred Tarski, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Wacław Sierpiński). The events of World War II pushed many of them into exile. Such was the case of Benoît Mandelbrot, whose family left Poland when he was still a child. An alumnus of the Warsaw School of Mathematics was Antoni Zygmund, one of the shapers of 20th-century mathematical analysis.
According to a KPMG report[166] 80% of Poland's current investors are content with their choice and willing to reinvest. In 2006, Intel decided to double the number of employees in its research and development centre in Gdańsk.[164]
Main article: Telecommunications in Poland
Warsaw headquarters of the telecommunications provider Orange Polska
The share of the telecom sector in the GDP is 4.4% (end of 2000 figure), compared to 2.5% in 1996. The coverage increased from 78 users per 1,000 inhabitants in 1989 to 282 in 2000. The value of the telecommunication market is zl 38.2bn (2006), and it grew by 12.4% in 2007 PMR.[167] The coverage mobile cellular is over 1000 users per 1000 people (2007). Telephones—mobile cellular: 38.7 million (Onet.pl & GUS Report, 2007), telephones—main lines in use: 12.5 million (Telecom Team Report, 2005).
With regard to internet access, the most popular ADSL services for home users in Poland are Neostrada provided by TPSA, and Net24 provided by Netia. Business users as well as some home users use Internet DSL TP also offered by TPSA. According to Eurostat, OECD and others, Internet access in Poland is amidst the most expensive in Europe. This is mostly caused by the lack of competitiveness. New operators, such as Dialog and GTS Energis are making their own provider lines and offer more attractive and cheaper service. The Polish Office of Electronical Communication is forcing the TPSA to rent 51% of their ADSL lines to other ISPs for 60% lower prices. This move will affect the prices of DSL in Poland. In 2012, the process of converting to Digital terrestrial television started, to be compatible with the rest of Europe.[citation needed]
Main Post Office in Bydgoszcz. Poland's postal service can trace its roots to the year 1558
The public postal service in Poland is operated by Poczta Polska (the Polish Post). It was created on 18 October 1558, when King Zygmunt August established a permanent postal route from Kraków to Venice. The service was dissolved during the foreign partitions. After regaining independence in 1918, Poland saw the rapid development of the postal system as new services were introduced including money transfers, payment of pensions, delivery of magazines, and air mail. During wars and national uprisings communication was provided mainly through the military authorities. Many important events in the history of Poland involved the postal service, like the heroic defence of the Polish Post Office in Gdańsk in 1939, and the participation of the Polish Scouts' Postal Service in the Warsaw Uprising. Nowadays the service is a modern state-owned company that provides a number of standard and express delivery as well as home-delivery services. Digital technologies are made available through the Internet platform Envelo.[168][169]
Main article: Demographics of Poland
Population of Poland, 1961-2010; data of FAO, number of inhabitants in millions
Poland, with 38,544,513 inhabitants, has the eighth-largest population in Europe and the sixth-largest in the European Union. It has a population density of 122 inhabitants per square kilometer (328 per square mile).
Poland historically contained many languages, cultures and religions on its soil. The country had a particularly large Jewish population prior to World War II, when the Nazi Germany's regime led to The Holocaust. There were an estimated 3 million Jews before the war; 300,000 after. The outcome of the war, particularly the shift of Poland's borders to the area between the Curzon Line and the Oder-Neisse line, coupled with post-war expulsion of minorities, significantly reduced the country's ethnic diversity. Over 7 million Germans fled or were expelled from the Polish side of the Oder-Neisse boundary.[170]
According to the 2002 census, 36,983,700 people, or 96.74% of the population, consider themselves Polish, while 471,500 (1.23%) declared another nationality, and 774,900 (2.03%) did not declare any nationality. The largest minority nationalities and ethnic groups in Poland are Silesians (173,153 according to the census), Germans (152,897 according to the census, 92% of whom live in Opole Voivodeship and Silesian Voivodeship), Belarusians (c. 49,000), Ukrainians (c. 30,000), Lithuanians, Russians, Roma, Jews, Lemkos, Slovaks, Czechs, and Lipka Tatars.[171] Among foreign citizens, the Vietnamese are the largest ethnic group, followed by Greeks and Armenians.
The Polish language, part of the West Slavic branch of the Slavic languages, functions as the official language of Poland. Until recent decades Russian was commonly learned as a second language but has been replaced by English and German as the most common second languages studied and spoken.[172]
In recent years, Poland's population has decreased due to an increase in emigration and a sharp decline in the birth rate. Since Poland's accession to the European Union, a significant number of Poles have emigrated, primarily to the United Kingdom, Germany and Republic of Ireland in search of better work opportunities abroad.[173]
Polish minorities are still present in the neighboring countries of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, as well as in other countries (see Poles for population numbers). Altogether, the number of ethnic Poles living abroad is estimated to be around 20 million.[174] The largest number of Poles outside of Poland can be found in the United States.[175]
The total fertility rate (TFR) in Poland was estimated in 2013 at 1.32 children born/woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1.[176]
Largest cities or towns of Poland
Central Statistical Office population report for 2013
Kraków 1 Warsaw Masovian 1,715,518 11 Białystok Podlaskie 294,921
2 Kraków Lesser Poland 760,700 12 Gdynia Pomeranian 248,726
3 Łódź Łódź 718,960 13 Częstochowa Silesian 234,472
4 Wrocław Lower Silesian 631,188 14 Radom Masovian 219,703
5 Poznań Greater Poland 550,742 15 Sosnowiec Silesian 213,513
6 Gdańsk Pomeranian 460,427 16 Toruń Kuyavian-Pomeranian 204 299
7 Szczecin West Pomeranian 408,913 17 Kielce Świętokrzyskie 200,938
8 Bydgoszcz Kuyavian-Pomeranian 361,254 18 Gliwice Silesian 186,210
9 Lublin Lublin 347,678 19 Rzeszów Subcarpathian 182,028
10 Katowice Silesian 307,233 20 Zabrze Silesian 179,452
Main article: Languages of Poland
Dolina Jadwigi — a bilingual (Polish-Kashubian) road sign with the village name
The oldest printed text in the Polish language – Statuta Synodalia Episcoporum Wratislaviensis printed in 1475 in Wrocław by Kasper Elyan
Main article: Polish language
Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and the native language of the Poles. It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages.[177] Polish is the official language of Poland, but it is also used throughout the world by Polish minorities in other countries. It is one of the official languages of the European Union. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet, which has 9 additions to the letters of the basic Latin script (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż).
The deaf communities use Polish Sign Language belonging to the German family of Sign Languages.
Minority languages
According to the Act of 6 January 2005 on national and ethnic minorities and on the regional languages,[178] 16 other languages have officially recognized status of minority languages: 1 regional language, 10 languages of 9 national minorities (the minorities that have their own independent state elsewhere) and 5 languages of 4 ethnic minorities spoken by the members of minorities not having a separate state elsewhere). Jewish and Romani minorities each have 2 minority languages recognized.
Languages having the status of national minority's language
Jewish languages: Yiddish and Hebrew
Languages having the status of ethnic minority's language
Rusyn, called Lemko in Poland - in Polish: "łemkowski"
Romani languages: official recognition is granted to the languages of two groups: Polska Roma and Bergitka Roma.[179]
Tatar, called Tartar by the Act
The official recognition gives to the representatives of the minority certain rights (under certain conditions prescribed by the laws): of education in their language, of having the language established as the secondary administrative language or help language in their municipalities, of financial support of the state to the promotion of their language and culture etc.
Main article: Religion in Poland
Religion in Poland according to 2011 survey of 91,2% of citizens
Roman Catholic (87.5%)
Opting out of answer (7.1%)
Non believer (2.4%)
Not stated (1.6%)
Orthodox (0.7%)
Other religions (1%)
Jasna Góra Monastery is a major pilgrimage site for Poland's many Catholics
From its beginnings, Poland has contributed substantially to the development of religious freedom. Since the country adopted Christianity in 966, it was also welcoming to other religions through a series of laws: Statute of Kalisz (1264), Warsaw Confederation (1573). However, the Polish king Władysław II Jagiełło was pressed by the Catholic Church to issue the Edict of Wieluń (1424), outlawing early Protestant Hussitism. Polish theological thought include theological movements, such as Calvinist Polish Brethren and a number of other Protestant groups, as well as atheists, such as ex-Jesuit philosopher Kazimierz Łyszczyński, one of the first atheist thinkers in Europe.
Until World War II Poland was a religiously diverse society, in which substantial Jewish, Christian Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic groups coexisted.[180] In the Second Polish Republic, Roman Catholic was the dominant religion, declared by about 65% of the Polish citizens, followed by other Christian denominations, and about 3% of Judaism believers.[181] As a result of the Holocaust and the post–World War II flight and expulsion of German and Ukrainian populations, Poland has become overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. In 2007, 88.4% of the population belonged to the Catholic Church.[182] Though rates of religious observance are lower, at 52%[183] or 51% of the Polish Catholics,[184] Poland remains one of the most devoutly religious countries in Europe.[185]
From 16 October 1978 until his death on 2 April 2005 Karol Józef Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II), a Polish native, reigned as Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He has been the only Slavic and Polish Pope to date, and was the first non-Italian Pope since Dutch Pope Adrian VI in 1522.[186] Additionally he is credited with having played a significant role in hastening the downfall of communism in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe; he is famously quoted as having, at the height of communism in 1979, told Poles "not be afraid", later praying: "Let your Spirit descend and change the image of the land... this land".[187][188]
Holy Spirit Orthodox Church in Białystok
Religious minorities include Polish Orthodox (about 506,800),[8] various Protestants (about 150,000),[8] Jehovah's Witnesses (126,827),[8] Eastern Catholics, Mariavites, Polish Catholics, Jews, and Muslims (including the Tatars of Białystok). Members of Protestant churches include about 77,500 in the largest Evangelical-Augsburg Church,[8] and a similar number in smaller Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. There are also a few thousand pagans some of whom are members of such officially registered churches as the Native Polish Church, (Rodzimy Kościół Polski).
Kraków's Tempel Synagogue is one of the largest in Poland
Freedom of religion is now guaranteed by the 1989 statute of the Polish Constitution,[189] enabling the emergence of additional denominations.[190] The Concordat between the Holy See and Poland guarantees the teaching of religion in state[191] schools. According to a 2007 survey, 72% of respondents were not opposed to religious instruction in public schools; alternative courses in ethics are available only in one percent of the entire public educational system.[192]
Famous sites of Christian pilgrimage in Poland include the Monastery of Jasna Góra in the southern Polish city of Częstochowa, as well as the Family home of John Paul II in Wadowice just outside of Kraków.
Main article: Health in Poland
Main clinical building of the Gdańsk University Medical Centre in Wrzeszcz
Poland's healthcare system is based on an all-inclusive insurance system. State subsidised healthcare is available to all Polish citizens who are covered by this general health insurance program. However, it is not compulsory to be treated in a state-run hospital as a number of private medical complexes do exist nationwide.[193]
All medical service providers and hospitals in Poland are subordinate to the Polish Ministry of Health, which provides oversight and scrutiny of general medical practice as well as being responsible for the day-to-day administration of the healthcare system. In addition to these roles, the ministry is also tasked with the maintenance of standards of hygiene and patient-care.
Hospitals in Poland are organised according to the regional administrative structure, resultantly most towns have their own hospital (Szpital Miejski).[citation needed] Larger and more specialised medical complexes tend only to be found in larger cities, with some even more specialised units located only in the capital, Warsaw. However, all voivodeships have their own general hospital (most have more than one), all of which are obliged to have a trauma centre; these types of hospital, which are able to deal with almost all medical problems are called 'regional hospitals' (Szpital Wojewódzki). The last category of hospital in Poland is that of specialised medical centres, an example of which would be the Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology, Poland's leading, and most highly specialised centre for the research and treatment of cancer.
In 2012, the Polish health-care industry experienced a transformation. Hospitals were given priority for refurbishment where necessary.[194] As a result of this process, many hospitals were updated with the latest medical equipment.
In 2013, the average life expectancy at birth was 76.45 years (72.53 years infant male/80.62 years infant female).[195]
Main article: Education in Poland
The wearing of traditional academic dress is an important and traditional feature of Polish educational ceremonies
The Commission of National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej) established in 1773, was the world's first state ministry of education.[196][197] The education of Polish society was a goal of rulers as early as the 12th century. Poland became one of the most educated countries in Europe. The library catalogue of the Cathedral Chapter of Kraków dating back to 1110 shows that in the early 12th-century Polish intellectuals had access to European literature. The Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364 by King Casimir III in Kraków was blessed by Pope Urban V. It is the world's 19th oldest university.
The modern-day Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranks Poland's educational system in its PISA 2012 as the 10th best in the world,[198] scoring higher than the OECD average.[199]
Elementary and secondary
See also: List of schools in Poland
Education in Poland starts at the age of five or six (with the particular age chosen by the parents) for the '0' class (Kindergarten) and six or seven years in the 1st class of primary school (Polish szkoła podstawowa). It is compulsory that children participate in one year of formal education before entering the 1st class at no later than 7 years of age. Corporal punishment of children in schools is officially prohibited since 1783 (before the partitions) and criminalised since 2010 (in schools as well as at home).[47]
Density of collegiate-level institutions of higher education
At the end of the 6th class when students are 13, students take a compulsory exam that will determine their acceptance and transition into a specific lower secondary school (gimnazjum, pronounced gheem-nah-sium) (Middle School/Junior High). They will attend this school for three years during classes 7, 8, and 9. Students then take another compulsory exam to determine the upper secondary level school they will attend. There are several alternatives, the most common being the three years in a liceum or four years in a technikum. Both end with a maturity examination (matura, quite similar to French baccalauréat), and may be followed by several forms of upper education, leading to licencjat or inżynier (the Polish Bologna Process first cycle qualification), magister (second cycle qualification) and eventually doktor (third cycle qualification).[200]
Main article: Universities in Poland
There are 500 university-level institutions for the pursuit of higher education in Poland,[201] one of the largest number in Europe. The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the first Polish university, was founded in 1364 by King Casimir III, as the 19th oldest university in the world, established in 1364.
There are 18 fully accredited traditional universities in Poland. There are twenty technical universities, nine independent medical universities, five universities for the study of economics, nine agricultural academies, three pedagogical universities, a theological academy and three maritime service universities.
There are a number of higher educational institutions dedicated to the teaching of the arts. Amongst these are the seven higher state academies of music. There are a number of private educational institutions and four national military academies (two for the army and one each for the other branches of service).
University of Warsaw [202]
Kraków Jagiellonian University[202]
Poznań Mickiewicz University[202]
University of Wrocław [202]
Main article: Culture of Poland
Tadeusz Kościuszko was a veteran and hero of both Polish and American wars of independence during the years 1765–1794[203]
The culture of Poland is closely connected with its intricate 1,000-year history[204] Its unique character developed as a result of its geography at the confluence of European cultures. With origins in the culture of the Proto-Slavs, over time Polish culture has been profoundly influenced by its interweaving ties with the Germanic, Latinate and Byzantine worlds as well as in continual dialog with the many other ethnic groups and minorities living in Poland.[205] The people of Poland have traditionally been seen as hospitable to artists from abroad and eager to follow cultural and artistic trends popular in other countries. In the 19th and 20th centuries the Polish focus on cultural advancement often took precedence over political and economic activity. These factors have contributed to the versatile nature of Polish art, with all its complex nuances.[205]
Mikołaj Kopernik the 16th century Polish astronomer who formulated the heliocentric model of the solar system that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at its center; first published in 1543
The list of famous Poles begins in earnest with the polymath Mikołaj Kopernik,[206] who studied at the Jagiellonian University founded in 1364 by Casimir the Great from proceeds of his Wieliczka Salt Mine.[207] Poland is the birthplace of many distinguished personalities among whom are: Fryderyk Chopin,[208][209] Maria Skłodowska Curie,[210] Tadeusz Kościuszko, Kazimierz Pułaski, Józef Piłsudski, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła). Great Polish painter Jan Matejko devoted his monumental art to the most significant historical events on Polish lands, along with the playwright, painter and poet Stanisław Wyspiański. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) was an example of a Polish avant-garde philosopher and author of aesthetic theories. Polish Joseph Conrad was a notable author of works in English.[211] Many world famous Polish movie directors include Academy Awards winners Roman Polański, Andrzej Wajda, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Janusz Kamiński, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and
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Search All NYTimes.com
N.Y. / Region
LAURA TYSON; Candidates for Obama's Inner Circle
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
BEING CONSIDERED FOR A top economic post, possibly in a return tour as director of the National Economic Council.
WOULD BRING TO THE JOB Experience in the Clinton administration, where she was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, the first woman to hold the post, and then director of the economic council. Before coming to Washington in 1993, she was an academic economist with an expertise in trade policy, international competitiveness and high technology.
IS LINKED TO MR. OBAMA BY A late-in-the-campaign conversion to his cause, having supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton until she dropped out of the race.
IN HER OWN WORDS The economic expansion in the Bush years ''has been marked by the fact that employment growth has been extremely weak. It's marked by the fact that this is the first economic expansion on record -- on record -- where the family incomes of working families have declined in real terms.'' (on Fox News.)
USED TO WORK AS A professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an expert in trade and international competitiveness. After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, she was dean of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, from 1998 to 2001, and then served four years as dean of the London School of Business.
CARRIES AS BAGGAGE Surprisingly little. She came through four years of the Clinton administration without becoming the target of great public criticism or praise.
BIOGRAPHY Born June 28, 1947, in New Jersey ... graduated from Smith College summa cum laude and earned her Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 ... taught economics at Princeton for three years, then shifted to Berkeley in 1977, where she is now a professor at the Haas School of Business ... married to the writer Erik Tarloff ...they have one son. LOUIS UCHITELLE
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Armando Tello
On February 21, 2019, "Bolero" appeared on Artstation's trending page.
Here are a few images I took at the Blender Conference 2018 back in October.
I will be attending the 2018 Blender Conference in Amsterdam!
On September 12th, 2018, Some of my renders were featured on Blendernation.
On September 9th 2018, "Sweaty-toothed Madman" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On August 31st 2018, "I Render EXR" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On August 14th 2018, "Sweaty-toothed madman" appeared on Artstation's trending page.
On August 14th 2018, "I Render EXR" appeared on Artstation's trending page.
On August 6th 2018, "Uhh... Sorry?" appeared on Artstation's trending page.
On June 26th, 2018, "Carnavalito" was included in Allegorithmic's Official Gallery.
On April 6th 2018, "Lost Art" and "Carnavalito" were featured in Reynante Martinez's Cycles Material Vault 2018 Render Showcase
On December 7th 2017, "Carnavalito" was awarded Poliigon's "Render of the Month"
On November 29th 2017, "Carnavalito" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On November 26th 2017, "Carnavalito" was trending on Artstation's trending page.
On November 11th 2017, "Off He Goes" was trending on Artstation's trending page.
On October 25th 2017, "Mother" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On October 13th 2017, "Bothain" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On September 7th 2017, "Accomplish Anything" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On September 3rd 2017, "Sunday Morning" was trending on Artstation's trending page.
On July 2nd, 2017, "Come Fly With Me" was trending on Artstation's trending page.
On June 18th, 2018, "Barber Ann" was included in Allegorithmic's Official Gallery.
On June 13th, 2017, "Lost Art" was trending on Artstation's trending page.
On May 30th, 2017, Some of my renders were featured on Blendernation.
On May 30th, 2017, "Lost Art" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On May 25th, 2017, "Barber Ann" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 20th, 2017, "Pulling Strings" was included in Allegorithmic's Official Gallery.
On March 30th, 2017, "Like A Record" was featured on Blendernation.
On March 23rd, 2017, "Dusty Wishes" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 22nd, 2017, "Walk With Me" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 22nd, 2017, "Gimme Shelter" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 21st, 2017, "Like A Record" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 20th, 2017, "Pulling Strings" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
On March 20th, 2017, "Crush" was featured on Allegorithmic's Twitter feed.
All works © Armando Tello 2018. Please do not reproduce without the expressed written consent from Armando Tello
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Hall-of-Famer Dryden Wants Action Taken to Stop Increase in Concussions
National Hockey League star and hall-of-famer Ken Dryden was famous for his time with the Montreal Canadiens. But now the six-time Stanley Cup champion is famous for something else: standing up against head trauma in the sport of hockey.
Dryden recognizes that awareness is critical for stopping the increased numbers of brain injuries in contact sports. That was partially what prompted him to write his book, “Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey.”
Dryden today focuses on how the hockey league has responded to concussions and the consequences those have on players. He firmly believes that the NHL failed to act decisively in these situations, and they could have done more to prevent other players from suffering long-term brain disorders as a result.
The NY Times wrote a piece focusing on Dryden’s latest work, stating that his book focuses on the career of Montador. Montador was a journeyman defenseman who played for six National Hockey League teams. His career tragically ended from concussions, and it was on record that he suffered at least seven during his career.
After the numerous incidents, Montador started to struggle with addictions and he died at only 35 years old in 2015. During a post-mortem autopsy, it was found that he had the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is a degenerative brain disease notorious for affecting hockey and football players.
In his book, Dryden discusses his history in hockey, including how the game failed to adapt equipment, tactics, and to evolve safety rules regarding head trauma. He believes that the NHL needs to remove all hits to the head, and the only person who could make that happen is NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
Dryden has met privately with the head of the NHL to discuss his feelings about head trauma and how they are treated, as well as the future of the sport. He does feel that the NHL might implement some changes to improve the safety of those in the sport, but nothing has happened just yet – and might not for several years.
Not the End for Montador’s Family
Currently, Steve Montador’s family is suing the NHL. In their suit, they allege that the league failed to protect him from CTE and failed to warn players about the effects of their repeated concussions.
Dryden states that Montador died thinking that the issues he suffered were his fault, and he would never know that it was caused by the repeated trauma he endured during his career.
Montador had experienced the symptoms that those with head injuries experience, including memory loss, anxiety and depression, focusing issues, inability to make decisions, and being unable to put things together critically. It affected his quality of life, and it made it hard for him to focus once he was not on the ice and needed to be out in the real world.
The NHL is under scrutiny for how they treat head traumas after multiple NHL players were found to suffer from CTE or repeated head trauma at the time of their death. This reason is why Dryden feels that an official call to change is the only way to get the NHL to act and take matters seriously.
Even if the concussions are accidental, the NHL owes players a duty to protect them and warn them about getting back onto the ice if they have already suffered a concussion. Furthermore, the NHL needs to step up their screening process and ensure that they are not letting players return before they are physically ready to do so.
Game Mechanics Partly to Blame
Dryden says one of the biggest culprits is that the game has changed dramatically from what it was 60 years ago. Right now, the speed and intensity are different. Players are going viciously after the puck at full speed, and the collisions are more violent amongst players. The fights have also grown in violence, and in some instances, the fights are almost encouraged for spectator enjoyment.
Unlike football, there is not a clear-cut path for hockey to cut down on these types of injuries. Also, Dryden fears that getting players on board for the changes required to cut down on these types of injuries will be problematic – and they may experience resistance. However, the league needs to implement stricter rules and consider gear changes to protect those who play it.
How Players Are Treated Is Equally to Blame for the Number of CTE Cases Present Today
In Dryden’s book, he focuses on the experiences Montador had with physicians and reflects on his journal to help tell his story.
In one instance, he talks about how there was an injury in January 2012 at a Blackhawks game against Detroit. Steve had gone to see a physician, Dr. Terry – a physician on the team’s staff – after he was hit in the face at the game. He told the doctor how he had felt as though his consciousness was altered, and that he was hazy.
The doctor did tests and said that the SCAT test was routine, even though Steve could not pass the test where he had to remember three words. Terry noted that his effect, balance, and cranial nerves were considered intact and normal at the time of the examination. Therefore, he was shipped back into the system to play another game.
Two days later, Steve had received an examination by a neuropsychological physician as part of the NHL Concussion Program. He told the doctor about his symptoms as he had with the team doctor. This physician referred to Steve as a “poor historian regarding his concussive history.” The doctor went over his symptoms and discussed with Steve the risks of repeated head trauma. However, it was noted that he knew the risk and was comfortable with the risk of returning to the game. Therefore, Steve was cleared to play that night.
A month later he was on the injured reserve list – but for an upper-body injury. Three weeks later, Steve was still complaining of symptoms from his concussion, but he decided to get a second opinion from that of Dr. Terry. This time, he sought the attention of Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher at the Michigan NeuroSport Clinic in Ann Arbor. He reviewed past physician notes, symptoms, and injuries of Montador.
Throughout the book, you see a history of Steve visiting physicians with symptoms present then gone, then more injuries, then symptoms, then less symptoms. His journal shows entries that he would start but never finish. However, he was still labeled as “not disabled” by the team doctor.
In his career, 35 games after his first head injury and 23 games after his fourth head trauma, he finally was taken out.
Unfortunately, all of the office visits before never caught the fact that Steve was suffering from repeated trauma because he could not recall suffering head trauma – a common symptom of a concussion. By allowing him to continue playing, even though the player reported symptoms that correlate with a TBI, the physicians only increased the likelihood of further damage – and in Steve Montador’s case, the likelihood he would develop CTE.
What Is CTE and Why Is It Serious for Athletes of All Ages?
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is the term used by physicians to describe a degenerative brain disease typically caused by repeated head trauma. CTE cannot be diagnosed via CT or MRI scan; instead, it is only diagnosed via autopsy. Therefore, most victims with CTE are diagnosed with other conditions, such as Alzheimer’s.
CTE is rare for most Americans. However, if you play in a contact sport such as hockey or football, it is not unusual at all. Those who play these sports are at higher risk for developing CTE, especially if they continue to play and suffer repeated blows to the head.
Today, CTE is controversial, primarily due to the policy changes it has enacted in some of America’s more popular sports.
Unfortunately, once CTE happens, there is no cure. A victim will continue to degrade, and CTE may eventually cause them to lose their life.
Symptoms of CTE
Once you understand the common signs and symptoms of CTE, you can better understand why it is misdiagnosed for other degenerative disorders.
Just some of the possible symptoms include:
Inability to think cognitively
Short-term memory losses
Depression or suffering from apathy
Impulsive behavior
Erratic behavior
Inability to plan or carry out tasks
Unstable emotions and emotional outbursts
Suicidal thoughts or behaviors
Language and speech difficulty
Motor and balance issues
Inability to swallow
Sense of smell problems
Dementia – including early onset dementia
Do You Have CTE from Your Sport? Speak with an Attorney Now?
Today, leagues are more than aware of the risks of repeated trauma. Therefore, they have an obligation to their players to reduce the number of injuries and take measures to prevent repeated concussions from being allowed.
If you played a professional sport such as hockey or football, and now you are suffering from CTE or you are suspected to have CTE, you may be entitled to compensation. Currently, these leagues have funds set aside to cover lawsuits stemming from CTE diagnosis, and you can access funds for your medical expenses, lost wages, and the permanent strain it has caused on your life.
CTE is a serious, debilitating disease. Once it starts, there is no cure. Doctors may prescribe medications to help manage symptoms, but in the end, most patients will suffer from a decrease in their quality of life – and many lose years that they could have had with loved ones.
To get started, schedule a consultation with an attorney who has experience with these types of cases.
The attorneys at Berkowitz Hanna can help. Contact our firm today to schedule a no-obligation case evaluation. Call or contact us online to get started now.
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Science —
Sometimes science is scary: drug-resistant plague
A multiple drug-resistant strain of plague has the same drug resistant genes …
Jonathan M. Gitlin - Mar 21, 2007 5:06 pm UTC
Every so often, when scanning the journals, you come across a paper that chills the blood. The last such time was when the data comparing H5N1, the avian flu strain that is spreading across the globe, with H1N1, the 1918 pandemic strain that killed as many as 50 million people, came out. This time around it's a paper published in PLoS ONE from a multinational group of authors. The paper in question concerns the emergence of a multiple drug-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague.
The drug-resistant Y. pestis was isolated from a patient in Madagascar in 1995 and was discovered to contain a self-transmissible plasmid that contained genes that conferred resistance to many of the antibiotics that are used to treat plague. Plasmids are small circular loops of DNA that carry genes that can be passed between bacteria to confer new traits. Highly similar plasmids have been detected in E. coli and Salmonella isolated from food samples in the US.
It is suggested that the gene transfer might have occurred when a multi-drug-resistant strain of E. coli or Salmonella was present along with Y. pestis in a host such as a flea. This has worrying implications for regions where plague remains endemic. Asia, Africa and the US southwest; all of these regions have the potential for natural transmission of drug resistance between common pathogens and Y. pestis exist.
The development of new antibiotics to combat the emergence of drug resistance is a high priority, but a novel antibiotic is never going to help a company's bottom line in the way that a blockbuster ulcer drug will. The idea of a drug-resistant plague being unleashed on a world with no drugs in the pipeline to combat it doesn't really bear thinking about.
Jonathan M. Gitlin Jonathan is the automotive editor at Ars Technica, covering all things car-related. Jonathan lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Email jonathan.gitlin@arstechnica.com // Twitter @drgitlin
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EVERYTHING OLD IS NEWS AGAIN! #14 FORGIVENESS…BURT BACHARACH… SUMMER AND PATRIOTIC MUSIC VIDEOS!
LAST YEAR WHEN I NEEDED A SPECIAL GRAPHIC FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY I CALLED MY FRIEND DON ORIOLO, WHO DRAWS FELIX THE CAT, TO SEE IF HE HAD ANYTHING ON HAND THAT I COULD USE. HE SAID HE DIDN’T, BUT IN THE NEXT FEW HOURS HE PAINTED THE ABOVE PIECE FOR ME AND EMAILED IT TO ME IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAY…THEN A FEW WEEKS LATER HE GAVE ME THE ORIGINAL ARTWORK!!!
THANK YOU AGAIN, MAY YOU AND FELIX HAVE A SAFE AND SANE 4th of JULY! http://felixthecat.com
CONGRATULATIONS ON THE NEW FELIX THE CAT STORE! https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/282609388491382/
SONGWRITER SPOTLIGHT
Since the early 60′s, Burt Bacharach has been one of the most innovative and influencial figures in popular music. His unique melodies and signature rythyms also made him one of the most imitated musicians of all times. With various lyricists, he racked up an early array of hits that included, “Tower Of Strength”, “Baby It’s You”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, “Any Day Now”, “Only Love Can Break A Heart”, “Blue On Blue”, “Anyone Who Had A Heart” and “Walk On By”.
I always felt a thrill just to be in his presence! I would see him at a party or a music business function and go over and introduce myself. This happened so often that after about the fifth or sixth time I did it, he stopped me, smiled and said, “I know…I know you’re Artie Wayne!” This not only made me feel good, but I felt validated!
He was not only a musical role model, but a personal one as well. He was probably one of the coolest people I’ve ever known, with his sunglasses on top of his premature white hair he always seemed to be dressed for a tennis game or a polo match! I also noticed all of the beautiful women that would fawn over him and it made me realize that you didn’t have to be a Rock Star to get that kind of attention!
In 1963, after I had my first hit as a songwriter and producer, “Meet Me At Midnight Mary” ( Raleigh/ Wayne) with Joey Powers, I called up Burt to see if he had any songs for the follow-up. I met him in his office at Famous music, in the Brill Building and he played me a new song he and Hal David had written, “Message To Martha” (which later became a smash in the UK by Adam Faith and a hit in the US by Dionne Warwick, re-titled, “Message To Michael”)
I loved the song, but I thought it was a bit too complex for Joey Power’s simple folk musical direction we were taking. I felt really weird turning down the song, but Burt was cool and said don’t worry about it. A few months later, I ran into him on my first trip to London, where he was the musical director on Marlena Dietrich’s concert tour, we had a drink and laughed about my embarrasment over turning down one of his songs.
The next time I saw him was in 1965, I was signed to Scepter records publishing company, as a songwriter and producer. I was encouraged to use the studio as often as I wanted for overdubbing and making demos of my songs to help break-in the studio. I produced or co-produced The Shirelles , The Kingsmen and the Guess Who, there which made the owner, Florence Greenberg, more confident in her new facility. At that point, she offered Burt Bacharach and Hal David, a chance to try her new, improved studio out.
I remember Burt and Hal had trouble mixing Dionne Warwick’s, “Are You There With Another Girl” at the original studio where they cut the track, and they decided to try out Scepter. I remember being in my office the day of the “Great New York City Blackout “…when the lights all over our building were dimming then getting brighter! Burt and Hal, after mixing for hours, ran out of the studio screaming, ” What the Hell’s going on ? We almost had it…We almost had the mix! Then machine started slowing down then stared speeding up!”
Tempers cooled, when we looked out the window and saw lights in the entire city dim…then go black! Florence’s son Stanley, who was head of A+R, as well as being totally blind from birth, yelled out, “Don’t worry, I’ll get us all out of here…JUST FOLLOW ME!”
About 20 of us, with Stanley leading the pack, managed to get down several flights of stairs, in total darkness, safely and without incident. It was an event that I’m sure none of us will never forget!
As Patti Dahlstrom and I spoke a few days ago about the power and need for forgiveness in our personal lives and in the world at large, I thought it might be time to bring this concept to Artie Wayne on the Web. Patti assisted me in gathering a beginning to this conversation. I welcome you thoughts and contributions to a 2nd edition on Forgiveness. Perhaps you have a personal or favorite story or spiritual quote about forgiveness in your life. I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps it will become a regular column here to help support each other in remembering this humbling behavior.
Patti:
I am very blessed to know these men quoted here, Mick Brown and Colin Tipping. They are both English, brilliant, talented authors of many books. Their spiritual curiosity has led them down fascinating paths. Asking for input on forgiveness, they graciously complied with a story and an understanding of this extremely profound act, so necessary in this world. LInks are provided, if you are interested in more information about the work of these men.
From Mick Brown:
When Tibetans escape from Tibet into India, to escape the Chinese oppression in their country, the first thing they always do is make their way to Dharamsala, to be in the presence of the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama tells the story of one elderly monk who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for a number of years, and been subjected to all manner of indignities and torture, including having electric cattle prods pushed in his mouth.
You must have had many fears, the Dalai Lama said to the monk.
He replied. “My greatest fear was that I would lose my compassion for the Chinese.”
English author and journalist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Brown_(journalist)
Artie:
THERE ARE TIMES IN OUR LIVES WHEN WE MUST LET GO OF PAINFUL MEMORIES AND EXPERIENCES THAT HAVE BEEN HOLDING US BACK. HERE IS A EASY WAY TO GET STARTED TO MOVE FORWARD AGAIN… THROUGH COLIN TIPPING’S RADICAL FORGIVENESS.
RADICAL FORGIVENESS
If you harbor a grievance that you want rid of quickly and easily, or you’re holding onto some anger about something that’s giving you a lot of pain then Radical Forgiveness is what you need. It really works and the results are amazing. Unlike conventional forgiveness which is difficult and takes forever, Radical Forgiveness is easy and fast acting. The tools simply dissolve the pain and leave you feeling peaceful and happy. The long-term benefits of Radical Forgiveness are better health, more energy, improved relationships, more prosperity, greater happiness, a lot more peace in your life, and so on.
To give you a little bit of background as to how Radical Forgiveness evolved, in the early 90s I was a therapist working with cancer patients. I needed to find a way to help them release the toxic emotions they had buried deep down in their subconscious minds that may have contributed to the formation of their disease process. This obviously called for forgiveness but we knew that conventional forgiveness took too long and was far too difficult. We recognized that it needed a form of forgiveness that was quick, easy to do,
In a nutshell Radical Forgiveness asks us to be open to the idea that, without exception, everything that happens to us in life is all part of a divine plan and meant to happen the way it does. In that sense, from the spiritual standpoint, there is nothing to forgive. Just being open to this idea is enough. Your own Spiritual Intelligence does the rest. By expressing your willingness to entertain this possibility you shift the energy around the story of what happened and releases it from your body. You don’t even have to know how it works. The tools and processes it provides do it all for you.
Colin Tipping is the author of “Radical Forgiveness, A Revolutionary 5 Stage Process for Finding Peace in Any Situation” and many other books.
His Website is www.colintipping.com.
As part of my dissertation research for a Professional Writing Masters Degree from a London University in 2009, I interviewed an Anglican Priest in St. John’s Wood.
This is part of that interview.
Patti Dahlstrom
Forgiving is hard. Speaking to Father Anders, a priest at the St. John’s Wood Anglican Church in London, I asked him what forgiveness is and why it is so difficult to do. “I‘ve gone round and round on this,” he said, “still I think forgiveness is when there is some kind of letting go inside yourself of a negative hold that a past betrayal has upon you; in forgiveness a past event ceases to have a hold on you.”
When I stated that people feel justified in their anger, Father Anders replied, “I know they do because they find their identity in their anger. That anger is reinforcing their sense of self. But they are not free; they are enslaved by that anger. Being released from that clutch so you are free is what you see in Jesus. He is incredibly free in Himself because He won’t let those resentments catch hold of him.”
It is their justification that is the tricky part. If someone has done something in word or deed to consciously hurt us, then we feel we have the “right” to be angry. Yes, but what does being “right” get one?
The minute people say, “I’m victimized” then one takes oneself out of all the bounty that is available. “You put yourself in a place that’s hard for redemption to happen, in a place in relation to evil in the world. That is what God does. God doesn’t protect, He redeems,” Father Anders revealed. Every time we think of the wrong done to us, we reinforce the pain; we re-victimize ourselves again and again turning one slight into multiple slights. And the more we replay that tape of angry thought, the worse we feel, the deeper we drive the pain, pushing it further away from the redemption we need, the freedom we seek.
We all need to forgive for our sakes, for their sakes, and for the very quality of life that is lived when love overcomes anger and hurt. When we forgive, we release the weight of the wrong. We don’t have to carry that slight, however great or small, anymore. We lay down our burden at the throne of forgiveness. We feel better. We are better.
Being right is a lonely place to be. As long as love is more important than being right, forgiveness will find a way and lead us out of those dark moods of ego and into the welcome light of the spirit, where no one is alone.
The world is full of people. But only a handful of humans. Which one are you? ~ Lakota Proverb
MY FRIEND AND FELLOW ARCHIVIST RONNIE ALLEN JUST EMAILED ME THIS ABOUT HIS UPDATED WEBSITE!
Artie,
Okay …. now you are the first to know!
I am sending this message to you before I inform those on my mailing list.
This is, of course, about an enhancement to the Jersey Girls Sing website.
The Jersey Girls (Denise and Bernadette) and I have just posted our re-designed “Gone But Not Forgotten Page.”
We are very proud of it and are determined to make it one of the best pages of its type on the Internet.
We intend to be very diligent in updating it (as needs arise) on a daily basis. Please note that — as I type this — we do not yet have any 2012 names in the section at the bottom (the non-musical section called “Special Remembrances.”) We will be adding names to that section shortly, probably as early as a few hours from now.
Our webage has some very special features. By clicking a couple of command buttons, you can instantaly sort the material three different ways: chronologically (by recency of passing, which is the default), by first name and by last name.
And yes, your Buddy Saltzman page is what I personally chose chose for his link. That was a no-brainer. Your page is awesome. The fact that there is no Wikipedia page on Buddy is a disgrace but, even if there were, I would still have used your page anyway!
Please feel free to spread the word about the page. Denise and Bernadette and I will appreciate that so very much.
NOW HERE ARE THE TOP TWENTY ALL-TIME SUMMER MUSIC VIDEO HITS! INCLUDING YOUR CHOICES!
CALIFORNIA GIRLS THE BEACH BOYS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a49McFOFp0
HERE COMES SUMMER by JERRY KELLER http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox1cFEwaHic
SUM-SUM-SUMMERTIME THE JAIMIES http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeNAgBFmJpM
HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME by SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ahhmiuyko0
SUMMERTIME by BILLY STEWART http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8OD56xaY_Y&feature=related
SUMMER IN THE CITY by THE LOVIN’ SPOONFUL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc0F-fw3tkY
THEME FROM “SUMMER PLACE” by PERCY FAITH http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt7SPm7N6D8
BY THE LETTERMEN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCJBuq1mYBw
IF YOU GOTTA’ GO…GO NOW BECAUSE THERE’S A WHOLE LOT MORE!
SUMMERTIME BLUES by Eddie Cochran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeWC59FJqGc
IN THE SUMMERTIME by MUNGO JERRY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUQcnfwUUM&feature=related
UNDER THE BOARDWALK by THE DRIFTERS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPEqRMVnZNU
CALIFORNIA GURLS by KATY PERRY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57P9C4SAW4&feature=related
BOYS OF SUMMER by DON HENLEY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfiKT1N670M
ALL SUMMER LONG by the BEACH BOYS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tytTebj8ic
DANCIN’ IN THE STREET by MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdvITn5cAVc
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER the MOTELS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9Ox-lGm-wA
SUMMER BREEZE by SEALS AND CROFT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BthCLLO-PY0
YOU WILL ALWAYS BE MY BOO by USHER and ALICIA KEYS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPgf2meEX1w&feature=related
A SUMMER SONG BY CHAD AND JEREMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bu454Eiavw
ALL SUMMER LONG by KID ROCK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwIGZLjugKA
FINALLY, HERE IS MY COLLECTION OF PATRIOTIC MUSIC VIDEOS, WHICH HAS BEEN ON THE #1 PAGE IN GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE PAST 216 WEEKS! INCLUDES ELVIS, RAY CHARLES, TOBY KEITH, JOHNNY HORTON, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, JAMES BROWN, WHITNEY HOUSTON, AND A DOZEN MORE! https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/the-top-the-best-and-the-greatest-patriotic-music-videos/
I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS EDITION OF “EVERYTHING OLD IS NEWS AGAIN”.
I WANT TO THANK EVERYBODY FOR THEIR SUGGESTIONS AND A SPECIAL THANKS TO PATTI DAHLSTROM http://pattidahlstrom.com AND HUNTER GEORGE https://www.facebook.com/#!/hhuntergeorge FOR HELPING ME PUT THIS ISSUE TOGETHER.
CURRENTLY MY ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME IS FROM THE SALE OF MY BOOK. ” I DID IT FOR A SONG”, WHICH I RECEIVE IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU LIKE WHAT I’M PUTTING TOGETHER I HOPE YOU’LL CONSIDER BUYING ONE DIRECTLY FROM ME THROUGH PAYPAL FOR ONLY $9.99 AT artiewayne@gmail.com
TO READ SOME OF THE REVIEWS AND COMMENTS CLICK HERE
AND NOW YOU CAN BUY MY BOOK, “I DID IT FOR A SONG” DIRECTLY FROM ME THROUGH PAYPAL FOR ONLY $9.99 AT artiewayne@gmail.com
THANKS AND REGARDS, ARTIE
BACK TO ARTIE WAYNE ON THE WEB https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/
Tags: COLIN TIPPING, COMPLETE TOP 20 SUMMER MUSIC VIDEOS, DIONNE WARWICK, Don Oriolo, EARLY BURT BACHARACH, Felix the Cat, FELIX THE CAT STORE, FORGIVENESS PATTI DAHLSTROM, FORGVENESS MICK BROWN, HAL DAVID, JERSEY GIRLS SING, NEW FELIX THE CAT STORE, NY BLACKOUT, RADICAL FORGIVENESS, RONNIE ALLEN'S OLDIES, scepter records, TOP 4th of JULY MUSIC VIDEOS
ARTIE WAYNE ON THE WEB OCTOBER BULLETIN BOARD
My longtime friend Grammy winning producer, engineer, and music supervisor Brooks Arthur called me up to thank me for the article I wrote about him a few weeks ago. He also asked if I would post his thank you to everyone who took a moment to write a comment…
“Since I do not have access to your entire mailing list, please be kind enough to pass my thank you note along to all your readers for me.
WOW! Quite an experience … thinking I was gonna’ read an article (a little blog) and then BLAMMO, messages and wonderful notes from you, your readers, my colleagues and of course … Friends. Well, truth be known, everyone of you guys and girls and groups and singers & musicians & producers & engineers & studios have helped to make me who I am today. Every session, every moment, every laugh, every tear, every hit recordand those records that should have made it but didn’t, are all a part of my heart forever!
It took alot of doing to scroll thru the tributes and remembrances without welling up a few times, but I powered thru it.
Yours in song, FOREVER!”
Brooks Arthur http://brooksarthur.com
TO READ THE ARTICLE “SPOTLIGHT ON BROOKS ARTHUR” CLICK ONTO https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/spotlight-on-brooks-arthur/
This seems to be the year of the documentary, with the Phil Ochs film, “THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE”, and GEORGE HARRISON’S, “LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD”, tearing up our collective conciousness. Now we can look forward to BEACH BOY, DENNIS WILSON and THE COWSILLS coming to theaters, and finally the long awaited film celebrating BOB MARLEY which is in final negotiations, and will be on our screens late next year!
People have been asking me how my stem cell procedure (using my adult stem cells…not embryos) is working. I tell the them that I’ve gone from feeling incredible for a few hours…to feeling like I’m gonna’ die! As the weeks go by though, I’m starting to even out and feel optimistic that I’ll walk again!
IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS WE’VE BEEN READING ABOUT THE “OCCUPY TOGETHER” MOVEMENT, WHERE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD HAVE GATHERED TO PROTEST AGAINST INEQUALITY, MONETARY DISFUNCTION, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE.
WHEN ASKED IF SHE WOULD ALLOW HER SONG, “SHINE” TO BE USED AS THE ANTHEM FOR THE MOVEMENT, SINGER/SONGWRITER HEIDI LITTLE, SAID SHE’S “HAPPY TO LET ANY ORGANIZATION USE HER SONG AS LONG AS IT’S IN THE NAME OF PEACE.” http://heidilittle.com
TO HEAR “SHINE” CLICK ONTO https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/occupy-together-and-heidi-little-shine/
The quote of the day comes from Producer, composer, and all around good guy, QUINCY JONES. Even though I haven’t seen Q in years, I remember the time that we spent together as one of the highlights of my life! I read something recently he said to his critics that inspires me whenever I get low on self esteem. “Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me”
AFTER BEING RAINED OUT LAST MONTH, MY FRIEND DON ORIOLLO, WILL BE HAVING HIS ART SHOW IN FLORIDA, FEATURING HIS PAL, WORLD-WIDE ICON, FELIX THE CAT DEPICTED IN DOZENS OF DIFFERENT SETTINGS AND ART TECHNIQUES. FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO http://felixthecat.com
Top photo l to r Brooks Arthur, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich
Photo of Heidi Little and outfit by Stephanie M. Dejoseph of Lamia designs
Copyright 2011 by Artie Wayne https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/about-artie-wayne/
EXTRA! EXTRA! NOW YOU CAN BUY MY NEW BOOK ,“I DID IT FOR A SONG” AT AMAZON or Barnes & Noble or from Smashwords
TO READ A CHAPTER OR TWO FOR FREE CLICK HERE
TO READ SOME OF THE COMMENTS CLICK HERE
BACK TO ARTIE WAYNE ON THE WEB! https://artiewayne.wordpress.com
Tags: BOB MARLEY DOCUMENTARY, brooks arthur, COWSILL'S DOCUMENTARY, DENNIS WILSON DOCUMENTARY, DON ORIOLLO, Felix the Cat, HEIDI LITTLE, jeff barry, PHIL OCHS DOCUMENTARY, QUINCY JONES QUOTE, STEM CELL THERAPY FROM ADULT CELLS
FELIX THE CAT INTRODUCES HIS NEW ORIOLO ELECTRIC GUITAR AT NAMM!
IF Y’ALL ARE IN NASHVILLE THIS WEEK AT THE NAMM CONVENTION, MAKE SURE YOU STOP BY TO SEE MY FRIENDS FELIX THE CAT AND PRODUCER/ CARTOONIST DON ORIOLO AT THEIR BOOTH. YOU CAN CHECK OUT THE ORIOLO LINE OF GUITARS AND EVEN GET A CHANCE TO PLAY THE NEW FELIX THE CAT ELECTRIC GUITAR I TOLD YOU ABOUT A FEW MONTHS AGO.
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO HTTP://FELIXTHECAT.COM
WHEN YOU GET TIRED OF PICKIN’ YOU CAN READ MY EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH FELIX,THE MOST POPULAR CAT IN THE WORLD! HTTP://ARTIEWAYNE.WORDPRESS.COM/2010/04/22/A-CONVERSATION-WITH-FELIX-THE CAT/
Tags: Don Oriolo, Felix the Cat, Felix the Cat at the NAMM show, Felix The Cat Electric Guitar, Oriolo guitars
BOB RENO R.I.P.”ROCK IN PERPETUITY”!
In 1963, when the first hit I produced, “Meet Me At Midnight Mary” was going up the charts, every songplugger I knew was pitching me Tunes to get on the next date. When it was Bob Reno’s turn, who was working at George Paxton music, he came in to see me empty handed and admitted that he didn’t have any songs that he felt was right, which immediately impressed me.
After that incident I was eager to hear anything he wanted to play me. He turned out to be one of the good guys in the “neighborhood” (The Brill Building). He was always looking out for me and all of his friends. When the Duprees (“You Belong To Me”) broke up, Bob Reno brought Ron Dante (“The Archies), Jerry Keller (“Here Comes Summer”), and me to his boss, George Paxton to do a record under their name.
Nothing happened with the track, but it gave me a chance to see how Coed records worked and how Adam Wade and the Crests were made. Bob loved a master I produced and brought it in to his boss, who bought it and put it out under the name Terry Boyd. Even though Bob knew it was me singing with a fake English accent, he never busted me.
Producer/ songwriter, and Felix the Cat cartoonist, Don Oriolo fondly remembers, “I was 16 years old and writing songs for my band in NJ and everyone seemed to like them….so I figured how hard could it be to get them published. Ahh, the naiveté of youth. I banged on door after door, publisher after publisher waiting at the Chock full of Nuts on Broadway between appointments. Just when I was about to give up I entered the offices of Coed records… “Hi, my name’s Don Oriolo, I’m a song writer and I have some great songs I’d like to get published.” Within a few minutes, the receptionist said, “go in, Mr. Reno will see you.” Wow….I couldn’t believe it…. Bob told me to play my best five songs. 10 songs later he stopped me, and said. “Not bad…you have a lot of talent.” I was bolstered by these words of confidence coming from an obvious professional. We talked for a while and Bob gave me lots of good advice. He asked me if I was sure that music was the profession I wanted to follow for my whole life, or was it nothing more than a hobby. Of course I said it was what I wanted to do, and to this day it still is what defines my life.” The next time I did some business with Bob was when he and my pal Neil Bogart were at Cameo Parkway, Neil running the record company, and Bob the publishing. They bought a master Mark Barkan (“She’s A Fool”, “Pretty Flamingo”) and I wrote, sang, and produced, “The Subway Train That Came To Life” and released it under the name The Third Rail”.
Once again the record wasn’t a hit but it allowed me to see how Neil Bogart operated up close. Although Cameo was having #1 hits like “96Tears” by Question Mark and the Mysterians, the company was in deep financial trouble. Every day Reno would tell me another horror story about how Cameo was imploding…driving down it’s stock every day.
As soon as I got any information about the company, I’d pass it along to my partner Kelli Ross’ father Irving Green, who owned Mercury and Smash Records. He quickly bought and sold shares in Cameo before the company was forced to stop publicly trading and made a killing! He was so grateful; he made a substantial (silent) investment in our company, which allowed Kelli and me to move from a two room office in the Brill Building, to a six room suite at 1650 Broadway, which once housed Aldon Music and later Koppleman and Rubin.
I arranged a meeting with Mr. Green, Neil Bogart, Bob Reno in hopes they’d make a deal, unfortunately Kama Sutra moved a little faster and brought the dynamic duo into their fold. It wasn’t long before Bob was dissatisfied with the treatment and compensation he was getting for bringing producer Paul Leka and The Lemon Pipers “Green Tambourine” in, and discovering “Melanie”(“Brand New Key”), so I set up another meeting with Irving Green. This time they worked out a deal and Bob was brought in to run Mercury’s publishing company MRC, which had just been a holding company up until then.
Producer, manager Joel Diamond who’s being considered to replace Simon Cowell on “American Idol”, recalls, “Bob Reno was by far the pivotal factor in my life for any success I am enjoying and have enjoyed for the past 30 years in the music business. When I was still selling insurance in Passaic, NJ and singing at the Holiday Inn in Wayne, NJ on the weekends at weddings and bar mitzvahs, it was Bob Reno who solely believed in me and allowed me to head up a music publishing company which by all rights had no business doing. I had met Bob through a chain of events and it was Bob who called me one day to meet with him and said, “Joel, you are the least qualified to succeed me as the head of MRC Music (Mercury Record Corporation) but I truly believe that you have the most potential of anybody I have met, including all the experienced and well seasoned music publishers.”
“Bob gave me the opportunity and there was no way I would let him down. I assembled a group of writers and artists who went on to extremely successful careers not to mention my #2 person in charge and my assistant, Tommy Motolla, who later became CEO of Columbia Records.”
Don Oriolo continues, “I signed as a writer for Bob at MRC music, his was one of the brightest people I’ve ever met. His letter writing skills where second to none, and I feel during those days at MRC and Mercury listening to him negotiate and dictate letters helped hone my business skills that help carry me through to this day. Bob was a great judge of talent, songs and people.”
Singer/ songwriter Scott English (“Mandy”, “Bend me, Shape Me”) says, “BOB RENO WAS A GENTLEMAN’S GENTLEMAN, ALWAYS READY TO HELP A FRIEND IN NEED. BOB WAS THE HEAD OF MILLS MUSIC WHEN WE MET, THAT WAS NEXT DOOR TO MY OFFICE AT CLAUS OGERMAN’S HELIOS MUSIC ON THE 6TH FLOOR OF THE BRILL BUILDING . WHEN BOB TOOK OVER THE TOP SPOT IN THE NEW YORK OFFICE OF MERCURY RECORDS, I FOUND A GREAT R&B GROUP CALLED THE MARVELLES, AND WITH OUT EVEN HEARING THEM BOB GAVE STUDIO TIME IN AT MERCURY PLUS A RECORD DEAL!,
Producer/manager Barry Oslander remembers, “Bob was good to many record biz pros of today giving them their first start and knowing from his talent of knowing talent they would all make it in the Record and entertainment biz. He did this with me, by taking me from being a recording engineer at Mercury Records to what I always wanted to do, become a producer. In addition to having an incredible ear for a finished record, it always amazes me how well Bob Reno is able to match up artists with producers and the right piece of material.”
Oslander continues, “One of Bob’s great creative talents is the ability to hear a hit song no matter how it’s presented to him, guitar/voice, piano voice or a full band playing the song.” Then Bob suggests to Barry to record Black Comedienne “Moms” Mabley, on a cover of Dion’s, “Abraham, Martin, And John”, which goes straight up the charts!”
Joel Diamond smiles and adds, “I was working late in my office at MRC Music when one of the engineers from the recording studio upstairs came in and said that Paul Leka wanted to see me in the studio immediately. Paul was not only a great songwriter, he also had an illustrious career as a producer that included The Lemon Pipers, Harry Chapin, and REO Speedwagon.
Upon entering the studio it looked like a gathering of everybody who had been left in the building that night including the janitors plus stragglers just walking by the building who were recruited to sing. Paul put me in front of the mike along with probably 40 other people, he taught us his new song, and we all just started singing the chorus to “Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye” Bob sure did know a hit song no matter what bag it was in. He went from Moms Mabley to Na, Na just weeks apart.”
Artie jumps back in the conversation, “One day while I’m visiting Bob in his new office, my friend Lou Reizner, who runs the Mercury office in London gives him a call. Bob puts me on the speaker as Lou tells us about a two album deal that Mercury can get for only $30,000 if they act fast and guarantee a US Release. The artist is David Bowie, and the first album is called “Space Oddity”.
Bob isn’t familiar with Bowie, but I am. I loved “Love You ‘Til Tuesday”” from his Deram album. As Lou continues to talk I put my thumbs up and without blinking an eye Bob says, “OK, You got a deal!” Maybe it’s just a sidebar to Rock and Roll History, but a negotiation I’m proud to have had a hand, or should I say a thumb in!
Bob Reno comes over frequently for dinner, and my wife Sheilah loves to cook for such an appreciative guest. He’s is also one of first people to encourage us to use our psychic abilities. It isn’t long before we’re answering all sorts of seemingly unrelated questions that Bob says helps him understand his complex life as well as make business decisions.
About six months later Sheilah and I get divorced and I move to Hollywood. I lose touch with Bob, while I’m on the West Coast running Irving – Almo music, and he’s back in New York, starting up Midland International Records. The last time I see Bob is at the airport in Nice, after the MIDEM convention in the south of France. I’ve never seen Bob this excited before! He slips a cassette into his player and plays formy partner Lou Reizner and I, a record he just leased for the U.S. “Fly, Robin, Fly”, by the Silver Convention. It’s one of those times when you know you’ve heard a #1 record! We wish Bob luck, and then we run to catch our plane.”
*From my forthcoming book, “I Did It For A Song” Copyright 2010 by Artie Wayne https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/about-artie-wayne/
Special thanks to Lauren Reno for the pictures, Joel Diamond, Don Oriolo helping to put this article together.
To reach Joel Diamond http://joeldiamond.com
For Don Oriolo http://felixthecat.com
Tags: Bob Reno R.I.P. Rock In Perpetuity, Coed Records, Don Oriolo, Felix the Cat, George Paxton, Irving Green owner of Mercury and Smash Records, Joerl Diamond, Kama Sutra and Buddah Records, kelli ross, MRC Music, Neil Bogart Cameo Records
A CONVERSATION WITH FELIX THE CAT.
When my longtime friend, songwriter/ producer/ cartoonist, Don Oriolo said I could interview his superstar client FELIX the CAT you can imagine how excited I was! We all know that Felix is about to launch his comeback with his 36 titles movie catalog being updated in 3 – D, which can be shown in theaters along with big 3 – D blockbusters like “AVATAR”, “ALICE IN WONDERLAND”, and “CLASH OF THE TITANS”.
Now with the new 3 – D TVs from Samsung and LG, and only a handful of 3 – D titles available, the 36 FELIX the CAT 3 –D DVD collection is poised to make history. The fabulous feline’s latest album, “Catzapoppin’”, including Hip – Hop and rock versions of “Alley Cat”, “Stray Cat Blues”, and “I Cat Get No Satisfaction” (featuring The Pussycat Dolls) is about to be released.
FELIX has just been signed as opening act on the Justin Beiber puberty tour…and is said to be secretly dating Taylor Swift. The Hollywood rumor mill is also purring that he’ll be starring in a new movie, dancing around with either Will Smith or Eddie Murphy like Jerry the Mouse did with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Away”.
Artie– “It’s good to see you, Felix”
FELIX – “Thanks, Artie….it’s good to be seen.”
Artie – “Throughout the years there have been six different dogs who portrayed Lassie in the movies. How many different cats have portrayed FELIX?
FELIX – “Hmmmm dogs…..you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all….down boy, sit boy, fetch boy…..geeeesshh. Try to get a cat to do that….NOT! I assure you, Artie, when it comes to “cats” there is only one FELIX the CAT! Mickey’s the mouse, Donald’s the Duck…but FELIX IS THE CAT!!! Ya know Artie, they say cats have 9 nine lives…..and I’m only on my first one….can’t wait to see what’s in store for me in the next 8…which by the way is my lucky number!
Artie – “I hear that your latest video “Catzapoppin’”, featuring Katy Purry getting a tattoo of your face inked on her ample er, uh….”attributes” has been banned by MTV…why was that?
FELIX – “Hmmm…MTV…how do you spell that? I have not been kept abreast of that situation, and I’ve pretty much been PG most of my “professional” life anyway as you know….What are you giggling about???.”
Artie – “Well…what’s the most exciting thing in your life right now?
FELIX – “Mmm, we’ve got millions of new orders on our new Fall fashion line…mmm a new book coming out “Conversations with FELIX”…a new TV show in production…but the most exciting thing in my life right now is my New FELIX the CAT electric guitar. If you got to you can see my pal, Don Oriolo playing a song that I taught him years ago when I was living in NYC… it’s called Harlem Nocturne.
Artie – “WOW”
FELIX – “if you want to know more about it go http://felixthecat.com and if you send me your address I’ll send you a guitar pick and temporary tattoo with my face on it…ABSOLUTELY FREE! Righty-O! Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…..
Tags: "Catzapoppin'", A conversation with Felix, Don Oriolo, Felix the Cat, Felix The Cat Electric Guitar, Old Felix The Cat CDs being converted to #-D
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Condensation Definition
Condensation has multiple meanings in the field of biology. A condensation reaction is when two smaller molecules join to form a larger one by removing functional groups that form a small molecule, often water. Condensation can also refer to a state change in water from gas to liquid, which is an important step in the water cycle. There is also DNA condensation, which is when chains of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) compact into a denser structure when a cell is preparing to divide.
Examples of Condensation
Condensation Reactions
A condensation reaction is the formation of a larger molecule from two smaller ones, which also form another, smaller molecule by losing functional groups in order to join together. Some examples of small molecules that are byproducts of condensation reactions are acetic acid (CH3COOH) and methanol (CH3OH), but most often water (H2O) is formed from one molecule losing hydrogen (H) and another losing a hydroxyl group (-OH), especially in the biological reactions that take place in living things. When water is a product, the condensation reaction is often called a dehydration reaction.
Condensation reactions are used to make crucial large molecules called macromolecules in the body, such as carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins. Carbohydrates are simple sugars such as glucose, which is used for energy in the body. A sugar with one ring is a monosaccharide, and condensation reactions join units of glucose together to form disaccharides, with water also being produced as a result. When more than two sugars are joined, the molecule is called a polysaccharide. Glucose is stored in long chains that are made through many dehydration reactions, and this molecule is called glycogen. When more energy is needed in the body, glucose is one necessary component, and glucose molecules are then broken off of the chain by hydrolysis, the addition of water (and the opposite of dehydration reactions).
Similarly, glycerol and three fatty acids are joined together through condensation reactions to make a lipid molecule, and amino acids are joined to form proteins. In the body, lipids are fats and certain vitamins, and they have many functions such as energy storage, cell signaling, and forming the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane. Proteins help certain chemical reactions to occur and also have roles in cell signaling and providing structure to parts of the body; for example, the proteins collagen and elastin are found in cartilage. Without condensation reactions, all of these important molecules could not be formed.
Condensation in the Water Cycle
Condensation is part of the water cycle, which describes how water continuously cycles throughout the Earth in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. During condensation, water vapor in the air changes from a gas to liquid water. As altitude increases, temperature and water pressure both decrease, which causes water vapor to turn into liquid water. A very large concentration of these droplets of water forms clouds and fog. The water then falls to Earth’s surface as precipitation. It falls back into the Earth’s waterways and also enters the soil, where it can be absorbed by plants. Water can also freeze into its solid form, ice, and then melt back into water. This can occur as snow or on the Earth’s surface where temperatures are below freezing. Next, evapotranspiration occurs, and the water changes from the liquid from to the gas form. Evapotranspiration is the combination of evaporation from Earth’s oceans, lakes and rivers and transpiration, which is when excess water evaporates from plants. Evapotranspiration allows water to enter back into the air, and then the water cycle starts all over again. The water cycle is crucial in all of Earth’s ecosystems because all living things need water to survive.
This is a diagram of the components of the water cycle.
DNA Condensation
DNA condensation occurs in all organisms. Unlike the other forms of condensation mentioned in this article, this condensation does not involve water; it involves making DNA fit into a smaller space. In eukaryotes, which include all living things that are not archaea or bacteria, DNA condensation occurs during mitosis, the process of cell division. During the prophase stage of mitosis, DNA strands condense into nucleosomes, which are segments of DNA wrapped around histone proteins. DNA wrapped around proteins is called chromatin. Nucleosomes are then folded even more to form chromosomes. DNA is always folded to some extent; if all the DNA in one of your cells were stretched out, it would be 2 meters long!
Bacterial DNA forms a circular, continuous loop. In order for all of a bacterium’s DNA to fit within it, the DNA strands must be made about 1000 times smaller. Instead of histone proteins in eukaryotic cells, DNA binding proteins are used to form loops within the circular chromosome to condense it. Then, these loops twist into themselves to condense the DNA even further, in a process known as supercoiling.
Even viruses, which are not considered true living things because they cannot reproduce without invading a cell, have DNA that undergoes condensation. The DNA must be condensed because it is longer than the virus’s capsid, which is the protein shell that contains the DNA. The DNA is essentially wound like a spool inside the capsid by a powerful motor that can condense DNA very tightly.
Dehydration – The removal of water; dehydration reactions remove water from two molecules as they are joined to form a larger one.
Water cycle – The flow of water in all its forms throughout the Earth, its organisms, and the air.
DNA condensation – The winding of DNA so that it can fit into a small space.
Mitosis – The process of cell division in eukaryotic cells.
1. Which is a type of condensation?
A. Water vapor becoming liquid water
B. The joining together of glucose molecules into a disaccharide
C. The packing of DNA into a small space
D is correct. All of these are examples of condensation. Choice A refers to condensation in the water cycle. In choice B, a water molecule is formed when two glucose molecules are joined. Choice C is DNA condensation.
2. What phase change does water undergo during condensation in the water cycle?
A. Liquid to gas
B. Gas to liquid
C. Liquid to solid
D. Solid to gas
B is correct. During condensation, water vapor becomes liquid water. Choice B refers to evaporation, C refers to freezing, and D refers to sublimation.
3. What is DNA wrapped around during condensation in eukaryotic cells?
A. Histone proteins
B. DNA binding proteins
C. Chromatin
D. Nucleosomes
A is correct. In eukaryotic cells, DNA is tightly coiled around histone proteins. Together the DNA and histone proteins are called chromatin. DNA binding proteins are used to condense bacterial DNA.
Condensation Reaction
Dehydration Synthesis
Nucleic Acid Elements and Monomer
Hydrolyze
Hydroxyl Group
Phospholipid
Disaccharide
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Glenmark announces presentation of New Subtype Analysis of GBR 830
04 March 2019 | News
GBR 830 is an investigational, anti-OX40 monoclonal antibody being studied for the treatment of moderate-to severe atopic dermatitis
Glenmark Pharmaceuticals has announced the presentation of a new post hoc analysis of data from a Phase 2a, proof-of-concept study of GBR 830 at the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
GBR 830 is an investigational, anti-OX40 monoclonal antibody being studied for the treatment of moderate-to severe atopic dermatitis (AD). The Phase 2a study was conducted to investigate the safety of GBR 830, evaluate its effects on AD biomarkers, and generate the first clinical evidence of its biological activity. The study was not powered for statistical differences between GBR 830 and placebo.
The new, post hoc analysis of the Phase 2a study was conducted to evaluate the activity of GBR 830 in patients with intrinsic and extrinsic AD subtypes, and for subjects with elevated IgE levels at baseline.
The analyses demonstrated that baseline clinical scores (EASI, SCORAD, IGA) were consistent regardless of a patient’s AD subtype or whether they had elevated IgE. Reductions in SCORAD clinical scores were observed throughout the treatment period.
Mahboob Rahman, President and Chief Medical Officer at Glenmark Pharmaceuticals said, “The consistent effect of GBR 830 observed across AD subtypes is important because not all AD therapies are effective or appropriate for all patients, thus increasing the need for precision in diagnosis and treatment. We are pleased to present this evidence at AAD on the potential effectiveness of GBR 830 across subtypes, which is valuable for future clinical development and decision making.”
Sixty-two randomized subjects (GBR 830 n=46; placebo n=16) received at least one dose of study drug during the trial. Of the 46 subjects treated with GBR 830, 42 were evaluated by baseline AD subtype (extrinsic n=15, intrinsic n=27, not specified n=4). Baseline clinical scores on the Eczema Area and Severity Index (EASI), Scoring of Atopic Dermatitis (SCORAD) and Investigator’s Global Assessment (IGA) did not show marked differences according to AD subtypes or IgE level. After treatment with GBR 830, decreases in SCORAD were observed during the study regardless of AD subtype or IgE level. These responses were observed shortly after the first dose of GBR 830 and maintained through the study period and beyond.
In the study, GBR 830 was safe and well-tolerated. The most common treatment emergent adverse event was headache, with no meaningful differences observed between GBR 830 (13%) and placebo-treated (25%) patients.
A Phase 2b clinical trial of GBR 830 in moderate-to-severe AD is underway and currently enrolling patients in the U.S. and Europe.
GBR 830 is designed to inhibit OX40, a costimulatory immune checkpoint receptor expressed on activated T cells and memory T cells.
Costimulatory signals are essential for T cell activity, and binding between OX40 and OX40L is a biomarker for the severity of autoimmune diseases. The activation of this pathway leads to conversion of activated T cells into memory T cells, which promotes inflammation. In addition, regulatory T cells also contribute to inflammation, and OX40 signaling by these cells downregulates immune suppressing functions. It is believed that GBR 830 may inhibit the dual activities of OX40 and OX40L binding in both activated T cells and regulatory T cells, thus potentially reducing inflammation associated with symptoms of atopic dermatitis.
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bradleyark.com
Bytes from Bradley, Arkansas, and thereabouts
Retirement of County Clerk Diane Fletcher, 12-30-08
A month ago today, an event occurred in Lafayette County that bradleyark.com cannot allow to pass unremarked upon. County Clerk Diane Higdon Fletcher, a member of the Bradley High School class of 1963, retired after thirty years of service as Lafayette County Clerk (1979–2008). A well-attended reception in Diane’s honor was held in the main courtroom of the Lafayette County Courthouse at 4:00 P. M. on December 30, 2008. All but one of the photos below were taken at that reception.
First, a photo of Diane and her family. From left to right, daughter Philesha Southern, husband Henry Fletcher, Diane, and son Neal Fletcher:
Diane was presented with recognition awards by State Senator Barbara Horn and State Representative Bruce Maloch.
Diane is shown below with retired Lafayette County Treasurer Lanie Sue Ormand.
Of all the people who transacted business in the County Clerk’s office for those 30 years, there were probably very few who realized that Diane was an All-State player on Bradley’s very first basketball state championship team, the Senior Girls of 1961–1962. Some may remember that the late Bradley School Superintendent E. V. Powell dubbed Diane as “Heavy” Higdon due to her diminutive stature. Diane, already married to Henry at the time, was the Bradley High School homecoming queen for the school year of 1962–1963, the first year of the then-“new”, now current, gymnasium.
And, finally, Diane says that the photo below, taken from the 1961 Bradley High School Yearbook, is proof positive that she did not always have gray hair.
Posted in People
Fourth Street/Highway 160, circa 1951
The photo below depicts Fourth Street/Highway 160, looking west, about 1951. The building on left front of the photo is the predecessor to the building in which are now located Bradley Ag Supply and Kevin’s Kitchen. The lettering on the window of the building on the right side, which is where the car wash is now located, says “U. S. Post Office, Bradley, Ark.”
The photo is courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Dick Bishop, and thanks go to them for sharing it with bradleyark.com.
Posted in Photos--old
Still More on 1930s Bradley High School Football
Some of the most visited posts on this site continue to be those regarding the early 1930s Bradley High School football team (posts dated 10/1/08 and 10/6/08).
I recently came across a more-or-less first hand account of a 1932 football game. It is part of a letter that Frank M. Cochran, Jr., then 11 years old, wrote to a cousin on November 3, 1932. Bradley was scheduled to play Stamps in Bradley the next day, and had played Hope in Bradley the previous week (October 28, 1932). The excerpt from the letter reads:
“Stamps plays ball here tomorrow. They are going to bring a band and a lot of people. Bradley has a good team. They held Hope to a 12–6 defeat for Bradley. It was Bradley’s ball on the 50, 4th [down] and about 8 [yards to go for a first down]. Thomas Williams punted to Hope’s 2 yard line. They tried to throw the ball. It was third [down] and about 5 [yards to go for a first down]. They punted to Pat Coker on Hope’s 30. He got the ball and ran for a touchdown. Bruz [Hamner] tried for point but failed and got knocked out. Sims went in.”
For a point of historical reference, it can be noted that on the following Tuesday, November 8, 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover in the election for President of the United States.
Bradley Boy Scout Troop No. 72, 1957
In 1957, Bradley had an active Boy Scout Troop (No. 72), which was described in the 1957 B. & P. W. scrapbook as follows:
“Highlights of Boy Scout Troop No. 72 during 1957.
Feb-1957. The Scouts distributed the posters of the Special Clean Up drive sponsored by the B & P W Club. The Scouts celebrated the 47th Birthday of Scouting in the U S A with an open house and family night dinner at the American Legion Hut.
June-1957. Seventeen Scouts spent one week in June at Camp Pioneer, near Hatfield, Arkansas. Two Scouts were inducted into the Order of the Arrow at this Camp.
July-1957. Two scouts went to the National Jamboree at Valley Forge.
During the year of 1957 a total of 300 Boy days and nights were spent in camping.
Four Scouts advanced to Tenderfoot. Two Scouts advanced to Second Class. Two Scouts advanced to First Class. Two Scouts advanced to Star Scouts. Mack Jackson advanced to Life Scout. A total of twenty merit badges were passed.
Thomas Burks and Don Barnett are the two Boy Scouts that attended the National Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge.
The Boy Scouts are sponsored by the American Legion.
Mr. J. M. Drake [shown below] is the Scoutmaster for Troop 72. He was the assistant Scoutmaster for several years.
The American Legion Hut [shown below] where the Boy Scouts hold their meetings.”
The American Legion Hut had fallen into disrepair and was demolished several years ago to make way for the construction of a baseball/softball field.
A previous article on this site has mentioned that George W. Bell was Scoutmaster of Troop No. 72 at one time. In the early 1960’s, when I was of Scouting age, Glen Ruth was the Scoutmaster. Perhaps some reader(s) can recall the names and approximate tenures of other Bradley Scoutmasters.
I was one of a very few people who attended the ceremony at the Legion Hut where Mack Jackson was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout, so I have personal knowledge that Bradley had at least one Scout to reach the highest rank in Scouting. Perhaps some reader(s) have knowledge of others to accomplish that feat.
Posted in Civic Organizations
Tagged Bradley Boy Scout Troop No 72
Old Elementary School Building, circa 1930
In the previous post, reference was made to the disassembly and move of the Walnut Hill School building to Bradley.
The 1963 Bradley School yearbook says that the old elementary school building was originally built in 1934.
In 1997, Frank M. Cochran, Jr., wrote the following short piece on that building which places a different date on the construction of that building:
“[This] building … was built in the summer of 1929 to prepare for students added by the consolidation with the Walnut Hill, Hackney, Canfield, Arkana and possibly other small districts. The lumber used was salvaged from the old Walnut Hill building, a three room structure built about the turn of the century. The doors and windows were also salvaged and used (notice the transoms above the doors). The walls were covered with beaded ceiling. There was one electric light in each room. The old roof was unusable and was replaced with asphalt shingles.
The southeast room was for the first and second grades with Ray Crabtree as teacher. The southwest room was for the third and fourth grades. This room was so crowded that most of the students had to sit two in a single desk. Donnie Marie Cheek Collins was the third and fourth grade teacher. She got married at Christmas and had to resign because of a rule that there could be no married teachers. This was my room and was very hot on fall afternoons. I think that [in] the first year, the fifth and sixth grades were in the northeast room. After the first year, the seventh and eighth grades were sent to the high school building, [but] may have been sent to the brick building from the start. After a very few years, the teachers taught certain subjects and the students moved from room to room.
In 1946, the State Line district consolidated with Bradley and the two north rooms of the building were added. These were built of newly purchased lumber, doors and windows.”
This is how the building appeared in the 1956 yearbook:
And this is a slightly different view of the building from the 1961 yearbook:
The building has recently undergone a remodeling. The photo below was taken earlier this week. The sign on the right (north) side of the building says, “Bradley Head Start Center.”
Walnut Hill School, circa 1910’s
Photos of Walnut Hill in the early twentieth century are quite rare, but below is a photo of the Walnut Hill School.
This building was located on the northwest side of the intersection of what is now Highway 160 and the old Washington (Arkansas)-to-Shreveport Road. It was probably taken on or close to what is now Highway 160, looking north. Judging from the shadows and the clothing worn by some of the students in the picture, it was probably taken in the early to mid-afternoon of a relatively cool day, although some of the students are indeed barefooted.
Glynn McCalman, in his book Bradley Connections, says of the Walnut Hill School: “A new building with two large rooms was constructed in 1900, and after consolidation into the Bradley school the white frame school building was disassembled and reassembled in Bradley. It has continued to serve after having been expanded and remodeled.” (More on the reassembly, expansion and remodeling will follow in a future post.)
At great magnification, the American flag in this photo appears to have six rows of eight stars each, which would mean that this photo was taken sometime after July 4, 1912, when the number of stars in the flag was expanded to 48 to reflect the admission of New Mexico and Arizona to the Union.
This photo is courtesy of Nancy McGee Ward, and many thanks to her for sharing it with bradleyark.com. On the back of the photo is written: “Walnut Hill School, Walnut Hill, Ark.” and “Photo belonged to William Alford (Dick) and John Blanton Martin McGee.”
Posted in Schools, Walnut Hill
Tagged Walnut Hill Arkansas School
Last Game in 1962 Gymnasium: February 7, 2012
Canfield Plane Crash, 1948 (Part 4 of 4)
Bradley City Government
Gov. Conway Days
Governor James S. Conway
Photos–current
Photos–old
Roane Township
Bumpham School Alumni
Walnut Hill Cemetery
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Breinton Parish Council
Councillors, Clerk and MP
Council Meeting Minutes
GDPR – Privacy Policy
GDPR – Consent form
Audit Returns
Public Rights & AGAR, for year to 31/3/18
Origin of Parish Councils
Roads and Planning
ROADS – The proposed Hereford Bypass
Local Planning Applications
Core Strategy, Hereford Area Plan
Breinton’s Community Led Plan
Painting Breinton Green
About Breinton
Breinton’s History
Breinton Residents
Houses and other buildings
Historical Records and Resources
Breinton’s Wildlife
Woodland Heritage
Apples, pears and horticulture in Breinton
Art and Design in Breinton
Landscape, Geology and Soils
Maps of Breinton
Final Plan and Referendum Result
Neighbourhood Planning 2014 – 2016
How to comment on the Neighbourhood Development Plan
Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group
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There are not many parishes bordering a city that have changed so little in the last 1000 years. In Breinton, one reason for that is the high quality of the soils for agriculture and horticulture. Therefore relatively few new buildings have been built on the valuable land. The name Breinton appears to be a modernised form of the word Bruntone, meaning a village near a flowing stream.
Rural Breinton on the northern bank of the River Wye (as seen on Google Earth)
Records of Breinton’s history
The Domesday Survey of 1086 does not mention Breinton, only the hamlet of Warham (dwelling by the water) as being a possession of the Canons of Hereford Cathedral comprising 2 ½ hides which pay tax, 8 villagers with ploughs, – value 30 shillings. One hide equals 120 acres, so Warham (as described by Muriel Tonkin) would have been about 300 acres with 8 farms, not all of the same size.
The Cassey Directory of Herefordshire for 1858 tells us:
“Breinton, consisting of Upper and Lower, is a township, parish, and straggling village, situated 3 miles west-south-west from Hereford railway station, and is in the Hundred of Grimsworth, and Hereford Union, archdeaconry, deanery, and bishopric. The church, dedicated to St. Michael, is pleasantly situated on an eminence bordering on the river Wye, which bounds the parish on the south, and consists of a nave and chancel, with a square tower at the west end containing two bells. The living is a perpetual curacy, worth £109 yearly, and in the patronage of the Bishop of Hereford; the Rev. Edmund Du Buisson, M.A. is the incumbent. The chief landed proprietors of this parish are John Edwin Jones, Esq.; John Cranston, Esq. of King’s Acre; Edward Lewis, Esq.; John Davies, Esq.; Daniel Pearce, Esq.; and Edmund Russell, Esq., of the Showers, Kingsland. Here is a chapel and school endowed by Lady Southampton, the latter of which is applied to the education of 42 children, and is conducted by Mr. James Pugh. At Warham is also a Church of England school for boys and girls, established January 22, 1855. This is partly within the limits of the city of Hereford. There are charities of about £9 yearly value. The population, in 1851, was 366, with 1,639 acres. The crops are wheat, beans, turnips, &c., with pears and apples.”
This text was also summarised for the 1868 National Gazetteer. In addition the Littlebury’s Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire (1876-7) listed the main landowners of the day, and highlighted the extensive Kings Acre Nurseries belonging to Messrs. Cranston and Mayos, declaring that their roses were among the best in the country. It described the recently rebuilt church, under the superintendence of F.R. Kempson, and noted that the parish registers began in 1625. The Directory also tells us that adjoining Kings Acre Nurseries the former Coach and Horses Inn had been turned into a reading room, particularly for the use of workers employed by Cranston & Mayos.
More records (and links to records and historic material) can be found on this page
Archaeology in Breinton
Beyond the lychgate to St Michael’s Church in Lower Breinton (SO 4726 3948) there is the National Trust property of Breinton Springs. Here a roughly circular mound or tump with part of a moat can be seen. Excavations showed walls and a stone gateway. This Norman ringwork is oval in plan with axes of 34 and 20m, and it rises from 0.2m to 1.5m above the surrounding sloping ground. The perimeter bank with an entrance on the north, rises 0.4m above the interior, and an external ditch 10m wide remains on the east and west sides. The earthwork was excavated in 1922 and also between 1959 and 1962 when part of a domestic building with a cellar was identified. It was in use around 1150 AD, possibly as a grange when it is known the Dean and Chapter of Hereford Cathedral held land here. However, it was probably abandoned in the 13th century and only used for a stock enclosure after that time. Read more about the-moated-mound. Recent excavations (2018) at nearby Breinton House suggest that the origin of the moated mound may be earlier than expected.
The mound with moat by St Michael’s church (A. Geeson)
The ground in the orchard to the north of the mound is undulating. Horizontal platforms may represent a former vicarage. Coins and a spindle whorl have been found.
Possible site of medieval village between the mound and St. Michael’s Church (N. Geeson)
Immediately to the west a track leads down the steep slope in a cutting to the River Wye at Breinton Springs. This is likely to have been a drover’s way, taking livestock through a ford across the river. Another former drove road, leading west out of Hereford, followed a route from Westfaling Street, along the top of the ridge and along Green Lane towards Sugwas Court just beyond the boundary of Breinton parish. This was formerly a rural residence of the Bishops of Hereford. The Green Lane, with clearly defined ditches and banks on each side in some places, and a large pond for watering livestock on their journeys can still be seen and followed today.
Close to the river there are meadows that still show evidence of the channels that were once used to irrigate them and provide lush pasture for livestock.
The ancient Breinton Springs at Lower Breinton were restored in 2015. See Breinton Spring short report
On a hill to the NW of Breinton Manor Farm, Camp Field is marked on maps from 1831, just outside Breinton Parish boundary, with a drawing of a circular mound and ditch. It is roughly midway between the Iron Age Hillforts of Credenhill to the north and Eaton across the river to the south. The adjacent Camp Wood is marked on some later maps, e.g. 1970. However, the details or age of any features here seem to be unknown.
St. Michael’s Church, Breinton
This was originally a Norman church, built around 1200AD. Between 1866 and 1870 it was completely rebuilt By F.R. Kempson, with an added north aisle. The only parts of the Norman church to survive are semi-circular tops to the west door and a west window and some masonry, including two buttresses on the south side. Today there is a short octagonal spire and there is a recurring trefoil theme. The two large yew trees in the church yard probably date back to the early days of the church. The chancel may have been rebuilt early in the 14th century.
St. Michael’s Church Breinton
The Church interior
There are two bells: one inscribed “Ave Maria gratia,” (probably 14th century) and the other “Ave Maria grasia plenas,” (probably 15th century). A boarded chest with iron bands and straps, iron extensions as legs and two carrying rings, dates to the 17th century, and a communion table with carved legs is late 16th century. The earliest monument is a painted and framed oak panel to Captain Rudhall Booth, 1685, inside on the north wall. Captain Booth was brought back to Breinton having died in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1685. He was a descendent of Charles Booth, Bishop of Hereford, 1516-1535. His brother Charles was exiled with King James I and his estate eventually passed to Thomas Cooke of Kinnersley. Read more details in a New short Guide to St. Michael’s Church Nov 2018
St. Michael’s Church, Breinton, showing the west door (N. Geeson)
The Churchyard
To the east of the vestry there are stones for Katherin, wife of Major John Booth 16[9]3, and to John Booth, 1690. The large tomb surrounded by rails near the south door of the Church commemorates Thomas Pritchard who died in 1811, and other members of his family. It was grade II listed in 1987[11]. The churchyard also includes some other interesting gravestones. Canon Charles Vincent Gorton (1854-1912) has a large cross with a line of music from Elgar’s Oratorio The Apostles. He and Elgar enjoyed the annual Three Choirs Festival of music from Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire together. Near the west door lies Charles Dodgson, a relative of another Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll. Charles Dodgson lived at Breinton House and died in 1941. James Cranston, an architect who helped to restore the church in 1866 is buried near the church window dedicated to him. Some of his relatives, including his grandfather John Cranston who founded the plant nurseries on Kings Acre Road can also be found.
A memorial to Dr. Henry Graves Bull, famous naturalist (N. Geeson)
Dr. Henry Graves Bull (1818-1885) is buried in Breinton churchyard and is remembered for founding the British Mycological Society (for the scientific study of fungi). He was a founding member of the local Woolhope Field Naturalist’s Club, and as a doctor he pioneered the use of anaesthetic and worked to improve health and sanitation in Herefordshire. He also studied orchards and cider-making with his friend the Reverend Charles Bulmer of Credenhill, and Robert Hogg, which resulted in their book, the “Herefordshire Pomona”.
Breinton has strong links with Bulmer’s cider: with nurseries at Kings Acre, extensive orchards and homes of family members. The company Messrs. Bulmer was founded in 1887, by Henry Percival Bulmer of Credenhill, and with his brother Fred and his descendants built the company up to become a household name (later called H.P Bulmer & Co. Ltd.) Although Edward Charles Bulmer (1907-1944) was buried at Credenhill, he lived in Breinton and there is a memorial to his death (hit by a wingtip of a plane) in the Second World War.
The du Buisson family built the rectory (now Breinton Grange), and the school by the church, but lived at Breinton Court. Edmund du Buisson, M.A. Oxon (1821-1875) was Vicar of Breinton between 1854 and 1875, and the east window is a memorial to him and his wife Charlotte.
Herbert Gatliff (1897- 1977) was the son of a Rector of Breinton who became a top civil servant at the Treasury in London. He loved long-distance walking between youth hostels. He went to the Outer Hebrides with John Cadbury, chairman of the Youth Hostel Association, but there were no hostels, – so he helped to fund some. The Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust is still in operation today, and Herbert is buried in Breinton churchyard.
A list of births/marriages/deaths for Breinton is held by the Herefordshire Record Office.
(Section compiled and updated by Nichola Geeson, 2018)
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A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
Dani Shapiro
“A gripping genetic detective story, and a meditation on the meaning of parenthood and family.” —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach
From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist and novelist—“a writer of rare talent” (Cheryl Strayed)—a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Dani Shapiro has based much of her writing—novels and memoirs both—on careful and unsparing examinations of her family’s history and heritage. But when she receives a shocking result from a mail-order DNA kit, her world breaks wide open and she starts to question everything she thought she knew about herself. Shapiro’s elegant and thoughtful memoir offers a clear-eyed account of this private heartbreak. Inheritance is a gift for anyone who’s ever questioned their biological destiny or longed for a more expansive definition of “family.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY OCT 8, 2018
In this fascinating memoir, Shapiro (Hourglass) writes of how she questioned her identity when a DNA test revealed that she was not, as she believed she was, 100% Jewish. Shapiro grew up in an Orthodox family in suburban New Jersey; blonde-haired and blue-eyed, she often felt out of place in a family of dark-haired Ashkenazi Jews, yet she had shrugged off the physical differences. But when she got the DNA test results, the then-54-year-old began researching her family history, and within months she unraveled a narrative leading back to the 1960s and the early days of artificial insemination. Her own parents had died, but now, with the support of her husband and son, she discovered her biological father, a doctor from Portland. Shapiro realized that her childhood, her ancestral lineage, and the foundation of her world were based on deception. "What potent combination of lawlessness, secrecy, desire, shame, greed, and confusion had led to my conception?" Shapiro writes. With thoughtful candor, she explores the ethical questions surrounding sperm donation, the consequences of DNA testing, and the emotional impact of having an uprooted religious and ethnic identity. This beautifully written, thought-provoking genealogical mystery will captivate readers from the very first pages.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Penguin Random House LLC
amy-re , 04/26/2019
Only The Sample
I’ve only read the sample and I really want and really liked it.
Mother to 4- Grandmother to 9 , 05/28/2019
The low rating only reflects an uncomfortable feeling regarding what feels to me like a hateful and - perhaps- jealous portrayal of her Mother- and then a slightly -ever so slightly-demeaning of Pilar.
Passive aggressive?
Limmon 85 , 03/14/2019
Wow, there is so much going on here. Not only does the author let us in on her very personal journey to discover her true “family”, she shows us the pain and vulnerability that precedes it. Big BIG questions about identity and ethics and the future (and past) of the medical practices we are beginning to take for granted today - things that were unheard of (or at least not discussed) 50 years ago. For me, though, just as important is the theme of secrets and what that does to a family and to the individual as they build their life. Really enjoyed this book and it brought up a lot of questions in my own life.
More Books by Dani Shapiro
Still Writing
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School District Pays $10,000 Bitcoin Ransom To Hackers After Cyberattack
Filed Under:cyberattack, Leominster, Leominster Public Schools
LEOMINSTER (CBS) – A Massachusetts school district is waiting for its computer system to be “unlocked” after it paid a $10,000 Bitcoin ransom to hackers following a cyberattack on its system.
And despite the nefarious nature of the school system’s lockdown, there is no criminal investigation into the matter because solving this crime is “impossible,” said Interim Leominster Police Chief Michael Goldman.
“It’s something likely to come from out of the country, (we) can’t trace it,” Goldman told WBZ-TV.
The police chief said he wasn’t told what types of school district files were locked down. He said this was “straight up decryption” and no data mining. School employees are locked out of their own system.
The school e-mail system is also down, and school employees are using their Gmail accounts as backup to communicate with one another, he said.
Leominster Schools Superintendent Paula Deacon said in a statement that the Bitcoin ransom was paid following the cyberattack, which occurred April 14.
The school district is waiting for its system “to be fully restored,” she said.
“The Leominster Public Schools were the victim of a Ransomware cyber attack on Saturday, April 14, 2018,” Deacon said. “A lock was placed on our system until a negotiated ransom was agreed upon. We paid through a bitcoin system and are now awaiting to be fully restored.”
Bitcoin is “a completely digital money” or cryptocurrency that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen, according to Bitcoin.org.
“From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet,” the site states of the worldwide payment system.
Goldman, the police chief, said Deacon asked him for advice on the matter, and he told her to pay the $10,000 ransom.
Goldman said there were some negotiations between the district and the hackers, and when the school system agreed to pay the ransom they were sent passwords to unlock certain files, as proof that the cyber extortionists could unlock the files.
Goldman said it is “impossible” to track the cyber extortionists down.
In her statement, Deacon thanked local, state and federal authorities for their support.
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Bottled Fame
The Britney Lances Carnival
“There’s solitary two sorts of individuals on the planet,” Britney Lances sings in “Bazaar,” her most up to date collection. “The ones that engage and the ones that watch/I’m a put-on-a-show sort of young lady.” She’s been putting on a show for quite a while, however it unquestionably hasn’t satisfied her. It’s protected to state the acclaim that thrives under Britney’s Huge Top isn’t what it’s laughed uncontrollably to be. We can surely become familiar with a ton about the sort of uber popularity Britney has and what it really brings into an individual’s life. For her situation, it has caught her totally she is the least free individual I can consider.
When you think about that Lances has sold in excess of 83 million collections since 1999, it’s nothing unexpected that “Bazaar” transforms the pop diva’s agitated life into bent pop tunes. In the title tune, “Carnival,” Britney looks at her should be viewed to a fixation – which, similar to all addictions, has the two its highs and lows.
The highs incorporate open worship. She disclosed to Allure magazine in its January 2009 issue that the 2008 Video Music Grants, where she got three trophies, “… demonstrated to me how much love is out there.” There seems to be a lot of consideration for the 27-year-old. Indeed, even in a year with a noteworthy presidential race and a staggering monetary emergency, Britney Lances was as yet the #1 name look, as indicated by Hurray’s yearly positioning of well known inquiry terms. For the seventh time in eight years, Britney Lances is the victor of the open’s interest with this grieved star.
The drawback for Britney is most exemplified in the way that the court has given her dad Jamie Lances uncertain control of her own and money related undertakings, and she’s lost guardianship of her two youthful children with her ex, Kevin Federline. In spite of the fact that the conservatorship had been set to terminate toward the finish of 2008, Britney made a deal to avoid restricting what could turn into a lifetime course of action. To some extent, this happened on the grounds that the L.A. Prevalent Court Magistrate said that Lances has indicated she is “powerless to undue impact.” The way that she consented to the course of action may likewise have to do with a Florida court case in which one of Lances’ previous chiefs is suing the artist to influence her to experience a statement. Her dad and his lawyers got the Chief to support a defensive request in any event through February of 2009, which indicates one advantage of the conservatorship. It additionally may give a sheltered umbrella to Lances to acquire appearance rights with her kids.
Addictions are jails. Such huge numbers of individuals wish they had Britney’s notoriety. They think about the advantages the cash, the shopping, the cool beaus or hot chicks they could date-yet once in a while of the jail of notoriety. From basic things like not having the capacity to go to the staple story or stroll with your children down the road without being mobbed to the greater issue of having each part of your life sprinkled over the media, Britney’s sort of distinction resembles a steel confine. In “The Deplorability of Britney Lances” main story for Moving Stone, Vanessa Grigoriadis said that “more than some other star today, Britney typifies the pot of acclaim for the well known: cherishing it, abhorring it and never fully having the capacity to prevent it from annihilating you.”
OK truly need to be in Britney’s position? On one hand, she benefits from the open praise and actually needs the paparazzi. On the other, she is completely caught by it. In her narrative “Britney: For the Record” for MTV, which was in reality to a greater extent a business to pitch her aromas and a push to make us feel frustrated about her, Britney is sad as she says, “There’s no fervor, there’s no enthusiasm. … I have great days, and after that I have terrible days. Notwithstanding when you go to imprison you know there’s the point at which you’re going to get out… In any case, in this circumstance, it’s endless. It’s much the same as Groundhog Day each day…” She proceeds, “… in the event that I wasn’t under the limitations I’m under, I’d feel so liberated….”
I do, truth be told, have compassion toward this Southern young lady who is essentially so miserable. She lets it be known. Being in the focal point of media consideration may bolster her longing to be seen, however she lives in dread that it will one day be no more. “You’re frightened that it’s going to be removed, you know? So it’s better only not to feel anything at all and to have trust than to feel the other way,” she says. Better not to feel anything? Britney, that is a certain formula for fiasco sometime down the road, if not as of now. As I probably am aware full well from my work with a huge number of individuals in live occasions, smothering or curbing your passionate agony prompts troubles with wellbeing, connections, funds, and so on. The injuries we conceal cause issues down the road for us.
Britney definitely knows the drawback of distinction full well. In the excitement business since she was 11 years of age and on the Mickey Mouse Club, Lances’ life has been a carnival sideshow throughout the previous quite a while. Since her separation from Federline, she has enjoyed wild showcasing that has made her a hit with the individuals who like to watch train wrecks: two excursions to emergency clinic mental wards, shaving her head, slamming vehicle windshields, run-ins with the paparazzi and an issue with one of them, spells in recovery, and her lamentable appearance at the 2007 Video Music Grants, to give some examples of her slides down the stepping stool in full general visibility. At a certain point in her narrative, she asks mournfully, “What the heck was I considering?” She was clearly considering: Make tracks in an opposite direction from the torment; I would prefer not to feel like this. Thus she celebrated and tranquilized and drank to overlook the pain and the indignation.
Presently the expectation is that she is en route to recuperation. She’s completely occupied with singing, moving, and recording, with the spotlight indeed sparkling on her as the fundamental fascination in the enormous tent. With the arrival of “Carnival” on her 27th birthday celebration in December, a fair Britney is making a course for a rebound. As Moving Stone brought up: “When she’s light, she’s cheerful. At the point when she’s brunette, she’s tragic. At the point when she’s pink, she’s insane.” And moving satisfies her. At the point when she’s in a move practice with her choreographer, it’s one of the main occasions she can feel free, which she can’t ever be out in the open. Moving is a shelter keeping her engaged right now. Similarly that activity can help every one of us to discharge stale or quelled vitality, the development of her body and the order of move bears her a powerful method to recreate her life.
The L.A. Times, while exploring Britney’s “Carnival,” stated: “Lances remains Another Marilyn, epitomizing desire and catastrophe in each swing of her hips.” It’s an able correlation, albeit ideally not a deadly one. We can’t quit watching her: some with an eager eye towards the following calamity, and some giving a shout out to her as the rebound kid. Indeed, 3.7 million watchers watched her MTV extraordinary. Furthermore, millions more watched her commend her 27th birthday celebration under New York Bazaar tent in Manhattan before the cameras of Good Morning America. Her show visit for “Carnival” starts in her home province of Louisiana in New Orleans on Spring third. Her unwavering fans are excited to have the “old Britney” back. By and by, she’s all out in the media-excited at the upside of having everyone’s eyes on her.
On the off chance that she truly needed to escape, she could, yet she’s dependent. As much as any addict is dependent on their substance of decision, Britney is dependent on the consideration she gets. Furthermore, similar to some other someone who is addicted, she has made her very own jail. She can’t surrender the substance she’s dependent on. The main way out is without any weaning period escape the open eye-yet she can’t leave the main life she’s known. From numerous points of view, she’s particularly similar to her godlike object and guide, Madonna. My expectation for Britney is that as she ages, she’ll comprehend what’s really significant throughout everyday life, and how her enthusiastic injuries have directed the terms of her detainment. In the event that she develops in knowledge just as years, on the off chance that she figures out how to adore herself and quits requiring steady external consideration and commendation, maybe one day we can find out about a glad Britney, content with her life-and less the bazaar.
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Bryant ’16: HSC Opportunity for Engagement
September 8, 2015 Howard HewittPosted in Uncategorized
Patrick Bryant ’16 – Since it was announced prior to the 2014-2015 school year, the Gentlemen’s Classic has been pitched as being more than just a football game between Wabash and Hampden-Sydney. It was about the all-male education and how we can draw from one another and learn from one another in the education of young men. This past weekend, Fabian House ’16, Scott Purucker ’16, and I traveled with the Little Giants football team to engage in a discussion with members of H-SC’s student leadership. I walk away proud and thankful for all we have by what I witnessed, yet inspired that we can do better.
Fabian, Scott, and I met with Hampden-Sydney’s Student Body President, the chairman of their Student Senate (which is comparable to Fabian’s role), the president of their Inter-Fraternity Council, and the president of their honor court. The notion of having an honor court has deep roots in the history of Hampden-Sydney. Although our Gentlemen’s Rule and their Honor Code are very similar, we don’t have that sort of infrastructure here at Wabash. I admire their student leadership for taking a stand, often times against friends and close classmates, for the sake of upholding that honor code. That can’t be an easy task.
I spent a good majority of the first half of the game talking with Josh, the chairman of their Student Senate. Despite having closer to 2,000 students, Josh was surprised that we have the funding dollars that we do to put towards clubs, activities, and student programming. Some of the events he outlined at Hampden-Sydney were a formal ball that they hold for the student body, faculty, staff, and alumni, and also a large philanthropic event they put on each year. That was two thought-provoking “gaps” for us as student leaders to consider. The notion of having a campus-wide formal at Wabash isn’t a new one and it’s something that’s been discussed in my time as Treasurer and now President of the Student Body.
The idea of having a philanthropic event is also very interesting to me. Our financial policy says that student funds cannot be directed to a charitable organization. The idea is we want to subsidize costs for groups that want to “do” philanthropy, but we don’t want to allow a free-for-all in allocating funds to various organizations. That said, I think it would be a great idea that we put our manpower and energy behind an event. Prior to coming to Wabash, I spent four years on the Executive Committee for our high school’s Dance Marathon, raising $1 million over four years for Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. Philanthropy is an area for growth and I come away inspired that we can do better as a student government in helping students “live humanely.”
The weekend was a great one and the opportunity for me to interact with our D.C.-area alumni and trustees, interact with their student leadership in-person, and participate in the radio broadcast during the second half. It was a great game day atmosphere at Hampden-Sydney, but to see the apathy of their student body to the game and their failure to wear their school color, showed me that we have a lot to be proud of and thankful for in Crawfordsville. You can look at any photo from any game day at Wabash and find a full crowd emblazoned in scarlet. Not so at Hampden-Sydney. Instead lots of blue blazers with their backs turned to the game. Wabash cares and proof can be found no further than in the crowd that supported our Little Giants this past Saturday.
Sunday was a day I won’t soon forget. I’ve traveled twice before to Washington D.C. and twice made the trip to Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown. Moved to tears doesn’t begin to explain it. Without discrediting our players in anyway, I think you can ask any of them about what that Tomb means and any football game pales in comparison.
When I look back on the weekend, I was asked a number of questions by members of the H-SC community and it humbles me to think I was an ambassador for our student body. When I explained our campus, our culture, our way of life, I quickly realized that I could sum it up my pride as a Little Giant by a lot of the actions off the playing field that I witnessed this weekend. Everywhere we went, whether at a hotel, a restaurant, or on our flights, the behavior of our players was noticed by just about everyone who came into contact with them. I heard countless times “please” and “thank you” and “bless you” when someone sneezed, I saw doors being held, guys pitching in and grabbing bags for one another, I saw so much of that in anticipation of and return from a 35-3 thrashing of the Tigers. I can’t tell you if it’s a product of a single-sex education or a small school, but there’s something special here at Wabash. Although it didn’t take a trip to Hampden-Sydney for me to realize that, it gives me a great deal of pride that the people we came in contact with at H-SC and along the way, may have a sense of what it means to be a Little Giant now too.
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John Frye on Center Hall Getting Major Landscape Facelift
Warren Rosenberg on Honoring Intelligent and Respectful Conversation
Athletic Fields Construction
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My European Vacation Favourites – Part 1
Landmarks & Icons Submitted on Tuesday, July 19, 2016
In my travels around Europe, there have been many cities, regions, and sites that I have enjoyed and vowed to return to. The following stick in my mind but are by no means the only ones. We all know that on a European vacation, there is sure to be a treasure-trove of wonderful places to visit, and I personally had a huge problem deciding on a selection to recommend to you. Nevertheless, here we go.
The Idyllic Lake District, England
Located in the extreme north west of England, the Lake District is not just a region but a scenic National Park made up of a series of serene lakes, rugged mountains rising up out of the sides of the lakes, and several attractive very British market towns. With its green fields, stone cottages, dry stone walls, and rolling fells, the landscape of the Lake District will definitely charm you.
Starting with the lakes, you have a wide choice, with the principal ones being Coniston, Windermere, Ullswater, and Derwentwater. Just standing on any of these lake shores admiring the surrounding countryside is thrill enough. If you want a different perspective, then take one of the many boat cruises available on the larger lakes. If you are energetic, you can take short walks or long hikes in the Lake District. There are companies who organize walking itineraries including accommodation, transfer of luggage from one point to another, and detailed maps showing points of interests. Or, you can linger a while in one of the market towns such as Keswick, Ambleside, or Coniston, where you can browse the small shops, have a hearty but tasty typical English afternoon tea, or stop in at one of the many traditional-style pubs for a pint.
Waterwheel at Ambleside, in the Lake District
You can visit Dove Cottage, the place where William Wordsworth, the famous English poet, used to live, on the edge of Grasmere. The cottage’s rooms are full of artifacts from when Wordsworth lived here happily with his sister, wife, and three children. The Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery next door houses one of the main Wordsworth collections, including many original manuscripts and some creepy death masks of some famous Romantic figures.
You might want to try the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, a pocket-sized railway originally built to ferry iron ore from the mines out to the coast. These days it is a major attraction with miniature steam trains that chug along for 7 miles down the Eskdale Valley between the coastal town of Ravenglass and the village of Dalegarth – a great way to view the countryside.
Remember reading Beatrix Potter books? Because of her love of the Lake District, she spent much of her time here. When she died, she left 14 farms and 4000 acres of land of her own beloved countryside to the National Trust for all to enjoy. Hill Top is a 17th Century house near Hawkshead, and was once Beatrix Potter’s home. It is open to the public as a writer’s house museum.
You can also head down memory lane at the Lakeland Motor Museum with its collection of 30,000 exhibits. This includes 140 classic cars and motorbikes all carefully assembled over 50 years. However, the museum isn’t just about cars. To quote the museum, the entire collection is “presented in a social context with a host of rarities to awaken some special motoring memories.”
After this brief outline of the pleasures of the Lake District, to sum up, I quote the 18th Century writer, one John Brown, “The Lake country is a glorious region, of which I had only seen the similitude in dreams, waking or sleeping…I longed to slip out unseen and to run away by myself in among the hills and dales.”
Suggested Itineraries:
3-Day The English Lake District and Hadrian’s Wall
6-Day York, The Dales, Lake District and Hadrian’s Wall
Bordeaux, France – also known as Little Paris
Bordeaux is certainly a famous wine type and also a wine region in South West France, but often it is ignored as a very interesting and attractive city well worth staying in for a few days. It is also, of course, a handy gateway for visits to the wine-growing areas just outside town. Bordeaux is a fairly large city but the most interesting attractions are in the very centre. It is also a city to enjoy by foot. The affluent districts of Bordeaux just north of the centre have been nicknamed “Little Paris,” and I have heard it said that the inhabitants feel Bordeaux is a rival to Paris in some ways.
One of Bordeaux’s attributes is that it lies on the banks of the Garonne River. In fact, the centre is separated from some of its suburbs by this wide stretch of water. The first thing that struck me on arrival here was the elegance of its many classical buildings from the 18th Century found in the centre. Like Paris, it is the architecture which creates a charming ambience. These types of buildings also line the quays of the river for around 1 kilometre/half a mile. An excellent example of this is the Place de la Bourse, built in the mid 1700s. A stroll down the quays of the river will immediately immerse you in history.
Palais de la Bourse
So what to see? An expansive public square in Bordeaux is the Esplanade des Quinconces, considered to be the largest square in Europe. Built in the early 1800s, the square’s monumental fountain honours important past citizens. Nearby is the Jardin Public, where you can visit the Botanical Gardens and the Natural History Museum.
A wonderful Gothic edifice, the Bordeaux Cathedral, dates back to the 11th Century. The masonry carvings are very interesting, as is the 50 metre / 180 feet high belfry. You can climb the tower’s 231 narrow steps after which the reward will be spectacular panoramic views of the city.
Continuing on with my architectural theme, the Grand Theatre was built in 1780 by the same architect who designed the Palais Royal and the Theatre Francais in Paris. It is grand in every sense of the word, with its colossal columns and statues of Greek muses and goddesses.
Belltower at Basilica of St. Michael
The St. Michel Basilica is another important church. Along with the Cathedral of Saint Andre, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. This basilica took 200 years to build from the 14th to the 16th centuries. From the top of the belfry, you can again take in stunning panoramic views of the city. After visiting the basilica, make sure you stroll around the Saint Michel Quarter that surrounds it. This is the most colourful and atmospheric neighborhood in the whole of Bordeaux, and twice a week – on Monday and Saturday mornings – the square of Saint Michel is transformed into a lively marketplace.
One more architectural gem is the Pont de Pierre (Stone Bridge) which blends in perfectly with the city’s elegant riverfront buildings. The bridge spans the Garonne River with 17 graceful arches supported by foundation piles set into the riverbed.
Bordeaux is also a city with more than its fair share of museums and art galleries. The Musée des Beaux-Arts takes up 2 wings of the 18th Century City Hall. Highlights here include Flemish, Dutch, and Italian paintings from the 17th century. A favourite of mine is the Bordeaux Wine and Trade Museum, which is located in the building of an old wine merchant. You can learn about the history of the wine trade with artifacts, videos, and a guided tour, followed by a personal wine tasting and presentation of wines of the region by one of the staff.
I feel I haven’t really scratched the surface of the delights of Bordeaux, and should mention there are quaint shops, cafes, gardens, and an abundance of very French restaurants. I can only suggest to find out more, you visit Bordeaux, France on your European vacation.
3-Day Bordeaux Stopover
9-Day A Taste of Bordeaux – Back Roads Experience
Aerial view of the city of Bordeaux
Dresden, Germany – a Beautiful City Literally Risen from the Ashes
If you are looking for a reasonably quiet and laid-back destination, on your European vacation, which offers lots of wonderful buildings, a long history, lush green spaces, and a unique charm, then head to Dresden in South East Germany. It is amazing to think that although 80% of Dresden’s historic centre was destroyed during World War II, all the important landmarks have been rebuilt to their former glory. Although not so specific, it was originally part of Eastern Germany and off limits to most of the west.
One’s first impression is of spaciousness. The River Elbe flows through the centre, with lots of greenery on both its banks along which you can take a leisurely stroll. The Old Town hovers above the river and makes for an attractive skyline. Simply stand on the promenade and look down on the river and the greenery to be drawn in by the view. Dresden has been described as “Germany’s Florence” and it’s no wonder.
Dresden cityscape over the Elbe River
Let’s start with the Old Town, also known as Altstadt. Along with the interesting district of New town (Neustadt), it was planned and constructed on the orders of Saxon monarchs. From the 19th century the city grew by incorporating other districts, but the Old town contains the majority of Dresden’s treasures. Neumarkt Square is the city’s best known square and one of the places restored to its old self. It has a wonderful charm, characterized by its gabled houses built in Baroque style. In the square is the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady). It was completely destroyed during the war, and the first time I visited Dresden, it had been determined that it be faithfully rebuilt. When I was there at that time, an area containing hundreds of pieces of stone all laid out perfectly in sections was a remarkable sight. The patience to do this as a precursor to the rebuilding boggles the mind. The ruins of the Frauenkirche and its surrounding area remained untouched for many years, acting as a memorial. Today it has been totally rebuilt. This magnificent domed Baroque church once again dominates Dresden’s skyline.
Frauenkirche Church in Dresden
The most architecturally beautiful section of the Elbe’s banks in Dresden, dating back to the mid 1700s is Brühl’s Terrace – known as the “Balcony of Europe.” From the terrace you can see many of the sites around Dresden, including the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden Fortress, and the Albertinum art museum, plus great vistas of the River Elbe. The terrace was originally part of ramparts built to protect the city.
The Royal Palace, or Dresden Castle, also destroyed, was reconstructed to create a museum complex. The best known is the Green Vault, one of Europe’s most magnificent treasure chambers with some 3,000 treasures.
The most significant building from the late Baroque period is the Zwinger Palace, Dresden’s answer to Paris’ Versailles, and originally built in 1709. Apart from its setting in spacious ornamental gardens, it contains various museums including one of the world’s largest collections of Dresden porcelain. The Armoury has an extensive collection of weapons, suits of armour, and ceremonial garments.
Bruehl’s Terrace at night
The Semperoper opera house, largely destroyed during the war, has been considered one of the world’s loveliest. This magnificent hall is an architectural delight and is home to the Saxon State Orchestra, as well as being a venue for symphony concerts and ballet.
Something a little different is Pfund’s Dairy in the Neustadt district. The Guinness Book of World Records has named it “the most beautiful dairy shop in the world.” The interior decoration of the dairy shop, which was founded in 1880, has amazingly embellished tile paintings in a Neo-Renaissance style. Every inch of the walls, ceiling, floor, and counters of this little dairy shop is covered with hand-painted tiles produced by Villeroy & Boch, in cooperation with local artists. Apart from the shop, there is also a café.
Dresden’s Neustadt neighborhood is a mixture of the bourgeoisie and the bohemian, with its alternative scene of eccentric cafes and pubs, art galleries, small theatres, and little shops. It’s a great place to spend some time while in Germany or on a European vacation.
To sum up Dresden, it’s a beautiful city that has heroically reinvented itself.
Suggested Excursion:
Dresden’s Neustadt by Night – Bars and Pubs | Germany
Zwinger Palace courtyard
Robert Glazier
With over 40 years experience in the travel industry, and working for Goway for the last 19 years, British-born Robert Glazier has travelled to over 80 countries. “I have never met a destination which didn’t have something to interest me,” he says. His first foray abroad was from England to Switzerland on a school trip at the age of 14, and that was the start of a long journey. An avid runner, Robert’s favourite way of exploring a destination, is to don his running shoes and really get to know it on foot, even if it means sometimes getting lost! His advice to other travellers? Always wonder what is around the next corner!
europe vacations
france vacations
germany tours
uk lake district
uk tours
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Meck Democrats slam Trump's Muslim immigration ban
By Edgardo Diaz, For Equilibrio Informativo, On 31 January 2017, Read Original
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Saturday sued the Trump administration on behalf of two men who were detained at an airport while traveling back to the US because of President Trump's immigration crackdown.
There are fears on both sides of the Pacific that the executive order signed by President Donald Trump to ban visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries will adversely affect America's tech industry. In a draft dissent memo, the State Department officials condemned the order, saying that it does not do anything to make the U.S. safer.
The organization says the order targets Muslims, and that refugees will be sent back to their homelands, where they face violence and possible death.
President Trump's travel ban caused confusion this weekend in airports across the globe.
"The Muslim Exclusion Order is the as‐promised outcome of Defendant Trump's hateful, year-long campaign which was fueled, in significant part, by a desire to stigmatize Islam and Muslims", it said.
"People have questions as to whether or not they should travel, they're concerned, they're anxious about what's going to happen next", said Hiba Rahim, CAIR Florida's Northwest coordinator.
The ban includes seven countries; Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. They're feeling it right now, and these people have done nothing wrong.
ACLU legal director David Cole said his group is preparing an Establishment Clause challenge to the order that will argue there is "copious "smoking gun" evidence that the president intends to disfavor Muslims on the basis of their religion" by way of the order.
"So we are seeing that the people do not support this ban; the people stand with immigrants and refugees", she added. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the unsafe threat it poses, our country can not be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.
Here are some snippets of the pro-Muslim waves of solidarity that Americans have put on full display over the last four days.
News, CAIR-FL In The News
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Briefing note on amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill 2019 relating to legacy investigations
Two amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill 2019, inserted in the House of Commons, would require reporting duties for the NI Secretary of State around legacy investigations. Namely (in summary), these amendments add requirements for the Secretary of State to: Report on protecting the security forces from ‘repeated’ investigation through a presumption of...
Representatives of three NI NGOs to address the UN on the UK’s record on torture
02/05/2019Committee on the Administration of JusticeNews, Press releases
Next week representatives of three local NGOs will be travelling to Geneva to address members of the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) regarding the UK’s compliance with its international obligations on the prevention of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. Andrée Murphy and Irati Aiesta from Relatives for Justice, Gemma McKeown from the Committee...
Committee of Ministers decision – international community asks UK to provide timeframe on introducing Stormont House Agreement legacy legislation into Westminster
The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers has published its latest decisions in relation to the scrutiny of the ‘cases concerning the actions of the security forces in Northern Ireland’, otherwise known as the McKerr group of cases. This follows on from a meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies, which took place in Strasburg earlier this...
Statement from CAJ on the Supreme Court judgment in the case of Pat Finucane
CAJ is pleased with the unanimous decision of the UK Supreme Court to uphold the appeal taken by Geraldine Finucane in relation to the murder of her husband Pat Finucane. Pat Finucane was murdered on 12 February 1989 and although David Cameron admitted in 2012 that there were ‘shocking levels of collusion’ in this murder...
Submission to the Committee of Ministers in relation to the supervision of cases concerning the action of the security forces in Northern Ireland (Feb 2019)
The Committee of Ministers is the decision-making body of Europe’s leading human rights organisation, the Council of Europe. Between 12 to 14 March, the 1340th (Human Rights) meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies will take place. This session will look at the execution of judgements made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in a...
Press statement re. Police Ombudsman’s reports being held up by PSNI failure to disclose information
The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI) has said that a number of his reports into past killings, which may have involved collusion, will be delayed because of police failure to disclose information. CAJ understands that new information on the activities of Loyalist murder squads has come to light. The PSNI claims that ‘human error’...
Joint letter on the Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill 2017-19
30/01/2019Committee on the Administration of JusticeNews
CAJ joins with seven other NGOs to sign a public letter on the Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill 2017-19. The Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill is a major shake-up of how authorities access the data of people in the UK and overseas, in the context of investigating and prosecuting serious crime. We welcome better measures...
Tribunal to consider whether MI5 covert agents can commit serious criminal offences
Agents for Britain’s Security Service are authorised to commit serious crimes, on British soil, without informing prosecutors, under a secretive MI5 policy, a court heard today. Reprieve, Privacy International, the Pat Finucane Centre and CAJ are challenging the legality of the scheme before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London. The groups’ leading counsel, Ben Jaffey...
Press statement on No Stone Unturned arrests
Responding to reports that two journalists have been arrested in connection with the alleged theft of a confidential report from the Police Ombudsman, which was used in a recent documentary on the Loughinisland massacre, No Stone Unturned, Brian Gormally, Director of CAJ, said: “The arrest of journalists because of their work is always a concern,...
Just News June/July 2018
06/07/2018Committee on the Administration of JusticeJust News, News, Publications
Inside this issue: The release of the RUC Walker Report, proposals to create an Oral History Archive, and more. Link: JN-June-July-18
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BufFYI
Home buying on a budget in Buffalo
Streets like Timon on the East Side still offer affordable homes—many in the $100K range. (Matthew Digati)
By Devon Dams-O'Connor|Published Fri, Feb 22, 2019 |Updated Fri, Feb 22, 2019
By now we’ve all heard countless stories about Buffalo’s residential real estate market and how competitive the home search has been for first-time buyers. A shortage of properties for sale, multiple offers, and buyers digging deeper than what’s financially prudent, at times, to finally win a bid. But for homebuyers whose pocket linings only reach to a depth of about $100,000, the search for a place of their own has been testing nerves, generating disappointment and pricing people out of long-term financial stability.
Belmont Housing Resources for WNY is one of a handful of local non-profit agencies that offer first-time homebuyer counseling, working with about 500 people each year. Housing Programs Manager Sandra Becker, who has been in the home buying field for over 25 years as a realtor and then a housing counselor, has seen skyrocketing home prices have a dramatic impact on who is seeking assistance.
Fuller Street in Riverside.
“We used to help very low-income people—under the 30th percentile—buy houses, and that’s not happening anymore,” she explains. “We’re struggling with people at the 80th percentile now.”
Becker also says that in the past year the agency has seen a decline in the number of people attending the homeownership classes offered at Belmont Housing Resources because there are simply fewer people who can afford to shop—and that’s not likely to change soon.
“The home prices have leveled off, but now the interest rates are rising,” says Becker. “If someone was making $40,000 and would’ve qualified for a $120,000 house at 4 percent interest, at 5 percent it’s $73 more per month to a mortgage payment, which brings their qualification down to $106,000 for a house. With higher home prices, it’s less possible to find that house.”
So who is looking to buy? Becker says the majority of first-time homebuyers are in their late 20s or early 30s. Half are single mothers. There has been an increase in refugees buying because there is a big community here that supports one another in homeownership. Less common but still seen are older people who have rented their whole lives and have saved up enough to buy.
Tamika Collins-Murphy, a real estate agent with Howard Hanna, has helped some of Belmont’s clients search for a home. She says that in today’s market, buyers really need about $125,000 to find a good home. Even at that price point, the search can be disappointing.
Cable Street in South Buffalo.
“Everyone starts off wanting the same things as buyers in any price range—an updated home with plenty of space within the city, close to shopping and places they could walk and things to do,” she explains. “Unfortunately in the city and surrounding areas, there are older homes. And in their price range, and when they go for mortgage pre-approval, they can’t qualify for enough. It’s a wakeup.”
The good news? “There are homes out there,” said Collins-Murphy, especially in re-emerging neighborhoods.
Rashada Stewart worked with Collins-Murphy to shop for her first house this winter. She had recently gotten married, had been saving for a house, and started a job where she saw herself staying long-term. Her budget was under $130,000 through a first-time homebuyer mortgage program, and her year-long search took her through several areas of the city where the neighborhoods were good and amenities were nearby. She walked through 15 houses total, put in offers on six, and won three of those bids. But two of the homes failed inspection due to a variety of issues. The final home, a three-bedroom in North Buffalo, became hers in mid-February.
Collins-Murphy and her partner, Howard Hanna Real Estate Agent Mia Mootry, say that while it’s very slim pickings for affordable houses in high-demand neighborhoods, there are pockets all over the city where solid homes under $125,000 do pop up for sale. Hamlin Park is an area that’s up-and-coming, diverse, and not too far from downtown. They’re seeing more options in the University District, Riverside, Blackrock and Kaisertown. Mootry says that South Buffalo is full of homes with beautiful woodwork and character. Around the Medical Campus, homes are priced low (although sometimes need a lot of work).
Pulaski Street in Kaisertown, where this house resides, has recently seen sales in the $100K and under range.
The obvious choice might be to opt for a fixer-upper, but while the home itself might carry a lower price tag initially, the costs to repair and renovate add up quickly. Many first-time homebuyer mortgage programs also require a home to be in suitable condition at purchase, and don’t allow a buyer to borrow extra to put towards rehab.
For homes that do qualify for a mortgage but need a little help, Collins-Murphy urges her clients to see the home’s potential—and the resources available to help pay for improvements.
“If a home has almost everything else on the list, maybe we talk about applying for an FHA 203k improvement loan, which lowers out-of-pocket costs and then they can make it what they want,” she explains. “There are grants available after you’ve lived in a place for a while to make improvements in certain areas of the city—a new furnace or new windows, for example.”
For now, Belmont Housing Services tries to layer as many financial resources as possible into programs for its homebuyers. This includes combining grants from the city, match-savers programs and closing cost assistance on fixed-rate mortgages from State of New York Mortgage Agency-approved lenders. The organization also strongly favors local lenders’ products for first-time and low-income buyers because the smaller institutions tend to have more options that extend the borrowing power of the buyer. For instance, a local credit union might waive mortgage insurance, a savings of $75 per month which, when subtracted from average monthly mortgage payments, means someone might be able to afford a house that costs $15,000 more.
In the end, Stewart says, the year she spent shopping and bidding was challenging, but ultimately worth it.
“First it was fun going to open houses and looking around,” says Stewart. “But then putting in offers and not getting the houses was frustrating. My first expectations were higher, and there were compromises along the way. We ended up with a house that checked most of my boxes; it just needs a little paint, but nothing major.”
Inside WNY’s hot housing market | Spotlighting Buffalo's curb appeal | At home in Larkinville
Story topics: Home
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Interesting Times in the Cemetery
Dear Readers, for some time now the two foxes above have been seen together almost every day. They play together, wait patiently for their jam sandwiches and dog food together, and sometimes groom one another. Occasionally they bicker, but generally all is serene.
The one laying down is completely mange-free, and a beautiful fox – I’ve seen him several times before. The one standing up still has a touch of mange, and is also losing her winter coat, but her skin is definitely improving (so much for my initial scepticism about the homeopathic remedy). She has now developed a limp, so I’ll be putting some arnica on the sandwiches along with the mange remedy. However, she still has quite a turn of speed, so I don’t think her leg is bothering her too much. It isn’t showing any signs of a wound, and it’s not at an unusual angle, so I’m hoping that it will just sort itself out.
When I was in the cemetery with my friend J (another dedicated cat lady like myself) the two foxes were waiting for us, and I had a chance to get quite a few photos. And then, when the vixen moved, I noticed something.
Apologies for the quality of the photo, but I am sure that she has the low-slung look of a mother fox.
To me, this confirms my initial hunch – the female is lactating, which presumably means that she has cubs back in her earth. No wonder she looks exhausted.
To say I am excited would be an understatement. Excited, and nervous. Cubs are so vulnerable, and this is the middle of a city, after all. But at least this litter will have lots of people looking out for them – B who feeds the cats, the Dog Unit man and myself to name but three of the small army of folk who seem to spend time watching the wildlife in the cemetery. We shall have to be hopeful that these two will manage to raise their family and, if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get to see the cubs. In the meantime, I am going to be dropping some dog food in addition to the jam sandwiches – lactating females of all species need all the food they can get, if my foster cats are anything to go by. I’m hoping that by just putting out a small amount, it won’t make the foxes dependent, but will help with their energy requirements. They spend very little time hanging around the feeding site (less than 30 minutes a day I’d say), and so they are obviously getting the rest of their food from the usual sources – insects, scavenging, and probably the remains of the lunches of wasteful humans.
The dog fox waiting for his dinner
The vixen, with the muzzle of the dog fox just visible behind her
And, to round off my fox report, I looked out of the window last week to see this beautiful creature in the garden. I guess a tiny portion of dog food might be useful for this one, too. I am intrigued by how different every fox’s face is, when you look at it closely. Just like humans, they are all individuals.
Seen in my garden during the week. What a beauty!
The dog fox from the cemetery
The fox from my garden
The vixen from the cemetery
To read the whole of the fox story so far, with all its ups and downs, follow the links below:
Jam Sandwiches in the Rain
News from the Cemetery
Distressing News from the Cemetery
All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer
This entry was posted in London Mammals on April 30, 2016 by Bug Woman.
Wednesday Weed – Snake’s Head Fritillary
Snake’s Head Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris)
Dear Readers, snake’s head fritillary is my favourite spring bulb. I am exceedingly fond of snakes, and so the strange scaly pattern on the purple flowers enthralls me. I love the elegance of the pure white flowers. I love the nodding heads, which only reveal their beauty if you turn them over.
However, it’s fair to say that the plant has an unfortunate reputation. One alternative name was ‘Leper Lily’, as the flowers are said to be the same shape as the bells that lepers had to carry to announce themselves. Vita Sackville-West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’ As with many other flowers of a nodding habit, they were said to be hanging their heads in sorrow at Christ’s crucifixion.
Well, harrumph to all that. The fritillary family contains the only truly chequered flowers that I know (but do remind me of others if you can think of them!) Both parts of the Latin name for snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) refer to this feature: the Fritillaria part refers to either the Latin word for dice (fritillus) or (more likely to my mind) the word frittillo, which means a table for chess-playing (thanks to The Poison Garden website for this insight). This is also the root derivation for the name of the fritillary group of butterflies.
The Pearl-Bordered Fritillary (Boloria selene) (Photo Two – credit below)
The meleagris species name means ‘spotted like a guineafowl’.
Helmeted Guinea Fowl (Photo One – see credit below)
According to my Harraps Wild Flowers book, snake’s head fritillary were first recorded in the UK in 1578 (they are native to mainland Europe and Asia), but were not reported in the wild until 1736. However, there is a view that the plants are actually native, growing originally on the floodplains that extended from the Rhine and included the Thames before the opening up of the North Sea in about 5500 BC. They are now a plant of unimproved meadow which occasionally floods, a vanishingly rare habitat, and are considered to be Nationally Scarce. Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, mentions a few sites where the plants can be seen in quantity, including North Meadow in Cricklade,Wiltshire. He describes this meadow thus:
North Meadow (now a National Nature Reserve) is an ancient common, and what is known as Lammas Land. Its 44 acres are shut up for hay on 13 February each year until the hay harvest (apportioned by lot) some time in July. On old Lammas Day, 12 August, it become the common pasture of the Borough of Cricklade, and any resident of the town may put up to ten head of horses or cattle on it, or (after 12 September) 20 head of sheep. As far as is known, this system of land tenure has continued unchanged for more than 800 years, and the show at North Meadow may be the best evidence that the fritillary is a native species.’
The snake’s head fritillaries at North Meadow in Cricklade
Whatever their provenance, snake’s head fritillaries are certainly widely naturalised in many places, such as here in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, where they are outgrowing their original planting site and heading off in to the woods. I have some in my garden as well, where they don’t seem to mind the clay soil and the shade.
Although the snake’s head fritillary is such an exotic and enigmatic plant, it appears not to have been used medicinally – maybe its association with lepers was too strong for it to be considered useful. It is also poisonous, though there are no accounts of anybody tucking into a bulb and doing themselves a damage as there are with daffodils. However, the plant is celebrated as the County Plant of Oxfordshire (due to Magdalen College Meadow being an important snake’s head fritillary site), and also as the provincial plant of Uppland in Sweden. And furthermore, it is also celebrated by me. This most curious plant cheers me up whenever I look at it, in much the same way as I am delighted when a new house spider turns up or when I discover an unexpected caterpillar in the lettuce. I find its snakiness a refreshing change from all the wholesome bulbs that are bursting forth at this time of year, and it reminds me that something (or somebody) doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.
Photo One – By Bob – Picasa Web Albums, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12365512
Photo Two – By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1680620
All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer
This entry was posted in London Plants on April 27, 2016 by Bug Woman.
Bugwoman on Location – Out and Back
The walk there…..
Dear Readers, this week I was in the village of MIlborne St Andrew in Dorset with my parents. Those of you who are regular readers will know that Mum has had some enormous health challenges in the past few months. Dad was also briefly hospitalized last week with a suspected stroke. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have had any major effects (in fact there was no evidence on the brain scan that a stroke has actually happened), but Dad is having trouble using his left arm and hand, resulting in a lot of frustration at mealtimes, and the occasional rude word. However, both of them are in good spirits and so I decided to take myself off for a walk, to see if I could find anything interesting to share with you all.
Maybe it was my mood, but finding something ‘interesting’ didn’t come easily. The wind rippled through the fields of barley and wheat, making waves as on a green sea, but all I could see was the monoculture, the lack of any other plant interlopers apart from the occasional bluebell growing on the edge of the crops.
There are signs telling me to ‘keep out’ and announcing ‘no admittance’ and chastising me for not cleaning up my dog poo, which seems a bit unkind as I don’t even have a dog.
I walk a bare path up between two fields and the only bird I see is a stray crow. Then I walk the same path back and don’t see anything at all.
….and the walk back.
I think that how we see the world depends on how we feel. I had done this self-same walk last month, and found it delightful. I suspect that the quality of my attention wasn’t what it might be. But then, as I decided to turn back, I looked up and saw a kestrel hunting, holding its own against the wind. I watched as it let the wind carry it and then hovered, all attention focused on a tiny square of green. It dropped to have a closer look, then rose again, poised on a pinnacle of air. I was so stunned that I didn’t even raise my camera. And then the bird swooped away, and disappeared behind the trees.
Me not managing to photograph a kestrel
I walked on. I spotted a yellowhammer in the tree, not far from where I saw one on my previous walk. Blackbirds and blue tits flew past with worms and caterpillars in their beaks.
Yellowhammer, at last…
I reached a tiny area of woodland that I’d trudged past on my outward journey without noticing anything at all. But in fact, just below the level of the road there was a miniscule bluebell wood, hemmed in by fields on one side and a hedge and path on the other. From the deep blue colour and the scent I’d say that these were native bluebells, and they were mixed with windflowers and lesser celandine and primroses. Was this tiny spot a remnant of a much larger wood that had somehow, mysteriously, been preserved? I tried to work out how to photograph it but it was too well protected, too difficult to get to, what with the hedge and the ditch and the barbed wire fence and all. And yet, maybe this very inconvenience is what has kept it so diverse and so pristine for all these years.
As I passed the wood and hit the top of the hill, I saw three roe deer feeding in a field that was probably a mile away. One had antlers just growing. Roe are my favourite deer – I love the way that they just disappear into the undergrowth, jumping over bushes by seemingly retracting their legs into their bellies with no effort at all. Even at this distance they seemed to notice me, looking up and sniffing the air. A prey animal must be constantly on the look out, and it is not as if humans are safe to be around. I both understand and hate the way that creatures flee from us – it reminds me of J.A.Baker’s masterwork ‘The Peregrine’, in which he speaks of how humans ‘stink of death’. When I do meet animals who are not afraid of me, all that I can think of is how vulnerable they would be to other humans who might not have such benign intentions.
Distant deer…
As I head back I notice that one of the houses has symbols of my favourite saint, St Francis of Assisi, and of what I’m fast beginning to think of as my totem animal.
By now, the village is coming into sight. I notice that the house martins are back, flying in giddying circles above the cottages, and a single swallow flies over the wall and on into the garage of the buildings opposite. I wonder how it would be to have a martin’s or a swallow’s nest under my eaves, and imagine how happy I would be to see the owners returning after their long flight north, and how heart-broken I would be if they didn’t come back. And I puzzle a little over how some people will destroy the nests because of the inconvenient noise and mess. For me, the thought of the confused birds turning anxious circles around the spot where they thought they’d built their nest, the knowledge that there may be eggs to be laid and nowhere to lay them sparks a feeling in my heart that is little short of anguish.
The site of many a martin nest
As I ponder these thoughts, a starling with a beak full of worms flies up on top of the burglar alarm outside one of the other houses. As I watch, she jumps up into the eaves and I hear the wheezing cries of her nestlings. She leaves the nest at such speed that I’m sure she’s aware of being watched, and doesn’t want to draw attention to the nest site. I notice that the house has been sold, and so there probably won’t be anyone around, at least for a few weeks. When they do move in, I hope that they are as delighted as I would be to have a nest site for this increasingly rare bird, and that they aren’t too worried about the state of their brickwork.
There’s an adult starling and a nest under them there eaves…
What strikes me most as I head back to make yet more pancakes for the parents, is how this really was a walk of two parts. Maybe it takes a little while for me to get into my stride, to slow my thoughts down enough to notice what’s going on outside. Or maybe, like the wind that’s still rustling the beech hedge, my mind is full of breezes and zephyrs and moments of stillness, ever changing. Like the kestrel, I have to learn to ride my moods, whatever they might be.
All photographs copyright Vivienne Palmer
This entry was posted in Bugwoman on Location on April 23, 2016 by Bug Woman.
Wednesday Weed – Honesty
Honesty (Lunaria annua)
Dear Readers, on my way through Coldfall Wood last week, my eye was caught by a group of bright magenta flowers growing beside the stream. When I slithered across the mud to investigate, I was delighted to find a little group of honesty (Lunaria annua) in full flower. This is another of those plants that has probably escaped, either from the local gardens or from the cemetery, but it has been recorded in the wild since at least 1597 so it is a long-term inhabitant. Its native home is the Balkans and parts of south-west Asia.
Who would have thought that this pretty plant is a member of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae)? And yet a close look at its flowers give us a clue. All members of this varied tribe have simple flowers with four petals and four sepals, and the cross-like arrangement is what gives the group its alternative name of crucifer.
Honesty is probably more familiar from its seed-pods, whose semi-transparent nature are said to give it its English name. These are very popular in autumn flower arrangements, and also give the plant many of its alternative names: in south-east Asia it’s known as ‘the money plant’ and in the US it is known as ‘silver money’ or ‘chinese money’. In Dutch-speaking countries, however, the plant is known as judaspenning (coins of Judas), an allusion to the thirty pieces of silver Judas was given for betraying Christ. It is fascinating to me how a plant may have a reputation for plain dealing in one culture, and be seen as treacherous in another. Even in the UK, the Plant Lore website reports that in Yorkshire, some people believe that the plant is very unlucky, and won’t have it in the garden or the house, while in Kent it’s known as ‘the devil’s ha’pence’. On the other hand, the Magickal Gardening website reports that keeping one of the ‘coins’ in the pocket will attract good fortune. I suppose that a plant with such evocative seedpods was going to attract all kinds of beliefs.
Honesty seed pods (Photo One – credit below)
In her book ‘Fifty Easy Old-Fashioned Flowers’, Anne M. Zeman tells us that honesty has been used to dress wounds, and as a cure for epilepsy. She also tells us that the roots have been used in salads since the 1500’s. Furthermore, other sources describe how the seeds can be turned into a kind of mustard if mixed with vinegar – this is not surprising when we consider that the cabbage family contains many other plants with this property, including Black and Hoary Mustard.
Honesty, and in particular its seedpods, were very popular in the Art Nouveau movement, as in the illustration by Alfonso Mucha below (part of his 1900 precious stones series).
Alfonso Mucha – Precious Gems series (Topaz) 1900. Photo Two (see credit below)
The Precious Stones series includes Ruby (which features of all things a poinsettia), Amethyst (with some irises) and Emerald (with Tradescantia). Mucha was such a favourite in our house when I was growing up that we had his ‘Moon and Stars’ series framed in the hallway. I have always liked his graceful female figures, and the way that he included plants and other elements of the natural world, even in his posters for theatrical productions and such necessities as Moet et Chandon champagne. If you are ever in Prague, I can recommend a visit to the Mucha museum. Although his paintings are a little too fey for many people’s taste in this more cynical age, I think that there is always room for a celebration of lush beauty and the abundance of nature. In this age of austerity, it’s easy to forget how much there is to be grateful for.
Photo One – By Christian Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1159063
Photo Two – Via Swallowtail Garden Seed https://www.flickr.com/photos/swallowtailgardenseeds/14985632221
‘My’ mangy fox, with the healthy fox in the background
Dear Readers, the plot has thickened regarding the foxes in St Pancras and Islington cemetery this week. On Monday, B informed me that she had seen three foxes, two with mange and one without.
‘Blimey’, I said, ‘I’m going to have to buy more jam’. As you know, I’ve been trying to medicate the fox in the photo above with a homeopathic remedy from the National Fox Welfare Society, which I’ve snuck into some jam sandwiches. ‘My’ fox seems to be on the road to recovery, much to my amazement – I’d been very skeptical when I’d started the process. I fairly skipped back to my house, passing en route a lovely patch of fritillaries, which may well crop up in a Wednesday Weed at some point in the future.
The next day, bearing an additional sandwich, I walk down to where B feeds the foxes. I’m a little late and I don’t see B, so I creep down to the feeding spot, behind the grave with the full-sized stone Labrador on it. This unlikely memorial celebrates a man who died rescuing a dog from drowning, and is always adorned with artificial flowers.
A very skinny, mangy fox watches me briefly from the other side of the hedges, and then crosses the path at a trot. I sit down with my camera. This is not ‘my’ fox, but I remember what B mentioned about one healthy fox, and two mangy ones. I see the fox again among the gravestones, just his ears and one bright eye. Then he’s on the move again, looping round behind the bins where the cats live. I sit a little longer. And then he’s back in the hedges, eyeing up the jam sandwiches with obvious longing.
I spot B making her slow progress towards where she feeds the cats. She raises her stick in greeting. I stand up and walk over, leaving the fox to his snack.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ says B. I have always liked the way that she looks at me directly, honestly.
‘Ok’, I say.
‘The Dog Unit man said he found a dead fox further up the road’, she says, and pauses. ‘A fox with mange’, she adds.
I have to look away for a moment.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘Martin thinks he was run down’, she says. ‘The cemetery people will take the body away’.
‘Where was it?’
B waves her hand vaguely. ‘He just said further up’, she says.
And so it may be that ‘my’ fox is dead. My mind is racing. I wonder if the body is still there, so that I can know for sure which fox has been killed. But then, I know that it’s hopeless. I’m sure that the evidence is already tidied away. Even if I saw the body, would I know?
And how am I going to cope with the unknowing?
‘My’ mangy fox
I am reminded of people whose beloved cats and dogs just disappear, and they never know what happened to them. But a fox is dead. The question is, what am I going to do now?
B can tell that I’m upset, but she carries on fussing over her cats, bending over, pouring the food into their bowls.
‘The thing is’, she says, ‘that we do what we can do. And that’s all we can do. They’re wild animals, after all. They come and go, and live their lives, and one day they’re gone. ‘
She straightens up.
‘A bit like people’, she says.
Her husband and father are both buried in the cemetery, and B visits them every day.
‘Did you see that skinny little fox over there?’ she said. ‘He’s got the mange really bad’.
And of course, my decision is made for me. ‘My’ fox, the one that drew me here, is most likely dead, but there are other foxes here that need help. Am I just going to give up now because all my hopes were pinned on one animal?
There’s a rustle in the brambles and the skinny fox heads off at a brisk trot. His whole tail and hindquarters are bald. He looks back briefly and accelerates his pace, until he is bounding off.
‘I’m down at Mum and Dads next week’, I say to B. ‘Could I leave the medicine with you for a few days?’
‘Of course’, says B. ‘And I’ll see you at the weekend’.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, you will’.
The healthy fox.
For the fox story so far, have a look at the posts below:
Fox Update
This entry was posted in London Mammals, London People, London Places, London Plants on April 16, 2016 by Bug Woman.
Wednesday Weed – Hairy Bittercress
Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta)
Dear Readers, this is one of those plants that is so small and inconspicuous that it often goes unnoticed. Yet, at the moment, it is coming into flower at the bottom of every other wall around here in East Finchley. It has popped up in a pot of last year’s hyacinths that I left in the garden too. But until I did a little bit of research I didn’t even know its name, and until I paid it some attention I thought it was shepherd’s purse. Silly me.
Hairy bittercress is a member of the cabbage family, or Brassiceae, and I have been told that it can be used in the same way as mustard-and-cress. Unfortunately, every plant that I have seen locally grows in the splash-zone of the neighbourhood’s numerous dogs, so I haven’t tasted it to find out. The seed pods are said to explode when touched (again, none of the ones that I’ve seen have been so obliging, but then they probably aren’t ripe yet). However, the way that the seedpods send the seeds cascading all over the place has given rise to several of the plant’s other common names, such as flickweed and shotweed. I am delighted to tell you that the technical name for this process is ‘explosive dehiscence’, which is such a wonderful phrase that I shall be seeking ways to slip it into ordinary conversation.
Hairy bittercress is a native plant, and, under its Old English name of stune, is one of the herbs used in the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, which was used as a treatment for poisoning and infection. However, the plant is a keen traveller (often hiding away in imported garden plants) and has made itself known in North America. Here, the flowers are an early nectar source for the spring azure butterfly (Celastrina ladon) and the falcate orange-tip (Anthrocharis midea).
Spring Azure (Celastrina ladon) (Photo One – credit below)
Falcate orangetip (Anthrocharis midea). Very like the European orangetip! (Photo Two – credit below)
I wondered a little about why the plant was called the Hairy Bittercress, when it looked remarkably glabrous to me. It is said to be hairy at the point where the leaves join the stem, but as neither of my two pairs of glasses seem to enable me to see this kind of detail, I must take my hand lens next time I’m plant hunting. If you are trying to distinguish this plant from its close relative the wavy bittercress (Cardamine flexuosa) you will need to work out whether the plant has six stamen (in which case it’s Hairy) or four, which is diagnostic for Wavy. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get a precise identification for a plant. It’s truly one of life’s little pleasures, though flora have a way of hybridizing and otherwise being unruly which makes it much trickier than you would think. Even at the level of tiny plants subsisting in a quarter of an inch of substrate, life is anarchic and unpredictable in a most delicious way.
If you have access to a less polluted supply of hairy bittercress than I do, you can wilt it like spinach (which apparently tames the eponymous bitterness a little), use it in a salad, or turn it into pesto. The Eatweeds website has a recipe for hairy bittercress harissa, for those of us who fancy a bash at North African cooking, and for hairy bittercress and roasted beetroot salad, and I have no doubt that the wonders of the internet will reveal many more uses for this little plant. Its bitterness is said to help with liver detoxification, and in these days of ‘clean eating’ and juice fasts, you could probably do worse than to eat some of your greens in the form of this little chap. My book Flowers of the Field by the Reverend C.A. Johns, which dates to 1913, tells me that the genus name Cardamine comes from the Greek cardio, the heart, and damao, to fortify. Whether this refers to a medical or romantic property of the plant I have no idea, but it has certainly lifted my spirits.
Photo One – By Walter Siegmund – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=854581
Photo Two – By Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren (Falcate Orangetip butterfly) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Dear Readers, last time I wrote about my adventures with foxes in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, I had just discovered that B, a lovely lady who feeds the feral cats in the cemetery, also regularly fed the foxes. This was great news, because it meant that I knew exactly where to find them, and where to drop my jam sandwiches with their homeopathic mange remedy. And indeed, between three and four thirty p.m. on any afternoon, you can spot the two foxes waiting for their high tea.
The fox at the front is the one that I’m trying to treat. What intrigues me is that the two foxes play and nuzzle one another, and are not particularly competitive – could they be mates, or siblings? B leaves a variety of foodstuffs that the foxes probably shouldn’t have (doughnuts not being part of a natural diet) but while I was away for a family funeral last week she liberally doused them in mange medicine for me, so I’m not about to complain. Plus, she also leaves them dog food and dog biscuits, so it isn’t dessert all the way.
It is clear that the fox with mange still has mange, but, without wanting to be too optimistic, I do think it’s a bit better, and the picture above was taken almost ten days ago, before I found exactly where to leave the medicated food. The Dog Unit man told me yesterday that he thought that there had been an improvement in the fox’s condition, and he isn’t a sentimental chap so I hope he’s right.
The fox when I first saw him/her
The fox now
Is it my imagination, or does the fox’s back end seem a bit furrier, as if some of the fur is growing back? The animal certainly seems a bit brighter. Only time will tell, but I have everything crossed.
It’s fair to say that the fox who doesn’t have mange has grown fairly used to me. He or she often shadows me as I walk around the cemetery, in the hope that I’ve got yet more sandwiches, I suspect. The fox always keeps the same distance between us, but if I stop, he or she will often just sit and wait to see what I’m up to.
It’s like having a little shadow. I wonder how often we are watched by animals and walk past, oblivious.
In other news, I promised you a picture of the pink hybrid bluebells in Coldfall Wood, and here they are, with some blue ones for comparison.
And the queen buff-tailed bumblebees have been out in force this week, especially in an area of the cemetery which has huge cherry laurels, the size of small trees. This place is sheltered, and the smell of the flowers, like dusty honey, is heavy in the air.
Finally, a most mysterious ‘artwork’ has appeared in Coldfall Wood. Is this to celebrate a birthday, I wonder? It’s rather elegant, I think, though how long it will survive the elements is an open question.
This entry was posted in London Mammals, London Places, London Plants on April 9, 2016 by Bug Woman.
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BYRNE, Ada Mosher[1, 2, 3, 4]
Name BYRNE, Ada Mosher [5]
Born 22 Oct 1875 Michigan [1, 2, 3]
Occupation Housewife
Residence 1880 Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States [1]
Residence 1910 Jackson Ward 2, Jackson, Michigan [2]
Residence 1930 Jackson, Jackson, Michigan [3]
Residence 1971 709 First Street, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, USA [4]
Cause of Death Cerebral Accident (aka Stroke, occurred in 1926) + Diabetes (onset in 1960)
Died 13 Jan 1971 Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States
Buried 15 Jan 1971 Mount Evergreen, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, USA
Ada Byrne Smith
Father BYRNE, Gilbert R, b. 8 Feb 1835, Connecticut , d. 19 Feb 1901, Jackson, Jackson, MI, USA (Age 66 years)
Mother MOSHER, Alice Jane, b. 24 Nov 1838, New York, USA , d. 28 Aug 1939, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States (Age 100 years)
Married 2 Dec 1858 Jackson, MI [6]
Family SMITH, Arthur H, b. 18 Jun 1871, Grand Traverse Co, Michigan, USA , d. 26 Dec 1927, jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States (Age 56 years)
Married 26 Dec 1899 Michigan, USA [7]
Born - 22 Oct 1875 - Michigan
Residence - 1880 - Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States
Married - 26 Dec 1899 - Michigan, USA
Residence - 1910 - Jackson Ward 2, Jackson, Michigan
Residence - 1930 - Jackson, Jackson, Michigan
Residence - 1971 - 709 First Street, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, USA
Died - 13 Jan 1971 - Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, United States
Buried - 15 Jan 1971 - Mount Evergreen, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, USA
[S11] 1880 United States Federal Census, Ancestry.com and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2005), Online publication - Ancestry.com and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1880 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2005. 1880 U.S. Census Index provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints © Copyright 1999 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. All use is subject to the limited use license and other terms and conditions applicable to this site.Original data - United States of America, Bur.
[S14] 1910 United States Federal Census, Ancestry.com, (Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006), Online publication - Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006. For details on the contents of the film numbers, visit the following NARA web page: NARA.Original data - United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 19.
[S17] 1930 United States Federal Census, Ancestry.com, (Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2002), Online publication - Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2002.Original data - United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930.T626, 2,667 rolls. Jackson, Jackson, Michigan, ED 19, roll 995, page , image 1088.0.
[S328] Ada B Smith State of Michigan Death Record.
[S335] Michigan Marriage Records , Bride’s Name: Ada Mosher Byrne.
[S263] Michigan Marriages, 1851-75, Name: G. R. BYRNE, Spouse: JANE MOSHER, Marriage Date: 2 Dec 1858, County: Jackson, State: MI.
[S335] Michigan Marriage Records .
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HomeAudie MurphyPart X
I HAVE SEEN WAR AND DO NOT LIKE IT
by Vicki Ellis Griffis
Celeste Tribune
Audie Leon Murphy had fought hard to be able to go overseas to partake in combat. Finally, on February 8, 1943, he boarded the USAT Hawaiian Shipper at Staten Island for the voyage to North Africa.
As per the account by Charles Whiting, the troops were taken like pack animals with their weapons and rifles, and each man was marked with a number chalked on his helmet. The port officials would remain unmoved by these cocky young men, for they knew, The war over there would soon take the piss and vinegar out of them.
Silently, as the ship slipped past the Statue of Liberty and out into the North Atlantic, all we know about Audie Murphy’s first cruise was that he and most of the other soldiers spent the next eleven days battling the waves, for in the wintertime, it was not the calmest of seas. Audie admitted years later that his exhilaration and adventure had quickly turned to a horrible bout of seasickness and “squatters.”
According to Mr. Whiting, Audie saw no fighting in Africa, but did receive some intensive and invaluable combat training. He learned to hike at a rate of five miles per hour for the first hour, four mph for the next two hours, and then marching the rest of the thirty-mile hike at three and a half miles per hour, all the while in hot weather with only one canteen of water.
Ultimately, Audie was assigned as a replacement and joined Company B of the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division near Casablanca.
In his book, To Hell and Back, Audie said finally the great news came that they were to go into action in the Tunis area. They oiled their guns, double-checked their gear, and prayed or cursed according to their natures. But, before they could move out, the order was canceled. The Germans in the area had surrendered. Audie said he took no part in the general sigh of relief, but perhaps later he would react differently.
Audie wrote to his sister Corinne, dated February 26, 1943:
Somewhere in Africa. Will write you a few lines to let you know that I am O.K . . . Well, there isn’t much to write at this time. I hope to see a little action soon . . . .
And again he made the same wish, on March 14, in a letter to Mrs. John Cawthon:
Sun. Mar. 14 – 1943
Somewhere in Africa
Dear Folks,
I will write you a few lines to let you know that I am well and hope you are all the same. I have been in Africa since the 20th of Feb. I like it fine. Hope to see a little action soon. I just got through writing Jean a letter. I haven’t got but one since I’ve been here but will probably get some more soon. When you write use air mail as I will get it much sooner. There isn’t much I can write now but will try to write more later on. Tell me all the news when you write and write me every week. I can’t write very often but you can. Tell all the old folks hello for me hope they are all well. Ans soon
With Love Audie
As the saying goes―be careful what you wish for; you might get it. Audie wished for action . . . he got it . . . far more than he could have ever dreamed up back when he was walking down a county road with his best friend, Monroe Hackney, in Celeste, Texas.
During the drive from the coastal township of Licata, Sicily, to the larger town of Canicatti, Audie and his company came upon enemy fire for the first time. He said, the fluttering fluttering roll of an enemy machine gun caused his flesh to creep. He wondered if the enemy know where they were. He felt they could easily.
They were stretched in an open field where the cover was not adequate. In front of them lay a railroad track which the machine-gun crew had dug in. Audie could hear the labored breathing of his men, and he could feel his heart churning against his ribs. They received the order to spread out. They were to go over the track. They were to make a run for it when they got the signal. They were to stop for nothing until they found cover on the other side of the track.
They jumped to their feet and took off. They heard, “Brrrrp . . .” From the corner of his eye, Audie saw two men in the center platoon reel backward and fall. Then he heard the crackle of rifles; the blast of a grenade. He leaped over the track and found a gully, dropped into it, and sprawled out.
The next day, he was ahead of the company with a group of scouts. They flushed out a couple of Italian officers who were getting away, and Audie said he acted instinctively, dropping to one knee, and firing twice.
Audie said it was not easy for him to shed the idea that human life was sacred. If there were any doubts in his mind, it began to vanish in the shell explosion that killed his fellow soldier and friend, Griffin; and it disappeared altogether when he saw the two men crumpled by the railroad track.
He had shed his first blood. It was his job. They would kill them if given the chance . . . that was their job.
The Sicilian campaign had taken the vinegar out of Audie’s spirits. He said,
“I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it. Experience has seasoned us, made us battle-wise and intensely practical. But we still have lots to learn . . . .”
To be continued . . .This is part ten of a continuing series on Audie Murphy, born in Kingston, Texas, reared in Celeste, who grew up to become the most decorated soldier of World War II.
Photo used with permission Audie Murphy Research Foundation
Used with permission and courtesy of the author.
NEXT – Part XI
2 thoughts on “Part X”
Ron Coulson says:
An extremely beautiful publishing!
Vicki Ellis Griffis says:
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It's bigger than football, Trades
Brown: ‘We’ve got a good thing going’
February 16, 2018 cc 3 Comments
Duane Brown was pleasantly surprised by the supportive culture of the Seahawks when he arrived last November, and he said, “We’ve got a good thing going” — a reference to the club both on the field and off.
Speaking on former teammate Arian Foster’s podcast, Brown recounted the deterioration of his relationship with the Texans’ front office, the perceived racism of good ol’ boy owner Bob McNair over the years, Brown’s final-straw holdout and the trade the day after the Texans played in Seattle.
“It was too far gone, and the departure was needed,” Brown said. “It had nothing to do with me wanting to get out of Houston or leave my teammates. Not at all.
“I wanted to finish my career there, and I wanted security doing that,” Brown said. But he said the team had distanced itself from him after a bogus suspension (overturned) and his silent anthem protest (raised fist) in 2016 and the club declined to consider redoing his deal with two years left (sound familiar?).
“When you get to a point where I’m able to use my leverage, I have to use it,” he said. “At that point I was nine years in and had a pretty damn good nine-year career, so I have to use that. I could have (gone) to training camp, got injured and I didn’t have any guaranteed money on my contract, so I could have got cut right then and there and that would have been it.”
Instead, he held out for six games and was traded to Seattle the day after the Seahawks beat the Texans in a shootout in Seattle — and a few days after he ripped McNair for calling NFL players “inmates.”
Brown said he’s having fun again with the Seahawks and appreciates the positive culture — a major change from Warden McNair’s Texans.
“It’s a great organization, man,” he said of the team run by socially conscious Paul Allen and Pete Carroll. “They support everybody to the fullest. … It’s a lot of fun. There’s not so much fear throughout the building. And everybody’s treated like men.”
Brown should finally get that extension he wanted and finish out his career playing for a winner on the field and off.
“We’ve got a good thing going,” he said. “We’re going to have a big year next year.”
Previous PostAfter purge, Schneider will bargain shopNext PostShould Hawks blow up the boom all at once?
3 thoughts on “Brown: ‘We’ve got a good thing going’”
It does feel good to have a professional left tackle. The sad parade between Brown and Russell Okung:
Rees Odhiambo
Bradley Sowell
Matt Tobin
Not to mention the Gary Gilliam fantasy that mercifully never was.
Isn’t this the truth?: “The sad parade”
Okung was Walter Jones compared to these guys. Still boggling that JSPC let it come to this.
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The Revelation of Yahshua (Jesus) Christ - Index
Revelation Chapters 8 and 9 - 02-11-2011
CHR20110211-Rev-8-9.mp3 — Downloaded 3285 times
Christogenea 02-11-2011: Revelation Chapters 8 and 9
Here I am going to pick up roughly where Eli James and I had left off with our series on the Revelation three weeks ago. I know a lot of people are disappointed that a schism has developed between Eli and I, but I want you all to know that this has nothing to do with personalities. It only has to do with academic practices and the fact that – as can be evidenced over the programs that Eli has done since January 23rd – our beliefs related to Scripture have grown much too far apart for me to continue working with him. While I enjoyed the two years I spent working with Eli, it is over, and the end of our working relationship is permanent. Now I pray that I am able to continue this Revelation series, presenting what little I can discern to the best of my ability.
Since I thought that in our last program we sort of rushed through Chapter 8, which I was not at all prepared for at the time, I will begin from there. First let me offer a summary from the previous chapters. In Chapter 6 we saw what we have interpreted as a description of the fall of Rome, which was ultimately at the hands of the Germanic tribes. This culminates in Chapter 8, and it all corresponds with Daniel Chapter 2, for instance especially with 2:45 where it states that “Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.” Once the interpretation of the Revelation of Yahshua Christ is made certain, we see that the hand of Yahweh in the world is indeed upon the Aryan peoples, and by that, we know the identity of the true Children of Yahweh. The people who we know today as jews have always been His enemies, and have never been His people. And, of course, the many proofs of that lie elsewhere.
So in Chapter 6 we saw the Fourth Horse – the pale or green horse - of the Apocalypse, which was the sickness in decay and corruption of old Rome. Then with the fifth seal we saw the saints under the altar cry out for justice. With the sixth seal we saw the great men of the empire wishing that they had a safe haven in which to hide from the judgement and wrath of Yahweh which has befallen them. The “stars of heaven” of 6:13 must be the Germanic Invaders, as the children of Israel are also called in the Old Testament, for example in Judges Chapter 5 in the song of Deborah where she states of Israel that “They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera”, the leader of Canaanites.
In Revelation Chapter 7 we saw in verse 1 what appears to be a momentary suspension of the destruction of the empire, and the sealing of the 144,000 – twelve thousand from each tribe, and then the innumerable multitude. These things are, I believe, representative first of the righteous remnant of Yahweh which would survive the tribulation that was to come upon the Roman empire, and second it is a description of the multitude of those who would be punished in this tribulation, all of them Israelites, who would wash their robes and whiten them in the blood of the Lamb, and these people in white robes must be the same people with white robes which we saw in Chapter 6 with the fifth seal. Now we shall proceed with Chapter 8 and the fall of Rome. Because the Christogenea New Testament and the King James Version have very few actual differences in translation in Chapters 8 and 9, except for names and titles, I will read from the Christogenea New Testament.
VIII 1 And when He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. 2 And I saw seven messengers who stood before Yahweh, and they had given to them seven trumpets. 3 And another messenger having a golden censor came and stood upon the altar, and much incense had been given to him, that he may offer it with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne. 4 And the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints ascended from the hand of the messenger before Yahweh. 5 And the messenger took the censer and filled it from of the fire of the altar and cast it into the earth, and there were thunders and noises and lightnings and an earthquake. 6 And the seven messengers who having the seven trumpets prepared them in order that they may sound.
7 And the first sounded the trumpet, and there came hailstones and fire mixed with blood and it had been cast into the earth, and a third of the earth had been burnt, and a third of the trees had been burnt, and all the green grass had been burnt.
The Roman Empire had been threatened by the Germanic tribes for quite some time, and even Julius Caesar in his own description of the Gallic Wars complained that the Germanic tribes were forever pushing west of the Rhine. Throughout the centuries of the Empire there were emperors who attempted to buy off the invading Germanic tribes. The examples are numerous. Augustus offered many tribes land, or bribed their chieftains, in order to gain them as allies. In the third century Caracalla fought against and then bought off the Alamanni with a large sum. In the fourth century Constantine bribed the Vandals with the land of Pannonia, which they inhabited for quite some time before becoming restless once again. Discussing Chapter 6 and the invasions of Rome by the Goths and Vandals, the following was mentioned, and here I will elaborate a little further: With the anarchy of the mid-third century, the city of Rome itself began to lose its lustre, and with Constantine in the early 4th century the capital was moved eastward. In 364 AD the empire was divided east and west, and this represents the beginning of the dissolution of the ten toes: the splitting of the original provinces of the empire as it existed under the first Caesars. The eastern portion would last another thousand years, however the west fell quickly. Later in the fourth century the Visigoths, after defeating the Romans in a large battle, were given leave to cross into the lands of the Empire. Eventually they were mistreated by Rome, and rebelled against the empire. Around 406 AD tribes from out of the Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine into Gaul and began to loot and pillage the empire, and take much of its lands in Gaul and Iberia, which were never recovered. The Visigoths at this same time raided Greece, and then invaded Italy. At first the western empire attempted to buy off the Goths with a large sum of gold. Rome was then sacked by the Goths under Alaric in 410 AD. The years from 433-453 AD saw the Hunnic Empire under Attila and Bleda, who raided the Balkans, Gaul, and Italy, threatening both Constantinople and Rome. The Vandals then sacked Rome in 455 AD. The Huns were bought off in the east with a large grant of land which eventually became Hungary. But looting and bribes were eventually not enough for the Goths, who really wanted the fertile soil of Italy and the treasures of the empire for themselves, and so finally in 476 AD they took it, when the Gothic chieftain Odoacer declared himself ruler of Italy. Rome could no longer defend herself first because the empire was completely corrupt and decadent, but more importantly, as Daniel 2:43 attests, because there was little unity in the citizenry, which was now made up of people of diverse and mixed races.
[During the audio program I made some extemporaneous remarks about the location of Pannonia, but I confused it with Dalmatia. Here is a map to clarify things. Click it to get a larger copy.]
8 And the second messenger sounded the trumpet, and thus a great mountain burning with fire had been cast into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood 9 and a third of those creatures having souls of those in the sea died, and a third of the ships had been destroyed.
The Vandals, along with the Goths were indeed descended from the Israelites of the Assyrian deportations, yet it had been quite a long time in their history since they had ever been sailors or had any sort of maritime tradition. Upon the invasion of Spain, the Vandals had taken the Balearic Islands off of the Spanish coast. From there, along with many of the Alans, they crossed to Africa, and Procopius states that there were no Vandals left in Europe – or at least in those parts of Europe which he was acquainted with - in his time, which was about a hundred years later. In Africa the Vandals eventually made a treaty with Rome, in 435 AD, dividing the coastline. Yet the Vandals still did not cease from their looting and pillaging of the coasts of Africa and Sicily. In October of 439 AD, the Vandals under Gaiseric made a successful surprise attack on Carthage. He had his designs on both the city and the large port. They took the city and found a large Roman fleet laying in the harbor waiting for them. This was a devastating strategic mistake on the part of the Romans, to allow such a large supply of ships to fall into the hands of their enemies.
The fall of Carthage to the Vandals greatly disturbed both the western and the eastern empire, as there was a large number of galleys and a great shipyard in Carthage, creating a Vandal fleet as great as the joint navies of both empires. That the Romans allowed for so many ships to be left in Carthage's port while the Vandals were so close by, must be one of the greatest errors of Roman history. The very next Spring, that of 440 AD, a vast fleet manned by Vandals and their allies (Alans, Goths, Romanized Libyans, and even Moors) set out from Carthage for Sicily, which at the time was the principal supplier of oil and grain to Italy after the loss of North Africa. All the coastal towns were looted and Palermo was besieged. Ships heavily laden with plunder returned to Carthage. The powerful eastern imperial fleet responded by sailing into Sicilian waters in 441 AD, taking the Vandals by surprise. This was under the command of the Romano-Goth Areobindus, but a major invasion of the Balkans by the Huns and the threat of a Persian attack, forced him to take his fleet back home. After this Gaiseric allowed his fleets to continue plundering throughout the western Mediterranean Sea. The Vandals then plundered Rome itself in 455 AD.
The Western emperor Majorian was the last to try to hold onto the old Roman Empire against the invading barbarians. Gibbon said of Marjorian that he “presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.” Marjorian planned a naval campaign against the Vandals to reconquer northern Africa in 461, but word of the preparations got out to the Vandals, who took the Roman fleet by surprise and destroyed it. A second naval expedition against the Vandals, sent by emperors Leo I and Anthemius, was also defeated, in 468.
10 And the third messenger sounded the trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, burning as a lamp, and it fell upon a third of the rivers and upon the springs of waters, 11 and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and a third of the waters came to be wormwood and many of the men died from the waters because they had been made bitter.
Bertrand Comparet in his own Revelation sermons identified this star with Attila the Hun. That is based on the idea that somehow the Huns were not White, and that is wrong on both counts. The Huns were indeed White, and this is not referencing Attila. When Clifton Emahiser had put together his transcriptions of Comparet's Revelation series along with a lot of my notes, I disputed the identification of this passage with Attila. Now I can do so much more effectively.
First, this passage is after the one which describes the invasions of the empire by the Goths and Vandals, and yes, the Huns. Yet the Huns had already come to relative peace with the eastern empire, and were no longer a threat to the west, when the Vandals had their maritime escapades, which we have seen described before this. Secondly, Procopius describes the Huns as tall and very fair. Procopius also equates the Massagetae and the Kimmeroi to the Huns on several occasions, therefore esteeming them to be of Germanic stock.
Now the depictions of Attila as a short Asiatic runt come from Jordanes, the Gothic historian, but he wrote in the seventh century – a hundred years after Procopius – and his main source was the Gothic propagandist Cassiodorus, whose work has hardly survived. Cassiodorus, a Roman Senator under Gothic rule, wrote his history in a manner very flattering to the Goths, who were once ruled over by and therefore despised the Huns. The depictions of Attila by Cassiodorus and Jordanes are clearly little but propaganda. However other records of Attila exist, where he is often mentioned in Germanic writings such as the Edda and the Nibelungenlied. In Germanic poetry, Attila is depicted as a much more noble character, and in the Nibelungenlied he even receives the widow Kriemhild – the wife of the slain Burgundian prince Siegfried, as a wife.
So with Attila discounted, let me repeat the passage:
It can be told from Daniel Chapter 7 that upon dissolution of the toes, from one of them would arise ten horns, and then an eleventh which would subdue three kings. This describes Justinian, the eleventh emperor of the eastern empire, during whose reign the Vandal King Gelimer was defeated in Carthage and the Gothic kings Witiges and Totila were defeated in Italy. During the wars of this period, much of Italy and Sicily were laid bare, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa was wasted and many of the Vandal soldiers were forcibly relocated to the east in the service of the conquering Byzantines. The city of Rome was practically deserted for an extended period of time. This, it can be ascertained, is the wounding of the head in another vision – that of the beast of Revelation Chapter 13. The empire is dead, but the beast and the dragon which gives its power to the beast still live to rise again – as the Roman Catholic Church! When we get to Revelation Chapter 13, the correlations with Daniel 7 will be discussed at great length. This star which fell from heaven made a third of the waters bitter because Justinian would prevail over the Germanic peoples in Italy and Africa, and this in turn would also pave the way for Catholicism in Western Europe. Therefore, it is evidenced that this passage in the Revelation also refers to Justinian, just as the little horn of Daniel Chapter 7 does.
12 And the fourth messenger sounded the trumpet, and a third of the sun had been struck, and a third of the moon and a third of the stars, that a third of them had become darkened, and the day did not shine for a third part of it, and likewise the night.
While it is not esteemed that the symbolic language of the Revelation should always be interpreted literally, here we do have a physical proof of the veracity of the interpretations of the Revelation which we have seen thus far. And while the references to the sun, moon and stars are not to the mere objects in heaven, but rather they are symbols of organized government and people, there is still an absolutely striking occurrence which happened in 536-537 AD, which points to a certain and literal fulfillment of this passage. Of the very time when the great general Belisarius had defeated the Vandals and taken Carthage for the Byzantines. Procopius writes thus: “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this happened men were neither free from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death. And it was the time when Justinian was in the tenth year of his reign.” This is found in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Procopius, Book 4 Chapter 14 Section 5. By this we also know that the interpretation of these passages as having to do with the wars which destroyed the old Roman empire, but also brought great harm to the people of God who brought that empire down, is absolutely certain. Yet the dulling of the Sun during this year only represents and reflects the events as they were happening upon the earth, for after the passing of Rome, much of Europe also fell into the so-called Dark Ages.
13 And I saw and heard one eagle flying in mid-air saying with a great voice: “Woe, woe, woe for those dwelling upon the earth from the rest of the sounds of the trumpets of the three messengers who are about to sound!”
Thus ends Revelation Chapter 8, and from this I hope that it is made evident, that the historical view of this prophecy is the only legitimate view. The Chapter that follows should make this even more evident, for it describes perfectly the Arab and Turkic invasions of the Adamic oikoumenê. Here we see that three woes announced
IX 1 And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star from heaven fallen to earth, and to him had been given the Key of the bottomless pit. 2 And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke ascended from the pit like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air had become darkened from the smoke of the pit. 3 And from the smoke locusts came out into the earth, and authority had been given to them like the scorpions of the earth have authority. 4 And it had been spoken to them in order that they do not injure the grass of the earth nor any green thing nor any tree, except those men who do not have the seal of Yahweh upon their foreheads. 5 And it had been given to them that they should not kill them, but that they shall be tested for five months, and their torment is as the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man. 6 And in those days men shall seek death yet they shall not find it, and they shall desire to die yet death flees from them.
Howard Rand and Bertrand Comparet have both identified this passage as a depiction of the rise of Mohammedism and the Arab conquests of the formerly White regions of Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the northern coast of Africa. I believe that they were absolutely correct. As an aside, it is also evident that Mohammed is the “little horn” of Daniel Chapter 8, This little horn is not to be confused with the little horn of Daniel Chapter 7, which we shall see when we get to Revelation Chapter 13 refers to the Emperor Justinian. So it may be seen that just as Daniel in Chapters 7 and 8 prophesied of Justinian, and then of Mohammed, so does the Revelation in Chapters 8 and 9. At Daniel 8 this is what it says in part, which I believe correlates with this passage in the Revelation:
Daniel 8:9-12, 21-25: “9 And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. 10 And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven [meaning the Children of Israel]; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them [the Mohammedan conquests]. 11 Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. 12 And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered. [The taking away of the “daily sacrifice”, I believe, represents a change in religion described in Daniel's own terms – in this case from Christianity to Mohammedism. Now to skip to verse 21:] 21 And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king. 22 Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power. [As we have seen it prophesied elsewhere in Daniel, and as happened in history, Alexander's kingdom was split into four pieces upon his death.] 23 And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up. [The Arabs of Islam were conquerors under the guise of religion, and used by Yahweh as a scourge against our race.] 24 And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people. 25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes [Mohammed claimed to be greater than Christ – and muslims still make that claim.]; but he shall be broken without hand.” [Something we wait for the fulfillment of even today.]
“2 And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke ascended from the pit like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air had become darkened from the smoke of the pit. 3 And from the smoke locusts came out into the earth, and authority had been given to them like the scorpions of the earth have authority.“
Arabia is renowned as a land of locusts. The locust eggs stay under the desert soil until it rains, and then they begin to hatch and swarm. (See the Earth Observatory website hosted by NASA which has much information concerning this.) This helps us identify who these people are and where they come from. Egypt and Arabia were one of the four portions of Alexander's empire, from where the Ptolemy's ruled until Roman times. The “latter time of their kingdom” is just as well a reference to the Greek rulers in general as it is to the Ptolemy's themselves, and the Greeks are still the rulers of the east in the Byzantine period.
The scorpions of the earth are a reference to the Canaanite Jews. This can be seen at Luke 10:18-19 where Yahshua Christ said “I beheld the Adversary falling as lightning from heaven! Behold! I have given to you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy, and no one shall by any means do you injustice.” The serpents and scorpions were not to be taken literally in that passage, but as metaphors for certain people, which we see are of the Adversary, or Satan.
“4 And it had been spoken to them in order that they do not injure the grass of the earth nor any green thing nor any tree, except those men who do not have the seal of Yahweh upon their foreheads. 5 And it had been given to them that they should not kill them, but that they shall be tested for five months, and their torment is as the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man. 6 And in those days men shall seek death yet they shall not find it, and they shall desire to die yet death flees from them.”
That a day in prophecy can represent a year is evident in many places in Scripture. Here are a few evidences of the validity of such an interpretation:
Numbers 14:34: “After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.”
Ezekiel 4:5-6: “For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. 6 And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year.”
The 5 month period of the locusts seems to represent the approximate 150-year period of Islamic conquest over the Byzantine lands. This period began around 622 AD when Mecca was entered by Mohammed and was eventually conquered, process which ended in 632 AD. Within two years of Mohammed's death, his followers began their conquests outside of Arabia, first taking Syria, Persia and Palestine. In 652 AD they already began attacking Sicily, and Arabs occupied parts of the island then for an extended period. By 670 they controlled the entire Middle East and began attacking even Constantinople itself. From this time they began conquering Northern Africa, and by 711 they are crossing into Spain. In 726 and again in 740 they captured Syracuse on Sicily, but never took the entire island until the 9th century. In 736 the Arabs took Georgia north of the Caucasus Mountains. In 751 they even defeated Chinese forces in a battle near the Talas River in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. By 762 Baghdad was created as the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, and Islamic conquests are virtually finished. Yet it is evident that the main period of Islamic conquest lasted about 5 prophetic months, or nearly 150 years. Until 1060 AD, when the Turks began to take Anatolia from the Byzantines, Arabs competed mostly among themselves, in lands they had already occupied to some extent, such as the taking of Crete and southern Italy – portions of which some Arabs had long occupied - in 820 and 827 AD.
7 And the likenesses of the locusts are like horses having been prepared for war, and upon their heads as crowns like gold, and their faces as faces of men, 8 and they had hair as hair of women, and their teeth were as of lions’, 9 and they had breastplates as breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings as a sound of many chariot-teams of horses running into battle, 10 and they had tails and stingers like scorpions, and their power is in their tails to injure men for five months. 11 They have over them a king: the messenger of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon but in Greek he has a name, Destroyer. 12 One woe has departed. Behold, there come yet two woes after these things!
This is a poetic description of the Arab hordes. Apollyon is a Greek word which means destroyer. This is how we should view Mohammedism, even to this very day – as a destructive force to our Christian Civilization.
13 And the sixth messenger sounded the trumpet, and I heard one voice from the four horns of the golden altar before Yahweh, 14 saying to the sixth messenger, he having the trumpet: “Release the four messengers who are bound by the great river Euphrates!” 15 And the four messengers had been released, who had been prepared for that hour and day and month and year, that they should kill a third of the men. 16 And the number of the armies of the horsemen is two hundred million. I heard the number of them. 17 And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and those sitting upon them, having fiery-red and hyacinth and yellow breastplates, and the heads of the horses as heads of lions, and from their mouths came out fire and smoke and sulfur. 18 From these three plagues a third of the men had been killed, from the fire and from the smoke and from the sulfur coming out from their mouths. 19 For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails, and their tails like serpents, having heads and with them they injure.
Again, both Howard Rand and Bertrand Comparet correctly identified this second woe as a description of the Turkic invasions of Byzantine lands. This is the release of those bound by the Euphrates, which is metaphorical and not a literal reference, so that the Turkic hordes – already converted to Mohammedism by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries - can begin to cross from the east. This process began in 1055 AD, when the Seljuk Turks captured Baghdad. Eventually they came to control nearly all of the formerly Arab lands, under the Ottoman Empire, but that is not our concern here. They began to move on Christian lands around 1064 AD when they began to clash with Byzantine troops in Asia Minor. In 1067 they attacked Caesarea and then Iconium in central Asia Minor. Although initially repulsed, within thirty years they controlled all of Anatolia. This ushered in the period of the Crusades, but wherever the European nations were able to recapture lands for Christendom, the results were only temporary. Furthermore, the Norman raids of the Balkans and southern Italy and their sacking of Constantinople in 1204 weakened efforts, rather than helping them. By the 14th century the Turks occupied the Balkans, and occupied or subjected many of the Black Sea nations. In 1453 Constantinople, surrounded by lands already fallen to the Turks, finally also fell to them. Looking at Byzantine resources in this period, compared to Turkic resources, it is amazing that the city held out as long as it did.
Going back to the text of the passage being discussed here, verse 15 from the King James Version reads in part “for an hour and day and month and year”, rather than “that hour and day and month and year”. The Greek may read either way, yet the interpretation need not change. If we interpret this time period by the prophetic time scale of a year for a day, this would add up to around 391 years and 15 days. The Turkic conquests of Anatolia began around 1067 AD, and their conquest of the of Eastern Roman Empire ended with the taking of Constantinople in 1453 AD, a that is a total of 393 years, very close to the 391 years of this prophecy. The army of two hundred million men in verse 16 need only represent the number of invaders over this nearly 400-year period.
Even more interesting, and a clear identifier of the fulfillment of this prophecy, where at verse 17 it says “And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and those sitting upon them, having fiery-red and hyacinth and yellow breastplates, and the heads of the horses as heads of lions, and from their mouths came out fire and smoke and sulfur”, this seems to be a poetic description of cannon. Constantinople was the first major city in history to have been taken with the help of cannon. Sadly, it was a Christian gun-maker, Urban of Hungary, whom the Turks hired to build the cannons, 70 of them. In his book, Marvels of Prophecy, Howard Rand has a picture of one of these cannon which sat as a war souvenir on the banks of the Thames in Britain. [I do have an image of one of these which I will post along with this document on Christogenea.]
This particular cannon is shaped just like a lion, including its limbs, and the mouth of the lion is the mouth – or muzzle - of the cannon, while its tail looks like a long serpent up its back, where the fuse was lit, just as John described.
20 And the rest of the men, those who had not been killed by these plagues, did not even repent from the works of their hands, that they do not worship demons and idols, things of gold and things of silver and things of copper and things of stone and things of wood, things which are able neither to see nor to hear nor to walk. 21 And they did not repent from their murders nor from their drugs nor from their fornication nor from thefts.
When the Catholic religion – by which the true Christian religion is not meant - is compared to the ancient Greco-Roman pagansim, we see that there is not much difference. The Catholics paganized Christianity, by transferring the ancient pagan gods and goddesses into the false conception of “saints”, thereby actually worshipping demons, and by their idolatry in the making of statues representing these things. The anti-Christian practices of pharmakeia – the use of drugs, and fornication – which is race-mixing, were also prevalent in Byzantium and Rome. They still are today, and we who remain of our race will never understand these things until we study our bibles and understand our history.
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Zitiello Bank
By Jim Dubelko with research support from Raymond L. Pianka
The Zitiello Bank, located at 6810 Herman Avenue, was the earliest known ethnic bank opened in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.
The bank was founded by Joseph Zitiello, an immigrant from the Campania region of Italy who came to Cleveland in 1898. Joseph was just one of several members of the Zitiello family who by 1910 had purchased homes on West 69th Street. As was customary with Italian immigrants, a number of the Zitiellos were proprietors of small businesses that were operated out of their homes. Joseph ran a butcher shop. Luigi was a saloon keeper. Pasquale was the neighborhood grocer.
By1910, Joseph Zitiello had achieved financial success as a butcher and began to engage in private banking. In 1916, he built the Zitiello Bank building on the corner of West 69th and Herman Avenue. In 1920, Zitiello, who by this time was known as the "King of the Italian Colony" on the west side of Cleveland, incorporated the Zitiello Bank. Later, the Zitiello Bank opened a branch office on Fulton Road. In 1929, while at this branch office, Joseph Zitiello was shot by several assailants who were attempting to rob the bank. Zitiello returned their fire, chasing the would-be robbers from his bank.
The Zitiello Bank, like many small banks, was forced to close during the Great Depression. Even so, the Zitiello family remained in the neighborhood, contributing both to the community and to their new country. In 1967, Ronald J. Zitiello, an American soldier and grandchild of one of the original Zitiello immigrants from Italy, was killed in the Vietnam War. A memorial garden dedicated to his memory is located in the neighborhood.
More than one hundred years have passed since the first Zitiello immigrants from the Campania region of Italy came to Cleveland and settled on West 69th Street. Today, a number of descendants of those original immigrants still live on West 69th Street, helping to anchor the ongoing revitalization of this old Cleveland neighborhood.
The Zitiello Bank Building: Built in 1915 on the northeast corner of Herman Avenue and West 69th Street, the Zitiello Bank building originally had bank offices on its first floor. The second floor of the building served as the Joseph Zitiello family's residence. Today, the building is exclusively used as a residence. Image courtesy of Jim Dubelko
The Neighborhood Entrepreneurs: This partial page from the 1911 Cleveland Directory reveals that three of the four Zitiello immigrants living on West 69th Street were engaged as proprietors of neighborhood businesses. Image courtesy of Cleveland Public Library
Joseph Zitiello, founder of Zitiello Bank: This photograph of 64-year old Joseph Zitiello was taken in 1933, shortly after his bank failed. Zitiello, an Italian immigrant, came to the United States in 1898, and by 1910 he had accumulated enough capital to become a private banker in what is today the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University Library, Special Collections.
Zitiello Bank Report: Joseph Zitiello incorporated his neighborhood bank in 1920. In 1923, he filed this report with the State of Ohio, which provides an interesting glimpse into the assets and liabilities of a neighborhood bank of that era. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University Library, Special Collections.
Banking in Tougher Times: On June 1,1929, bank president Joseph Zitiello was shot by robbers while he was at the Zitiello Bank's Fulton Road branch office. Though shot in the mouth and nose, he managed to return fire and chase the robbers out of his bank. He eventually recovered from his life-threatening injuries. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University Library, Special Collections.
Dying for his Country.: Ronald J. Zitiello, a grandchild of Italian immigrants from the Campania region of Italy, was killed by enemy gunfire in 1966. He was serving in the United States Army in Vietnam. Ronald grew up on West 69th Street in Cleveland. Image courtesy of Cleveland State University Library, Special Collections.
A Neighborhood Memorial: This garden on West 67th Street in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood om the west side of Cleveland is a memorial to Ronald J. Zitiello. Ronald - a grandson of Italian immigrants - died during the Vietnam War. Image courtesy of Jim Dubelko
Jim Dubelko, “Zitiello Bank,” Cleveland Historical, accessed July 18, 2019, https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/450.
Gordon Square: From Outlaw Enclave to Arts District
Detroit-Shoreway
Published on May 8, 2012. Last updated on Aug 20, 2018.
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Pro Specialist in Roswell, Georgia.
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Tag Archives: Heather Matarazzo
Girl Flu
Girl, you’ll be a woman soon.
(2017) Dramedy (Free Chicken) Katee Sackhoff, Jeremy Sisto, Jade Pettyjohn, Heather Matarazzo, Judy Reyes, Diego Joseph, Isabella Acres, Max Baroudi, Robert Farrior, Fallon Heaslip, Grace Olsen, Jonah Beres, Arianna Ortiz, Marem Hassler, Golden Bachelder, Amanda Troop, Jovan Armand, Kyle Kittredge, Jackson Royce Laurence, Kelly Straub Hull, Madison Dae Clarion. Directed by Dorie Barton
Let’s face it; girls have it much rougher than boys. They generally are taken less seriously, are paid less money for doing similar work, are expected to take care of the house and the kids even when they feel like crap and let’s not even start about menstruation. Or, if you’re director Dorie Barton, let’s do just that.
Robyn (Pettyjohn) who has been called “Baby Bird” by her mother since she was a baby, a nickname that irks her (she grudgingly settles for “Bird” which people seem dead set on referring to her as), is not a happy 12-year-old Her mother Jenny (Sackhoff) moved her from the (San Fernando) Valley where she was happy into Echo Park (an L.A. neighborhood) where she is not. She is bullied by Rachel (Acres) who isn’t afraid to get physical. And to top it off, at her Middle School Graduation party, she gets her first period – wearing her grandma’s white pants, no less. There is probably nothing on earth that could have mortified her more.
That is, until her mother tries to connect with her daughter. Jenny is actually far less mature than Bird; she basically lives to get high and have sex with her musician boyfriend Arlo (Sisto) while refusing to commit to him even though he’s anxious to take their relationship to the next level. Jenny also has issues with her own mother who is at the moment at an Ashram in India. Jenny wants to be there for her daughter and help her through all the lovely things that goes with one’s first period; the cramps, the mood swings, the tears, the rage – and doesn’t understand when Bird gets livid with her. Jenny really doesn’t do the mothering thing very well.
Barton is a first-time feature film director and I give her props for taking on a subject matter that makes members of both sexes uncomfortable. Rough, tough, macho men can turn into squeamish little children when discussing their wife/girlfriend’s menstrual issues, while I can’t imagine women who have to endure the monthly visit of Auntie Flo (as an ex-girlfriend used to refer to it as) discussing it with much enthusiasm beyond saying “Oh GAWD it sucks!” Still, she brings the subject out in an often humorous and always sensitive way.
The movie is nicely shot, giving the overall effect of a sun-drenched L.A. summer (although some of it takes place on rainy days). There is definitely a feminine point of view here and the fact that those types of films are becoming more and more prevalent is encouraging. We certainly need more women who direct in the film industry and the indie ranks are beginning to develop a nice talent base among the fairer sex. That can only translate to more women directing big Hollywood productions over the next few years. One of the best points of this movie is that it allows men like myself to experience a bit what adolescent girls go through. That kind of thing can lead to more understanding, more empathy and maybe down the line the death of rape culture. One can only dream.
I do have a few issues with the film however and the main one is Precocious Child Syndrome; that’s the one where the child is adultier than the adults. I’ve met a lot of children in my time and some of them have been very intelligent, very precocious and very responsible; invariably kids who are that way have adults as role models to guide them in that direction. Generally you don’t see a single mom who is a mess raising a kid who is as amazing as Bird. I’m not saying there aren’t kids who are like Bird out there; they just generally don’t have to rescue their parents. There’s also the misstep of Arlo pretending to be Bird’s boyfriend on a couple of occasions; that was just a little bit too creepy and I can’t imagine Jeremy Sisto felt good about the pedophile vibe that was in the background there.
Sackhoff shows herself to be a fine comic actress and here she brings out her inner Goldie Hawn. Jenny is a bit of a ditz and a bit self-centered and maybe she is the poster child for unfit mothers (in a fit of rage she leaves her child at a fire station; Jade promptly calls a cab to drive her to Reseda, paying with a wad of cash she took from her mom) but Sackhoff makes Jenny vulnerable and scared which gives the audience something to sympathize with.
Pettyjohn is a capable actress; I would have liked to have seen her character be more of a 12-year-old and less of a prodigy. She handles the emotional histrionics of a young girl encountering her hormones for the very first time and the wicked mood swings that brings with it. Parents of young girls will exchange looks of recognition at some of the things Bird puts Jenny through; parents who don’t have girls in their brood will look heavenward with gratitude that they only had boys.
I think this had the potential of being a really important movie but I just can’t get past the pandering to young adult girls that is done here. I think it sets unrealistic images of how moms and daughters actually get along and may give kids the idea that their parents are unstable idiots and that they are wiser and more responsible than they are. Believe it or not, kids do take those sorts of messages to heart.
REASONS TO GO: The film tackles head-on some taboo women’s issues.
REASONS TO STAY: The film suffers from precocious child syndrome. The subject matter may make some feel a bit awkward.
FAMILY VALUES: There is drug use and smoking, a fair amount of profanity and some sexuality.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie debuted at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/25/17: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: 20th Century Women
NEXT: The Holly Kane Experiment
Posted in New Releases | Tagged ashram, bullying, cinema, Cinema365, dramedy, Echo Park, Films, fire station, first crush, first kiss, first period, Florida Film Festival, Florida Film Festival 2017, Free Chicken Productions, Girl Flu, graduation party, grocery shopping, Heather Matarazzo, Jade Pettyjohn, Jeremy Sisto, Katee Sackhoff, Los Angeles, menstruation, mother-daughter dysfunction, movies, musician, pot smoker, Reseda, reviews, San Fernando Valley, single mom, skateboard, Wiccan ceremony | Leave a reply
We’ve seen this movie before.
(2000) Horror Comedy (Dimension) Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox-Arquette, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, Patrick Dempsey, Lance Henriksen, Kelly Rutherford, Parker Posey, Emily Mortimer, Jenny McCarthy, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, Deon Richmond, Patrick Warburton, Jamie Kennedy, Heather Matarazzo, Carrie Fisher, Scott Foley, Julie Janney. Directed by Wes Craven
As one character says, in the third installment of a trilogy, all bets are off. That can be a good thing and bad – it gives you the freedom to deviate from the course set by the first two films but sometimes lose the essence of what made them successful in the first place. Perhaps that’s why so few of them are really that successful, both artistically and financially.
Talk show host Cotton Weary (Schreiber), the man accused of the murder of Sydney Prescott’s (Campbell) mother (and later exonerated by the events of the first movie), is brutally killed in his apartment, and of course intrepid (and irritating) journalist Gail Weathers (Cox-Arquette) is on the case. Meanwhile over in Woodsboro a movie called Stab 3 is being shot.
Soon, cast members of the third movie of a series of movies based on the events in Scream (talk about art imitating art) are beginning to turn up dead, in the exact order that they are bumped off in the script. Former deputy-turned-technical advisor to the movie Dewey Riley (Arquette), in his own laconic way, is out to protect his friend Sydney, as well as rekindle a romance with Gail, with whom he has broken up twice (art imitating life, kind of). Sydney, for her part, has secreted herself in an isolated, rural home with lots of high-tech security. Still, even Dewey can’t protect her from the visions of her dead mother and for the most part, from the Ghostface killer who continues to stalk her.
Much of Scream 3 is pretty formulaic and is just the kind of movie, ironically, that the original Scream poked fun of. Although Craven deviates here from the tradition of murdering a lovely young starlet before the opening credits (a la Drew Barrymore and Jada Pinkett) by taking out Schreiber, they do manage to send Jenny McCarthy to join the Choir Invisible, getting a hearty “Amen!” from critics everywhere. We critics are a vindictive lot.
Still, director Wes Craven knows how to yank out all the stops, but the loss of screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who penned the first two Screams, is keenly felt (he would return for the fourth installment). This one doesn’t have the hipness quotient, the humor, or the insight into horror movies that Williamson has. I didn’t guess who the killer was, but by the time the identity of the killer behind the Edvard Munch mask is revealed, I pretty much didn’t care.
Although not bad by the standards of horror movies of the late 90s and early part of the following decade, Scream 3 belongs in the clutches of the robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which puts it far beneath the standards of the first two movies. That’s a little too much painful irony for my taste. At the time that this came out, I thought it was just as well Craven decided to bury the franchise at that point, since the corpse was smelling mighty bad. Scream 4 was a bit of a redemption but not enough to make up for this, the worst installment of the franchise to date – although it DOES get points for the Jay and Silent Bob cameo. Craven knows hip when he sees it. Honestly though, once you’ve seen the first two movies in the series you’re pretty much done.
WHY RENT THIS: Jay and Silent Bob show up. Seriously, that’s about it. There are some fans of the series who are very affectionate about this movie though.
WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Been there, done that, done better.
FAMILY MATTERS: Plenty of violence and foul language although not as much as in earlier films of the series.
TRIVIAL PURSUITS: Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” is played at some point in all three films of the original trilogy.
NOTABLE HOME VIDEO FEATURES: There is a music video by Creed, an outtake reel and a montage of footage from all three films (fittingly set to “Red Right Hand”).
BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $161.8M on a $40M production budget; the movie was a big hit for Miramax/Dimension.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Scary Movie (only unintentionally funny)
NEXT: Brother’s Justice
Posted in DVD Review | Tagged Carrie Fisher, cinema, Courtney Cox, creative consultant, David Arquette, Dimension Films, DVD Reviews, Edvard Munch, Emily Mortimer, Films, Ghostface, Heather Matarazzo, horror, horror comedy, investigative journalist, Jamie Kennedy, Jason Mewes, Jenny McCarthy, Kevin Smith, Lance Henriksen, Liev Schreiber, movie within a movie, movies, Neve Capbell, Parker Posey, Patrick Dempsey, Patrick Warburton, Scott Foley, Scream 3, sequels, shut-in, talk show host, trilogy, Wes Craven | Leave a reply
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In Search of a Strategy
Obama isn't the only one who needs a coherent approach to the worldwide jihad.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Is it better to have no strategy or a delusional strategy?
The question arises, of course, after President Obama’s startling confession on Thursday that he has not yet developed a strategy for confronting the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-rooted terrorist organization still often called by its former name, ISIS – an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to Greater Syria.
You may have noticed that President Obama calls the group ISIL, preferring the acronym that refers to the Levant to the one referring to al-Sham. After all, anything that invokes Syria might remind you of red lines that turned out not to be red lines and the administration’s facilitation of the arming of “moderate rebels” who turned out to include, well, ISIS. The fact is that the president has never had a Syria strategy, either — careening from Assad the Reformer, to Assad the Iranian puppet who must be toppled, to Assad who maybe we should consider aligning with against ISIS — ISIS being the “rebels” we used to support in Syria . . . unless they crossed into Iraq, in which case they were no longer rebels but terrorists . . . to be “rebels” again, they’d have to cross back into Syria or cruise east to Libya, where they used to be enemy jihadists spied on by our ally Qaddafi until they became “McCain’s heroes” overthrowing our enemy Qaddafi.
No? Well, congratulations, you may have caught mental health, a condition to be envied even if it would disqualify you from serving as a foreign-policy and national-security expert in Washington. In either party.
The Islamic State’s recent beheading of American journalist James Foley is not the only thing that captured Washington’s attention of late. The Beltway was also left aghast at the jihadisst’ rounding up of over 150 Syrian soldiers, forcing them to strip down to their underpants for a march through the desert, and then mass-killing them execution style.
Shocking, sure, but isn’t that what the GOP’s foreign-policy gurus were telling us they wanted up until about five minutes ago? Not the cruel method but the mass killing of Assad’s forces. Nothing oh nothing, we were told, could possibly be worse than the barbaric Assad regime. As naysayers — like your faithful correspondent — urged the government to refrain from backing “rebels” who teem with rabidly anti-American Islamic-supremacist savages, top Republicans scoffed. It was paramount that we arm the rebels in order to oust Assad, even though “we understand [that means] some people are going to get arms that should not be getting arms,” insisted Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Turns out that quite a lot of people who shouldn’t have gotten arms have gotten quite a lot of arms. And that is because Syria is not the only place as to which Republicans urged Obama to ignore federal laws against arming and otherwise supporting terrorists. They did it in Libya, too.
We have several times documented here that influential Republicans led by Senator John McCain were champions of Moammar Qaddafi before they suddenly switched sides — along with President Obama — in campaigning to oust the Libyan regime they had only recently treated (and funded) as a key American counterterrorism ally. The resulting (and utterly foreseeable) empowerment of Islamic supremacists in eastern Libya directly contributed to the Benghazi Massacre of four Americans on September 11, 2012; to the rise of the Islamic State and the expansion of al-Qaeda franchises in Africa, all of which were substantially strengthened by the jihadist capture of much of Qaddafi’s arsenal; and to what has become the collapse of Libya into a virulently anti-American no-man’s land of competing militias in which jihadists now have the upper hand.
The disastrous flip-flop was no surprise. When Mubarak fell in Egypt, Senator McCain stressed that the Brotherhood must be kept out of any replacement government because the Brothers are anti-democratic supporters of repressive sharia and terrorism. He was right on both scores . . . but he soon reversed himself, deciding that the Brotherhood was an outfit Americans could work with after all — even support with sophisticated American weaponry and billions in taxpayer dollars. The Brothers were in power because, in the interim, McCain’s good friend Secretary Clinton pressured Egypt’s transitional military government to step down so the elected “Islamic democracy” could flourish. When the Brothers took the reins, they promptly installed a sharia constitution, demanded that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (convicted of running a New York–based terror cell in the 1990s), rolled out the red carpet for Hamas (the terror organization that is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), and gave free reign to terrorist leaders — including the brother of al-Qaeda’s leader and members of the Blind Sheikh’s Egyptian jihadist organization — who proceeded to foment the violent rioting at the U.S. embassy in Cairo the same day as the Benghazi Massacre.
I could go on, but you get the point. While ripping Obama for having no Islamic State strategy, Republicans are now reviving the inane strategy of supporting the illusory “moderate Syrian opposition.” Those would be the same forces they wanted to support against Assad. The only problem was that there aren’t enough real moderates in Syria to mount a meaningful challenge to the regime. The backbone of the opposition to Assad has always been the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most effective fighters against the regime have always been the jihadists. So we’re back to where we started from: Let’s pretend that there is a viable, moderate, democratic Syrian opposition and that we have sufficient intelligence — in a place where we have sparse intelligence — to vet them so we arm only the good guys; and then let’s arm them, knowing that they have seamlessly allied for years with the anti-American terrorists we are delegating them to fight on our behalf. Perfect.
There is no excuse for a president of the United States to have no strategy against an obvious threat to the United States. But at least with Obama, it is understandable. He is hemmed in by his own ideology and demagoguery. The main challenge in the Middle East is not the Islamic State; it is the fact that the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebears have been fueled by Iran, which supports both Sunni and Shiite terrorism as long as it is directed at the United States. There cannot be a coherent strategy against Islamic supremacism unless the state sponsors of terrorism are accounted for, but Obama insists on seeing Iran as a potential ally rather than an incorrigible enemy.
Moreover, the combined jihadist threat is not a regional one merely seeking to capture territory in the Middle East; it is a global one that regards the United States as its primary enemy and that can be defeated only by America and its real allies. This is not a problem we can delegate to the basket-case governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, or to the “moderate” Syrian “rebels.” Yet the Obama Left’s relentless indictment of American self-defensive action in the Middle East has sapped the domestic political support necessary for vigorous military action against our enemies — action that will eventually have to include aggressive American combat operations on the ground.
But the GOP should take note: The jihad is not a problem we can delegate to the Muslim Brotherhood, either. We will not defeat our enemies until we finally recognize who they are — all of them.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.
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Labels: Andrew C. McCarthy, ISIS, Islam and Terrorism
S’long, Jeet
BY ROGER ANGELL
http://www.newyorker.com/
September 8, 2014 Issue
We know Derek Jeter by heart, so why all this memorizing? The between-pitches bat tucked up in his armpit. The fingertip helmet-twiddle. The left front foot wide open, out of the box until the last moment, and the cop-at-a-crossing right hand ritually lifted astern until the foot swings shut. That look of expectation, a little night-light gleam, under the helmet. The pitch—this one a slow breaking ball, a fraction low and outside—taken but inspected with a bending bow in its passage. More. Jeter’s celebrity extends beyond his swing, of course, but can perhaps be summarized by an excited e-mail once received by a Brearley School teacher from one of her seventh graders: “Guess what! I just Googled ‘Derek’s butt!’ ”
This is Derek Jeter’s twentieth and final September: twenty-seven more games and perhaps another hundred at-bats remain to be added to his franchise record, at this writing, of 2,720 and 11,094. He’s not having a great year, but then neither are the Yanks, who trail the Orioles by seven games in the American League East and are three games short of qualifying for that tacky, tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the post-season. It’s been a blah baseball year almost everywhere, and, come to think of it, watching Derek finish might be the best thing around.
Jeter has just about wound up his Mariano Tour—the all-points ceremonies around home plate in every away park on the Yankees’ schedule, where he accepts gifts, and perhaps a farewell check for his Turn 2 charity, and lifts his cap to the cheering, phone-flashing multitudes. He does this with style and grace—no one is better at it—and without the weepiness of some predecessors. His ease, his daily joy in his work, has lightened the sadness of this farewell, and the cheering everywhere has been sustained and genuine. Just the other day, Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon groused about the rare sounds of cheering offered up to Derek by his customarily sleepy attendees.
At every stop, there have been replays of Jeter’s famous plays and moments up on the big screens—the no-man’s-land relay and sideways flip to nab the Athletics’ Jeremy Giambi at the plate in the 2001 American League Division Series; that horizontal dive into the Yankee Stadium third-base stands against the Red Sox in 2004. I don’t expect further dramatics—he’s forty and often in the lineup as d.h. these days—but closings have been a specialty of his, and it’s O.K. to get our hopes up one more time. I’m thinking of the waning days of the old Stadium, in 2008, when Derek’s great rush through September carried him to the top of the all-time career hits list at the famous crater, each fresh rap of his coming as accompaniment to the deep “Der-ek Je-tuh!” cries from the bleachers that the new restaurant site has pretty well silenced. The next year, up there, he passed Lou Gehrig for Most Yankee Base Hits Ever. Two years after that, he delivered his three-thousandth career hit: a home run that touched off a stunning five-for-five day at the Stadium against the Rays.
All right, I’ll settle for one more inside-out line-drive double to deep right —the Jeter Blue Plate that’s been missing of late. It still astounds me—Derek’s brilliance as a hitter has always felt fresh and surprising, for some reason—and here it comes one more time. The pitch is low and inside, and Derek, pulling back his upper body and tucking in his chin as if avoiding an arriving No. 4 train, now jerks his left elbow and shoulder sharply upward while slashing powerfully down at and through the ball, with his hands almost grazing his belt. His right knee drops and twists, and the swing, opening now, carries his body into a golf-like lift and turn that sweetly frees him while he watches the diminishing dot of the ball headed toward the right corner. What! You can’t hit like that—nobody can! Do it again, Derek.
It’s sobering to think that in just a few weeks Derek Jeter won’t be doing any of this anymore, and will be reduced to picturing himself in action, just the way the rest of us do. On the other hand, he’s never complained, and he’s been so good at baseball that he’ll probably be really good at this part of it too.
Labels: New York Yankees
Happy Birthday, William Wilberforce
By Jeanneane Maxon and Clarke Forsythe
http://www.realclearreligion.org/
255 years ago, a "force" was born into this world. The aptly named William Wilberforce would prove to be instrumental -- not just in ending legalized slavery in England, but sparking unprecedented social reform in the Western World, and also in setting a framework for future generations to follow his path of persistence, faith and sacrifice for others.
Wilberforce still inspires generations of social reformers and political leaders over two and a half centuries since his birth.
Wilberforce has lessons for pro-lifers. One of the most important is an acute understanding of the obstacles that block success and how to combat them -- an understanding of the nature of social evil and the forces that sustain it. The campaign against slavery was much more complicated and difficult than portrayed in the familiar movie, Amazing Grace. While the movie is stirring, it provides only a snapshot of Wilberforce's taxing campaign, just the first 20 years of Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade, from 1787 to 1807.
Wilberforce's work took more decades, including the next 25 years of his struggle against slavery itself (not just the trade of slaves), which was not abolished by Parliament until 1833, years after Wilberforce's retirement from Parliament and just a few days before his death. And after the full abolition of slavery in 1833, the struggle took many more years to effectively enforce the laws on the high seas and throughout the British Empire.
There were no silver bullets, though there was healthy (sometimes heated) debate about the right solution to the obstacles and the right road to success.
Wilberforce battled tremendous odds throughout his life. His greatest virtue was perseverance in the face of constant illness and many setbacks, while mastering political rhetoric and seeking cordial relations even with his most strident adversaries. Strategically focused, he combined long-term goals with short-term objectives. These included limiting the slave trade and reducing it as much as possible, and then regulating slavery (through e.g., registry laws) before it could realistically be prohibited.
One urban legend that needs to be dispelled is that Wilberforce "repented" of his "instrumentalism," or step-by-step approach. There's no historical record of this. The fact is that Wilberforce pursued abolition of the slave trade and the full abolition of slavery along with short-term objectives that would limit it. It was not either/or; it was both/and.
This unfortunate myth is apparently based on one passage from Wilberforce's diary: After the 20 year fight against the slave trade (1787-1807), Wilberforce and his allies refocused on the full abolition of slavery itself.
They encountered tremendous obstacles, domestic and foreign. In his book Amazing Grace, author Eric Metaxas writes that
Britain's horrendous domestic situation in 1818 prompted [British Foreign Minister] Castlereagh to strongly advise Wilberforce against pushing for emancipation just then. But Wilberforce was unhappy about waiting. That April, feeling ill, he poured out his feelings in his diary: 'I feel more and more convinced of the decay of my own faculties both bodily and mental and I must try to husband the little that remains. Alas how grieved I am, that I have not brought forward the state of [the] W. Indian slaves.' His guilt over the situation grew when the next day, again obviously sick and weak, he fumbled an opportunity to bring the subject up at a meeting of the African Institution...
This disappointment, during one of his recurring illnesses, hardly suggests repudiation of his strategy. In fact, a great victory that advanced governmental involvement in the fight against slavery was a law that at first may have seemed incremental.
When England was a war with France, Wilberforce's allies quietly put forth a bill that would allow the Royal Navy to commandeer the cargo of foreign ships captured. This innocuous bill allowed Britain to seize the cargo of slave ships that sailed under a number of national flags.
Writer David Perrin observed, "This meant that, over a period of time, English slave-traders were deprived of their ships and profits...This disabling of the slave trade meant that they could not pay off their supporter-MPs. Hence, Wilberforce's legislation to abolish the slave trade eventually passes in 1807."
Wilberforce's prudence and success should inspire us. Prudence is practical wisdom, which requires deliberation about concrete opportunities and obstacles in the specific context of our day. Under great pressure, Wilberforce discussed and debated tactics and strategies with a spirit of humility and goodwill. That may be the most important lesson that we can learn from him.
And we will follow the example of one of the greatest heroes ever born. Happy Birthday William Wilberforce, and thank you for living a life that exhibited timeless lessons.
Jeanneane Maxon is Vice President of External Affairs and Corporate Counsel for Americans United for Life. Clarke Forsythe is senior counsel at Americans United for Life and author of Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade.
Labels: European History, Race
Rotherham’s — and England’s — Shame
The Muslim men who tortured more than 1,400 girls are criminals.
So are the authorities who covered it up.
By John O’Sullivan
Shaun Wright, South Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner, is refusing to resign over the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. Photograph: South Yorkshire Police/PA
We often read or hear from the media that a nation is “shocked” or “horrified” by the revelation of some crime or government scandal. It is almost never true. At best, most people are disapproving or mildly interested in the shocking news. Since Tuesday afternoon, however, Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.
Some of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another, a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action on his complaint.
It is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and called for further investigations and arrests. The police and child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed, they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions, intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the general public was innocently ignorant.
If these events were occurring in a film noir or a paperback novel set in a midcentury American city, the Philip Marlowe character would eventually unravel a complicated plot in which a corrupt administration and police force were helping a criminal gang run child brothels for fun and profit. That is in fact the most rational interpretation of what took place. But it is not the true explanation.
What happened is explained by two additional facts: The 1,400 girls were all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus “worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so. Still worse, the police also treated the girls as worthless when they bravely ignored the physical threats against them (one man poured petrol over a girl and threatened to light it) and sought police help. As a result, some of the girls came to believe they were in fact worthless, which, of course, made them more tractable to the gang. Others committed suicide. Many of the survivors will experience, perhaps for the rest of their lives, prolonged bouts of depression, self-contempt, shame, and other psychological disorders.
This scale of criminality and victimhood is vast for a country that has traditionally regarded itself as law-abiding. Worse, the report concedes that the estimate of 1,400 victims is a conservative one. (It is the equivalent of about three girls’ schools.) Some of the girls were as young as eleven. And since other (more or less identical) cases of criminal exploitation of young Christian girls by Pakistani Muslim men have been uncovered in cities such as Oldham, Birmingham, and Oxford in the last decade, the total number of victims must be staggering.
The motives of the exploiters, though vile, are not hard to understand. They plainly include both racism and sexism alongside the lust and cruelty enabled by their misogynistic culture. But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist.” Most people in the Muslim community were unaware of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention of “community leaders,” they too played the race card to suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.
The Labour member of Parliament for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, Dennis MacShane, admitted yesterday that as a Guardian-reading left liberal, he had shied away from looking into such topics as the oppression of women in “bits of the Muslim community.” He ought to have done something about it, but, well, you understand . . . “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”
That kind of official response is worse than outright bigotry, but it has unfortunately been not uncommon in recent years. Anxious to avoid the “racist” taint, the police frequently ignore the appeals of young Muslim women fleeing from forced marriages or genital mutilation; instead, they work with community leaders to persuade the women to return to their families. This shameful collaboration is gradually being brought to an end. But it still shapes many official attitudes.
Official attitudes to the young white girls in Rotherham were different — but, if anything, worse. They combined sexism with a contempt for the white working class that is now common in both the progressive intelligentsia and the lumpen-intelligentsia whose members respectively lay down and enforce social policy under uncomprehending or cowardly political leaders. Thus the police shared the opinion of the criminals that their victims were little better than “sluts.” They were powerless, without influential parents or friends, lacking an ethnic support group that would rally to their defense. If racism is a weapon that can be used only by the powerful, as the progressive mantra holds, then the girls were victims of racism. But they were the wrong victims just as the criminals were the wrong pedophiles. Their plight had never been a topic in lectures on diversity. In short, they certainly weren’t worth risking a reprimand for disrupting good community relations or undermining diversity.
The authorities’ contempt was ill deserved by any standard. Many of the young women victims have proven to be brave, decent, and articulate. All of them were bullied, deceived, and beaten into submission by their tormentors and betrayed by those legally obliged to protect them. But the moral character of the victims is irrelevant in any case. So-called sluts deserve the same police protections as the rest of us — arguably they deserve more since they are at greater risk. Instead, these girls were seen by officials not as children in need of protection but as powerless pieces of meat who scarcely deserved the rights of British citizens and who could be safely ignored to avoid embarrassment.
Another element in official attitudes is hostility to the family and a hatred of the notion that families might instill traditional moral values in their children. Such hostility proved very convenient for the criminal gangs, who probably had to overcome a weaker moral resistance on the part of their grooming victims. To be sure, this hostility arises from a very different source than sexism or contempt for the white working class: a sense among progressives in the public sector that intact families undermine equality and that even etiolated Christian beliefs obstruct multiculturalism. If that sounds a trifle paranoid, recall that it was the same Rotherham social-work department that wanted to remove children from foster parents whose support for UKIP indicated an impermissible hostility to multiculturalism. You couldn’t make it up.
No one can deny that many families in Britain’s new underclass neglect their children and, in the worst cases, abuse them almost as much as the criminals did. But exactly the same is true of social workers. They too have been guilty of the worst possible scandals (leading at times to murder), some of which are rooted in quasi-sophisticated “anti-racist” nonsense about the proper ethnic culture that young children should enjoy. They increasingly show a contempt for natural families and their rights that is plainly contrary to almost any theory of human rights and that allows them to break up families on slight pretexts. Late last year, the British courts forced a young Italian tourist to have a caesarean operation and hand over her newborn to foster parents on the grounds that she was bipolar and might not always take her medication. And to put the top hat on it, these social-work interventions have a very poor record of success. As Colin Brewer, a distinguished psychiatrist, points out in the current London Spectator, it is increasingly plain that social work simply doesn’t work. And that makes intact families with religious commitments even more of a threat — because they do work.
A final factor is that Rotherham and South Yorkshire have been Labour “pocket boroughs” for 80 years or more. Until the last local elections — when UKIP broke through to win ten seats — there has been no effective opposition to hold Labour to account. The threat from UKIP in recent years has made Labour still more determined to hold the Muslim vote and even more reliant on those Muslim Labour councilors who were its missionaries to Muslim voters. So Labour kept the lid on the scandal as long as it could and discouraged interest in it. (You may hear certain American echoes there.)
What can we do? Given the scale of horror in this story, governments and politicians will propose to do a great deal between now and the election. But will their proposals pass the tests of serious effectiveness? There are two:
First, will anybody apart from the “Asian” criminals themselves go to prison for what has happened? What penalty, for instance, will be imposed on the current police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire who, in his previous position as a Labour councilor, shared responsibility for the council’s treatment of the young victims? At the moment, he is offering weak apologies and refusing to resign. But he and his official colleagues are guilty of something like conspiracy to facilitate and conceal crimes such as rape, sexual assault, grievous bodily harm, etc., etc. A competent lawyer could probably run up a dozen formal charges on such lines overnight. Mere resignations and dismissals will not fit this bill. Nothing short of prison sentences for senior officials in the police and local government will meet the needs of both justice and public opinion. People are tired of official scandals for which no one ever pays a price.
The second test is whether the British government will reform the broad-brush multiculturalism and “anti-racism” that have grievously distorted government policy nationally and locally. One way of advertising such a change would be to repudiate the official definition of “institutionalized racism” that the Macpherson report introduced a decade ago. The Commission on Racial Equality, a quasi-official body, defines it as follows:
If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs, or practices, that institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial intentions.
And the Macpherson Report itself gave a further explanation as to how it works:
[Institutionalized racism] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes, and behaviour which amount to discrimination throughunwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
These arguments are fatuous and cannot withstand serious intellectual criticism — though there is a huge inverted pyramid of intellectualized nonsense resting on them. Once intentionality is removed from the concept of racism, it becomes the accidental result of policies or structures adopted for legitimate reasons, and almost anyone anywhere can be shown to be guilty of it. But in Britain and (under the term “disparate impact”) in America, these arguments have carried the day in law and politics. That explains why the police and local authorities in Rotherham and elsewhere have been willing to conceal or ignore crimes that involve race, ethnicity, or religion.
If racism is a mysterious airborne virus that shapes people’s behavior without their realizing it, then why should an ordinary copper take the risk of even noticing a case with racial overtones? If he cannot avoid involvement, why not take the side of the “disadvantaged ethnic minority” — especially when it has such advantages as powerful friends and helpful pressure groups? And if the powerful friends sense that police intervention might threaten their ethnic electoral support, then a quiet word in the right place will ensure that the problem “goes away.” In reality, however, the problem metastasizes — until, as in Rotherham, it becomes so massive, toxic, and embarrassing that the authorities join the criminals in concealing it, to the continued detriment of its victims.
Ultimately, this mess is the result of progressive official policies. It will recur endlessly until the policies are changed. Ordinary citizens — especially working-class “Old Labour” voters — realize this. The only good aspect of this scandal is that this time they seem enraged enough to insist on real change.
— John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review.
Labels: Crime and Punishment, Europe, Islam and The West
Lower corporate tax rates. Now.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
The Obama administration is highly exercised about “inversion,” the practice by which an American corporation acquires a foreign company and moves its headquarters out of the United States to benefit from lower tax rates abroad.
Not fair, says Barack Obama. It’s taking advantage of an “unpatriotic tax loophole” that hardworking American families have to make up for by the sweat of their brow. His treasury secretary calls such behavior a violation of “economic patriotism.”
Nice touch. Democrats used to wax indignant about having one’s patriotism questioned. Now they throw around the charge with abandon, tossing it at corporations that refuse to do the economically patriotic thing of paying the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.
Odder still because Democrats routinely ridicule the very notion of corporations as persons. When Mitt Romney suggested that corporations were people in 2011, Democrats mocked him right through Election Day. In the Hobby Lobby case, they challenged the very idea that corporations can have religious convictions. Now, however, Democrats are demanding that corporations exercise a patriotic conscience. Which is it?
Moreover, corporations have an indisputable fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ interest. Surely Walgreens betrayed this responsibility when it caved to administration pressure and canceled its plans to move its headquarters to Switzerland. The inversion would’ve saved it billions of dollars. Its cancellation caused an instant 14 percent drop in Walgreens shares.
But the Democrats’ problem is deeper. Everyone knows why inversions are happening. America’s 35 percent corporate tax rate is absurdly uncompetitive. Companies are doing what they always do: try to legally lower their tax liabilities.
What is maddening is that the problem is so easily solved: tax reform that lowers the accursed corporate rate. Democrats and Republicans agree on this. After the announcement of the latest inversion, Burger King buying Tim Hortons and then moving to Canada, the president himself issued a statement conceding that corporate tax reform — lower the rates, eliminate loopholes — is the best solution to the inversion problem.
It’s also politically doable. Tax reform has unique bipartisan appeal. Conservatives like it because lowering rates stimulates the economy and eliminating loopholes curbs tax-driven economic decisions that grossly misallocate capital.
The appeal to liberals is economic fairness. By eliminating loopholes, tax reform levels the playing field. Today, the more powerful companies can afford the expensive lobbyists who create the loopholes and the expensive lawyers who exploit them. Which is why the nominal corporate tax rate is 35 percent but the effective rate for some of the largest corporations is about 13 percent.
So why not attack the inversion problem with its obvious solution: tax reform? Time is short, says Obama. He can’t wait. Instead, he wants legislation to outlaw inversion.
No time? Where has he been? He does nothing about tax reform for six years (during two of which Democrats fully controlled Congress), then claims now to be too impatient to attempt the real solution. Instead he wants to hurry through a punitive anti-inversion law to counterbalance the effects of our already punitive tax rates.
This is nuts. But amusing, given that a major financier of the inversion-célèbre of the day, the Whopper-to-Canada deal, is none other than Warren Buffett, Obama’s favorite plutocrat.
Buffett’s demand that the rich be required to pay more taxes made him a hero to the president. In 2012, Obama repeatedly held up Buffett as a champion of economic justice. What does Obama say today about his 2012 class-war comrade in arms — now become, by Obama’s own lights, an economic traitor?
And more such Benedict Arnolds are being minted every week. One of the reasons for the recent acceleration of inversions is that corporations want to move before Obama outlaws it, locking them into America’s anti-competitive corporate tax rate.
The Wall Street Journal cited a Buffett confidant as saying he likely wouldn’t have backed a deal like Burger King if it were purely for tax reasons. Indeed, there are other considerations that can always be invoked. Which makes some of the contemplated anti-inversion proposals even more absurd: They would outlaw only those mergers done for tax reasons. How do you prove motivation? Lie detectors?
A real political leader would abandon this sideshow and actually address corporate tax reform with a serious revenue-neutral proposal to Congress. There would be hearings, debate, compromises. We might end up with something like the historic bipartisan tax reform of 1986 that helped launch two decades of nearly uninterrupted economic growth.
But for that you need a president.
Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more on this from Opinions:
Katrina vanden Heuvel: If Congress won’t, Obama may have to address inversion
Jacob J. Lew: Close the tax loophole on inversions
Orrin Hatch: How to deal with corporate inversions — without the politics
Charles Lane: Another tax reform solution: taxing consumption
George F. Will: In a stew over inversions
Labels: Charles Krauthammer, Economics
The Rotherham Rapes’ Muslim Connection
Political correctness prevented authorities from recognizing the community’s sexual-abuse problem.
By Ian Tuttle
About eight miles from Sheffield in central England, the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham is home to just over 258,000 residents — for comparison, about as many as reside in its transatlantic “twin town,” Buffalo, N.Y.
It’s also home to a local government, child-social-services agency, and police department that effectively countenanced at least 1,400 instances of “child sexual exploitation” (CSE) between 1997 and 2013 — and that is a “conservative” estimate, according to the “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham,” just released by Rotherham’s Metropolitan Borough Council. How could police and local leaders ignore the victimization of so many children? In part, thank political correctness.
Authored by Professor Alexis Jay, an expert and government adviser on social work, the inquiry was based on 988 children known to have been victims of sexual exploitation, defined by the United Kingdom as involving young people under the age of 18 in “exploitative situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person or persons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, affection, gifts, money) as a result of performing, and/or others performing on them, sexual activities.”
Jay and her fellow researchers read 66 case files, some of which remain under investigation. What they discovered were not just instances of all-too-common sexual abuse, but sex trafficking networks, gang rape, and terror:
It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.
Reports of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham were known to social workers by the early 1990s, but many of those reports were incorrectly identified as “child prostitution.” Not until 1997, when the Council’s Youth Services launched the Risky Business youth project, did child sexual exploitation become a separate concern. Risky Business aimed to identify persons ages 11 to 25 who might be at risk, often recommending them to children’s social-care agencies, but those agencies were regularly derelict in their duties.
In 2000 a twelve-year-old girl was plied with drugs and raped by five men. The Criminal Investigation Department representative handling her case argued that every incident had been “100% consensual.” Two men who admitted to intercourse with the girl received “police cautions.”
In 2001 a serial predator threatened his victim, a 15-year-old girl, with forced prostitution — then threatened her family, vandalized her home, and used his other victims to assault the girl. She was hospitalized, and members of her family went into hiding. The girl and her mother refused to cooperate with police, convinced that law enforcement was helpless to protect them.
A twelve-year-old girl found in 2008 drunk in the backseat of a vehicle with a suspected predator — who had obscene pictures of the girl on his cell phone — was assessed by local authorities as being at no risk of child sexual exploitation, and her case was closed. “Less than a month later,” the inquiry reports, “she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested.”
The consequences of government mismanagement perpetuated the cycle of violence: “One of the children who failed to meet the threshold for social care went on to become a serious sex offender, convicted of the abduction and rape of young girls.”
Many of the victims were not unknown to the system: “In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and child neglect. There was a history of domestic violence in 46% of cases. Truancy and school refusal were recorded in 63% of cases and 63% of children had been reported missing more than once.”
So why did Rotherham fail to protect its children? Consider the background of the perpetrators.
“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims,” the inquiry reports — by which they mean members of Great Britain’s “Pakistani-heritage community,” with which Rotherham officials reportedly never engaged “to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue” of child sexual exploitation.
In her 2006 report on child sex exploitation in Rotherham, Dr. Angie Heal, a strategic drugs analyst, wrote, “It is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators.” She also noted, in Jay’s words, that “the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry.”
The current inquiry reports, in agreement with Heal:
Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police. . . . One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators.
Of course, the issue is not only race, but religion. According to 2011 census figures, 91 percent of Pakistanis in England and Wales are Muslim. According to Dr. Heal’s 2006 report, child-sexual-exploitation suspects also commonly hail from Iraq and Kosovo — both nations where Muslims constitute upward of 90 percent of the population.
Additionally, although the majority of victims have been “white British” children, child sex exploitation is also dishearteningly common within the Pakistani-heritage community. In September 2013 the U.K. Muslim Women’s Network released a report on child sex exploitation, primarily among Muslim victims. The Inquiry quotes it at length:
“Offending behaviour mostly involved men operating in groups. . . . The victim was being passed around and prostituted amongst many other men. Our research also showed that complex grooming ‘hierarchies’ were at play. The physical abuse included oral, anal and vaginal rape; role play; insertion of objects into the vagina; severe beatings; burning with cigarettes; tying down; enacting rape that included ripping clothes off and sexual activity over the webcam.” This description mirrors the abuse committed by Pakistani-heritage perpetrators on white girls in Rotherham.
The “Rochdale gang” was sentenced in May, 2012
Recent trials would seem to corroborate the Inquiry’s findings — and suggest that the problem is not contained to Rotherham. In November 2010 — the same month that five Rotherham men were jailed for sexual offenses against girls ages 12 to 16 — nine men from Derby were convicted for their part in “systematically abus[ing] and rap[ing]” girls as young as 12. Twenty-seven girls claimed to be victims of the gang. In May 2012, nine Rochdale men were sentenced for similar crimes against girls as young as 13. In June 2013, seven men who together groomed, raped, and trafficked girls as young as 11, were convicted and sentenced in Oxford. The defendants in each case were almost exclusively Muslim.
Professor Jay and her researchers performed interviews with a small number of Rotherham-area victims. “One young person told us,” they wrote, “that ‘gang rape’ was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham in which she lived.”
That is life under the tyranny of senseless taboos: The most vulnerable end up the victims.
— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
Labels: Islam and The West
Kenneth Timmerman On "The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi"
By Sarah Jean Seman
http://townhall.com/
Kenneth Timmerman has reported from the Middle East for 35 years. He was one of the first journalists on the scene after Iranian terrorists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.
When the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi left four Americans dead, Timmerman recognized the pathetically inadequate coverage.
“Iranians have been killing us for the past 30 plus years and the U.S. government has never done a thing,” Timmerman told Townhall. “I think it’s about time we stood up to the Islamic fascist government in Iran and made it clear that their continued murder of American citizens will not be tolerant any longer and we will make them pay a price for it.”
Timmerman utilized his contacts from the Middle East and his knowledge from time spent reporting on the ground in the countries to write “Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.” Last week, Timmerman joined me for an exclusive interview.
Q: You write in the book that the Benghazi attacks were a culmination of a shift in U.S. policy that was set in motion by President Obama. What were the key moving points that led up to what happened in Benghazi?
Timmerman: The administration right in the beginning set off on a path to quote “improve relations with the muslim world.” This was an announced policy shift, it included also, an outreach toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama claimed, inaccurately, that the Bush administration had no diplomatic contacts with the Iranians when, in fact, there had been 28 high-level meetings between Bush administration officials and the Iranian government that led to nothing.
Obama came this new stated policy and put it into effect immediately. He goes to Istanbul in April, he invites the Muslim Brotherhood to Washington to the White House for secret meetings also in April of 2009. In June, shortly after his speech at Cairo University, the pro-freedom demonstrations erupted in Iran after their failed, or stolen presidential elections, and there were 3 million people in the streets of Iran holding up signs in English: “Obama are you with us?” and he showed, very quickly, that he was not, and he was on the side of a radical Islamist regime in Tehran, rather than the people of Iran.
Fast-forward from there, to the ousting of Ben Ali in Tunisia, the ousting of Mubarak in Egypt, and ultimately the ousting of Gaddafi, and what you have is a systematic reversal of American policy. The shift goes to essentially enhance radical Islamist regimes around the world, or to create them, as happened in Egypt and later in Libya. And that, I think, is what led directly to the Benghazi attacks. It showed weakness, and in the Middle East and the Muslim world, where I’ve been reporting from for the past 35 years, weakness invites attack.
Q: How did your knowledge of the Middle East add to the book?
Timmerman: Many of the players I know personally; I’ve met them, I’ve interviewed them. I’ve been to most of the countries that I describe. I was in Libya, witnessing Gaddafi’s submission to the United States in 2004. We actually got his weapons of mass destruction loaded onto a ship in Tripoli Harbor while I was there in March of 2004; brought back to the United States, both the uranium enrichment centrifuges and his ballistic missiles. This was a tremendous victory for the Bush administration.
Gaddafi also cut off his support for international terrorist organizations, and he truly did. He was an ally in the global War on Terrorism, he was cracking down on the al-Qaeda fronts in his country, and he was accepting Libyans that we had detained (either in Gitmo or Pakistan, or elsewhere) in his jails and treating them relatively humanely. And I can say that, because Chris Stevens was going into the jails to actually interview these prisons to make sure that they were not being tortured.
Gaddafi had become a de facto ally in the war against global terrorism and what do we do in response? We throw him over, in exchange for the terrorists we were trying to fight.
Q: Do you think Obama’s actions result from design or ignorance?
Timmerman: This was a policy of conviction on the part of the president and his closest advisors. He believed, for whatever reason, that the United States was at fault. That the hostility towards the United States that led to the September 11, 2001 attack was America’s fault and that we had to correct the image that we presented around the world, by kowtowing to dictators, by kowtowing to Islamic fundamentalists, and by pretending that radical Islam was as acceptable as...um...I don’t know, democratic socialism in Europe.
Q: You discuss how former White House press Secretary Jay Carney played a part in the cover-up, and even more recently he criticized the GOP for politicizing Benghazi. What is the proper response to that claim?
I’ve notice that Jay Carney has since resigned, perhaps because telling lies on a daily basis just got too much for him. We only know the bare minimum of the facts, of what happened in Benghazi, that’s why I wrote this book.
I am only one person. I did not have big think tank people behind me, I did not have any major news organization behind me. I did have 35 years of experience in the Middle East and a pretty large rolodex of contacts. I went to defectors for the Iranian terrorism organization, for example, to ask the fundamental question: “Was Iran engaged at all in Benghazi?” The information that came back was astonishing. That should have been accessible to other reporters and other researchers, as well as to the U.S. government. I found out, also through my contacts, about an absolutely astonishing arms smuggling operation out of Libya to radical jihadi groups around the world, that appears to have been authorized, or at the very least explicitly tolerated, by John Brennan, who at the time was the president’s counterterrorism advisor. That is in violation of so many U.S. statutes it’s hard to number them on my hands and my feet.
Q: What would you like to see moving forward?
Timmerman: It’s time to tell the truth. It’s time to get the facts out. It’s time for the American people to understand and be told, authoritatively, that what happened in Benghazi was a state-sponsored terrorist attack by the Islamic people of Iran. And it’s time for the U.S. government to stand up to that very uncomfortable truth and do something about it.
Labels: Books and Things, Libya
Kenneth Timmerman On "The Truth About What Happene...
Embracing the obvious truth
Call the Islamic State What It Is: Evil
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A Beheading Ends All Illusions About Islam
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Joe Torre deservedly immortalized among legends as...
Just a Bit More Beheading than We Are Used To
Barbarism Endures
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Ivan Golunov Is Free. Other Victims of Russia’s Police Are Not So Lucky
High-Profile Cases
Source: AP/TASS
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No one denies that drug lords really exist, but so long as everyone is busy fabricating cases against innocent people and battling to meet crime targets, the real ones go about their business undisturbed. After all, their cases would need proper investigation: real criminals are clever and cautious.
The investigative journalist Ivan Golunov, whose arrest in Moscow on false drug charges on June 6 elicited unprecedented outrage in Russia, has been freed and the charges dropped after police admitted there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. His case has already gone down in history as a modern example of solidarity and resistance, but it’s crucial to remember that he is far from alone in falling victim to a fabricated drug case—and that in seeing the charges dropped, he is the exception to the rule.
Why did we see such solidarity and resistance in Golunov’s case? There was an element of professional solidarity (journalists came out in full force in support of their colleague), and a far stronger feeling that what was happening to Golunov was revenge for his work exposing corruption: he had already been threatened with just that. But it was also the effect of a simple liquid surface tension experiment, in which one excess drop of water changes the balance.
Golunov’s case was that last drop. People are sick of endless arrests, trumped-up cases from which no one is safe, police who must be feared more than a gang of thugs in a dark alley, investigators who don’t investigate, prosecutors embroiled in commerce, and courts that don’t care but simply stamp rulings that weren’t decided by them.
People are sick of the fact that like Golunov, any one of us could have drugs planted on them; that they could be beaten and tortured with impunity; that the head doctor called on to examine their injuries would be on the side of law enforcement instead of that of the patient, and wouldn’t be afraid to admit that publicly (as in Golunov’s case); that a major TV channel would show a fictitious report about them during prime time; that they could explain all of this in court (that, for example, their confession was obtained under torture, which didn’t happen in Golunov’s case, but is completely standard) and hope for a judicial enquiry, but none would come: the judge doesn’t care. They have heard this a thousand times before. The judge doesn’t doubt that the complainant was beaten, but can’t and doesn’t want to do anything about it.
I’ve been following cases just like this for the last twelve years. In recent years, the number of people serving prison sentences for drug-related crimes has stood at about 140,000. That’s currently 26–27 percent of all prisoners. It wasn’t always like that. In 2004, just over 43,000 people were jailed for drug-related offenses. That’s 100,000 fewer than today, despite an overall drop in convictions for all other crimes of more than one-third since 2004. Are there more drugs, or are the law enforcement agencies working more efficiently? No. Or rather, we don’t know. There are no precise data, nor indeed can there be in a situation in which cases are fabricated from start to finish.
Falsified drug cases are neither a new nor an undocumented phenomenon. A report by the Institute for the Rule of Law at the European University at St. Petersburg found that “Russian law enforcement officers have been put in a situation in which they are forced to use any means to achieve crime targets imposed on them by management, even if those target figures differ wildly from the real picture. In the case of drug crimes, those means can include entrapment, the planting of drugs, deliberate manipulation of drug test results, and falsification of information about drug crimes entered into statistical records.”
In that respect, Golunov’s case was typical. It seemed so simple (i.e., usual) to law enforcement officers that they didn’t even resort to faking drug tests when they arrested him: they simply refused to carry them out at all, and that would have suited everyone, had there not been such a public outcry.
What happens next is very simple. A duty counsel would have come to see Golunov, free of charge. Usually these lawyers work closely with investigators. The lawyer would have convincingly explained to Golunov that he should confess to everything he was being accused of. Otherwise, they would (continue to) beat and mistreat him, and why prolong the agony? If he confessed, they would leave him alone and wouldn’t be angry; he could even try for a suspended sentence. No matter that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that’s just how things are.
Or they might have said: “sign everything for now, and then change your testimony in court, and nothing will happen to you.” And people make a full confession and provide testimony against anyone they are told to. Eighty percent of drug cases are seen under special procedure, meaning there is no investigation of the evidence or anything else—only a sentence.
There are plenty of articles in the Russian criminal code under which the fabrication of evidence is punishable. There is also an article punishing judges for handing down a sentence that they know to be unjust. But these articles are dead. In my time as the director of Russia Behind Bars, an organization that helps thousands of people who have suffered at the hands of the Russian justice system every year, I can recall one case that ended in the conviction of several investigators—for abuse of office and extortion, not for falsifying evidence. The people who had set up the scheme were taken off the inquiry: one former police captain turned out to be the son of a regional governor, and went to work on the Olympic Games committee and then for Russian Railways. The other two are now deputies to the Prosecutor General.
I don’t recall a single case of a judge being sent to prison for knowingly handing down an unjust sentence. Yet any falsification is obvious in court, and can easily be identified where there is willingness to do so.
Of course it’s not only drug cases that get fabricated. It’s just that they’re among the easiest ones to set up. It’s even simpler to falsify pedophilia cases: for that, all that’s needed is a statement from a representative of the alleged victim. Usually that’s a former partner who is taking revenge on their lover or husband during a divorce and the division of assets.
Obviously, pedophiles and drug lords really do exist. But so long as everyone is busy fabricating cases against innocent people and battling to meet targets, the real ones go about their business undisturbed. After all, their cases would need proper investigation: real criminals are clever and cautious.
It’s no more difficult to frame someone for murder: we recently handled the case of a young man with previous convictions who was charged with murder, despite having an alibi. After being tortured in a Moscow police station, he signed a statement, but knew enough to ask for a jury trial. He was acquitted by two separate trials by jury, the ruling of the first having been annulled, and now no one knows whether that second acquittal could also be annulled. We know of cases when rulings have been annulled two times, and even three.
Is there a chance of punishing the investigators in that case for falsifying evidence? Alas, if we are being realistic, judging by what we have seen up until now, there is no chance. Yet at least ten people were involved. It’s simply what they are used to doing. Why can’t the investigators be brought to justice? Because it’s our word against theirs, and our word doesn’t mean anything. They simply made a mistake, and will meet their targets using someone else.
Golunov has been freed, but no one knew how it would end for him, or for you and me. Because any one of us could find ourselves in his place, and some of us already have.
Even one victim yanked out of the jaws of the system could become the beginning of its end. There should be no illusions that we can change the system. That would require political will, and the current system suits the authorities. Ultimately, there are far more security service officials, judges, police officers, and public sector employees linked to them, along with entrepreneurs with state contracts—multiplied by the members of their families—than free-thinking members of the public.
But it’s also true that lawlessness in the country affects them too, and they understand that. That is why Golunov’s case was so important and why it united so many people. Everyone realized that they had to try to resist this lawlessness, this one time at least, and see this case through, to the dropping of all charges and the public bringing to justice of those behind it. People understood that they had to make a supreme collective effort for once, because no one had ever succeeded in doing so before—despite a well-documented database of fabricated cases. Now there is a chance.
The Global Think Tank
Why Jailed U.S. Investor Calvey Is the Least of Putin’s Concerns
How “Loyalty” Ensnared Russia’s Journalists and Media Owners
The Problem With the Russian Judiciary
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2014 Coaching Carousel
Report: a former NBA veteran is considered the frontrunner for College of Charleston job
To follow along with the 2014 Coaching Carousel, click here.
After several investigations, the College of Charleston fired head coach Doug Wojcik, who had been accused of verbally and physically abusing players during his two years at the school.
According to a report on Thursday from Andrew Miller of the Post and Courier, an eight-person search committee is looking to have a candidate to present to College of Charleston president Glenn F. McConnell by Aug. 19, the day classes are set to begin. It is believed that Anthony Johnson, who a member of the CofC Athletics Hall of Fame, is the frontrunner.
From the Post and Courier:
“There’s a lot of support for Anthony and a lot of people who want to see Anthony get the job,” the source said. “There’s no question that he’s a very strong candidate, but the committee does not want to rush to a decision. They want it to be a thorough process so they can get the right person in place.”
Johnson set the school record for assists with 520 while leading the Cougars to an appearance in the 1997 NCAA Tournament. He went onto become an NBA journeyman, playing for seven different teams in his 13-year career.
Miller also mentioned four other candidates for the position. Among them are Wofford head coach Mike Young, Clemson assistant Earl Grant, Tulane assistant Shammond Williams and former Boston College head coach and current Bryant associate head coach Al Skinner.
Wojcik was initially investigated for verbal abuse in early July. After five weeks, a detailed 50-page report of the allegations and a second investigation, Wojcik was fired for just cause on August 5. In two seasons, he was 38-29.
At the start of the month, assistant Antonio Reynolds Dean was named acting head coach.
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Al Skinner, Anthony Johnson, Coaching Carousel, College of Charleston Cougars, Doug Wojcik, Mike Young
Scottie Wilbekin can’t see Billy Donovan leaving Florida
By Terrence PayneJun 15, 2014, 3:30 PM EDT
In four years at Florida, Scottie Wilbekin may have had his bumps in the road, but the Gators point guard was part of teams that reached three Elite Eights, and this past season made it to the Final Four after running the table in the SEC.
The 2014 SEC Player of the Year is hoping his success in college translates to the next level. As he tries to find a spot on a roster, will his coach, Billy Donovan, find a spot on an NBA sideline?
That’s been a consistent storyline this offseason as Donovan, along with several other college coaches, have been targeted for NBA vacancies. The Cleveland Cavaliers pushed for hard for UConn’s Kevin Ollie, were in “deep talks” with Kentucky’s John Calipari and reached out to Donovan in recent months.
Despite the rumors, and Donovan’s refusal to guarantee his future at the University of Florida, Wilbekin believes Donovan won’t leave Gainesville. The former Gator appeared on The Jim Rome Show on Friday to discuss the topic.
“I could definitely see him being a coach [in the NBA], but I don’t think he’ll leave just because I know how much he loves Florida and Gainesville,” Wilbekin said. “It’s such a great atmosphere in Gainesville that I can’t see him leaving.”
In 2007, Donovan briefly left Florida for the Orlando Magic. In the past week, reports stated that the Cavaliers had offered Calipari a seven-year, $60 million deal while other reported that the proposed offer was longer and worth more money. Not saying that would have been the same deal Donovan would have received, but it’s clear that NBA teams will be willing to do what it takes to try and uproot coaches from college campuses.
In March, Donovan signed an extension with the university through 2019.
The entire Wilbekin interview can be heard here.
[h/t @OnlyGators]
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Billy Donovan, Coaching Carousel, florida gators, Scottie Wilbekin
Manhattan coach Steve Masiello completes degree at Kentucky
By Terrence PayneMay 29, 2014, 12:20 PM EDT
Manhattan head coach Steve Masiello has completed the necessary coursework and will receive his undergraduate degree from the University of Kentucky in August, according to Jeff Goodman of ESPN.
Masiello, one of the rising stars in the college coaching ranks, led Manhattan to the NCAA tournament — its first since 2004 — in only his third season. He had agreed to a deal with South Florida, though, it was later called off after a discrepancy was found during a background check.
On his resume, Masiello claimed he had graduated from Kentucky when in fact he had not. Manhattan allowed Masiello to remain as the head coach, but was put on an unpaid leave until he completed his degree at Kentucky.
“I am extremely grateful and humbled by the opportunity to continue as the head men’s basketball coach at Manhattan College,” Masiello said in the release back in April. “I made a mistake that could have cost me my job at an institution I love. Details matter. Manhattan College has shown me a great deal of compassion and trust during this process, and I will do everything in my power to uphold that trust. I understand that I am very fortunate to have the chance to remain here at Manhattan.”
In three seasons with the Jaspers, Masiello is 60-39. Masiello led his Jaspers into the NCAA tournament against his former coach Rick Pitino. Louisville avoided the upset with a 71-64 win in the Round of 64.
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Coaching Carousel, Kentucky Wildcats, MAAC, Manhattan Jaspers, South Florida Bulls, Steve Masiello
Billy Donovan not guaranteeing a return to Florida
By Terrence PayneMay 27, 2014, 8:00 PM EDT
Florida head coach Billy Donovan, along with UConn’s Kevin Ollie and Iowa State’s Fred Hoiberg, is on a short list of college coaches who are being targeted for NBA coaching vacancies this offseason.
Last Thursday, it was reported that Donovan, who for agreed to coach the Orlando Magic in 2007 before reversing his decision and returning to UF, had been contacted by the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team with the top pick in next month’s NBA Draft. With SEC Spring Meetings taking place this week, Donovan explained to reporters on Tuesday why he hasn’t ruled out a possible jump to the NBA, offering no guarantee about his future in Gainesville.
From the Edgar Thompson of the Orlando Sentinel:
“I think when you start making guarantees about life and start making guarantees about where you’re going to be, that’s not good,” he said. “If for some reason I ever change my mind and did something, I wouldn’t want (people) saying, ‘Well, he promised, he guaranteed, he said this on record.’ I just think when you start doing that, that’s a mistake.
“I’ve seen a lot of coaches over the years come out and say, ‘No, no, no, no, I’m not going anywere, I’m not going anywhere,’ and then all of a sudden they go somewhere and it’s like, ‘Well, this guy is a complete liar.’ I don’t want to get into that situation. There’s been some teams that have called, but that’s really it.”
Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated appeared on the Dan Patrick Show on Tuesday morning (video above), mainly to discuss his column on Memphis Grizzlies owner Robert Pera. But in the final minute of the interview, Patrick asked Mannix to provide a coaching update for teams around the NBA. Cleveland is looking for a college coach, said Mannix, and based on what Cleveland can offer Donovan, Mannix believes the longtime Gators coach could still head to the NBA.
Donovan has won 451 games in his 18 seasons at Florida. In March, he signed an extension through 2019. The Gators are projected to finish at the top of the SEC once again, along with likely preseason No. 1 Kentucky.
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Cleveland Cavaliers, Coaching Carousel, Dan Patrick Show, florida gators, NBA, video
Oregon State names assistant Doug Stewart interim head coach
The Oregon State men’s basketball team has been without a head coach for 10 days.
The Beavers whiffed on trying to lure Ben Howland to Corvallis, who withdrew from consideration on Monday night. Oregon State announced some stability on Thursday night, promoting assistant Doug Stewart to interim head coach.
Stewart has served as an assistant to Craig Robinson at both Brown (2006-2008) and Oregon State (2008-2014). Robinson was relieved of his duties on May 5, following a 93-104 (39-69 Pac-12) record in his six seasons.
Stewart does have head coaching experience, spending two years on the sidelines at Casper College, a junior college in Wyoming.
Gina Mizell and Connor Letourneau of The Oregonian reported that Arizona assistant coach Damon Stoudamire is still considered the top candidate for the coaching vacancy, though, there is no timetable for a hire.
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Coaching Carousel, Craig Robinson, Doug Stewart, Oregon State Beavers
Report: Southern Miss has offered Stephen F. Austin’s Brad Underwood
By Terrence PayneApr 29, 2014, 11:28 PM EDT
To follow along with the 2014 Coaching Carousel,click here.
Southern Miss has been in search for a new coach for more than a week, and according to a report on Tuesday night, the university has extended an offer to a potential successor.
Gary Parrish of CBS Sports is reporting that Stephen F. Austin head coach Brad Underwood has been offered the position. And while nothing has been even agreed upon, an announcement could be made as early as Wednesday, a source told Parrish.
After spending seven seasons as a Division I assistant coach at Kansas State and South Carolina, Underwood took over the Stephen F. Austin program in 2013. In his first season as a D1 head coach, he led the Lumberjacks to the Round of 32 in the 2014 NCAA Tournament, upsetting Shaka Smart and VCU in the South Region. Stephen F. Austin finished 32-3 (18-0 Southland), riding a 29-game winning streak that spanned almost four months.
Last Thursday, Parrish reported that Underwood was being targeted by Southern Miss, while Wichita State assistant Greg Heiar and Rick Stansbury, who coached Mississippi State from 1998-2012, were also viewed as possible candidates.
The Golden Eagles were the top team, in a four-way tie for first place, in Conference USA this past season with a 29-7 (13-3 CUSA) mark. On April 21, Donnie Tyndall accepted the Tennessee vacancy after Cuonzo Martin left to take over Cal.
Tags: 2014 Coaching Carousel, Brad Underwood, Coaching Carousel, Southern Miss Golden Eagles, Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks
Report: a former NBA veteran is considered the frontrunner for College of Charleston job August 10, 2014 2:00 pm Scottie Wilbekin can’t see Billy Donovan leaving Florida June 15, 2014 3:30 pm Manhattan coach Steve Masiello completes degree at Kentucky May 29, 2014 12:20 pm Billy Donovan not guaranteeing a return to Florida May 27, 2014 8:00 pm Oregon State names assistant Doug Stewart interim head coach May 15, 2014 11:05 pm Report: Southern Miss has offered Stephen F. Austin’s Brad Underwood April 29, 2014 11:28 pm Reports: Ben Howland, Kim Anderson candidates for Missouri job April 27, 2014 3:15 pm Report: UTEP head coach Tim Floyd emerges as a candidate for Missouri job April 22, 2014 11:08 pm Report: Tennessee hires Southern Miss coach Donnie Tyndall April 21, 2014 10:33 pm Tennessee State hires Dana Ford as new head coach April 21, 2014 3:17 pm Report: Mike White turns down Tennessee, Donnie Tyndall next up? April 21, 2014 2:07 pm Reports: Missouri’s Frank Haith agrees to take the Tulsa job April 17, 2014 4:03 pm Report: Western Illinois to hire former assistant coach Billy Wright April 14, 2014 5:52 pm Maine buys out the contract of head coach Ted Woodward April 14, 2014 3:33 pm Reports: IPFW’s Tony Jasick hired by Jacksonville April 9, 2014 12:00 pm Appalachian State names Davidson assistant Jim Fox as new head coach April 8, 2014 6:25 pm Kentucky coach John Calipari on Lakers rumors: ‘I have the best job in the country’ April 8, 2014 12:02 am Report: Florida Atlantic to name former NBA head coach Michael Curry to same position April 7, 2014 4:35 pm North Dakota State’s Saul Phillips named new Ohio head coach April 6, 2014 12:31 am 2014 Final Four breaks all-time attendance record for college basketball with 79,444 April 5, 2014 10:57 pm Report: Danny Manning will be Wake Forest’s next coach April 4, 2014 9:31 am Report: Jim Christian has accepted the Boston College job April 3, 2014 2:03 pm Report: Houston to hire Kelvin Sampson with five-year deal April 2, 2014 3:58 pm Mark Schmidt to remain at St. Bonaventure, ending Boston College rumors April 1, 2014 4:37 pm Report: Marquette has hired Steve Wojciechowski April 1, 2014 11:07 am Report: Cuonzo Martin withdraws from Marquette coaching search April 1, 2014 8:32 am Report: Montana State hires Oregon assistant Brian Fish March 31, 2014 10:28 pm New Mexico gives head coach Craig Neal an extension March 31, 2014 7:25 pm Report: Washington State hires former Oregon coach Ernie Kent March 31, 2014 6:59 pm Cal tweets Mike Montgomery to retire March 31, 2014 3:32 pm Report: Kentucky assistant Orlando Antigua to be next head coach of South Florida March 31, 2014 1:52 pm Report: Marquette, Wake Forest will continue to pursue Dayton head coach Archie Miller March 30, 2014 3:30 pm ESPN college basketball analyst Jimmy Dykes named Arkansas women’s head coach March 30, 2014 1:46 pm Report: Louisville assistant Kevin Keatts hired by UNC-Wilmington March 27, 2014 9:40 am Manhattan places head coach Steve Masiello on leave March 26, 2014 5:18 pm Report: Steve Masiello deal with South Florida over inaccuracies on his resume March 26, 2014 9:10 am Jim Calhoun on Boston College head coaching job: ‘I’m not interested’ (AUDIO) March 25, 2014 6:22 pm Tom Izzo on Michigan State: ‘This is a pretty good place for me right now’ March 25, 2014 5:06 pm Report: Steve Masiello will accept the South Florida job March 25, 2014 10:18 am Houston head coach James Dickey steps down March 24, 2014 6:12 pm
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What’s the matter with Kansas?, part 2: Superman Inc.
Filed under: elseworlds, superman — Tom Bondurant @ 2:24 pm
I got the idea to blog about this 1999 Elseworlds while in the middle of reading Red Son, and the reason should be pretty obvious: here, the focus isn’t on communism, but unapologetic capitalism.
Superman Inc. was written by Steve Vance, pencilled by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, and inked by Mark Farmer. It’s an unusual Elseworlds in that it’s not about superheroics. Instead, Dale “Superman” Suderman (the erstwhile Kal-El of Krypton) is the greatest athlete the Earth has ever known — a star in the NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball, a multiple-medal-winning Olympian, and an unstoppable marketing force. His chief rival is still Lex Luthor (now a team owner), but this time Dale/Supes earns Luthor’s wrath by screwing Luthor out of a new stadium.
See, Dale isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue, which the book demonstrates in a pointed parody of the regular Superman’s boy-scout reputation. After Dale’s grinned and glad-handed his way through a lobby full of adoring kids (“Have this [jacket] fumigated,” he later tells his assistant), he tears into his staff for their concept-art failures. “Can’t you morons get anything right? How many times do I have to tell you?! I’m Superman! I’m everybody’s friend! I don’t grimace — I smile!” This last sentence accompanies the scary picture of an intensely beady-eyed Superman poking the ends of his mouth upwards in a look that would give the Joker chills.
What brought Dale to this state was a succession of foster homes and juvenile facilities, necessitated by the death of Dale’s foster mother. Dale’s powers contributed to her death, because his flying startled her into falling down the stairs and breaking her neck. This caused Dale to draw into himself (and also repress the use of his flashier powers), until years later when a chance involvement in pickup basketball awakened his “athletic abilities.” It’s certainly not an unrealistic alternative to Superman’s origin, and it gives Dale’s story a poignancy that a straight-up “Clark chose football over virtue” choice might have lacked. (Dale isn’t without some scruples, though, thanks to his mentor, ex-NBAer Marcus Clark.)
Nevertheless, Dale can’t quite let go of his powers, and as another marketing tool creates a “Superman” cartoon which uses the familiar costume and abilities. Thus, in this reality superstar athlete Dale Suderman invented the super-hero, which seems a little precious but pretty much works in context. Meanwhile, though, Luthor and his investigators (including reporter Lois Lane, naturally) have pieced together Dale’s extraterrestrial origins, and use their findings to “out” Dale. Being a nigh-omnipotent alien is apparently worse than using human growth hormone, so Dale’s career threatens to start circling the drain.
An enraged Dale makes matters worse when he storms Luthor’s penthouse offices, is defenestrated thanks in part to a shard of Kryptonite, and flies back up to administer beatings in front of many witnesses. Furthermore, during an attempt at talk-show rehabilitation, Dale gets shot with a Kryptonite bullet and winds up in the hospital. Shortly thereafter, Lois shows up, having quit Luthor’s employ once she figured out he was behind the shooting. She’s withdrawing herself: “I may do some teaching,” she says as she leaves.
At this point Superman Inc. starts to steer Dale in a more traditional direction, with a visit from a familiar generically-named police detective. Yes, J’Onn J’Onzz tells Dale that there are many aliens living on Earth who could benefit from a more positive role model, so why doesn’t he shape up? Thus, Dale heads back to where it all began, in Kansas, to clear his head and figure out what to do with his life. Along the way, he’s knocked out by a lightning strike. No points for guessing which kindly couple takes him in!
Actually, that too is handled pretty smoothly. The Kents don’t know Dale Suderman from Adam, so he’s able to hide out with them without much effort. On the farm he learns the value of hard work, etc., and eventually tells the world (via taped message) he’s headed into space to find the remains of his home planet. However, on the last page of the book, it’s “Clark Kent” who registers for Lois’ Journalism 101 class….
Superman Inc. looks like a pretty slight story, but I think it has a lot going on beneath the surface. The “I don’t grimace” scene is actually a nice encapsulation of the book’s message about image management. Dale’s mother dies because she thinks her flying child is a demon, and Dale turns this into introversion and self-loathing. Once Dale has started playing basketball, though, that gets completely inverted, and his face becomes ubiquitous. (The “S” symbol shows up too, but as the logo for Dale’s new basketball franchise, the Metropolis Spartans.) In this way “Superman” allows Dale to use his powers, after a fashion.
However, as in Red Son, Dale has no “secret identity” which might offer another perspective. Therefore, this book’s “Superman goes nuts” scene also forces him into hiding as a bespectacled nobody. In Red Son Superman’s disguise is just that; but here, it’s implied pretty strongly that “Clark” is the real deal — a kinder, gentler iteration of the boy who grew up to be an oversaturating sensation. The traditional Superman was Clark before he was famous, so Dale needed to learn how “Clark” could help him cope.
There is a hint, too, that Dale could re-emerge as Superman the superhero, fighting evil and injustice in the mode of his animated alter ego. After all, if Dale can’t use his powers for sports anymore, he’ll need some other outlet. The logistical gymnastics that would require seem well-suited for a sequel. Too bad DC has gotten out of the Elseworlds business….
What’s the matter with Kansas?, part 1: Red Son
This post is the first installment in a short series about various Superman Elseworlds. Nudged by the news that DC is releasing a hardcover edition, I re-read Superman: Red Son over the weekend. That got my brain going, and I wanted then to re-read other stories. Look for posts on Superman & Wonder Woman: Whom Gods Destroy, Superman: The Dark Side, Superman Inc., and probably at least one other, in the near future.
Right from the start, Red Son (written by Mark Millar, pencilled by Dave Johnson and Killian Plunkett) creates an all-encompassing sense of horrifying inevitability, like there is absolutely no way it will end well. At the same time, though, that inevitability almost makes it read like dull, state-sanctioned propaganda. Accordingly, I found Red Son to be rather a frustrating comic — not in the reading, which was fairly engaging, but in the message (or lack thereof).
SPOILERS FOLLOW…
First, a bit of personal perspective on Red Son. Lefty though I may be, I did grow up during the last two decades of the Cold War, and lived under the shadow of mutually-assured destruction. We didn’t have “duck and cover” drills in the ’70s and ’80s, but we did have The Day After, Red Dawn, and “Amerika.” While a lot of that turned out to be right-wing nightmare fuel, I wasn’t particularly eager to have the United States turned into the Workers’ Paradise.
It seems to me that Red Son plays on those kinds of fears and expectations. The big surprise, apparently, is not that Superman is a Commie; it’s that he’s a compassionate Commie, eschewing outright conquest in favor of winning the world’s hearts and minds. Even so, I found it hard to root for Superman, simply because of what he represented in this story; and I’m sure that’s just the way Millar wanted it.
See, Red Son argues that as a Soviet operative (and later as Soviet leader), Superman gets to examine how the apparatus of the state could be used for the benefit of all. In the capitalist United States, Superman/Clark can be just another guy, doing what he can to help out. However, if the state is charged with taking care of everyone, and Superman is the state (for all practical purposes), then he has an obligation to give the people food, shelter, etc.
Nevertheless, these are background and motivational details. Millar doesn’t really make a case for communism (Soviet-style or otherwise) — or, more accurately, he doesn’t use Superman to “rehabilitate” communism — as much as he implies that a communist viewpoint enables Superman’s actions in the pursuit of social justice. Thus, Red Son is another in a long line of “Superman takes over the world” stories, and like those, it ends with the realization that Superman can’t impose his personal morality on humanity as a whole.
“But that would mean,” my straw-man says, “that if the world got too corrupt, evil, depraved, etc., for Superman, he wouldn’t do anything about it!” I agree — and remember, that’s exactly what turns the Kingdom Come Superman into a bearded, pony-tailed hermit, living on a holo-farm in the Fortress of Solitude. Both the KC and RS Supermen have one last red-eyed rampage which ends in the above-described come-to-Jesus moment.
And as much as I shudder at the thought of a Soviet Superman leading the Red Army triumphantly down Main Street USA, I think Red Son would have been better had it not given into that familiar character bit. Admittedly, Millar sets up RS‘s come-to-Jesus moment pretty well, equating Superman’s global victory with his one unquestioned failure, but its first two chapters are so chilling that it’s almost a cop-out for Millar to bring in conventional Superman morality.
I want to stress here that I am not trying to connect said morality with uniquely American values. Instead, I just think it would have been more interesting for RS-Supes to have embraced fully the benign totalitarianism he’d been practicing for most of the story.
That’s the unspoken point of Elseworlds generally, though, isn’t it? Superman is Superman, whether he’s in the Middle Ages or the Civil War or raised by the Waynes. At some point, however, it makes these stories exercises in rearranging the details. In the end that’s what I didn’t like about Red Son: all of its radical visions — Wonder Woman traumatized by the loss of her lasso, JFK an aging buffoon, Hal Jordan waterboarded — seem only skin-deep. Indeed, the critical moment in the third part comes when President Luthor pretty much only has to snap his fingers in order to reinvigorate the United States’ moribund, third-world economy. There’s your communist-vs.-capitalist showdown in a nutshell: Superman spends decades shaping the USSR into the world’s only superpower, and Luthor reawakens the US practically overnight.
Like I said, frustrating. Is Red Son shaggy and padded with high-concept “moments,” or is it all necessary in order to get to Luthor’s “checkmate?” Is it shrewd satire, not just of Superman but Bush-era foreign policy; or is that undercut by the eventual redemptive moment? Did Superman deserve some comeuppance beyond the loss of his identity and prestige? Certainly Red Son is thought-provoking, but I’m not sure the answers justify the effort.
Last week’s comics (7/28/04)
Filed under: batman, crisis, elseworlds, green lantern, justice league, legion, new frontier, planetary, superman, weekly roundups — Tom Bondurant @ 2:23 am
Hoping to catch up soon, but for now, still a week behind.
Batman #630: Written by Judd Winick; art by Dustin Nguyen. The conclusion to the Penguin/Scarecrow story is satisfying enough. That may not sound like high praise, but there is a knack to writing Batman which not even the most high-profile creators always have. Of late writers have taken their Batman assignments as opportunities to tour the Bat-universe, stitching together episodes without worrying about whether they make sense. Winick wisely chose to focus on story over spectacle. That said, it’s still a story about the Penguin, the Scarecrow, and a boogeyman which rips people apart, so it’s not like something new was revealed about the human condition. Winick will be the regular Batman writer once “War Games” is over in 3 months, and this storyline doesn’t make me dread his arrival.
Crisis on Multiple Earths Volume 3 paperback: This collects the Justice League/Justice Society team-ups from the early 1970s. The first story is an odd one about an alien child and his pet getting separated across dimensional planes, and causing havoc. The second is a three-issue epic reintroducing the Seven Soldiers of Victory. The third features Earth-X, a world where World War II lasted 30 years and the Nazis won; and the fourth tells us what happened to the Golden Age Sandman’s sidekick, Sandy. I bought this because, by and large, I didn’t have these issues, and I always enjoyed JLA/JSA team-ups. It’s pretty much critic-proof for me.
DC Comics Presents Hawkman: The two stories here are similar in theme to the Mystery in Space issue. The first takes its cue from the notion that ‘60s comics writers were literally channeling events on the parallel Earth where their characters lived, and turns it around so that Julie Schwartz is controlling what “really” happens to Hawkman. The second is a Valentine- themed tale revealing how Hawkman met his wife and partner, Hawkgirl. Both are enjoyable and light-hearted, and both skillfully include the winged monkey featured on the cover.
DC: The New Frontier #5 (of 6): Written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. I read all 5 issues in one sitting last night, and it made me love this series even more. The future Justice Leaguers are finally all introduced as the “mystery villain” emerges. So much happens in this issue that it’s hard to believe there are still 64 pages to go until the end. My expectations are accordingly high for the concluding issue, due out in two months. Working on a NF essay, so more details there.
Green Lantern #179: Written by Ron Marz, drawn by Luke Ross. Kyle Rayner figures out who’s been messing with his life and sets out to destroy him. Since he’s involved with the government, fellow Lantern John Stewart shows up to stop Kyle. They fight for a while. Kyle then realizes the error of his ways, and decides to pick up the pieces of his crappy life without further violence. This doesn’t sit well with our villain, who decides to go after Kyle himself. All I know is, there are two more months left in this series and it just seems to be marking time until the Big Changes in Green Lantern: Rebirth. Since Ron Marz created Kyle Rayner, I presume he’ll want to give him a happy ending, so at least I can look forward to that.
JLA #102: Written by Chuck Austen, drawn by Ron Garney. This time it’s the Flash in the Seat of Woe, not being fast enough to save a couple of children from a fire. Apparently this is the first time the Flash has seen children die. Not to be cruel, but I find that hard to believe. The character has supposedly been fighting crime since he was a teenager, so you’d think he would have seen worse. Also, considering that last issue Superman couldn’t save a guy from a fire, you’d think Austen could have come up with something more original.
Justice League of America – Another Nail #3 (of 3): Written and drawn by Alan Davis. I like Alan Davis fine, and he draws gorgeous comics, but honestly I don’t know why this series should exist. The original Nail miniseries answered the justifiable question “what would the JLA have been like without Superman?” in shocking, often horrifying fashion. In this sequel, we have the JLA, complete with Superman, fighting some interdimensional menace. I think it’s supposed to be the Alan Davis answer to Crisis on Infinite Earths. It comes off more like “Alan Davis draws every DC character he can imagine.” If it didn’t look so fantastic, I’d be more upset. I feel very shallow for admitting that.
Legion #36: Written by Gail Simone, drawn by Dan Jurgens & Andy Smith. The Legion regroups in the wake of Earth’s total technological failure. That’s about all there is to it. Simone and Jurgens do a nice job of advancing the various plot threads from last issue, especially those involving the floating prison. They also show the calvary – i.e., the rest of the Legion – preparing to come to the rescue, but they make it clear that the situation is still dangerous. Probably the coolest and creepiest part of the issue is the sight of Brainiac 5 without his “neural inhibitors.” At first we think he’s going off the deep end into criminal insanity, but then he pulls himself together and starts firing on all cylinders. Jurgens and Smith are at their best portraying this process, first as mania, then focus.
Planetary #20: Written by Warren Ellis; drawn by John Cassaday. I can’t really explain the significance of this issue without laying out the premise of the entire series, so here goes – the Planetary team encounters very familiar archetypal characters on its way to defeating their arch-enemies, who are pretty much evil versions of the Fantastic Four. (That really doesn’t do it justice.) In this issue we finally meet the evil “Thing.” It was worth the wait.
Superman #207: Written by Brian Azzarello, drawn by Jim Lee & Scott Williams. Part 4 of “For Tomorrow,” as Superman fights Equus, the cybernetic enforcer who’s connected to the mysterious Vanishing, and learns that Equus and his master might not be as evil as we think. I really have no opinion on this issue. I want to like it, but it just kind of sits there. Lee’s art is very pretty, but not enough to win me over like Alan Davis’.
Superman: Birthright #12 (of 12): Written by Mark Waid, drawn by Leinil F. Yu. The end of the year-long revision to Superman’s origins and first adventure is touching, but it too left me a little flat. Look for a more comprehensive Birthright essay in the near future.
New Comics for July 14, Part 2
Filed under: batman, elseworlds, gotham central, lotdk, supergirl, superman, weekly roundups — Tom Bondurant @ 5:06 pm
I forgot to mention that Part 1 featured all the “team” books, but you probably noticed the theme. Here are the rest.
Action Comics #817: Written by Chuck Austen; drawn by Ivan Reis and Marc Campos. A wounded Superman recovers at STAR Labs after the last few issues’ worth of fighting with Gog. However, several B-list villains who didn’t make the cut for Identity Crisis have learned Supes is vulnerable, and attack the facility. As it happens, Wonder Woman and Superboy are there to help, but the Weapons Master manages to get through and provide the cliffhanger. The art carries the book, maybe by design — it doesn’t seem too hard to write snappy dialogue for fight scenes, and since Austen took over in April, that’s primarily what Action has delivered. Still, Austen gives us satirical characters — Jack Ryder, a Jerry Springer/Morton Downey-like newscaster whose cameraman sacrifices himself for the story; and Mohlman, an annoying, nerdish doctor who in the movie would be played by a bleached-blond Jack Black. Both are fairly broad, and the cameraman comes off the best. It’s hard to take the whole thing too seriously when it begins and ends with somber announcements about Superman’s death.
DC Comics Presents Mystery In Space: The Julius Schwartz tribute continues this week with Adam Strange, an Earthman periodically teleported to the planet Rann via “Zeta-Beam” (and no, his Rannian wife is not named “Catherine Zeta-Beam”). The two stories herein are inspired by a cover where Adam must choose between stopping an atomic blast on Earth or a giant heat-beam on Rann. The first story, by veteran Superman writer Elliot S! Maggin and artist J.H. Williams, is a more literal interpretation of the cover. When Adam’s advanced Rannian technology falls into the hands of a corrupt Earth government, it creates a nuclear crisis which guest-star the Elongated Man must solve; since Adam himself must take out a rogue weather-control device on Rann. The resolution is a neat bit of dovetailing worthy of “Seinfeld.”
The second story, written by Grant Morrison with art by Jerry Ordway, is a more conceptual riff on “two worlds.” It juxtaposes an Army attempt to invade Rann with commentary on Adam’s editor Julius Schwartz, DC’s sci-fi heroes of the Space Age, and the readers of the original Mystery in Space. This unconventional approach argues that the children who read Adam’s fantastic adventures in their youth grew up to face the struggles of the 1960s, and hope for a better world. The message is somewhat more poignant given that DC’s comics of the 1960s sought to keep out those harsh realities — and Adam himself was literally able to escape Earth for a comparatively idyllic life on another planet. All in all, this was a fine installment in what hopefully will be a fitting tribute.
And now, the Batman books.
Gotham Central #21: Written by Ed Brubaker; art by Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano. This is the penultimate chapter of “Un(re)solved,” but just like last issue (and like the cop shows this book emulates) there’s a helpful “Previously in Gotham Central” recap page. Basically, the Mad Hatter is being questioned for his role in killing a high-school baseball team several years before. Also suspects are two former students, now adults but then ostracized for being nerds. There is some thought that the Penguin might have wanted the team dead as part of his gambling operations. Finally, the detective on the case was Harvey Bullock, now disgraced for killing a man who shot former Commissioner Gordon. Most of the issue follows detectives Driver and MacDonald questioning the Mad Hatter (who’s locked up), Bullock, the ex-nerds, and the Hatter’s former landlady about his involvement — but by the end of the issue, things have gone south and the investigation might be compromised. I really like this book — the characters all talk like real people (or at least real TV cops, which may well be a step up for comics) and the art is gloomy, almost photorealistic. When fantastic characters like Batman and his villains show up here, they still look natural. There is a Gotham Central paperback out, collecting the first 7 issues, which is a great way to get into this ambitious series.
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #181: Written by Dylan Horrocks; art by Ramon Bachs and Jon Holredge. Barbara Gordon gets to slip into Batgirl’s skin again, at least in cyberspace, as she tries to find out who’s been killing hackers. Along the way, Batman gets to question a mob boss’s daughter, who Bruce Wayne knew from summer camp and who blames Batman for her father’s incapacity. The best part of the story involves one hacker’s attempt to take out another by hijacking a cruise missile. The revelation of the killer’s identity is both surprising and novel, and the art isn’t bad. It tries to blend different styles in the “cyberspace” segments, to reflect the different genres of characters in the computer universe. While the story doesn’t say anything new about Batman or Barbara, I’ve read worse, including in this series.
Superman/Batman #11: Written by Jeph Loeb; drawn by Michael Turner and Peter Steigerwald. Part 4 of “The Supergirl From Krypton” finds Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman invading Apokolips (with the help of former Apokoliptian Big Barda) to rescue Superman’s ostensible cousin Kara from the evil despot Darkseid. Even if I hadn’t seen the cover of the next issue, I wouldn’t have been surprised at the ending for this one — but I’m getting ahead of myself. Wonder Woman and Barda fight Barda’s old colleagues, the Female Furies. (This includes Barda’s admission that WW “inspired” her; never mind that these days, Barda was around for a few years before WW showed up.) Batman fights giant Demon Dogs. Superman finally catches up to Darkseid, but we don’t get to see him fight too much.
Along the way, dialogue and our heroes’ internal monologues drive home the point that 1) Batman doesn’t trust Kara, 2) Superman trusts her implicitly, 2a) this is no different than if Batman were going to rescue Robin, and 3) Kara’s stay on Paradise Island made her partly Wonder Woman’s responsibility. Ever since Jeph Loeb started writing this series, I have been annoyed with his use of dueling first-person narration for Supes and Batman; and here, when he actually stops using it (for the Wonder Woman scenes, naturally), the issue improves noticeably. To me this series has become an excuse for “big dumb fun,” and has turned out to be an overwrought exercise in — for lack of a better term — “stunt plotting.” There are probably a half-dozen better ways for these high-profile heroes to find out the truth about Kara, but apparently they are not as marketable as “Three Justice Leaguers Attack Apokolips!” Oh well; it’ll be over in two months.
Batman: The Order Of Beasts: Eddie Campbell’s one-shot is an “Elseworlds” tale of Bruce Wayne traveling to 1939 London and getting tangled in a murder mystery involving an animal-themed cult. Despite the monochromatic color palette and the unassuming artwork, the word that comes immediately to mind is “jaunty.” Campbell presents a Batman who isn’t quite as grim or driven as the current version. He’s just starting out and makes little mental notes as to how he can improve his crimefighting skills. He’s also accepted by local law enforcement without much question — just a transatlantic call to Commissioner Gordon to check his bona fides. Campbell’s Batman is depicted as a guy in a suit, almost as if he were drawing Adam West, but he never makes Batman a ridiculous figure. The mystery itself goes from plot point to plot point without much trouble, making for a light bit of entertainment that captures the spirit of the Darknight Detective.
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A Halloween Tale
The Fall Forage Tour
Significant Careers of Determined Artists: Dale Chihuly
Most people are familiar with the characterization of the starving artist. They are the determined visionaries who forgo many of life’s comforts—money, food, bathing—so they can focus all of their energy on their art. It can be a struggle.
Some of America’s most prominent artists have had phenomenally influential careers in spite of hardships that transcend those associated with the starving-artist epithet. One such individual is internationally celebrated glass artist Dale Chihuly.
Chihuly has had a tremendous impact on the studio glass movement since the 1960s. Having trained, worked, and instructed the art of glass manipulation in hotshops from Seattle, Washington, to Venice, Italy, Chihuly developed his own unique style. He uses glass blowing as a method of sculpting to create vibrant, energetic forms. Much of this energy is derived from the natural movement of the glass. Rather than using a plethora of tools to confine the shifting molten glass, he allows gravity to influence the material and determine its shape.
Chihuly’s journey has not been without hurdles. A car accident in 1976 left him without sight in his left eye and with permanent damage to his right foot and ankle. Just three years later, Chihuly dislocated his shoulder in a bodysurfing accident. With such a physically demanding medium, Chihuly relinquished his role as gaffer—the glass technician who does the majority of shaping and transferring during the glass-blowing process.
Stepping down as gaffer has not caused Chihuly to limit the scale or scope of his work in the least. In fact, the result has been quite the opposite: “He found that he could see the process better and have more control over it when he ‘turned over the stick’ to another gaffer. He has been inspired to run a larger operation, whereas with full sight, he might have been satisfied with one or two assistants.”[1]
Dale Chihuly, Glasshouse, 2012,
Chihuly Garden and Glass, Seattle, Washington.
With the support of an expert team, Chihuly’s exploration of color and form continued unhindered as his focus evolved from small sculptures to larger outdoor installations, to vast environmental exhibitions wherein he creates habitats made entirely from glass. These sculptures and environments have been installed in museums and other institutions across the globe. One of Chihuly’s neon sculptures was featured just last year in Crystal Bridges’ temporary exhibition See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art.
Chihuly’s physical limitations have not prevented him from creating. If anything, they’ve given him the inspiration and perspective to push further and dream bigger. His vast installations and multitudinous accomplishments stand as a testament to his perseverance and determination.
Starting this month, the Crystal Bridges Museum Store is featuring Chihuly Workshop Studio Editions. Studio Editions are handcrafted designs produced by the CHIHULY WORKSHOP in collaboration with DALE CHIHULY.
[1] Chihuly, Dale, Walter Darby Bannard, and Henry Geldzahler. 1993. Chihuly: form from fire. Daytona Beach: Museum of Arts and Sciences.
Hilary Hutter
Children’s Book Week at the Museum Store
It has been my understanding Crystal Bridges will feature Dale Chihuly’s work will be featured early in the spring–I need to know if this is
correct. I would really appreciate an answer to my question, so I can allot time to visit.
Linda DeBerry says:
Yes, we will have a major exhibition of Chihuly’s work, from June 3 through November 13. It is a two-part exhibition featuring an indoor gallery show and an outdoor exhibition on the Museum grounds. You can read more about our 2017 schedule here: https://crystalbridges.org/blog/crystal-bridges-museum-of-american-art-announces-2017-exhibitions/
Joy Walker says:
Very excited for Chihuly exhibit as my nephew trained under him.
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Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Announces Development of Innovative Arts Venue
Museum Officials Dealing with Overnight Break-In: April Fools Prank?
Women’s History Month: Vanessa German
Vanessa German Image from German's Facebook page, where you can find samples of her poetry, her artwork, and the Art House. Click on the image to visit.
Vanessa German
Image from German’s Facebook page, where you can find samples of her poetry, her artwork, and the Art House. Click on the image to visit.
In honor of Women’s History Month, each week we are profiling some of the women artists in Crystal Bridges’ collection. This week we look at Vanessa German: artist, performer, activist, poet, and force of nature. German creates elaborate and fantastical sculptures of African American figures she has crafted from baby dolls, shells, found objects, paint, wood, handmade “beads” of fabric wrapped around bits of paper… whatever she sees that speaks to her. She refers to these works as “power figures,” and considers them guardians, as well as powerful statements about oppression, race relations, violence, and poverty. Her work was featured in the State of the Art exhibition at Crystal Bridges and is now on tour in two State of the Art exhibitions on the road.
German lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood called Homewood. In 2011, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show referred to Homewood as “the most dangerous neighborhood in America” for its history of violence, poverty, and drugs. But to Vanessa German it is a community of people in need of protection, love, and a voice. “To me, Homewood is one of the most inspiring places in the world,” she writes on her web page. “I’ve seen acts of love and bravery here that would leave you slack-jawed and damp-eyed with awe.”
Her home there, which is referred to as Art House, has become a center for art and community: a place whose doors are always open to the neighborhood children who come every day to make art, have a snack, and bask in the warmth of her presence. Their parents come too, and members of the community and the city who drop by to bring donations of supplies or food, sit around and socialize while the kids make art, or make art of their own. The story of how Art House came to be is a remarkable one.
The new Art House, decorated with mosaic stars made by neighborhood children.
Before Vanessa German acquired the current Art House, she lived in another row house house not far away. She would often work on her sculptures on the front porch where she could spread out with her tools and materials and enjoy the fresh air.
“I would paint and build things and [the neighborhood] kids would say ‘What are you doing?’ I want to do that,’” German said. “So I pulled out all this old paint and paintbrushes, and I would work and they would work too.”
Vanessa German, b. 1976
“Artist Considers the 21st Century Implications of Psychosis as Public Health Crisis or, Critical/Comedic Analysis into the Pathophysiology of Psychosis,” 2014
Mixed media assemblage Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.
As the word spread and more and more children came to make art, German began to refer to her porch as the “Love Front Porch,” a place where everyone was safe and valued. “I realized that all I was doing was sharing the thing that I loved and that by sharing what I loved I was sharing love,” she said.
When a house down the street became empty, German asked the president of the housing authority if she and the children could use the house for art-making. During their meeting—which took place on German’s front porch—the neighborhood kids gathered around, eager to make art. Although German’s proposal was turned down, the gaggle of young artists on her porch made an impression. The housing authority president called her a few days later.
“She said she couldn’t stop thinking about how just because we were sitting on the porch, all this activity happened, and she said she would work out a way to let us use the house,” German said.
Over the next two years, the Art House drew an increasing number of kids and their parents who came to make art, or just to sit and socialize. Neighbors regularly supplied snacks for the kids, many of whose parents can’t always afford to feed them. The Art House became a social center for the neighborhood.
“I live in a neighborhood where they tear down a lot of houses,” German said. “So to have a house that is being used and taken care of—with vision and with hope and with purpose—is really something that makes people proud.”
In 2014, using crowd-sourced funds, along with a chunk of her own money earned through the sale of her art, German purchased a house on her block to provide the Art House with a permanent home. Since then, the neighborhood children have been helping German to decorate the house in colorful and welcoming mosaics, and now Art House appears like a joyful shout of welcome and creativity in the midst of this troubled area.
Mosaics with a message grace the Art House’s steps. Photo by Erika Beras (NPR). Click this image to read NPR’s January, 2016, feature about Art House.
“It’s hard to put into words what it means for each and every person,” German continued. “But I know how much it means to the kids when they come. The kids know what they want to create: so that means they have taken this space—and what happens inside of it—home with them, and they’re thinking about it and imagining and dreaming. And I live in a place where there’s not a lot of dreaming going on. I can’t speak to what it means and what it does for everybody else. But I know that I’ve seen a lot of things happen in the house, and I don’t know where else those things would have happened if the house wasn’t there.”
Lida Moser. Photo by Lenny Campello
Women’s History Month: Lida Moser
" 1882
E. Leopold Trouvelot and Intergalactic Kitchen Printing
Women’s History Month: Agnes Pelton
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LOVE in the Library: Beyond the Stacks
Coming Soon: Van Gogh to Rothko: Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Yosemite: Art and a National Icon
Thomas Hill "Yosemite Falls
El Capitan, Yosemite
Just a short while ago, a pair of climbers accomplished a remarkable and frankly terrifying feat: free-climbing the sheer 3,000-foot face of Yosemite’s iconic El Capitan. Their 19-day journey up the rock was followed closely by people across the country and around the world. Perhaps part of the reason for our collective fascination with this endeavor was our familiarity with the cliff’s imposing silhouette. El Capitan, along with its fellow formation, the even-more-iconic Half Dome, is among the most pictured chunks of rock in the country.
“Yosemite Falls,” 1884
53 1/2 x 35 1/4 in.
Art has played a major role in turning Yosemite into a defining icon of nature in America. Artists were Yosemite’s earliest and most effective advocates. Their paintings and photographs sold the promise of a spiritually and culturally important experience, and drew countless visitors to California’s Sierra Nevada wilderness.
First protected in 1864 as a state park, by the time Yosemite was established as a national park in 1890, it was one of the most recognizable landscapes in the country. Artists captured the geological wonders of the landscape —Yosemite Falls and the awe-inspiring rock formations El Capitan and Half Dome—in grand terms.
Today Crystal Bridges unveils a recent acquisition: Thomas Hill’s large-scale painting of Yosemite Falls, made in 1884. Hill first visited Yosemite in 1865 and, after moving from the East Coast to California in the 1870s, made regular sketching trips to the park. He gradually came to be known as a painter of the Yosemite landscape. In 1883, Hill was the first artist to build a studio in Yosemite Valley, and he moved permanently to the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite Park in 1886.
The physicality, size, and symbolic potential of Yosemite presented a challenge for artists. Hill emphasized the impressive 2,425-foot-height of Yosemite Falls through a vertical composition. Further, the inclusion of a tiny fisherman in the foreground gives human scale to the waterfall.
This painting is now on view in Crystal Bridges’ Colonial and Early-Nineteenth Century Art Gallery, along with a collection of large-format photographs of Yosemite made by Carleton E. Watkins in 1869.
Nature’s Nation First Look: Charles Willson Peale
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Leave a comment Posted on February 6, 2016 Cam Newton, Carolina Panthers, Carolina Panthers Cam Newton, Patricia Ferguson
Cam Newton…I Wonder? Published by Patricia Ferguson
The Watch Dog response: This is my longtime friend a very intelligent, strong powerful woman.
Published by Patricia Ferguson on February 6, 2016
For days now I have endured a smorgasbord of outlets reporting negatively on Cam Newton, a young African American quarterback for the Carolina Panthers who works hard and competes even harder, leading his team to Super Bowl 50. Imagine that. Here we have a young, 26-year-old African American male living his dream-navigating the politics of first the collegiate culture, and then the professional football culture to emerge as a highly competitive, spirited, strategic super threat of an athlete; one of the best on the planet. And, instead of him being celebrated for his accomplishments, critics speak of Cam Newton in ways that are perplexing and less than complimentary. Meanwhile, invisible young black boys are watching, listening and wondering.
These comments are being made while school systems and systems of incarceration in North Carolina and across the nation struggle to keep young black males in school and out of jail. We preach to them about dreaming big and living the American dream. We inspire them with stories of courage and endurance… of hard work and sacrifice. At the same time, they hear us throw disparaging remarks at a young man trying to learn his way in a highly competitive world where millions of dollars are in play. The pressure to be a super performer is palpable – have you seen his super hero commercials? It is almost more than a 26-year-old can carry.
He needs a full community of supporters across lines of race and culture and ethnicity to help. Whoever said words don’t hurt and don’t have power? That is wrong, very wrong. In fact, the truth about words is that they have a strong creative power. Words can create. Words to young children can change lives. Millions of dollars are being spent on low wealth schools (average of about $1500 per child locally) and after school programs (some say nationwide up to 1.2. billion) with hopes that teachers and mentors and community leaders will speak words of encouragement and inspire greatness.
There is no doubt that we are losing our African American males to a life of incarceration and ultimately poverty. According to the Census Bureau American Community Survey, the poverty rate for all African Americans in 2012 was 28.1%. Black families with children under 18 headed by a single mother had the highest rate of poverty at 47.5. In addition, the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet: Racial Disparities in Incarceration reports that:
• African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
• African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
• Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population
• One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime
• Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice).
Yes. I would say the statistics above move beyond Langston Hughes dreams deferred. It is in fact, my retitlement- the death of dreamers and their dreams. So then, how do we reconcile the temperament adults cast toward this young man? How do we explain to a cadre of young black boys a justifiable cause for acts of continual chastisement when, to them, they see greatness? They see miracles and the “dare to believe the unbelievable” preached about in Sunday School and pulpits? Here we have an opportunity to exchange a few things. Would you not agree that taking issue with Cam Newton’s end zone demeanor that is fueled by his youth and love of the game, pales in comparison to a much larger presence he makes?
I wonder what Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music, had in mind when they commissioned Pharrell Williams to write a theme song for the movie Despicable Me and he titled it “Happy”. Could it be that this generation, super athletes included, interprets the world differently from the protocols and practices “we” see as befitting of a representative of the super star class? Could it be that Cam’s “happy” dance propels and energizes him after running and passing and yes, then celebrating in the end zone, and igniting young fans by giving them the football?
Imagine that! He hands over a football that will transform a child forever and, even with this, he is scolded as being “fake”, unreal and anything but genuine. Could it be that Cam Newton simply wants to have fun and enjoy what his athletic gifts have afforded him? Isn’t this what we have forgotten to do in pursuit of our dreams… have fun?
Cam Newton, I’m so very, very proud of you! Here’s to an amazing kickoff-just do what you do and make us proud!
About: Patricia Ferguson is an accomplished writer, community leader and renowned speaker, teacher and expert facilitator. She draws on more than 30 years of public and community service. She has spent a number of years refocusing her efforts designing strategies to help women thrive. She has spent much of that time working on behalf of empowering and enabling women with a passion for self-sufficiency and entrepreneurism.
Follow @CountyImpact on Twitter.
Cam Newton Carolina Panthers Carolina Panthers Cam Newton Patricia Ferguson
Leave a comment Posted on February 6, 2016 12th Congressional District, 1st Congressional District, Federal Court, Gerrymandered districts
Federal court strikes down NC congressional district maps – WRAL
The Watch Dog response: This is fabuloustastic. This is why I am a proud Life Fully Paid Member of the NAACP because they fight for what is fair and just for all folk. This should put me and others in Edgecombe and Nash Counties to name a few back where we belong. Thank you!
The ruling throws the March 15 primary into chaos, as the judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw the maps within two weeks and not to hold any elections for U.S. House until the maps are in place. A special session of the legislature would have to be called to approve new maps, and they might have to pass federal muster again.
Mail-in absentee voting started last week, and more than 8,000 ballots have already been requested, according to the State Board of Elections. It was unclear late Friday how many ballots have already been filled out and sent back in.
The three-judge panel ruled that the 1st Congressional District, which spreads like an octopus across northeast North Carolina and has a tentacle that dips into Durham County, and the 12th Congressional District, which snakes along Interstate 85 between Greensboro and Charlotte, were drawn specifically so that the majority of voters in each were black. (Source: Read more)
12th Congressional District 1st Congressional District Federal Court Gerrymandered districts
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Apply to the School of Architecture
Professor Michael Webb Named Contributing Author for THE CAR IN 2035
The Car in 2035: Mobility Planning for the Near Future, Actar D Publishing, 2013
"The Car in 2035: Mobility Planning for the Near Future focuses on the car, the street, and public policy in Southern California. In this collection of essays and images, the car is viewed as both a challenge and benefit to our neighborhoods, cities, and suburbs.
Despite rising fuel prices, the automobile will be Southern California's primary form of transportation in 2035 because the region's population will continue to be dispersed widely, and the car offers the best access to the area's tremendous diversity of economic, social, recreational, and cultural opportunities. But the infrastructure will need to accommodate a heterogeneous mix of modes of transportation, including more cars on the road than today." - Actar D Publishing
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Home Blog 65 Motivational Quotes to Help You Achieve Your Goals In Life
65 Motivational Quotes to Help You Achieve Your Goals In Life
The path to achieving your goals isn’t always easy to follow, there will be lots of obstacles to face, sometimes you will feel like quitting. A simple quote can help.
To help you overcome those negative thoughts and help you stay positive and dedicated towards your goals, here we’ve collected 65 motivational quotes which will help you achieve your goals and remind you to believe in yourself, when things are going hard in life.
Here are 65 quotes to inspire you to succeed in the time of setbacks, failures, and barriers.
Good Read → 65 Motivational Quotes to Help You Achieve Your GoalsClick To Tweet
1. “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
— Winston S. Churchill
2. “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
— Herman Melville
3. “The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.”
— Colin R. Davis
4. “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
5. “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.”
— Chris Grosser
6. “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”
–John D. Rockefeller
7. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
8. “There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.”
— Ray Goforth
9. “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.”
10. “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
11. “Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
12. “Stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion.”
13. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
14. “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”
— G. K. Chesterton
15. “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”
— Thomas J. Watson
16. “If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.”
17. “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.”
18. “Do one thing every day that scares you.”
19. “All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.”
— Michael John Bobak
20. “People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
— Tony Robbins
21. “Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.”
— Robert Kiyosaki
22. “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”
23. “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”
24. “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
25. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
— Helen Keller
26. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
27. “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”
— Bruce Lee
28. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
— Colin Powell
29. “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
— Conrad Hilton
30. “If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”
31. “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure–It is: Try to please everybody.”
— Herbert Bayard Swope
32. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
33. “Success isn’t just about what you accomplish in your life; it’s about what you inspire others to do.”
34. “Fall seven times and stand up eight.”
— Japanese Proverb
35. “Some people dream of success while others wake up and work.”
36. “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
37. “The difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do.”
38. “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that other throw at him.”
— David Brinkley
39. “In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”
— Bill Cosby
40. “In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis
41. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
— Thomas Edison
42. “Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember–the only taste of success some people get is to take a bite out of you.”
— Zig Ziglar
43. “The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.”
— John D. Rockefeller Jr.
44. “You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.”
— Oprah Winfrey
45. “There is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleashed, can make any vision, dream, or desire a reality.”
— Anthony Robbins
46. “The secret to success is to know something nobody else knows.”
— Aristotle Onassis
47. “I failed my way to success.”
48. “I never dreamed about success, I worked for it.”
— Estee Lauder
49. “I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.”
50. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
— Vidal Sassoon
51. “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.”
— Charles F. Kettering
52. “The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.”
53. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
54. “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
55. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
56. “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
— George Addair
57. “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”
58. “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny. ”
– C.S. Lewis
59. “Believe in yourself. You are braver than you think, more talented than you know, and capable of more than you imagine.”
― Roy T. Bennett
60. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
61. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho
62. “It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up.”
– Vince Lombardi
63. “Your true success in life begins only when you make the commitment to become excellent at what you do.”
— Brian Tracy
64. “Believe in yourself, take on your challenges, dig deep within yourself to conquer fears. Never let anyone bring you down. You got to keep going.”
– Chantal Sutherland
65. “Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.”
– W. Clement Stone
Good Read → 65 Motivational Quotes to Help You Achieve Your GoalsClick To Tweet 5/5 (1)
Mohammad Rashid
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Showing results for tags 'forums'.
Gaming News:The BioWare Forums Close This Week
Jack Gardner posted a topic in Announcements
Come Friday, the BioWare forums that have been in operation for the past six years will become read-only. After two months, the read-only period will end and the forums for the Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and legacy franchises like Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic will be no more. In their announcement of the forum closure, BioWare stated that the decision was difficult: Our players are important to us. Your feedback, stories, and love for our games drive and inspire us. In the past, our forums were the only way we could speak to you directly. They allowed our developers to talk with fans, and gave our players the opportunity to talk with each other about our games. But with the rise of social media and geek culture, there have never been more ways for us to connect. EA and BioWare figure that since there are other online communities on sites like Reddit or Tumblr where fans of their games have joined together that makes their forums obsolete (with the exception of the Old Republic forums, which will continue to operate normally for the foreseeable future). Being able to meet fans at events like PAX also factored into their decision, according to their statement. As a result, people working at BioWare or EA have been spending less time on the forums due to having to cover all the other avenues of information. Some private boards will be spared the forum purge for future betas and special projects. It's truly the end of an era for BioWare as it moves in a new direction. That direction might not be healthy for fans, especially those who made the BioWare forums their own community. "This is our home now, and while it may seem strange and confusing I believe we're going to settle in just fine," said BioWare forum user Kolomir back in 2010 when BioWare moved to the forums currently in use. The BioWare forums will be inaccessible after October 26 of this year. View full article
The BioWare Forums Close This Week
Jack Gardner posted an article in Gaming News
Come Friday, the BioWare forums that have been in operation for the past six years will become read-only. After two months, the read-only period will end and the forums for the Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and legacy franchises like Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic will be no more. In their announcement of the forum closure, BioWare stated that the decision was difficult: Our players are important to us. Your feedback, stories, and love for our games drive and inspire us. In the past, our forums were the only way we could speak to you directly. They allowed our developers to talk with fans, and gave our players the opportunity to talk with each other about our games. But with the rise of social media and geek culture, there have never been more ways for us to connect. EA and BioWare figure that since there are other online communities on sites like Reddit or Tumblr where fans of their games have joined together that makes their forums obsolete (with the exception of the Old Republic forums, which will continue to operate normally for the foreseeable future). Being able to meet fans at events like PAX also factored into their decision, according to their statement. As a result, people working at BioWare or EA have been spending less time on the forums due to having to cover all the other avenues of information. Some private boards will be spared the forum purge for future betas and special projects. It's truly the end of an era for BioWare as it moves in a new direction. That direction might not be healthy for fans, especially those who made the BioWare forums their own community. "This is our home now, and while it may seem strange and confusing I believe we're going to settle in just fine," said BioWare forum user Kolomir back in 2010 when BioWare moved to the forums currently in use. The BioWare forums will be inaccessible after October 26 of this year.
Setting Up Forum Notifications
AndrewRDU posted a topic in Raleigh-Durham, NC
Due to the recent news of our Facebook Group disappearing, I thought now would be a good time to point out just how easy it is to set up notifications on the forums. This will help with our total migration off of Facebook. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to customize your notifications and make it super easy to keep up with everything Extra Life and Guild related! 1) Create a username. Remember, your donation page login is separate! 2) Once you're logged in and browsing the forums, click the "Follow This" at the top right of any content. The button should change to "Following". Make sure to follow our forum. 3) Once you're following a piece of content, click the button again to bring up even more options. From here you can quickly change how you want your notifications sent. 4) If you want to go into even greater detail, click "Change how the notification is sent". You can customize almost every single notification to be sent as either an alert, email, etc. 5) Finally, make sure to follow our calendar. It can be found at the top of our forums. You'll be alerted when new events are added and you can even sync it with services like iCalendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, etc. And that's it! Two big things to do 1) Follow our forum & 2) Follow our calendar. Hope this helps! Also, remember that you can browse the forums on mobile. The site scales very well on all devices and can be very useful for those of us on the go! Or if you prefer to use apps. You can download the Tapatalk app for iOS or Android and search for "Extra Life Community". If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me, @MajorLinux or @SobeDog007!
duke childrens hospital
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CHINA CALLING | Van Review – LDV
Competitive pricing helps LDV to more than double its market share.
Chinese van maker LDV flew under the radar in 2018, quietly growing its market share and producing a growth rate to the end of November of 145 percent (source: VFACTS). Sales increased from 2017 to the corresponding 11-month period of 2018 from 2315 to 5679 vehicles, represented by the LDV G10 van, G10 People Mover, T60 4×2 and 4×4 ute, and V80 van and bus.
LDV’s parent company, SAIC Motor Corporation, is no third-rate manufacturer. With origins dating back to the late 1940s, this Chinese state-owned automotive design and manufacturing company had the largest production volume of any Chinese automaker when, in 2014, it built more than 4.5 million vehicles. In 2010, SAIC acquired the intellectual property rights to what had once been known as Leyland DAF Vans from administrator Pricewaterhouse Coopers, subsequently commencing manufacturing in China in 2011 under its Maxus division.
The Australian van line-up starts with the medium-sized G10, which offers the choice of a turbocharged petrol 2.0-litre four-cylinder, a naturally aspirated petrol 2.4-litre four-cylinder, or a 1.9-litre, turbocharged diesel four-cylinder.
Power and torque come in at 105 kW/200Nm, 165 kW/330Nm and 106 kW/350Nm respectively. Transmission choices are a five-speed manual for the 2.4-litre, a ZF six-speed auto for the 2.0-litre turbo, and a six-speed manual or auto for the diesel. Pricing ranges from $27,358 to $30,516.
Moving up in size is the LDV V80 Low Roof SWB (short-wheelbase) in manual and automatic form at a driveaway price of $32,621 and $34,736. ABN holders get the preferential treatment, with a reduction to $30,990 and $32,990 respectively.
Moving up to the LDV V80 Mid Roof LWB (long-wheelbase) brings in driveaway six-speed manual pricing of $37,886, with the auto at $39,989 ($35,990 and $37,990 for ABN holders). At the top of the van range, pricing for the LDV V80 High Roof LWB hits $39,989 and $42,095 (manual and automatic driveaway), with ABN holders paying $37,990 and $39,990.
Along with a revised pricing structure, the 2019 models have stronger frontal styling, contributing a more purposeful appeal for quite a long-standing design.
The engine throughout the V80 van range is a VM Motori Eco 2.5-litre turbocharged and intercooled four-cylinder diesel with Bosch common rail direct injection that produces 100 kW at 3800 rpm, with peak torque of 330 Nm rated at 1800 to 2600 rpm.
From an engineering perspective it’s all pretty conventional, with MacPherson struts and coils on the front and taper leaf springs on the rear, plus disc brakes all-round. Standard features include sliding doors on both sides, plus barn doors at the rear with 16-inch alloy rims running 215/75/R16 tyres.
Technically and electronically, it’s not disadvantaged. Every V80 buyer benefits from ABS braking, electronic stability control, hill hold, electronic brake force distribution, brake assist system, reverse parking sensors, reversing camera, driver and passenger SRS airbags, and central locking. Buyers of the LWB version gain blind spot monitoring and lane departure warning systems.
When compared to long-standing brands such as the Ford Transit, the base specification stands up well. Admittedly, the wider range of wheelbases, cargo lengths and roof heightsof the Ford are not available, but most buyers can cope with what is offered dimensionally, especially when everything is included in a one-size-fits-all driveaway pricing structure.
To reach the same level of inclusions as Ford usually brings a hefty series of extra costs, illustrating that Ford product planners have little interest in the practicality of the specification. For them, it’s all about technology and voice-activated command systems that annoy drivers more than the old alternative of pressing a button.
Payload figures come in at 1204 kg for the SWB, rising to 1419 kg for the LWB Mid Roof and dropping back slightly to 1389 kg for the LWB High Roof. As most vans in this segment carry volume rather than weight, that’s all acceptable to the average buyer. The maximum towing limit for a braked trailer is 1200 kg, but very few buyers would consider towing an important part of the purchase decision, as the extra length compounds problems when parking.
With cruise control, power windows, a sound system and three years’ roadside assistance, the warranty of 100,000 km is somewhat on the short side of distance travelled if buyers are going to be made to feel comfortable at the time of vehicle selection. Nobody raves about driving a van − it either works well or doesn’t, and with some good safety features and driver aids to assist with parking, that’s usually enough to keep the owner or driver satisfied.
The actual driving experience is little different from its competition, although there are indications that higher-priced alternatives feel more solid and more dynamic in performance.
The customer receiving the parcels certainly won’t notice that the van bringing them was $15,000 cheaper than a European-manufactured alternative. As long as it starts and stops when required, and parts are available on demand, expect sales to continue to rise.
LDV LDV Vans Van Vans 2019-03-05
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Gore-Al
June 2, 2016 by dandelionsalad
Who Stole The 2000 Election? (Hint: Not Nader) by Eric Ruder
Image by Elvert Barnes via Flickr
by Eric Ruder
The myth that Ralph Nader “spoiled” the 2000 election and put George W. Bush in the White House is being resurrected. Eric Ruder remembers how it really happened.
WITH POLLS showing a much closer race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump than was originally expected, Clinton supporters are resorting to frantic warnings that Bernie Sanders could cause a replay of the 2000 elections–when, according to the standard narrative of what went down, Ralph Nader’s Green Party campaign put Bush in the White House.
Posted in All Posts News Politics and-or Videos, Congress, Elections, History, Racism | Tagged Democracy, Electoral College, Eric Ruder, Florida, George W. Bush, Gore-Al, Mythology, Ralph Nader, Supreme Court, Voter Suppression Voting Rights | 19 Comments
May 7, 2009 by dandelionsalad
Al Gore: Alarming new slides of the worsening climate crisis
TEDtalksDirector
http://www.ted.com At TED2009, Al Gore presents updated slides from around the globe to make the case that worrying climate trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on “clean coal.”
Posted in All Posts News Politics and-or Videos, Dandelion Salad Videos, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, Politics, Science, Survival | Tagged Climate Crisis, Gore-Al | 3 Comments
The Gore Presidency: An Alternative History by William Cox
by William Cox
www.thevoters.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. – With the first debate of the 2008 presidential campaign now set to take place on the campus of the University of Mississippi, it seems appropriate to reflect back upon the Supreme Court decision in Bush vs. Gore almost eight years ago and the subsequent history of the United States that has flowed from the swing vote of a single justice.
Writing for a 5-4 majority of the divided court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a former Professor of Constitutional Law, upheld the Florida Supreme Court’s decision that a vote was legal if there was a “clear indication of the intent of the voter.” Following the recount of all “undervoted” and uncounted legal ballots, Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to Al Gore giving him victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Justice Kennedy continued as the Court’s “swing” voter until 2005 when, following the death of William Rehnquist, President Gore appointed Senator Hillary Clinton as Chief Justice and his Attorney General, former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the three female justices have had a collaborative influence on the Court, causing even Justice Thomas to concur in several of their decisions.
In a clear reversal of its conservative drift, the Supreme Court has not only continued to uphold a woman’s reproductive choice as a matter of constitutional right, but it has also generally supported President Gore’s administrative regulations and the federal laws intended to protect the environment, workers, and the economy.
With the appointments of former Senator Sam Nunn as Secretary of Defense and retired Army General Colin Powell as Secretary of State, Gore’s first serious foreign policy and national security challenge was the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist organization.
Heeding warnings by the CIA that bin Laden was determined to strike America, Gore brought intense pressure on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to cut off all funding and support of al Qaeda. He secured an UN Security Council resolution supporting military action inside Afghanistan, if its Taliban government continued to provide aid and comfort to bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Under the “Powell Plan,” the United States dedicated $25 billion over a five-year period to stabilize Afghanistan and to reduce the threat of war in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. With the extradition of bin Laden in 2001 and his murder conviction for complicity in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, organized terrorist activities were substantially reduced worldwide.
Once President Gore reaffirmed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, terminated development of the ballistic missile defense system, implemented a detailed and shortened schedule to reduce and ultimately eliminate the nuclear stockpiles of both nations, and increased the funding and support of Secretary Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative to safely dispose of Russia’s nuclear weapons, he and Secretary Powell focused their efforts on the elimination of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Recognizing that the recession that struck the European Union in 2000 and 2001 could affect the United States, President Gore took immediate steps to deflate the “dot com” bubble and to secure the well-paying jobs of manufacturing and professional workers through high-tech initiatives. Although there was some economic contraction, it was far less severe than anticipated, and job creation quickly resumed.
The Republican Congressional majority had been narrowed in the 2000 election, and using Vice President Lieberman as his Congressional Whip, President Gore had been able to maintain the Clinton tax reforms and to push through indexing of the Alternative Minimum Tax, relieving pressure on middle-income taxpayers.
Although the Clinton budgetary surplus was reduced by the recession, Gore came very close to balancing his first two budgets.
The 2002 Congressional elections were a judgment on Gore’s leadership and his continuing application of President Clinton’s mantra, “It’s the economy stupid!” Overall, the economy was doing well and voters responded by electing Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Acting with public and Congressional support, President Gore commenced the series of the bold initiatives that have come to characterize his administration. Despite the initial opposition of Vice President Joseph Lieberman and the intense lobbying of AIPAC, Gore reasserted the principles of the 1993 Oslo Accords and brought extreme diplomatic and financial pressure on Israel to abide by the agreement and to publicly acknowledge its nuclear weapons program, which it did early in 2003.
Secretary Powell organized and chaired a roundtable conference at the United Nations exclusively focused on the nuclear weapons programs of Israel, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Threatening an international boycott, economic quarantine and diplomatic isolation, Powell applied unrelenting pressure until Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea agreed to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Iraq and Iran agreed to abide by its conditions.
The final agreement of the parties was to adhere to the same schedule as the United States and Russia for the elimination of their nuclear weapon stockpiles and for UN inspections.
Iraq’s agreement was a surprising development and represented another victory for Gore’s carrot and stick approach. Acting on inside information from Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Jaji Sabri, and Tahir Jali Hubbush al-Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s intelligence service (both of whom had become agents of the West), Gore authorized his ambassador to the United Nations, former president Jimmy Carter, to secure the removal of all economic sanctions against Iraq (and its people).
Gore then secretly informed Saddam that his resignation and exile would be the price for him to keep his foreign bank accounts containing funds he had diverted from the “oil for food” program. Otherwise, the funds would be judicially frozen by litigation resulting from his invasion of Kuwait.
After Saddam left on an “extended vacation” in Egypt, the Iraqi people elected a government more reflective of its Shiite and Kurdish populations. UN inspections continued to find that Iraq had abandoned all of its weapons of mass destruction programs.
Quickly rebounding from the mild recession of 2002, America’s business profits, job creation and the incomes of its workers began to steadily increase.
With a solid majority of progressive Democrats in Congress and a disorganized Republican opposition, President Gore convinced business and industrial leaders that national health care would be in their best interests.
His proposal went beyond the single-payer insurance concept, and Congress established the National Health Service to administer a program to provide medical care to all Americans, except those who opt out of the System in exchange for a tax deduction and private coverage.
Workers benefited from elimination of their Medicare payroll tax deductions, and once freed from the cost of providing medical insurance and most workers’ compensation insurance coverage, American businesses quickly gained equal footing with their competitors in other countries.
Exports soared and the balance of payments began to weigh on America’s side of the scale.
The demoralized Republican Party nominated Senator John McCain as its candidate for the 2004 presidential election. McCain, who had lost the primary battle in 2000 to Texas Governor George W. Bush due to the nasty campaign conducted by Karl Rove, Bush’s political advisor, hired Rove to manage his 2004 campaign.
Rove’s attempts to go negative ricocheted when several investigative journalists independently reported McCain’s active complicity in concealing the fate of more than 600 American POWs who were left alive in Vietnam at the end of the war. McCain’s campaign imploded and he backed out of his agreement to debate President Gore.
President Gore refused to comment on McCain’s erratic behavior, and he conducted an entirely positive campaign based on his record and his plans for the future. The American public responded enthusiastically and handed McCain the greatest electoral defeat in the nation’s history, even worse than that suffered by George McGovern in 1972. McCain carried only one state, Arizona, for a total of six electoral votes.
The voters also handed President Gore a filibuster-proof majority of progressives in both houses of Congress
President Gore had obtained Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol during his first term, and he had been able to get legislation through Congress that substantially increased the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and eliminated the “light truck” exemption that was allowing domestic manufacturers to turn out fuel-guzzling “sport utility vehicles.”
He then challenged American automobile manufacturers to take the lead in producing “hybrid” vehicles that combine battery power and small internal combustion engines to further reduce domestic fuel consumption.
To overcome the problem of incompatibility and to achieve economies of scale, Gore obtained Congressional legislation to fund research and development of a standardized and easily replaceable plug-in battery for all hybrids. Recharged batteries are now available at most automobile service stations across the country and easily allow for long-distance travel primarily using battery power.
Most American automobiles and small trucks are now hybrid powered and tens of thousands have been exported, along with interchangeable “American Hybrid” batteries, throughout the world.
Even though Americans continue to enjoy a service and consumer economy, the balance of payments deficit has declined steadily, as manufacturing and technological innovations have driven exports.
During the 2004 election, President Gore established a goal for the United States to produce “100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.”
Beginning with a concrete plan to establish a Unified National Grid, the Gore administration pushed through legislation giving tax credits for utility companies to upgrade their transmission lines and to connect to the Grid, requiring them to purchase electricity from private and public wind and solar installations at market rates, and establishing uniform building codes for the installation of solar roof collectors and water heaters, wherever feasible.
With the installation of hundreds of thousands of roof solar collectors, the price of specialized silicon used in solar cells continues to drop, and as small towns and farmers throughout the Midwest have established public and private wind farms, the generation of electrical power has soared.
President Gore announced an even more ambitious environmental and energy goal in 2005. He proposed that the United States energize all of its national highways with free electrical power within 15 years using space solar energy transmitted by microwaves from outer space.
Just as Americans once placed an astronaut on the Moon within a decade, the first heavy lifters are already moving gigantic arrays into orbit for assembly, microwave collectors and transmission lines are being constructed in the Southwest deserts, and the Interstate highways are being prepared for the installation of mutual inductance interfaces to transmit energy to vehicles.
The project is currently on time and on budget, with a fully operational date set for 2020.
The combination of these initiatives not only set the United States on course to become fully energy independent, but they were a substantial boost for the economy. An abundance of well-paying, high-tech jobs was created for American workers; however, President Gore was displeased to see that some American businesses were shifting operations overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor.
President Gore pushed Congress to amend the tax codes to eliminate business deductions for salaries paid to workers outside the United States. The outsourcing of jobs was substantially reduced by this change and has contributed to the very low unemployment rate enjoyed during the last eight years.
As the economy soared and the value of the dollar strengthened, President Gore’s financial advisors became increasingly concerned about the effects of a 1999 law passed in the last days of the Clinton administration that effectively repealed a depression-era law which had prevented combinations of investment and deposit banks and insurance companies.
The Gore administration sought legislation to stop and reverse the “megamergers” taking place between banks and insurance and securities companies.
Testimony and staff investigations during the Congressional hearings on the legislation also revealed major potential problems with the unregulated trading of derivatives, the unrestricted making and reselling of mortgages and the out-of-control activities of hedge funds and their managers.
The Omnibus Financial Regulation Act of 2005 established reasonable regulations of these financial activities, and it imposed limits on executive compensation and certain lobbying activities.
The restriction on lobbying quickly resulted in litigation that brought the Omnibus Act to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the doctrine of “corporate personhood.” Supreme Court decisions had provided corporations with the legal status and protections afforded to “persons” under the Constitution, including the First Amendment right to lobby Congress.
In reversing the line of decisions culminating in the 1980 case of Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation, a 6-3 majority of the Court found that there was no authority in the Constitution for providing “personhood” rights to corporations, whose power had grown over the years to the extent that it “threatened the very foundations of individual freedom and the survival of the United States’ democratic form of government.”
One of the primary concerns of the Gore Administration about regulation of the financial sector was the preservation and stability of public and private retirement systems. Acting upon the recommendation of the Social Security Administration, Congress raised the annual cap on wages subject to social security taxes to be equal to the top salary paid by the federal government – that of the president. With that simple change, the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund was ensured for at least 100 years.
A companion bill to the Social Security Solvency Act was the National Bond Fund Act in which Congress acted to provide a reliable source of inexpensive bond funds for state and local governments to use for the improvement and maintenance of their infrastructure.
Jump-started with a $10 billion federal contribution, the Bond Fund provides an alternative personal investment plan to workers as a supplement to basic Social Security. Employees can voluntarily make additional tax-free contributions to personal accounts in the Bond Fund, and employers can match employee contributions as a job benefit. All original deposits are guaranteed by the federal government.
Employees are allowed to take their accounts with them from job to job; workers can negotiate the level of each subsequent employer’s contribution; retirees can decide for themselves whether to invest their savings in a lifetime annuity at retirement; they can choose to spend their entire nest egg as they please, or they can leave their account to their heirs.
The 2006 Congressional elections revealed that the alignment of political parties had been substantially altered, perhaps forever. Although Republicans retained status as a national party, fully one third of all voters were registered as independents, and Green Party candidates were elected to congressional offices in a number of states. Overall, representatives and senators with progressive credentials were filling more than two-thirds of all seats.
Early in 2007, President Gore decided to act upon continuing complaints about the North American Free Trade Agreement by inviting the foreign and finance ministers of all North, Central, South, and Caribbean American countries to discuss the possibility of creating a customs union and single currency for the Americas.
Hosted by Secretary Powell, the conference produced a framework for further discussion, which took place when all American heads of state gathered in Washington last year to meet with President Gore. The resulting treaty established the Federation of the Americas as a counterbalance to the European Union and the emerging power of the “Asian Tigers.”
When President Gore submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification, he also proposed that Congress enact a constitutional amendment eliminating the definition of citizenship based on birth within the United States. The amendment defines citizenship as birth to a citizen parent or individual naturalization.
The amendment allows for the movement of the citizens of all countries throughout the American Federation for employment or other economic purposes, without providing the benefit of citizenship to children born to non-citizens, who happen to be in the United States for economic reasons.
The Senate ratified the American Federation Treaty last year, and the constitutional amendment has already been ratified by 15 states. It is expected to take effect by the time the Federation becomes fully operational in 2010.
With the aging of the Baby Boom population and President Gore’s continued strong support for local law enforcement, the crime rate has continued to decline every year during his administration.
Administration efforts to quell gun violence were primarily directed to the encouragement of local and state governments to tailor reasonable gun licensing and registration requirements to meet their local needs and concerns.
These efforts were upheld by the Supreme Court’s decision last year ruling that the Second Amendment right to bear arms relates only to the power of states to form militias and national guards, and that it is not an unrestrained individual right.
One of President Gore’s pet projects to curb gun violence was funded by Congress early in his administration to provide money to local governments to purchase guns from the public and to pay artists to create public sculptures using the weapons.
Today, all across America sculptures incorporating millions of firearms provide mute testimony to the injuries avoided, the lives saved, and the hearts that have not been broken.
Most remarkable, the U.S. military has not fired a single shot, dropped a bomb or launched a single missile in the eight years of the Gore administration.
One of President Gore’s first orders as Commander in Chief was for every sailor, soldier and marine to be trained as a medical first responder. As a Vietnam vet, he wanted to ensure that American troops injured or wounded in the line of duty will have the greatest chance of survival possible.
The military medical training has proven invaluable at a series of major natural disasters during the Gore administration, including the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and most recently when Hurricane Ike struck the Texas coast. Today, the American military is the most respected fighting and life saving force in the world.
Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of the Gore Administration was the United Nations agreement negotiated by Secretary Powell and UN Secretary Carter in 2005 that eliminated the international weapons trade. Today, a country can waste its treasure on the production of military weapons and small arms if it chooses, but it cannot export those weapons to another country, nor can it purchase them without violating international law.
The 2008 Election
With the impending retirement of President Gore, the Democratic Party’s 2008 primary campaign was hotly contested in the belief that its candidate would be a shoo-in because of public confidence in the Gore administration.
Vice President Lieberman ran on his record of having managed the administration’s legislative agenda in Congress, but it was his attention to the party faithful over the years of attending local campaign fund raisers and funerals on behalf of the President that provided him his small margin of victory.
The runner-up, Illinois junior Senator Barack Obama attracted attention and interest as the first African-American to be a serious contender for a presidential nomination; however, his policy positions require further development if he is to have a chance in 2012.
Once Secretary Powell announced he would not be a candidate, the Republican primary settled on the most moderate candidates who pledged to do the least to change the policies of the Gore administration and the nation’s status quo.
The nomination went to Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War vet, who has been both logical and articulate in establishing positions of conscience over the years. He has sometimes voted with his party and at other times he has supported the administration.
With the emergence of the Green Party and the growing power of independents, the election of Joe Lieberman is far from certain. The strength of the Green Party is demonstrated by the invitation to its candidate, Cynthia McKinney, to participate in the University of Mississippi debate.
Depending upon McKinney’s performance in this and the following debates, she may draw enough votes from Lieberman to allow Senator Hagel to win in the Electoral College, even if he doesn’t receive a majority of the popular vote.
In some respects, the Gore administration has been unexciting – much like the President. There have been no wars, no financial recessions, no riots in the cities, and no major political scandals. His administration has been compared with Eisenhower’s, which may be apt in that it has restored the American Dream for millions of Americans and has provided hope for democracy throughout the world.
President Gore has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize and he will probably receive it this year. When asked about his future plans, President Gore, who is only 60 years old, talks about producing a film on the effects of global warming, and he is considering starting an independent television network aimed at young viewers, who will create much of its content.
It is hard to imagine American politics without President Gore, but it is more difficult to imagine what the United States and the world would be like today if Justice Kennedy had decided to cast his vote with his fellow members of the Federalist Society sitting on the Court in 2000.
Undoubtedly, it would be a different world, but would it be a better world, more prosperous, more at peace? Probably not, but we will never know for sure.
Copyright © 2008 William John Cox
William John Cox is a retired supervising prosecutor for the State Bar of California. As a police officer he wrote the Policy Manual of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Role of the Police in America for a national advisory commission. Acting as a public interest, pro bono, attorney, he filed a class action lawsuit in 1979 on behalf of every citizen of the United States petitioning the Supreme Court to order the other two branches of the federal government to conduct a National Policy Referendum; he investigated and successfully sued a group of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for publication of the suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. His book, You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency is reviewed at http://www.yourenotstupid.com, and he is currently working on a fact-based fictional political philosophy. His articles are collected at http://www.thevoters.org, and he can be contacted at u2cox@msn.com.
Posted in Dandelion Salad Featured Writers, Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Elections, Politics | Tagged Cox-William John, Creative Writing, Gore-Al, William John Cox | 5 Comments
August 28, 2008 by dandelionsalad
Al Gore Keynote Address to 2008 DNC (no longer available)
Democratic National Convention Continue reading →
Posted in Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Dandelion Salad Videos, Obama-Barack, Politics | Tagged DNC - Denver CO, Gore-Al | 1 Comment
Al Gore Endorses Barack Obama (videos)
videocafeblog
Al Gore’s endorsement of Barack Obama aired on MSNBC.
“Al Gore Endorses Barack Obama Part 1“, posted with vodpod
Posted in Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Obama-Barack, Politics | Tagged 2008 Election, Gore-Al, Video - Videos | 1 Comment
Earth Day Cancelled: Things are just too far gone by R J Shulman (satire)
by R J Shulman
Robert’s blog post
SEATTLE – The founders of Earth Day have called off this year’s celebration because the state of the earth according to their press release, “is past the point of no return.”
“Unfortunately,” said Vincent Holly of Earth First, “there comes a time when you just have to admit it’s too late, so we’re gonna party like it’s 1999, you know when there was still hope.”
“I’m so relieved,” said Al Gore. “It’s like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders. You have no idea how impossible it is to try to save the planet for a bunch of ungrateful bozos.” “Actually, I’m disapointicated,” said President Bush, “I was just about to say that there might be a thing called global warming and they cancel the day, ruinicating my photo op.” “Now that they have cancelled one useless day,” said Senator John McCain, “maybe they can do the same to Dr. Martin Luther King Day.” “It looks like, if you will,” said Dick Cheney, from a drilling rig somewhere in the pristine Alaskan wilderness, “that the earth is in its final throes.”
Bush Speech on Global Climate Change + US climate change plan branded ‘Neanderthal’
Posted in Bush-George W, Cheney-Dick, Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Environment, Featured Writers, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, Humor, Politics | Tagged Climate Crisis, Gore-Al, Shulman-R J | 1 Comment
April 1, 2008 by dandelionsalad
Olbermann: Sadr State of Affairs + Gore More Years? + Worst + Bushed! (9/11)
Ryokibin
Sadr State of Affairs
Keith speaks with Sen. Chuck Hagel.
Sadr State of Affairs: Iraq. All quiet on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Unless you count the rockets and guns. Senator Chuck Hagel joins us on that and on the whispers about who might want him, as Vice-President.
Gore More Years?
Keith speaks with Dana Milbank.
The Goracle: Al Gore to save the day? Nah…
World’s Worst
Worse: Walmart
Worser: Ohio Judge Richard Bernat
Worst: Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell
Bushed!
Iraq & 9/11-Gate
Mortgage-Gate
Mukasey Said What-Gate? (9/11)
Iran Brokers Call for Ceasefire; Bush reduced to Irrelevancy in Iraq; Fighting Continues
Iraq In The Balance By Scott Horton (+ video)
Bush’s Legacy Leads to Iran By Heather Wokusch
Sadr orders fighters to stand down
The Smart Way Out of a Foolish War by Zbigniew Brzezinski
The sieges of Basra & Sadr City: another US war crime in Iraq
Posted in 9/11, Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Iraq, Politics | Tagged 9/11 on Dandelion Salad, Gore-Al, Maliki-Nouri-al, McCain-John, Nouri al-Maliki, Olbermann-Keith, Video - Videos | 5 Comments
March 2, 2008 by dandelionsalad
Nader’s Latest Run – Monkey Wrench or Cattle Prod?
by Stephen Fleischman
“Here we go again,” murmured the old guard Democrats when Ralph Nader officially announced his candidacy for president in 2008, on Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” show, Sunday, Feb.24th.
“Nader–the spoiler,” they called him since the 2000 election when Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush. “It’s all Nader’s fault!” they cried. Nader was a good scapegoat, a good person to blame, so they wouldn’t have to examine their own souls.
Yes, George W. Bush was named President. He won Florida by 537 votes. Ralph Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. It’s simple. If Nader hadn’t run, Gore would have won!
Hold on! It’s not as simple as that!
What about the “monkey wrench” effect? Will Nader be accused of blowing the election for the Democrats, again, in 2008? Lose to John McCain? It would take Houdini to do that. As Nader said to Tim Russert in the “Meet the Press” interview, “If the Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication that he’s the candidate for perpetual war”.
Nader the Best Antidote to American Imperialism
Nader did not “spoil” the 2000 election (videos)
In defense of Ralph Nader (video)
Nader-Ralph
www.votenader.org/
Posted in Bush-George W, Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Elections, Fascism, Nader-Ralph, Politics | Tagged 2008 Election, Fascism on Dandelion Salad, Fleischman-Stephen, Gore-Al, Ralph Nader | 5 Comments
December 11, 2007 by dandelionsalad
“It Is Time to Make Peace With the Planet”–Al Gore Accepts 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (link)
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Monday to former Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work to help combat global warming. “We and the earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: ‘Mutually assured destruction,’” Gore said in his acceptance speech. “It is time to make peace with the planet.” Continue reading →
Posted in Environment, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, News &-or Politics, Politics | Tagged Climate Crisis, Democracy Now!, Democracy Now! on Dandelion Salad, Gore-Al, Nobel Peace Prize, Video - Videos
Dance Dance Revolution: Don’t Draft Gore by Manila Ryce (video)
ManilaRyceTLM
Vote in this DFA poll
http://democracyforamerica.com/pulsep…
Polls close at midnight on November 5th
Dennis Kucinich: Democracy For America straw poll (videos)
Rep. Dennis Kucinich has been working for us for years (video)
Kucinich on War & the Environment (vid)
Kucinich on the Environment (vid; Aug 06)
Posted in Dennis Kucinich, Environment, Music, News &-or Politics, Politics | Tagged 2008 Election, Gore-Al, Kucinich-Dennis, Ryce-Manila, Video - Videos | 1 Comment
October 31, 2007 by dandelionsalad
It’s the End of the World as We know it and I feel fine #22 (video)
stimulator
http://submedia.tv
1. WWIII
2. Famin and Fire
3. Sydnot
4. Hot-Lanta
5. Cheney’s heart of Oil
6. The APC Strikes back
8. Gore’s Genocide
9. Buggin out
Posted in Environment, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, Iraq, News &-or Politics, Peak Oil, Politics, Resistance | Tagged Climate Crisis, Gore-Al, The Stimulator, The Stimulator-SubmediaTV, Video - Videos
Al Gore and the Nobel Peace Prize by Jennifer
Jennifer ..
Al Gore and the Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize, as determined by Nobel’s own words, should be granted, “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Al Gore hardly fits this requirement; however, this argument will not analyze or critique his behavior for the jets he fuels on his journeys throughout the world, nor the distribution of a film that discussed his life more than the issue it purports to tackle (Global Warming), it will examine some of the events that unfolded during his Vice-Presidency under Bill Clinton. In fact, according to Edward S. Herman the office of Bill Clinton was responsible for some of the most horrific war crimes and abuses of international law, such as the Geneva Conventions and The Hague in the history of the United States. The Bush Administration has simply furthered the abuses of power that Clinton et al reigned down upon poor nations. The list of abuses includes the carrying out of wars of aggression, the use of poison gases and other inhumane weapons, deliberately killing and starving civilian populations, and the use of force beyond military necessity. None of which Al Gore ever used his power to deter or extinguish. As stated by the International Criminal Court, any crime against peace is namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the forgoing…War Crimes and Crimes against humanity. Considering the long list of civilians enslaved, oppressed, starved, and violently murdered during the Clinton Administration, Mr. Gore surly should stand trial as an accomplice along side Clinton.
The list of crimes against humanity committed by the US under Clinton and Gore is gruesome indeed. Included are the genocide in East Timor, the illegal and unwarranted bombings of Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, coupled with aid to Turkey and Columbia, where the civilian casualties from counterinsurgency warfare and death squad operations…exceeded the pre-NATO bombing deaths in Kosovo by a large factor. None of this, of course, includes the brutal sanctions imposed on Iraq, which, had it not been for the power the US wields on the UN Security Council, would have been prosecuted as war crimes under international law.
According to UNICEF, in 1999, years into the Clinton/Gore administration, sanctions in Iraq were killing close to 5,000 children under the age of 5 monthly far beyond normal death rates. Several reports from the United States Defense Agency show that contrary to the Geneva Convention, the US government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the countries water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. (Jeff Lindemyer, November 2001). Other DIA documents (dated January, 1991, February, 1991, and March 1991) showed that not only was the Clinton/Gore Administration knowledgeable about how the sanctions would impact civilians, they monitored the situation closely. A charismatic statesman, Clinton repeatedly cited abuses of the “Oil for Food Program” by Iraqi leaders as the cause of civilian casualties and suffering, of course avoiding the fact that the devastation of sanctions was being felt by Iraqi’s as early as 1991 and the “Oil for Food Program” did not start until December of 1996. As the “Oil for Food Program” got underway, the US continued charges levied at the Saddam regime, with no basis in fact. According to the US State Department, Holds on inappropriate contracts help prevent the diversion of oil-for food goods to further Saddam’s personal interests. However, Jeff Lindemyer shows that requests for urgent assistance were repeatedly delayed to the point that Secretary-General Kofi-Annan along with Benon Sevon wrote numerous letters decrying the excessive holds placed on items ordered under the program, not by the Saddam regime, but by the UN Security Council.
Remarkable to the Clinton/Gore Administration was its ongoing relationship with President Suharto, the person responsible for genocide in Indonesia, East Timor, and West Papua. Clinton brokered weapons deals and trade agreements, which enslaved an entire people for companies such as Reebok and Nike, while US bought weapons were used to exterminate any people who resisted. Against the will of the Administration and the corporate controlled media, it was the actions of a few brave journalists who brought this tragedy to light. American journalist Amy Goodman was severely beaten by US supplied weapons when she captured the murder of innocent civilians in East Timor. Upon her return to the United States, she worked tirelessly to bring attention to the matter through US media outlets who finally after intense international coverage could no longer ignore the story, however, the coverage the genocide did receive was minimal and no mention was made of US involvement.
Some other notable war crimes and immoralities committed by the Clinton/Gore Administration include the use of DynaCorp, a private “security firm” that at the time Clinton and Gore were lobbying Congress heavily for their use in South America was in the midst of an investigation for participation in a child sex-slave ring. Regardless of this knowledge Clinton/Gore continued to offer DynaCorp military contracts and relied on the firm heavily to carry out illegal military operations. The people of the Delta Niger suffered and continue to suffer horrific environmental degradation, mass murder, and torture at the hands of the US backed government, which Clinton/Gore did not hesitate weaponizing and training at the time of these known abuses.
Clearly, Mr. Gore, if he had any redeeming qualities at all, would apologize for his active role and participation in these war crimes and crimes against humanity, and return the Nobel in order to be awarded to someone more deserving.
Nobel Hypocrisy – Peace Prize Awards to War Criminals by Stephen Lendman
Please comment on Jennifer’s blog: Al Gore and the Nobel Peace Prize
Posted in Environment, Featured Writers, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, Human Rights, News &-or Politics, Politics, War Crimes | Tagged Climate Crisis, Fenton-Jennifer, Gore-Al, Jennifer - Myspace, Nobel Prize | 43 Comments
Global Research, October 18, 2007
Alfred Nobel was a wealthy nineteenth century Swedish-born chemist, engineer, inventor of dynamite, armaments manufacturer and war profiteer who remade his image late in life by establishing the awarding of prizes in his name that includes the one for peace. This most noted award was inspired by his one-time secretary and peace activist, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times and became the first of only 12 women to be honored.
Since it was established in 1901, the Peace Prize was awarded to 95 individuals and 20 organizations. Some recipients were worthy like Martin Luther King, Jane Addams and Albert Schweitzer but too many were not including this year’s honoree. Al Gore joins a long list of past “ignoble” recipients like warrior presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and supporter of rogue regimes Jimmy Carter. He’s also among the likes of genocidists Henry Kissinger and three former Israeli prime ministers – Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin – along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who never met a US-led war he didn’t love and support. So much for promoting peace and what this award is supposed to signify. More on this below.
Almost anyone can be nominated for the prize and look who were but didn’t get it – Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and more recently George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Rush Limbaugh laughably. In contrast, one of the most notable symbols of non-violence in the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi, was nominated four times but never won. More recently, anti-war activist Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, now known as Voices for Creative Nonviolence, got three nominations but was passed over each time for less deserving candidates. Her “reward” instead was to be sentenced in 2004 to three months in federal prison for crossing the line into Fort Benning, Georgia in protest against the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation that’s commonly called “the school of assassins.”
Peace Prize Awards to War Criminals
Henry Kissinger was likely the most noted war criminal ever to win the Nobel Prize (in 1973 with Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho who declined his award saying there was no peace in his country). The sheer scope of his crimes is breathtaking:
— three to four million Southeast Asian deaths in the Vietnam war,
— the bloody overthrow of a democratic government in Chile and support for Latin American dictators,
— backed Surharto’s takeover of West Papua and his invasion of East Timor killing hundreds of thousands,
— supported the Khmer Rouge early on and its reign of terror rise to power,
— backed Pakistan’s “delicacy and tact” in overthrowing Bangladesh’s democratically elected government causing a half million deaths, and much more around the world as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the world body he represented won their award in 2001 “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.” It wasn’t for what Annan did in his various UN roles. Early on, he had a position in the Secretariat’s services department in New York. He then got subordinate responsibility for the Middle East and Africa in the “special political affairs” department. There his support for Washington’s call for troops to be sent to Somalia in the early 1990s helped put him in charge of all peacekeeping operations in February, 1993. In that role, he prevented measures from being taken to stop the impending Rwanda slaughter he was warned about in advance that caused around 800,000 deaths on his watch. He also kept the Security Council uninformed of what was coming.
At the behest of then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright and without consulting Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali, Annan sided with the Clinton administration’s authorization of NATO to illegally bomb Serb positions in Bosnia in 1995. It got him the Secretary-General’s job in January, 1997 in which one observer noted he “courted the wrath of the developing world by rejecting anticolonialism in favor of moral principles cherished in the West.”
Kofi Annan’s Nobel award is a testimony to hypocrisy for a man whose ten years as Secretary-General failed to fulfill the mandate he was sworn to uphold: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice….equal rights of men and women (in all nations and respect for) international law (and) social progress….to ensure….armed force shall not be used.”
During his ten year tenure in the top UN job, Annan:
— supported Iraqi economic sanctions that caused around 1.5 million deaths including over one million children under age five;
— backed the Bush administration’s illegal 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation that’s now taken an additional 1.2 million or more lives;
— supported the illegal Afghanistan war and occupation;
— remained mute on the possibility of a wider war with Iran even if it includes first strike nuclear weapons;
— made no efforts to work for peace in the Middle East including in Occupied Palestine nor did he denounce Israel’s 2006 war of aggression against Lebanon;
— remained loyal to the West and ignored the plight of his own people throughout the African continent including the immiseration of South African blacks post-apartheid;
— allowed thuggish paramilitary Blue Helmets to occupy Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sudan. More on UN peacekeeping below.
Kofi Annan’s sole achievement was his uncompromising complicity with the Clinton and Bush administrations’ worst crimes of war and against humanity. His loyalty earned him the Nobel award that signified nothing to do with peace he disdained.
UN Peacekeeping Forces got the Nobel award in 1988 for missions the UN defines as “a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace.” Blue Helmets supposedly are sent to conflict and post-conflict areas to perform multiple services that include as top priority restoring order, maintaining peace and security and providing for the needs of people during transitional periods until local governments can take over on their own.
Most often, Blue Helmets end up creating more conflict than resolution and function mainly as unwanted paramilitary enforcers or occupiers. At other times, they become counterproductive or ineffective and end up doing more harm than good. Since 1948, over five dozen peacekeeping operations have been undertaken. Most were dismal failures including the first ever UNTSO mission during Israel’s so-called “War of Independence.” The operation is still ongoing after nearly 50 years, peace was never achieved, Blue Helmets are there but play no active role, and the world community is silent in the face of Israeli crimes of war and against humanity.
The same condition is true in Haiti where for the first time in UN history MINUSTAH peacekeepers were deployed to enforce a coup d’etat against a democratically-elected president. They disdain peace and stability and function instead as paramilitary occupiers indiscriminately terrorizing and killing unarmed civilians in service to Western capital.
Three former Israeli prime ministers also got Nobel Peace Prizes – Menachem Begin in 1978 and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994. All three men committed crimes of war and against humanity as did all other Israeli prime ministers since David Ben-Gurion took office May 14, 1948 after the new State of Israel declared it independence as an exclusive Jewish state. Nonetheless, the Nobel Committee awarded them its highest honor for furthering the cause of peace they disdained by using their position to inflict on the Palestinian people what Edward Said once called Israel’s “refined viciousness.” Menachem Begin was a particularly virulent racist and Arab hater calling Palestinians “two-legged beasts” and saying Jews were the “Master Race” and “divine gods on this planet.”
Then there’s the current Nobel Peace Prize honoree, Al Gore. CounterPunchers Alex Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair wrote the book on him in 2000 titled “Al Gore: A User’s Manual.” It’s a critical account of a “man whom his parents raised from birth to be president of the United States” and who always put politics over principle. He built his credentials for the high office around pro-business, pro-war, anti-union and phony environmental advocacy as no friend of the earth then so who can believe he’s one now.
His 1992 book “Earth in the Balance” was more theater than advocacy. In it, he assessed the forces of planetary destruction that included air and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, overpopulation, ozone depletion and global warming. He highlighted the impact of auto emissions and need to phase out the internal combustion engine but made no effort in office to do it.
Then as vice-president he used his “green credentials” to sell the pro-business, anti-worker, anti-environmental NAFTA to the environmental movement. He also supported clear-cutting logging practices including in old-growth areas. He ignored an assessment that this practice risked the extinction of hundreds of species. He backed a 1995 spending bill “salvage logging rider” that opened millions of National Forest lands to logging and exempted sales of the harvest from environmental laws and judicial review for two years. He and Clinton further allowed South Florida’s sugar barons to devastate thousands of Everglades acres and gave away consumer Delaney Clause protection that kept carcinogens out of our food supply.
Throughout his political life, Gore supported Big Oil and was tied to Occidental Petroleum Company and its “ruthless tycoon” chief, Armand Hammer. In return for supporting company interests, he got political favors and patronage from Hammer and his successor, Ray Irani who was a major DNC contributor and got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom as a bonus reward. He’s also been a shill for the nuclear industry that won’t solve or even alleviate global warming and the threat it poses according to nuclear expert Helen Caldicott. Commercial reactors discharge huge amounts of greenhouse gases along with hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements besides being sitting ducks for retaliatory terror attacks experts believe will eventually happen.
Earlier in the House (1977 – 1985) and Senate (1985 – 1993) and as vice-president Gore also shilled for the Pentagon and defense contractors. He “played midwife to the MX missile,” opposed efforts to cut defense spending, and backed the Reagan administration’s Grenada invasion and Central American wars. He partnered with Clinton’s Balkan wars in the 1990s that destroyed Yugoslavia so NATO could expand into Central and Eastern Europe for its markets, resources and cheap, exploitable labor. In Kosovo, he collaborated with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) paramilitary thugs against Serbia and ignored their connection to organized crime. He earlier traded his vote for the Gulf war for prime time coverage of his speech.
He then backed ousting Saddam by coup or any other means and supported the most comprehensive genocidal sanctions ever imposed on a country that killed a likely 1.5 million or more Iraqis including over one million children under age five.
Cockburn and St. Clair fill in more blanks about a political opportunist who supported Big Tobacco, “exploited his sister’s death and son’s (near-fatal) accident for….political advantage; became a soul brother of Newt Gingrich; race-baited Jesse Jackson; pushed Clinton into destroying the New Deal; plotted to stop Democrats from recapturing Congress in 1996” so “his rival Dick Gephard” wouldn’t become Speaker; “leached campaign cash from nearly every corporate lobbyist” in town, and, as already covered, lied about being a friend of the earth by disdaining environmentalism through his actions.
Does this man deserve a Nobel Peace Prize (let alone to be president) along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The Nobel Committee ignored Gore’s environmental record and went on to say “for a long time (he’s) been one of the world’s leading environmental politicians (through) his strong commitment, reflected in political activity, (that) strengthened the struggle against climate change.” Contrary to his easily accessed public record, not his posturing, The Nobel Committee blindly added “He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”
In point of fact, throughout his political life, Gore’s actions betrayed the public’s trust and still do. He and his wife live in two large energy-consuming homes: a 10,000 square foot, eight bedroom one in Nashville and a 4000 square foot one in Arlington, VA. The Gores also own a third home in Carthage, TN. In both Washington and Nashville, utility companies offer a wind energy green alternative to customers for a small per kilowatt hour premium. Gore can easily afford it, but public records show no evidence he’s does it in either residence. Alex Cockburn gets the last word on a man who shills for privilege, has plenty for himself, and like George Bush disdains the public interest: “Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party” that’s mostly indistinguishable from the other side of the aisle in a city where the criminal class is bipartisan.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on www.TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.
Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman
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Posted in Environment, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, History, Human Rights, NAFTA, News &-or Politics, Politics, War Crimes | Tagged Climate Crisis, Gore-Al, Lendman-Stephen, Nobel Prize | 35 Comments
The Palast Report on Air America’s Clout: Gore No More (video)
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“Gore No More”
The Palast Report
Greg Palast and Louie Free on why the Al draft is daft.
Posted in Dandelion Salad News or Politics, Dandelion Salad Videos, Elections, Labor, NAFTA, News &-or Politics, Politics, Trade | Tagged Gore-Al, Greg Palast, Greg Palast on Dandelion Salad, Palast-Greg, Video - Videos, Voter Suppression Voting Rights
Olbermann: Gore + Clinton & Obama + Sanchez + Richardson + Worst (vids)
clyde1952
Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He still gives no indication of running for President. Honestly, why would he want to? Jonathan Alter joins Keith.
Barack Obama attacks Clinton, Clinton defends herself, and neither one is my candidate. And no, it will never ever be Ron Paul.
Dana Milbank drops on to continue the discussion regarding the Obama criticism of Clinton. I’ll be honest, I still don’t buy Clinton’s explanation of her vote for the Kyl/LIEberman amendment. Whether it was non-binding or not, no matter what it was it just didn’t make sense.
Also: General Ricardo Sanchez now says Iraq is a pitiful screwed up mess. Isn’t it amazing how these generals speak out long after they retire?
Keith interviews Presidential candidate Bill Richardson about General Sanchez’s comments in regards to the war. He also talks about Russia wanting to pull out of a nuclear treaty signed with us. See what happens when you begin dumping treaties into the toilet like Bush. It seems every country thinks they should be able to do it. How dare they!
Oddball: The Underpants run in Hawaii,
a new electric chair from Japan to ride around in.
Best Persons: Andrea Eichhorn drops her law suit, A reporter who printed what the questions were on an essay test, and another dumb criminal in Michigan.
O’Reilly still hasn’t apologized to Shawn Hornbeck and his family over his comments about Shawn having fun. Look, I know O’Reilly is a total butt wipe, but even butt wipes can apologize once in a while. Worse yet, O’Reilly has a new book aimed at kids coming out.
Keith interviews Shawn’s parents.
Keeping Tabs: Search warrants have been issued and searches carried out in regards to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I see a doctor going to jail. Reporters were booted out of the courtroom when Britney showed up at court to give the court commissioner a piece of her mind.
Worst Person: Terry Jeffreys, the NSA,
and Bill O’Reilly.
Mo Rocca joins Keith for the end segment when they discuss that Bush’s ratings have gone up when he competes head to head with Paris Hilton.
Posted in Clinton-Hillary, Environment, Global Warming, Global Warming on Dandelion Salad, Health Care, Iraq, News &-or Politics, NSA, Obama-Barack, Politics | Tagged 2008 Election, Bill Richardson, Climate Crisis, Gore-Al, Hillary Clinton, Olbermann-Keith, Ricardo Sanchez, SCHIP, Shawn Hornbeck, Video - Videos
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CBS Orders ‘TKO’ Obstacle Course Reality Series From Mark Burnett For Summer
CBS has ordered 10 episodes of TKO (working title), an obstacle course competition reality series with a twist, from Survivor executive producer Mark Burnett and MGM Television, for premiere this summer.
TKO joins CBS’ recent series order to The World’s Best, a global talent competition series from Burnett and fellow reality heavyweight Mike Darnell as the network, home of long-running hits Survivor, Big Brother and The Amazing Race, clearly is ramping up its unscripted portfolio.
TKO (wt) is an original format created by Steve Hughes and Sean Kelly of Shaggy Entertainment that is reminiscent of Legoland water rides. It features one player racing through daunting obstacles while the other contestants are manning battle stations along the course, firing over-the-top projectiles in an attempt to knock them off and slow them down. It’s a physical and funny “us versus them” scenario, with the top two players advancing to the final showdown to face off for a cash prize.
“Mark Burnett is a master at creating exciting competitions that make for entertaining television,” said Sharon Vuong, SVP, Alternative Programming for CBS. “We are thrilled to partner with him and his team on this wild and fun summer series.”
Last summer, CBS launched game show Candy Crush, which is not expected to come back.
TKO will be produced by MGM Television and distributed internationally by MGM. Burnett, President MGM Television Group and Digital, and Barry Poznick, President, Unscripted Television, MGM, are executive producers.
“TKO is unlike any other competition show on television. It’s an obstacle course meets dodgeball. It will create amazing viral moments,” said Burnett. “I’ve got a great history with CBS, and I’m excited to be premiering this summer.”
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dooneyscafe.com
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Hark, the Herald Angels Sing: Welcome to Post-Gay
Stan Persky|2006 December 21|Local Matters
Okay, I didn’t expect that there would be a blast of celestial trumpets when parliament a couple of weeks ago decisively voted 175-123 against re-visiting and challenging Canada’s 2005 law that legalised same-sex marriage. Nor was I anticipating that the parliamentary gallery would rise as one and belt out a chorus of “Hark, the herald angels sing.” So I wasn’t disappointed by the absence of triumphal horns or hearty chorals.
What I expected was pretty much what happened: a 48-hour minor political wonder, sandwiched in between the early-December selection of Stephane Dion as the new leader of the Liberal Party and the full tide of Xmas shopping. Equally predictable was a smattering of mainstream media stories about the gay marriage issue almost entirely devoted to speculation about the tactical maneuverings of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the new leader of the opposition, Monsieur Dion, followed by the inevitable slide into collective amnesia.
Apart from members of parliament, about the only voice permitted by the media to comment on the matter was that of the pustulant moralist, Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, who assured the press that his side wasn’t going to abandon the fight against gay marriage. “We are going to continue to lobby members of Parliament, to raise up grassroots and to engage in the democratic process,” McVety declared in a garbled bit of rhetoric, but one felt that his presence on the tube was merely designed to satisfy the media’s leaning-Tower-of-Pisa notion of journalistic “balance.”
Harper’s strategy
Before getting to what should happen in a society not afflicted by instant forgetfulness, let’s dispense with the micro-politics. The media angle on the issue was the discovery of a paradox: it was “A vote Harper doesn’t want to win,” as a Globe and Mail analysis (Dec. 7, 2006) by Ottawa Bureau Chief Brian Laghi was headlined. Why would an anti-gay marriage government sponsor a motion against gay marriage if it didn’t want to win? There are two reasons.
The first is that Harper had promised not only the public but especially the “social conservative” members of his party that the issue would be debated in parliament if he became head of government. It was a promise he made on the first day of the campaign that brought him to power. Fulfilling the promise, Harper was proving that he is a politician who doesn’t renege on promises, a point he was happy to make to the general electorate. As well, formally raising the issue, even if there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the vote, would demonstrate to an important sector of his supporters that he had not forgotten the issues by which they had “brung him to the dance.” As it happened, most right-wing members of the Conservative Party were not all that happy with Harper’s fulfillment of the promise. What they wanted was not a debate in this parliament, but for Harper to wait until after the next election when, they presumed, he would have a majority that could actually reverse the law on same-sex marriage and much else. Hence, the grumpiness of people like McVety.
The second reason that Harper wanted to lose the vote is because, as analyst Laghi put it, “a same-sex defeat blunts a Liberal arrow from the campaign quiver” of the next election. Hence, Harper’s declaration after the vote that the issue is now dead or, as they say in Ottawa, the file is closed. “The result was decisive,” Harper told reporters. “I don’t see reopening this question in the future.” Because the point was obvious, Harper didn’t have to explicitly say that the opposition could no longer make it an issue in the next electoral contest. He even declined to indulge in the bad idea of a law exempting public servants from performing same-sex marriages on grounds of religious conscience.
What was odd about the mainstream reportage/commentary was that it contained a tone of blame and disappointment that Harper wasn’t really interested in reversing the same-sex marriage law. Since most of the commentators themselves wanted to “move on” and “put the issue behind us,” as people like to say these days, their disappointment was puzzling. Since they too wanted the anti-same-sex marriage motion to go down to defeat, they ought to have welcomed Harper’s willingness to do the same. Perhaps they think the punditry and reportage business would be easier if Harper really is the reactionary ogre that he’s often been portrayed as being.
I regarded Harper’s evident disinterest in reversing this bit of Canadian history as a good thing. I took it that his handling of the same-sex marriage issue was a signal that he doesn’t have the intention of pursuing a “social conservative” agenda (even with a majority) and that he is bringing his version of the Conservative Party back into the traditional spectrum of Canadian politics, and moving it away from the wingnut fantasies of the former Reform and Alliance configurations. I like the traditional Canadian political spectrum because it’s committed to a large degree of social democracy and public good, which is what makes it distinctive from the American political spectrum. It was the Reform-Alliance’s entrance onto the scene in the 1980s, with its emphasis on grim morality, religious fundamentalism, and indifference to a notion of public good, that made Canadian right-wing politics so disturbing. So, if Harper’s conservatism is focused on taxes, property, free market capitalism, military matters, and the rest of the standard conservative positions, that, if not a good thing, is at least better than the alternative. You don’t have to agree with any of those views to see that focusing on them would be a “normalization” of Conservative Party politics.
As for the tactical challenge faced by Dion in the attempted revisiting of the same sex marriage issue, that can be dealt with in a sentence or two. It was Dion’s first public test as leader and he passed it with flying colours when he immediately defined same-sex marriage as a matter of constitutional equal rights, period. He also deftly sidestepped potential pitfalls by permitting his Liberal caucus a “free vote” on the issue, thus avoiding the danger of the new leader being accused of autocracy, even though a dozen or so troglodyte Liberal MPs would oppose same-sex marriage.
Desperately Seeking Substance
Insofar as the debate was a possible matter for public reflection, the media’s reduction of it to the usual horserace treatment of politics, which was pretty much about all there was, is sad. It would have been nice if space in the public forum could have been found for at least one representative of the country’s sexual preference minority. He or she might have noted that the decision not to re-visit the gay marriage issue marked the de facto and maybe even de jure end of a more than 30-year campaign to provide equal rights to homosexuals. He or she might even have cheerily said, “Yo Canada, welcome to Post-Gay!”
There are two things on my mind in the effort to locate some substance in this obscurely-Xmas-positioned, quickly-passing event. First, I’m troubled by our inability to mark public events and processes that have come to a meaningful conclusion. My vague idea is that if we had the ability to declare such issues resolved we’d have a better idea of who we are as a society and where we are in relation to history. Second, if the vote against further wrangling on same-sex marriage is the anti-climactic conclusion of the debate about homosexuality in Canada (and I think it is), then we have to define Post-Gay.
Within living memory (if you’ve lived long enough), three or four genuinely important political-social “struggles” that emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s have, some three-and-a-half decades later, produced significant transformations in Western societies. The struggles I’m thinking about have to do with race/ethnicity, feminism, homosexuality, and the environment. Homosexuality is perhaps the social issue most conclusively settled, followed by the status of women, ethnicity, and ecology.
Yet, I’m unable to think of an instance in which anyone has stood up and said, as people do at the end of decisive wars, “We’ve done it! It’s over. The world is changed, however slightly.” Part of the problem is that no one seems to know when or how to declare victory. Since the participants are still caught up with tending the wounded or worrying about whether they’ll continue to receive grants now that it’s over, you’d think the media would make the announcement. But the media’s attention-deficit-disorder is as severe as that of the multitasking, iPod-listening, cellphone-chatting citizens whose doings they’re allegedly reporting. Instead, the change is muted, then gradually forgotten, or the former combatants lose their minds and engage in excesses modelled on the Terror of the French Revolution.
I think the partial but substantial transformation wrought by feminism provides the paradigm here. Without reprising the whole story or the statistics, I think it’s fair to say that a young woman’s possibilities in the 2000s are significantly expanded from those of a young woman in the 1950s. First, it’s possible today, if you’re a woman, to conceive of oneself as an equal citizen and person; second, there is legal equality for women inscribed throughout Canadian law; and third, public attitudes about women’s rights and opposition to sexism have shifted considerably in favour of women. There’s still plenty of sexism and existing disparities to provide a full program of political activity, but we ought to be able to recognize that a fundamental battle has been won, and though the gains might conceivably be reversed, it doesn’t look likely. I rather regret that at some point in the last couple of decades, we weren’t able to pause long enough to observe and declare that there was a victory, and that it was a pretty good thing. Even raising a glass and proposing a toast would have been preferable to the mere fizzling out into post-Post-Feminism.
The situation regarding race, ethnicity, and saving the planet are all still very much in media res and we’re obviously a long way from resolution on these matters. Canada has done surprisingly well in fashioning a multi-ethnic society. No bloodbaths, no French-style riots in the burbs. Too much tribalism perhaps, not enough constitutional patriotism. Still, a remarkably successful-so-far experiment. The same can’t be said for Canada’s portion of the planet. Although we’re going to hear a lot more about climate change, global warming, sustainable environments and sundry other catchphrases in the next election(s), I’ve yet to see anything resembling a program from New Democrats, Liberals, or Greens that will make a difference. I don’t even think much fundamental thinking about these issues has been initiated, outside of think-tank organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation and similar still-marginal outfits.
So, what is Post-Gay?
When it comes to the much simpler question of homosexuality, we’ve reached a circumstance close enough to Post-Gay to be able to ask for a definition of it.
The best way to become able to recognize Post-Gay when you see it is to begin by comparing the situation in Canada to the rest of the world. My conceptualization of Post-Gay is based on an old Marxist notion, one usually applied to economic affairs, and known as the “Law of Uneven Development.” I think the Law of Uneven Development also can be applied to cultural circumstances, such as the status of homosexuality. The idea is simple: what we find in the economic world at one and the same time are completely different ways or modes of producing things, such that feudalism, raw capitalism, social democracy, and other forms of production, all exist simultaneously and can only be explained by examining the specific historical circumstances, cultures, and power structures of particular nations. I think something similar holds for how we might think about homosexuality.
What I see, and I’m intentionally over-simplifying, is a tri-partite global situation. In various countries, which I’ll call Pre-Gay, homosexuality is still illegal, often punishable by death, and cannot be spoken of much less named. There, homosexuals remain intellectually puzzled by their own sexual passions; the subject is forbidden in public discussion; and the activity is completely proscribed by law. Yet, in all of those pre-gay places, there is a considerable amount of homosexual activity despite the peril.
In other countries — the United States is a prime example — they’re still in the midst of gay struggles. Religious denunciations of homosexuality, referenda banning gay marriage, rollbacks of sexual preference anti-discrimination laws, all jostle with gay characters on TV, commercial gay pornography, increasing and/or declining public sympathy for various gay causes. But the U.S., in the midst of a strange period of religious revivalism, to say nothing of bellicosity, is clearly still in the Gay Struggle mode. Other countries — I’m thinking of Thailand — present a more hybrid situation that combines traditional pre-gay modes with a vigorous debate among homosexuals themselves about the conceptualization of modern gay identities.
Third, there are countries like Canada, as well as various European nations, which I would describe as Post-Gay or Post-Queer. What I mean by that is that being gay is no longer a contested identity; legislation has been passed that protects gay human rights up to and including same-sex marriage; and public sentiment has clearly moved to the side of people who identify themselves as gay, if they feel the need to identify themselves in sexual terms at all. Indeed, in post-gay societies, work on self-identity tends to move in directions that make the notion of gay somewhat obsolete, as reflected in the discussions of the last decade over the use of the term “queer.” One’s sexual identification no longer requires priority in a list of identifications that may include everything from vocation to musical talents to left-handedness.
All of these modes of homosexuality exist simultaneously in the world and, using a loose notion of the Law of Uneven Development, can be traced to specific cultural histories. Post-Gay, however, is a term that makes some people in post-gay societies, particularly those who have been involved in the history of gay struggles, uneasy. People working in gay organizations or gay-oriented businesses may worry that they’re going to be done out of a job or a program of activism by success. But I don’t think that’s the case, even if we recognize a notion of Post-Gay.
First, it really is important to know when to declare victory, or else one tediously lives in a past that no longer exists, or worse, persists in a tribalism that is already all too prevalent in the world. Second, the Law of Uneven Development applies not only to entire cultures, but operates differentially within countries. So, while Post-Gay clearly obtains in places like Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, in various other specific communities and provinces, the issue of being gay or queer remains problematic, and “coming out” is still a major personal event.
Third, and finally, the condition of Post-Gay doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do. Post-Gay doesn’t mean, as many wrongly assume, the End of Gay. Athough gay politics becomes less vital, crimes like gaybashing continue to occur; anti-gay organizations such as the U.S.-based Canadian branch of Focus on the Family continue to press for repeal of rights; and the plight of various individuals, such as teenagers in regressive school board districts, is an abiding concern. Furthermore, having achieved a Post-Gay condition doesn’t mean it can’t be reversed.
And one more practical point: given that homosexuality looks like a more or less permanent minority preference, in which there are ongoing concerns about finding like-minded or like-desiring people (the ubiquitous Internet notwithstanding), or finding support in the development of one’s own identity, whether as a teenager or as an adult in particular communities, all of that ensures there is no End of Gay in Post-Gay. There’s still space for vigilant organizations, vigorous lobbies, and even the annual parade. So, no sleeping on the last watch of the night. Although the Love that dare not speak its name, as Oscar Wilde meant it, is perhaps relegated to history, the Love that just won’t shut up, as we jokingly dare to describe it today, will continue to be heard, but at lower volumes.
Some of this should have been said at the time that parliament concluded the gay debate a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t. However belatedly, then, consider it said now.
Vancouver, Dec. 21, 2006
Stan Persky
Stan Persky taught philosophy at Capilano University in N. Vancouver, B.C. He received the 2010 B.C. Lieutenant-Governor's Award for Literary Excellence. His most recent books are Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade, 2000-2009 (McGill-Queen's, 2011), Post-Communist Stories: About Cities, Politics, Desires (Cormorant, 2014), and Letter from Berlin: Essays 2015-2016 (Dooney's, 2017).
More by this author:
Once in Europa: What do the 2019 EU election results mean?
The rightwing populist tsunami didn't happen; Greens blossom; Europe fragments, pro-EU majority maintained. Read more… →
Sonnet About Orpheus (Where)
Singing the Lord's song in a strange land. Read more… →
Trump Prose Poem, a.k.a. Potus Takes a Snooze
POTUS takes a snooze. Read more… →
Guardians of the Truth? Notes on MSM
Stan Persky checks out the "guardians of the truth," and puts in a good word for mainstream media (MSM). It's "breaking news." Read more… →
This Year’s Question
Can Democracy Work? asks James Miller. It's not only this year's question, it's a question for the ages, from ancient Athens to the Trumpian present. Read more… →
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Games Utilities & Editors
The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth official trailer 1
By EA Games | May 10, 2004
"The battle for Middle-Earth is about to begin." With these words from Gandalf, the 640x480 QuickTime trailer for this real-time strategy begins. The trailer is 1:15 long.
Windows 98 Windows NT Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows Windows XP Windows 95
Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/2003 Server/XP, QuickTime
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Tag Archives: Devotchka
Bonnaroo X Schedule Released Today
Finally the Bonnaroo schedule has been released! Click HERE to take a look. As expected when the schedule came out, there are many many conflicts and overlaps with artists and set times. Of course for me there are the staple artists that are marked as must sees (Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, Buffalo Springfield, Mumford & Sons, Gregg Allman, Robert Plant, G. Love, The Black Keys, Warren Haynes, etc.) and after that, time to figure out the rest. Who knows, my ideal schedule today may end up being completely different when I arrive. All I know is there is a ton of great music and I can’t wait to be surrounded by 90,000 of my new closest friends.
Tags: !!!, 22-20s, 420 Comedy Blaze, Abigail Washburn, Alberta Cross, Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, Allen Toussaint (w Dr. John and The Original Meters), Amos Lee, Anthony B, Arcade Fire, artist, Atmosphere, Band of Skulls, Bassnectar, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, Beats Antique, Beirut, Ben Sollee, Best Coast, Big Boi, Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, Black Uhuru, Bonnaroo, Bootsy Collins & the Funk University, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Buffalo Springfield, Cheech Marin, Chiddy Bang, Clare Maguire, Cold War Kids, Concert, Craig Baldo, Daniel Lanois' Black Dub, Dãm-Funk, Deer Tick, Deerhunter, Dennis Coffey, Devotchka, Do You Hear The Music, Donald Glover, Dr. John and The Original Meters performing Desitively Bonnaroo, Eugene Mirman, Explosions in the Sky, Festival, Florence & the Machine, Forro in the Dark, Freelance Whales, Futurebirds, G. Love & Special Sauce, Galactic, Girl Talk, Global Gypsy Punk Revue curated by Eugene Hütz, Gogol Bordello, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Graveyard, Gregg Allman, Hangaii, Hannibal Buress, Hayes Carll, Henry Rollins, Henson Alternative's Stuffed & Unstrung, Iron & Wine, J.Cole, Jessica Lea Mayfield, Joe Vitale, John Waters, Jon Lajoie, Jovanotti, Junip, Justin Townes Earle, Karen Elson, Kathleen Madigan, Kylesa, Lewis Black, Lil Wayne, Line up, Loretta Lynn, Man Man, Manchester, Matt & Kim, Mavis Staples, Mumford & Sons, Music, My Morning Jacket, Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens, Nate Bergatze • Eminem, Neil Young, Neon Trees, Nick Kroll, Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea, NOFX, now playing, Old Crow Medicine Show, Omar Souleyman, Opeth, Paul Scheer, Phosphorescent, Portugal. The Man, Pretty Lights, Primus, Railroad Earth, Ralphie May, Ratatat, Ray LaMontagne, Richie Furay, Rick Rosas, Robert Plant & Band of Joy, Robyn, Ryan Bingham, Schedule, School of Seven Bells, Scissor Sisters, Set Times, Sharon Van Etten, Shpongle Presents Shpongletron Experience, Sleigh Bells, Smith Westerns, Stephen Rannazzisi, Stephen Stills, String Cheese Incident, STS9, Superjam ft. Dan Auerbach and Dr. John, Ted Alexandro, Tennessee, The Black Angels, The Black Keys, The Decemberists, The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Drums, The Gregory Brothers, The Head and the Heart, The Knux, The League, The Low Anthem, The Strokes, The Sword, The Walkmen, Tig Notaro, Tim Minchin, Twin Shadow, Wanda Jackson, Warren Haynes Band, Wavves, Widespread Panic, Wiz Khalifa
Categories News, Now Playing
Bonnaroo Artist Additions
Today Bonnaroo announced artist additions and the comedy line-up for this summer. I know some people were hoping for bigger names but really, you couldn’t expect more headlining acts to be announced. Could it have been better, sure but either way I for one am stoked as two of my favorite artists we added, G. Love and Black Joe Lewis. Add in Galactic, Black Uhuru and Daniel Lanois’ Black Dub and Superfly definitely added some great talent. DJ line-up should be coming soon too.
Artists Additions
Black Uhuru
Shpongle Presents Shpongletron Experience
Daniel Lanois’ Black Dub
Allen Toussaint (w Dr. John and The Original Meters)
Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears
Dennis Coffey
Forro in the Dark
Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens
Hangaii
Comedy Lineup!
420 Comedy Blaze hosted by Cheech Marin featuring Ralphie May, the stars of Workaholics and more
Henson Alternative’s Stuffed & Unstrung
The League (Paul Scheer, Nick Kroll, Jon Lajoie, Stephen Rannazzisi)
The Gregory Brothers
Eugene Mirman
Ted Alexandro
Craig Baldo
Nate Bergatze
Tags: !!!, 22-20s, 420 Comedy Blaze, Abigail Washburn, Alberta Cross, Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, Allen Toussaint (w Dr. John and The Original Meters), Amos Lee, Anthony B, Arcade Fire, Atmosphere, • Eminem, Band of Skulls, Bassnectar, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, Beats Antique, Beirut, Ben Sollee, Best Coast, Big Boi, Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, Black Uhuru, Bonnaroo, Bootsy Collins & the Funk University, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Buffalo Springfield, Cheech Marin, Chiddy Bang, Clare Maguire, Cold War Kids, Craig Baldo, Daniel Lanois' Black Dub, Dãm-Funk, Deer Tick, Deerhunter, Dennis Coffey, Devotchka, Donald Glover, Dr. John and The Original Meters performing Desitively Bonnaroo, Eugene Mirman, Explosions in the Sky, Florence & the Machine, Forro in the Dark, Freelance Whales, Futurebirds, G. Love & Special Sauce, Galactic, Girl Talk, Global Gypsy Punk Revue curated by Eugene Hütz, Gogol Bordello, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Graveyard, Gregg Allman, Hangaii, Hannibal Buress, Hayes Carll, Henry Rollins, Henson Alternative's Stuffed & Unstrung, Iron & Wine, J.Cole, Jessica Lea Mayfield, Joe Vitale, John Waters, Jon Lajoie, Jovanotti, Junip, Justin Townes Earle, Karen Elson, Kathleen Madigan, Kylesa, Lewis Black, Lil Wayne, Loretta Lynn, Man Man, Manchester, Matt & Kim, Mavis Staples, Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens, Nate Bergatze, Neil Young, Neon Trees, Nick Kroll, Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea, NOFX, Old Crow Medicine Show, Omar Souleyman, Opeth, Paul Scheer, Phosphorescent, Portugal. The Man, Pretty Lights, Primus, Railroad Earth, Ralphie May, Ratatat, Ray LaMontagne, Richie Furay, Rick Rosas, Robert Plant & Band of Joy, Robyn, Ryan Bingham, School of Seven Bells, Scissor Sisters, Sharon Van Etten, Shpongle Presents Shpongletron Experience, Sleigh Bells, Smith Westerns, Stephen Rannazzisi, Stephen Stills, String Cheese Incident, STS9, superfly, Superjam ft. Dan Auerbach and Dr. John, Ted Alexandro, Tennessee, The Black Angels, The Black Keys, The Decemberists, The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Drums, The Gregory Brothers, The Head and the Heart, The Knux, The League, The Low Anthem, The Strokes, The Sword, The Walkmen, Tig Notaro, Tim Minchin, Twin Shadow, Wanda Jackson, Warren Haynes Band, Wavves, Widespread Panic, Wiz Khalifa
Say Hello to BONNAROO 2011
The Coachella lineup is pretty damn sick but after seeing the initial announcement of artists slated to perform at Bonnaroo, I am now torn and thinking I should look into heading to Tennessee this summer. I mean at Bonnaroo you have the return of Buffalo Springfield and Widespread Panic celebrating 25 years, String Cheese Incident, Warren Haynes and Gregg Allman which I can all but see some fun little guest appearances in the works, Mumford & Sons are thrust to the big time stage, Ray Lamontagne and Iron & Wine finally out of the tiny print on the line-up, just knowing Primus is going to be there leaves me wondering what Les Claypool has up his sleeve, Sleigh Bells, Portugal the Man, The Drums, Wavves, Ryan Bingham! Plus Smith Westerns, Beats Antique and STS9, Hayes Carll, Amos Lee, Deer Tick, Matt & Kim, Grace Potter and so many more great acts and that’s not even including the headliners, Eminem and Arcade Fire.
Here’s the line-up as of today:
Buffalo Springfield feat Richie Furay, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Rick Rosas, Joe Vitale
Robert Plant & Band of Joy
Dr. John and The Original Meters performing Desitively Bonnaroo
Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas
Superjam ft. Dan Auerbach and Dr. John
Scissor Sisters
Ratatat
Global Gypsy Punk Revue curated by Eugene Hütz
Warren Haynes Band
Bootsy Collins & the Funk University
Matt & Kim
Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Béla Fleck & the Flecktones
Chiddy Bang
Dãm-Funk
Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea
Man Man
The Head and the Heart
Clare MaGuire
Tags: 22-20s, Abigail Washburn, Alberta Cross, Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, Amos Lee, Arcade Fire, Atmosphere, Bassnectar, Beats Antique, Beirut, Best Coast, Big Boi, Bonnaroo, Bootsy Collins & the Funk University, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers Loretta Lynn, Buffalo Springfield, Chiddy Bang, Clare Maguire, Coachella, Cold War Kids, Dãm-Funk, Deer Tick Band of Skulls, Deerhunter, Devotchka, Dr. John and The Original Meters performing Desitively Bonnaroo, Eminem, Explosions in the Sky, Florence & the Machine, Freelance Whales, Girl Talk, Global Gypsy Punk Revue curated by Eugene ütz, Gogol Bordello, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Gregg Allman, Hayes Carll, Iron & Wine, J.Cole, Jessica Lea Mayfield Smith Westerns, Joe Vitale, Jovanotti, Junip, Justin Townes Earle, Karen Elson, Lil Wayne, Man Man, Manchester, Matt & Kim, Mavis Staples Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, Mumford & Sons The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Neil Young, Neon Trees Portugal. The Man, Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea, Old Crow Medicine, Omar Souleyman, Opeth, Phosphorescent, Pretty Lights, Primus, Railroad Earth, Ratatatat, Ray LaMontagne, Richie Furay, Rick Rosas, Robert Plant & Band of Joy, Robyn, Ryan Bingham, School of Seven Bells, Scissor Sisters, Sharon Van Etten, Sleigh Bells, Stephen Stills, String Cheese Incident, STS9, Superjam ft. Dan Auerbach and Dr. John, Tennessee, The Black Keys, The Decemberists, The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Drums The Black Angels, The Head and the Heart, The Low Anthem, The Sword, The Walkmen, Twin Shadow Kylesa, Wanda Jackson, Warren Haynes Band, Wavves, Widespread Panic, Wiz Khalifa
Categories Music You Should Know, News
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Connecticut Bill Equating Taxidermy Possession to Manslaughter Advances
Posted in Sportsmen's Alliance
Connecticut Sen. Bob Duff’s (D-Norwalk) Senate Bill 20, which bans the import, sale, transport and possession of African elephants, lions, leopards, rhinoceros, Cape buffalos and giraffes, has passed the Joint Committee on Judiciary by a stunning vote of 31 to 5, and will now head to the Senate floor for a full vote.
Take Action Today! Connecticut sportsmen should contact their state legislator and ask them to vote NO on Senate Bill 20. Members can contact their legislator by using the Sportsmen’s Alliance Legislative Action Center.
The large vote margin is stunning because the penalties in SB 20 are outright ridiculous, treating possession of an African game taxidermy the same as killing a human being. Violations of the new law would be a felony with a fine of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up to two years. These are the same penalties given to a person found guilty of manslaughter.
“Animal-rights extremists used to be subtle, careful not to reveal their true views that humans and animals deserve equal rights,” said Bruce Tague, vice president of government affairs for the Sportsmen’s Alliance. “SB 20 doesn’t hide it at all. Even worse than that, it treats someone who just buys a piece of legally obtained taxidermy the same as a criminal who has killed a person!”
By preventing the import or possession of African big game trophies, the authors of Senate Bill 20 are basically banning a Connecticut resident from hunting those species. Hunting for big game in Africa is tightly regulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which only issues import permits for hunts that occur in countries that maintain sound conservation plans. Money that flows into these countries actually helps maintain healthy populations of wildlife and prevents poaching. A recent report by Southwick and Associates, a leading economist for wildlife agencies, found that $326 million in direct spending from hunting in the top-eight hunting destination countries annually, actually “changes the attitudes of the local community and gives wildlife a positive value, providing incentives against poaching and mitigating human-wildlife conflict.”
“So, in addition to equating the possession of legally obtained taxidermy with killing someone, this bill would actually do more harm than good to the animals the supporters purport to be trying to save,” said Tague. “You seriously can’t make this madness up.”
About the Sportsmen’s Alliance: The Sportsmen’s Alliance protects and defends America’s wildlife conservation programs and the pursuits – hunting, fishing and trapping – that generate the money to pay for them. Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation is responsible for public education, legal defense and research. Its mission is accomplished through several distinct programs coordinated to provide the most complete defense capability possible. Stay connected to Sportsmen’s Alliance: Online, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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Data demonstrate efficacy of more flexible dose of regorafenib to relieve side-effects in mCRC patients
Medical oncologists administer anticancer drug regorafenib to try to improve overall survival in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who have ceased to respond to standard therapy (known as refractory mCRC).
However, some of the adverse events related to the use of this drug often limits its use in clinical practice.
A study reported at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2019 suggests the usefulness of a more flexible dosing, which improves patients' quality of life without jeopardising efficacy.
The study was published in The Annals of Oncology.
This international trial, led by the Spanish Cooperative Group for the Treatment of Digestive Tumours (TTD), included 299 patients from over a dozen hospitals in Spain, Italy and France.
The average age of the participants was 64 and they had received an average of four treatment lines prior to inclusion in the trial with regorafenib between July 2016 and September 2017.
"Regorafenib has been approved since 2013 for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) who have progressed to standard treatments," said study author, Dr Guillem Argiles, medical oncologist and clinical investigator, Gastrointestinal & Endocrine Tumors Group, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital and Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Barcelona, Spain.
"Its adverse toxicity profile often limits its use in routine clinical practice. This clinical trial attempted to show the usefulness of different dose strategies in order to improve its tolerability and quality of life in patients who can benefit from the medicine in the context of advanced disease," Argiles continued.
In the trial, patients were randomised 1:1:1: standard dose 160 mg/day for three weeks followed by a week off; reduced dose of 120 mg/day for three weeks followed by a week off (reduced dose group); or intermittent dose of 160 mg/day a week, followed by a week off (intermittent dose group).
The patients in the latter two groups (reduced or intermittent dose) were escalated to the standard of care dose if, after a first treatment cycle, no limiting toxicities that prevented to continuing to stay in the trial occurred.
"We reduced the dose in the first cycle and then escalated because it has been shown that the toxicity is higher in the first and second months of treatment", explained Argiles.
The investigators observed that flexible dosing showed numerical improvement on several parameters that improved tolerance, such as fatigue, hypertension or hand-foot syndrome (reaction due to redness, swelling and pain caused in the palms), although REARRANGE did not meet its primary endpoint of improving regorafenib global tolerability in the reduced and intermittent dose groups.
The average treatment duration was 3.2 months in the standard group; 3.7 in the reduced dose group; and 3.8 in that with alternating weeks.
Median progression-free survival was not different across groups (approximately 2 months).
"Although statistical significance was not achieved, we did observe a numerical reduction in some side-effects that can be very troublesome for the patients", explained Argiles. "These results, interpreted in the context of other trials, like the American study ReDOS, tell us that the more flexible doses of regorafenib are an effective alternative in order to improve quality of life in patients with metastatic refractory colorectal cancer".
Commenting on the results, Prof. Eric Van Cutsem, from the University Leuven, Belgium, said: "This study will change clinical practice with regard to the use of regorafenib in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, because it demonstrates and supports something that many clinicians have already observed and were carrying out in regular clinical practice".
In his opinion, the trial shows that this reduction in regorafenib initial dose limits the drug toxicity while maintaining its efficacy.
Source: European Society for Medical Oncology
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Master of brutal deadpan Arj Barker returns to Fringe
US comic backs recent Flight of the Conchords role with Edinburgh show
The deadpan Arj Barker makes a long-awaited Fringe return, telling David Pollock that these are his salad days
This will be San Francisco comedian Arj Barker’s first working visit to Edinburgh in a decade, and he promises to pull out the stops for an audience which might only recently have become familiar with his work. ‘The show covers a range of topics, from the environment to pirates, my personal life to mattresses. It’s good solid stand-up, that’s what I do. But just be prepared to laugh and cry.’
Long-time Fringe-goers might not need reminding that Barker was the Perrier Best Newcomer in 1997, the first of four consecutive years he appeared in Scotland. Yet ten years spent breaking into what he describes as ‘other markets’ (his name is well-established in Australia, and when The List tracks him down he’s touring to largely ex-pat audiences in Thailand) mean that British audiences might know him best for his recent role as laconic New York pawn-shop owner Dave Mohumbhai in Flight of the Conchords, owner of one of TV’s most brutal deadpans.
‘I decided I should give the UK a look, and this show’s really a way of re-introducing myself to the fans. Obviously the popularity of Flight of the Conchords has given me a nice boost, but I don’t rely on the show to endorse what I do, you know? Would I have come back if I didn’t have that behind me? Maybe I would. But maybe I wouldn’t have been quite as hopeful.’
Despite past and hopefully future television success, Barker eagerly declares his love for the stand-up life. He works hard at it, aiming to write an entirely new show every year, although his lengthy absence from Edinburgh means that we will get a ‘best of’ selection of his last two or three years’ work. ‘I’ve achieved what I always wanted in stand-up,’ he says, ‘which is to have people want to come and see me, rather than just showing up at the club. These are the good days for me. I’ve worked hard to get to this stage and I want to enjoy it.’
He reminisces fondly of the good old days in Edinburgh some more. ‘It’s a beautiful city, I remember walking home early in the morning and seeing the sun come up over the castle. I’m kinda sentimental about those days, to be honest. And I never lost money on it.’ Here’s hoping it’s a happy homecoming.
Arj Barker, Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, 7–29 Aug, 9.20pm, £12–£14 (£11–£13). Previews 5 & 6 Aug, £5.
Arj Barker - Let Me Do the Talking
Packed theatre? Relax. I'll handle this. You just sit back and do what you do best - listen, laugh and look good. Luckily for us, I've been in this situation before and although it's never easy, it's nothing an hour of classics won't handle! Ages: 14+
Conchords man Rhys Darby courts the apocalypse in 2012 Fringe show(27 Jul 2012)
New Zealand comedian's show on how to survive Armageddon
Arj Barker (11 Aug 2010)
Disappointing gaggery from much-hyped actor
5 Questions: Kristen Schaal & Kurt Braunohler(13 Aug 2009)
A weekend fuelled by comedy and cake(12 Aug 2009)
Amber Baxter's festival blog
Rhys Darby (10 Aug 2009)
Crafty characters and weird sound effects
Kristen Schaal & Kurt Braunohler (21 Aug 2008)
Schaal and pal delve into surreal corners
Taking flight: Rhys Darby(24 Jul 2009)
Free from managing New Zealand's third hottest folk-comedy duo - Darby returns
Paul Merton: 'My only prep is having done it for 30 years'(17 Jul 2019)
The Have I Got News For You star and comedy veteran reveals the art of an improv comedy show
Arj Barker
Let Me Do The Talking
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Gender-based violence is enacted under many different manifestations, from its most widespread form, intimate partner violence, to acts of violence carried out in online spaces. These different forms are not mutually exclusive and multiple incidences of violence can be happening at once and reinforcing each other. Inequalities experienced by a person related to their race, (dis)ability, age, social class, religion, sexuality can also drive acts of violence. This means that while women face violence and discrimination based on gender, some women experience multiple and interlocking forms of violence.
The Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe, Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence), defines violence against women as falling under four key forms: physical, sexual, psychological and economic.
EIGE has produced and uses uniform definitions of these forms of violence, which encourage comprehensive understanding of what falls under the scope of gender-based violence. For current statistical data on these forms of gender-based violence please check EIGE’s Gender-Statistics Database.
Any act which causes physical harm as a result of unlawful physical force. Physical violence can take the form of, among others, serious and minor assault, deprivation of liberty and manslaughter.
Any sexual act perfomed on an individual without their consent. Sexual violence can take the form of rape or sexual assault.
Psychological violence
Any act which causes psychological harm to an individual. Pyschological violence can take the form of, for example, coercion, defamation, verbal insult or harassment.
Economic violence
Any act or behaviour which causes economic harm to an individual. Economic violence can take the form of, for example, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony.
It is also important to recognise that gender-based violence may be normalised and reproduced due to structural inequalities, such as societal norms, attitudes and stereotypes around gender generally and violence against women specifically. Therefore it is important to acknowledge structural or institutional violence, which can be defined as the subordination of women in economic, social and political life, when attempting to explain the prevalence of violence against women within our societies.
Learn more about gender-based violence
EIGE's Gender Statistics Database
EIGE's Gender Equality Index
Publications by EIGE
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NYC Teams
New York Jets: A fascinating history of quarterback debuts
9/20/98: Vinny Testaverde
12-21, 203 yards, 4 TD’s, 1 INT 109.7 rating (W 44-6 vs. Indianapolis)
(Photo by Damian Strohmeyer/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images) (SetNumber: X56397)
The human Sporcle answer, Testaverde perhaps never truly found an NFL home in a career that spanned over two decades, but it’s safe to say the Brooklyn native posted his finest moments in green.
Among those moment was first Jets starts, granted the reigns for a divisional game against the Colts when Glenn Foley went down with an injury. Going head-to-head with some little-known rookie named Peyton Manning, Testaverde guided the Jets to an early lead and coasted to a blowout win. Despite the big lead cutting down on his workload, Testaverde was diverse with his passes, finding four separate receivers for multiple receptions, and his four scoring throws each going to a different recipient.
Sitting at 0-2 at the time, the Jets’ 1998 season hit a turning point with that one-sided win. They would end the year 12-2, win their first division title since 1969, and reach the AFC title game.
10/6/02: Chad Pennington
22-29, 237 yards, 2 TD’s, 1 INT, 105.1 rating (L 29-25 vs. Kansas City)
(Photo by Andrew Savulich/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Perhaps part of a retired practice, Pennington was the Jets’ first-round pick in the 2000 draft, but sat for two seasons behind Testaverde. With the Jets at 1-3, he was finally granted the start for a visit from the Kansas City Chiefs. Pennington had played the lion’s share of the week’s previous game, a blowout loss in Jacksonville, prior to this first start.
He kept pace with a veteran Chiefs unit, even leading the Jets to a go-ahead score in the game’s final stages, a 14-play, 61-yard drive that ended in John Hall’s short go-ahead field goal. Kansas City, however, doomed the Jets to defeat, Priest Holmes, scoring a 19-yard receiving touchdown to send the home crowd to the parking lot in tears.
Pennington might’ve lost the game, despite his best efforts, but his insertion turned the Jets’ season around. After a bye week following the Kansas City defeat, Pennington guided the Jets to an 8-3 record, culminating in a shocking 41-0 AFC wild-card victory over the Indianapolis Colts that postseason.
NEXT: QB Debuts Under Eric Mangini
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Central Bank Digital Currencies: A Revolution in Banking?
Posted on September 16, 2016 by Ellen Brown
Several central banks, including the Bank of England, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, are exploring the concept of issuing their own digital currencies, using the blockchain technology developed for Bitcoin. Skeptical commentators suspect that their primary goal is to eliminate cash, setting us up for negative interest rates (we pay the bank to hold our deposits rather than the reverse).
But Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, puts a more positive spin on it. He says Central Bank Digital Currencies could supplant the money now created by private banks through “fractional reserve” lending – and that means 97% of the circulating money supply. Rather than outlawing bank-created money, as money reformers have long urged, fractional reserve banking could be made obsolete simply by attrition, preempted by a better mousetrap. The need for negative interest rates could also be eliminated, by giving the central bank more direct tools for stimulating the economy.
The Blockchain Revolution
How blockchain works was explained by Martin Hiesboeck in an April 2016 article titled “Blockchain Is the Most Disruptive Invention Since the Internet Itself“:
The blockchain is a simple yet ingenious way of passing information from A to B in a fully automated and safe manner. One party to a transaction initiates the process by creating a block. This block is verified by thousands, perhaps millions of computers distributed around the net. The verified block is added to a chain, which is stored across the net, creating not just a unique record, but a unique record with a unique history. Falsifying a single record would mean falsifying the entire chain in millions of instances. That is virtually impossible.
In a speech at the London School of Economics in March 2016, Bank of England Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent pointed out that a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would not eliminate physical cash. Only the legislature could do that, and blockchain technology would not be needed to pull it off, since most money is already digital. What is unique and potentially revolutionary about a national blockchain currency is that it would eliminate the need for banks in the payments system. According to a July 2016 article in The Wall Street Journal on the CBDC proposal:
[M]oney would exist electronically outside of bank accounts in digital wallets, much as physical bank notes do. This means households and businesses would be able to bypass banks altogether when making payments to one another.
Not only the payments system but the actual creation of money is orchestrated by private banks today. Nearly 97% of the money supply is created by banks when they make loans, as the Bank of England acknowledged in a bombshell report in 2014. The digital money we transfer by check, credit card or debit card represents simply the IOU or promise to pay of a bank. A CBDC could replace these private bank liabilities with central bank liabilities. CBDCs are the digital equivalent of cash.
Money recorded on a blockchain is stored in the “digital wallet” of the bearer, as safe from confiscation as cash in a physical wallet. It cannot be borrowed, manipulated, or speculated with by third parties any more than physical dollars can be. The money remains under the owner’s sole control until transferred to someone else, and that transfer is anonymous.
Rather than calling a CBDC a “digital currency,” says Broadbent, a better term for the underlying technology might be “decentralised virtual clearinghouse and asset register.” He adds:
But there’s no denying the technology is novel. Prospectively, it offers an entirely new way of exchanging and holding assets, including money.
Banking in the Cloud
One novel possibility he suggests is that everyone could hold an account at the central bank. That would eliminate the fear of bank runs and “bail-ins,” as well as the need for deposit insurance, since the central bank cannot run out of money. Accounts could be held at the central bank not just by small depositors but by large institutional investors, eliminating the need for the private repo market to provide a safe place to park their funds. It was a run on the repo market, not the conventional banking system, that triggered the banking crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Private banks could be free to carry on as they do now. They would just have substantially fewer deposits, since depositors with the option of banking at the ultra-safe central bank would probably move their money to that institution.
That is the problem Broadbent sees in giving everyone access to the central bank: there could be a massive run on the banks as depositors moved their money out. If so, where would the liquidity come from to back bank loans? He says lending activity could be seriously impaired.
Perhaps, but here is another idea. What if the central bank supplanted not just the depository but the lending functions of private banks? A universal distributed ledger designed as public infrastructure could turn the borrowers’ IOUs into “money” in the same way that banks do now – and do it more cheaply, efficiently and equitably than through banker middlemen.
Making Fractional Reserve Lending Obsolete
The Bank of England has confirmed that banks do not actually lend their depositors’ money. They do not recycle the money of “savers” but actually create deposits when they make loans. The bank turns the borrower’s IOU into “checkable money” that it then lends back to the borrower at interest. A public, distributed ledger could do this by “smart contract” in the “cloud.” There would be no need to find “savers” from whom to borrow this money. The borrower would simply be “monetizing” his own promise to repay, just as he does now when he takes out a loan at a private bank. Since he would be drawing from the bottomless well of the central bank, there would be no fear of the bank running out of liquidity in a panic; and there would be no need to borrow overnight to balance the books, with the risk that these short-term loans might not be there the next day.
To reiterate: this is what banks do now. Banks are not intermediaries taking in deposits and lending them out. When a bank issues a loan for a mortgage, it simply writes the sum into the borrower’s account. The borrower writes a check to his seller, which is deposited in the seller’s bank, where it is called a “new” deposit and added to that bank’s “excess reserves.” The issuing bank then borrows this money back from the banking system overnight if necessary to balance its books, returning the funds the next morning. The whole rigmarole is repeated the next night, and the next and the next.
In a public blockchain system, this shell game could be dispensed with. The borrower would be his own banker, turning his own promise to repay into money. “Smart contracts” coded into the blockchain could make these transactions subject to terms and conditions similar to those for loans now. Creditworthiness could be established online, just as it is with online credit applications now. Penalties could be assessed for nonpayment just as they are now. If the borrower did not qualify for a loan from the public credit facility, he could still borrow on the private market, from private banks or venture capitalists or mutual funds. Favoritism and corruption could be eliminated, by eliminating the need for a banker middleman who serves as gatekeeper to the public credit machine. The fees extracted by an army of service providers could also be eliminated, because blockchain has no transaction costs.
In a blog for Bank of England staff titled “Central Bank Digital Currency: The End of Monetary Policy As We Know It?”, Marilyne Tolle suggests that the need to manipulate interest rates might also be eliminated. The central bank would not need this indirect tool for managing inflation because it would have direct control of the money supply.
A CBDC on a distributed ledger could be used for direct economic stimulus in another way: through facilitating payment of a universal national dividend. Rather than sending out millions of dividend checks, blockchain technology could add money to consumer bank accounts with a few keystrokes.
Hyperinflationary? No.
The objection might be raised that if everyone had access to the central bank’s credit facilities, credit bubbles would result; but that would actually be less likely than under the current system. The central bank would be creating money on its books in response to demand by borrowers, just as private banks do now. But loans for speculation would be harder to come by, since the leveraging of credit through the “rehypothecation” of collateral in the repo market would be largely eliminated. As explained by blockchain software technologist Caitlin Long:
Rehypothecation is conceptually similar to fractional reserve banking because a dollar of base money is responsible for several different dollars of debt issued against that same dollar of base money. In the repo market, collateral (such as U.S Treasury securities) functions as base money. . . .
Through rehypothecation, multiple parties report that they own the same asset at the same time when in reality only one of them does—because, after all, only one such asset exists. One of the most important benefits of blockchains for regulators is gaining a tool to see how much double-counting is happening (specifically, how long “collateral chains” really are).
Blockchain eliminates this shell game by eliminating the settlement time between trades. Blockchain trades occur in “real-time,” meaning collateral can be in only one place at a time.
A Sea Change in Banking
Martin Hiesboeck concludes:
[B]lockchain won’t just kill banks, brokers and credit card companies. It will change every transactional process you know. Simply put, blockchain eliminates the need for clearinghouse entities of any kind. And that means a revolution is coming, a fundamental sea change in the way we do business.
Changes of that magnitude usually take a couple of decades. But the UK did surprise the world with its revolutionary Brexit vote to leave the EU. Perhaps a new breed of economists at the Bank of England will surprise us with a revolutionary new model for banking and credit.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. She can be heard biweekly on “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown” on PRN.FM.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | Tagged: blockchain, central bank digital currencies, fractional reserve lending, public banking |
« On “It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown”: Viking Economics – Sharing Prosperity Ralph Nader’s “Breaking Through Power” Conference, Washington DC »
ambrose bierce, on September 28, 2016 at 8:10 am said:
) no one has incentive to save because there is no collateral) cbs engage in asymmetric counterfeiting, now they get complete control? why not allow individuals the right to print their own money without making unsecured loans from the cb?) works as a transaction only currency, not a store of value, money moves it does not sit or store.user may elect to park their digital money in gold for instance.) plan only works if implemented incrementally, without creating distinct economic disadvantages (see mcluhan on the telegraph and the telephone)
Central Bank Digital Currencies: A Revolution in Banking? – The Daily Coin, on September 28, 2016 at 11:10 am said:
[…] Continue Reading>>> […]
d, on September 29, 2016 at 3:54 pm said:
the whole premise of infinite money is ludicrous. Nothing wrong with the block chain technology used properly but not through any kind of a central bank control. We need less central control not more.
ejhr2015, on September 29, 2016 at 8:01 pm said:
Infinite money is a definition, not a reality. The Constitution gives the government infinite power over its currency and it can never go bankrupt in its own currency, unless deliberately attempted. Effectively there is no limit, but in reality, in the real world, money is debt. There has to be debt before there is money.
J Anthony, on October 7, 2016 at 12:28 pm said:
Yes, that’s how it works now, and that’s the problem, debt-based currency.
Central Bank Digital Currencies – Neritam, on November 7, 2016 at 11:34 pm said:
[…] — source ellenbrown.com […]
Central Bank Digital Currencies: A Revolution in Banking? | True News, on February 28, 2017 at 4:48 pm said:
[…] Brown — The Web of Debt Blog via TruthOut Sept 20, […]
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(-) Remove Organizations filter Organizations
The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1910-1939)
From its founding in 1910 until it closed its doors in 1939, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York was the center of the American Eugenics Movement. Charles Davenport, a geneticist and biologist, founded the ERO, and served as its director until 1934. Under the direction of Davenport and his associate, superintendant Harry H. Laughlin, the influence of the ERO on science and public policy waxed during the early twentieth century until after World War II.
Human Betterment Foundation (1928-1942)
In 1928 Ezra Seymour Gosney founded the non-profit Human Betterment Foundation (HBF) in Pasadena, California to support the research and publication of the personal and social effects of eugenic sterilizations carried out in California. Led by director Gosney and secretary Paul Popenoe, the HBF collected data on thousands of individuals in California who had been involuntarily sterilized under a California state law enacted in 1909. The Foundation's assets were liquidated following Gosney's death in 1942.
Oregon State Board of Eugenics
In 1917 the Oregon State Legislature, in Salem, Oregon, passed a bill titled, 'To Prevent Procreation of Certain Classes in Oregon.' Passage of the bill created the Oregon State Board of Eugenics, an organization that presided over the forced sterilization of more than 2,600 Oregon residents from 1917 to 1981. In 1983, Legislation abolished the State Board of Eugenics, by that time called the Oregon State Board of Social Protection.
The Mother's Health Clinic of Phoenix (1937-1942)
The Mother's Health Clinic opened in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1937 and provided women in central Arizona with contraception and family planning resources. A group of wealthy philanthropic Phoenix women founded the clinic under the guidance of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. The clinic was the second birth control clinic to open in Arizona and the first to serve the central and northern Arizona residents.
Subject: Organizations, Outreach, Reproduction
Planned Parenthood Committee of Phoenix (1942-1978)
The Planned Parenthood Committee of Phoenix was established in 1942 to expand Arizona women's access to family planning resources. The Planned Parenthood Committee of Phoenix was formed through the merging of The Mother's Health Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, with the national Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The clinic was primarily based within the Phoenix Memorial Hospital campus but expanded to other locations in the late 1960s.
Subject: Organizations, Reproduction, Outreach
Planned Parenthood Center of Tucson (1950-1977)
Established in 1950, the Planned Parenthood Center of Tucson provided Arizona women with family planning resources until 1977, when it expanded to locations outside of Tucson and became Planned Parenthood of Southern Arizona. The Planned Parenthood Center of Tucson was formed after the Clinica Para Madres, the first birth control clinic in Arizona, merged with the national organization Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Clinica Para Madres (1934-1950)
The Clinica Para Madres (Mother’s Clinic) opened in Tucson, Arizona, in December of 1934 as the first birth control clinic in Arizona. After moving to Tucson, birth control activist Margaret Sanger, along with a group of local philanthropic women, founded the clinic to provide Arizona women with contraception. During the early 1900s in the US, contraception was illegal under the federal Comstock Act. Additionally, many viewed contraception and sex as obscene and not to be discussed in public or outside of marriage.
The Malthusian League (1877–1927)
The Malthusian League, founded in London, England, in 1877 promoted the use of contraception to limit family size. Activists Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant established the Malthusian League after they were arrested and exonerated for publishing a pamphlet describing techniques to prevent pregnancy. Founders based the league on the principles of Thomas Malthus, a British nineteenth century economist, who wrote on the perils of a population growing beyond the resources available to support it.
Center for Reproductive Health (1986-1995)
The Center for Reproductive Health was a fertility clinic run by a partnership of world-renowned fertility specialists from 1986 to 1995. The Center operated at three clinic locations under affiliation with the University of California Irvine 's Medical Center (UCIMC). The Center's renowned specialists and medical success stories attracted clients worldwide until evidence of highly unethical practices conducted by doctors there resulted in over one hundred lawsuits against the University. At issue was the doctors' misappropriation and unauthorized use of eggs and embryos.
National Embryo Donation Center
The National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) is a non-profit organization that was established in 2002 in Knoxville, Tennessee. The organization is endorsed and supported by several Christian-based associations such as the Christian Medical Association, Bethany Christian Services, and Baptist Health Systems. Its goal is to provide embryo donation and embryo adoption services in order to utilize the large number of embryos that are being cryopreserved as a result of infertility procedures and are no longer needed.
Marie Stopes International
Marie Stopes International (MSI) is a not-for-profit organization based in the United Kingdom that promotes reproductive and sexual health. It grew from one small clinic, founded in North London in 1921, into an international provider of reproductive health care and information that operates in almost forty countries. The Mothers' Clinic, from which it grew, was created in the hopes of expanding couples' reproductive rights, and the modern organization continues to work toward the same goal today.
The Mothers' Clinic
The Mothers' Clinic for Constructive Birth Control was established on 17 March 1921. The first family planning clinic ever established in Great Britain, it was co-founded by Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes and her husband Humphrey Verdon Roe at Number 61, Marlborough Road in Holloway, North London. The Mothers' Clinic was one of the highlights of Stopes's extensive career as a proponent of available birth control and women's sexual equality.
Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC)
Established under the Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) Act of 2004, Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC), also known as the Assisted Human Reproduction Agency of Canada, was created in 2006 to oversee research related to reproductive technologies and to protect the reproductive rights and interests of Canadian citizens. AHRC serves as a regulatory body for the development and use of such research and technology while enforcing the guidelines and restrictions laid out by the AHR Act.
Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia (1974- )
Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia is a nonprofit organization that began in 1974 as a joint endeavor by Reginald and Catherine Hamlin and the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia promotes reproductive health in Ethiopia by raising awareness and implementing treatment and preventive services for women affected by obstetric fistulas. It also aims to restore the lives of women afflicted with obstetric fistulas in Ethiopia and eventually to eradicate the condition.
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Publications on the EP (32) Apply Publications on the EP filter
Photographs (25) Apply Photographs filter
Displaying 176 - 200 of 335 items.
Ian Wilmut (1944- )
British embryologist Sir Ian Wilmut, best known for his work in the field of animal genetic engineering and the successful cloning of sheep, was born 7 July 1944 in Hampton Lucy, England. The family later moved to Scarborough, in the north of the country, to allow his father to accept a teaching position. There Wilmut met Gordon Whalley, head of the biology department at Scarborough High School for Boys, which Wilmut attended.
Florence Rena Sabin (1871-1953)
Florence Rena Sabin had successful careers as both a researcher and public health reformer. When Johns Hopkins University Medical School opened, accepting women and men on the same basis, Sabin was one of the first to enter. After the successful completion of her MD degree, Sabin went on to become the first female faculty member and later full-time professor at Johns Hopkins.
Wilhelm Friedrich Phillip Pfeffer (1845-1920)
Wilhelm Friedrich Phillip Pfeffer studied plants in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He started his career as an apothecary, but Pfeffer also studied plant physiology, including how plants move and react to changes in light, temperature, and osmotic pressure. He created the Pfeffer Zelle apparatus, also known as the Pfeffer Cell, to study osmosis in plants. PfefferÕs experiments led to new theories about the structure and development of plants.
John Chassar Moir (1900–1977)
John Chassar Moir lived in Scotland during the twentieth century and helped develop techniques to improve the health of pregnant women. Moir helped to discover compounds that doctors could administer to women after childbirth to prevent life-threatening blood loss. Those compounds included the ergot alkaloid called ergometrine, also called ergonovine, and d-lysergic acid beta-propanolamide. Moir tested ergometrine in postpartum patients and documented that it helped prevent or manage postpartum hemorrhage in women.
Subject: People, Reproduction, Disorders
Edwin Stephen Goodrich (1868-1946)
Edwin Stephen Goodrich studied the structures of animals in England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Goodrich studied how animals develop to identify their parts and to establish the evolutionary relationships between different species. Goodrich established that body structures can shift their positions relative to an organism's body during evolution, and he hypothesized that body structures can share ancestry (homology) between organisms of different species, even without identical body placement.
Dana Louise Raphael (1926–2016)
Dana Louise Raphael was an anthropologist and breastfeeding advocate in the US during the twentieth century. After she was unable to breastfeed her own infant, Raphael began to research why breastfeeding was more common in other cultures than in the US. As part of that research, Raphael cofounded the Human Lactation Center, where she studied the breastfeeding habits of mothers around the world. Through that research, she coordinated with formula manufacturers to educate women on the benefits of breastfeeding and formula supplementation to reduce infant mortality in developing nations.
Anthony Comstock (1844–1915)
Anthony Comstock was a US postal inspector and politician who advocated for the suppression of obscenity and vice throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Comstock considered any sexually explicit material like pornography and literature related to birth control and abortion as obscene. In 1873, Comstock lobbied US Congress to pass an anti-obscenity law titled An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, also called the Comstock Act.
Alec John Jeffreys (1950–)
Alec John Jeffreys created a process called DNA fingerprinting in the UK during the twentieth century. For DNA fingerprinting, technicians identify a person as the source of a biological sample by comparing the genetic information contained in the person's DNA to the DNA contained in the sample. Jeffreys developed the technique in the 1980s while at the University of Leicester in Leicester, UK. Jeffreys's technique had immediate applications. In forensic science, DNA fingerprinting enabled police to identify suspects of crimes based on their genetic identities.
Boris Ephrussi (1901-1979)
Boris Ephrussi studied fruit flies, yeast, and mouse genetics and development while working in France and the US during the twentieth century. In yeast, Ephrussi studied how mutations in the cytoplasm persisted across generations. In mice he studied the genetics of hybrids and the development of cancer. Working with George Wells Beadle on the causes of different eye colors in fruit flies, Ephrussi's research helped establish the one-gene-one-enzyme hypothesis. Ephrussi helped create new embryological techniques and contributed the theories of genetics and development.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805-1861)
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire studied anatomy and congenital abnormalities in humans and other animals in nineteenth century France. Under the tutelage of his father, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Isidore compiled and built on his father's studies of individuals with developmental malformations, then called monstrosities.
Subject: People, Disorders
Keith Henry Stockman Campbell (1954-2012)
Keith Henry Stockman Campbell studied embryo growth and cell differentiation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the UK. In 1995, Campbell and his scientific team used cells grown and differentiated in a laboratory to clone sheep for the first time. They named these two sheep Megan and Morag. Campbell and his team also cloned a sheep from adult cells in 1996, which they named Dolly. Dolly was the first mammal cloned from specialized adult (somatic) cells with the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Etienne Stephane Tarnier (1828–1897)
Etienne Stephane Tarnier was a physician who worked with premature infants in France during the nineteenth century. He worked at the Maternité Port-Royal in
Paris, France, a hospital for poor pregnant women. Tarnier developed and introduced prototypes of
infant incubators to the Maternité in 1881. Tarnier's incubators became standard in neonatal care,
especially for premature infants, enabling doctors to save many such infants that previously would
have died.
Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564)
Andreas Vesalius, also called Andries van Wesel, studied anatomy during the sixteenth century in Europe. Throughout his career, Vesalius thoroughly dissected numerous human cadavers, and took detailed notes and drawings of his research. Compiling his research, Vesalius published an anatomy work titled De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books). The Fabrica included illustrations of dissected men, women, and uteruses with intact fetuses.
Benjamin Harrison Willier (1890-1972)
Benjamin Harrison Willier is considered one of the most versatile embryologists to have ever practiced in the US. His research spanned most of the twentieth century, a time when the field of embryology evolved from being a purely descriptive pursuit to one of experimental research, to that of incorporating molecular biology into the research lab. Willier was born on 2 November 1890 near Weston, Ohio to Mary Alice Ricard. He spent his childhood doing farming chores and running the farm while his father, David Willier worked as a banker.
Max Ludwig Henning Delbruck (1906–1981)
Max Ludwig Henning Delbrick applied his knowledge of theoretical physics to biological systems such as bacterial viruses called bacteriophages, or phages, and gene replication during the twentieth century in Germany and the US. Delbrück demonstrated that bacteria undergo random genetic mutations to resist phage infections. Those findings linked bacterial genetics to the genetics of higher organisms. In the mid-twentieth century, Delbrück helped start the Phage Group and Phage Course in the US, which further organized phage research.
Priscilla White (1900–1989)
Priscilla White studied
the treatment of diabetes in mothers, pregnant women, and
children during the twentieth century in the US. White began
working with children with Type 1 diabetes in 1924 at Elliott
Proctor Joslin’s practice in Boston, Massachusetts. Type 1
diabetes is an incurable disease where the pancreas produces
little to no insulin. Insulin is a hormone that allows the body
to use sugar from food for energy and store sugars for future
use. Joslin and White co-authored many publications on children
Pope Pius XII (1876-1958)
Pope Pius XII was born Eugenio Maria Giuseppi Giovanni Pacelli on 2 March 1876 in Rome, Italy, to Virginia and Filippo Pacelli. Known for his oft-disputed role in the Roman Catholic Church's approach to the Nazis and World War II, Pope Pius XII also contributed a number of important documents regarding conception, fertility, abortion, and reproductive control to the Vatican's collection of writings and doctrine on procreation.
Subject: People, Religion, Reproduction
Leon Richard Kass (1939- )
A PhD and medical doctor turned ethicist, Leon Kass calls himself an unlicensed humanist. Throughout his unique career he has sought to impact others and engage important cultural issues. This he has accomplished over the course of many years by studying biochemistry, teaching humanities, writing articles and books on ethics, and serving as chair of the President's Council on Bioethics.
Subject: People, Ethics, Reproduction
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun known for her charitable work and attention to the poor, was born 26 August 1910. The youngest child of Albanian parents Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu, she was christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu and spent her early life in the place of her birth, present-day Skopje, in the Republic of Macedonia. In addition to her unwavering devotion to serve the sick and the poor, Mother Teresa firmly defended traditional Catholic teachings on more controversial issues, such as contraception and abortion.
Pope Gregory XIV (1535-1591)
Pope Gregory XIV, born Nicolo Sfondrati, reversed the bull of Pope Sixtus V, Effraenatum, under which an abortion at any time of gestation can be punished by excommunication. He supported the Aristotelian distinction between an "animated" and "unanimated" fetus, making abortion of an unanimated fetus punishable by lesser means. This decision contributed to the historical debates within the Roman Catholic Church on when a fetus has a soul, and when abortion was punishable by excommunication.
Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)
Pope Pius IX, born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, marked his contribution to the abortion debate by removing the distinction between an "animated" and "unanimated" fetus from Catholic doctrine, and established the edict that a human should be protected starting from the moment of conception onward. This proclamation made abortion at any time of gestation punishable by excommunication. Pope Pius IX's decision became Canon Law of the Catholic Church.
Pope Pius XI (1857-1939)
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was born to the wealthy owner of a silk factory on 31 May 1857 in Desio, Italy. He was ordained to the priesthood at the age of eighteen, at which time he began a long life devoted to study, peacekeeping, and the betterment of societies around the world. Pius XI is noted here for his contribution to the Roman Catholic Church's early twentieth century approach to issues regarding contraception and abortion, which was presented in his December 1930 encyclical "Casti Connubii."
Pope Innocent XI (1611-1689)
Pope Innocent XI, born Benedetto Odescalchi, made considerable contributions to the Roman Catholic approach to embryology by condemning several propositions on liberal moral theology in 1679, including two related to abortion and ensoulment. His rejection of these principles strengthened the Church's stance against abortion and for the idea of "hominization," meaning the presence of human qualities before birth.
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Pope Francis Suppresses Ecclesia Dei, Transfers Duties to CDF
by Edward Pentin
As had been widely expected, Pope Francis has issued a papal decree suppressing the pontifical commission charged with bringing separated traditional Catholics linked to the Society of St. Pius X back into full communion.
In a motu proprio signed Jan. 17 and published today, the Pope decreed that the Pontifical Commission ‘Ecclesia Dei’ is to be abolished but that its work will continue in a “special section” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Francis said he decided to issue the decree after “ample reflection,” and having considered what he called the “changed conditions” today compared to those that led Pope St. John Paul II creating the body in 1988.
The Pope praised the achievements of the pontifical commission in helping those connected with the SSPX to “remain united with the Successor Peter while preserving their own spiritual and liturgical traditions.”
He also noted significant developments since the commission was founded: Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum which fully liberalized celebration of Mass in the Extraordinary Form, and Benedict’s reorganization of the commission following his lifting of the excommunications of four SSPX bishops in 2009.
Pope Francis said he came to his decision after officials requested in November 2017 that the CDF directly handle dialogue between the Holy See and the SSPX.
He consented to their request in January 2018, recognizing that the “questions being dealt with” are “of a doctrinal nature.”
The Holy Father also noted that institutes and religious communities which are used to celebrating the Extraordinary Form “have today found their own stability of number and of life.”
The Pope also said he took the decision because he wants the aims of the pontifical commission to be “made ever more evident to the conscience of the ecclesial communities.”
As a result, the Pope ruled that “Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, instituted on July 2, 1988 with the Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei adflicta, is suppressed.”
He said the tasks of the commission are now “entirely assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, within which a special section will be set up to continue the work of vigilance, promotion and protection conducted so far by the suppressed Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.”
He also said the commission’s budget will now be “part of the ordinary accounting of the above-mentioned Congregation.”
The motu proprio is to come into force “immediately.”
As part of a separate motu proprio published today on the future of the Sistine Chapel Choir, the Pope appointed the outgoing Secretary of Ecclesia Dei, Archbishop Guido Pozzo, as the choir’s superintendent to the economy.
L’Osservatore Romano Article
In an explanatory article in today’s L’Osservatore Romano, and which Francis refers to in the motu proprio, Nicola Gori writes that “conditions and circumstances change, but the dialogue continues” with the SSPX and with all those who have followed its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
He explained that the “main core of this dialogue is now made up of mainly doctrinal issues” which has “led” Pope Francis to take the decision announced today. He stressed it is not a question of “total abolition” of the commission but rather “a transfer of competences given that the main axis on which the task will be set is restricted to the doctrinal sphere.”
“This means that progress has been made in communion and therefore the current motu proprio offers an implicit recognition of the pontifical commission which, with its efforts and its activity, has brought its own duties to a conclusion.”
An informed Vatican source told the Register that the motu proprio is “essentially” a good development towards helping the SSPX return to full communion.
But he added that primarily it “represents a normalization of the ecclesiastical status of traditionalist communities in the Pius X ambit which many years ago were reconciled with the See of Peter, as well as those celebrating the extraordinary form.” Both areas, he noted, have been “administered by Ecclesia Dei until now.”
He also pointed out that “dialogue with the SSPX has actually been the responsibility of the CDF for some time.”
Gori notes in his article that with the 2009 motu proprio Ecclesiae unitatem, Benedict had “organically linked” the commission with the CDF.
Ecclesia Dei's Origins
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX in 1970 in response to errors he believed had entered into the Church following the Second Vatican Council.
Pope St. John Paul II set up the Pontifical Commission in 1988 in response to Archbishop Lefebvre’s decision that year to consecrate four bishops without papal permission, a schismatic decision according to the Vatican which led to Archbishop Lefebvre’s excommunication along with those of the four bishops. Benedict XVI lifted the four bishops' excommunications in 2009.
The commission’s role was originally to care for Archbishop Lefebvre’s followers who wished to remain united with the successor of Peter, also serving as the chief Vatican body in overseeing efforts to regularize the SSPX and bringing them back into full communion with Rome.
The commission also had the task of regularizing canonical situations of religious communities of a traditionalist nature, giving them a canonical form corresponding to their charism.
Added to this, the commission had the responsibility of working with local bishops to facilitate Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (according to the 1962 Missal) for those faithful who request it, especially after Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.
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Agreement between NBT, Total, EBRD on Syvash project signed in Davos
An agreement was signed between the Norwegian company NBT, the French company Total-Eren and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) regarding the Syvash Project with participation of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and President of the EBRD Suma Chakrabarti on January 23, 2019.
The signing ceremony took place in Davos (Switzerland) in the Ukrainian House before a meeting of the National Investment Council.
The arrival of NBT, Total in Ukraine shows that the country is now the second largest European market, Chakrabarti said during the signing of the document. He expressed confidence that NBT will have more projects.
"This shows that foreign investors are returning on the back of reform in Ukraine," he said.
Head of the Office of the National Investment Council Yuliya Kovaliv wrote on her Facebook page that Total-Eren, the subsidiary of the French energy giant Total, is entering the Ukrainian market and jointly with Norway's NBT will invest in construction of a wind farm with a capacity of 250 MW in the coming 18 months. Over EUR 350 million will be invested in the project.
"The project will be financed in the amount of EUR 150 million by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development together with a consortium of banks. The relevant agreement was signed today [on January 23] in Davos at a meeting of the National Investment Council," she wrote.
As reported, on November 28, 2018, the EBRD approved the issue of a loan of up to EUR 150 million to Syvashenergoprom LLC (Kherson region, a subsidiary of Norway's NBT) for the construction of a wind power plant with an installed capacity of 250 MW in Kherson region.
Norway's NBT bought Syvashenergoprom LLC in April 2018 (it operates a wind farm with a capacity of about 3 MW) and intends to build wind plants with an installed capacity of 250-330 MW in the adjacent territories.
In 2006, Kherson Regional State Administration transferred the unfinished Syvash wind power plant to concession to Syvashenergoprom LLC until 2055. In 2011, Syvashenergoprom signed a lease agreement for land plots of 12 hectares under the concession wind farm and 1,300 hectares intended for the construction of new wind and solar generating capacities.
Early September 2018, an agreement on the implementation of an international investment project to build a complex of wind farms in Kherson region with Norway's NBT to play the leading role in the project was signed. According to the agreement, by the end of 2019 a total 67 wind units will be built along the northern coast of the Syvash Lake. The total investment under the agreement is around $450 million.
Tags: #ebrd #total #davos
Farmak raises EUR 15 mln loan from EBRD
EBRD to issue EUR 20 mln to Dniprovska agro-industrial group to reconstruct slaughtering house
EBRD to continue cooperation with Ukraine irrespective of election campaign
Lviv's Innovation District IT Park seeks to attract up to $100 mln from EBRD, IFC for construction
EBRD to provide EUR 19.7 mln for Scatec Solar to build solar power plant in Chyhyryn
EBRD may lend EUR 60 mln to Naftogaz for purchase of gas
Ukrtransgaz asks EBRD, EIB to revise modernization loan for Ukraine's section of Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod gas pipeline
EBRD counts on acceleration of preparing Ukrgazvydobuvannia loan project
EBRD supports postponing launch of electricity market in Ukraine, but considers one-year term excessive
EBRD strategy in line with priorities of Ukraine, country and bank can work more efficiently
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Australia's ABC head Levy leaves for "Channel Nine"
Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) television head, Sandra Levy, has quit to become the director of development for "Channel Nine." Her new role is expected to focus on drama.
ABC managing director Russell Balding said that Ms Levy had lifted audiences to "historically unprecedented" levels. However, Ms Levy came under fire during her ABC tenure for an overly conservative programming approach to major news stories - notably a sluggish response to coverage of the December 2004 South Asian Tsunami. She was criticised for refusing to interrupt regular programming to go to breaking news reports.
The Channel Nine network, that she now joins, is in a rebuilding phase after coming under heavy ratings pressure in the past 12 months. Long the dominant commercial network in Australia, in 2005 it has seen numerous changes in its executive ranks, including the sudden resignation of CEO David Gyngell.
Channel Nine's interim CEO, television veteran Sam Chisholm, has launched cost-cutting at the network.
Daniel Ziffer. "ABC's Levy leaves for Nine" — The Age, September, 6, 2005
"ABC TV chief heads for Channel Nine" — ABC News Online, September, 6, 2005
The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article. This is currently the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Australia%27s_ABC_head_Levy_leaves_for_%22Channel_Nine%22&oldid=434058"
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British Arabs
(Redirected from British Arab)
British Arabs (Arabic: عرب بريطانيا) are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom that are of Arab ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage or identity from Arab countries.
عرب بريطانيا
Regions with significant populations
London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle upon Tyne, Leicester, Nottingham, York
Arabic (160,000 native speakers in England and Wales[citation needed]) · British English
Islam (Sunni, Shia; also Sufi);
Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Melkite, Protestantism, Anglican, etc.)
Related ethnic groups
'Other Ethnic Group' (UK Census), Arabs
OverviewEdit
Unlike Black British or Asian British, the term British Arab was not one of those employed in government ethnicity categorisations used in the 2001 UK Census and for national statistics.[2] As a result, community members are believed to have been under-counted in previous population estimates according to the National Association of British Arabs (NABA). This absence of a separate "Arab" category in the UK census obliged many to select other ethnicity categories.[3] In the late 2000s, the British government announced that an "Arab" ethnicity category would be added to the 2011 UK Census for the first time.[4] The decision came at the request of the National Association of British Arabs and other Arab organizations, who lobbied for the inclusion of a separate "Arab" entry to accommodate under-reported groups from the Arab world.[5] As a result, 240,545 British Arabs were reported in the 2011 Census in England and Wales.[1] In NABA's report on the 2011 Census, it broke down answers from the Ethnic Write-In Responses that NABA classifies as Arab, namely "Arab", "African Arab", "White and Arab", "Moroccan", "North African", "Other Middle East", "Somali", "Somalilander" or "White and North African". It also notes that how many of the individual identities responded in the general "Arab" box is uncertain so there may be some overlap in the numbers; it found 366,769 Arabs in England and Wales.[1]
"British Arabs" is used as an official ethnic designation by the National Association of British Arabs.[6] It is also employed by academics,[7] and in the media.[8]
As of 2011, the National Association of British Arabs estimates that there are around 366,769 first and second generation British Arabs.[1] The largest amount originate from Somalia (99,484 or 27%), Iraq (70,426 or 19%), Egypt (28,927 or 8%), Saudi Arabia (29,076 or 8%), and Morocco (21,016 or 6%).[9] Most live in the Greater London area, and many are either businesspeople, recent immigrants or students.[3] There are also sizable and long-established Yemeni Arab communities living in both Cardiff and the South Shields area, the latter near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
A diverse community, British Arabs are represented in the business and media fields, among other areas. Miladi's 2006 survey of 146 community members during the summer of 2001 reported Al-Jazeera as being the respondents' preferred news outlet. Reasons supplied for the selection included the quality of the station's programs and transmission, its discussion of current issues in the Arab world, and the possibility of giving voice to the community's concerns and positions on various matters.[10]
Additionally, 2010 was a breakthrough year in terms of political participation. Several British Arabs ran for and/or were appointed to office as community representatives.[11][12]
ReligionEdit
According to the 2011 Census, the religious breakdown of Arabs in England and Wales can be seen in the table below.[13]
Percentage of Arab population in England and Wales[13]
Islam 77.27%
Christianity 9.54%
Hinduism 0.46%
Judaism 0.25%
Sikhism 0.22%
Buddhism 0.17%
Not Stated 6.54%
No religion 5.18%
Other religions 0.37%
Total 100%
Famous British ArabsEdit
Lowkey, musician
Shadia Mansour, musician
Julia Sawalha, actress
Zaha Hadid, architect
Jade Thirlwall, member of Little Mix (half Arab)
United Kingdom portal
Arab diaspora
Arabs in Europe
British Arab Commercial Bank
List of British Muslims
^ a b c d "REPORT ON THE 2011 CENSUS – MAY 2013 – Arabs and Arab League Population in the UK". National Association of British Arabs. Archived from the original on May 29, 2014. Retrieved 25 April 2014.
^ "Population size: 7.9% from a minority ethnic group". Office for National Statistics. 2003-02-13. Archived from the original on 2009-05-27. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
^ a b Jalili, I.K. "Study for consideration of inclusion of 'Arab' as an ethnic group on ethnicity profile forms" (PDF). National Association of British Arabs. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 30 November 2012.
^ "2011 Census Questions Published". BBC News. 2009-10-21. Retrieved 2010-04-27.
^ "Arab Population in the UK - Study for consideration of inclusion of 'Arab' as an ethnic group on future census returns". Archived from the original on 2013-01-09. Retrieved 2012-12-30.
^ "The National Association of British Arabs". The National Association of British Arabs. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
^ Nagel, Caroline (2001). "Hidden minorities and the politics of 'race': The case of British Arab activists in London". Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 27 (3): 381–400. doi:10.1080/136918301200266130.
^ Akbar, Arifa (2004-01-10). "Kilroy was here... BBC suspends daytime host". The Independent. London. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
^ "REPORT ON THE 2011 CENSUS – MAY 2013 – Arabs and Arab League Population in the UK". National Association of British Arabs. Archived from the original on October 8, 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2015.
^ Miladi, Noureddine (August 2006). "Satellite TV News and the Arab Diaspora in Britain: Comparing Al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN" (PDF). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 32 (6): 947–960. doi:10.1080/13691830600761552. Retrieved 30 November 2012. [permanent dead link]
^ Tarbush, Susannah (26 April 2010). "Arab engagement in the British general and local elections". Al-Hayat. Retrieved 30 November 2012.
^ Tarbush, Susannah (17 June 2010). "Mixed results in the British general and local elections for candidates of Middle Eastern origin". Al-Hayat. Retrieved 30 November 2012.
^ a b DC2201EW - Ethnic group and religion (Excel sheet 21Kb) ONS. 2015-09-15. Retrieved on 2016-01-14.
National Association of British Arabs
Arab British Centre
British Arabs Resource Centre Broken link
Arab British Chamber of Commerce (ABCC)
BBC Arab London
Reassessing what we collect website – Arab London History of Arab London with objects and images - Broken link
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Arabs&oldid=900530988"
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Don Was
Don Was – Americana Music Association showcase – Nashville, TN (2010)
Don Fagenson
(1952-09-13) September 13, 1952 (age 66)
Detroit, Michigan, US
Rock, new wave
Musician, Record Producer, Record Executive
Bass guitar, guitar, vocals, piano
Orquestra Was Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, John Mayer, Bob Weir and Wolf Bros
Don Edward Fagenson (born September 13, 1952), known as Don Was, is an American musician, record producer and record executive. Primarily a bass player, Was co-founded the funk-rock band Was (Not Was). In later years he produced songs and albums for a large number of popular recording artists. In 2012, he became president of jazz music label Blue Note Records.
1 Life and career
3 Selected discography
Life and career[edit]
Born in Detroit, Michigan,[1] Was graduated from Oak Park High School in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, then attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor but dropped out after the first year. A journeyman musician, he grew up listening to the Detroit blues sound and the jazz music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, amongst many others. As a teenager, Was was further influenced by the Beat Generation, most notably John Sinclair.
In high school, Was was the lead singer and guitar player in a Detroit rock band called the Saturns.
The first recording project that he engineered and produced was in 1971 with drummer Muruga Booker on a recording called Rama Rama / Endless Path.[2]
Using the stage name "Don Was", he formed the group Was (Not Was) with school friend David Weiss (David Was). The group found commercial success in the 1980s – releasing four albums and logging several hit records. Their biggest hit was "Walk the Dinosaur", off of their album What up, Dog? A jazz/R&B album of Hank Williams covers, "Forever's A Long, Long Time" was released in 1997, under the name Orquestra Was.[3] In 2008, Was (Not Was) reunited for an acclaimed new album titled Boo! and tour.
Was has received four Grammy Awards including the 1994 Grammy Award for Producer of the Year.[4][5] He produced several albums for Bonnie Raitt including her Nick of Time album that won the 1989 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.[4] Don also collaborated with co-producer Ziggy Marley, on Family Time, winner of 2009's Best Musical Album For Children.[4] He produced the Rolling Stones 2016 album Blue and Lonesome, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues album.
He served as music director and/or consultant for several motion pictures such as Thelma and Louise, The Rainmaker, Hope Floats, Phenomenon, Tin Cup, Honeymoon in Vegas, 8 Seconds, Switch, The Freshman, Days of Thunder, Michael, Prêt-à-Porter, Boys on the Side, Toy Story and The Paper.
In 1997, he directed and produced a documentary, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, about former Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and won the San Francisco Film Festival's Golden Gate Award. He also received the British Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Original Score in recognition of his compositions for the film Backbeat.
Was, who is a fan of the Rolling Stones and saw them in concert when he was age 12 in 1964, produced their albums Voodoo Lounge, Stripped, Bridges to Babylon, Forty Licks, Live Licks, A Bigger Bang and Blue & Lonesome. He also worked on the Rolling Stones's reissues Exile on Main Street, released in May 2010 and Some Girls released in October 2011. Was scoured old master recordings of the albums for lost gems, remastering some songs while producing entirely new vocals and tracks on others.[6]
Was also produced the B-52's 1989 album Cosmic Thing, which included their smash hit "Love Shack".
Since 2008, Was has hosted the proceedings (and led the house band) at the Detroit All-Star Revue, an annual showcase of local acts from the Detroit music scene.[7]
From 2009 to 2012, Don hosted a weekly radio show on Sirius XM satellite radio's Outlaw Country channel called The Motor City Hayride.[8] During the 2011 season of American Idol, Was appeared in several episodes producing contestants Haley Reinhart, Scotty McCreery, Paul McDonald, Lauren Alaina and Casey Abrams.
In January 2012, he was appointed president of the jazz record label, Blue Note Records in succession to Bruce Lundvall.[9]
He won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction for his work on the CBS TV special "The Beatles: The Night That Changed America."
On November 18, 2015, at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington DC, he led the house band that performed at a concert celebrating Willie Nelson, recipient of the 2015 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.[10]
In 2018, Was joined former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Jay Lane to form Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio which undertook a North American tour in the Fall of 2018 [11], and continued with a second tour of twenty more shows in the Spring of 2019. [12]
Don Was is the father of three sons who are also musicians; Tony, who plays in Eve 6, Henry plays in Thumpasaurus, and Justin Jay's Fantastic Voyage, and Solomon who has played in Leven Kali, and Felly. Don is married to former Virgin Records A&R executive and video director Gemma Corfield, and is the brother of Dr. Nancy Fagenson Potok, Chief Statistician of the United States of America, who is also former Principal Associate Director and Chief Financial Officer of the US Census Bureau and Deputy Undersecretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce.
Selected discography[edit]
1981: Was (Not Was) – Was (Not Was) (Bass, Synthesizer, Vocals, Producer)
1982: The Beat Goes On – Orbit featuring Carol Hall (Co-Producer)
1983: Born to Laugh at Tornadoes – Was (Not Was) (Producer, Bass. Keyboards, Engineer)
1984: Into the Hot – Floy Joy (producer)
1985: Spoiled Girl – Carly Simon (producer)
1986 Weak in the Presence of Beauty – Floy Joy (producer)
1986 Madness of It All – The Ward Brothers (producer)
1986 Cross That Bridge – The Ward Brothers (producer)
1988: What Up, Dog? – Was (Not Was) (Producer, engineer, Bass, Guitar, Keyboards)
1989: Nick of Time – Bonnie Raitt (keyboards, producer)
1989: Cosmic Thing – The B-52s (producer)
1990: Take It to Heart – Michael McDonald (programming, producer, synthesizer, sequencing, synthesizer programming)
1990: Brick by Brick – Iggy Pop (producer)
1990: Under the Red Sky – Bob Dylan (bass, producer)
1990: To Be Continued – Elton John (Producer)
1991: Khaled – Khaled (Producer, Bass, Keyboards)
1991: Are You Okay? – Was (Not Was) (Producer, Bass, engineer, Guitar, Vocals)
1991: Luck of the Draw – Bonnie Raitt (producer)
1991: The Fire Inside – Bob Seger (bass, producer)
1992: Kirya – Ofra Haza (producer)
1992: Arkansas Traveler – Michelle Shocked (producer)
1992: Time Takes Time – Ringo Starr (producer)
1992: Good Stuff – The B-52s (producer)
1992: Read My Lips – A Thousand Points of Night (one-off side project alias)
1992: Strange Weather – Glenn Frey (producer)
1992: King of Hearts – Roy Orbison (producer, Hammond organ, background vocals)
1992: Never Been Rocked Enough – Delbert McClinton (Producer)
1993: Across the Borderline – Willie Nelson (producer)
1993: Thousand Roads – David Crosby (producer)
1993: I'm Alive – Jackson Browne (producer)
1994: Longing in Their Hearts – Bonnie Raitt (bass, producer)
1994: Voodoo Lounge – The Rolling Stones (producer)
1994: "Waymore's Blues" – Waylon Jennings (Producer and Bass)
1995: The Road Goes on Forever – The Highwaymen (producer)
1995: MTV Unplugged – Bob Dylan (mixing)
1995: I Just Wasn't Made for These Times – Brian Wilson (producer)
1995: Road Tested – Bonnie Raitt (producer)
1995: Stripped – The Rolling Stones (producer/Hammond B-3 Organ)
1996: The Restless Kind – Travis Tritt (producer)
1996: Organic – Joe Cocker (Producer)
1996: El Equilibrio de los Jaguares – Jaguares (Producer)
1997: Bridges to Babylon – The Rolling Stones (bass, keyboards, executive producer, producer, piano)
1997: Undiscovered Soul – Richie Sambora (producer)
1999: Suicaine Gratifaction – Paul Westerberg (producer)
1999: Spirit of Music – Ziggy Marley (producer)
1999: Avenue B – Iggy Pop (producer)
1999: In the Life of Chris Gaines – Garth Brooks (producer)
2000: Maroon – Barenaked Ladies (producer)
2001: Lions – The Black Crowes (bass, producer, mixing)
2002: The Wide World Over – The Chieftains (Producer, Bass)
2003: Hootie & the Blowfish – Hootie & the Blowfish (producer)
2004: Live Licks – The Rolling Stones (producer)
2005: Countryman – Willie Nelson (producer)
2005: Make Do with What You Got – Solomon Burke (Producer)
2005: A Bigger Bang – The Rolling Stones (producer, piano)
2006: This Old Road – Kris Kristofferson (producer, piano, acoustic and upright bass)
2006: "Out of the Ashes" – Jessi Colter (Producer, Bass)
2006: Fly – Zucchero (producer)
2008: Last Days at the Lodge – Amos Lee (producer)
2008: Tennessee Pusher – Old Crow Medicine Show (producer)
2008: Boo! – Was (Not Was) (Producer, engineer, Bass, Keyboards, Drums, Vocals)
2009: The Excitement Plan – Todd Snider (producer)
2009: Shimmer (EP) – Pieta Brown (Producer, Bass)
2009: Acquired Taste – Delbert McClinton (Producer)
2009: Closer to the Bone – Kris Kristofferson (producer)
2009: "California Years – Jill Sobule (Producer, Bass)
2010: Y Not – Ringo Starr (bass)
2010: Stone Temple Pilots – Stone Temple Pilots (producer)
2010: Welder – Elizabeth Cook (Producer)
2010: The Union – Elton John/Leon Russell (bass)
2010: Chocabeck – Zucchero (producer)
2011: Wild and Free – Ziggy Marley (producer)
2011: The Gate – Kurt Elling (producer)
2011: Blessed – Lucinda Williams (producer)
2012: Born and Raised – John Mayer (producer)
2012: Born to Sing: No Plan B – Van Morrison (producer)
2012: La sesion cubana – Zucchero (producer)
2013: My True Story – Aaron Neville (co-producer with Keith Richards)
2013: Paradise Valley – John Mayer (producer)
2013: Una rosa blanca – Zucchero (producer)
2014: You Should Be So Lucky – Benmont Tench (bass)
2014: Melody Road – Neil Diamond (producer)
2014: "All My Friends" concert January 14, 2014 – A tribute to Gregg Allman – Bass
2014: Rester Vivant – Johnny Hallyday (producer)
2014: Everlasting - Martina McBride (producer)
2014: Enjoy the View - Bobby Hutcherson, David Sandborn, Joey DeFrancesco (producer)
2014: Heigh Ho - Blake Mills (bass)
2014: All Rise - Jason Moran (producer)
2015: Yesterday I Had the Blues - Jose James (producer)
2015: Duets: Re-working the Catalogue - Van Morrison (producer)
2015: No Pier Pressure - Brian Wilson (bass)
2015: 1 Hopeful Rd. - Vintage Trouble (producer)
2016: Black Cat – Zucchero (producer)
2016: Blue & Lonesome – The Rolling Stones (producer)
2017: Southern Blood - Gregg Allman (producer)
^ "Don Was – Biography". Allmusic. Retrieved March 29, 2014.
^ Muruga - Rama Rama / Endless Path on Bandcamp
^ "Don Was Biography". Musician Guide. Retrieved March 29, 2014.
^ a b c "Grammy Award Past Winners Search – Don Was". Grammy.com. Retrieved March 29, 2014.
^ Harrington, Richard (August 26, 1995). "Brian Wilson's Sensational Safari". The Washington Post. p. D.01. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
^ Don Was Revisits 'Exile On Main Street' National Public Radio United States May 16, 2010
^ DeVito, Lee (July 8, 2015). "Get Your Mojo Working". Detroit Metro Times. Euclid Media. 35 (39): 58. Retrieved September 3, 2015.
^ "Don Was Joins Sirius XM for Show". AllAccess.com. Retrieved March 29, 2014.
^ Chinen, Nate (May 2, 2012). "Exuberance Is Just One of His Skills". The New York Times. Retrieved May 4, 2012.
^ Thanki, Juli (November 18, 2015). "Willie Nelson saluted by Alison Krauss, Jamey Johnson, more". The Tennessean. Retrieved November 19, 2015.
^ "Bob Weir & Wolf Bros. Announce Fall Tour". jambase.com. Retrieved November 2, 2018.
^ "Bob Weir & Wolf Bros Confirm Spring Tour 2019". jambase.com. Retrieved March 22, 2019.
David Was
"Sweet Pea" Atkinson
Harry Bowens
Born to Laugh at Tornadoes
What Up, Dog?
"Out Come the Freaks"
"Where Did Your Heart Go?"
"(Return to the Valley of) Out Come the Freaks"
"Spy in the House of Love"
"Walk the Dinosaur"
"Out Come the Freaks (Again)"
"Papa Was a Rollin' Stone"
"Listen Like Thieves"
"Shake Your Head"
BAFTA Award for Best Film Music
John Barry (1968)
Mikis Theodorakis (1969)
Burt Bacharach (1970)
Michel Legrand (1971)
Nino Rota (1972)
Alan Price (1973)
Richard Rodney Bennett (1974)
Bernard Herrmann (1976)
John Addison (1977)
Ennio Morricone (1979)
Carl Davis (1981)
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1983)
Maurice Jarre (1985)
Andrea and Ennio Morricone (1990)
Jean-Claude Petit (1991)
David Hirschfelder (1992)
Don Was (1994)
Luis Bacalov (1995)
Gabriel Yared (1996)
Nellee Hooper (1997)
Thomas Newman (1999)
Tan Dun (2000)
Craig Armstrong and Marius de Vries (2001)
Philip Glass (2002)
T Bone Burnett and Gabriel Yared (2003)
Gustavo Santaolalla (2004)
Christopher Gunning (2007)
A. R. Rahman (2008)
Michael Giacchino (2009)
Alexandre Desplat (2010)
Ludovic Bource (2011)
Steven Price (2013)
Justin Hurwitz (2016)
Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, and Lukas Nelson (2018)
BNF: cb14021039d (data)
MusicBrainz: b5ae32fc-5625-4a9a-99eb-f036c88b4f62
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Don_Was&oldid=892685399"
American Jews
American male singers
American record producers
Grammy Award winners
University of Michigan alumni
People from Oak Park, Michigan
Was (Not Was) members
American rock bass guitarists
American music industry executives
Singers from Detroit
Guitarists from Detroit
American male bass guitarists
20th-century American bass guitarists
20th-century male musicians
Pages using Template:Infobox musical artist with unknown parameters
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Look up troublemaker in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Troublemaker, The Troublemaker, Trouble Maker, or Trouble Makers may refer to:
1 Film
3.1 Albums
3.2 Songs
4 Other uses
Troublemaker Studios, a Texan film production company founded by Robert Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan
The Troublemaker (1924 film), a Spanish silent film
Trouble Makers (1948 film), an American film
The Troublemaker (1950 film), a Spanish musical comedy film
The Troublemaker (1963 film), a Spanish musical film
The Troublemaker (1964 film), a film by Theodore J. Flicker
Troublemakers (1994 film), a Western comedy film
Trouble Maker (film), a 1995 Taiwan and Hong Kong romance comedy film
The Trouble-Makers, a 2003 Hong Kong film
Trouble Makers (2006 film), a Chinese film
Troublemakers (2015 film), a documentary film by James Crump
Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, a 2015 book by Leah Remini
Troublemaker: Let's Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again, a 2011 book by Christine O'Donnell
The Troublemaker (zarzuela), a Spanish zarzuela (opera)
Trouble Maker (duo), a South Korean music duo
Troublemakers (French band), an electronic music band
Troublemakers (Swedish band), a punk rock bank
Albums[edit]
Troublemaker (album), a 1979 album by Ian McLagan
The Troublemaker (album), a 1976 album by Willie Nelson
Trouble Maker (album), a 2017 album by Rancid
Trouble Maker (EP), a 2011 EP by Trouble Maker
Songs[edit]
"Troublemaker" (Akon song) (2008)
"Troublemaker" (Arashi song) (2010)
"Troublemaker" (Taio Cruz song) (2011)
"Trouble-Maker", a 1976 song by Roberta Kelly
"Troublemaker" (Olly Murs song), (2012)
"Troublemaker" (Weezer song) (2008)
"Trouble Maker", a 1976 song by Hummingbird
"Trouble Maker", a 1969 song by Johnny Darrell
"Troublemaker", a 2012 song by Green Day
Trouble Maker, an American gasser driven by Joe Lunati
Troublemaker, an American harness racing horse that won the 1984 Messenger Stakes
Troublemaker, a 2014 Showtime Dane Cook comedy special
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Troublemaker.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Troublemaker&oldid=885343643"
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Children, Schools and Families Bill/Amendments to Section 19D of Schedule 1
From Wikiversity
< Children, Schools and Families Bill(Redirected from Children Schools and Families Bill/Amendments to Section 19D of Schedule 1)
1 Current wording of Section 19B
2 Proposed amendment 1
6 How Section 19D would look when amended
Current wording of Section 19B[edit]
19D Duration of registration
(1) Subsection (2) applies if a parent of a child has made an application to a local authority in England, in the prescribed manner, for the child’s details to be entered on their home education register.
(2) The child is to be treated for the purposes of this Act as being registered on the register throughout the registration period; and references in this Act to a child being registered on an authority’s home education register are to be interpreted accordingly.
(3) The registration period begins with the date on which the application for entry of the child’s details on the register is received by the authority.
(4) Subject to subsection (5), the registration period ends—
(a) where the authority give notice to the child’s parent under section 19B(5)(a), with the expiry of the period of 12 months starting with the date of the notice;
(b) where the authority give notice to the child’s parent under section 19B(5)(b) or (c), with the date of the notice.
(5) If before the end of the period mentioned in subsection (4)(a)—
(a) the authority give notice to the child’s parent under section 19F(3), or
(b) the child ceases to be of compulsory school age,
the registration period ends with the date of the notice or (as the case may be) with the date on which the child ceases to be of compulsory school age.
Proposed amendment 1[edit]
Section 19D(1) Replace "made an application to" with "notified"
Section 19D(3) Replace "application" with "notification"
Section 19D(4)(a) After the comma, replace with "when the parents notify the authority that the registration is no longer required because the child is attending school"
Section 19D(4)(b) replace with "where a court has determined that registration should be revoked and a school attendance order applied".
How Section 19D would look when amended[edit]
(1) Subsection (2) applies if a parent of a child has notified a local authority in England, in the prescribed manner, for the child’s details to be entered on their home education register.
(3) The registration period begins with the date on which the notification for entry of the child’s details on the register is received by the authority.
(a) where the authority give notice to the child’s parent under section 19B(5)(a), when the parents notify the authority that the registration is no longer required because the child is attending school;
(b) where a court has determined that registration should be revoked and a school attendance order applied.
Children Schools and Families Bill
Explanatory notes for Amendments
Amendments to Section 19B of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19C of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19D of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19E of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19F of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19G of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19H of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 19I of Schedule 1
Proposed new Section 19J of Schedule 1
Amendments to Section 437 of EA 1996
Wish-list for Amendments
Discussion on Amendments
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Children,_Schools_and_Families_Bill/Amendments_to_Section_19D_of_Schedule_1&oldid=1677502"
Children, Schools and Families Bill
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Natuurfoto (English Translation)
Butterflies and Caterpillars
Amphibians and Reptiles
Zoom-In
Photo Tips and Tricks
The map butterfly is very unusual indeed.
For many reasons, the Map (Araschnia levana) is a very special butterfly. It was first seen in South Limburg in 1939. By the early sixties, it was found throughout the southern half of the Netherlands, and in 1983 it reached the West Frisian Islands of Texel and Terschelling. Since then, it is a butterfly that you can find in the entire country.
Another unusual fact about the map butterfly is that it looks very different in the spring and the summer. So different, in fact, that Carolus Linnaeus cataloged them as two different species in 1758. The spring map as Papilio levana and the summer form as Papilio prorsa.
When butterflies appear different from one season to the next, they call that seasonal dimorphism. This is caused by the length of the days and temperature during the caterpillar and pupae stages.
The first generation in the spring is red-orange with black spots, while the summer generation is black with a white band, and looks like a miniature white admiral. On the underside of the wings is a complex pattern of colored spots and stripes, It looks a bit like a map, and this is where this butterfly gets its name.
Also interesting is the way the females lay their eggs in long strings, one on top of the other. on the underside of stinging nettles, the larval food source.It is thought that they resemble the nettle flowers, confusing predators. These string vary from 5 to sometimes 20 eggs long. Each female will lay an average of 67 eggs at a time, and will lay 3 or 4 times. That nearly 200 eggs total.
The map usually flies in two generations, but if warm weather persists, can sometimes produce a third generation. Then you’ll see map butterflies flying until the middle of October. The markings of this third generation is sometimes a combination of the the spring and summer generations. The map will hibernate over the winter as pupae.
Above: The spring generation, the underside of the wing, and the summer generation.
Left: Eggs, caterpillar, and pupae.
Website Copyright © 2019 - All images copyright Frans Hodzelmans - Website Design by Hotpixels.com
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WOAI-TV
Children's TV Programming Report Amendment
Report reflects information for : Second Quarter of 2016
Are attachments (other than associated schedules) being filed with this application? Yes
WOAI LICENSEE, LLC
Doing Business As: WOAI LICENSEE, LLC
C/O CLIFFORD HARRINGTON, PILLSBURY WINTH
1200 SEVENTEENTH STREET, NW
CLIFFORD.HARRINGTON@PILLSBURYLAW.COM
CLIFFORD M. HARRINGTON, ESQ.
PILLSBURY WINTHROP SHAW PITTMAN LLP
Affiliated network NBC
Nielsen DMA San Antonio
Web Home Page Address www.news4sanantonio.com
Program Title Family Style
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 10:00-10:30am (4/2/2016 - 6/25/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Chef Jeff teaches viewers how making the right choices in the kitchen can lead to life-changing experiences for the entire family. Each episode features interesting and valuable health and nutrition information as viewers also learn how to cook healthier versions of some of their favorite dishes. Family Style also helps young viewers to retain and reflect on important and current health-related information. Some of the other features of the program are nutritional quizzes, health tips, and positive reinforcement from Chef Jeff. This program's mission is to help viewers make well-informed choices about their eating habits, nutrition and health. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title Animal Atlas
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 8:00 - 8:30am (4/2/2016 - 6/25/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Life science, biological science, photography and humor combine to provide viewers of this program with life science concepts, animal classification, as well as the anatomy and physiology information of animals. The viewers are taken around the biomes of the world, merging the fascination of the animal world with a greater understanding of the relationship between the branches of the animal kingdom. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title Nina's World
Age of Target Child Audience 2 years to 5 years
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program is an animated series about the childhood adventures of a six year girl named Nina, her family and neighborhood. The program celebrates multiculturalism and family in Nina's close-knit household, where she's cared for by her parents and her grandmother. Elements of their Latino heritage are prominent. Its multilingual approach incorporates English, some Spanish and American Sign Language. Children learn inclusiveness, as well as the value of communicating across multiple languages and appreciating other cultures. (THIS PROGRAM AIRS ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program Nina's World
Date Preempted 2016-06-04
Episode # #NNW103
Program Title Floogals
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This animated program features the Floogals, aliens who travel in a spaceship to earth on a mission to document everything around them. During each episode, the Floogals set out on a mission explore their new world. These missions explore the uniqueness of the world and how it works, while children learn the processes of questioning, predicting, observing and experimenting. Episode examples include discovering ice, bubble baths, examining bananas and seeing a turtle for the first time. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program Floogals
Episode # #FGL101
Program Title Coolest Places
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This series takes viewers on a journey of discovery to the most astonishing places on the planet - cities, festivals, landmarks, and jaw-dropping works of nature. The history and cultures of these locations are explored to help viewers gain a better understanding of the diverse world in which they live. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title The Young Icons
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 11:00-11:30am (4/2/2016-6/25/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program showcases world-class athletes, accomplished artists, scholars, philanthropists and entrepreneurs that are all under the age of 18. Some of the stories highlighted include: Patrick Peerage, a 14 year old actor and philanthropist, who traveled America raising cancer awareness; Turquoise Thompson, who sprinted her way into the record books and earned a full scholarship to UCLA; and sisters Marni & Berni Barta who created Kidflicks, a non-profit organizations that donates new and used DVDs to children's hospitals all across America. These stories are meant to inspire young people to be selfless and to take part in the larger community around them in some meaningful way, and to show them that there are many ways to accomplish things. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program The Young Icons
Episode # #615R
Program Title The Chica Show
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Through this program, the viewer joins Chica for play dates that will take them under the sea, rocketing into space and time traveling back to caveman days. Set in a colorful, quirky shop with every kind of costume, accessory and prop imaginable, through animation, live action and lots of surprises, The Chicha Show teaches preschoolers about the world around them today and in history. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program The Chica Show
Episode # #TCS110
Program Title Noodle And Doodle
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 10:30 - 11:00am (4/2/2016 - 6/25/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. The program features art projects and cooking projects around a specific theme. Noodle & Doodle, along with host, Sean, demonstrates step-by-step "how to" projects while encouraging parent engagement, and often feature families working together to make something to display within the child's home. The art projects typically promote utilizing recycled materials to demonstrate that objects can be repurposed. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program Noodle & Doodle
Episode # #NAD110
Program Title Safari Tracks
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program is an exciting and entertaining series which takes viewers on location to explore the magnificent and immense world of Africa's animals. Ushaka, a young South African host, takes the viewer from the brushlands of the Savanna to the great Okavango, and the from the greatest game reserves to the most remote beaches of Madagascar, and more. The viewer will see everything from rare African birds to "creepy crawlers", to animal babies interacting with their mothers and siblings. The viewer will learn about life science as well as biological facts. which will educate the viewer about the natural activities of a species as well as biological facts, which will educate the viewer about the natural activities of a species as well as its environment, the need for wildlife conservation, and how to better support the protection of endangered species. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title Astroblast
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 9:30 - 10:00am (4/2/2016 - 6/25/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Inspired by the books of the same name, this interplanetary television series follows the adventures of a crew of space animals who run the Astroblast Space Station. Comet, Halley, Sputnik, Radar and Jet are the best of friends. Under the watchful eye of Sal the Octopus, the Astroblast crew learns to accept differences, help one another solve problems, make new friends, and discover that getting along and working together is always the best way to achieve a goal. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program Astroblast
Episode # #ATB123
Program Title Ruff Ruff Tweet & Dave
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program chronicles the animated adventures of three best friends: Ruff-Ruff, an instinctive pup; Tweet a cautious bird; and Dave, an imaginative panda. During each episode the program asks questions and children engage with the program by deciding which of the characters offers the correct answer or solution. The program encourages children to learn to make their own decisions. Episode examples include answering questions about: words that describe opposite states and actions; how to plant a seed and help it grow; and, searching for the biggest number during a visit to Number Land. (THIS PROGRAM AIRS ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Title of Program Ruff Ruff Tweet And Dave
Episode # #RTD123
Program Title State To State
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. During this program, viewers "travel" across the United States exploring cities, amazing monuments, natural wonders, and other interesting destinations. The series presents core curriculum information about history, geography, and culture, giving viewers a fun and entertaining learning experience. (THIS PROGRAM AIRED ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Name of children's programming liaison Carolyn Joyce Mastin
Address 4335 NW Loop 410
City San Antonio
Email Address CJMastin@sbgtv.com
Include any other comments or information you want the Commission to consider in evaluating your compliance with the Children's Television Act (or use this space for supplemental explanations). This may include information on any other noncore educational and informational programming that you aired this quarter or plan to air during the next quarter, or any existing or proposed non-broadcast efforts that will enhance the educational and informational value of such programming to children. See 47 C.F.R. Section 73.671, NOTES 2 and 3. The licensee sponsors public appearances by the news anchors, meteorologists and San Antonio Living hosts to local schools to promote the importance of education and community service.
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 8:00 - 8:30am (7/2/2016 only) / 8:30-9:00am (7/9/2016-9/24/2016)
Age of Target Child Audience from 2 years to 5 years
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This animated program features the Floogals, aliens who travel in a spaceship to earth on a mission to document everything around them. During each episode, the Floogals set out on a mission explore their new world. These missions explore the uniqueness of the world and how it works, while children learn the processes of questioning, predicting, observing and experimenting. Episode examples include discovering ice, bubble baths, examining bananas and seeing a turtle for the first time. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. During this program, viewers "travel" across the United States exploring cities, amazing monuments, natural wonders, and other interesting destinations. The series presents core curriculum information about history, geography, and culture, giving viewers a fun and entertaining learning experience. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 10:00 - 10:30am (7/2/2016-9/24/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Through this program, the viewer joins Chica for play dates that will take them under the sea, rocketing into space and time traveling back to caveman days. Set in a colorful, quirky shop with every kind of costume, accessory and prop imaginable, through animation, live action and lots of surprises, The Chicha Show teaches preschoolers about the world around them today and in history. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title The Coolest Places
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 9:00 - 9:30am (7/2/2016-9/24/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This series takes viewers on a journey of discovery to the most astonishing places on the planet - cities, festivals, landmarks, and jaw-dropping works of nature. The history and cultures of these locations are explored to help viewers gain a better understanding of the diverse world in which they live. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title Terrific Trucks
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program follows five truck friends from their morning meeting at their quarry homebase to doing work on the work site. Important lessons are shared as the trucks overcome obstacles and work together as a team on tough projects. Young children learn how to overcome obstacles, work as a team and coordinate with one another. In one episode, a truck learns a valuable lesson as she becomes overconfident in her skills and accidentally ruins a straightforward job as a result. In another episode, a truck learns to be considerate of his teammates during a grimy job at a dump site. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 9:00 - 9:30am ( 7/2/2016 only) / 9:30-10:00am (7/9/2016-9/24/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program chronicles the animated adventures of three best friends: Ruff-Ruff, an instinctive pup; Tweet a cautious bird; and Dave, an imaginative panda. During each episode the program asks questions and children engage with the program by deciding which of the characters offers the correct answer or solution. The program encourages children to learn to make their own decisions. Episode examples include answering questions about: words that describe opposite states and actions; how to plant a seed and help it grow; and, searching for the biggest number during a visit to Number Land. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. The program features art projects and cooking projects around a specific theme. Noodle & Doodle, along with host, Sean, demonstrates step-by-step "how to" projects while encouraging parent engagement, and often feature families working together to make something to display within the child's home. The art projects typically promote utilizing recycled materials to demonstrate that objects can be repurposed. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Life science, biological science, photography and humor combine to provide viewers of this program with life science concepts, animal classification, as well as the anatomy and physiology information of animals. The viewers are taken around the biomes of the world, merging the fascination of the animal world with a greater understanding of the relationship between the branches of the animal kingdom. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Chef Jeff teaches viewers how making the right choices in the kitchen can lead to life-changing experiences for the entire family. Each episode features interesting and valuable health and nutrition information as viewers also learn how to cook healthier versions of some of their favorite dishes. Family Style also helps young viewers to retain and reflect on important and current health-related information. Some of the other features of the program are nutritional quizzes, health tips, and positive reinforcement from Chef Jeff. This program's mission is to help viewers make well-informed choices about their eating habits, nutrition and health. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 11:00 - 11:30am (7/2/2016-9/3/2016)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program showcases world-class athletes, accomplished artists, scholars, philanthropists and entrepreneurs that are all under the age of 18. Some of the stories highlighted include: Patrick Peerage, a 14 year old actor and philanthropist, who traveled America raising cancer awareness; Turquoise Thompson, who sprinted her way into the record books and earned a full scholarship to UCLA; and sisters Marni & Berni Barta who created Kidflicks, a non-profit organizations that donates new and used DVDs to children's hospitals all across America. These stories are meant to inspire young people to be selfless and to take part in the larger community around them in some meaningful way, and to show them that there are many ways to accomplish things. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program is an exciting and entertaining series which takes viewers on location to explore the magnificent and immense world of Africa's animals. Ushaka, a young South African host, takes the viewer from the brushlands of the Savanna to the great Okavango, and from the greatest game reserves to the most remote beaches of Madagascar, and more. The viewer will see everything from rare African birds to "creepy crawlers," to animal babies interacting with their mothers and siblings. The viewer will learn about life science as well as biological facts, which will educate the viewer about the natural activities of a species as well as its environment, the need for wildlife conservation, and how to better support the protection of endangered species. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE SECONDARY DIGITAL STREAM.)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. This program is an animated series about the childhood adventures of a six year girl named Nina, her family and neighborhood. The program celebrates multiculturalism and family in Nina's close-knit household, where she's cared for by her parents and her grandmother. Elements of their Latino heritage are prominent. Its multilingual approach incorporates English, some Spanish and American Sign Language. Children learn inclusiveness, as well as the value of communicating across multiple languages and appreciating other cultures. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Program Title America's Heartland
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 11:00 - 11:30am (9/10/2016-9/24/2016))
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Much of the food Americans eat is produced by farmers and ranchers in the country's heartland, but many children don't know how it's produced. "America's Heartland" provides information about the people and processes responsible for the availability of food and fuel across the country and around the world. The show's reporters and producers tell stories in topics that include farm families, consumer issues, animal welfare and crop sustainability. Children will learn about the production of the food and fuel they consume. Some episodes also take the show abroad to countries such as Egypt and Taiwan, to show the impact American agriculture has on the global economy. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Days/Times Program Regularly Scheduled Saturdays 9:30 - 10:00am (7/2/2016 only)
Describe the educational and informational objective of the program and how it meets the definition of Core Programming. Inspired by the books of the same name, this interplanetary television series follows the adventures of a crew of space animals who run the Astroblast Space Station. Comet, Halley, Sputnik, Radar and Jet are the best of friends. Under the watchful eye of Sal the Octopus, the Astroblast crew learns to accept differences, help one another solve problems, make new friends, and discover that getting along and working together is always the best way to achieve a goal. (THIS PROGRAM WILL AIR ON THE MAIN DIGITAL STREAM.)
Carolyn Joyce Mastin
WOAI Program Director / Children's Programming Liason
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Visit Gusztáv’s YouTube channel
0141 339 2708 info@fenyo-musicmakers.co.uk
Recital Room, City Halls
The City Halls, Glasgow is an established and much-loved concert venue, especially due to the fine acoustic of its traditional ‘shoe-box’ Grand Hall which, with an extensive gallery, has a seating capacity of over 1,000. Built in 1841 to a design by George Murray, it was the city’s first auditorium suitable for large gatherings, playing host to important personages, including Benjamin Disraeli and Lajos Kossuth, the great Hungarian patriot.1
From 1962 to 1990 it was the prime venue for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and, since 2006, the City Halls have been home to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Music Centre. It is also regularly used by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Scottish Ensemble, and many other promoters.
A major refurbishment of the Halls in 2006 revealed a hidden space, which was converted to a small Recital Room, seating around 100, and provided with a fine full-size Steinway grand piano. Its modern, airy design, combined with its intimate size, create an appealing sense of directness and immediacy between performers and audience, ideal for solo, duo or small-scale chamber music-making.
It was, thus, an appropriate choice for Music-Makers’ mini-series in 2006 marking the birthday centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Comprising three concerts, the opening concert presented works for strings and piano, including the second Piano Trio, as well as ‘7 Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok’ sung by the outstanding mezzo-soprano, Jane Irwin.
The remaining two concerts, given by pianist Gusztáv Fenyő, were dedicated to what is believed to be the first complete performance in Glasgow of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes & Fugues. Although clearly influenced by J.S. Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, a collection of two books of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, the immediate stimulus for Shostakovich came from his visit to Leipzig in 1950 for the bi-centenary Bach celebrations, where he was impressed by the playing of a Bach Prelude & Fugue by the young Russian pianist, Tatyana Nikolayeva. The cycle, composed between October 1950 and February 1951, was dedicated to her, and remains one of the great masterpieces for piano of the twentieth century.
In 2018 we returned to the Recital Room for a 5-concert series which imaginatively coupled Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes & Fugues with J.S. Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ to highlight their connections and the continuing influence of Bach’s music. Full details here.
Click on the images to open
2018 March-May
1Wikipedia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Music-Makers is a company limited by guarantee and a charity | Registered in Scotland No. 155257 Scottish Charity No. SC023220
Copyright Music-Makers 2017 | All rights reserved | Website design by WebCreationUK
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Movie Overview Movie Synopsis Movie Review Movie Trailers
I Feel Pretty Movie Review
My wife is a psychotherapist who specializes in body image issues. She’s a huge Amy Schumer fan. And, like me, she found Schumer’s I Feel Pretty to be a flat, largely unfunny comedy that wastes its well-intentioned premise.
The movie is by writing/directing duo Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, and similar to their 2016 comedy How to Be Single, this one too is instantly forgettable and best left ignored.
Many people suffer from low self-esteem, especially as it relates to appearance, and I Feel Pretty plays to how the insecurities we all have are so ridiculous. Schumer, who is pretty but not in the smoking-hot-and-perfectly-slender kind of way, is a great fit for the role of highly insecure Renee Bennett, who, after a head injury, suddenly sees herself as the most beautiful woman on the planet—which in turn sends her confidence sky high.
The premise, a kind of reversal and less offensive version of Shallow Hal, is a pretty clever way to address body image issues and how confidence, or lack thereof, is the real thing people notice. And Kohn and Silverstein piece together several promising scenes that have plenty of potential.
They just fail spectacularly.
I Feel Pretty isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s a comedy that isn’t funny. Kohn and Silverstein seem to have a knack for outlining strong comedic concepts, but less ability when it comes to actually drawing the humor out of what they’ve drafted. Whether it’s Schumer prancing around thinking she’s the hottest item in the room or Michelle Williams squeaking out an against-type performance, Kohn and Silverstein were on to something—and yet the movie still doesn’t work.
It all comes down to execution, and the screenplay just doesn’t cut it. As hard as Schumer tries, the dialogue is flat, the comedic payoff just out of reach. The movie so desperately wants to be funny, but in the end, it’s I Feel Pretty that has confidence issues.
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Iran Gov't Revenues Fall 3.7%, Spending Rises 13%
Budget deficit came in wider than expected to reach 181.1 trillion rials ($4.52 billion)
Revenues associated with the sales of oil and petroleum products reached 446.6 trillion rials ($11.16 billion), indicating an 82.2% rise YOY
The government’s revenues in the first half of the current fiscal year (March 21-Sept. 22), including tax proceeds, amounted to 567.8 trillion rials ($14.19 billion), registering a 3.7% decline year-on-year.
The latest data released by the Central Bank of Iran show revenues associated with the sales of oil and petroleum products reached 446.6 trillion rials ($11.16 billion) during the period, indicating an 82.2% rise compared with the same period of last year, but less than the projected 580.4 trillion rials ($14.51).
Although tax revenues were estimated to hover around 593.5 trillion rials ($14.83 billion), they only reached 431.2 trillion ($10.78 billion), registering a 0.4% decline YOY.
The government’s tax revenues consist of its returns from direct and indirect taxation. Direct taxes include three groups of “tax on legal entities”, “income tax” and “wealth tax”.
Overall, direct tax revenues stood at 231.9 trillion rials ($5.79 billion) during the six months, registering a decline of 5.1% YOY.
Indirect taxes, including “tax on imports” and “tax on goods and services”, reached 199.3 trillion rials ($4.98 billion), indicating a 5.6% rise YOY.
Tax on imports generated 41.2 trillion rials ($1.03 billion), 1.8% more than last year’s corresponding period and tax on goods and services earned the government 158.1 trillion rials ($3.95 billion), up 6.6% YOY. Value added tax, which is a subcategory of tax on goods and services, increased by 11.9% to reach 107.5 trillion rials ($2.68 billion).
The report also shows government spending hit a whopping 1,074.9 trillion rials ($26.87 billion) during the period under review, posting a rise of 13% over last year's corresponding period.
Iran’s budget deficit came in wider than expected in the six months of the current fiscal year to reach 181.1 trillion rials ($4.52 billion). The shortfall for the period was higher than forecast, which was 163.8 trillion rials ($4.09 billion).
To cover the widening deficit, the government has been issuing bonds. H1 data show 253.3 trillion rials ($6.33 billion) worth of bonds were issued during the period, 7.7% less than the corresponding period of the year before.
The government only spent 78.2 trillion rials ($1.95 billion) on development projects, not only 36% less than the similar period of last year but also much lower than the projected 363.7 trillion rials ($9.09 billion).
According to Director General of the Supreme Audit Court of Iran Adel Azar, capital expenditure budget accounted for 25% of the budget in March 2011-12 fiscal year compared to 13% last year (March 2016-17). This comes as the share of operating budget increased by 87% last year from 74% in 1390.
The government is busy these days drafting the budget for the upcoming fiscal year (March 2018-19). Government Spokesman and President of Planning and Budget Organization Mohammad Baqer Nobakht said the budget bill will be submitted to the parliament on December 5.
“One of the features of next year’s budget is the performance-based allocation of budget to each governmental body and not the traditional method of distributing the money according to the treasury inflows,” he said.
The parliament-approved budget needs the final endorsement of the Guardians Council—the body in charge of ascertaining the constitutional and Islamic nature of all laws.
Addressing an open session of the parliament on Monday, Azar said the current budget allocation approach in Iran has reached an impasse and it needs to undergo extensive modifications.
"Over the years, the government and the parliament have focused on committing resources to meet all but 100% of the operating budget rather than the capital budget," he was quoted as saying by IRNA.
The current fiscal year’s budget stood at 11.5 quadrillion rials ($305 billion) as per the law approved by the parliament in March just before the beginning of the year. It includes 3.98 quadrillion rials ($90.5 billion) earmarked as “general revenues”, in addition to a whopping 8 quadrillion rials ($211 billion) to fund state companies, institutions and banks.
Iran Budget Bill in Parliament on Sunday
Gov’t Spending Tops Revenues
Iran Budget Deficit Hits $4.5b
Iran's Tax Collection Again Rise Over Oil Export Earnings
Inflation-Adjusted Budgets “Not Expansionary”
Iran Budget Deficit Tops $8b (Mar-Dec 2017)
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Poll Suggests Risks for Obama if Liberals Feel Taken for Granted
Dec. 11, 2010 , at 10:27 PM
A new poll from Marist University is suggestive of a potential worst-case scenario for President Obama. As he endures criticism from his left over his handling of the tax policy debate with Republicans, his approval rating has declined among liberals, according to the poll: 69 percent of them now approve of his job performance as compared with 78 percent in November. Likewise, his approval rating has declined among Democrats: to 74 percent from 83 percent. However, there has been no comparable improvement in Mr. Obama’s standing among independents.
These data should be interpreted cautiously. The margin of error among liberal respondents, for instance — a relatively small group of about 165 interviewees — is around 7.5 percentage points, and it is about 5.5 percentage points among Democrats. It is probably worth waiting to see whether a similar trend is manifest in the Gallup tracking poll when Gallup updates its weekly trend data, since Gallup’s sample sizes are about three times larger, making analysis of trends among political subgroups much more reliable. (However, although Gallup has yet to break out its weekly results among individual demographic groups, Mr. Obama’s standing has declined somewhat over all respondents in the poll over the course of the past week.)
Moreover, as we’ve noted previously, liberal dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama may not translate into a willingness to vote against him in 2012. In the Marist poll, Mr. Obama won the support of between 78 and 85 percent of both liberals and Democrats against a group of three potential Republican presidential nominees: Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee. Essentially, about half the liberals and half the Democrats who disapproved of Mr. Obama’s job performance in the poll were nevertheless unwilling to vote against him for re-election (at least provided that one of those three Republicans was his opponent).
Finally, the tax compromise was presumably not intended as a short-term political fix. One benefit to Mr. Obama, instead, could come in the medium term, as most economists expect the proposal to boost the economy over the next two years, at the expense of increasing long-term deficits.
Still, the poll outlines a blueprint for one potential downside case for Mr. Obama. If he moves toward the center in light of November’s election results and the impending Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, he will annoy liberals without winning himself much more support among independents — who may be waiting for clearer signs of economic recovery — or Republicans, whose dislike for him is probably too intractable at this point. Mr. Obama’s compromise initially won praise with a number of leading centrist political observers and pundits, but their opinions may carry less weight with the public than those of thought leaders toward either end of the political spectrum.
It may also be that the liberals’ issues are not with the substance of Mr. Obama’s policies — there has been no consensus among the House Democratic caucus or among liberal advocacy groups about what a realistic alternative to his tax compromise might look like, for instance — but rather with his modes of communication, which in recent days have been increasingly critical of liberals.
One theory of mine is that Mr. Obama — if one assumes that he is a liberal himself — sees less need to hedge his words when speaking to other liberals, in the same way that most of us tend to speak more bluntly to friends and family members than to relative strangers. But liberals — just like moderates and conservatives — formulate their impressions of the president based on a combination of intellectual and emotional factors, and their view of politics may not be so emotionally detached as Mr. Obama’s sometimes seems to be. And few voters of any kind would be pleased if it feels as though their support is being taken for granted.
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#Seth Rogen
Review: Long Shot
Things started on a high note at the SXSW 2019 premiere of the Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen headliner comedy Long Shot. Upon entry to the Paramount theater, staff distributed free drink vouchers. It was either a semi-transparent ploy...
See The Long Shot early and free
Have you been in the mood for an actually good romantic comedy? Well, since we got to check out Long Shot at SXSW I can indeed tell you that it's actually good. It's both surprisingly touching and thoughtful. You don't have to take our...
Preacher's fourth season to be its last
Preacher was always the little show that could. Ever since it debuted in 2016, the show always seemed to be a bit too odd for TV yet it still attracted an audience just large enough to justify being renewed. Even compared to its contemporar...
Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron rom-com it up in Long Shot's first trailer
The romantic comedy might be getting poorly skewered by Isn't It Romantic right now but the genre will never die and when it's done right it can be really quite enjoyable. Both Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron have done it right in the ...
Seth Rogen and Lonely Island want to make fun of the Fyre Festival
First trailer for Amazon's The Boys gives away almost nothing
Garth Ennis' comic The Boys is one of those comics everyone tells you to read because it's just so damn good. That's probably why Amazon scooped it up to be a superhero TV show. That and the more superhero content you can put out the better...
The one-time battle between Nintendo and Sega is coming to your TV
When I was a kid, I had a Nintendo Entertainment System. I played so many games and wasted so many breaths on corroded cartridges it's since become a nostalgic memory that makes this cartoon hilarious: Art by Jake Likes Onions
James Franco's The Room true story film The Disaster Artist has trailer
In bad movie news, Tommy Wiseau's cult classic, and honorific title holder for world's worst movie ever, The Room is getting the Hollywood treatment with a movie about the movie and its odd writer-director-star. And now, it's got ...
Union files complaint on behalf of mistreated Sausage Party animators
Controversy has grown around Seth Rogen's cartoon dick-joke movie Sausage Party. The film was made by Nitrogen, a Vancouver-based animation studio. According to comments at Cartoon Brew, Sausage Party animators were forced to work...
Review: Sausage Party
Do I want to start eating dirt? Perhaps, as an individual who already entertains questions on whether or not I’m morally comfortable (in spite of a true appreciation for) eating meat, I should have more deeply considered whether or no...
Review: Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
In my long tenure here at Flixist I've carved out a niche for myself. If you see a review for a Seth Rogen film or a sequel to a comedy, chances are it's my words you're reading. So little did I know I'd stick around here long enough for th...
First trailer for Seth Rogen's R rated animated comedy Sausage Party
We got through so many movie announcements here at Flixist that it's hard to take some seriously. When Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg mentioned they were working on an R rated food comedy, I kind of brushed it off thinking it's going to be on...
First trailer for Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is Neighbors all over again
Remember Neighbors? It was the decent Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produced film released in-between juggernauts This is the End and The Interview. Well, if you've forgotten about that movie than Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is for you! In ...
Review: The Night Before
When Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produce a film, you pretty much know what you're going to get. As the duo have made their way through the romantic comedy, high school buddy film, stoner comedy, old Hollywood existential, superhero story, ...
Watch the first trailer for AMC's Preacher adaptation
Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher is one of the best comic books of the 90s. Hard-hitting, hard-drinking, and just plain hardcore, Preacher is an over-the-top, ultra-violent riff on westerns in which a preacher named Jesse Custer...
Review: Steve Jobs
I was texting a friend about Steve Jobs over the weekend, the new biopic written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle. Sorkin thankfully avoided the birth-to-death biopic that we've all seen and grown tired of by now. Instead Jobs' l...
First poster for AMC's Preacher revealed
Back when I collected comics in high school Preacher was the totally bad ass cool kid who did whatever the hell he wanted. It's interesting it's taken so long to adapt to any screen, but AMC is finally bringing it to life. One does won...
Red band trailer for The Night Before full of bromance and vomit
The first trailer for The Night Before, a film that will hopefully be a new holiday classic for adults, is here and its full of what you'd expect from a film with Seth Rogen. There's plenty of dumb comedy and drug use and cameos from other ...
Neighbors renews its lease
Neighbors had, to me, one of the most memorable, laugh-out-loud trailers in recent memory. Unfortunately, and perhaps personally, the film didn't deliver quite as many laughs. The general public seems to disagree, however, and it was c...
Universal's Steve Jobs film gets official title and cast
This Steve Jobs biopic has been through the ringer. After years of director changes, big stars (Christian Bale) joining and leaving the film, and Sony dropping the project after budget concerns, Steve Jobs (the film's now official name) fin...
Nick's Top 15 Movies of 2014
It was the best of films, it was the blurst of films. Hey everyone I'm Nick Valdez, News Editor here for Flixist and you've probably seen my name on a good chunk of the stuff written here. If not, then I'll tell you a bit about myself. I li...
Nick's Top 10 Movie Music Moments of 2014
Music plays an integral role in film. Easily ignored, easily forgotten, a film's soundtrack is the little celebrated framework of cinema. But when sound and sight marry into a great scene, you get some of the best moments. Like in 2013, 201...
The Interview grossed $31 million on VOD despite piracy
When Sony released The Interview on most video demand services but its own, it was promptly pirated nearly 100 million times. At first it seemed like this news would only deter studios from simultaneous theatrical and VOD releases for big n...
Why what The Interview says about North Korea actually matters (an analysis)
I saw The Interview because I was curious. Amidst the complete ridiculousness of the past few weeks, thoughts and feelings have been flying around about the film. Outside of the few who had attended pre-chaos press screenings, no one was re...
Review: The Interview
After a crazy couple of weeks of Sony hacks, full on terrorist attack threats, cancellations, and a last minute reneging, I sort of forgot that at the center of all this mess was a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. Under normal c...
The Interview getting limited theatrical release, possibly VOD
After all of the hubub and hooey giving attention to a film that's probably super funny, but forgettable, Sony is allowing a limited theatrical run of The Interview on its intended Christmas Day release (for those theaters that want it). Th...
Why did it have to be The Interview?
The Interview is the most important film of 2014. Does that sentence depress anyone else? It really should, because it's undoubtedly true. The film that will have the greatest impact on the world at large is not Boyhood or Selma&...
Final Trailer for Rogen and Goldberg's The Interview
I've been worried how Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were possibly going to follow up This is the End, hands down one of the best films of 2013, after their recently produced effort Neighbors showed quite a few cracks in their comedy. Then a...
First Red Band trailer for The Interview has some jokes
After watching this latest Red Band trailer for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's latest film, The Interview, I think I'm okay with its push from October to December. There are some good jokes here as the trailer reveals more of the plot, but...
Watch this 20 minute MTV special for The Interview
Just as how MTV once had a cool promotion for This is the End last year, this year they're working with Sony to promote Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's The Interview. I'm pretty excited for it, North Korea seems less excited, but now that w...
Sony is digitally altering The Interview
You know who hates democracy and freedom? Sony. They've kowtowed to pressure from North Korea about some crazy issues it has with the comedy, which is about two interviewers who get to sit down with Kim Jong Un. What's the change? They'll b...
Rogen's The Interview gets new release date, possibly because of communism
I'm really, reeeeeeeeeeeeally looking forward to The Interview. It's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's follow up to This is the End, one of my favorite films of 2013, stars Rogen and James Franco doing what they do best, and it's been declared...
Teaser trailer for The Interview, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco
James Franco and Seth Rogen are the peanut butter and jelly of the film world; they just work so well together. And their dynamic duo-ness holds up strong in the first teaser for their upcoming and undoubtably hilarious comedy, The In...
Review: Neighbors
I had completely written off Neighbors. Coming off of Seth Rogen's last starring role in This is the End, the first trailer for Neighbors underwhelmed me. I've gotten used to Rogen acting, writing, and directing his own films so I was a lit...
New 'Neighbors' red band trailers are hilariously raunchy
It is an interesting transformation to see Seth Rogen go from playing schluby, sweet, stoney screw-ups to a new father who is worried about neighborhood parties waking his baby. But Rogen plays a good dorky dad, and these two new t...
Rogen and Gordon-Levitt coming back together for Xmas
The heavily under appreciated 50/50 was probably one of Seth Rogen's best performances and really landed Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an entirely awesome human being in every way for me. It's exciting to hear that they'll be getting back to...
Rogen and Franco recreated Kanye West's "Bound 2"
On the set of Seth Rogen's directorial follow up to This is the End, The Interview (featuring Rogen and James Franco as a TV personality and producer who are roped into helping assassinate the prime minister of North Korea), James Franco a...
Seth Rogen's R-rated animated film is now being made
Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Evan Goldberg have evidently been bandying about the idea of an R-rated animated film for some time now, and now that they have all the monies from things like This is the End they can make it. So they're go...
This is the End getting re-released in theaters soon
This is the End was the best film of the Summer hands down (Fast & Furious 6 notwithstanding). It brought the biggest surprises, biggest laughs, and most memorable moments (that finale had to be the greatest thing I've seen in years). S...
Flix for Short: The Real World: This is the End Edition
This is the End is one of the funniest films of the year so far if you're a fan of Seth Rogen and his gang. Even if you're not, you're still going to find yourselves laughing. A good gauge of how funny This is the End is going to be to you...
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United states: stock markets end higher; the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 0.26 per cent
United States: equity markets finished the session higher on Tuesday; the progress of the sectors Telecom, utilities, and consumer Services has contributed to this increase.
In closing to NYSE, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was taken to 0.26%, thus signalling a high of 6 months, while the S&P 500 is awarded at 0.29%, and the NASDAQ Composite index made of 0.22%.
The best performance of the session for the Dow Jones Industrial Average is to the credit of the title Verizon Communications Inc (NYSE:VZ) up 2.61% at 1.48 points for a closing price of 58,14. In the second position, we find Cisco Systems Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO) and win 1,95% 1.07 points to close at 55,81. The title Mcdonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) rounds out the top three with an increase of 1.53%, that is, to 3.16 points for the end of the session to 209,46.
Chevron Corp (NYSE:CVX) signs the worst performance of the session, losing 1,52%, or 1,90 points for a closing price of 122,94. Dow Inc (NYSE:DOW) gives up 1,46% or 0.73 points and ends at 49,43. For its part, Exxon Mobil Corp (NYSE:XOM) loose of 1.06% or 0,81 points for a closing price of 75,75.
The best performance of the S&P 500 index return to Harris Corporation (NYSE:LHX), which gained 4.22% for a course of 185,66, HCP Inc (NYSE:HCP), an increase of 3.15% to holders of 32.56 and Welltower Inc (NYSE:WELL) that wins 3,01% for a closing price at 84,20.
The values of the less powerful are Range Resources Corp. (NYSE:RRC) decreased 8,44% 6.18 in closing, Acuity Brands Inc (NYSE:AYI) who loses declined by 7.84% to 129,96 and Apache Corporation (NYSE:APA), down 6,23% to 27,38 in close.
The best performance of the NASDAQ Composite index to return to FuelCell Energy Inc (NASDAQ:FCEL), which won 127,27% for a course 0,550, Oasmia Pharmaceutical AB (NASDAQ:OASM), an increase of 28,76% to 1,455 and Sellas Life Sciences Group Inc (NASDAQ:SLS) who wins 27,83% for a closing price at 0,1470.
The values of the least-performing Puyi Inc ADR (NASDAQ:PUYI) down from 28,12% to 10.02 in closing, ARC Group Worldwide Inc (NASDAQ:ARCW) who loses 27,84% to 0,271 and CyberOptics Corporation (NASDAQ:CYBE), a decrease of 23,36% to 13,71 in close.
The titles on the rise and have exceeded the number of titles down to the New York stock Exchange by 1537 values in 1477 and 28 stable; on the NASDAQ, 1577 values have decreased, and 1087 rose, 93 remained unchanged.
The securities of Range Resources Corp (NYSE:RRC) decreased and reached a low , after a decline of 8,44%, or at 0.57 points for a course of 6,18. Securities Mcdonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) increased and reached a historical high, thanks to an increase of 1.53%, that is, to 3.16 points to a course of 209,46. The titles ARC Group Worldwide Inc (NASDAQ:ARCW) have decreased and reached a low , after losing 27,84% is 0,104 points for a course 0.271. The securities CyberOptics Corporation (NASDAQ:CYBE) have decreased and reached a low of 52 weeks, after having abandoned 23,36% either 4,18 points for a course 13,71.
The CBOE Volatility Index, which measures the implied volatility of options on the S&P 500 index, has lost 8,04% up to 12.93, new low of one month.
On the other hand, the gold for delivery in August gained 2,32% is 32,25 points, to $1.421,55 a troy ounce. Regarding other raw materials, crude oil for delivery in August has decreased by 4,69%, that is, of 2.77 points for a $56,32 per barrel, while Brent crude for delivery in September lost 0.08 per cent 0.05 points for a $62,58 the barrel.
The pair EUR/USD has recorded an increase of 0.04% to 1,1287, while the USD/JPY pair has taken 0.03% to 107,92.
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July 16, 2016 By Mark 107 Comments
08/28/16 — The Inevitable Damage to Come From J. Bruce Harreld’s Ranking Obsession.
08/26/16 — J. Bruce Harreld in Three Days: Confused, Compliant and Caustic.
08/23/16 — On Bruce Rastetter, Oversight, Politics, Business and Biofuels.
08/21/16 — The Moment When J. Bruce Harreld Sold Women Out and Went All-In on Gary Barta.
08/18/16 — Regents Appoint Abuser of UI Students, Faculty and Staff as Co-Chair of UNI Search.
08/15/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents Sics the Iowa AG on a Teacher the Board Abused.
08/14/16 — Iowa Regent Larry McKibben Tells a Lie Within a Lie Within a Lie.
08/12/16 — On Presidential Searches, Funding Splits and Regental Incoherence.
08/10/16 — Governor Terry Branstad Corrupted the Iowa Board of Regents.
08/08/16 — A Brief Administrative History of Bob Donley and Mark Braun. Updated.
08/06/16 — What You Don’t Know About 2016 UNI Presidential Search Firm AGB.
08/03/16 — Comparing the 2015 UI Presidential Search to the 2016 UNI Search (So Far). Updated.
07/31/16 — Bruce Rastetter and the Common Application Portal Scam.
07/26/16 — On the Iowa Board of Regents, Fairness and the UNI Search.
07/23/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and Big Data. Part 1. Part 2. Updated.
07/21/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents and the UNI Search Firm Search.
07/19/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents as Crony Political Machine.
07/17/16 — Ten Months of J. Bruce Harreld’s Mendacity in One UI Press Release.
« « Two Headlines 33 Minutes Apart | Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 7 » »
Last September, when J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa, the Board of Regents’ justification for their betrayal of the UI community was that Harreld was a proven transformative business leader whose experience was desperately needed at a time of great crisis in higher education. In the weeks and months following Harreld’s scandalous appointment, it was subsequently revealed that a small cabal of co-conspirators lied Harreld into office because he could not win the job on the merits of his own candidacy. Thus the great crisis in higher education — at least in Iowa — was in turn revealed to be rampant corruption at the highest levels of state government.
The only remaining mystery about J. Bruce Harreld is why he in particular was chosen by the conspirators who jammed him into office. The individuals involved are not people who would risk crippling or even destroying their own reputations just to give a mopey, down-and-out former business executive a job, so there must be some greater goal. While we don’t yet know what that goal is, not only won’t that keep us from speculating about Harreld’s secret mission in an upcoming post, but it’s clear from Harreld’s administrative machinations over the past ten months that he has been laying the groundwork for that mission in his own typically disreputable and devious manner.
Amid a flurry of corruption news emanating from the Iowa Board of Regents, Iowa State and the University of Iowa this past week, one thing I did not expect was a single banal press release which documented, step by step, Harreld’s bureaucratic machinations over the past ten months. Having discussed many of Harreld’s intentionally deceptive maneuvers in prior posts, it was almost disorienting to see his entire bureaucratic offensive laid out in mundane words. Yet had I not known what those words actually meant, I had to admit I would have been either mildly reassured by the messaging, or narcotized by the slew of facts therein.
Iowa Regents to consider tuition and UI budget
UI budget proposal shaped by new guiding principles
The title was straightforward, but the subhead promised “new guiding principles”. Since I think most people would agree that it’s good to have guiding principles, and most people seem to prefer things that are new rather than old, the prospect of “new guiding principles” was tantalizing.
The Iowa Board of Regents next week will consider the University of Iowa’s proposed fiscal year 2017 budget and decide new tuition levels for fall 2016.
Unfortunately, no “new guiding principles” there — just a heads-up about the upcoming board meeting, and a reminder that the board would be voting on J. Bruce Harreld’s proposed tuition hikes. Speaking of which….
If the proposed tuition increase is approved, UI’s general university budget is expected to grow by 4.4 percent in FY 2017 to $736 million. That’s an increase of $30.9 million over FY 2016. The majority of that revenue will be used for instruction, academic support, scholarships and fellowships, and plant operations and maintenance. It includes an average salary increase of approximately 2 percent for faculty and 1.6 percent for non-bargaining professional and scientific staff.
Now, if you’ve been following the news at the University of Iowa at all, you know that in response to a legislative shortfall in supplemental funding, the Iowa Board of Regents is about to vote on tuition hikes at all three of the state’s schools. What was never clearly articulated, however, despite endless numbers being tossed about, was exactly how much revenue Harreld’s tuition hikes would raise at Iowa. And once again, in the above quote, we see that specific number omitted.
From the wording of the text — which was released last Wednesday — it almost seemed as if the tuition hikes would raise $30.9M for fiscal year 2016, but that was not what the text actually says. More importantly, $30.9M would be an absolutely shocking number relative to anything that had been previously announced. In fact, for a recent post I looked at all of the UI budgeting numbers I could find, trying to answer that obvious question, yet the closest I came was an article by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, which put the total money raised from the proposed tuition hikes at all three regent schools at only $21.1M.
And yet somehow, as if guided by an unseen hand, the press release quoted above also avoided specifically stating the projected total of Harreld’s tuition hikes, even though the vote was only days away. In fact, the omission was so glaring that it was almost as if someone didn’t want that obvious and germane total to be put in play before the vote. Fortunately, the Gazette’s Miller followed up with news on Thursday that UI’s take from Harreld’s egregious tuition hikes would be a whopping $27.2M!
So what does Harreld intend to do with that massive cash-grab from students and their families — and how exactly do Harreld’s “new guiding principles” fit into the equation?
“To me, a world-class faculty is a world-reaching faculty—people whose work and teaching have the power to make changes on a global scale,” says President Bruce Harreld. “To recruit and retain faculty of their caliber, we must be competitive with other top universities in terms of pay, benefits, and tenure.”
Again, if you’ve been following the carnage of Harreld’s first year in office, you know that “world class” has become a persistent tic in Harreld’s oratory. Despite making him sound like a late-night infomercial huckster, the man can’t go five seconds without talking about “world-class” this and “world-class” that, which may be an artifact of his long private-sector experience as a marketing weasel. On the other hand, anything that’s “world-class” usually costs a pretty penny, so Harreld’s mercenary determination to screw students out of money they don’t have does have a certain cold-blooded logic to it, at least from a purely actuarial perspective.
The bigger problem with Harreld’s focus on “world-class faculty”, of course, is that because of the AAUP’s recent sanction of the University of Iowa, it’s unlikely that any world-class faculty will be signing on with a school run by an illegitimate president and a corrupt governing board. Instead, Harreld is much more likely to attract faculty who are either hard-up for a job or looking to cash-in themselves, and that’s particularly true if prospective faculty do their homework — say, by reading this post and following the helpful links.
The university requested a $4.5 million increase in state funding for fiscal year 2017, but due to budget constraints, the Iowa General Assembly voted in April to appropriate only $1.3 million. Harreld says that means the university must be more creative with resources.
The facts in the above paragraph are correct. There was a shortfall in legislative funding relative to Harreld’s supplemental request. The intimation that Harreld now intends to be “more creative with resources” as a result of that shortfall, however, is manifestly false. The only creative response Harreld has had to UI’s $3.2M shortfall in appropriations is to use that as a trumped-up pretext for jamming his grubby mitts as deep as possible into the pockets of students and their families.
Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Harreld’s indefensible tuition hikes are approved, and he walks away with almost ten times the amount of the funding shortfall which purportedly triggered those hikes, what does Harreld plan to do with his bounty?
This spring, the university embarked on a new collaborative budget process giving the colleges and VP offices larger decision-making power over their unit budgets. Academic and administrative leaders were asked to present their budgets to central administration and align resources based on four guiding principles: student success, quality indicators, UI values, and shaping the UI’s future.
Behold, finally — four “new guiding principles” for resource allocation!
And may I say, what an uplifting quartet of guiding principles they are. Who could possibly oppose “student success”, “quality”, “values” or “shaping the UI’s future”? In fact, given such laudable goals, what could be wrong with tying the allocation of precious UI resources to the pursuit of those values?
The problem is that not only was the collaborative budgeting process a sham engineered by Harreld, but Harreld’s four guiding principles were shaped by Harreld himself over a couple of weeks, for the express purpose of obscuring his actual budgetary intent. From the time of his appointment until a few months ago, J. Bruce Harreld made it abundantly clear that his main objective in reallocating resources at the University of Iowa would be raising the school’s national college rank. Not only did he talk openly about doing so, but he also tied his original $4.5M funding request to that goal, which he hoped to achieve by improving what he called “faculty vitality” — meaning faculty pay.
What was particularly odd about Harreld’s ranking fixation, however, was that it was not actually something he was hired to do. Instead, after being appointed, Harreld simply adopted that as his own personal mandate or “charge”, and he’s been pursuing that self-appointed goal with single-minded determination ever since. Over time, however, Harreld did realize that his vanity project of gaming the school’s ranking using scarce resources sounded pretty bad, so like a good marketing weasel he began changing the words he was using while remaining true to that goal.
Where Harreld previously used the word ‘ranking’, by late spring he had replaced that crass term with “quality indicators”. Likewise, what was previously and accurately described as ‘student outcomes’ — which are another metric pertinent to a school’s national rank — became “student success”. Even better, at least from Harreld’s point of view, the guiding principles of “values” and “shaping the future” were not even quantifiable, meaning when all four goals were considered together they still only furthered his goal of raising the school’s national college rank.
All of which should make clear exactly how Harreld’s new “collaborative budget process” actually works. If a budget proposal will help improve the school’s national ranking, then it will be considered. If not, then it is obviously lacking in the proper “collaborative” spirit.
UI leadership also set aside $10.8 million for a Strategic Initiative Fund to ensure high-priority activities receive adequate resources. Leadership reviewed 66 proposals from the colleges and VP offices totaling $22 million, before eventually selecting the 25 most ready for implementation. The strategic initiatives selected include increased student financial aid, new academic advisers, faculty cluster hires, support for interdisciplinary and large grant proposals, and investment in building renewal and energy conservation.
Who exactly is the “leadership” that decided to set aside almost $11M? Well, that would be J. Bruce Harreld, and J. Bruce Harreld alone. Yes, Harreld has a team, and committees, and toadies out the wazoo, but when it comes to who’s calling the fiscal shots — particularly about discretionary funds — that’s former business executive and current fanatical rankings-raiser J. Bruce Harreld.
Assuming that Harreld’s rapacious tuition hikes pass, then, he will have successfully used his new “collaborative budgeting process” and his “new guiding principles” to set aside an $11M slush fund to be tapped at his sole discretion. In fact, we know that Harreld himself will be in charge of all that money because in a UI press release back in April, only days after the regents’ legislative funding shortfall was announced, that same exact fund was literally described as the “president’s strategic initiative fund”. Now, only a couple of months later, following a little weaselly tweaking, the Strategic Initiative Fund doesn’t seem like it belongs to anyone in particular, let alone to the weasel himself, but as we just learned, Harreld’s words can be deceiving.
One thing that was missing from that earlier press release, and from every other UI press release, was any notice that the Strategic Initiative Fund would be financed by students, from last-minute tuition hikes passed on a pretext. Hikes that until only a few days ago were absolutely critical for hiring “world-class faculty”. But it gets better.
“In order to provide a cushion, a small amount of the $10.8 million will be reserved for one-time commitments that may arise during the year,” says Rod Lehnertz, vice president for finance and operations.
Whatever you think of J. Bruce Harreld and his ceaseless mendacity, the idea of hiding a slush fund inside a slush fund is pretty clever. Even better, that smaller slush fund is aimed squarely at “one-time commitments”, meaning no-bid contracts which — thanks to the ongoing intentional erosion of fiscal controls at the Iowa Board of Regents — can now be dispensed up to $50,000, as opposed to the previous $25,000 limit. (Don’t worry, though — if there’s an emergency or a special case, and Harreld really wants to give someone a second $50,000 contract, all he has to do is call Mark Braun at the board, because under the new rules Braun is the sole determiner of what is and isn’t okay.)
So a slush fund for internal use and a slush fund for external use. What’s not to love? Now all Harreld has to hope is that the board will actually give him the go-ahead to strip all that money from the students.
Funding for these strategic initiatives depends partly on the board’s decision regarding tuition. If the board approves a smaller tuition increase than proposed, fewer strategic initiatives can receive funding. About two-thirds of the UI’s general fund revenues comes from tuition (62.5 percent), while state appropriations cover slightly less than one-third (31.5 percent). The remainder is indirect cost recoveries and interest income.
Does Harreld have five votes on the nine-member board? Well, given that the board was packed with political cronies by Governor Terry Brandstad, who also appointed Rastetter, who in turn went way out of his way to fix the search for Harreld, the odds are in Harreld’s favor. Still, Regent Larry McKibben, who is so philosophically committed to keeping costs down that he didn’t want UI to raise its minimum wage, even though Iowa City is the most expensive place to live in Iowa, might balk, and if that happens others might follow. Much more likely, of course, is that McKibben will ingratiate himself to the masses with a ceremonial no vote, knowing all the while that five yes votes are in the bag.
As noted in the above quote, however, even if tuition hikes are approved, there could be a last-minute glitch in Harreld’s carefully orchestrated caper….
The board approved a $200 undergraduate tuition increase in December 2015, and the board now considers a proposal for an additional increase of $300 for resident students and $400 for non-residents, with additional increases for business and engineering majors. UI Student Government requested the board consider a $200 increase for all students.
In a recent post I suggested that UI’s student leadership amend their previous compromise to include the full funding and hiring of eight mental health staff for students prior to the end of the upcoming fall term. In light of the projected haul from Harreld’s outlandish tuition hikes, however, I think they should also amend their across-the-board hike to $100, down from $200.
This now brings us to the final paragraph of the press release, which was either a non-sequitur, or was included to set the stage for the thrilling announcement of a new contract for football coach Kirk Ferentz.
The UI’s $102.1 million FY 2017 athletics budget does not use any funds from the state. Athletics is a self-sustaining auxiliary enterprise and receives no general university support.
So let’s review. Harreld not only withheld the magnitude of his proposed tuition hikes until only a few days before the regents’ vote, intentionally pulling world-class cashmere over the eyes of the student body and its leaders, but Harreld’s collaborative budgeting process was a lie, Harreld’s plan to be “creative with resources” was a lie, Harreld’s “Strategic Initiative Fund” is a scam, and tying it all together are Harreld’s “new guiding principles”, which are also a lie. So that’s lie, lie, lie, scam and lie.
Truly, it’s an impressive body of work for less than a full year. And yet it’s all there in one pedestrian press release, as long as you know the whole story. Which is of course the last thing that the visionary J. Bruce Harreld wants you to know, which is why he keeps transforming his verbiage to cover his tracks.
Again, none of this tells us what Harreld’s co-conspirators hired him to do. All it tells us is how, over the past year, step by step, Harreld has leached his parasitic administrative toxins into UI so completely that the budgeting process has been turned into a loyalty oath, the school’s “new guiding principles” are an Orwellian pledge of fealty to college rankings, and Harreld is only hours away from generating an eight-figure slush fund on the backs of hard-working students and their families. This should be an interesting week.
That’s awesome. Notice that the graft pile is, you know, a small amount. Notice too that specific “no, this cannot go back into the graft pile” amounts haven’t been laid out for those other things. Who’s up first for a million-dollar bribe, I wonder?
I’m reminded, too, of that corporate communications whosis person he supposedly hired from his “own money” a year or so ago. My guess is that this person(s) is actually the PR horror(s) who’s writing all this stuff, because I’m not persuaded that UI comm staff really have the chops for the serious thieving baloney. Who was that hire, anyway? That should tell us something about what we’ll likely hear next.
Also, to be fair, the paralyzing toxin didn’t have to be all that strong.
You wouldn’t know it from observing the crony politics at the Iowa Board of Regents, but it is possible to administer a function of government without politically exploiting that responsibility. That there is a collective benefit to doing so, in fact, is why the first section of the statute governing the Iowa Board of Regents reads as follows:
262.1 MEMBERSHIP.
The state board of regents consists of nine members, eight of whom shall be selected from the state at large solely with regard to their qualifications and fitness to discharge the duties of the office. The ninth member shall be a student enrolled on a full-time basis in good standing at either the graduate or undergraduate level at one of the institutions listed in section 262.7, subsection 1, 2, or 3, at the time of the member’s appointment. Not more than five members shall be of the same political party.
Because he is a politician it’s perhaps not surprising that Governor Terry Branstad decided to pervert the intent of that statue by packing the board with political cronies, but the fact that he did so should not be overlooked simply because it confirms our worst fears about his failed leadership. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/03/15:
On Monday, Branstad announced dozens of appointments to fill Iowa’s boards and commissions, including three new regents. Mary Andringa of Mitchellville and Patricia Cownie of Des Moines are both registered Republicans. Rachael Johnson, a student representative from the University of Northern Iowa, is not registered with a party, according to Jimmy Centers, a spokesman with the governor’s office.
If confirmed by two-thirds of Iowa’s senators — or 34 votes — the board effective May 1 would include five Republicans, three without party, and one Democrat — current regent President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland. The board cannot have more than five members of the same political party, according to Iowa Code.
Sen. Bob Dvorsky, D-Coralville, said although Branstad’s appointments don’t violate the letter of the law, “this clearly is a violation of the intent.”
“That’s a major problem they’ll have to look at,” he said.
Since Miller’s piece was published, Regent Mary Andringa resigned abruptly, just prior to widespread reporting of a scandal involving a no-bid contract which the University of Iowa approved for a company at which Andrigna served as a paid director. True to form, however, Governor Branstad simply appointed another political crony in Andringa’s place, keeping the totals consistent with those previously reported.
You also wouldn’t know it by watching the crony politics at the Iowa Board of Regents, but it is actually possible to be fiscally responsible in administering a function of government without turning that responsibility into either a profit-making enterprise in itself, or using one’s authority to enrich cronies by bleeding money from that system. That is of course why governments usually come with all sorts of rules and regulations, including the size of no-bid contracts that corrupt government officials can give out like patronage candy.
An that point, and following hundreds of thousands of dollars of no-bid contacts that were improperly authorized by the state’s schools, the Iowa Board of Regents recently took a very close look at that problem and came up with a unique solution. Instead of tightening controls they loosened them, doubling the amount of money that can be spent in a single contract, while also channeling all authority for oversight of no-bid contracts through a single board administrator. Instead of $25,000, crony no-bid contracts can now be freely dispensed up to $50,000, with variances granted equally freely for emergencies and other easily abused excuses.
From the point of view of the $5B enterprise that is the Iowa Board of Regents, changing the maximum amount for a no-bid contract from $25K to $50K seems trivial. The problem, however, is that from the point of view of anyone receiving such a contract, not only does that represent a full 100% increase, but relative to the cost of living that additional $25,000 means a single contract now potentially represents a living wage, after taxes. Meaning not only can state schools now shell out $50,000 whenever they want, but in doing so they can buy crony loyalty off the rack.
By statute the Board of Regents is meant to be politically neutral if not apolitical, and by function the board is supposed to ensure that every available penny goes to education and research at the state’s schools. In practice, however, under the jaundiced leadership of Governor Brandstad and his single largest political donor, Bruce Rastetter — who also happens to be the president of the regents — the board functions as little more than a crony political machine.
This is not to say that such perversions are not common in government. Of course they are, and have been throughout history. Get two or more small-minded, ethically challenged people in the same room, and they will, if not immediately, soon or later get around to the subject of how they might join forces in order to rip-off everyone else by any means available. That such perversions are common, however, and have become the norm at the Iowa Board of Regents, does not and should not excuse them.
Sticking it to the Students
With the above as context, Monday’s meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents revealed itself to be little more than a crony operation administrated by political appointees, particularly regarding tuition hikes at the state’s schools, and the Rastetter-Leath land deal. On the subject of the tuition hikes, the board’s performance was admirable, and generated the desired headlines.
Factually, the regents backed off a bit from their planned $300 tuition hike on resident students at all three schools, dropping that number to $250. And yet, if you’ve been following the tuition hikes at all, you know that the proposed hikes were so completely out of scale to the legislative funding shortfall which purportedly triggered those hikes — and particularly so at the University of Iowa — that the board’s last-minute reduction was stage-managed for political reasons, not because it was the right thing to do for the students.
The political messaging at Monday’s meeting began immediately with the announcement that neither illegitimate UI President J. Bruce Harreld nor beleaguered ISU President Steven Leath would be receiving pay raises during the year. Except that’s not actually what the board said. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 07/18/16:
Board President Bruce Rastetter said that the presidents of both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University asked not to receive any percentage increases at this time.
So what’s the premise here? That Harreld and Leath each independently came to this magnanimous decision on their own, then informed the board? Or did Harreld and Leath talk about it together, then inform the board? Or, given that the board was about to screw every student at the state’s schools, did the board suggest to its presidents that it might be a bit unseemly to shovel yet more money at them, then allow them to save face by claiming not to have wanted any more state money in the first place?
While the latter option seems most in keeping with the board’s current modus operandi, that may be precisely why Regents’ President Rastetter felt compelled to come out forcefully in denial of any such linkage. From the Gazette’s Miller, also on 07/18/16:
Rastetter said Harreld and Leath requested the status quo salaries months ago and said the board decision was not tied to tuition increases also approved Monday.
It’s also important to note that nowhere in the regents’ comments about their selfless university presidents was there any mention whether those men might receive a future pay increase which was retroactive to this year, or perhaps additional deferred compensation, which seems to be all the rage at the crony board. (It’s also possible, of course, that any future increase in pay will simply be adjusted upward to help these poor men recoup any wages lost to the indignity of having to pretend to be decent humans being.)
Now, if all that seems a tad unfair, let’s remember that J. Bruce Harreld is being paid a minimum of $4,000,000 over five years for a job he could not have attained without the corrupt search process engineered by Rastetter, former Interim UI President Jean Robillard, and others. And of course there’s still the possibility that Harreld will be given tenure in the Tippie College of Business, which would currently pay off at more than $300,000 per year. As for Leath, at the same time that former UI President Sally Mason was being frozen out by Rastetter and his cronies on the board, Leath was granted a massive new contract, tenure, and a pay raise three times that of his peers at the other state schools.
The students, on the other hand, did get sucker punched despite the $50 decrease for resident undergrads. In fact, it’s entirely possible that the reason for the tuition hikes was engineered by Regents’ President Rastetter, who went out of his way to avoid putting a hard number on the appropriations necessary to preclude tuition hikes, and also by Governor Branstad, who did nothing to make sure that the legislature reach Rastetter’s purported necessary minimum. And of course once given the green light by the regents, Harreld and Leath had no problem proposing massive tuition increases which greatly outpaced even the largest numbers mentioned by Rastetter.
Enter now Regent Larry McKibben, who introduced the motion on Monday to reduce the across-the-board hike on resident undergrads from $300 to $250. From a separate report by the Gazette’s Miller, also on 07/18/16:
The Board of Regents on Monday unanimously agreed to shave $50 off a tuition-hike proposal for this fall, decreasing the annual increase for resident undergraduate students from $300 to $250.
The rest of the original tuition proposal — which includes increases as high as $800 for some students — remained untouched during Monday’s final reading and approval. But regents said they wanted to address concerns around rising resident undergraduate tuition rates, which had been frozen for an unprecedented three straight years.
So how much is that ceremonial $50 hit going to cost J. Bruce Harreld? What horrible fate will befall his plan to fund his own presidential rank-raising success on the backs of students and their families?
During the proposal’s first reading last month, UI students asked regents to consider an across-the-board $200 tuition increase — regardless of school, student level, and program type — instead of the broad range of increases that included a $300 bump for resident undergraduates. Board President Bruce Rastetter at the time said he would support the original proposal, and UI President Bruce Harreld said decreasing the rate bump would hamper his ability to lead the institution to improved excellence.
But Rastetter on Monday said he’s had time to consider more feedback and consult with each university president, and he feels comfortable supporting a $250 increase rather than the $300 hike.
“When going out and asking the three presidents if they can support and manage their budgets with $50 less in in-state tuition … they assured me that they could,” he said.
The original proposal had expected to bring in about $21.1 million, and Rastetter said decreasing it by $50 per resident undergraduate student would cut anticipated revenue by nearly $500,000 at University of Northern Iowa, nearly $700,000 at UI, and just under $1 million at Iowa State University.
At UI, the total cost of the regents’ PR stunt will be $700,000 lost, out of a total of $21.1M for all three schools. (The collective dollars raised, and the dollars expected to be raised for UI alone, still don’t add up. For example, I can’t tell if the $21.1M is from the resident undergrad hikes alone, because once again the state-funded Iowa Board of Regents and the state-funded University of Iowa have gone out of their way to make it impossible to actually follow public policy. It’s almost like they don’t think of themselves as governmental agencies, but more as private concerns.)
Can poor J. Bruce Harreld get by without that $700K, or without personally profiting after having been denied wink a raise wink by the board wink? Well, I’m sure Harreld has taken a bit of an ego hit what with not being able to stomp his way through the citizenry of Iowa on his way to student-funded presidential glory, but when you serve a crony political machine, those are the breaks. If a long-time crony regent like Larry McKibben has to put his faux reputation as a fiscal conservative on the line, you know something has to give. From Dar Daneilson, on 07/18/16:
Regent Larry McKibben of Marshalltown also expressed concern. “As everyone here knows, the tuition increase has been an issue that has been difficult one for me, when we initially discussed it and the proposals came out as late as they did, I was on the other side of it,” McKibben says. He made the motion today for the amended increase and says he knows that’s how the process sometimes works. McKibben says he’s heard a lot of concern about the increase while also hearing about the need to maintain the quality of education at the three schools. “So at the end of the day, you come to the floor of the debate and you are very conflicted about which side that you are going to pick. I was pleased to hear the governor say that he though some sort of adjustment needed to be made for Iowa in-state students,” according to McKibben.
So there you have it. After doing nothing to compel further appropriations from the legislature during the previous year, the entire crony political apparatus of the Iowa Board of Regents turned around and gave the green light to presidents Leath and Harreld to strip-mine money from the students. In recognition of the fact that the proposed tuition hikes were a complete screw, however, that same crony political machine made the crony political calculation that denying raises to its complicit university presidents, and making a token concession on the tuition hikes, would make them look a little less like outright thieves, so they shaved $50 off the across-the-board undergrad resident increase, while leaving all of the other hikes in place.
This is fiscal stewardship and administrative resolve at the Iowa Board of Regents. In one of the most important decisions they’ve made since they fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, the board sided fully with the crony Governor and his crony political benefactor, and against the students. (To their credit, the student leaders at UI and ISU get what this was all about.) This is the Iowa Board of Regents functioning not as a well-oiled governmental machine that exists to provide an education to the citizens of Iowa and others, but as a brutish crony political operation designed to wield political control over, and exploit, a $5M governmental enterprise.
The Rastetter-Leath Land Deal
Compared to the deft and practiced administrative cynicism displayed on the tuition-hike front, the on-the-record responses Monday regarding the Rastetter-Leath land deal bordered on willful collective delusion. While the words were all positive, and there was no lack of support for the idea that Steven Leath did nothing wrong because he’s Steven Leath, at least one regent also took the opportunity to take a big step back.
Along with being a former Republican legislator and current unrepentant political crony on the board, Larry McKibben is also an attorney. Which is why, despite all of his support for Steven Leath as a fine upstanding individual who would never do anything wrong, the most important quote coming out of McKibben’s mouth on Monday was this, as reported by the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, on 07/18/16:
Regent Larry McKibben, an agricultural business lawyer and former state legislator, said Monday that ISU President Steven Leath had asked him in 2014 about prospects for buying farmland in Marshall County, where McKibben lives. Leath, who is an avid hunter, was especially interested in any good, available deer hunting grounds.
“Well, I’m an ag business attorney, so what do I do? I know a whole lot of farmers and a whole lot of ag people. And I did ferret out a couple of parcels that were potentially on the market,” McKibben said after Monday’s meeting of the regents in Ames.
McKibben said he gave Leath the information about potential purchases at the time and told him that he would have to do his own due diligence on them.
“And that was the end of it,” he said.
Whatever else Larry McKibben may be, he’s not an idiot. Despite weighing in later to pronounce the land deal perfectly fair and square — a pronouncement with no legal gravity whatsoever — it’s telling that McKibben took such obvious pains to distance himself from any future personal liability. Whatever else McKibben wants you to know about what a what a great humanitarian Steven Leath is, the one thing he really wants you to know is that he has absolutely nothing to do with the current jam Leath is in. And he wants you to know that because, as an attorney, he knows that Leath is in real trouble, and that an investigation of the Rastetter-Leath land deal could blow up all over the Board of Regents, and Rastetter in particular.
Speaking of Rastetter, here’s his own chin-quivering version of assuring the world that nothing improper happened when he floated the president of Iowa State $1.15M to purchase land that Leath couldn’t otherwise afford:
Rastetter told reporters that the transaction demonstrates how the relationship between the nine regents and three university presidents often goes beyond the overly formal interactions at board and committee meetings. He said the nuances of those relationships are often misunderstood by the media.
“When we meet with the presidents, we don’t just say, ‘Hey, how’s your budget going?’ We say, ‘How’s your family? What do you enjoy doing? How are your kids doing? How’s your wife doing? How is she (acclimating) herself to Ames, Iowa, or to Iowa City, Iowa, or to Cedar Falls, Iowa?’ And all the regents do that. And I think it’s perfectly normal for Iowans to do that,” Rastetter said.
Just as it’s apparently also normal for Iowans to front their subordinates over a million dollars in cash, on one week’s notice. Speaking of which, despite all of Rastetter’s babbling uplifting quotes on the subject from Monday, nowhere will you find him repeating his prior claim — as related by Summit Farms President Eric Peterson — that he himself was “not involved” in the transaction.
The question is not whether the land deal between Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter and Iowa State President Steven Leath was unethical or a conflict of interest, because by any definition of those terms it was both. On Iowa State’s own website, on the page titled “Code of Business and Fiduciary Conduct” — which was updated/revised on January 1, 2016 — we find the following:
As stated by the president of Iowa State University, Iowa State University is committed to adhering to the highest principles of ethical behavior. All employees must abide by the Code of Business and Fiduciary Conduct adopted by the Board of Regents, State of Iowa. This Code sets forth the fundamental expectations of employees when carrying out their duties, including conducting responsibilities with fairness, integrity and respect, promoting and protecting the institution’s best interests, and complying with applicable laws and policies.
In addition, Iowa State University has adopted policies that support the expectations set forth in the Code of Business and Fiduciary Conduct. The supporting policies (see links below) address conflicts of interest, undue influence, discriminatory bias, and proper use of university funds, resources and information.
The Code of Business and Fiduciary Conduct makes each member of the university community responsible for bringing suspected violations of applicable law, university policies and government contracts to the attention of appropriate offices. University policy provides guidance on which office is appropriate for receiving reports of suspected violations.
The Senior Vice President for Business and Finance is responsible for developing a program to promote a culture of compliance. This program is described in the Business Ethics Awareness and Compliance Program document.
Supporting Policies
* Conflicts of Interest and Commitment – ISU policy
* Conflict of Interest Vendors/Employees, Procurement – ISU policy
* Conflict of Interest – Board of Regents policy
* Conflicts of Interest – State law (Iowa Code, see §68B.2A)
* Codes of Conduct – Federal regulations (2CFR §200.318)
* Segregation of Duties
* Consenting Relationships
* Nepotism (Employment/Supervision of Immediate Familiy Member)
Gifts – ISU policy
Gratuities and Gifts, Procurement – ISU policy
Conflicts of Interest – State law (Iowa Code, see §68B.2A)
Follow the link to the “Conflicts of Interest and Commitment” page, and we find this:
Iowa State University requires the disclosure, review/approval, and management of external activities or financial interests with the potential to interfere with one or more of the following:
Performance of Duties: Covered employees are expected to devote sufficient time and attention to their university duties to perform them conscientiously. An external activity with the potential to interfere with the employee’s university duties is known as a conflict of commitment.
Objectivity: Covered employees are expected to be objective in the decisions they make while performing their university responsibilities. Financial or other personal considerations with the potential to compromise an employee’s objectivity are known as conflicts of interest.
Follow the link to the Gifts — ISU Policy page, and we find this:
Employees of the University and the immediate family members shall not, directly or indirectly, solicit, accept, or receive from any one donor in any one-calendar day, a gift as defined below.
Employees of the University and immediate family members of each shall not, directly or indirectly, offer or make a gift as defined below to an official, employee, local official, local employee, member of the General Assembly, candidate, or legislative employee in any one calendar day.
Gifts Defined
A gift is a rendering of money, property, services, discount, loan forgiveness, payment of indebtedness, or anything else of value in return for which legal consideration of equal or greater value is not given and received, if the donor is in any of the following categories:
Donor is doing or seeking to do business of any kind with the Board of Regents, State of Iowa or an institution it governs.
Because Steven Leath could not afford to purchase a property that his wife fell in love with, Leath either asked Rastetter for, or Rastetter volunteered his company to provide, $1.15M to purchase that property. Which means the only question left is whether Leath’s solicitation of, or acceptance of, financial support from Rastetter’s company, was an actual violation of law. Like the crony political machine that it is, however, the Iowa Board of Regents is rallying around its beleaguered president at Iowa State, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the other half of the unethical land deal — which implicitly involves a conflict of interest — is the president of the board, who is now singing Leath’s praises.
By very virtue of the fact that Rastetter has not recused himself from the board’s authority over Leath, and insists on speaking on behalf of Leath in his own capacity as president of the board, the crony political machinery driving those imperatives is laid bare. No one in any position of authority in government would ever try to pull the same stunt, yet for Rastetter the response is reflex. Control, exploit, omit, deny, lie.
The Only Remaining Hope
By rights the Iowa Attorney General’s office would look into such matters, forcefully, in order to avoid the taint of partisanship. Unfortunately, one of the perks of working for the Iowa Board of Regents is that when you do cross the line, the Attorney General’s office is obligated to defend you against charges, presenting the AG with a clear conflict of interest should it then need to investigate you. (This is, truly, Rastetter’s great gift. He can spot a weakness to be exploited a mile away, whether in a human being or a bureaucracy. By giving Governor Branstad a big bag of money, then asking to be put on the board in return, Rastetter bought himself the protection of the single most powerful law enforcement agency in the state.)
The only remaining hope is that the legislature will get involved, and will do so despite attempts by the board’s crony political allies to portray any investigation as a partisan witch hunt. But here’s the thing. If there are people in the statehouse who are willing to take the initial heat, it’s not going to take long before the evidence they present convinces the public that something is seriously wrong. At which point all of the brave political cronies rallying around Rastetter will pull a McKibben and take a very big step back.
As noted in multiple prior posts, the cronies exploiting the Board of Regents and the state’s universities are not people who ask what’s right or wrong, they only ask what they can get away with. And the bottom line with these people is that they will never admit they did anything wrong. Even when you can prove it — when you can show that they lied, on the record — the most they’ll do in response is either fall silent or deny, deny, deny. Absent a criminal or civil case being brought against them, no matter what they’ve done, they know they can continue to wreak havoc with impunity if they simply refuse to admit their guilt.
If you are in state government, whether on the legislative side or in the Attorney General’s office, you need to make a decision. None of the warning shots that anyone has fired has done any good. If nothing else, the hijacking of the UI presidency and the Rastetter-Leath land deal — to say nothing of the crony jobs being handed out by Leath at ISU — prove that these people are not going to stop doing what they’re doing until forced to do so through investigation and prosecution.
tv says
gawd bless ‘merica, plagiarism and all
Leath is now the 8th highest paid college prez in Merica. Wonder if he needed to hide that tax wise in a land purchase
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2016/07/19/isus-leath-eighth-highest-paid-college-president/87291230/
Rastetter then said his employees were hunting with Leath (haha) and then lunch and that is how the deal went down
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/rastetter-defends-land-deal-with-iowa-state-president-leath-20160718
bull****
So here’s the other thing – Leath is apparently out hunting with “ISU grads” who happen to be Summit employees.
Why is he out hunting with Summit employees? With people from the president of the BOR’s company? And why in hell would Bruce want him fraternizing with Summit employees? Why, in fact, has he met Summit employees at all? They’re ISU grads, Bruce says. So are hundreds of thousands of other people. I’m sure Leath doesn’t have anything to do with most of them. Are these Summit employees tremendous personal donors to ISU? Is he there perhaps courting them as ISU alumni donors, and if so, where are ISU’s development people in the party? What exactly is it that these fresh-faced ISU grads do at Summit?
Did Leath accept any gifts from them while hunting with them? Nice meal? Gear?
And what about Ruud and Mason? Did they socialize with Summit goons? How about Harreld? Ski with them or what?
How about the AG? Does he also hunt with Summit goons? You know, in Rhode Island, when you’re an AG who goes out in the woods with somebody’s goons, you don’t come back. Maybe the Iowa AG intends to dodge any such invitation from Summit. I mean even the vice president of the United States has hunting accidents.
I’d really like to hear more about this sporting relationship between the regents’ university presidents and Summit employees.
You can see how Leath might get confused. One minute Rastetter is asking him about his wife. The next minute Rastetter is asking him about something at Iowa State. The next minute Rastetter is asking him about a public-private partnership with SummitAg.
One minute Rastetter is Leath’s friend, one minute Rastetter is Leath’s boss, the next minute Rastetter is Leath’s P3 CEO .
It wouldn’t at all surprise if me if Leath didn’t simply start thinking of himself as a public-private partnership with Rastetter, which is why he may be confused about how his crony land deal was not only unethical but potentially unlawful. If everything you do or say revolves around Rastetter, it’s got to be hard keeping your mind on the fact that you’re actually the president of Iowa State.
This article from Storm Lake explains alot:
http://www.stormlake.com/articles/2016/07/20/they%E2%80%99re-playing-game-our-expense
They’re playing a game at our expense
Submitted by on Wed, 07/20/2016 – 8:34am
By ART CULLEN
Fair enough, but what the hell does he want with UI, then? We can’t do his business any good. If we’re the timberland, then sell us o– ah.
Well then.
That’s such a great piece. Thanks for posting that.
The Waterloo Courier has an editorial that sure sounds like it reads Ditchwalk.
http://wcfcourier.com/news/opinion/editorial/isu-president-s-land-buy-not-private/article_9be0e7f4-9b72-5667-bf05-034af3f4fc9b.html
A question, since UNI’s coming into it:
What precisely is the BOR’s charge? In Iowa Code words?
Because in the end, the three universities are a public trust, are they not? And if they’re being quietly, seriously mismanaged, then this would be a breach of public trust. And yet I’m guessing there is nothing in law that addresses the possibility of the concerted mismanagement of trust.
Rob Hogg might be doing some finger-wagging, but it seems to me that if there is a question of BOR impropriety or malfeasance, and there’s an absence of Code to deal with such matters, it would be a legislator’s job to write some and start maneuvering it through, and not just scold in the newspaper.
There are examples of other trustees who have run their universities into the ground while chasing profits. The one that comes immediately to mind is Cooper Union, in New York. Real estate schemes, there. Nearly sank the school entirely and killed off its tuition-free model. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/11/president-and-five-trustees-quit-amid-bitter-unrest-cooper-union
My guess, given the “law? What law?” behavior we’ve seen over the last half-year, is that substantial damage has already been done to all three institutions (and UIHC), and that all of them have exposure that would shock your average Iowan. But we need mechanisms not just for investigating frauds and thefts but for prosecuting them timely. What happens, for instance, if it’s demonstrable that the BOR is corrupt, but Branstad refuses to get rid of them? I think these are things worth knowing.
Your question about the BoR’s charge is on the money. I’ve read through that entire section of the code multiple times, and one specific session was devoted to trying to find the board’s mandate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.
The simplest explanation for that omission is that the mandate should be obvious to everyone who wants to do right by the state’s schools, but of course that overlooks the crooks who are focused on larceny. (Again, that is Rastetter’s gift — spotting an opportunity for exploitation a mile away.)
The individual members of the board are protected by Branstad. He could ask them to step down and it would be almost impossible for them to refuse, but because he’s a big part of the corruption that’s not going to happen. The legislature could step in and yank the bad eggs out, but so far it’s shown no inclination to take a real stand for reasons that baffle me — if only in a political context.
I would also point out that the failure of the state’s politicians on all sides to confront Rastetter is not solely related to his abuses of power. The insane feedback system that has been implemented — laughably called a ‘public forum’ — is an abomination to democracy and government accountability. And yet it persists, without a single public official pointing out that it is the very definition of bureaucratic menace.
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/university-of-iowa-public-criticizes-troubling-regent-hearings-20160218
I think some are waiting the clock out, hoping Rastetter will quit when his current term ends in 2017. I don’t see Rastetter walking away, but even if he does that changes nothing. Brandstad will simply appoint the next Rastetter, who will outlast the next governor’s first term.
Apart from Subhash Sahai’s comments after the vote, and statements made by Mary Louse Peterson after Harreld’s sham appointment, there has been nothing but silence from people whose voices would matter most. And don’t get me started on the AG, and how important an investigation would have been even if it concluded that there was nothing illegal about Harreld’s hire. (And as I think I’ve made clear, I think there was.)
I think that’s a reprint of the Register’s editorial, but even if that’s the case the fact that it’s being reprinted is a big deal. The Register’s response to the Rastetter-Leath land deal was on the money, and I’m glad that more papers are calling out the corruption. This is a state-wide, systemic problem, and it’s not going to get better until people are put on notice that there’s a price to pay for such behavior.
It was incredibly telling that Leath’s first response was haughty indignation, as if he could quite literally glower the Register into silence. If nothing else, I think he’s gotten a big wake-up call over the past week or two, that that little fantasy bubble he’s been living in with Rastetter has popped. Iowa State is not a subsidiary of SummitAg, no matter how much those two men would prefer otherwise.
Blood in the water….
DMR comments on the Regents ‘Dr Bob’ ‘s gross overpay
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/07/21/editorial-regents-ceo-grotesquely-overpaid-despite-law/87390472/
However I do not see these editorials changing things w Branstad in charge.
I do not know what to make of this. One of the Koch’s lays out the case that America is becoming closed minded, with some emphasis on hostility to academic freedom.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-closing-of-the-american-mind-1469141624
This is a byproduct of the collapse of the Republican party. Koch has been out in the press about this for several months, including this piece in the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/03/inside-charles-kochs-200-million-quest-for-a-republic-of-science/
The bottom line is that when Koch talks about ‘science’ he’s talking about approaching business and governance from a rationalistic perspective wholly slaved to making money, as differentiated from the fundamentalist majority on the right. As a libertarian Koch doesn’t care about ‘social politics’ per se, except in so far as he and his brother are allowed to do whatever they want when they want.
Still, invoking ‘science’ is clever, and will confuse a lot more people about Koch’s motives, which are as laser-focused on profit as ever. (Koch doesn’t want to use science to discover truth, he wants to control science in order to define truth.)
It was guys like Koch, a hundred years ago, who gave big money to science because they not only wanted exploitable technology but Improved Man. You see their descendents all over (aged 30-50, lean, big on performance cycling, with shaved heads, less than maximal social awareness, and many devices tracking their every medical and fitness move) talking about about efficiency and being Better. The old eugenics-happy business types gave a hell of a lot of money to biological sciences, esp. early genetics, and psychologists (their descendants are the ed psychologists with a a zillion tests for every kid and the jokers who want to give you a personality inventory before they interview you for a job). The only thing they braked for was Hitler, who gave eugenics a bad name for a while.
These guys have tremendous difficulty imagining the perspective of people who aren’t themselves, and not much incentive to try. These are the nice guys who’re sure racism and sexism aren’t serious things because after all they don’t see any.
On Tuesday the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller updated the Iowa Board of Regents’ progress toward filling the vacant presidency at the University of Northern Iowa. Specifically, Miller detailed the process by which the board will select a search firm, perhaps by as early as the end of next week. As always with the Board of Regents, however, the devil is in the details, and in this case it’s a devil we already know.
From the lede to Miller’s piece, on 07/19/16:
Four firms have applied to help in the search for a new University of Northern Iowa president, and the Board of Regents expects to pick one by the end of next week.
The board moved the application deadline from Friday to Monday after one firm requested an extension for undisclosed reasons, board spokesman Josh Lehman said.
Only two paragraphs in we learn that that the board couldn’t follow through on its own guidelines for choosing a search firm. The deadline was this coming Friday, one of the search firms purportedly begged for more time, and because the board is benevolent in its ways the deadline for proposals was moved to Monday.
In a world without liars we could simply take this adjustment at face value. One of the four submitting search firms got in a jam, somebody missed a plane, a dog ate somebody’s USB thumb drive, whatever. In response to that new and completely honest information the board could have given everyone an extra weekend to get their submissions in order — or at the very least a little extra time to retrieve that thumb drive. By the same token, however, the board could have said tough noogies and stuck with their stated timeline, asserting that any company unable to meet the agreed-upon terms had disqualified itself.
In reality, of course, the world is full of liars, and the Iowa Board of Regents has them right at the top of the food chain. As such it isn’t even particularly cynical to wonder why this change in plans is happening at the last minute, who requested the change, and who approved the change. None of which, of course, the board feels like sharing.
Had the Board of Regents made this adjustment with several weeks to go, it could reasonably be assumed that all of the search firms were still working on their proposals. With only three days to go until the original deadline, however, it’s entirely possible that some of the companies — meaning particularly those that felt honor-bound to treat the board’s deadline like, you know, an actual deadline — may have already submitted their proposals, only to now be effectively punished twice by the last-minute change of plans. (First, because they’re getting less time than they otherwise might have, and second because they will now be competing against at least one firm that should have either been disqualified or forced to turn in an unfinished proposal.)
The board being its usual slippery self, however, not only was an extension granted to a company that apparently couldn’t meet the stated terms, but as it turns out there never was a hard deadline to begin with. How can that be? Well, here is the absolutely unambiguous deadline from section 9 of the regents’ RFQ, as it would have appeared prior to the recently granted extension:
All materials must arrive no later than 4:30 p.m. July 15, 2016.
If you keep reading that paragraph, however, you’ll find that the board’s crystal-clear bolded and underlined deadline is not actually a firm deadline. And here to teach us that important lesson, about how the regents actually do business, is Josh “We’re Not Concerned About The Resume” Lehman, also from Miller’s report:
The change shouldn’t affect the board’s ability to award a contract by the end of next week but, Lehman said, that date is tentative.
“Additionally, I would note that the (request for qualifications) reserves the right to accept proposals after the deadline,” he said.
So, not only can you get an extension if you say the right magic words or do the right magic things to make that happen, but there’s even a possibility that you can blow the deadline outright and still have your proposal accepted. I don’t know what specific arguments or acts might convince the board to extend the deadline or allow you to submit a proposal past the deadline, but the important thing is that it is possible, as a matter of board policy, to negotiate such things with the board. All you have to do is find the right inducement and you’re in, even if you failed to meet the submission criteria that everyone else was held to.
Now, if you’ve been following the fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, and that wishy-washy, board-friendly clause rings a bell, you’re right. We’ve seen that before, during the search which led to Harreld’s sham appointment, which was managed by Parker Executive Search. From a post on 01/22/16, looking at the UI presidential search timeline, and Parker’s role in that corrupt search:
To review, then, there was no hard deadline for applications, the job was to remain open until filled even after the cutdown process was under way, and the amount of time that the committee had to screen and vet candidates during the first and largest cutdown was — at most — four days, itself cut down from twelve days. Which means any candidate who blew off the preferred date for submissions (07/28/15), or the later date on which disclosure of “ALL” materials was to take place (07/31/15), could still weasel in the door at the last minute. Which is how we come to this email exchange (pages 5 and 6 here), between PES and committee member Sarah Gardial, dean of the business college, on 08/03/15:
PES: We look forward to seeing you tomorrow. For your information, materials for 3 additional candidates/potential candidates have been uploaded for your review.
GARDIAL: Are we to evaluate the two candidates who are still being recruited but who have not applied?
PES: No. Please evaluate Active Candidates only.
Now keep in mind, this is the day before the entire committee gathers to cut the pool of candidates down to 8 or 9. And here we not only have three new candidates being added, but, apparently, there are two other candidates in the mix who have still not technically applied. And PES specifically tells Gardial not to evaluate those two candidates.
During the UI presidential search, not only was there no hard deadline by which candidates had to submit their paperwork, there wasn’t even a hard deadline by which candidates had to declare their candidacy. Meaning after all the other conscientious candidates submitted their applications and supporting documentation on time, and went through the cut-down process, and even after four finalists were picked and sent to the board, the board’s own rules allowed new candidates to apply for the job because — according to wording which seems to have appeared in the ad and ad alone, which almost no one would have been referencing at that point — the position was to “remain open until filled”.
Does that strike you as fair? Or does it sound more like a back door that was intentionally added to the rules, which then allowed a shady shyster at the board to sneak a stealth candidate in to the search at the last minute? Speaking of which, to this day nobody knows when J. Bruce Harreld actually declared his candidacy, or when his scant paperwork (a resume only) was submitted to Parker Executive search, or even if Harreld’s resume was submitted to Parker Executive Search. (One big clue that Parker may never have seen Harreld’s resume is the fact that even people with no experience vetting candidates recognized that his resume was a disaster.)
On the question of hiring a search firm for UNI, then — and remembering that the current president of the Iowa Board of Regents really did run a sham search at taxpayer expense in order to fraudulently elect J Bruce Harreld, which itself hinged on non-existent deadlines that were used to slip Harreld into the process at the last minute — what’s the worst-case scenario? Well, if you’re a conniving administrator, and you suddenly grant an extension to all companies based on one company’s last-minute request, then you would be in a position to leak information about any proposals that you had already received to the company that requested the extension. And that would then allow said company to tailor its own belated submission to advantage.
Crazy? Of course — who would do such a thing? That would be cheating!
And yet, as it stands right now — and believe me, I know nothing about submitting proposals to anybody for anything, let alone how search firm proposals work — it is a certainty that at least three of the firms submitting proposals for the UNI search are already convinced that if Parker Executive Search is the fourth company in the hunt, that PES will get the job. And of course if PES turns out to be the company that requested and was granted an extension, and PES also gets the job, then no matter what you think or what I think, everyone who works for those other three companies is going to feel like they got royally screwed. Much like how the other three final candidates for the presidency at Iowa felt when they found out the Iowa Board of Regents ripped them off.
Now, the board’s perpetual justification for never actually having a real deadline, whether or not a deadline is stated or implied, is that they might miss out on the best of all possible solutions simply be sticking to an arbitrary date. And I guess in some alternate universe, where the best people or companies are oblivious to offers until the last possible second, then need special accommodations to do what everyone else had no problem doing, maybe that’s possible. The reality, however — and particularly the reality at the Iowa Board of Regents — is that deadlines are omitted and voided precisely to allow the board and its minions to manipulate each selection. Not to administer a fair process, but to exploit what looks like a fair process in whatever way is most profitable at the time.
Having said that, one big reason why there may be no sinister motive behind the extension of the UNI proposal deadline is that somewhere in the criteria for selecting the winning proposals, there will be an equally ambiguous clause which allows the board to choose whoever the hell they want regardless of the merits of the proposals or any previously stated criteria. Again, J. Bruce Harreld had no experience in academic administration, he had not been a business executive for eight years prior to applying to be president at Iowa, his documentation was a joke, and yet he was unanimously appointed.
When it comes to choosing a lowly search firm to handle the UNI search, the board is going to pick whichever search firm it wants to work with, using whatever criteria it wants to employ in making that choice. In fact, here’s Iowa State Athletic Director Jamie Pollard, speaking directly to that point in the context of coaching searches, from a CBSSports.com article by Jon Solomon, on 04/12/16:
At Iowa State, Pollard was hired as athletic director in 2002 through work done by Parker. Pollard regularly uses Parker for coaching searches.
“I’m going to use somebody I feel understands our institution and our president and me personally,” Pollard said. “Their familiarity with us is more important than the fact they did a search for Iowa State to hire me 11 years ago. It’s kind of immaterial at this point. They’ve got a long relationship in the state of Iowa.”
Yes, Parker Executive Search does have “a long relationship with the state of Iowa”. As Miller noted in her story, not only did Parker perform the prior presidential searches at each of Iowa’s three state schools, but the Harreld search netted Parker over $300K, which was two to three times more expensive than any prior regents’ presidential search. All of which brings us to the real point of this post.
Whether anything hinky is going on with the UNI proposal submissions or not, nothing about the process for submitting those proposals will have anything to do with which firm is selected. There are no deadlines at the Iowa Board of Regents, there are no hard and fast criteria, there are no rules. Everything is ambiguous, on purpose, because ambiguity allows the greatest amount of leeway in corrupting the process. Whether you’re a candidate for a job at one of the state’s schools, or a company looking to do business with the board, the one thing you can be sure of is that you are never, ever going to get a fair shake on the merits.
As to what you might do to actually land the position or contract you’re seeking, I can only suggest that you study J. Bruce Harreld or Parker Executive Search for clues to their success.
This will seem obvious, but for the purposes of this post it needs to be stated explicitly. The problem with people who have no compunction about lying to your face is that you can’t simply ask them what they’re up to. When you encounter an honest person you can say, “Why are you here?”, or, “What are you doing?”, and they will tell you. When you encounter a dishonest person, any and all such questions merely prompt whatever lie that individual feels like telling, or whatever lie they were told to tell.
Unfortunately, because J. Bruce Harreld, the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, will lie to anyone’s face, we can’t simply ask him why he wanted the job so badly that as a candidate he spent tens of thousands of his own dollars flying himself back and forth to Iowa on private chartered jets. That shouldn’t be the case with the leader of an institution of higher learning, of course — and particularly one at a major public research university — but liars have a way of weaseling themselves into all kinds of positions they’re not qualified for, and J. Bruce Harreld is a stellar example. Despite having no experience in academic administration, and having spent the prior eight years not at the top of his game as a business executive but as an adjunct professor and lecturer, Harreld nonetheless parlayed his complete lack of qualifications into a job that now pays him almost $800,000 per year in total compensation. (According to a recent report by the Chronicle for Higher Education — that would rank Harreld as the #13 highest-paid such administrator in the United States.)
The most obvious answer as to why J. Bruce Harreld wanted the Iowa job, then, would seem to be money. He was completely unqualified and unprepared for the job, but maybe he was sick of being just another number as a part-time prof. What was he to say when someone offered to fix the search process and election in his favor, making him not only president, but also netting him more than three quarters of a million dollars for each of the next five years? Even better, because everyone would know he was a neophyte, no one could possibly complain about his bumbling job performance.
It’s a good theory, but there’s one small problem. By any measure J. Bruce Harreld was already wealthy when he left the East Coast at the end of 2014, ultimately headed to Iowa by way of Colorado. We know that because even if he was cash-poor at the beginning of that year, he sold two multi-million-dollar homes in 2014. Combine that infusion of cash with Harreld’s habit of flying himself around on chartered jets, and the fact that he decided to hold on to a third home worth $2.6M on the beach in Jacksonville, Florida, and we can infer that J. Bruce Harreld not hurting. Yes, he might just be greedy, and you can probably never have too much money lying around what with the cost of jet fuel, but unlike some of the students he would soon be ripping off with abusive tuition hikes, the man was clearly not going hungry.
So what else might have convinced Harreld to weasel his way into the president’s office at the University of Iowa? Well, over the past ten months Harreld has repeatedly demonstrated the temperament of a pugnacious brat, in toxic proportion to a deep-seated need to be the center of attention. Compared with being an out-of-work business exec or an adjunct professor, the appeal of once again being surrounded by a staff that was contractually obligated to do whatever he said would seem obvious.
One big problem, however, with assuming that the only reason Harreld became president at Iowa is because he couldn’t confront his declining years with any degree of grace, is that there is no motivation for anyone to offer him the job on that basis. Sure, if it was Harreld University, and his father or uncle had been at the helm for forty years, you can see how Harreld might have slid in under the cover of dynastic nepotism. But the University of Iowa is a billion-dollar research university, under the watchful eye of the Iowa Board of Regents, which is itself an arm of state government. People don’t just hand out public university presidencies to someone like Harreld without expecting a considerable return on their investment — meaning over and above slavish loyalty.
So in asking why Harreld became the president at Iowa, we’re really asking a different question, which is why a small cabal of co-conspirators installed Harreld as president even though he was completely unqualified for the job. And what is it that those people expect from Harreld, now that he’s the illegitimate captain of the ship? Fortuitously, in reframing that question we make it considerably easier to divine the truth. First, we already know who Harreld’s co-conspirators were, though there could be others we still don’t know about. Second, and more importantly, because Harreld himself is never going to fess up, we can blessedly stop trying to figure out what he was thinking.
J. Bruce Harreld Tips His Hand
From the time Harreld was appointed in early September until now, the publicly stated rationale for his ‘non-traditional’ hire has been that he would use his business experience to advance the university at a time of great upheaval in higher education. Over that eleven-month span, however, Harreld has so far done nothing but lay the groundwork for whatever he was actually hired to do for his minders. And yet, characteristically, Harreld has shown no reluctance to take credit for things he has not actually accomplished.
From an interview with KCRG-TV, on 05/17/16:
“A lot of people have come out of the wood work to help, once they realize I’m not the ogre that’s going to slash and burn,” said Harreld.
At the time of that interview — as well as before and since, for that matter — Harreld had not put forward any plans, at all, about where cuts would be made or resources reallocated. As such, he has so far demonstrated nothing about his slash-and-burn proclivities. In fact, Harreld’s sole business-like initiative to-date was his just-concluded campaign to strip as much money as possible from students and their families through predatory tuition hikes, thus providing himself with a war chest for whatever his plans actually are — including an $11M slush fund that he can disperse at his sole discretion.
From a UI press release this past week regarding those just-passed tuition hikes:
“I respect the board’s decision and understand the concerns of Iowa families,” says University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld. “We’ve had a collaborative budgeting process that involved the deans, unit leaders, and shared governance leaders, and we’ll return to that process to determine which strategic initiatives we can fund and which will likely have to wait.”
As noted in multiple prior posts, Harreld’s “collaborative budgeting process” is a lie, the “unit leaders” at UI have been given responsibility with no consequent budgetary authority, Harreld himself has betrayed “shared governance” on multiple occasions, and yet as of this date he still refuses to disclose his plans for reallocating resources. And despite Harreld’s professed “respect” and “understanding”, not only did Harreld himself insist on the egregious tuition hikes which were just passed, but once again the UI press release quoted above contains a barrage of data, but no accounting of exactly how much money those draconian tuition hikes will generate.
Over the past ten months, Harreld has kept his cards — or, rather, the cards of his minders — so close to his vest, that despite everything I have read (which is almost everything that has been written), I can only point to one sentence in one article which presents anything I would even remotely characterize as new information about his plans. As it happens, that article was referenced in a prior post because it also contained Harreld’s sputtering response to the recent AAUP sanction of Iowa — a response which we will now revisit for reasons other than sheer incredulity:
No matter what you think of J. Bruce Harreld, by any measure that response — to a reporter, following the AAUP’s sanction of the university that Harreld presides over — is the definition of failure. Harreld makes almost $800,000 a year in guaranteed compensation, he is the president of a major research university, he is purportedly the reason why IBM did not go bankrupt when then tech boom caught that stodgy company by surprise, and yet the above quote is the entirety of his on-the-record response to the AAUP’s unprecedented action against a school of Iowa’s standing. And this is the same man who is now poised to order and implement new resource allocations across the University of Iowa campus.
That dissonance – between Harreld’s striking incompetence on one hand, and the magnitude of the transformational authority that he was given by his minders — suggests that whatever Harreld is about to do, he will simply be following orders. We know that because nobody in their right mind would actually allow someone so utterly incompetent to have a free hand in re-imagining the University of Iowa. Yes, in the margins Harreld will have discretionary authority to crush programs and people who do not please or appease him, but in the main even those abuses will be geared toward freeing up resources which can then used to implement his minders’ plans.
From that same article, here is the only information about Harreld’s still-secret agenda that caused me to sit up and take notice during the entire ten-month span between his appointment and the publication of that piece:
University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld said that to compensate for historic lows in state funding, the university is likely to pursue more research partnerships with corporations, and may concentrate resources internally toward select areas such as big data, hydraulics and professional education.
While there is a lot to digest in that small paragraph, there are two words that don’t seem to belong in a conversation about the University of Iowa, and those words are “big data”. It’s a given that Harreld is going to open up UI to exploitation by corporations, if not sell it off piecemeal under the guise of partnerships, much the same way that Iowa State is now controlled by ag interests. It is also known that Iowa has a world-renowned hydraulics lab, which is housed in one of the coolest buildings on campus. I can even see how the “professional education” (continuing education) angle might work, particularly with regard to UIHC, the healthcare space, and charging professionals big bucks for trendy CEU’s. But “big data”? Where did that come from?
It’s also worth noting that Harreld’s recent quote about “big data” was not given to or unearthed by the regular beat reporters covering Harreld, the University of Iowa, or crony political crime in the state. Instead, that new information comes to us from the Corridor Business Journal, which, as the name suggests, covers the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids business corridor. As such, it seems that Harreld may have gotten a bit chatty upon finding himself among friends instead of among academics — at least until the impertinent CBJ reporter prompted Harreld to swallow his tongue by asking about the AAUP sanction.
Big Data and the University of Iowa
In the absence of any other information, and knowing full well that J. Bruce Harreld may be lying about his interest in “big data”, we’re going to pick up that single thread and give it a tug. In doing so, we’re not only going to see where that thread leads, but how tightly woven it is into information we already have available. Does the idea of Harreld pouring resources into “big data” fit with what we already know?
The most obvious question, of course, is what “big data” means, and not just to Harreld. When I read that term in the CBJ report I understood it to mean the search for meaningful signals in large amounts of aggregated data. The more information you have at your disposal, and the more granular that information, the more likely it is that you will spot new tendencies or trends — provided, of course, that you know how to look. Big data is about how to look.
Most people are probably familiar with the concept of big data from analytics in sports, where more and more information is being compiled and analyzed in the quest for any possible performance advantage. Big data is also important with regard to healthcare, particularly in terms of pointing researchers at important and/or profitable areas of study. And, obviously, at the heart of many such studies is the question of scale:
Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy. The term often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics, user behavior analytics, or certain other advanced data analytics methods that extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set. Accuracy in big data may lead to more confident decision making, and better decisions can result in greater operational efficiency, cost reduction and reduced risk.
Whether you like that explanation or not, big data is clearly a thing. The next question, then, is what J. Bruce Harreld meant by big data, when he said he would “concentrate resources internally toward” that area of study. And that’s an interesting question, because whether you’re a creaky old alum or a recent graduate, I’m willing to bet that you never thought of the University of Iowa as a hotbed of big data. Big hangovers, maybe. Big tuition hikes, apparently. But big data?
When I first ran across Harreld’s quote I did a bit of digging, including a sophisticated internet search using the terms ‘University of Iowa’ and ‘big data’. What I found, when cross-referencing the first page of hits for both recency and relevance, was this article, published less than a month ago on 06/27/16, from, of all sources, the Corridor Business Journal:
University of Iowa joins the big data rush
UI’s Tippie College of Business expanding degree programs in analytics as big data goes even bigger
By Dave DeWitte
Businesses large and small have discovered the power of data to make better decisions, and that has made the Business Analytics and Information Systems (BAIS) degree program at the University of Iowa one of the hottest tickets for business students.
The bachelor’s degree program was launched by the Management Sciences Department in the UI’s Tippie College of Business three years ago – the same year that CNBC ran an article calling data analyst “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” But while most universities introducing degrees in the field were focused on master’s programs, the UI became the first in the Big Ten to offer an undergraduate degree in the subject.
In the context of Harreld’s comments about reallocating resources toward big data, and perhaps even engaging in partnerships with corporations, the above quote is obviously a treasure trove of information. Again, however, it’s a bit odd that we’re hearing about this specific administrative pivot — the first I can recall Harreld announcing anywhere — from the CBJ, as opposed to one of the mainstream news outlets that Harreld and UI are constantly plastering with press releases. Still, we clearly have an answer as to what Harreld means by big data, plus more information to boot.
At Iowa, big data means, at a minimum, the Business Analytics and Information Systems (BAIS) degree program in the Tippie College of Business. And of course reallocating resources to that hot ticket — like shifting marketing money to a hot product — should bring in even more students, which will generate even more revenue, which will be doubly great because Harreld just socked the crap out of business (and engineering-slash-hydraulics) students with extra tuition hikes. (Yes, those differential hikes on business and engineering students could make it impossible for low-income students to participate in those programs, but because J. Bruce Harreld is a complete neophyte, he can hardly be held responsible for failing to account for namby-pamby concerns about diversity or fairness.)
While Harreld himself is not quoted in the CBJ article about the BAIS degree, there can be no confusion about what Harreld meant by “big data” when he was quoted using those exact words only six days earlier, in another CBJ article. Because confirmation is always a good thing, however, here’s a quote from a 04/20/16 article on CIO.com, titled “8 Universities at the Forefront of Big Data“:
At the University of Iowa, you can opt to get your bachelor’s degree in Business Analytics and Information Systems, a degree program that the university notes has experienced an average increase of 5 percent in starting salary offers upon graduation. According to the website, the University of Iowa also boasts a 100 percent placement rate with the choice of two degree tracks in business analytics or information systems. The business analytics track focuses on improving a business’ data strategy and building new processes, analyzing large databases of information, creating decision support systems and understanding how data fundamentally affects a business. The information systems track is more about managing the technology that collects, houses and protects the data with a focus on solving infrastructure problems, learning the fundamentals of software design and development and analyzing current business processes to create business solutions.
So okay — the University of Iowa is a player in big data, and Harreld intends to expand that presence, perhaps even making a run at ‘owning the space’ as biz execs say. But again, how did all of that happen when most Iowa grads probably don’t think of Iowa as having a prominent big data program? Well, the answer may have more to do with a recent change in terminology than anything else.
We can see that by rolling the clock back almost a year, to publication of a prior article on UI and big data — this time by the Gazette’s indefatigable Vanessa Miller. What’s interesting about Miller’s piece is that it appeared on 08/06/15, two days after the UI Presidential Search and Will-Never-Screen Committee cut down the list of candidates for the Iowa presidency from 47 to nine. Those nine candidates then went on to be interviewed in Chicago in order to determine the four finalists, and as we now know J. Bruce Harreld made both of those critical cuts.
Another thing that’s interesting about Miller’s report is that even though she uses the phrase ‘big data’, at the time that’s not how UI was talking about the concept internally:
Every time you swipe a credit card, someone somewhere records that. Every time you click on a website, it’s tabulated. Biomedical scientists today are capable of tracking intricate genetic behavior.
“Everyone has data,” said University of Iowa professor Nick Street. “That’s the reason ‘big data’ is such a buzzword.”
And everyone wants to use it — to improve marketing strategies, hiring practices, health care and basic decision-making in a wide swath of industries, said Street, executive officer of the UI Henry B. Tippie College of Business management sciences department.
“It’s really quite exciting,” he said. “I’ve been here 17 to 18 years, and this is the best time to be an applied computing person since I’ve been here.”
Street is referencing, in part, a new “Informatics at Iowa” initiative aimed at strengthening the research and training of informatics at centers and institutes across campus — including those in medicine, business, geography and the social sciences.
I don’t know how far back the term ‘informatics’ goes, but that is a word I’ve heard before at UI, particularly with regard to information analysis at UIHC. Even back in the day I knew it was a cutting-edge discipline, but as Miller’s report makes clear, it has only recently become a focal point across the university:
The UI3 initiative, as it’s called, will support and coordinate collaboration among those centers by adding faculty with informatics expertise and by creating a physical space for the resources.
That space will be the fifth floor of the new Public Health building. The Board of Regents on Wednesday approved spending $4.6 million to create the UI3 center, scheduled for completion in March.
So when Harreld talks about throwing more UI resources at big data in the summer of 2016, what he’s talking about is not only the BAIS program but the UI3 initiative. Interestingly, however, in the entire CBJ article from only a few weeks ago, the term ‘informatics’ or ‘UI3’ is absent, and the emphasis really is on ‘big data’. That change in terminology suggests that perhaps Harreld, in his role of chief marketing weasel, is already hard at work, sexing up the terminology in advance of a major move.
Big Data and J. Bruce Harreld
It’s the premise of this post that J. Bruce Harreld was placed at Iowa by a person or persons who intended to use him as a tool to accomplish some goal. As a tool, then, it’s worth asking whether J. Bruce Harreld is the right tool for the job. You don’t pick up a screwdriver when you need a wrench, so why would you go out of your way to grab a Harreld if you’re planning on using him to push big data at the University of Iowa?
While Harreld spent the eight years prior to being hired at Iowa not as a muscle-flexing business executive but as an adjunct professor, it’s important to note the subjects he was teaching. And here for once Harreld’s dilapidated resume actually proves helpful:
Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dual Faculty Appointments to the Entrepreneurial and Strategy Units
Taught Strategy to first year MBA students. Taught several second year MBA courses focused on turnarounds and executing strategy. Taught in numerous executive programs in Cambridge, Qatar, Mumbai, and Shanghai. Faculty Chair of “Building New Businesses in Established Organizations. Member of Faculty I/T Advisory Committee.
Leaving aside the orphaned quote mark, which has no closing twin, the fact that Harreld used to teach a course called “Building New Businesses in Established Organizations” is intriguing vis-a-vis his job at Iowa. (Still, if Parker Executive Search lands the contract for the UNI search after allowing Harreld’s disastrous resume to pass muster, the Iowa Board of Regents and PES both need to be investigated.) In researching the “Building New Businesses in Established Operations” course, we find this mention in a Harvard Business Review article by Michael L. Tushman, on 07/18/12, appropriately titled Exploring and Exploiting Your Way to Growth:
Last week, I taught an Executive Education program at HBS, with my colleague Bruce Harreld, on “Building New Businesses in Established Organizations.” We addressed the question of how leaders turn great invention into business innovation that generates organic revenue growth.
In terms of Harreld’s fitness as a tool, one thing we should note here is that Harreld and Tushman were teaching an “Executive Education” course, which dovetails nicely with Harreld’s CBJ quote that he intends to reallocate resources toward “professional education”. Meaning out of Harreld’s three proposed areas of future revenue focus, we see that Harreld is familiar with two of them from his own professional past. And of course from his resume we also know that Harreld’s undergraduate degree was in engineering from Purdue, which would also seem to explain his impending support for the hydraulics program.
It’s also worth noting, in the CBJ article about Iowa and big data, that the BAIS degree program at the UI Tippie College of Business is described as follows:
Two different tracks are offered in the UI’s BAIS program. The Business Analytics track focuses on using data to analyze and improve business processes, and includes classes in decision support systems, business intelligence and optimization/simulation.
The Information Systems track focuses on the design and management of the information technology that collects, organizes and secures data that will be used to solve business problems. It includes classes in business programming, software design and development, and data communications.
So big data at Iowa not only means gathering and analyzing data, but also the hardware and code of the systems which are used to accomplish that goal. That in turn fits with Harreld’s mention that he was on the Harvard Business School’s “Faculty I/T Advisory Committee”. If Harreld intends to grow big data/informatics at Iowa, as a tool he’s certainly got all the bases covered. From the course title we also know that Harreld knows how can build parasitic businesses inside a still-functioning host system — including, presumably, by siphoning off resources from other parts of that system. (At which point those other parts would inevitably fail, thus proving they weren’t worth saving in the first place.)
Moving on we come to Harreld’s thirteen years at IBM (or ‘BM’) in various roles, and here Harreld’s fit for the Tippie BAIS big-data program could not be more obvious. IBM was and is heavily invested in both hardware and software, and at one point in its glorious history may have been (and may again become) the world-wide leader in big data.
From Harreld’s resume:
Created and led the firm’s Emerging Business Organization that produced more than $15 billion in new, profitable revenue across 20 new businesses.
Not only is tech right in Harreld’s wheelhouse, but reallocating resources away from programs that might be lagging, toward programs that might make a lot of money, is pretty much Harreld’s core strength. Which may in turn explain the abusive tuition hikes he just forced on the students at the University of Iowa, which he defended at a meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents by saying the following….
As quoted in a Des Moines Register article on 06/09/16:
University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld told reporters after the meeting that UI needs its full proposed increase to ensure it can continue to attract and retain the world-class faculty required to provide students with a world-class education.
“If the mission, which is my charge, continues driving the University of Iowa back into the top ranks nationally, we’re going to need some resources. … If the students want to take that to roughly half of what we’ve proposed, it’s just going to stretch out the time and make it a lot more difficult — while a lot of our competitors continue to zoom ahead,” Harreld said.
And as quoted in the Gazette, also on 06/09/16:
UI President Bruce Harreld said paring down the proposed tuition increases for the upcoming academic year would make it harder for him to move the university ahead.
“If the mission, which I believe is my charge, is to continue driving the University of Iowa back into the top ranks nationally, I need some resources,” Harreld said. “If, in fact, the students want to take that roughly in half of what we’ve proposed, it’s just going to stretch out the time and make it a lot more difficult, while a lot of our competitors are continuing to zoom ahead.”
Leaving aside whether Harreld just pulled a fast one by ripping off students school-wide in order to fund his minders’ plans for big data at UI, it should be clear that Harreld’s experience at IBM would be central to that cause. In fact, if you were, say, a member of the UI presidential search committee in 2015, or perhaps even a prospective member of said committee back into 2014, and you were president-shopping for just the right tool to shift a whole bunch of money toward your pet cause of advancing big data at the University of Iowa, then from only the first two items on Harreld’s resume it’s already hard to imagine coming up with a better candidate. If that’s the job, then J. Bruce Harreld is the right tool, and the rest of Harreld’s resume confirms that:
Boston Market Company
Personally led the store operations, store design, product development, marketing, procurement, and information technology functions.
Developed and taught first ever MBA course on Strategic Use of Information Technology at Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
Kraft General Foods
Promoted to Chief Information Officer responsible for the integration of business processes across Kraft Foods, General Foods, and Oscar Mayer.
All the talk about Harreld being a transformational leader and helping the University of Iowa steer a course through troubled waters in higher education is a crock. But if someone had a specific mission, and that mission involved growing a big-data program inside UI by first pilfering and reallocating resources to that cause, not only is that the core strength of J. Bruce Harreld’s business expertise, but that’s pretty much exactly what he has accomplished in his first eight-plus months on the job.
For Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and Big Data, click here.
This is Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and Big Data. For Part 1, click here.
Big Data and the Tippie College of Business
In terms of fit, the synergies between J. Bruce Harreld as a former business exec and the UI business college are obvious. That’s Harreld’s academic home base, as demonstrated by his eight years as an adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Business. Given Harreld’s background as a marketing weasel, it also wouldn’t be surprising if he almost reflexively ditched the word ‘informatics’ in favor of the concept of bigness.
I don’t know the history of informatics at Iowa, but I know it goes back quite a ways, including particularly at UIHC, where you can see the obvious utility. If you want to cut down on, say, post-op infections, nothing is better than having reams of data which account for all possible variables, making the critical factor(s) that much easier to identify.
On the Informatics/UI3 website, there’s a page that talks about “our future home” on the 5th floor of the College of Public Health Building, which — after a short delay — seems just about ready for business. What’s particularly interesting about that new informatics space, however, is that it’s on the west side of the UI campus, which, apart from sports, is ruled over by Vice President for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard. Robillard, who also recently appointed himself dean of the college of medicine, was also the chair of the Harreld search committee, and the interim UI president during the Harreld search, and the key traitorous UI administrator who enabled Harreld’s fraudulent hire. By contrast, the Tippie College of Business, which hosts the BAIS program, is on the east side of campus, and is presided over by Dean Sarah Gardial under the administrative auspices of J. Bruce Harreld.
So, how to explain this territorial divide? Well, here’s the entire text from the ‘About’ page on the UI3/Informatics page website, which also includes a diagram referenced in the first sentence:
The major informatics scholarship and teaching components at Iowa. There are existing <a href="http://informatics.uiowa.edu/informatics/informaticsiowa/about-informaticsiowa/informatics-related-centers-and-institutes-university-iowa“>centers and institutes that have informatics components that focus on specific application areas. Furthermore, several of the recent faculty cluster hires rely heavily on informatics. UI3 is designed to strengthen the research and training capacities of these centers and clusters by adding new faculty with foundational and domain expertise, and to enhance the professional staff infrastructure to better support informatics activities and maximize the effective use of campus wide informatics resources.
[The links on the UI3 web page are broken because of an unnecessary ‘ informatics/ ‘ in the URL. I have fixed both links in the quote above.]
Informatics at Iowa, then, including the UI3 initiative, is internal. Follow the two links above and you’ll see that the integration of informatics at UI is also extensive, as it almost certainly should be. The BAIS program at Tippie, on the other hand, trains students to take jobs in informatics, analytics or big data, including perhaps at UI. To that now add all of the big-data professors teaching the BAIS program on the east side of campus, and all of the professionals implementing informatics solutions on the west side of campus, and among those groups will also be individuals researching and generating new solutions, which may not only have applicability for UI but also be of value to other institutions.
On the UI campus, then, it’s not that there are two separate but similar groups involved in big data, but that there one big-data ecosystem already up and running, which might be repurposed for other things, including making a profit. Unfortunately, as they say, it takes money to make money, and that’s where J. Bruce Harreld comes in.
In order to exploit the profit potential in the synergies between Tippie and the Informatics program, those programs would normally have to lobby for a greater share of increasingly scarce campus resources. That’s also true if they wanted to hire someone like Harreld — or maybe even Harreld himself — to oversee such a program. There would have to be planning and budget meetings and on an on, and the whole thing would get mired down in administrative red tape.
Now look at what’s happening. Despite his manifest illegitimacy, J. Bruce Harreld is the president of the University of Iowa, and as such he can simply ‘find’ the money for a UI big-data program by either ripping off the students with big tuition increases, reallocating money from other programs, or both. And as of today he’s already halfway there.
In terms of fit — as a tool — J. Bruce Harreld’s claim to fame is not taking venture capital and building new businesses from scratch. Instead, Harreld is a cannibalistic infiltrator, specializing in reallocating resources from within, purportedly as a means of salvation for struggling organizations. That, in turn, explains why Harreld and his co-conspirators were so eager during the search to portray higher education as being in crisis. If UI wasn’t broke, they couldn’t have hired Harreld to fix it.
Big Data and Harreld’s Masters
Again, it’s the premise of this post that J. Bruce Harreld was placed at Iowa by a person or persons who intend to use him — like a tool — to accomplish some task. Assuming that Harreld was and is the right tool for the big-data job, as seems to be the case from all of the above, one question we haven’t asked yet is who would have known where to find Harreld.
If you’ve been following the Harreld hire at all, you know there were three key co-conspirators involved in Harreld’s sham appointment: Bruce Rastetter, then and now the president of the Iowa Board of Regents; Jean Robillard, previously discussed in a multiplicity of administrative roles; and Jerre Stead, an accomplished and wealthy alumnus. While Rastetter and Robillard were central to the administrative machinations that levered Harreld into office, and Rastetter served on the search committee that Robillard chaired, Stead was also a member of that committee.
From J. Bruce Harreld we have the most recent version of his origin story as a candidate, which has gone through multiple iterations in the past ten months. Purportedly, an anonymous individual at Boston Consulting — where Harreld worked after snagging his MBA at Harvard — spontaneously tipped Rastetter off about Harreld’s existence. After Rastetter cold-called Harreld and was shot down, Rastetter somehow spontaneously knew to ask Jerre Stead to call Harreld one week later, to beg Harreld to at least consider meeting with Rastetter. Sometime later, Stead arranged a face-to-face meeting between Rastetter, Robillard, then-Chief of Staff Peter Matthes and Harreld, in a hotel conference room in Cedar Rapids. (Stead was scheduled to attend himself, but backed out at the last minute.)
Now, although Harreld has changed his candidate origin story multiple times, it is a constant that the one person who was absolutely not responsible for Harreld finding out about the open presidency at Iowa, or anyone at Iowa finding out about Harreld, was Jerre Stead. And yet when we actually look at Harreld’s past, among Rastetter, Robillard and Stead — if not also every single human being even remotely connected with the University of Iowa — the one person who actually knew about Harreld and his suitability as the perfect tool for pushing big data, is Jerre Stead.
Not only do Stead and Harreld go back over twenty years or more as business executives, including having worked on projects together, but Stead’s business in Denver is only a hundred miles or so down the road from Harreld’s home in Avon, Colorado. Because the Steads have long been at least part-time residents in Colorado, and Harreld and his wife have deep familial ties to the Denver area, it’s also not too hard to imagine social interactions as well. And yet somehow, no matter what origin story Harreld has told about how he found his way to the Iowa campus, Jerre Stead was absolutely not the person who pulled him out of the toolbox and put him to work.
Just knowing of J. Bruce Harreld wasn’t enough, however, because in order to sell the others on Harreld’s suitability to the task, the person who put him forward had to authoritatively speak to Harreld’s credentials. While Rastetter might agree that Harreld was the right tool, Rastetter’s background in agriculture and commodities hardly positioned him to know that Harreld was the right tool. Likewise for Robillard, whose career in medicine and administration has certainly brought him into contact with people from many different professions, but has hardly made him an expert on big data.
But what about Jerre Stead? How qualified would he have been to judge Harreld’s fitness for pushing big data at UI? Well, to answer that question, let’s take a look at how Jerre Stead’s company, IHS Markit, is described on the company’s ‘About Us’ page:
Through a unique combination of information, analytics and expertise, IHS Markit enables smarter, better decision making in everything from day-to-day operations to long-term investments.
Well…golly. That there pretty much looks like an exact description of big data, without using those words. Still, we don’t want to leap to any conclusions, so what size of a company are we talking about? I mean, is IHS Markit operating out of a garage or what?
Oddly enough, Jerre’s former company (IHS) just closed on a major merger with Markit, another ‘analytics’ company based out of London. Now with a global reach, the pre-deal market cap for IHS Markit was pegged at about $13B, meaning when it comes to big data and informatics, Jerre Stead clearly does know what he’s talking about.
It’s also worth noting that Jerre Stead is in his mid-seventies, and has been in business at a high level for close to fifty years. If there’s one person involved in the Harreld hire who had an almost infinite number of contacts around the world, who had worked with hundreds if not thousands of executives, who would know almost reflexively how to find the exact right tool for the job once he understood what the job was, it’s Jerre Stead. In fact, if there wasn’t an actual university surrounding the big-data program that Harreld seems poised to unleash, he might actually have been the right tool for that job.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why would Jerre Stead, bazillionaire, go out of his way to help Rastetter and Robillard target and hire J. Bruce Harreld? And I don’t have an answer for that. What I can tell you, however, is that the day after Harreld’s appointment was announced, on September 3rd, 2015, Jerre Stead, future CEO of IHS Markit and member of the UI presidential search committee, did a very strange thing. He lied to the press about when he first learned that J. Bruce Harreld was a candidate.
I know, I know — it hardly seems possible, but it’s true. Which of course raises all sorts of questions about why Jerre Stead, head of IHS Markit, might himself want to install J. Bruce Harreld, IT nerd and entrepreneurial parasite, as president of the University of Iowa. In the abstract, of course, you can see the appeal. IHS Markit is on the cutting edge of big data in commercial applications, but their ability to stay on the cutting edge relies on constant innovation. While they could do all that in-house, that would also cost a pretty penny and divert resources. Much better might be a taxpayer-funded or partially funded entity which not only researched and prototyped new solutions, but also trained workers in those new solutions.
So what about that? Does UI alum Jerre Stead have any ties to the Tippie College of Business? Well, as it turns out, Jerre donated $25M to the college in 2003, which apparently prompted such appreciation that he was given his own web page right on the school’s website. From the ‘About’ page of the UI Stead Technology Services Group:
Stead Technology Services Group
The Stead Technology Services Group (STSG) is a professional information technology organization dedicated to the broad-based, cross-curriculum technological leadership and support of the teaching, research, and service missions of the Tippie College of Business. The staff of STSG are committed to sustaining current technologies, identifying and researching emerging technologies, and intelligently deploying those that will most benefit the goals and objectives of the Tippie College of Business and the University of Iowa. STSG’s primary goals are to:
* Sustain and build upon the organization’s recognition and trust as the first place for college constituents to seek professional consultation about technological needs;
* Grow the size of the organization and the skills of its staff in order to meet the continually growing technology needs of the college;
* Use available program fees to support instructional computing at the highest level possible;
* Identify and implement emerging technologies that best support the strategic goals of the college and the university, doing so within the limits of available resources.
Did you catch that at the end there? “Within the limits of available resources.” If only the Stead Technology Services Group could find more resources!
While the IHS Markit merger closed only recently — as in 12 days ago — initial talks between Stead and Markit CEO Lance Uggla began as early as 2014, before Markit went public in the United States, on 06/16/14. From an IHS Markit conference call on SeekingAlpha.com, published on 03/21/16:
Jerre Stead
… So, let me just make a couple of comments that Lance and I first started talking with each other when Lance was a still a private company preparing to go public. And I was fascinated by what he was doing, so impressed with what he had found as an attack mechanism to a huge market growing quickly. So stayed close, talked to him. I actually talked to him when he was doing his IPO, stayed in close view of the great work he was doing. We met, as we said, in December for a breakfast and then both spent our 2-week holidays on the phone about 80% of the time. So, when we have got done with holiday, we were pretty square on how we are going to go.
Although Markit is in London and IHS is in Denver, prior to the merger Markit already had other UI alums in the fold. For example, on the old-but-still-live Markit site, the Head of Equities for Markit Financial Information Services is listed as Rob Flatley, who has an BBA in Accounting from UI. Likewise, from a LinkedIn search hit titled Top 25 Project Manager Profiles at Markit, we find that 2 of the 25 are Iowa grads, and both are listed not as working in London, but in ‘greater Denver’.
How deep the ties go between Stead/IHS Markit and UI’s Tippie College I do not know, but it would be interesting to know how many UI grads have found homes at both of those now-joined companies. It would also be interesting to know whether the gaudy claims of placement for UI BAIS grads correlate with hires from either or both of those companies. From the CBJ article on big data at UI:
For the first two years, every single student who graduated from the program received job offers, a record that receded only slightly in the third year.
Now, I am not at all suggesting that the Tippie College of Business may have primed the pump on the success of its BAIS program by pipelining grads to an alum’s company. Because obviously that would be an egregious wrong among a list of wrongs that just keeps growing and growing in the aftermath of the Harreld hire. Speaking of priming the pump, however, here’s J. Bruce Harreld himself, from the CBJ report in which he referenced big data as a priority at UI:
Mr. Harreld said he’s fielded inquiries about the university’s “big data” studies, and specifically identified the Stanley Hydraulics Laboratory as one asset with noteworthy commercial potential, but declined to give details about any specific partnerships.
“I know a lot of people in corporate America, so I’ve asked them to come and take a look at what we’re doing, and see if it might play a role, and if they’re looking for a partner,” Mr. Harreld said. “This is going to lead to some pretty interesting potential relationships, so we’re launching some of those.”
Among the questions which come to mind about Harreld selling UI off to corporations, is IHS Markit one of the companies that Harreld has “fielded inquiries” from? You know, as if IHS Markit’s CEO didn’t already know that Harreld was at UI, and that Harreld was planning a major reallocation of resources toward big data? Also, have there been any discussions about a public-private partnership between UI and IHS Markit, and if so, when did those conversations first take place?
Big Data and the Iowa Board of Regents
Having seen how UI traitor Jean Robillard fits into any big-data plan at UI, and how central big data is to Jerre Stead’s business success, we’re left to ponder how Bruce Rastetter figures in the big-data aspect of J. Bruce Harreld’s sham hire — particularly given that Rastetter was the chief architect of that administrative con. From a distance it doesn’t seem like there’s much of an incentive on Rastetter’s part, although there are a few connections. For example, among Rastetter’s many charitable donations — some of which he has actually followed through on, and not simply taken credit for, is this:
Summit Agricultural Group donates funds to the University of Iowa Foundation to create four scholarships annually at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. This scholarship program will be funded for five consecutive years starting in 2015. While each scholarship has its own eligibility criteria, all of them will be awarded to individuals possessing strong Iowa ties, agricultural backgrounds, and leadership skills.
Okay, so four scholarships to Tippie. Good for the kids, good for the tax deduction, win-win. Yet not nearly the kind of association that we find with Robillard and Stead.
As noted in a number of recent articles and editorials in the press, and even in a lawsuit against the regents stemming from the Harreld hire, Rastetter tends to devote most of his campus-corrupting influence to Ames, which is not only much closer to Des Moines, but also home to offices for his own company, SummitAg. And yet, as discussed recently in an extensive post, a central tenet of Rastetter’s rule over the state’s schools is that he doesn’t want any competition for resources. Instead, he wants all three schools to function like a crony state-controlled system of higher education, which means any big-data program at UI would also be ported to the entire regents enterprise.
On the other hand, that would mean existing IT infrastructure and programs at the state’s other schools would have to undergo significant change. Speaking of which, what’s that going on over in Ames?
Iowa State University did not advertise or conduct a search before hiring former Republican lawmaker Jim Kurtenbach as its vice president and chief information officer.
The Board of Regents at its June meeting approved Kurtenbach’s appointment to the $252,794-a-year post — prompting questions and concerns among some employees.
Kurtenbach, who first joined the Iowa State faculty as an associate professor in 1991, had been serving as interim CIO since January 2015. Earlier this year, he launched a reorganization of the information technology services unit that cut 23 positions.
John McCarroll, director of Iowa State’s university relations, said ISU policy allows the university president to waive open searches, and that’s what President Steven Leath did in this case.
Not only did ISU President Leath engineer the hire of yet another political crony in order to avoid having to advertise that IT position, but as you may have heard recently, Leath is also up to his neck in an unethical and perhaps even illegal crony land deal with Rastetter. And yet while all of that has gotten a lot of attention as you might expect, ISU has also been gutting its IT department, and so radically so that it has actually been paying people to sit around and do nothing.
While ISU’s tech upheaval purportedly relates to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), it’s also true that one of the pressing problems in IT is figuring out how to merge ERP with big-data analysis. As such, any individual or organization that does solve that problem is going to be in heavy demand for both solutions and expertise. (Short of a power outage, the world is never going to produce less data than it is now, and even today the amount of data being produced is overwhelming available IT solutions.)
For a glimpse at how big data could apply to ISU more broadly, as well as to Rastetter’s private-sector agricultural interests, there’s also this, from a UI press release only a few months ago:
A data-driven method for helping farmers decide what seed varieties to plant has landed a University of Iowa team of analytics experts in the finals of an international agricultural-management competition.
The team—led by Sam Burer, a professor of management sciences in the Tippie College of Business who researches business analytics—was tasked to use soil-property data, seed-variety data, and weather data to develop a model to predict what varieties farmers should plant to maximize yield. The hypothetical farm where the teams were asked to plant is in central Iowa, north of Des Moines.
If it’s not clear by now, dig-data analytics are useful in almost any field. It’s a legitimate profession, it’s a legitimate area of research, and it’s a legitimate area of study. If it wasn’t the focus of resource allocations by the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, who has close personal ties to a mega-donor whose business is big data, along with crony ties to Robillard and Rastetter, in theory it might even be a good thing.
The problem, of course, is that you can’t separate out the sleaze. In this instance it’s baked into the cake by virtue of Harreld’s fraudulent hire, and the complicity of those three men in that fraud. Which, oddly enough, brings us to a lingering IT issue from the Harreld search.
One of the unique features of the 2015 presidential search at Iowa was a snazzy new automated feedback system that Parker Executive Search put together in exchange for part of their whopping $200,000 flat-fee price tag. (At last count, total expenses for the search were $300,000+ and climbing.) As far as I can tell, no search in Iowa had ever used such a system before.
As a practical matter, like much of the rest of that search, the feedback system was designed not to actually produce the best candidate, but to shelter Harreld from criticism by allowing him to appear at the last possible moment at every step in the search process. Last to declare his candidacy, last to be interviewed in Chicago, and last to present in the candidate forums only two days before the final vote.
The pretext for the PES system was that data would be collected and transmitted to the board at the speed of light, where it could be analyzed prior to the vote. In practice the data was summarily ignored by the board, if the board ever saw it, and that’s particularly true of the extensive comments that many respondents submitted. In fact, given the time crunch it’s not at all clear that the regents could have digested all of the feedback even if they had wanted to.
It will be interesting to see if the regents insist on the same snazzy data collection and feedback system for the upcoming UNI search, but in either case there remains one lingering question about the UI search. Whose idea was that?
Big Data and Personal Profit
Whatever is about to transpire at the University of Iowa — wherever Harreld is going to reallocate resources, and wherever he is going to make cuts if not swing his axe — as a result of both his abusive tuition hikes and his budgetary manipulations, for the first time since he was fraudulently hired Harreld will be flush with cash, and all of it other people’s money. He will not have done anything to earn that money, and he will not have had to put any concrete plans in place to justify access to that money, he will simply be granted control over all that money because he was jammed into office by a small cabal of co-conspirators who had that intermediate goal in mind all along.
Right now, as you read this, J. Bruce Harreld is poised to make good on whatever promises he made to his co-conspirators, and nobody on campus has the power to stand in his way. His actions will be an implicit injustice, but they will be touted by the UI and regent media machines as visionary and transformational. Yet there is still one important question worth asking, and that’s who will be allowed to profit from Harreld’s coming machinations. And by profit I literally mean make money.
Is Harreld allowed — as a matter of rule or law — to profit? Rastetter? Robillard? Stead? What about spouses? Family? Friends of the family? If big data is poised to take off at P3 Company X, or a startup is being spun off by UI and looking for early investors, who gets to know about those opportunities, and when? Can people who are currently employed by UI or the state simply slide into the CEO chair at a UI startup?
We know that Rastetter has frequently co-mingled his roles as regent president and SummitAg CEO, all the while professing no possible conflict of interest. We also know that Rastetter has done so in order to profit financially. Robillard may have any number of clauses in his contract, including performance bonuses, or may be be allowed to invest in businesses associated with or spun off from UI or UIHC. And of course Jerre Stead hails from the private sector, where making money is the whole point.
We still don’t know — and unlike the IHS Markit merger will probably never know — when Jerre Stead and J. Bruce Harreld first talked about the Iowa job. We also don’t know when Jerre Stead and J. Bruce Harreld first talked about the IHS Markit merger. If IHS Markit and UI are going to partner in any way in the future, it might be worth asking whether J. Bruce Harreld or anyone in his family has a position or stake in IHS Markit, and when that position or stake was acquired. Then we could ask the same questions of Rastetter and Robillard, and of all three concerning any other P3 opportunities embraced by UI. (And then we could ask whether Harreld still has a position in IBM, and whether IBM is one of the companies that has come calling.)
Because all of that is speculative, however, and J. Bruce Harreld may have wanted guaranteed income as compensation for his administrative larceny, there is one other way that Harreld might profit from bringing big data to UI by hook or by crook, and that’s by triggering tenure for himself. If you didn’t know, Harreld’s current contract provides for the possibility of tenure at a rate equivalent to the highest-paid professor on the Tippie staff at the time, which would currently net Harreld $330,000+ per year. As you may or may not also know, although Harreld has poo-pooed the idea, his poo-pooing is just another carefully scripted lie.
To see that clearly, consider the following:
Bruce Harreld, the newly appointed president of the University of Iowa, is eligible for a tenured faculty position in the UI Tippie College of Business, according to contract details released Friday by the Iowa Board of Regents.
But UI officials said Friday he has no plans to seek tenure.
Harreld, whose experience is in corporate leadership and not university administration, said in a public forum Tuesday he would not demand a tenure position as a condition of his employment. No such tenure provisions were included in the initial contracts for Iowa State University President Steven Leath or University of Northern Iowa President William Ruud, although such status was granted to Leath later.
That seems pretty definitive, doesn’t it? J. Bruce Harreld “has no plans to seek tenure”, and “would not demand a tenure position as a condition of his employment”. And yet the seeds of Harreld’s deception are in plain sight.
To begin, after declaring that “he would not demand a tenure position as a condition of his employment”, Harreld somehow still ended up with a tenure provision in his contract. How did that happen? Well, purportedly no one at UI knew anything about that provision until after the contract was signed, which means it must have been included by someone at Rastetter’s Iowa Board of Regents.
The tenure provisions in Harreld’s contract — except for the naming of the College of Business specifically — used “the standard language that would have been for any candidate that was selected for the presidency,” Lehman said. University and business college officials said they were unaware of the contract provisions until they were contacted Friday morning.
“Mr. Harreld did not make tenure a condition of his employment and will not seek tenure,” UI spokeswoman Jeneane Beck said Friday afternoon via email.
Again, when Jeneane Beck from the UI Office of Strategic Communications says that “Mr. Harreld did not make tenure a condition of his employment and will not seek tenure,” that may be factually correct, but the whole point of the specific words she’s using is to leave open the possibility of tenure. To make the lie apparent we don’t have to parse Beck’s words, however — all we have to do is add a wee-little bit of emphasis:
“…and will not –> >>>> SEEK <<<< <— tenure."
Do you see the dodge? It may be that Harreld will not seek tenure himself, but that doesn’t preclude someone else from giving him tenure — say, as a thank-you for reallocating funds from other departments and colleges, and showering those funds on the business college. In fact, we know that’s how Harreld will get around Beck’s apparent iron-clad statement because that’s exactly how Harreld ended up with a tenure clause in his contract in the first place.
Click here and you’ll see candidate J. Bruce Harreld, back at his candidate forum in early September, making it absolutely clear that he would not — as specifically quoted by Jeneane Beck above — make tenure a condition of his employment. And yet by some incredible miracle, when Harreld’s contract was signed it contained a tenure provision. And that provision stipulates not that Harreld must meet the requirements for tenure generally, but that he must meet the requirements for tenure specifically in the Tippie College of Business, whose coffers he will have filled with his big-data largesse.
Given Harreld’s background it makes sense that if he were to be given tenure in any college, it would be the business college. Harreld, however, does not have a doctorate, which both Leath and Ruud held when they were first hired by the board, and yet neither Leath nor Ruud were given the possibility of tenure in their initial contracts. Harreld also had no prior experience in academic administration before being hired, again unlike Leath and Ruud, which means not only was the tenure provision in his contract undeserved, but the mind boggles at what the regents thought Harreld would have to do to actually earn tenure under those conditions.
Two months before Harreld took office, however, and thus long before he ever began assessing which programs deserved more resources and which would be cut, someone at the Iowa Board of Regents had the foresight to add a tenure provision to Harreld’s contract which specifically tied him to the Tippie College of Business. An act that should not have taken place for multiple reasons, including the million-to-one possibility that Harreld could earn tenure as a neophyte without a Ph.D, was nonetheless perpetrated as if tenure was a serious possibility. Because of that savvy anticipation, all Harreld has to do to now to pocket that extra money is wait for Dean Gardial of the Tippie College of Business to round up the necessary faculty votes and give Harreld tenure because he’s been such a great friend to the school.
Update 07/24/16: As was pointed out to me, the director of the UI Institute for Hydraulic Research is Larry Weber. In early 2015, Larry Weber was one of twenty-one individuals named to the search committee that went on to nominate J. Bruce Harreld and three others as finalists for the UI presidency. Following Harreld’s shocking nomination, Weber had this to say:
“If we want to be able to ensure the University of Iowa is in a leadership position among our peers in 25 years, sometimes we have to think outside the box,” said Larry Weber, a member of the search committee and director of UI’s IIHR Hydroscience and Engineering.
Hydraulics is one of three areas at UI which Harreld has targeted for increased resource reallocations. True to Rastetter’s crony administrative ethos, everybody gets paid.
Good post. You have stayed with this story longer than anyone, and know more than anyone too.
I do wonder if some of this is a head fake.
Rastetter (and Branstad’s cronies) know that they want the status quo. Rastetter is making alot of money with agribusiness. And what can protect the status quo?
You can buy politicians (and buy a BOR position, obviously) but sometimes despite all your machinations, and gerrymandering, the vicissitudes of the ballot box throw you a setback.
If you capture those non-elected government positions, then you really have something. The bureaucracy is one place to start, but the nonelected Govt institutions might be better.
.If you get the SCOTUS you get Citizens United, You dress down the voter’s rights acts, you can almost take down public health. Non Elected and powerful.
At a state level you can gain the courts. Better yet, capture the universities — lots of monies and influence there. And non-elected. Appoint a university president beholden to you and you have influence for at least 5 years, if not 10 or 15. And alot can change in that time.
What is the big threat to Agribusiness and Rastetter? I don’t know all, but environmentalists would be,. He reacted very strongly to climate change research at the UIowa. He controls Ag research at Iowa State (see Harkin). So what is there to suppress at UIowa – environmental studies unfavorable to Ag: liberal views; shared governance.
Therefore I would be careful in that alot of this are head fakes. Promote AG safe research and Ag safe teaching. Suppress environmental research and teaching. Make your aims something else (like big data) which means you can dismiss profs you do not like because ‘limited resources and not our focus right now’.
Wait and see. These are slow subtle changes and often sneaked into an agenda adroitly. Announcements of retirements. Faculty leaving. Weekend proclamations without oppositions. Stacking adminstration with your operative and your cronies.
Pretty soon you have neutered your opposition and replaced it with favorable sycophants (like the fine UIowa Senate President). No more unfavorable to Ag research. Lots of sweetheart deals to plunder the treasury. Lots of students to indoctrinate and plunder.
And pretty soon you have a red state that displays the Confederate flag proudly — like Rep Steve King, that pollutes the waterways, and that fouls the air.. And no one to keep watch or object.
It would be naive to think there is no larger context in play, but I reflexively return again and again to Occam’s Razor. We know that a small cabal of co-conspirators stole the presidency at Iowa. That is beyond dispute. As to why they did that, we can leap to macro concerns like libertarian opportunism, but there are prior factors.
First, you don’t do something like that unless you think you’re above the rules that apply to everyone else. You also don’t do something like that unless you feel that lying is a justifiable means to an end. So before we attribute some shadowy political or business agenda to these people, we can say that they are also afflicted with common human failings such as ego and vice.
What distinguishes them, of course, is the scale of the theft, but that’s really a byproduct of the power they wield — and yet another reminder that nothing is more important than leadership. Put corrupt people in positions of power and you get more corruption.
As to the political or economic agenda behind the theft of the UI presidency, it seems fairly straightforward. Turn every possible aspect of the school into a money-making venture, treat the school’s resources as your own personal startup incubator, and profit wherever possible — both financially, and in political terms.
Again, that fits with the corruption of the individuals involved. To them an uncorrupted, unexploited bureaucracy is simply a waste.
The more I thought about your points, the more I agree with your positions on this mess.
You likely know more about this than anyone, and have synthesized the known facts to delineate an explanation that fits.
When is the journal article/book coming out?
If you’ve been following the fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, you know that Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter has repeatedly insisted that the search process leading to Harreld’s appointment was fair. Rastetter initially made that claim in the fall of last year, when his abuses of power were first reported in the press, and he continues to do so to this day. For example, here he is a little over a month ago, following the AAUP’s sanctioning of the university for abuses committed during that sham search:
“The Board of Regents ran a fair process in the search for president at the University of Iowa, and we are very pleased with the progress that President Harreld is making,” Bruce Rastetter, president of the regents, said in an emailed statement.
As a purely factual matter, Rastetter’s assertion that “the Board of Regents ran a fair process” is false. Rastetter has been able to stick to that false claim, however, because the administrative workings of the 2015 UI Presidential Search and Select Committee were and remain covered by a confidentiality provision. As a result, even after the search was concluded, neither the disbanded committee nor the regents were obligated to “show their work” — as an incisive Gazette staff editorial demanded on 09/12/15, only nine days after Harreld was appointed. In fact, despite paying Harreld almost $800,000 per year, the regents have never been obligated to document Harreld’s path through the search and selection process, including when and if he ever declared his candidacy, or whether his disastrous resume was vetted by the search firm that was hired to perform that and other critical functions.
Although there is a great deal we still don’t know, the mechanics of the fraudulent 2015 UI presidential search are quite clear. At every step, J. Bruce Harreld was given advantages and special treatment which were not offered to other candidates in the search process. We know that by clear inference, but we can’t prove many specifics because we do not have access to the emails and communications which were sent by the committee and/or the board. By the same token, however, we also have no evidence that there were any rules which determined how the committee would conduct itself in such matters, suggesting that from an administrative perspective, and by malicious intent, there may actually have been no formal committee. Instead, there was a gaggle of individual members charged with “aggressive recruitment” of candidates, which was itself an administrative dodge designed to obscure the inherent unfairness of the search.
For example, under the pretext of “aggressive recruitment”, J. Bruce Harreld and his wife were invited to campus on July 8th, 2015, by search chair Jean Robillard. While Harreld presented to a roomful of UIHC and UI bigwigs, including Regents’ President Rastetter, Harreld’s wife was given an extended tour of the campus. Harreld then chatted with four members of the search committee at a “VIP Lunch”, during which at least three people at the table — Harreld, Robillard and Rastetter — knew he was there as a stealth candidate for the UI presidency, yet that fact never came up in conversation with the other members of the committee.
While the intentional deception which took place at the “VIP Lunch” is bad enough, neither before or afterward has there been any indication that the committee or the regents sent emails to the other candidates and members of the committee, letting them know that such opportunities and contacts were available. And we know that because after the search was over, several members of the committee stated that they did not know Harreld had visited the campus in early July of 2015.
The same withholding of information also occurred when J. Bruce Harreld purportedly demanded to meet with “at least four regents” — which somehow then compelled Rastetter to set up those meetings at his own place of business in Ames. Not only did no one other than Harreld, Rasteter and the four regents know about those meetings until after Harreld’s appointment — including other members of the board, who were kept in the dark by their peers — but those meetings eventually triggered a lawsuit contending that Rastetter and the four regents violated the state’s Open Meeting laws.
Although those meetings may have been a violation of state law, in the context of the search there is no evidence that Robillard or Rastetter notified the other candidates or the nineteen other members of the search committee that the committee or board viewed such meetings as compulsory when requested by any candidate. Indeed, on 03/22/16, Rastetter asserted in an interview with the Des Moines Register that any or all regents would have gladly met with any candidate who wanted such meetings, yet to date he has produced no evidence that the committee ever communicated that policy during the search.
At the very least, then, with the UNI presidential search looming, it does seem relevant to ask what standard of fairness the Iowa Board of Regents holds itself to when communicating information to all parties during a search. Unfortunately, although I looked for that information over the past year, I was not able to find anything which obligated the board to demonstrate such fairness precisely because the regents routinely shield themselves with confidentiality agreements during searches. Or at least that was the case until a few days ago, when I was reading through the board’s Request for Qualification for search firms interesting in managing the presidential search at the University of Northern Iowa. From the bottom of page 5:
The Board reserves the right to amend this RFQ without altering the timing requirements indicated. Any changes or addenda to these documents will be communicated in writing to all vendors as quickly as possible.
Answers to Firm’s questions that impact scope, timetable, etc., will be communicated in writing to all Firms as quickly as possible.
This policy of immediately communicating information to all interested parties is of course completely sensible. If the board makes a new determination regarding the UNI search-firm hiring process, all search firms will be notified of that change as soon as possible. If one firm asks a question relevant to the board’s search for a search firm, then all search firms will be provided with the answer in order to ensure fairness.
In the context of the 2015 UI presidential search, however, not only do we not have any similar statement concerning the administration of the search, the administrative conduct of both the search chair and the president of the board, who was also a member of the committee, shows that they did not hold themselves to that same standard. When Harreld and his wife were invited to campus in early July of last year, to meet the two most powerful administrators involved in the search, we have no evidence that other search members or candidates were told that meetings were available with those key individuals. Several weeks later, when Rastetter arranged meetings between Harreld and four other regents on July 30th, 2015 — including two regents who weren’t even on the search committee — we again have no evidence that Rastetter and/or Robillard notified the other committee members and candidates of the regents’ availability, let alone of Rastetter’s willingness to arrange and host such meetings at his own private place of business. (In fact, that notice should have gone out as soon as Rastetter and/or Robillard decided that such meetings were allowed.)
Given that Rastetter orchestrated the fraudulent search which led to J. Bruce Harreld’s sham appointment, it’s not surprising that he would be reduced to lying in order to avoid answering for his abuses of power. What remains perplexing, however, is why the press has exhibited blanket incuriosity with regard to Rastetter’s false assertion that the search was fair, when it was clearly not. In fact, given that Rastetter’s political crony and protector, Governor Branstad, just spit in the eye of every reporter in the state, it’s perhaps time for the editors and producers who determine which stories get told, and which stories get squelched in return for access, to reassess their journalistic priorities.
All that’s needed is for a member of the press to ask the Board of Regents whether — during the 2015 UI presidential search — notices of regent availability were sent to all members of the search committee, and all of the candidates, once it was known that Harreld was to be granted meetings with four regents at Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames. It’s a very simple question, and the only dodge available to the board would be to assert that such communications were privileged. At which point the press could then contact any of the other candidates who applied for the Iowa job and ask them if they received notice from the committee about the availability of the entire Board of Regents to meet with them, as was recently asserted by Rastetter in his interview with the Register. Even if the board lawyers up, as it did when the AAUP investigation was first announced, that conspicuous silence could then be reported, putting the public on notice that the question of the board’s fairness during the 2015 UI presidential search has never actually been established.
Now, given that it’s almost eleven months since Harreld was fraudulently appointed, you may be thinking that the issue is too far removed to demand attention, but that’s exactly the point. Because Rastetter’s claim has never been verified, it still exists not only as an important story relative to the UI search, but as an important story going forward. Again, Rastetter’s most recent assertion that the regents ran a fair search was on 06/19/16 — only a little over a month ago. At the time that assertion of fairness was not only central to Rastetter’s response to the AAUP sanction, it was the only substantive response he offered. That in turn raises legitimate concerns about whether the board knows how to run a fair search, which is of critical importance regarding the imminent UNI presidential search.
If the press can’t or won’t investigate the 2015 UI presidential search based on Rastetter’s repeated claims that the search was fair, then it will fall to the legislature to do so. In that eventuality, however, the legislature will have one significant advantage. Where the Board of Regents can simply refuse to talk to the press, shielding themselves behind claims of confidentiality, the legislature faces no such impediments even if the board turns hostile. Armed with subpoena power, the only way for Rastetter to avoid turning over the accumulated work product of the 2015 UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee would be for him to order or personally see to the destruction of that information, assuming he hasn’t done so already.
According to the board’s RFQ for the UNI presidential search, the interviews of the final firms that are still under consideration will end Wednesday, with the awarding of a contract to take place no later than Friday. Even at this late date relative to the UI search, it’s important to ask questions about that search in order to make sure the same abuses of power are not repeated during the UNI search. Beyond nailing down whether the board was fair in its communication of opportunities to other candidates, it’s also worth following up on Rastetter’s claim that any and all members of the Iowa Board of Regents were standing by to meet with candidates during the UI search, and how that same availability will be implemented during the UNI search — assuming, of course, that Rastetter’s offer holds for all of the state’s schools.
If that is the case, it would seem prudent for Rastetter and the board to explain how the regents intend to make such meetings equitable among all of the UNI candidates, while also scrupulously avoiding any violation of the state’s Open Meeting law. Practical concerns include scheduling, the cost of reimbursing candidates for travel to such meetings, and making sure that all candidates are eligible whether they have officially declared their candidacies or not. (There is no evidence that Harreld declared his candidacy prior to meeting with the four regents in Ames, and considerable evidence to the contrary. At that late date Harreld may not even have filled out any of the paperwork required by the search firm overseeing the search. As to travel expenses, Harreld may or may not have been reimbursed for his regent meetings, but if he wasn’t reimbursed that’s likely because he never submitted a request. On multiple occasions during the search Harreld traveled to and from the state on a private jet at considerable personal expense, which would not have been reimbursed in any case.)
http://sandratrappen.com/2013/11/14/student-debt/
scroll down to the map..where it says attending ISU increased 71% from 97 to 07/ Wonder what happened the next 9 years?
In the past year I’ve come across graph after graph from UI and the BoR which shows the economic upheaval that happened in 2008, but then ignores it. I’ve also come across graphs which purport to show a big spike in demand after 2008, but which also ignore the economic upheaval that sparked that demand. (It wasn’t great branding — the world economy collapsed.)
As for Iowa and student debt — man, we’re killing those kids.
As a general comment about the corporate university.
HRC says she will work with Bernie Sanders to make college tuition free for middle class students (and lower I presume)
If someone wants to make universities less attractive to the Rastetter type vultures and Harreld type dilettantes, take away the corporate university. Take out the profit motive that attracts these guys like road kill attracts buzzards.
(Trump U as example A)
The amount of college debt is crippling young Americans. This debt has escalated since the advent of the university incorp. And the universities are now an instant teller for the Rastetter/Harreld/Leath crew. Need a grant? Hit up your underling univ. Need land? Weasel a deal with your rich uncle/BOR boss. Need to put a crony in a 250,000 job. Land him a no-compete job at your State U.
On 06/03/15, the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson reported on the development and impending implementation of the Iowa Board of Regents new ‘common application portal‘:
The Iowa Board of Regents will spend about $290,000 for the first year of a common, online application portal that could be used by the few thousand prospective students looking to apply to more than one of Iowa’s three public universities, according to regent documents released Tuesday.
As part of last year’s efficiency study, Deloitte Consulting identified a business case regarding the development of a common application portal for the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa. In November, regent staff organized a team to evaluate Deloitte’s suggestion and to develop a portal. The goal was to have something ready to use for fall 2016.
That $290,000 cost, however, was only the buy-in:
The projected first-year costs include $90,000 already spent on developing the portal and $200,000 in estimated operating expenses, according to the team’s final report. ISU will host the portal, but the universities will share the ongoing annual costs, which are estimated at $100,000 “above and beyond the on-going IT and other support costs of each of the admissions offices.”
As for the impetus driving the portal, the only stated goal was providing a service to prospective students:
“The reason the board decided to go with a common application was to provide a convenience for those students who choose to apply for more than one university,” said Phil Caffrey, ISU’s director of admissions operations and policy.
As for justifying the program’s $290,000 first-year cost, the board’s own data showed marginal demand:
Of the 35,305 total applications to the three universities for fall 2014, 324 (0.9 percent) applied to all three universities, and 3,969 (11.2 percent) applied to two universities. Nearly 88 percent (31,012) applied to one university.
For Iowa students during the same period, 278 applied to all three universities, 2,110 applied to two universities and 9,574 applied to only one university.
As for any cost savings to applicants for using the portal, there was none.
The portal was not intended to provide an incentive for students to apply to more than one institution, Caffery said. Students still will have to pay the application fees for each university to which they apply.
“We didn’t want to encourage more ‘soft applications,’ ” Caffery said. “There are some institutions that will waive their application fee in an attempt to increase the number of applications. That generates more … applications from students who are not that likely to enroll.”
As for being a one-stop shop, the portal also failed that test:
The common portion of the application only provides the information applicable to all three universities. That means would-be students seeking to apply to more than one university will still have to answer institution-specific questions from each school. Those additional questions will be emailed directly to applicants after a school receives the submitted [information].
As for the rollout, here’s how that was described:
If approved, the portal would be available on July 1 for admission of students to the Class of 2016. The board office would then work with the universities and Iowa high schools to publicize the portal, and the team would monitor and evaluate the use of the portal — making changes when necessary.
By all accounts the portal went live on July 1st, 2015, and has been available for use by prospective students since that date.
Revisiting Bruce Rastetter’s Long Game
As you probably know by now, on 09/03/15 the Iowa Board of Regents fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa. Prior to that time I only paid passing attention to the school as an alum, and no attention whatsoever to the board. After Harreld’s appointment, however, I began looking into the abuses of power behind his sham hire, and along the way I started learning about the key players involved in that conspiracy. Included in the group was Regents’ President Bruce Raster, who I had never heard of before, but who was apparently a well-known “kingmaker” in Iowa politics.
Just a little over a month ago, after reading up on Rastetter and the board for the better part of a year, I put up a two-part post titled Bruce Rastetter’s Long Game at the Iowa Board of Regents. In that post, I came to three conclusions.
First, that Rastetter and the board were intent on eliminating academic competition between that three state universities. While an arguable pursuit in itself, that goal portended ill for redundant programs at schools which failed to claim the mantle for a given discipline. For example, because education is UNI’s core strength, it’s entirely possible that both UI and ISU may end up dismantling their education departments over time, whether as a result of attrition and atrophy or brute bureaucratic force. The same goes for business, engineering, the arts, and on and on.
As it happens, between writing that two-part ‘Long Game’ post and this post, I ran across an extensive Iowa Press interview from 2012 (transcript here), featuring then regent President Craig Lang, and then President Pro Tem Bruce Rastetter, who was appointed to the board the previous year. In that interview, both Lang and Rastetter were explicit about their intent to eliminate academic competition between the state’s schools:
[Associated Press Senior Political Writer Mike] Glover: Mr. Rastetter, the Regents have talked about creating what they call centers of excellence at the major public universities. And what that means is each university would specialize in something. Does that cheat students from not getting a broad higher education at all of the universities?
Rastetter: I think the point would be is that you’ll still have that comprehensive education. But what you need to focus on and what the universities have consistently done over the years is use resources to what they can really be great in. For instance, the University of Iowa Hospitals and the children’s hospital that is number one in the country, the engineering school at Iowa State that continues to grow, the law school and utilizing those resources in a strategic way and making sure we don’t have duplication between the universities and in UNI’s situation make sure that we strategically continue to have UNI serve Iowa, for instance, in the college of education. So I think that is an ongoing process. We’re going to continue to encourage that.
Glover: Mr. Lang, same question to you. Do students get cheated by not getting a broad education if you focus on things?
Lang: No, I don’t believe so. And we’ve talked among ourselves about having like Iowa State be the problem solvers to the world in food and energy and the University of Iowa being the same thing as it relates to medical and writing, creative writing is so important there and the University of Northern Iowa, it would be so great if they had all the answers K-12 education. And we have talked about that privately. But at the same time we want to make sure when our students go they have the hours that they need to graduate on time and the curriculums that they have on time is becoming more and more challenging because we’re getting more and more students. So I think no, I don’t believe they are cheated.
The second conclusion I came to in the ‘Long Game’ post was that Rastetter was determined not only to eliminate competition between schools, but to impose a ‘system-like’ administrative structure on the schools. Effectively, the board — and specifically the board president — would wield authority over all of the state’s schools, while the putative presidents functioned as de facto chancellors. Exhibit A in reaching that conclusion was J. Bruce Harreld himself, who was and remains entirely unfit to preside over a major research university. Equally compelling, however, was Exhibit B, which was the fact that the one state university president who truly advocated for his school — UNI’s William Ruud — recently resigned after the ruthlessly passive-aggressive Rastetter refused to offer him a new contract.
The third conclusion I came to was that while Rastetter was seeing to all of that as president of the regents, he was also intent on exploiting opportunities for personal, professional or political gain — as has been nauseatingly demonstrated over the past year by far too many examples. Factoring into that calculus was Rastetter’s central role in Governor Terry Branstad’s crony political machine, and Rastetter’s close personal and professional ties to Iowa State University in Ames, which in turn has close ties to Rasteter’s company, Summit Agricultural Group. (SummitAg is located in Alden, just north of Ames, but also maintains an Ames business office minutes from the ISU campus.)
As egregious as Rastetter’s conduct has been, however, and as questionable as the strategy of building centers of excellence may be in terms of what’s actually best for the state’s students, for the purposes of this post it is the second conclusion above that is germane. The Iowa Board of Regents, under Bruce Rastetter, has implemented an undeclared, unbidden plan to centralize control over the state’s schools. Instead of acting as a facilitator and steward for the state’s universities, Rastetter is determined that the Board of Regents should take active administrative control over both inter-university and intra-university decision making. (As noted in prior posts, the appointments of Steven Leath at ISU and Harreld at UI speak to that intent, and the payoff is clearly reflected in their slavish obedience to Rastetter’s rule.)
The Common Application Portal at One Year
On this past Thursday, 07/28/16, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller published a report on the common application portal’s use during its first year of operation. The results were not encouraging:
The Iowa Board of Regents spent $290,000 to launch a new “common application portal” last year expected to save the thousands of prospective students who apply to more than one of its public universities time and paperwork.
But instead of thousands, just 104 people used the new portal since its launch July 1, 2015.
Although total application statistics for the upcoming fall aren’t yet in, University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and University of Northern Iowa combined for 50,779 new freshman applications for fall 2015, and officials say receipts are on track this year.
That means about .2 percent of the total applicants took advantage of the new tool that — as part of the board’s “transparent, inclusive efficiency review” — aimed to make it easier for student prospects to apply to more than one university.
Over fourteen months ago, in the Charis-Carlson story, several thousand students were expected to use the new application portal. One year after launch, and after throwing a projected $290,000 at the project, little more than a hundred people had taken advantage of the site’s functionality. As Miller herself pointed out, that translates to a cost to the regents — and thus the state — of $2,788 per use.
So what could possibly explain the anemic 0.2% use rate by prospective students?
The dismal use could be tied to the fact that none of the three universities link to the new portal from their application websites, and the portal isn’t easily accessible from the Board of Regents home page. Prospects can find the portal through an internet search.
“We can always do a better job of advertising so the students know that it’s available,” said Mark Braun, chief operating officer for the Board of Regents.
While noting for future reference that Braun’s comment is so utterly meaningless as to constitute a willful attempt to mislead, a more pertinent point at this juncture would be that the Iowa Board of Regents could not have done a worse job of letting students know the site was available, even if they set out to do so. Which is of course a very odd thing given both how much state money the regents invested in the portal, and how super smart and competent all of those tech-savvy people are at the regents’ office.
To underscore how difficult it is to actually find the regents’ $290K common application portal, Miller posted this tweet on Friday:
Having been to the regents’ site many times, I assumed I would be able to find the portal with a little bit of digging. I was wrong. While I did find a few dead links and 404 pages, I didn’t come close to locating the portal. Performing an internet search to locate the portal fared no better, and even when I performed a site-specific search using terms like ‘portal’ and ‘application’, I found nothing.
Only after digging into a slew of newspaper articles on the portal, dating back to 2014 when the project was approved, and reading various docs on the regents’ site about the portal’s progress, did I notice that at a very late date the name of the project changed from ‘common application portal’ to a more formal ‘Iowa Public Universities Application Portal’. Plugging that descriptor into a search engine finally revealed the URL to the site, which then allowed me to confirm that you cannot link to the portal from the regents’ site. If you do not know the subdomain — apply.regents — you cannot get there from the regents own site. (If you perform a search today you may have success simply because the search engines are responding to Vanessa’s story, to her challenge, or both.)
As damning as all that clearly is, however, the most important part of Miller’s story was a series of quotes from a former regent who served on the board for twelve years:
“These are pretty shocking numbers,” said Bob Downer, a former regent who was on the board when it agreed to move forward with the proposed application portal.
“What this does, is it seems to me to highlight a need to take a step back and evaluate some of these things that have been touted in the name of efficiency to really see if it’s worthwhile spending additional funds to complete,” Downer said.
[UI Director of Admissions Kirk] Kluver said UI looks forward to more students using the portal in the coming years, and former Regent Downer said the low usage could simply be tied to its newness.
“But it would certainly appear that it hasn’t been very well publicized,” he said. “It seems to me that this is existing in a sort of vacuum, and it can’t be worthwhile to spend $100,000 a year for 100 applications.
“There is nothing economical about that.”
In a post last October I was hard on Downer because he seemed to be siding with Jean Robillard’s preposterous and self-serving argument that the 2015 UI search was flawed because it was semi-open, when it was flawed because Robillard betrayed the school and helped Rastetter steal the presidency. While I don’t know how much Downer actually knows about the conspiracy behind Harreld’s fraudulent election, I do know that Downer was on the board when the common application portal was discussed and approved, so he should clearly understand the long-range intent of that project.
As noted in the earlier Charis-Carlson piece, the common application portal was purportedly implemented as a convenience to students. As noted in the Miller piece, however, nobody — including the Iowa Board of Regents, which is presided over by Laird Rastetter — ever publicized the availability of the $290,000 portal, even though it was up and running well over a year ago. So how to explain that disconnect?
Downer’s comments as a former board member are perfectly consistent with the premise that the common application portal was designed and implemented for the benefit of students alone. And as someone in the room Downer should know what the discussions were, and what the basis was for authorizing that expenditure. And yet if you dig into the actual board documents supporting the development of the common application portal, that’s not what you find. Instead, what you find is a long-term plan that includes letting the site idle for several years, at an annual cost to the state of $100K or more.
The Iowa Board of Regents and Deloitte
In early 2014 the Iowa Board of Regents hired Deloitte Consulting to implement an extensive TIER review of the state’s entire higher-education enterprise. As recently noted in a separate report from the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, the Iowa Board of Regents does not actually have it’s own budget, but instead bills the state’s schools for its expenses, whether those expenses are legitimate, questionable, or a crony rip-off:
The amount of reimbursement required for the board office has increased by 7.5 percent annually over the previous five years – with a low of 4.3 percent in FY2013 and a high of 15 percent in FY2014. The table included in this year’s budget information, unlike those of the previous five years, did not include a column showing the year-over-year percentage increase for the board office revenue and expenses.
The nearly 30 percent increase for this fiscal year comes as the regents’ office is experiencing a $435,000 year-over-year increase in personnel costs along with a $300,000 cut in state funding and a $140,680 reduction in grant funding.
Regents officials said the bulk of the personnel increase comes from transferring the $240,000 salary for the board’s chief operating officer, Mark Braun, from UI’s payroll to the regents’. The rest comes from finding new funding for the position that had been paid for by a grant and bringing on a new academic program manager.
That’s right — the same Mark Braun who gave a flippant response when asked why the common application portal was never advertised, also happens to be the board’s highest-paid employee. Or at least Braun is normally the highest-paid employee, except when the board goes out of its way to evade state law and throw $300K+ at XD/CEO Bob Donley. All of which helps explain why Rastetter and other members of the board were perfectly happy to support recent tuition hikes which soaked the students, instead of tightening their own damn belts and living within their means.
All that payroll larceny pales in comparison, however, to the cost of hiring Deloitte and other associated TIER consultants — which, as of last count had surpassed $5M, all electively expensed by the board at a commensurate cost to the schools. And of course there was also that whole debacle about the regents demanding actual receipts for an unsubstantiated $200K bill from one the consultants that they were paying to help them save money, and then Deloitte suing the regents to keep state records closed. But the important thing is that after blowing all of those scarce funds, Deloitte delivered pieces of paper in exchange for their millions.
If you want to actually see what millions of dollars in consulting fees and bloated expenses buys you these days, click here to view the board’s Catalogue and Prioritized List of Opportunities. While there is a lot to look at, however, if you skip down to the ‘Board of Regents’ section on page 88, you’ll find a discussion of the board’s Key Strengths and Challenges. For example, here’s a key strength:
Public accountability and transparency – the Board maintains close touch with its constituents through public meetings, reporting, and open access to Board meetings, minutes, and materials.
Hilarious, obviously. The ‘key challenges’ section is even better, however, because each purported challenge has nothing to do with problems at the board, and everything to do with empowering the board to greatly expand its power and authority over the state’s schools:
Limited capacity and resources – given the small size of the Board, there is limited capacity and resources to meet all of the needs of the system from a governance, coordination, and oversight perspective
Limited partnerships and working relationships with Universities – partnerships and working relationships between the Board and key counterparts at each university could be stronger for greater collaboration
Lack of transparency and visibility into university operations – the Board has a limited view into the operations at each university due to lack of key performance indicators and ability to track and monitor progress
Limited technology capabilities – the universities have different enterprise systems, making integration and standardization difficult
Not a proactive policy body – while the Board establishes policies, it does not play an active role in providing policy interpretations, enforcing policies, and evaluating progress and compliance
Now, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that when you’re being paid millions of dollars as a consultant, a fair amount of the money you’re getting is in exchange for telling the client exactly what they want to hear. As previously noted in the two-part ‘Long Game’ post, that is in fact why Rastetter routinely hires consultants at the board, and on that score Deloitte clearly outperformed. Not only did Deloitte give Rastetter a veritable mandate for assuming administrative control of the state’s three schools — which is what Rastetter wanted all along — but in the process Deloitte scrupulously avoided any of the real shortcomings at the board.
The Common Application Portal Business Case
Proving that the precious millions the regents spent on consultants over the past few years were not a total waste, however, Deloitte took the time to break a number of suggestions out into separate business cases, which are listed on page 95 of the above doc. The second-to-last case is, fortuitously, a student service designated SS-05: Create a Common Application Portal. That case can be read in its entirety here, and on page 14 of that doc, under a section titled Future State Solution, you will find the following two bullet points:
* The current admissions portals continue to run in parallel with the common application portal for approx. 2-3 years to minimize change management concerns
* Review metrics for cross-applying students from the common portal before determining timing and modalities for transitioning from the university-specific admissions portals, whether fully or partially
As you can see, not only is a 2-3 year delay built into the very concept of the common application portal, but the plan assumes that the application process at each school will be partly if not entirely facilitated by the common portal at the end of that period. That new information in turn prompts a number of obvious questions, including why former regent Bob Downer did now know that was the plan all along. Here again is part of what Downer said, from Miller’s report on Thursday:
It is entirely possible that Downer simply forgot the details of the plan. What is not possible — unless Downer is lying, and there is no reason to believe that’s the case — is that Downer knew of the long-range plan, yet still gave Miller the quote above. If Downer remembered or even suspected that the portal was going to run in parallel with the current application process for two or three years, he would simply have said so, and perhaps also explained that the portal would eventually take on a portion of — or all of — the application process at each school. On the other hand, it’s also possible that all of the executive-level discussions at the board really did highlight the student service angle, yet that possibility brings us right back to the fact that the regents went out of their way to avoid promoting the site. If you’re implementing something as a convenience you don’t hold back, you push it out and make sure people know about it.
What I do believe, however — whether Downer ever knew or simply forgot about the actual plan for the portal — is that there was never a day when Rastetter did not know what the long-term objective was. Which means the board and its office staff, including Mark Braun, did not simply forget to promote the site, they made a conscious decision not to do so. Again, as of a few days ago you literally could not link to application portal from the regents’ site, or from any of the three universities, and yet the board shelled out $290,000 for the site for the first year, and will pay another $100K for each of the next 2-3 years.
So why doesn’t the board want people using the site? Well, a small amount of traffic — say, a hundred people a year — would be beneficial in terms of testing and bug fixing, but ramping up for heavier use would require more resources, to say nothing of prompting administrative infighting before the board is ready to impose its authoritarian will. Allow the board 2-3 years to compel the necessary administrative change at each school, however, cutting positions and compelling acceptance — particularly through the hiring of toady presidents — and the application portal won’t simply be available to students who are applying to multiple state schools, it will become the gateway and control point for a single unified regent application system.
In fact, there are two good reasons for believing that was the plan all along. First, consider the following, from page 13 of the same business case:
Recent cross-applying student metrics unavailable – While recent statistics are unavailable, anecdotally, approx. 10-20% of prospective total undergraduate students (who total approx. 44,000 per year) cross-apply between the three universities; Understanding this trend for the future will be important to determining how to continue improving customer satisfaction related to this admissions process
As you can see, the board elected to spend $290,000 for the first year, and $100K for each year after that, based on no firm data. Even assuming heavy advertising of the site, in any given year it would be used by several thousand students at most, which would constitute marginal utility by any measure. In terms of a return on investment, then, and even assuming that the Iowa Board of Regents is all about the students — which the Harreld hire and the subsequent approval of his egregious tuition hikes proves they are not — there is no conceivable measure by which the common application portal could ever be deemed cost-effective.
Even with several thousand students using the portal at a minimum cost to the state schools of $100K per year, that would equal a per-use cost of $50 per applicant. Although the regents are charging $40 per application to each school — or, potentially, $120 per applicant if an individual applies to all three state of the state schools — those fees must also pay for the entire application process. If that process costs more than $70 for such students, or $23 per school, then the state will lose money.
There is, however, an even better reason to believe that solving a marginal student inconvenience was never the actual goal of the portal, and that has to do with the first conclusion I reached in the ‘Long Game’ post about Rastetter — which was subsequently confirmed by a prior Iowa Press interview. If you intend to segregate the state’s three schools by specialties, as the board clearly does, then over time it will become less likely that any given student will want to apply to more than one of the state’s schools. For example, even if a prospective student has only the faintest thought that they might want to go into medicine, that’s going to steer them to UI. The same goes for becoming a teacher (UNI) or a veterinarian (ISU), and decreasing the competition among other school programs will only sharpen those divides.
Still, if you stand back and look at what Rastetter has accomplished with the application portal, it’s pretty impressive. Without a budget of his own he nonetheless managed to use the state schools to build a system that the board can now use to take over the applications process at each of the state’s schools. Rastetter also managed to justify that expense by meeting a marginal unmet student need which was purportedly identified by his own high-priced consultants, who gave the idea the appearance of objectivity even as they cited no supporting demand. Finally, in keeping with Rastetter’s personal, political and professional allegiances, he sited the portal at Iowa State, which is already effectively under his control.
Bruce Rasetter’s Long Game and Iowa State University
If anyone still needed convincing that Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter’s heart is not with higher education in general or with the regents’ enterprise overall, but almost exclusively with Iowa State as an extension of his own power base, confirmation arrived in spades when it was recently revealed that Rastetter’s company, SummitAg, purchased a $1.15M parcel of land for Iowa State President Leath and his wife, which the smitten Leaths could not otherwise afford to buy for themselves. Cementing his personal commitment — if that was ever in doubt — Rastetter’s company not only acted on the Leath’s behalf after only a week’s notice, SummitAg handled all of the surveying and subdividing of the parcel before selling the Leaths only the acres they wanted. (While the Rastetter-Leath land deal was a clear breach of state and ISU conflict-of-interest rules, it may also have been a violation of the state’s Gift Law.)
The cozy relationship between Rastetter and Leath extends from the personal realm well into ISU’s administration and public policy positions. Not only has Leath taken on multiple former pols aligned with Rastetter’s politics, giving them jobs which were never advertised, but Leath also took the point on behalf of Rastetter’s failed performance-based funding model. Sold as a long-overdue updating of the historical legislative funding splits for the state’s schools, the plan was actually a naked attempt to short the University of Iowa millions if not tens of millions of dollars — the bulk of which would have been transferred to ISU in Ames.
The premise of the performance-based funding model was that it would reward the state schools, in part, based on the number of enrolled resident students. Not so coincidentally, President Leath turned ISU into an educational confinement operation in the preceding years, stockpiling resident students at every opportunity in anticipation of a windfall when the plan was implemented. What is particularly important to note about the performance-based funding model, however, is that it was designed to hurt UI in two ways. First, by taking legislative dollars away from Iowa. Second, by then compelling Iowa, alone among the state’s schools, to raise tuition to make up for that sudden precipitous shortfall. Those UI hikes would in turn price Iowa higher among the state’s schools, decreasing enrollment particularly among the very resident students that the performance-based funding model favored, further magnifying the loss of revenue and making it that much harder for UI to compete.
In that context, the board’s tuition freezes over the past few years were not about doing what’s right for the students, but about eventually relieving the pent-up revenue demand at ISU and UNI with appropriations which would normally have gone to UI. When that plan failed, however, Rastetter and the board were forced to instigate the recent tuition hikes at all three schools, at which point — incredibly — J. Bruce Harreld himself stepped up and abused the UI students by raising tuition out of all proportion to the hikes at ISU and UNI. While doing so does net Harreld more funds for his own yet-to-be-revealed plan of attack on the school, Harreld’s tuition hikes also not-so-coincidentally replicate the performance-based funding outcome that Rastetter desired.
Compare the recent tuition hikes for both business and engineering students at UI, and you’ll see that Harreld not only introduced division increases — meaning hikes targeted at one student group — but those increases are two to three times those of similar groups at either of the other state schools. At Iowa State, upper division resident business students were hit with a 2.93% increase in tuition, and in combination with mandatory fees will pay $9,951 for 2016. At Iowa, upper division resident business students were rocked with an 8.91% increase, and, in combination with mandatory fees, will now pay $11,509. At Iowa State, upper division resident engineering students were hit with a 2.73% increase in tuition, and in combination with mandatory fees will pay $10,667 for 2016. At Iowa, upper division resident business students were rocked with an 8.49% increase, and, in combination with mandatory fees, will now pay $11,347.
J. Bruce Harreld’s justification for his abusive hikes on business and engineering students was that those programs are more expensive to run, and in the division hikes at ISU we see some confirmation of that premise. It is in the magnitude of Harreld’s increases at UI, however, that we not only see Harreld stuffing as much money as possible into an administrative slush fund under his discretionary control, but also consistently positioning Iowa as the more expensive state school to attend for those two disciplines. And that’s on top of the fact that Iowa City is already the most expensive place to live in the state.
The upshot of J. Bruce Harreld’s divisional tuition hikes is that ISU is now clearly the better bargain for prospective business and engineering students, and over time that differential will inevitably convince more students, and particularly more in-state students, to go to ISU for the cost savings alone. If you can get your business or engineering degree and save thousands of dollars in the process, if not more when the cost of living is factored in, why wouldn’t you? That incentive ensures that ISU’s preference for growth above even the quality of education available on campus — which, much to the delight of Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter, recently turned ISU into the state’s largest school — will continue unabated.
In the context of the fraudulent Harreld hire there are a number of questions worth asking about Rastetter’s determination to promote ISU at the expense of the other state schools, but none are more important than whether UI alum Jerre Stead knows about all this. Because apart from helping Rastetter find the right puppet to head up the University of Iowa, Jerre Stead has given tens of millions of dollars to his alma mater, including $25M specifically to the Tippie College of Business. That’s the same college that Stead’s pal Harreld just priced well above ISU’s business school, and if there’s anyone in this sorry saga who knows how that pricing will affect future demand it’s Jerre Stead.
It’s also a given in discussions about Iowa and Iowa State that cultural and political differences between the schools and their home towns will inevitably intrude on the conversation. What’s important to note about those differences, however, is that they are most often actively promoted by people who are determined to pervert the state’s system of higher-education for their own ends. What those people want — from Branstad to Rastetter to the crony ex-pols that Leath keeps putting on his payroll — is to redirect state funds in ways which aid their crony business and political interests, meaning it’s about the money not about ideology.
As president of the Iowa Board of Regents, Rastetter’s dream seems to be moving the status of Iowa’s flagship university from UI to ISU. In hiring J. Bruce Harreld, Rastetter found a man willing to raise prices on Iowa students to such an extent that ISU now has a clear competitive advantage in enrolling business and engineering students. That in turn feeds into the board’s stated goal of building centers of excellence around specific programs, meaning the UI should expect more erosion of those programs in the future.
Again, segmenting the state schools by academic disciplines may be more efficient from the regents’ top-down perspective, but it also necessarily means students will have fewer choices. That in turn further exposes the lie that the common application portal is a student service, because it will be needed less and less as time goes on. As a central point of administrative control for the board, however, the portal is consultant-perfect, and from Rastetter’s perspective all the more so because it is being hosted at Iowa State.
Whether you’re Jerre Stead, former regent Bob Downer, or anyone else who cares about the University of Iowa, it’s time to wake up and realize that Bruce Rastetter’s personal, political and professional interests are all aligned with empowering ISU, and thus furthered by doing everything possible to undermine UI. Even if you’re not an indignant alum, but hail from the Iowa City or Johnson County business community, or even the IC-CR Corridor, Rastetter’s machinations represent an intentional administrative looting in the same way that performance-based funding was a blatant attempt to shift millions and millions of dollars to Ames. Even hiring J. Bruce Harreld to run UI is part of that plan, because Harreld has no allegiance to the city or the school, not allegiance to liberal arts and the humanities, and no allegiance to ethics.
Yes, if you’re lucky J. Bruce Harreld may throw a little money your way, but while you’re delighted at that pittance millions more will be diverted to ISU by Rastetter and the regents, until that school becomes the fulcrum for higher education in the state. That will happen without any formal discussion on the subject, without any hearings or votes in the state legislature, and without any investigation into the abuses that Rastetter has already perpetrated. Instead, Rastetter will orchestrate all of those changes himself — just as he orchestrated Harreld’s fraudulent hire — while perhaps also position himself to appoint a third toady president, thus completing the set. The regents’ application portal scam — which could end up costing Iowa taxpayers more than half a million dollars over its first three years of intentional minimal use — is simply another artifact of Rastetter’s relentless consolidation of power.
Excellent thought– perhaps the intent was to centralize admissions all along. Still not sure to what end, but this is where we seem to be.
The shenanigans with ISUs IT personnel are almost certainly tied up in this portal. It’s the 3 Universities that were tasked with developing this portal. My guess is that ISUs crony IT leadership drove this bus and likely swallowed up a higher proportion of the $290,00. How on earth this particular portal can cost $100,000/yr to operate is rather mind boggling. That’s a full time IT salary, yes?
Hi Paula,
In JCC’s story about the portal from last year, he had this about staffing:
ISU will require the addition of one full-time equivalent staff member to handle the portal and to provide a service desk/call center to respond to questions about the portal, the report states.
If you go to the FAQ for the portal, however, you find this:
Q: Who do I contact if I have questions about the Iowa Public Universities Application Portal?
A: For general admissions questions you may contact the admissions office at any of the three Regent universities.
Iowa State University: admissions@iastate.edu, (800) 262-3810
University of Iowa: admissions@uiowa.edu, (319) 335-3847
University of Northern Iowa: admissions@uni.edu, (319) 273-2281
If you have specific questions about the Iowa Public Universities Application Portal, you may submit those via the following web form:
https://apply.regents.iowa.gov/contact_us.php
A staff member will respond to your question either via email or phone call within 1-2 business days.
Assuming that those instructions were online when the site went live last year, there’s clearly no ‘help desk’ function being offered. Even when using the portal, prospective applicants are first steered to the school admissions offices for help. The only help option for someone using the portal is a web form, with the promise that someone will respond 1-2 business days.
I think we can all agree that is not the kind of service that will make people want to use the site, and certainly not the kind of service one would expect from a site that was specifically designed to make applying to multiple schools easier for prospective students.
The obvious question, of course, is whether a full-time staffer was hired specifically for the site. It’s entirely possible that plans changed after JCC reported the quote above, and that the regents decided to automate the help process when they realized they were going to effectively idle the site for a couple of years.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that ISU went ahead and hired someone for the job, then had them either do something else, or just sit back and collect a paycheck for doing nothing. (Even if every person who used the portal in the past twelve months also used the web form to ask a question, that would still only be one question every three days.)
After reading JCC”s and Vanessa’s reports several times, it seems as if the cost of the portal — whatever it was actually billed at — was over and above all the other IT/staffing costs already associated with the applications process at each school. How the three schools split that cost, and who got paid what, I don’t know.
The BOR spends money like it grows on trees (old Iowa saying)
It is especially galling that despite the state’s deteriorating support, and despite the tuition increases, the marketing/business geniuses (and there are alot) continue to pump up their salaries.
The oft mentioned Mark Braun pulls in 240,000 plus complementary car. “Dr” (night school) Bob the “CEO” of the BOR managed to dodge the law for his 250,000. So administration (making the tough decisions like the common portal, or hiring Deloitte for a few million) pay themselves knowing they have that almost bottomless source of funding called tuition.
We know the AG is scared of the Branstad/Rastetter pol machine, but is the state legislature skeered too?
As an aside I wonder where the money the state has pulled from the universities goes?
The DMR article from last year, profiling Rastetter, is quite clear. Rastetter’s ethos is that those who stick with him get paid, and we see that at the BoR. For Braun and Donley — no expense is too great, and no state law too restrictive, for Rastetter’s fixers at the board office.
As for the legislature, I don’t get it. Even on the banal subject of fiscal responsibility anyone could take the BoR apart, but there’s nothing. Not even crickets.
The trend in Iowa for 20 years or so is to drain resources and power from the outposts, the countryside, the boonies of Iowa to Des Moines.
Nothing against the capitol city itself, but it seems a little too smug and too haughty and the population and power growth.
If you look at Iowa, resources have moved inward: mental health, employment, wealth, population, medical, and political.
This moving the educational power to a central location continues this trend. ISU in Ames is the Des Moines school. Iowa is Eastern Iowa and Chicago; UNI is NE Iowa.
Some points:
– Rastetter has publicly depreciated the student diversity at Iowa, he hates not only the Illinois student, but seemingly the international contingent;
– Rastetter denied presidents of UNI and Iowa raises while pumping up the ISU pres;
– When the Des Moines business college donated it’ campus to UIowa there was wailing and gnashing of teeth (ISU) until the campus went from UIowa to ‘Regents;
– There are some subtle medical education moves to Polk CO (and also the protection Branstad gives his former presidency at Des Moines U to Polk CO)
Iowa City, Dubuque, Davenport, CR traditionally vote Democratic; Rastetter and cronies hate Democrat and worse yet liberals.
What school produces those dang liberals: UIowa.
Your points fit in with this thinking. UIowa is slowly being bled of resources; slowly being controlled by Rastetter political cronies like Braun, Matthes, etc. UIowa has a weak, irrelevant, inexperienced, clueless new president who will easily be hoodwinked and bled of resources.
Within 5 years the entire system will be ruled from Des Moines by the BOR staff, and a new President (Leath) dominating 3 chancellors (Ames, Iowa City; CF). The momentum is already established. And when it happens the bullet points will have been shot into the story: Efficiency; Cost Savings; Coordination: Improvement in Quality; Better Customer (like students are customers) Satisfaction.
Just as medical school was once in Keokuk and Davenport I believe, then moved to the more powerful Iowa City, I predict significant programs will be moved to Polk CO – medical, PhD program, and maybe even law in some form. All roads will lead to Rome, er Des Moines and central Iowa.
There’s this very weird thing going on now with the business schools at UI and ISU. Harreld is talking about making UI/Tipped a bastion of ‘big data’, which fits with Stead. But Harreld also jacked up prices at Tippie so high that ISU’s biz schools is now the clear winner in terms of cost.
And now, just a couple of days ago, the BoR announced <a href="http://www.businessrecord.com/Content/Default/-All-Latest-News/Article/-ISU-to-launch-entrepreneurship-major/-3/248/74220"this:
Students who want to become entrepreneurs will have more options this fall at Iowa State University. The College of Business announced it will begin offering an undergraduate major in entrepreneurship this fall. The Iowa Board of Regents gave its final approval for the program at its July 18 meeting, making ISU the first public university in Iowa to offer an undergraduate major in entrepreneurship, said Raisbeck Endowed Dean David Spalding. Earlier this year the college also received approval to launch a doctorate program in entrepreneurship, which will begin this fall. The college also offers a minor in entrepreneurship. The undergraduate program will be in the university catalog beginning fall 2017, but students can begin the program this academic year.
So ISU is now the low-cost ‘entrepreneurial’ school, and UI is the high-cost ‘big data’ school? Again — does Jerre Stead know about this?
Specializing is one thing, but if you’re looking at building enrollment I think ISU is clearly staking out the winning strategy (With Rastetter’s help, of course.)
Mark, here’s the thing.
I actually do not think that specialization is a bad idea, or that the universities manage in any way to compete with each other to any considerable degree when they’ve got similar programs. If you live in Dubuque, for instance, and you don’t have any particular ed-degree goals beyond “I want to be a teacher”, you’re not wandering around comparing campuses and faculty like some edge-hunting family in New Jersey; you’re probably going to UNI because your friends are going there and it’s an easy drive home. And in a state with only 3M people to begin with, I don’t see the point of the duplications.
I don’t even worry that students won’t be exposed to “everything a university has to offer”. You’re only there four years. It doesn’t matter how much a university has; there’s only so much you can do with 60-odd courses when most of them are going to be connected with your major. And you are going to be alive, likely, for a good 60 years after graduation — knock yourself out on edX or at the library if you want more.
The part that concerns me is the part to do with the quality of the programs. We keep circling around humanities, which are now uneasy tenants at UI; we haven’t had a president who came from the humanities in 20 years, and the dean of CLAS hasn’t been a humanities person since…uh…before that, I think. I can’t even remember who was dean before Maxson. To a substantial degree the university admin doesn’t know what the humanities are anymore, and could not possibly know whether or not they were being done well.
When the marketing and sales people are in charge, as they are now (and oh boy, are they — this is felt all the way down to student level) things get even worse, because there’s no benefit at all to actually doing things well. The marketing people don’t care whether you’re doing things well. They care whether you have something they can promote, and the two are not the same set.
And the faculty know this. Vanessa reported not long ago that UI’s had record faculty resignations this year, with 100 professors blowing this taco stand. I don’t think she really made clear in the story just what that means, though: how hard it is to get a faculty job elsewhere, why professors stay put if they can find any excuse to do so. 100 professors leaving means things are B-A-D in the sense that they feel they cannot do their work here. Do not have the freedom to do their work and advance their careers. And/or that the hits UI has been taking to reputation as these clowns whack away at the university are damaging their own reputations, and they want to distance themselves from UI.
The problem, in the end, is that all these guys — the Bruces, the BoR — are amateurs. They genuinely can’t hear the difference between a functioning department full of smart professors and a bunch of people flailing around and pretending to get things done: they have to wait to see metrics, and then they don’t really know what the metrics mean. None of them have the faintest idea how research really does or doesn’t turn into products. They’re still running around with some inane idea about online education, blind to the difficulties and expense of competing in that space. And they are slow, slow, slow to hear of the new fashions, and then they take the fashion as wisdom.
The smart thing, it would seem, would be to step back and say, well, all right — we’re hundreds of miles from anywhere, we haven’t got much money, our students are poor, what shall we do — and then make a thrifty plan based on those facts. I suspect, though, that given the amount of institutional debt and new fancy building we’ve taken on, thrift is no longer an option. We’ve already committed to the McMansion 75 miles from work. It’s starting to look to me like that’s where we are.
Dormouse– I agree with all that you are saying here especially about the marketing and lack of attention to quality that goes with it.
There is one thought that I hope is worth mentioning. I don’t know where the narrative about faculty attrition originated. However, I am suspecting that the release of this information as ‘news’ originated at the UI or Regents administrative level. It fits into the narrative of faculty salaries as a key quality metric. However, I don’t think any of us honestly believe that the narrative ends with higher salaries for faculty in the humanities or liberal arts in general. Do we really believe that anyone in Central Administration cares about the attrition in CLAS? Is there even one person in the Central Administration with any advanced degree in a CLAS field? I can’t think of any. It’s an upsetting thought given the history.
What it does is to set the stage for something to happen at the Colleges of Business and Medicine. People filling positions in both of those colleges have ample opportunity to enter into the private sector and earn even more money.
We know that the College of Medicine is the main driver for the UI faculty attrition metric. What we don’t really know is how their attrition rate compares to similar schools across the country. Additionally, we haven’t seen how many of those are Clinical Faculty (which are faculty, but not tenure track).
My only point here is that there is something fishy behind the faculty attrition/faculty salary narrative coming out of the central administration and we need to be suspicious of where this is headed.
It’s a good point (about the attrition), and a maddening reminder that you can never get straight numbers/data from UI. Everything is massaged by the marketing weasels, and as such you can never really tell where the problem areas are. (My nightmare scenario is that even the marketing weasels get massaged numbers, so nobody is ever operating from the truth.)
Even after the tuition hikes went through, you cannot find a simple calculation of the amount of money that they raised — which is of course going right into Harreld’s discretionary slush fund.
1. Look at how Rastetter operates (it is well documented): he develops projects — hog confinement, ethanol – generally deceives the public about the consequences (smell) sucks up resources, then bails out just before the operation goes belly up. (he even screwed the Kochs). It is almost Trump-like: take benefits from the public and Govt then hand someone else the bag of crap. Why expect anything else when he operates the Regents schools?
2. Why the controversy about specilization? It obviously happens. Both ISU and Iowa have engineering, both one deals more with civil mechanical etc while the other supports biomedical. There are not duplicate law, medical, and pharm schools? So where is this crisis in education?
3. Certain classes are needed on each campus to meet accredidation. Does anyone think Rastetter even knows that?
4. Agreed about environment for the humanities…..it is ignored…because to an agribusinessman that is an area of academics very hard to monitize.
5. It appears to me that although the BOR talks about plans, strategic or otherwise, the have consistant overall plan that is rock solidly supported.
Agree with these points: Rastetter, Harreld, and even Dr. Night School Bob, are all rank amateurs in this however they are pros at sucking resources and $$$$$, as well as pros at weaseling benefits out of organizations.
By appointing Harreld, Rastetter esp thumbed his nose at professional educators. Fits with his personal and political philosophy.
And yes those marketing weasels want to sell a product on anything but the merits of the product. Therefore they need an academic star or two, a huge number of cheap faculty, and winning basketball and football.
We’ve talked about the specialization angle before, and we agree. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept, at least in theory. If ISU wanted to start its own Writers Workshop, or UI wanted to start its own veterinary program, there would literally be no point. And I agree that it’s probably good for each campus to have a core strength — UNI/teaching, ISU/ag, UI/LA&S, UIHC/medical.
As TV points how, however, there’s also a built-in floor to that idea having to do with accreditation, such that each school needs an English department and a math department, etc. I would go a step further, however, and say that each school also needs to cover the basics — whatever those are — in terms of providing the standard fare/offerings that one would expect to find at any school. The reason for that is reason that high schools don’t usually specialize, which is you just never know which kid is going to be sent off by introducing them to new ideas.
Yes, maybe at the grad level you can really bear down, but at the undegrad level it’s too damn early to be turning kids into worker bees, which is of course the only thing that Rastetter, Harreld and their narrow-minded ilk are concerned about. So I guess I disagree about your point that kids are only there for four (or five, or six) years. Make sure you cover the bases so kids who might be turned on by a discipline have a greater chance of having that happen. (Again, competence is fine; not everyone can be the best.)
CLAS has indeed been getting short shrift at UI, and part of that has to do with the long-term tilt toward Tippie on campus. Despite no end of business gutter trash blowing the economy to smithereens over and over (dot-com bubble, mortgage crisis, etc.), people want to get stinking rich and buy gold door knobs, and you can’t talk them out of it. Which is of course where leadership should come in, but as you point out — and as the fraudulent Harreld hire proves — UI hasn’t had that kind of leadership for far too long. (Again, in order to install Harreld his co-conspirators quite literally had to lie and cheat. That’s the business ethos in action.)
Harreld’s pathological fixation on rankings, and the preeminence of marketing weasels at the board and at each school, is a big problem. The only solution is putting adults in charge, but Harreld’s clearly not here to play that role. Instead, it’s about exploiting opportunities for profit, both financial and political, and he’s well on his way. (I gotta wonder what the upper-division resident undergrad biz students are thinking, now that he just stuck them with an extra grand each for this year.)
I would also say that the marketing weasels are doing damage at UIHC. Look beneath the latest rankings (and yes, rankings are a scam), and you find far too many areas which are “worse than average”. That speaks directly to your point, where money is shoveled at specialties which are sexy or already good, and non-performing areas are left to rot:
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/university-of-iowa-hospitals-again-ranked-nationally-in-seven-specialties-20160801
Seriously, if they don’t yank Robillard out of there and put someone in charge who can see these problems, there’s going to be a point of collapse. $68M cost overrun at CHI, and on top of that he was a key conspirator in the fraudulent Harreld hire, so what do they do? They also make him dean of the College of Medicine.
In September of 2015, when news first broke of J. Bruce Harreld’s fraudulent appointment as president of the University of Iowa, I knew absolutely nothing about academic searches at the state’s three regent schools, or anywhere else for that matter. Now, closing in on a year later, I know a great deal more but even at that I’m still learning, and as such I keep seeing the 2015 UI search in new ways. In this post we will look at the timeline of the 2015 UI presidential search, then compare it to the unfolding timeline of the 2016 UNI presidential search, and in so doing shine a light on something I noticed a long time ago but did not comprehend.
We don’t know exactly when Sally Mason decided to retire at UI, or when she first communicated that decision to anyone at the Iowa Board of Regents — or, alternately, when that information was communicated to the board by a third party. We do have Mason’s commentary on that timeline, however, so we’ll use that as our starting point. From a UI press release on 01/15/15:
Sally Mason has announced she will retire on August 1st after serving as president of the University of Iowa for eight years. Mason will turn 65 in May and says the timing feels right both personally and professionally.
“The holiday break gave me and my husband time to reflect on how we’d like to spend the next few years. When I returned, I approached Board of Regents leadership about retiring.”
For the moment we’ll simply note in passing that although Mason announced her retirement in January she would stay on until August 1st, six-and-a-half months later. By “the holiday break” I assume Mason meant the break ending with New Years Day, which would have concluded at the earliest if she returned to work on 01/02/15, which was a Friday. The earliest the regents could have known that Mason would be stepping aside, then, was on that day, which then prompted public notice of Mason’s decision two weeks later.
In response to Mason’s decision, the board set about requesting qualifications and proposals from search firms interested in managing the search, while also putting together the search committee that would work with the firm that was selected. On 02/02/15, only two weeks after the official announcement of Mason’s retirement, and one month from the earliest date at which the board could have known that Mason was retiring, the Iowa Board of Regents made the following announcement:
In response to the recent retirement announcement from UI President Sally Mason, the Board of Regents is moving forward with development of the Presidential Search and Screen Committee to undertake the search process and recommend to the Board its candidates for a new president for the University of Iowa. The Board has selected Jean E. Robillard, M.D., Vice President for Medical Affairs at the University of Iowa, to chair the search committee.
Although there is no Request for Qualifications (or Proposals) on the board site, we know from other documents that the deadline for search firms to respond to the board’s request was also 02/02/15 (see p.12) — again only two weeks after Mason’s official announcement, and one month after the earliest date on which she could have given notice.
Three days later, on 02/05/15, the board released a list — by title or class — of the people who would be filling the twenty-one slots on the 2015 UI presidential search committee. Included in that list were two slots for members of the public at large, which the board requested nominations for on 02/06/15 (see p. 126). Those nominations due no later than 02/12/15, or only six days later.
On 02/16/15, only two weeks after the deadline for search firms to respond to the board’s RFQ, and one month after Mason’s official retirement announcement, the regents announced that a search firm had been selected:
The Board of Regents has selected Parker Executive Search of Atlanta, Georgia, as the search firm for the selection of the next president of the University of Iowa.
On 02/25/15, just under six weeks after Mason’s official retirement announcement, and two months since she notified the board of her intent, the regents announced the entire twenty-one person search committee:
The Board of Regents has named the 21 members of the University of Iowa Presidential Search and Screen Committee. The Committee is charged with identifying candidates for Board consideration, in conjunction with the search consultant, Parker Executive Search, to serve as the next president of the University of Iowa.
On 03/13/15 the board signed its contract with Parker Executive Search, approximately two months after Mason’s official retirement announcement, and two-and-a-half months after the earliest date on which she could have notified the board of her intent. On 03/18/15 the board announced that the first meeting of the search committee would be on 03/25/15. From that point on, and with some small tweaks in the coming months, the schedule for the rest of the search was as follows (see p. 26):
05/08/15 — Meeting with the Presidential Search Committee concerning position requirements, timeline, and search process.
05/15-06/15 — Advertisements announcing the position will be placed in multiple publications.
05/15-08/15 — Candidate identification will proceed through advertising and direct recruiting by the Presidential Search Committee and PES to identify qualified candidates interested in the position.
06/04/15 — The first search update will be provided to the Presidential Search Committee.
07/02/15 — The second search update will be provided to the Presidential Search Committee. This will include the candidate status log being posted on the secure site.
07/30/15 — The third search update will be provided to the Presidential Search Committee. This will include the candidate status log being posted on the secure site.
07/31/15 — The Presidential Search Committee will be provided access to ALL candidate materials.
08/04/15 — The Presidential Search Committee will meet to discuss candidates and identify 8 (more or less) candidates to schedule for final interviews.
08/11-12/15 — The Presidential Search Committee will conduct initial interviews of 8 (more or less) candidates. Candidates will be scheduled by PES.
08/12/15 — The Presidential Search Committee will select final candidates for on-campus interviews.
08/31/15 — First finalist on-campus forum.
09/01/15 — Second finalist on-campus forum.
09/02/15 — Third finalist on-campus forum.
09/03/15 — Fourth finalist on-campus forum.
09/04/15 — Board of Regents may conduct interviews of the final candidates.
Early September — An offer may be extended to the selected candidate.
Again, some of those dates shifted a bit later, but as of late May that’s how the full schedule looked. From its official beginning in late February, to its fraudulent end in early September, the 2015 UI presidential search was expected to take just over six months.
The 2016 UNI Presidential Search (So Far)
On 05/18/16, in a story that seemed to catch everyone by surprise, the Des Moines Register reported that UNI President William Ruud was leaving to take a similar job at a school one tenth the size of Northern Iowa. While we don’t know when Ruud first tipped off the regents about his impending resignation, his appointment at Marietta College in Ohio followed a quiet search, meaning it is entirely possible that the board had little if any notice. That is not to say, however, that the board had no inkling that Ruud would be leaving fairly soon, insofar as they had refused to offer him a second contract, and his initial three-year deal was due to expire only two weeks later, on 06/01/16.
With the debacle of the 2015 UI presidential search hanging over the announcement of Ruud’s unexpected resignation, thoughts turned to the administrative process by which his replacement would be selected. On 05/25/16, roughly one week later, Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter put out the following statement, without irony:
In light of recent news articles, I wanted to take an opportunity to address the University of Northern Iowa presidential transition process.
At our June meeting, the Board of Regents will appoint an interim president at UNI, who will serve until a new permanent president can take office.
We already have, and will continue to, reach out to key stakeholders to get their thoughts regarding the next UNI president. We will continue to ask for advice and counsel from these constituents, as well as the entire Board of Regents, to get their feedback on the selection process.
This process needs to be deliberative, thoughtful and inclusive so that we can hire the best person to serve as the next president of UNI. We will have more to say about the search process at the June meeting.
The hiring of a university president is the single most important thing a Board does. We take this responsibility seriously and want to make sure we take the proper time to put together a process that will ensure the best possible candidate is found.
On 05/31/16, two weeks after Ruud’s announcement, it was reported that the regents would appoint UNI Provost Jim Wohlpart as interim UNI president, at the next board meeting on 06/09/16. (Wohlpart had been hired at UNI only a little over a year earlier.)
On 07/01/16, a month and a half after Ruud’s unanticipated resignation was made public, the regents put out a request for qualifications for search firms interested in managing the UNI presidential search:
The Board of Regents, State of Iowa is soliciting Requests for Qualification (RFQ) from qualified search firms to assist in the process to select the next president at the University of Northern Iowa.
The Board hopes to select the successful firm by the end of July.
The deadline for responding to the RFQ was 07/08/16. The deadline for submissions was initially 07/15/16, but was extended to 07/18/16 due to a request for more time from one of the applicants. On 07/19/16 it was reported that four companies would be vying to manage the UNI search, and that a selection would probably be made by the end of the following week (07/29/16) — the same date specified in the RFQ timeline for awarding the contract.
As of today — Wednesday, 08/03/16 — there has been no announcement about which search firm was selected, or whether any firm was selected. Also as of this date, almost two and a half months after Ruud’s surprise resignation, and a full two months after his actual departure, no information has been communicated about when a search committee will be impaneled, or even about how that process will unfold. (Both of the previous two links currently lead to ‘access denied’ pages on the UNI site.)
Comparing the Pace of the UI and UNI Searches (So Far)
While there are certainly numerous variables involved in any search for a university president, and there are considerable differences between UI and UNI over and above differences in scale, and the UNI search has only just begun, if we pull back and looking at the general pace of the 2015 UI presidential search and the 2016 UNI presidential search, we can already come to a couple of interesting conclusions.
First, here’s a compressed timeline for the first two months of the 2015 UI Presidential search:
01/15/15 — Sally Mason announces impending retirement.
02/02/15 — Jean Robillard announced as chair of search committee
02/02/15 — Deadline for search firms to respond to RFQ
02/03/15 — Board releases list of slots on the search committee
02/12/15 — Cut-off date for nominations of members of the public
02/16/15 — Regents announce PES selected as search firm
02/25/15 — Regents announce individuals on search committee
03/13/15 — Regents release signed PES contract for search
03/18/15 — Regents announce first committee meeting to be 03/25/15
As you can see, it only takes one month from the date of Mason’s retirement announcement until a search firm is selected, and the full search committee is impaneled before six weeks have passed.
Now here’s the timeline for the first two months of the 2016 UNI search:
05/18/16 — Ruud announces resignation
05/31/16 — Regents announce UNI Provost Wohlpart will be interim president
07/01/16 — Regents announce RFW for 2016 UNI presidential search
07/08/16 — Deadline for responding to RFQ
07/19/16 — Regents announce four companies vying for search
That’s it — that’s the sum total of progress that has been made with the UNI search in the two months following Ruud’s surprise announcement. In order to even get to the originally scheduled announcement of the winning UNI search firm we would have to extend the timeline another two weeks until last Friday — meaning ten weeks total — whereas the entire search-firm hiring process at UI only took four weeks for a much, much larger school. (I delayed this post several days in that hope that the announcement of the winning UNI search firm would be made, thus saving me from having to write these last few sentences.)
Again, there are clearly a lot of variables in play, including the fact that it’s summer, meaning it may be a little more difficult to round up all of the right people for impaneling a committee. On the question of hiring a search firm, however, summer clearly does not factor into the process, as the timeline in the RFQ makes clear, yet it has already taken four weeks longer to hire the UNI search firm than it took to hire the firm for the 2015 UI search. Too, the last presidential search at UNI was less than three years ago, meaning a template clearly exists as to how to move forward, yet to-date there has been almost no progress at all. (Prior to the 2015 search, the most recent search at UI occurred eight years earlier.)
By the thirty-day mark in the 2015 UI search, not only had the committee chair already been announced, but the search firm had been selected and announced. At the forty-day mark the entire committee was announced, and by the sixty-day mark the first meeting of the committee was only a week away.
By contrast, at the thirty-day mark in the 2016 UNI search the only decision that had been made was that Wohlpart would become the interim president. While clearly necessitated by the imminent departure of Ruud, that decision did not preclude progress on the search front, yet as of the sixty-day mark not only had the winning search firm not been announced, as scheduled, but there had been no announcements at all about the composition of, or process for defining, the UNI search committee.
So what accounts for the UNI delay? Well, during the board’s 06/09/16 meeting, when Wohlpart was approved as interim president, the board signaled slow progress:
The Board of Regents on Thursday kicked off the search process for a new University of Northern Iowa president by authorizing their executive director to develop a process and timetable.
Executive Director Robert Donley, along with regents President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland, will meet with key constituents — including UNI faculty — before coming back with a timeline and proposed process for replacing UNI President Bill Ruud, who last month announced plans to leave for the presidency at Marietta College, a small private school in Ohio. Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter said that could be in August, as the board isn’t going to rush the process while many faculty, staff, and students are gone this summer.
Again, the idea that summer might intrude on the planning process seems to make some sense, though almost anyone critical to the process is only a phone call away even if they’re on the other side of the world. And yet even two weeks earlier, in his 05/25/16 press release regarding Ruud’s announcement, Rastetter was already signaling a leisurely pace:
We take this responsibility seriously and want to make sure we take the proper time to put together a process that will ensure the best possible candidate is found.
While taking “the proper time to put together a process that will ensure the best possible candidate” sounds great, the 2015 UI presidential search reveals an intractable contradiction. Even allowing for the ready availability of key personnel and constituencies on the UI campus in 2015, the regents blew through the entire preparation phase in only forty days, meaning they could have done so at UNI by the end of June if they had put the same process in play. Unfortunately, in terms of equating the time taking to establish the search process with the hiring of the best possible candidate, the blitz-like roll out of the 2015 UI search would seem to signal that either they weren’t interesting in hiring the best candidate at UI, or that there was actually no correlation between the time taken and the quality of the eventual appointee.
As for the idea that the board wants to move slowly at UNI so all constituencies can be fairly represented, that is an actual joke in the shadow of the recent cash-grab tuition hikes at all three universities, which were jammed through while the students were home for the summer. It is even likely that the tuition hikes themselves were compelled by manipulations by the board, and it is known that the board and the university presidents — and in particular, J. Bruce Harreld — were not forthcoming about their plans when they should have been. (To date neither Harreld, the board or the UI has ever published the total revenue raised from Harreld’s egregious tuition hikes.)
To further expose inconsistencies between the two searches, all we have to do is ask whether the summer break or any other factor would have stopped the board from proceeding as they did at UI in 2015, and the answer is of course no. Again, only two weeks following Mason’s announcement in mid-January of 2015, the board announced that UI administrator Jean Robillard would chair the search committee before the committee had even been selected. By that same precedent, the board could have easily announced the chair of the 2016 UNI search committee by the time Ruud left and Wohlpart took over at the beginning of June, but there’s been nothing on that front.
The two-month timelines for each search show absolute zeal by the board in 2015 at UI, and veritable lethargy with regard to UNI in 2016. But of course as we now know, in 2015 the board was eager to rig a fraudulent search at UI, which was greatly abetted by the traitor Robillard in his role as search chair. So eager was the board to finally replace Mason, in fact, that they had everything ready to go a scant sixty days later, at which point the search suddenly fell idle for several months. Conversely, despite a longer time frame to-date, the UNI search has hardly progressed, and seems destined to be a long, drawn-out affair.
The Interim President Angle
From the outside it seems as if replacing a university president is as straightforward as replacing a burned-out light bulb. As I have learned over the past year, however, and continue to learn, the appointment of a new president is not only an administrative task but a political one, and that’s assuming a best-case scenario in which all of the key players are persons of integrity and good conscience. If instead there are bad actors in the process, the search for and appointment of a new university president can easily become a tortured, mendacious, corrupted endeavor.
In retrospect, the main reason for the board’s zeal in ramping up the 2015 UI search, and particularly in appointing the traitorous Robillard as search chair after only two weeks, was the desire to finally install a toady president who would weaken the school from the inside out. So eager — so constipated by that desire — were Rastetter and others, that they sped through the preparation process as if they had collectively taken a double dose of administrative laxatives. And yet, once they had all their ducks in a row, they then fell idle for almost two full months, before embarking on another two months of advertising to attract candidates. Why the hurry-up-and-wait?
Sally Mason announced her impending retirement on 01/15/15, effective 08/01/15, meaning the board had more than six months — and probably closer to seven months — to appoint her replacement. While it’s probable that the board needed to appoint an interim president to cover the gap between the hiring of a new president and that person’s first day on the job, as we know that’s not what happened. Despite long advanced notice, the search schedule extended one month beyond Mason’s retirement date, meaning the interim UI president would also preside over the school during the critical final thirty days of the search.
As noted above, the announcement of the first meeting of the 2015 UI search committee came on 03/18/15, with that meeting held on 03/25/15. Also on 03/25/15 the Board of Regents made the following announcement:
Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter said today (Wednesday, March 25) that he and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland will recommend that the regents name Jean Robillard to serve as interim president of the University of Iowa.
The board is expected to consider the appointment at its April 23 meeting. Robillard is the university’s vice president for medical affairs. The announcement came at today’s meeting of the presidential search committee, which Robillard chairs.
Following that announcement, however, the search committee did nothing for the next thirty days or more — equaling the thirty-day overlap at the end of the search, when the traitor Robillard would be both chair of the search committee and interim president. Alternatively, had the search committee proceeded apace, Mason would have been president through the end of the appointment process, with Robillard taking over shortly thereafter. (Robillard was approved as interim president on 04/24/15.)
That odd lag — particularly after the fanatical pace of ramping up and locking down the UI search process — is something I noticed long ago, but until recently ascribed to administrative factors outside my ken. I now believe, however, that that one-month (or more) lag was intentional. In fact, given what we now know about the conspirators behind Harreld’s fraudulent hire, and the corrupt lengths to which they went to jam him into office, it is not only not difficult to imagine that Rastetter and Robillard strung out the search so that Robillard would be interim president during the final critical month of the process, that is perfectly in keeping with their orchestrated betrayal of all of the constituencies involved in the search process.
Not so coincidentally, in all that there is also a remarkable connection to a previous search disaster at the University of Iowa, which took place during the tenure of another malevolent board president. Even today the 2007 UI presidential search — which ultimately resulted in Sally Mason’s appointment after a complete reboot — is remarkable for its protracted length and administrative abuses. What is not much discussed, however, is that during that protracted search, interim president Gary Fethke made a number of decisions which would seem to have been inappropriate for an interim president to make. One of those decisions, ironically, was the appointment of Jean Robillard as Vice President for Medical Affairs, without opening up the position to applications or a nation-wide search.
If you’re keeping score, then, the last two presidential searches at the University of Iowa involved interim presidents pulling fast ones on the UI community while the Board of Regents — dominated by a malevolent president in league with the interim president at the time — went about the business of delaying the search process. Even as a purely administrative matter it is not possible that Fethke appointed Robillard without then-board president Michael Gartner’s approval, and in fact Gartner was not only in support of Fethke’s decision, but wholly in support of unilateral decision making at every step:
Search committees are costly and, often, a waste of time — or a sham. A board should have in mind one or two possible successors for each president, and a president should know whom he wants as his next lawyer or provost or finance person without having to go through a search.
Jean Robillard, the outstanding vice president for medical affairs at the University of Iowa, was not picked by a search committee but simply was tapped by Gary Fethke, who in 18 months as acting president of Iowa accomplished more than his predecessor or successor. “There was no search committee formed to pick Jean Robillard, just a few great conversations with a bunch of people who were on the same page,” says Fethke, who had been dean of the business school.
That’s how good executives operate.
Similarly, when Robillard wanted a dean of the medical school, he named Paul Rothman. “I didn’t want to do a formal search since I knew Paul and could probably not have found someone better in the country,” Robillard says. So why waste time and money?
The mind boggles that such a decrepit line of reasoning comes to us from a man who was, less than a decade ago, president of the Iowa Board of Regents. Gartner’s assumption — that great leaders always know the best people available for any job, and thus have no need of looking for them — is so arrogant and contemptuous in its implications that it encompasses every conceivable permutation of crony corruption without a hint of self-awareness. “Good executives operate” that way, therefore that’s how government should function — which, at UI in 2015, leads to the board’s appointment of a thoroughly unqualified and pugnacious business executive named J. Bruce Harreld, solely as a result of a “sham” search orchestrated by the sitting president of the regents.
Unfortunately, that same individual — Bruce Rastetter — is still president of the board, which means any questions about the pace of the 2016 UNI search begin with the possibility, if not the inevitability, that Rastetter is slow-walking the search for some reason. Again, given the history of the two previous searches at UI, and the damage the interim presidents at that school were encouraged to do while no one was looking, the reason why Rastetter might delay the UNI search seems obvious. The Iowa Board of Regents may be moving at a glacial pace on the 2016 UNI presidential search because they plan to do damage to UNI through interim president Jim Wohlpart, and as of last report Wohlpart himself is also eligible to apply for the open presidency.
Whenever the regents actually learned of Ruud’s impending departure, they could not possibly have been surprised because they knew well in advance that his contract ran out on 06/01/16. In that context, it strains credulity that the board simply waited to see what would happen instead of taking proactive steps to manage Ruud’s forced farewell — including, perhaps, talking with Wohlpart about taking over as interim president in advance of Ruud’s announcement. That in turn may mean, at least for the time being, that the Iowa Board of Regents already has the president they want at UNI, and that accommodation from Wohlpart during his interim presidency may be exactly what the board is looking for as they continue to assert administrative authority over all three state schools.
In 2015 at the University of Iowa, the traitor Robillard was interim president from the beginning of August to the beginning of November, or three months. At UNI, having become interim president on 06/03/16, Wohlpart has already served in that capacity for two months and counting, and the search process has not yet been defined. If the schedule for the 2016 UNI presidential search also takes a full six months, as it did at UI, and the process is announced tomorrow, then by the time an appointment is made Jim Wohlpart will have been interim president for eight months. If he also serves another two months after that, to allow the new president time to transition to the job, Wohlpart will have served as president of the University of Northern Iowa for the majority of the 2016-2017 academic year.
If Jim Wohlpart proves particularly accommodating to the board, he may have the inside track when the regents finally get around to conducting a search at UNI. In fact, by virtue of those personal and professional connections, he may even become the next done-deal university president in the state of Iowa, without all of the unpleasant Harreld aftertaste.
Update: On 08/04/16 (the day after this post), the Iowa Board of Regents announced that it had selected AGB, from Washington, D.C., the run the 2016 UNI presidential search. That decision took eleven weeks, compared to four for the 2015 UI search which was (mis)managed by Parker Executive Search. PES did not apply to run the 2016 UNI search.
Apparently PES and the BOR are not buddies anymore.
I never understood why people like the AD and groups like the Iowa BOR need search agencies anyway. Aren’t they supposed to keep up on stuff like this? I bet if regular readers of this blog worked on it, we could form a search group, advertise, interview and submit 4-5 good names for a president.
How hard is it anyway? You have a limited pool of serious candidates (Harreld is not one). You make some phone calls to knowledgable ppl, and move on.
Wasted money and resources!
As the search process gets underway to find a new president at the University of Northern Iowa, the battle lines are being drawn between those who believe in propriety, integrity and transparency, and the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents. Indicative of that tension, on this past Friday UNI Professor Christopher Martin published a letter-to-the-editor in the Des Moines Register, which included the following assessment after a damning list of the board’s malfeasance:
There are three patterns here, all not befitting the board: 1) The board functions as a revolving door of political patronage, 2) the board is secretive in its dealings, particularly where cronyism and favoritism might come to light, and 3) the board seems to treat compliant university presidents with special favor, and those it deems less compliant with disdain.
On this past Thursday, after blowing its own timeline by a week, the Iowa Board of Regents announced the awarding of the contract for managing the 2016 UNI presidential search. From the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier’s Christina Crippes, on 08/04/16:
The board announced Thursday it selected Washington D.C.-based AGB Search as the consultant firm to assist with the selection of the next UNI president.
“We look forward to working with AGB on this critically important hire,” said Katie Mulholland, Board of Regents president pro tem, who is leading the board’s efforts in the UNI search. “AGB has a proven track record of assisting with successful searches in a timely and efficient manner.”
Although former UNI President William Ruud announced his resignation in mid-May, and was gone two weeks later, it has taken eleven weeks to choose the firm that will handle the administrative and logistical end of the 2016 UNI search. By comparison, although former UI President Sally Mason stayed on another six and a half months after announcing her resignation in mid-January, the regents hired Parker Executive Search to run the 2015 UI search after only four weeks.
Though no specific timeline for the 2016 UNI search was announced by the board, Crippes’ report included the following information:
[AGB] will assist with defining the goals of the search; developing the position specifications and search timeline; identifying potential candidates; receiving nominations and applications for the position; communicating with prospective candidates; facilitating candidate interviews; and conducting background checks on applicants.
The firm will be paid $85,000 for its services assisting with the search, plus expenses. AGB Search estimated the expenses to be an additional $25,000, according to its request for qualification.
The firm proposed a timeline in its request for qualification that included launching the search for a new president in October, after some planning and organization, and interviewing candidates in December, with a plan to oversee the president’s appointment in January.
AGB Search also will plan to visit campus after initial research to get input from the campus community, including administration, faculty and students. Mulholland already has begun to organize focus groups on campus to get input for the presidential search.
The consultant firm will not be involved in helping form the search committee. That work will be done by the Iowa Board of Regents, though there is not a time frame for announcing the search committee, according to the Regents spokesman Josh Lehman.
AGB Search’s lead consultant will be James McCormick, though he may designate other staff to perform specific services, according to the contract the firm signed with the Regents. McCormick has served as the chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.
So AGB will help with or lead on most aspects of the search, with the exception of packing the 2016 UNI search committee with enough crony votes to compel the inclusion of whichever candidate the regents may already have decided they are going to choose when they cast the final vote. Leading AGB’s participation in the search process is James McCormick, whom neither I nor most of the people reading this post has ever heard of before, which in turn gives AGB the appearance of having no possible conflicts of interest, but only the best interests of the UNI community in its $85K (plus expenses) heart.
Unfortunately, given the routinely sleazy business practices of the Iowa Board of Regents, it’s worth asking if anyone else works for AGB that might have some bearing on the outcome of the search, and here we find two interesting employees. First, there is former UI President Sally Mason, who joined AGB sometime in 2015. Having announced her resignation in mid-January of that year, then having officially retired as president on August 1st, we will assume that Mason joined AGB in the second half of 2015. Still, that could have been as early as August 2nd, or, just two days over a full year before the UNI search was awarded to AGB.
In fact, however, the timeline of events surrounding Mason’s departure from UI, and the awarding of the UNI contract to AGB, is considerably tighter. Although Mason did retire as president on 08/01/15, she remained a member of the UI faculty until quite recently, as reported by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis Carlson two weeks ago, on 07/20/16:
Less than one year after retiring as university president, UI President Emerita Sally Mason has submitted her letter of resignation as a tenured faculty member in the UI Department of Biology, UI officials confirmed Tuesday.
During that transition year, Mason’s contract called for her earning a salary equal to 60 percent of her final salary as president. Mason’s 2014-15 salary was $525,828, making her 2015-16 salary $315,497.
On June 30, Sally Mason completed the terms of a five-year deferred compensation agreement that paid her $625,000. The plan, approved in 2011, called for $25,000 in deferred compensation for the first year and $150,000 for every year after that.
So while Mason was hanging on at UI and cashing out over the past year, she was also — as Charis-Carlson noted in his piece — in the employ of AGB for much of that time. The final date of Mason’s employment at UI seems to be 06/30/16, although the letter she sent declaring her intent to resign was dated one week earlier, on 06/23/16, as helpfully volunteered by UI spokesperson Jeneane Beck. In any case, by the most amazing cosmic coincidence, and after dragging their administrative asses for six weeks — which is two weeks longer than it took to actually hire PES during the 2015 UI search — the Iowa Board of Regents finally put out a request for qualifications for the UNI search exactly one day after Mason stopped working for the University of Iowa, on 07/01/16:
The Board of Regents, State of Iowa (Board) located in Urbandale, Iowa, intends to retain the services of a qualified consulting Firm with a national perspective to provide a search to identify candidates for the next President for the University of Northern Iowa in a timely, accurate and professional manner.
Now, I don’t know anything about the law, or about what the board, Mason or AGB needed to do to be legally eligible to apply for the regents’ 2016 UNI RFQ, but if any obstacles existed, they seem to have miraculously disappeared less than twenty-four hours before the release of the board’s RFQ. Which of course raises an interesting question, which is whether the regents delayed the release of the 2016 UNI RFQ so Mason could get paid and clear at UI, thus making AGB either eligible for — or, if we momentarily lapse into cynicism — the intended recipient of the board’s UNI search contract.
Admittedly, those are loaded questions, but it’s not just the incredibly close timing that’s a problem, it’s the fact that the regents had nothing to say about Mason or even the potential appearance of impropriety in awarding the contract to AGB. In fact, other than Charis-Carlson’s piece about Mason’s retirement, I can find no mention — not even in passing — of Mason’s employment by AGB in any of last week’s stories about the awarding of the board’s 2016 UNI search contract to AGB.
Even if only in a ‘small world’ context, it seems that someone at the board would have mentioned that Mason worked for AGB, but that didn’t happen. Instead, all we got is deadpan boilerplate commentary from Mulholland, as quoted above, about a “proven track record” and “successful searches”. Nothing about Sally Mason at all, let alone about the timing of Mason’s resignation from the University of Iowa.
Which brings us to the second employee at AGB who seems to have slipped Mulholland’s mind, and that’s Constantine (Deno) Curris, who was himself president of the University of Northern Iowa for twelve years, from 1983-1995. That in turn is a particularly odd omission given that Mulholland herself has three degrees from UNI (’69, ’80, ’89), with the last one having been entirely earned during Curris’ tenure as president. [There are two other members of the current board who also received degrees from UNI: Larry McKibben (’70), and Subhash Sahai (’70).]
Although the majority of Curris’ presidency occurred prior to the rise of the internet, a perusal of his time at UNI concludes with the renaming of the Business Building in his honor. Following that business thread in turn leads to Curris’ longtime association with Sigma Chi, a fraternal organization which describes itself as follows:
Fundamental Purpose
The fundamental purpose of the Sigma Chi Fraternity is the cultivation, maintenance and accomplishment of the ideals of Friendship, Justice and Learning within our membership.
Sigma Chi Fraternity best serves its purpose by developing, implementing and monitoring programs that foster leadership, build character and promote positive relationship skills that, in turn, enable our members to become productive and caring participants in their families, colleges and communities.
Leaving aside the fact that the above quote is also a perfect description of an old boys’ club, in 2010 Curris was listed in the Sigma Chi annual report as a leader at Sigma Chi, and by 2015 he was listed as a Governor Emeritus. By great cosmic happenstance, in those same reports we also find illegitimate UI president and Sigma Chi ‘Significant Sig’ J. Bruce Harreld, who is listed as one of six members to have donated between $500K and $1M by 2010, and one of eleven members to have given between $1M and $2M by 2015.
Now, I’m not sure how J. Bruce Harreld abetting his own fraudulent hire at UI fits into the ‘justice’ and ‘character building’ aspects of Sigma Chi, but as the entire fraudulent Harreld hire revealed, it’s not what you actually do that matters to the Iowa Board of Regents, but who you know. And in the context of the 2016 UNI presidential search, what we now know is that the company the board just hired to oversee the UNI search includes both the most recent president of the University of Iowa, who finally cut her ties with that school exactly one day before the regents’ RFQ was released, and a long-time president at UNI, who also has long-standing fraternal ties to the current illegitimate president of the University of Iowa.
In a vacuum it might be possible to ignore all of those coincidences, but the 2016 UNI presidential search is not taking place in a vacuum. It’s also a certainty that all of those long-time administrators would respond to any questions about those coincidences by rising in high dudgeon and blasting anyone who dared to question their professional integrity — which they would then attest to for each other. The problem, of course is that the 2016 UNI presidential search is inherently corrupt because it is being run by the same Iowa Board of Regents which ran and then covered up a fraudulent taxpayer-funded search at the University of Iowa in 2015, and that board includes four members (Mulholland, McKibben, Dakovich and Rastetter) who intentionally denied other board members information about the potentially illegal meetings they (and a fifth, recently resigned regent) had with then-candidate J. Bruce Harreld. In that light, unless you are the sunniest of optimists, it has to be assumed that the Iowa Board of Regents also intentionally omitted any mention of AGB’s deep ties to higher-education in the state of Iowa, and particularly to UNI.
The point here is not that the Iowa Board of Regent is sometimes less than forthcoming, it’s that it’s always less than forthcoming if not outright corrupt. And it’s not just big-ticket items like presidential searches that cause the board to lie, they lie about everything. Again, only a few days ago there was the story of a $290K web app which was never publicized by the board. In response to questions about that oversight, Mark Braun — the (normally) highest paid member of the board office staff, who is also the board’s Chief Operating Office — gave a wise-acre response which omitted the fact that the board’s own plan was to idle the site for several years in order to generate administrative momentum for change. Meaning either Braun intentionally avoided answering the question, or he doesn’t know what the hell is happening around him when that’s his job.
Read Professor Martin’s LTE for more. Between crony revolving doors, secretive dealings and special favors, the Iowa Board of Regents has proven it cannot be trusted. Whether AGB can be trusted is now also in question, as is the degree to which AGB is aware of the abuses the regents committed during the Harreld hire. How often do ‘Significant Sigs’ Curris and Harreld talk? Has Mulholland stayed in touch with Curris over the years? Did the board stall the release of the 2016 UNI RFQ until Mason was no longer a UI employee?
It’s not only possible that the board just awarded another done-deal crony contract, it’s entirely possible that Mulholland and her board cronies already know who they want to appoint — meaning it’s only a question of stacking the search committee with loyalists and blowing $100K in taxpayer funds on another sham search. Maybe they regents want to give the job to Interim President Wohlpart, maybe they’ve got someone else in mind, but the one thing you can count on is that they’re never, ever going to tell the truth. Which is precisely why you’re finding out that Mason and Curris both work for AGB here, instead of from the Iowa Board of Regents or AGB.
All of this will need to go into digest form so that prospective students and hires can read it, Mark. I am still persuaded that the serious trouble is in the institutional borrowing, but obviously the corruption just steps on the gas. These kinds of goings-on tend to end abruptly in events that damage students’ and employees’ lives, and of course we haven’t begun talking about what might be happening at the hospital, where the stakes are a little more immediate for the people who go for care. The guys at the top will walk away, of course, but their victims will not come out fine. Your posts are good but long and convoluted, and it would help if someone gave them a journalistic treatment.
I share your concerns about UIHC, and will get into some of my own in an upcoming post. The borrowing, even at very low interest rates, is a problem, as is the opening that presents to bondholders to dictate terms to the school and the regents regarding administrative and even academic matters. That the regents are themselves wholly corrupt and more than happy to use borrowing to turn the entire state higher-ed system into a minor league farm team and startup incubator for corporations obviously does not help.
I’m generally bullish on the reporting by the press over the past year, but there are moments of almost uniform impotence that completely baffle me. The most recent example I can think of was Rastetter’s repeated assertion that he had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that his own company bought a $1.15M property at the behest of Steve Leath and his wife, and in less than one week’s time. I mean seriously — how did nobody follow up on that statement?
Having said all that, however, it’s worth remembering how much has changed over the past year. The absolute zenith of the board’s corruption was the moment when they fraudulently appointed Harreld as president of the University of Iowa. Only weeks later, the board and Robillard and Harreld started taking serious hits, and since then the hits have just kept coming. (The paralysis that Harreld exhibited in the face of the AAUP sanction was telling.)
Throw in the sudden resignation of Regent Mary Andrigna and I see no rebound from the Harreld hire, and in fact the future seems to point in the other direction. If anyone in politics from either party decides to open up on the board, it’s going to be a free-fire zone, and that’s only taking into account the stuff we know about. Throw in all the corruption behind the scenes, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see more regents hit the bricks in the next twelve months.
I do not see any evidence the Iowa BOR will be rebooted:
– A semi-senile Terry Branstad has shown no remorse for any corruption in his second regime. He has screwed Medicaid, mental health, the Iowa BOR, schools, maybe clean water etc..
– AG Tom Miller needs professional Viagra, apparently impotent in all this…..or he defends corruption against outside lawsuits
– The state legislature has put out some whimpers about the Leath deal, but otherwise is AATW.
– Despite negative editorials, stories, etc, there has been no movement of anyone in state Govt or in the BOR (other than Andringa who must have been really scared) as a result of the press. They appear immune to pressure.
The political cronies and Iowa agribusiness oligarchs are in charge and not threatened by the voters nor the regulators, nor the press.
And I will add UIowa’s AAUP sanctions landed in the dumpster with a huge thud. Not even a blink from the BOR other than a sycophantic letter from the UIowa Senate President.
I understand your sentiment here, but I think it understates the impact of the AAUP sanction. The AAUP has no power to move the board, but the board could have adopted any number of responses, including a vigorous defense. Instead, Rastetter once again retreated behind his false claim that the search was fair, which was tantamount to an admission of guilt.
As I’ve noted in other comments and posts, what’s happening now is a hollowing out — a weakening from within — that won’t look any different until something gives way. But there is no question that the Iowa Board of Regents is significantly weaker than it was a year ago, and that the key players at the board have all been thoroughly discredited, particularly with the press and the non-crony legislature. (Don’t forget Grassley Jr.’s tweet about the tuition hikes. He saw that boondoggle for what it was.).
Today’s aggressive Des Moines Register editorial about the Iowa Board of Regents is important in its own right, but also broadens areas of inquiry that need to be addressed by investigative journalists. Specifically, although Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter clearly remains the locus of and impetus for crony corruption at the board, there is now sufficient evidence to question the role played by key members of the board staff as well:
This need for additional funding also follows the creation of a new position in the regents office — that of chief operating officer. Former UI administrator Mark Braun has taken that job, which pays $240,000. His hiring was never even voted on by the board.
Mark Braun’s recent cavalier response to the press about the board’s ‘common application portal’ scam shows that he’s part of the problem. Until now, Braun and XD/CEO Bob Donley have mostly kept their heads down, playing the staff-flunkie role while Rastetter sets the agenda. In fact, it’s remarkable how seldom XD/CEO Bob Donley is ever quoted in the press, as if he literally does not have the leadership role at the board office that he actually has. (SHEEO recently appointing Donley national chairman of their organization, despite both the corruption at the board and the end-run the board used to boost Donley’s 2016 salary to twice the amount permissible under state law.)
As for Braun, not only are there questions about the manner of his most recent promotion at the board, but there are legitimate questions about whether he and/or Donley knew about the fraudulent presidential search that Rastetter and UI administrator Jean Robillard ran in 2015. Because if either Braun or Donley did know about any part of that plan, it’s hard not to see at least some of the extra money they’ve pulled down in the last year as either payment for services rendered or payment for their silence.
While Donley has been a fixture at the board office since 2008, when he was hired as Executive Director, Mark Braun has been ping-ponging between the board and the University of Iowa for close to two decades. Hired in 1998 as UI’s Director of State Relations, Braun became a State Relations Officer for the board in 2004. In 2008 — six months after Donley’s hire — Braun then headed back to UI as chief of staff for the recently hired President Sally Mason. (It’s not clear whether Mason wanted Braun in that role, or whether the board — coming off the protracted and corrupt 2007 search which ultimately led to Mason’s legitimate appointment — imposed Braun on Mason as a minder.)
In November of 2012, Donley and Rastetter started what would soon become a trend at the Iowa Board of Regents:
The head of the Board of Regents is defending its decision to hire a co-worker of a current Regent member. Joe Murphy is replacing Ann McCarthy as the Iowa State University`s head lobbyist.
Murphy served in the same role at the University of Northern Iowa for three years but most recently worked for The Summit Group, a company owned by Regent member Bruce Rastetter.
The Board of Regents hired Murphy without conducting a search to fill the position and without notifying the public that the position was being filled.
Rastetter has denied any involvement in the hiring process.
Regent director Bob Donley says he made the decision to skip a search because he needed to fill the position in time for the start of the legislative session in January. Murphy will be paid $110,000 dollars a year.
In subsequent years that same tawdry administrative drama would play out with multiple political cronies at Iowa State, culminating recently in a $1.15M land deal between Rastetter and ISU President Steven Leath, which Rastetter also claimed to have nothing to do with.
In February of 2014 Donley also played a key sandbagging role in exacerbating tensions between Mason and the board following a controversial comment that Mason made about sexual assault.
In May of 2014, Braun added the title of Vice President for External Relations to his Chief of Staff duties at UI, with a commensurate bump in pay. That same dual-title administrative role would soon be handed to Peter Matthes, who, in 2015, was exposed as having overseen multiple no-bid crony contracts at UI. What remains unclear is whether any of those crony contracts were facilitated by Braun while he was in that same role. (As for Matthes, in penance for his abuses of power the incoming illegitimate UI president, J. Bruce Harreld, would almost immediately promote Matthes to one of his Senior Advisors, with the full blessings of the board.)
In August of 2014, Braun took a leave of absence from his duties at UI to head up the regents’ multi-million-dollar TIER review process. One recommendation of that process was for the board to create and then idle a ‘common application portal‘ at a projected cost of close to a half a million dollars, yet only last week Braun had nothing to say about the board’s long-term plans for that application.
In mid-January of 2015, Sally Mason announced her impending retirement effective August 1st. In early March of 2015, approximately one week after the announcement of the full search committee impaneled to replace Mason — which included regents Rastetter, Mulholland and Dakovich, as well as Matthes and Donley in an ex officio capacity, and would be chaired by the traitorous Robillard — it was announced that Mark Braun would soon be returning to UI in yet another role:
Braun will become UI vice president for operational efficiency and regulatory compliance, effective April 6, according to regents documents and UI officials. He will maintain his current responsibilities with the efficiency study and his salary will not change, documents show.
Less than four months later, however, and quite literally on the eve of the secret regent meetings between J. Bruce Harreld and four regents at Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames, it was announced that Braun would again be leaving UI for yet another new job at the board:
The Iowa Board of Regents is creating a new position to run its daily operations, with a base salary that’s more than $85,000 higher than what its executive director can receive by law.
University of Iowa administrator Mark Braun has been named to a one-year interim appointment as chief operating officer for the board, which governs the state’s three public universities.
Mark Braun stepped out of his most recent job at UI just as Mason’s retirement became official, and just as search chair Jean Robillard assumed the role of interim president. Even though Braun was only on staff at UI for less than four months, however, Braun’s brief tenure as VP for Operational Efficiency and Regulatory Compliance coincided with the secret Kirkwood meeting between Rastetter, Robillard, Matthes and Harreld in June, and with Harreld’s 07/08/15 appearance and presentation on campus at a UIHC “VIP Lunch”.
It is not currently known whether Bob Donley or Mark Braun attended Harreld’s presentation at UIHC, or whether either knew about it. It is also not known whether Donley or Braun knew about the secret Kirkwood meeting, or about the secret regent meetings between Harreld and four regents on 07/30/15, which may have constituted a violation of state law. What is currently known is that if either Donley or Braun had any knowledge of the serial improprieties or potential illegalities which took place during the 2015 UI presidential search — at a cost of over $300K to state taxpayers — neither one of them has had a damn thing to say about any of it.
Update: On the heels of the Register’s editorial, Governor Terry Branstad took a big step back this afternoon from his own crony-packed Board of Regents:
Gov. Terry Branstad on Monday urged the Board of Regents to “live within our means” when it comes to staff members’ salaries, especially in light of recent tuition increases that have University of Iowa resident undergraduates paying $500 more this fall than last.
“I would caution that the regents need to be very cognizant of the budget limitations that we have in state government,” Branstad said, during his weekly news conference in response to a question about board office spending and salaries.
While the governor appeared to break lockstep with the regents over the recent tuition hikes at the state schools, that was merely a bit of post-boondoggle positioning, entirely designed to distract people from the fact that neither Branstad nor Rastetter lifted a finger to prevent those hikes from taking place. By contrast, these comments go to the very heart of state government, to the role the legislature plays in setting state salaries, and to the degree that the board is overstepping its authority.
One year ago Branstad was backing the corruption at the regents full-tilt, including the sham hire — at taxpayer expense — of J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa. A year later Branstad is positioning himself as the wise old governor, so people will forget that he is the progenitor of the board’s corruption.
Interesting comments by the Gov-for-life.
I do wonder if TB is only positioning himself for deniability, or truly believes what he said. As most behaviors in Govt are behind the scenes, wonder what else there is to discover.
If the legislature is sniffing around the BOR shenanigans, TB might understand not only could this be politically embarrassing but potentially illegal.
Someone in the press really needs to put together a comprehensive expose` on the Iowa BOR excesses. (thinking Spotlight-like work). The investigator could start with all the references here. Considering the stakes (huge public debate about higher education, huge student loan debt etc.) it could be award winning work.
Keep up the pressure Ditchwalk.
Rastetter and Branstad to advise Trump on how the crisis clinic campaign is going to go over the waterfalls while on fire, during a nuclear attack, while ‘2nd amendment people’ take of Sec Clinton….
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/08/who_are_trumps_new_energy_advisers_christies_old_o.html
Maybe Rastetter can detail for Trump how to build a yuge wall around a university (made of corn and pig manure) and make the university pay for it.
Could a script writer write these things????
From the article:
“Rastetter, whose support Christie once obtained in part by his veto of a Garden State ban on pig gestation crates, has made becoming secretary of agriculture a “life goal,” according to one top Iowa GOP donor who’d previously backed Christie.”
NO WAY! Imagine, Bruce Rastetter and cronies running the US Dept of Ag. ISU President Leath is going to get a great deal on about 1000 acres of Yellowstone National Park!
The timing of this story — about Branstad and Rastetter becoming players in the Trump campaign — could not have been worse given Trump’s assassination comments. I have been genuinely surprised that both Branstad and particularly Rastetter — as president of the regents — have been able to show open support for a man who espouses views which are hostile to decency on multiple fronts.
In any case, it doesn’t say anything good about either man, apart from their crony corruption of state politics.
The past several years a coup has played out in Iowa higher education:
1. Sally Mason UIowa Pres (was forced out) retired in 2015
2. BOR counsel Thomas Evans was suddenly and surprisingly dumped as chief counsel in June 2015 under suspicious circumstances http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2015/06/29/regents-legal-counsel/29451959/
3. UNI President Rudd was essentially shown the door in 2016
This left Leath the senior president, and Branstad/Rastetter operatives free to give themselves fat raises, easy no bid contracts, crony jobs/contracts (apparently Andringa’s was too obvious), sweet real estate deals, and lots of plunder. Looks like some banana republic…
I’m really intrigued by how the BoR will handle the UNI search. It must be incredibly tempting to play it straight in order to shut up all the people who were enraged by the Harreld hire, yet that would squander the opportunity to hire that key third toady.
Which will win out? Self-preservation or vice?
Ah, I was wrong about Branstad,’s semi-feeble performances. This quote from the Miller article suggests he continues to swing the political rapier: http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/governor-to-iowa-board-of-regents-be-careful-with-the-level-of-spending-20160808
“Branstad pointed to “significant progress” over the last five years in addressing the rising cost of higher education.
“I would contrast to the Vilsack years when we had double-digit increases, sometimes as high as 17 to 18 percent,” he said. “I don’t want to see us go back to those bad old days.” ”
1. Is this true?
2. Is Branstad trying to cut Vilsack down to size, considering the former Iowa Gov and current US Sec Ag appears to be very very tight with the Clintons. Now the HRC train appears to be on track for a record setting win, could Vilsack move up in the cabinet, and thus Branstad is positioning Vilsack in a negative way?
Tom Vilsack was not my favorite, esp after he blew the previous Iowa Presidential search trusting it to Michael (I blew up NBC News) Gartner. A friend of mine however countered:
“When I worked as a staff at the UIowa under Branstad 1 we barely made a living wage. It was terrible. When Vilsack came along he raised the common UIowa worker’s wages to at least a livable range. I will support Vilsack forever’.
Always another side to the story.
Branstad should look further into the dwindling state support and the increasing university budgets:
1. How much of the increase is due to administrative bloat?
2. How much of the increase is due to crony contracts and crony hires (related to #1)?
3. And why, despite spending millions on Deloitte Consulting for TIER the saving don’t seem to keep up with the consultant fees?
(almost 3,000,000.00 plus 300,000 expenses http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/2014/10/08/regents-demand-deloitte-receipts/16892561/ : and a resulting lawsuit http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/deloitte-suing-iowa-board-of-regents-to-keep-records-secret-20150803)
4. Why did the Board move on to Chazey Partners, and Wilshire then even another consultant Marquette? http://www.pionline.com/article/20160127/ONLINE/160129863/iowa-board-of-regents-picks-marquette-as-new-consultant
The board even hired a consultant to monitor the consultant: Huron (at 900,000.00) monitored Deloitte http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2015/07/29/reports-universities-savings-may-take-longer-less/30839619/
“Mark Braun, who has been overseeing the TIER process, said Wednesday that the implementation approach being suggested by the current consultants “is not as fast and aggressive as Deloitte recommended doing it.” Yet the process, he said, “was on track to reach those larger estimates.”
“It’s not a race to the finish line,” Braun said.
The report from Huron Consulting represents the first of several waves for the savings to be reached, Braun said. Deloitte, in contrast, never broke down its total estimates for the individual waves.”
Notice Mr Braun is the master of smart-arse statements that say nothing.
Did Vilsack spend 3-4 million on consultants who delivered far less than promised? http://www.kcci.com/news/report-costsavings-at-universities-not-as-much-as-projected/34423206 http://cogs.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DUMP-DELOITT2.pdf
Maybe Braun could add up all those 0000000000s. Should be something like 5-6 million in consultant costs alone.
And maybe he could hire a PR firm (as Harreld did) to soften his sarcasm, then hire another PR firm to monitor the first PR firm…..the onion PR plan.
Someone, please examine the books!
I think Branstad reaching all the way back to invoke Vilsack was a panic move. He tried to change the conversation in a way that made him (Branstad) look good, but all it really did was make him look desperate.
I think you’re also right to highlight the degree to which Braun initially hyped, then a year later walked back, the impact of those pricey consultants. It’s been reported, but I don’t know if people really understand that it’s a tacit admission that some of that money was wasted. (The board wanted objective correlation of its own ill intent, and it had to pay a premium to get it.)
Caretaker says
Branstad and Rastetter now fully onboard with Trump, named as economic advisors. Rastetter also being mentioned as possible ag secretary.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/trackers/2016-08-09/branstad-rastetter-heineman-said-advising-trump-on-ag-energy
This was a telling moment of overreach, quickly countered by Branstad only hours later. It was also interesting that Branstad once again distanced himself from Rastetter (via his spokesperson’s comments).
In only a matter of weeks this is the third time Branstad has tried to put distance between himself and Rastetter. Whether Rastetter is trying to vault himself out of state politics, or he’s simply naive to the implications of Branstad’s change of heart, I expect the distance between them to continue to grow.
Also, whether Branstad would ever pressure Rastetter to resign, and whether Rastetter would ever agree to do so, those questions no longer seem hypothetical.
For a politician, Vilsack’s a remarkably decent guy, something that’s marked his tenure at Ag. I’m not saying he’s been terrifically effective, but he’s not a hideous person.
And yes, tuition went up steeply in the early ’00s. Very. The excuse at the time was the same as everyone else’s: you had to compete for the best [fill in type of person] with non-prisonlike dorms, the fancy gym, the fancy etc. Then down came the rain and washed it all away.
On Sunday evening the Des Moines Register posted an editorial which effectively characterized the Iowa Board of Regents as a rogue operation in state government. Although charged with doing right by the state’s three universities, the board has repeatedly skirted state law to enrich board staff at the expense of the students, faculty and staff at those schools. Couple those abuses of power with crony deals between high-ranking officials, and with the dispensing of crony jobs to former political operatives — to say nothing of the fraudulent appointment, at taxpayer expense, of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa — and the Iowa Board of Regents under President Bruce Rastetter has proven consistently and unrepentantly corrupt.
Separately Governored
On Monday, less than twenty-four hours after the Register editorial was published, Governor Terry Branstad attempted to distance himself from the regents’ serial malfeasance by positioning himself as a responsible statesman in sync with the Register’s point of view:
While a laudable sentiment from any other quarter, coming from Branstad that statement was a perverse joke because the governor himself diverts money from the state’s schools to paper over budget items he does not want to put on the books. Included in such administrative abuses is the leaching of patient care dollars for state prisoners, who are often treated at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Instead of reimbursing UIHC for those costs, the state stiffs the state-run hospital — of which the Board of Regents are trustees.
In that recurrent vein, only a week ago the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported the exact same fiscal sleight of hand with regard to a state-mandated reading program. Instead of including the program’s cost in his budget, Branstad simply left it out, then cobbled together funds from multiple state institutions of higher education to cover part of the cost. Not surprisingly, the Board of Regents stepped up to do its part, both indirectly and directly:
Public contributions included $250,000 from the Iowa Department of Education; $100,000 from the Iowa Reading Research Center, housed at the University of Iowa; and $100,000 from the Iowa Board of Regents.
The regents’ contribution came from foundations at the three public universities — $45,000 each from the UI and Iowa State University, and $10,000 from UNI.
Governor Branstad is the last person who should chastise anyone about being “very cognizant” of state budget limitations. And yet just as he did on Monday, only a few weeks ago Branstad also made a show of distancing himself from the abusive tuition hikes proposed by the regents’ university presidents, which were fully backed by Rastetter. In fact, when he had the chance Branstad did nothing — and demanded nothing from Rastetter — that would have made up for the minimal legislative funding shortfall that purportedly triggered those egregious hikes. (Even that threshold turned out to be a lie, however, as Rastetter never actually committed to a hard fiscal target so as to keep his options open for forcing the hikes.)
All told, after a purported shortfall of only $1.7M, the regents voted to raise over $20M by increasing tuition at all three schools. At that point the board then turned around and soaked the schools for its own expenses, including the bloated end-run salaries that were the focus of the Register’s editorial. Throw in $5M spent on consultants over the past few years (and still climbing), and the regents’ cavalier attitude with state funds actually makes a mockery of the TIER process that the board has repeatedly used as justification for hiring those same consultants.
In Monday’s comments, Branstad followed his budgeting hypocrisy with a bit of deflection dressed up as a stately teaching moment:
“We’ve got to be very careful in terms of the level of spending, and the universities need to recognize that they’re part of state government as well, even though they’re separately governed,” Branstad said. “They need to be cognizant of the need to try to keep the costs as reasonable as possible.”
In talking about being “separately governed”, Branstad’s inference is that the Iowa Board of Regents and the state universities exist in some alternate governmental universe immune to his own administrative influence. While the board is indeed independent by statute, even a cursory check of the facts shows that not only is the board governing in lockstep with Branstad’s political philosophy, the board is quite literally an extension of Branstad’s political machine. Nowhere in state government is Branstad’s own crony influence laid bare as it is at the Board of Regents, which is precisely why Branstad is now trying to position the board as somehow removed from his gubernatorial powers.
To see the extent to which Branstad’s has intentionally corrupted the board, here is the sentence in the Iowa Code which describes the permissible political make-up of the nine-member Iowa Board of Regents:
Not more than five members shall be of the same political party.
Now, keeping in mind that only two days ago Branstad cautioned the regents about working around state law to pay members of their own office staff more than the legislature intended, let’s take a look at how Branstad went about packing the board with political cronies despite the above statutory restriction:
If Iowa senators confirm the three new Board of Regents members recommended this week by Gov. Terry Branstad, the board will include only one registered Democrat.
The board’s nine volunteer members currently include five Republicans, two Democrats and two members who are not registered with a party.
In order to skew the board toward his own political leanings, Branstad had no problem betraying the intent of a state law — as he showed again recently in appointing a non-journalist to the Iowa Public Information Board. In fact, only a few months ago Branstad appointed yet another Republican to replace Mary Andringa, who resigned suddenly after only a year as a regent, just before it was publicly revealed that she was being paid by a company which secured a multi-million-dollar no-bid contract with UIHC. At the time Andringa was the chair of the regents’ UIHC committee, with direct oversight over the hospital, yet as testament to the depth of corruption at the board that same crony contract was initially portrayed as a TIER success story.)
Branstad’s key addition to the board, of course, was political ‘kingmaker’ Bruce Rastetter, who simply requested his appointment after becoming Branstad’s largest campaign donor. In fact, so eager was Branstad to make sure Rastetter not only joined the board but became its president, that in an unprecedented move the governor bulldozed the sitting president and president pro tem out of the way, clearing the way for Rastetter’s eventual ascendancy.
The Lone Democrat
The one constant at the board is that Governor Terry Branstad has politicized and corrupted the regents at every conceivable opportunity. Even the presumed political independence of the lone Democrat on the board crumbles when looked at from the point of view of crony politics — which makes a lot of sense given that no one has been more loyal to President Rastetter than President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland.
So how did Katie Mulholland, Democrat, find her way to the Iowa Board of Regents when Branstad was determined to pack the board with political cronies? By allowing herself to be promoted by a series of crony Republicans who thought she would be perfect for the job:
“The whole process was interesting and unique,” she said about being interviewed and selected to serve as a Regent. “Unbeknownst to me, my husband, after the fall election, had talked to a legislator, telling him I was interested in serving in some capacity on a committee or a commission, but I didn’t know there were openings on the Board of Regents. “I got a call from Kraig Paulsen, the house majority leader from Hiawatha, and he told me to fill out an application on a website. “I heard from the Governor’s Office and they asked me if I would submit an application for the Iowa Board of Regents.
“Apparently, I met certain characteristics and made it through the first level of vetting. I think some of the characteristics I have met the needs for balanced representation that they had on the Board of Regents.
So who is Katie Mulholland’s husband?
Katie is not a Republican. Her husband, Ed, she said, is a conservative Republican, but she is a registered Democrat. During last summer’s primary campaign, though, she changed her registration to vote in the primary. She voted as a Democrat in the general election and always does. She said she and her husband did not contribute to Branstad’s campaign.
As for Kraig Paulsen, if you’ve been following news reports about the rampant corruption at the board his name will be familiar:
Iowa’s former [Republican] House Speaker Kraig Paulsen has taken a $135,000 unadvertised position with Iowa State University leading a new “supply chain initiative” aimed at improving corporate engagement in research, experiential learning for students, and educational outreach for faculty and staff.
Paulsen, who in August announced plans to step down as the House’s top leader and end his legislative career by not seeking re-election in 2016, will start working for Iowa State’s College of Business on a part-time basis in January. He will move to full-time once the 2016 Legislative Session ends, according to Iowa State.
So Republican political heavyweight Paulsen pitches Democrat Mulholland for the regents, then years later a cushy job is not only invented for Paulsen at one of the regent universities, but Paulsen doesn’t have to compete for the position because it’s never advertised. And while it is true that the Mulhollands have never donated directly to Branstad, and Republican Ed Mulholland has never donated to Paulsen, in an odd twist Democrat Katie Mulholland gave $2,575 to Paulsen in thirteen separate donations between 2006 and 2014.
No matter where you look in Branstad’s political machine you not only find crony cockroaches, you find the same crony cockroaches. Years before Paulsen landed himself a cushy job at ISU, with the explicit approval of ISU President Steven Leath and the tacit approval of the regents, Paulsen was pulling strings to get Mulholland appointed to the board. Demonstrating a spirit of bipartisanship which again undermined the intent of state law, Branstad was happy to appoint a Democrat to the board as long as he knew that individual would roll over for Rastetter’s crony abuses of power, and Katie Mulholland has certainly met that test.
The Harreld Hire
To see the degree to which Branstad himself is not simply the architect of the corruption at the board but its committed champion, consider the governor’s reactions — plural — to the outcry at the University of Iowa, after Rastetter and a majority at the board forced the unqualified and illegitimate J. Bruce Harreld on that school. Instead of taking a step back and asking why there was such immediate outrage, or why that outrage grew as more and more information about the sham search came to light, Branstad not only sided with his crony appointees on the board, he did so in unabashedly condescending fashion:
“The faculty needs to calm down and give the new president a chance. He is not even on campus yet. He doesn’t take over until Nov. 1, “ Branstad told reporters Tuesday at the Iowa Capitol.
Less than a week later, after that bit of snot-nosed paternalism blew up in his face, Branstad played the folksy betrayal card:
Governor Branstad says he’s disappointed faculty at his alma mater have called for the ouster of the entire board that governs the University of Iowa.
“I was kind of shocked that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, of which I am a graduate, would advocate for something that I clearly don’t have the authority to do,” Branstad said today.
True to crony form Branstad ignored the fact that he could simply ask the corrupt regents to resign, and instead chose to pile on the victims of Rastetter’s regental abuses. All of which proved even more corrupt when it was subsequently revealed that Branstad himself played a role in Harreld’s fraudulent appointment. Even better, that moment was actually captured by a film crew:
The video from Aug. 15 focuses on Branstad’s day at the Iowa State Fair, culminating in the his participation in the annual Governor’s Charity Steer Show. (The conversation between Rastetter and Branstad takes place between minute 24:57 and 25:32.)
“Before I forget, I’d like you to call that candidate we have at Iowa,” Rastetter said. “I think he’s fine, but I’d just like if you could encourage him what a big difference he could make. … He is terrific.”
Although the candidate’s name is not mentioned in the recording, the context makes it clear that Rastetter was referring to now UI President Bruce Harreld, a former IBM executive, rather than to one of the other three finalists for the job — a college president and two university provosts.
Despite being fully aware that there was more than one candidate running for president at the University of Iowa, Branstad agrees to subvert the board’s hiring process without even batting an eye. Branstad never asks if he should call the other candidates, but instead reflexively agrees to help his biggest political backer run a stealth candidate for the position. In that instance, as in so many others, Branstad stands not apart from the corruption at the board, but as the critical factor facilitating that corruption.
The Bad New Days
Over Branstad’s record-six terms as governor it would be impossible to find a more pure expression of his political malice than the current Iowa Board of Regents. Not only did Branstad appoint all nine members of the board, and not only did he take unprecedented steps to make his biggest political contributor president of the board, but without the slightest bit of hesitation Branstad then worked with that president to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld as president of his alma mater at a cost of over $300K to state taxpayers. Given current press coverage it is understandable that Branstad is now backing away from the monster he created in order to protect what’s left of his tattered legacy, but as a factual matter there is no difference between how the board has conduced itself and how Branstad has conducted himself as governor. More to the point, it has to be assumed that if anyone was taught how to perpetrate abuses of power and administer crony corruption in state office, it was the six-term governor doing the teaching.
In the following comment, also from Monday, you can see wily old Governor Branstad distancing himself from the board while simultaneously reframing the conversation in partisan political terms:
But, Branstad said Monday, “for the rest of state government,” the Legislature sets the salary range, “and then we set the salary within that range.”
“I would contrast to the Vilsack years when we had double-digit increases, sometimes as high as 17 to 18 percent,” he said. “I don’t want to see us go back to those bad old days.”
What Branstad does not want to talk about, of course, is that in the here and now the Iowa Board of Regents is corrupt. He does not want to talk about that because that’s exactly what he intended when he loaded the board with political cronies and paved the way for the state’s most ruthless political fixer to become board president. Bruce Rastetter may have crawled out of a pig-urine lagoon determined to burrow his way deep into state government, but Rastetter needed Branstad’s help on multiple occasions to make that crony dream a reality. All of which means the Iowa Board of Regents is not a rogue operation in need of sage advice from the governor, but a corrupt governmental body which stands as testament to the governor’s own crony political machine.
DolanP53 says
Terry Branstad is Scott Walker, except he’s not running for president, so he knows he’ll be more effective if he keeps his mouth shut.
It’s been very interesting watching developments in three states — Iowa, Wisconsin (as you rightly note), and Kansas. Iowa has the seen the subtlest assault on education and government, Wisconsin is the middle-ground case, and Kansas has been a barbarian invasion. Perhaps not surprisingly, voters in Kansas are pushing back against the wreckage wrought by Brownback, but elsewhere the weakening of government services proceeds apace. And other than a change in the voters, I don’t really see a way to stop it.
Semi-senile Terry Branstad is a genius compared to Scott Walker. Terry has both undergraduate and law degrees. Walker has an ummmmm bad haircut.
Do we actually have an Attorney General? Has any reporter asked him directly why he is not investigating the BOR and Terry’s actions here?
I remain utterly baffled by the IA AG’s complete lack of interest in corruption (and potential criminality) at the Iowa Board of Regents. It almost seems that not only is the board its own administrative world, but in that world there is no regulatory or legal oversight. Does it take a federal crime to get someone with investigative powers to look into the regents? If there is a Gift Law on the Iowa books — and there is — and someone violates that law, who is supposed to investigate and prosecute that law? Who investigates abuses of ethics at the board or at one of the state universities? Who watches the highest-ranking administrators to make sure they’re not corrupting or squelching investigations?
I don’t know enough about state politics or government to explain it, but I do know that the regents are using the AG to respond to Gerhild Krapf’s lawsuit about the secret regent meetings, meaning the office of AG is working for the exact same governmental body that may have broken the law on multiple occasions.
As you point out, this is baffling the way AG Tom Miller handles things. He acts as the defender of all things, corrupt or not, in State Govt.
Imagine this kind of inaction, laziness, or corruption in Michigan. The AG there would be defending the criminals who contaminated the Flint water.
Or New York, where Cuomo, rather than indict corrupt New York legislators, would defend them.
Miller has become part of the problem. Voters should let him know this is not in the public interest.
Again, there needs to be a ‘Spotlight’ type of award-winning journalistic investigation into this acrid corruption.
As the Des Moines Register continues to publish scathing editorials about the obvious corruption of the Board of Regents and as the State Attorney General and the State Legislature continue to do nothing about it one is reminded of the infamous quote that was later attributed to Karl Rove.
“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html
The date of that quote is October of 2004 and in the next month George Bush was re-elected. The invasion of Iraq started in March of 2003. That quote is now seen as evidence of hubris and the re-election likely tipped that hubris into serious delusion as Iraq spiraled into chaos and a deregulated Wall Street descended into financial chicanery.
Is there any current evidence that Bruce Rastetter will be held accountable as he continues to act and create more corruption in the BOR and the UofI whether or not it is exposed? Why shouldn’t he consider himself to be the next Secretary of Agriculture in that case? This hubris will take it’s course and we have yet to see the full extent of the damage his delusions will inflict on the University of Iowa.
In practical terms, if there is enough pressure to dislodge Rastetter, I think he’ll be allowed to walk without facing any charges, or even having a bad day in front of a microphone. Same for Robillard at UIHC, who will be celebrated even as he is pushed into retirement. Harreld is the tough one, because if he leaves before his five years are up that’s going to look like a defeat, and Harreld is all about projecting himself as a winner.
What genuinely bothers me is that the lies required to compel an actual investigation of these people have been apparent since last fall, and yet not even the press has picked up those threads and pursued them. There seems to be no will to enforce the rules and the laws, and that’s disturbing. Either people don’t care, or they’ve given up in the face of this rampant crony corruption.
The BOR now knows there are no consequences to their corruption, they aren’t even trying to follow the law.
“On Wednesday, after notifying the public of Thursday’s meeting on the issue, a Board of Regents attorney sent Aranza an email to let him know the board was going to “meet tomorrow to vote to reject the adjudicator’s decision.”
When Aranza asked her if the board already had discussed the issue — potentially violating open meetings laws — board attorney Aimee Claeys clarified her initial message.
“I apologize if my email was inartfully drafted,” she wrote. “I was simply notifying you that the board will be meeting to consider the matter tomorrow.”
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/regents-reject-state-findings-on-teacher-termination-with-no-discussion-20160811?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
This is why the board fired the old attorney last summer. They wanted a lackey attorney to ape and cover their nefarious actions.
(from the Gazette) Aranza said he doesn’t know whether or not regents violated any laws.
Maybe Drake law school dropout and presumptive US Sec Ag B. Rastetter can represent them.
In an upcoming post we will take a close look at the inherent incoherence, if not reflexive malice, of yesterday’s decision by the Iowa Board of Regents to go to war with two long-time teachers at the Iowa School for the Deaf. In digging into that issue over the past day or two, however, I was reminded not only that the decision making at the board perpetually lapses into incoherence when subjected to even a modicum of scrutiny, but that in the fall of 2015 I ran across a particularly glaring example of that incoherence while trying to get up to speed on all of the damage that crony board President Rastetter was doing to higher education in Iowa. Specifically, in looking at the regents’ most recent presidential searches at each of the state’s three universities, including Rastetter’s fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa in September of 2015, I was struck by how those searches completely contradicted the rationale that Rastetter, ISU’s Steven Leath and UNI’s recently resigned William Ruud put forward in advocating for their vaunted performance-based funding model — at least until the legislature told them all to stuff it.
The main reason I did not point this contradiction out earlier was because I did not know — as was indeed asserted by the regents, in defense of the 2015 UI search — if the market for university presidents had changed substantially in the past five years, but the recent contract with AGB for the 2016 UNI presidential search makes clear it has not. Where the regents paid a flat fee of $90K (plus expenses) in 2011 for the search which begat Ruud’s short-lived presidency at UNI, only a few weeks ago the board signed a contract with AGB which will pay a flat fee of $85K (plus expenses) to replace Ruud. If anything, then, the trend in the market for university presidents in Iowa — slight as it might be, and derived from an extremely small sample size — seems to be recessionary.
With regard to the failed performance-based funding model, which the board invented in 2013, then pushed aggressively in 2014 and early 2015, here is the most cogent explanation of that plan that I have been able to find over the past year. Perhaps not surprisingly, it comes to us not from the board itself, but from the office of Rastetter’s then-future crony land-deal partner, ISU President Leath:
Dating back to the 1940s, the schools shared the general university appropriation on a perceived 40 percent/40 percent/20 percent (Iowa/Iowa State/Northern Iowa) split. The actual allocations have deviated over time. For example, this year’s (FY15) $501 million appropriation is divided on a 46 percent/36 percent/18 percent split, mirroring at least the last 15 years. In real dollars, it sent $230.9 million to Iowa, $180.9 million to Iowa State and $89.2 million to Northern Iowa this year.
Even a true 40-40-20 split, over the last five years alone would have sent $85 million more in state support to Iowa State and $66 million more to Northern Iowa. On average, about $30 million each year was allocated instead to Iowa.
That explanation is excerpted from a much longer point-by-point justification which was prepared by Leath’s media machine at ISU, forwarded to the regents for Rastetter’s personal blessing, then distributed far and wide to explain why it was perfectly okay to strip tens of millions of dollars from the University of Iowa using a rigged system solely designed to accomplish exactly that goal. (More on the performance-based funding scam here and here.) Setting aside Rastetter’s long-stand personal animus toward UI, however, and his equally naked bias in favor of ISU, and even the understandable self-interest of ISU President Leath — particularly given the rapacious rate at which he was stockpiling resident undergrads in order to make out like a bandit when the performance-based funding plan was eventually approved — it’s important to focus on the core of their self-serving performance-based funding argument.
The short version is that there used to be an arbitrary historical 40/40/20 legislative funding split between the three state schools. Over time the legislature got away from that in Iowa’s favor until the splits were 46/36/18, and the performance-based funding model was crafted to correct that deviation based on purportedly objective metrics. In fact, not only were the metrics themselves rigged to shift money to the other two schools and give the board much greater discretionary authority over state appropriations, but the performance-based funding model would have over-corrected the historical splits to UI 37%, ISU 40% and UNI 22%. (Again, you can see why the crony ISU home team of Rastetter-Leath loved the idea.)
Flash forward now to the early stages of the fraudulent 2015 UI presidential search, and to the board’s announcement that Parker Executive Search was being hired for the third straight time, only at the eye-popping price of a flat $200K fee, plus expenses. Here is how then-board Communications Director Sheila Koppin responded to an inquiry about that unprecedented contract (p. 69):
The Board of Regents has contracted with Parker Search firm for the last three Presidential searches (ISU, UNI and SUI). For each search, the Board and Parker contracted for payment of a flat fee for professional services plus actual expenses incurred in conducting the Search. As you note, the professional fees for ISU and UNI were $95,000 and $90,000 respectively.
Efforts to compare the fees for each of the searches are misplaced. The three universities differ in both size and mission, and the search process and demands for each are unique. It’s also important to note that these searches were conducted in different years, so expenses, market conditions and available candidate pool will differ.
Note specifically Koppin’s caution about comparing the cost of the three PES searches to each other. What Koppin is specifically warning against is the idea that each search should cost the same — which would indeed make the cost of the UI search truly remarkable. Instead, Koppin points out that the differing search costs for the three PES searches reflect relevant differences at the schools, including the school’s size and mission, and so on.
In fact, because the same company (PES) managed each of the previous presidential searches, and those searches encompassed all three of the state schools, and did so under the same fee-plus-expenses structure, the proportional difference in the cost of each search gives us a simple and direct way of seeing how the regents themselves have judged the relative value or importance of each school over the past five years. That in turn exposes the contradiction implicit in the board’s proposed splits under the purportedly objective metrics of the performance-based funding plan.
For the 2015 UI search the Iowa Board of Regents happily paid PES a flat fee of $200K, versus a flat fee of $95K paid for the ISU search in 2011, and a flat fee of $90K paid for the UNI search in 2012. Even allowing for a 7.2% increase in inflation between 2011 and 2016, and any of the other variables cited by Koppin in the quote above, the 2015 $200K flat-fee UI search was almost exactly equal to the cost of the 2011 ISU search and the 2012 UNI search combined. (As of last count, when factoring in expenses, the 2015 UI search had passed $300K. By comparison, in 2011 the $95K ISU search topped out at $135K.)
To make the contradiction in the board’s reasoning even clearer, we can express those PES search fees in percentage terms. When we do that — without adjusting for inflation — we find that the UI search was 52% of the total of all three searches, the ISU search was 25% of the total, and the UNI search was 23% of the total. Even if we do adjust the cost of the ISU and UNI searches to constant 2016 dollars, however, Iowa’s 2015 $200K search still represents 50% of the total for all three searches.
Although the board has contracted with a different firm for the 2016 UNI search, the flat fee for that search was recently reported at $85K, or $5K less than the $90K 2012 UNI search. Adjusted for inflation that disparity actually increases to roughly $10K (reflecting a $95K 2012 UNI search in 2016 dollars), meaning in the board’s own eyes UNI’s relative valuation has actually gone down over the past four years. And of course why wouldn’t it, what with the board closing the Malcolm Price Laboratory School and generally hacking away at UNI whenever possible.
As you can see, when the Board of Regents wanted to strip money from the University of Iowa by any means available, they had no problem manufacturing new metrics and funding splits which either put UI and ISU on the same level, or gave ISU the edge. On the other hand, when the regents wanted to explain why they paid twice as much for the 2015 UI search compared to the prior searches at either of the other two state schools, they made it perfectly clear that UI differs in its “size and mission” and other factors, and on that basis deserved a much more costly search. (Unfortunately, having now identified the board’s search-firm split as a metric, the value of that metric going forward is zero because the board will be incentivized to pay lavish search fees for whichever schools it favors.)
The real irony in all this, at least with regard to UI, is that when adjusted for inflation, the 50% funding split suggested by looking at the cost of the most recent searches at each school is only 4% higher than the 46% funding split currently dictated by the legislature. In that context — which seems to have more to do with objective reality than the disingenuous metrics of the performance-based funding plan — it’s also clear that the one school getting royally screwed is not ISU but UNI. UNI should be getting 23% of total state appropriations, but only receives 18%, while ISU receives a whopping 36% when it should top out at 25%.
So there you go. The next time someone starts whining about how the University of Iowa gets too much state money, you remind them that under the regent’s own search-firm splits, Iowa should be getting at least 50% of total appropriations, but is already making do with 46%. As for ISU and UNI, I honestly don’t know how UNI will ever be treated fairly with Rastetter running the board — greasing not only state appropriations for ISU, but private land deals for ISU President Leath — but hopefully the good people at UNI will fight like hell for their due. And that starts with compelling the corrupt and perpetually incoherent Iowa Board of Regents to hire a real university president for the University of Northern Iowa, instead of a third Rastetter toad.
One week ago, on 08/07/16, the Des Moines Register published an editorial entitled Iowa’s Board of Regents has spent itself into a hole. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The Iowa Board of Regents, which exists to help fund, manage and oversee the state universities, now wants those schools to cough up $3.6 million to help pay the bills at the board’s central office.
The additional funding represents a 30 percent increase over the amount of money the regents asked for last year from the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa.
And, as the Iowa City Press-Citizen recently pointed out, the $833,435 year-over-year increase is nearly as much as the total increase in payments the board budgeted during the previous five years combined.
This increased spending by the regents, to be underwritten by the universities themselves, coincides with a recent $250 tuition increase for resident undergraduates, and tuition increases of between $50 and $800 for all other students at the three schools.
That is all true. The Board of Regents can simply bill the state’s institutions of higher learning for any costs it incurs, and do so with relative impunity. In this instance, however, the impetus for the Register’s editorial sprang from the fact that on two separate occasions the regents intentionally worked around state law to provide office staff with pay far in excess of what the legislature intended. In fact, those personnel expenses warranted an earlier Register editorial on 07/21/16, titled Regents’ CEO is grotesquely overpaid, despite law:
If you accept the premise that the salary caps written into state law are not mere suggestions, it’s hard not to conclude that the Iowa Board of Regents is holding itself above the law.
As the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported recently, the board paid its CEO and executive director, Robert Donley, $338,466 in 2015, which is more than double the maximum salary allowed by state law.
Donley’s total compensation included a $154,300 salary, a $5,000 bonus, plus $179,166 in payments from two deferred compensation plans that were approved by the board in 2012 and in 2013.
His total annual compensation not only violates the spirit of the state’s salary-cap law, it’s also grotesquely out of line. Donley oversees a regents office that has just 21 employees and a budget of $4.5 million. And it was only last year that the board created the new staff position of chief operating officer at the regents’ office. A former University of Iowa administrator was given the job, along with a $240,000 annual salary, ostensibly to make the board staff “more efficient.”
As you can see, that’s all pretty damning. The board voted to give its XD/CEO, Bob Donley, twice the pay allowed by law in 2015, and its COO, Mark Braun, a salary higher than the statute-capped pay for the XD/CEO. The board then paid for those elective expenses by first raising tuition on the students at the state’s schools, then diverting some of those scarce funds to cover the board’s additional payroll costs. While obviously a windfall for Donley and Braun personally, the entire progression only confirms the rank and rampant cronyism that is the one true hallmark of the current board.
All of which may be why, on Friday evening — five days after the Register editorial about the regents spending themselves into a hole — Iowa Regent Larry McKibben published an LTE in the Register, refuting the paper’s charge that the board was behaving irresponsibly. Because McKibben is a key part of the crony majority on the board, however, and because the facts are clearly against him, McKibben’s did what the Board of Regents seems to do best, which is lie to the people of Iowa. Specifically, as a seasoned bureaucrat, McKibben followed the well-worn footsteps of his duplicitous peers by perpetrating not lies of commission, but serial lies of omission — meaning electively withholding information in order to deceive.
Here is the opening paragraph of McKibben’s LTE:
For the past three years, I have had the privilege to serve as a member of the Iowa Board of Regents — a position that allows me to devote time and attention to something that is very close to my heart, and to that of so many Iowans — education.
One of the things Larry McKibben devoted time and attention to just over a year ago was meeting in secret with then-candidate J. Bruce Harreld, at Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames. McKibben and another regent met with Harreld regarding his interest in the open presidency at the University of Iowa, in one of two tandem meetings which may also have violated state law. What we know for a fact, however, is that after McKibben and at least three other regents met with Harreld on that day, McKibben and at least four other regents kept those meetings secret not only from the press and the public until well after Harreld’s rigged appointment, but from at least one and perhaps as many as four of the other regents on the board.
McKibben’s next paragraph:
I take enormous pride in being the only regent with direct ties to each of our state’s three public universities. I earned my undergraduate degree at the University of Northern Iowa and my law degree from the University of Iowa. I also served as a graduate teaching assistant at Iowa State University.
From this we now know that McKibben is a lawyer. Except we already knew that from reporting about the crony Rastetter-Leath land deal, which McKibben vigorously defended in the press while also distancing himself in terms of his own potential legal exposure. We also know that in defending the Rastetter-Leath deal, McKibben did not call for an independent investigation, but instead simply felt comfortable telling the people of Iowa that nothing improper happened based on his minimal understanding and distorted recitation of the facts.
The next graph from McKibben’s LTE:
Those experiences, each unique, shaped my perspectives and taught me valuable lessons both in and out of the classroom. Some of the most important life lessons taught me to keep an open mind, weigh the facts and avoid a rush to judgment.
If Regent McKibben has been consistent about anything during his three years on the board it is in keeping a closed mind, dispensing with if not withholding facts, and consistently rushing to judgments which protect his crony peers and those crony members of the office staff that the regents are intent on enriching. Again, as a regent and attorney, Larry McKibben intentionally withheld critical information from other regents on the board in order to abet the fraudulent appoint of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa. From crony jobs for political operatives to crony no-bid contracts for political operatives to crony business transactions between the board president and the president of Iowa State University, Regent McKibben has never sought the truth.
That can be challenging in today’s world filled with misinformation, social media missives and less-than-hidden agendas. Which is why I felt it necessary to respond to recent reports in the media about the operations of the Board of Regents, the administrative office and staff.
As already noted, the Des Moines Register had its facts straight, both in its reporting and in its editorials. The regents gave permission to the state’s universities to raise tuition on the students — in significantly greater amounts than necessary to make up for a negligible $1.7M legislative funding shortfall — then turned around and used a chunk of that money to pay for its own excesses. So what does McKibben specifically have to say in defense of the board’s actions? Nothing.
Far too often, we have seen the funding challenges for higher education addressed with a pass-the-buck mentality. The state Legislature would cut appropriations and the regents would make up the budget shortfall on the backs of students and parents with annual tuition increases. Roughly 30 years ago, state support was more than two-thirds of the universities’ operating budgets and tuition was less than one-third. Today, it is nearly the exact opposite.
As far as it goes McKibben’s statements here are accurate, but who exactly is “the state legislature”? Well, as it turns out, one of those hatchet-wielding legislators was Larry McKibben himself, who was a member of the state senate from 1997-2008, including serving as president pro tem and chairing the powerful Ways & Means Committee. So when McKibben talks about a “pass-the-buck mentality”, he’s actually talking about himself.
(As to how McKibben became a regent, in 2012 he came out of political retirement to challenge an incumbent state senator in a newly reconfigured district. Unfortunately, McKibben didn’t even make it out of his own primary, losing to the candidate who then lost to the incumbent. True to Governor Branstad’s determination to leave no crony behind, however, one year later McKibben was appointed to the board.)
This trend in higher education funding led to a near doubling of in-state undergraduate tuition from 2001-2010. Finding it no longer acceptable, the Board of Regents worked with lawmakers and froze tuition for two-and-a-half consecutive years, slowing the trend and providing much-needed financial relief to students and their families.
Again, the near-doubling of in-state undergraduate tuition which McKibben refers to was the result of massive cuts in state support, and the 2001-2010 time frame almost perfectly coincides with McKibben’s time in the senate. As for the tuition freeze imposed by the board, that was done not for the benefit of the students, but in anticipation of the passage of a performance-based funding model that would have shifted tens of millions of dollars from the University of Iowa to the state’s other two schools. When that funding plan was axed by state legislators who saw the scam for what it was, only a year later the Iowa Board of Regents went back to raising tuition more than necessary, in part to pay the exorbitant salaries of its own staff.
Unfortunately, this well-worn path of funding cuts and budget backfill has now wound up at the door of the Board of Regents Office. This year’s appropriation for the Board Office was reduced by 27 percent to $794,714. Compounding the Board Office’s budget woes were mandated expenses associated with state services from the attorney general, state auditor and in the area of information technology, costs that totaled more than $500,000. With declining funds and even fewer options, we required additional investment from the three universities for our Board Office to maintain adequate staffing and proper oversight.
Here we have McKibben’s overarching lie. After being part of the problem for more than a decade, slashing at funding that was critical for the state’s schools and the board office, McKibben is now turning around and pleading poverty on behalf of the board, while simultaneously ignoring the windfall he and his crony peers gave XD/CEO Donley, or the end-run salary awarded to COO Braun. As for “mandated services” being the cause of the board’s increased costs, the current board wastes taxpayer funds constantly, and does so almost always in service of crony agendas that are not in the best interest of the state. For example, the Iowa Board of Regents routinely compels the Iowa Attorney General’s office to defend it against its own abuses of power and violations of state code, the board ran the sham Harreld search at a cost of over $300K, the board elected to give the completely unqualified and illegitimate Harreld one of the top-fifteen compensation packages in the country on an initial unprecedented five-year deal, and the board paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for development of a ‘common application portal‘ that was never promoted. And as for maintaining “proper oversight”, it should be clear by now that the last thing McKibben has ever advocated for or demonstrated is proper oversight.
Much like the trend that led to rubber-stamped tuition increases, this, too, is a funding trend that must be reversed. Sufficient resources are necessary to provide proper oversight and governance of our state universities. To veer in the opposite direction and make even greater cuts would go against our core mission. Particularly when our Board Office, staffed by dedicated and hardworking professionals, is one of the leanest, most efficient operations in the country. The bottom line is that efficiency is engrained into everything we do.
One of the many things McKibben leaves out here is that the Iowa Board of Regents has minimized staffing not to control costs, as is clearly evidenced by the exorbitant end-run salaries of both Donely and COO Mark Braun, but to concentrate power, particularly in the office of president. That focusing of power in very few hands — meaning also very few checks and balances — is part of the board’s plan to take administrative autonomy away from the state’s three schools, and transfer it to the political appointees who control the board. While being sold as “efficiency”, this usurpation of power is in fact a coup, and is being aided by those “dedicated and hardworking professionals” who willingly accept payment in excess of state law.
As noted by McKibben, the administrative mechanism of the board’s insurgency is its tireless (and tirelessly selective) emphasis on efficiency in operations. What McKibben leaves out, for reasons that will soon be made apparent, is that he himself was the main driver of many of the purported efficiency initiatives at the board, including the spending of more than $5M on TIER consultants. In early 2014, less than a year after being appointed to the board, McKibben and Rastter began setting the table for the consolidation of power they would engineer over the next two years, including the fraudulent hire of the utterly unqualified J. Bruce Harreld. Three months later, the regents — including TIER Committee Chairman McKibben — announced a projected TIER savings between $30M and $80M. Several months later, Mark Braun — future recipient of a salary end-run around state law — was named as the board’s Transformation Project Manger for TIER. In early 2015, McKibben took on implementation oversight of the administrative recommendations provided by the board’s paid consultants. Then, in the summer of 2015, Mark Braun drastically reduced the prior estimates of TIER savings, while simultaneously pushing the implementation timeline out to infinity to avoid having to explain the drastic shortfall.
In all this we see McKibben’s lie within the lie. Despite being intimately involved in the TIER process, McKibben studiously avoids engaging the entire point not only of the Register’s most recent editorial about board costs, but the earlier editorial and reporting about the board intentionally evading state law in order to enrich its own staff. Nowhere — nowhere — does McKibben answer that charge, or even obliquely refer to it. Instead, he positions the board as a victim of policies which he himself implemented in the state senate, while intentionally omitting any mention of his own central role in the board’s TIER process.
And this is why:
In fact, an independent study two years ago reported that “compared to other state systems of higher education, Iowa has one of the leanest organizations” and it further stated that “building the board’s capacity in these areas may require additional investment.”
This is McKibben’s lie within the lie within the lie. The “independent study” that McKibben references is actually the final report prepared by Deloitte, the main consultant McKibben and the board paid millions to during the first phase of the TIER process. As noted in a recent post, the Deloitte findings with regard to the board are comical, consistently validating the board’s determination to expand and consolidate power by taking authority and resources from the state schools. In no sense can Deloitte’s findings be considered “independent”, yet Larry McKibben — the chairman of the board’s TIER committee — goes out of his way to omit that connection, and even to avoid identifying the source of his quotes.
If that external assessment doesn’t convince you, perhaps these numbers will. Every year since 1991, the Board of Regents Office budget has represented less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total regents enterprise budget, and the staff has grown by just one employee. Over those same 25 years, the regent enterprise that includes all three public universities and the two special schools has grown from approximately 38,000 employees and a budget of $1.5 billion to its current level of roughly 50,000 employees and a budget of $5.7 billion — 32 percent and 280 percent increases, respectively.
So what does any of that have to do with the board’s serial determination to enrich members of its own staff by evading state law? Nothing. In fact, as noted earlier it works against the premise of those huge payments to Donley and Braun, who are — somehow — both being handsomely paid for overseeing the board’s tiny office.
Clearly there are severe economic constraints facing higher education in our country. That is why we have worked diligently over the past three years to create a transformative process that will better position our three public universities for the future. However, to do that, we need proper oversight, efficiency and the effective and productive use of our financial resources.
Here McKibben again omits any mention of a laundry list of elective regent expenditures which belie his efficiency mantra, including the issues raised by the Register editorial to which McKibben was purportedly responding. Instead of relevant information about why Donley and Braun are making out like bandits in defiance of state law, or even a feeble justification for those expenditures, McKibben offers propaganda, deception and evasion.
Investing in those efforts is what all of us as Iowans should demand — improving higher education in our state and ensuring it is accessible, affordable and high quality is what all of us as Iowans deserve.
What all Iowans deserve is a Board of Regents free from corruption and deception. Unfortunately, the board’s premeditated determination to avoid state law in compensating its own employees — at the direct expense of the students and the universities the board presides over — makes clear that the current regents do not feel likewise. In rising to the board’s defense, then, and in omitting critical information necessary for the Register’s readers to make their own informed judgment about that issue, Larry McKibben proves only that he is the one with the less-than-hidden agenda.
McKibben is a very good sophist isn’t he? I do believe his reasoning could be called circular — ‘we are responding to an independent consultant (which we hired) who commended us on our austerity while charging us an exorbitant rate for their recommendations on austerity’. It isn’t even circular but more like the programming ‘recursive’ but I am not sure that is correct either.
Destroy the village to save it?
McKibben is part of the crony gang which you nailed. Branstad as Don or Boss and Rastetter is the Consigliare (although you could say McKibben is the Sig which moves Rastetter to Underboss). Members of the gang (GOP operatives with connections to the legislative and executive groups in Des Moines) include Braun, Matthes, Olson, Kutenbach, Paulson and others.
Another branch of the family infiltrated Iowa Medicaid privatization.
Leath heads up the Academic Family which includes Capos Harreld and TBN at UNI.
Of course the gangs intermix when top consul to the Dons – McKibben — recommended that land and money laundering deal Leath could not refuse.
This gang pulls the same old con games — no show jobs, sweetheart deals, construction fraud, shy-locking (student loans) and protection schemes.
And look how angry underboss Rastetter gets when you get in his way. Figurative bodies in the trunsk or in confinement shoes….
On several occasions over the past six months or so, in among the steady stream of reports about corruption at the Iowa Board of Regents, a story popped up about two long-time teachers who were suing the board for reinstatement, after having been fired mid-year from the Iowa School for the Deaf (ISD). As a general rule, personnel disputes are a nightmare to judge in the same way that it is difficult to know what really happened when a marriage falls apart. There are indeed two sides to every story, and in workplace disputes there are often limitations — for good reason — about who can and cannot comment on matters of discipline or litigation.
On this past Wednesday (08/10/16), however, that particular story took a decidedly objective turn when the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported that a state-appointed adjudicator from the neutral Public Employment Relations Board had sided overwhelmingly with one of the terminated teachers:
A state adjudicator has ruled in favor of an Iowa School for the Deaf teacher who the Board of Regents terminated earlier this year, questioning not only the decision but how the board reached it.
“I find that the termination of Tina Murdoch was without just cause,” Neil Barrick, an adjudicator with the Iowa Public Employment Relations Board, wrote in his Aug. 2 decision. “Just cause cannot include reasons which are arbitrary, unfair, or generated out of some petty vendetta.”
The nine-member board in March unanimously agreed to terminate Murdoch, who had taught at the Council Bluffs school for 25 years, and Tricia Tighe, who had been with the school 15 years, after a new principal determined they were not meeting state teaching standards, according to the adjudicator.
The decisions were based on opinion, not achievement scores or other objective measure, according to the decision.
Now, as anyone knows who has been following events at the board over the past year — since President Bruce Rastetter and a small cabal of co-conspirators rigged the 2015 University of Iowa presidential search in order to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld — this ruling is perfectly in keeping with how the board does business under Rastetter’s rule. If you’re loyal, you get fat checks and promotions paid for by the taxpayers of Iowa. If you’re disloyal, or simply in the way, you get discarded, and if you fight back you get punished for your insolence.
After noting that the board would meet the next day (Thursday, 08/11/16) to discuss the ruling, Miller provided more quotes detailing the adjudicator’s findings:
“The overall review of Ms. Murdoch’s performance by staff at (Iowa School for the Deaf) was not done in a fair fashion,” according to Barrick. “The board’s review of the termination decision failed to take into consideration the entirety of the circumstances.”
In fact, Barrick specifically questioned the board’s process in reviewing the allegations and the time it spent considering them.
“As the adjudicator, I am also concerned about the hearing process before the Board of Regents,” he wrote. “I was not presented with any evidence as to how the two-hour maximum for the entire hearing process was determined, but I have never been involved in a matter where so much is at stake and such a short time period involved to get a full record made.”
Again, anyone who has paid even passing attention to the Iowa Board of Regents over the past year will note that this is perfectly in keeping with how Rastetter does business. Setting punitive time limits, constraining appeals and feedback, dictating terms in a highly biased manner — those are all hallmarks of Rastetter’s leadership style, and have, over the five years since his appointment, permeated through the board and its crony staff. If you are a friend, you get a pat on the back or a $1.15M loan to buy property you couldn’t otherwise afford, as ISU President Steven Leath found out recently. If you are not properly subservient you will find yourself without a contract offer or an official explanation as to why you’ve been left hanging, as recently resigned UNI President Bill Ruud also found out recently.
Miller also reported that in communicating the board’s meeting on Thursday to Murdoch’s attorney, board attorney Aimee Claeys stated that a decision had already been made:
The Board of Regents on Wednesday morning issued a notice for Thursday’s meeting, as required by Iowa law. A short time later, board attorney Aimee Claeys sent Aranza an email to give him a “courtesy notice that the Board of Regents will meet tomorrow to vote to reject the adjudicator’s decision.”
“I will confirm the board’s vote with you following the meeting,” she wrote in the email obtained by The Gazette.
Aranza asked how the board came to a decision without meeting, as required by law.
“I don’t know how they could do that without meeting on it already,” he told The Gazette. “It felt odd that I have this email that they’re going to reject it. It sounds like a decision has been made, and if it’s been made, it sounds like people have been discussing the matter.”
After Aranza raised his concerns with Claeys, asking, “Have there been communications between the board members prior to tomorrow,” she clarified her earlier message.
“I was simply notifying you that the board will be meeting to consider the matter tomorrow,” she wrote.
Board spokesman Josh Lehman and Claeys confirmed for The Gazette the initial email was “inartfully drafted” and was meant to include the word, “consider.” They said the board has not yet met or taken any vote on the issue.
Again, if you’ve been following the board over the past year you know that this is perfectly in keeping with Rastetter’s modus operandi. Despite even momentous events, there is almost never any substantive discussion of the board’s decisions, yet votes are routinely taken which indicate that issues must have been discussed. As a result the board is less like the deliberative governmental body it was intended to be, and more like a corporate office, disclosing only the bare minimum of information as required by law.
To be clear, all governing bodies need work sessions or other opportunities to discuss issues and debate the impact of decisions. At Rastetter’s Board of Regents, however, the tendency in every aspect is to minimize transparency, accountability and public involvement. From the Orwellian ‘public hearings’ which no regent attends, which require individuals to speak into a camera in order to tape a message that regents are not obligated to view, to the board’s consistent disinterest is questioning the conduct of its own members — including particularly its leaders — to the consideration of a recent plan to reduce the number of meetings overall, the board has shown one clear tendency, and that is to act as if it, and the individuals on the board and in the board’s office, have no obligation to the people of Iowa. (The board eventually backtracked on its plan for fewer meetings, and instead accomplished the same goal by proposing more but shorter meetings.)
Even the number of board emails released to the public has plummeted since a rule was instituted to provide more transparency regarding board deliberations, because members of the board subsequently shifted their means of communication in order to avoid such compulsory disclosures. In fact, as also reported by the Gazette’s Miller, “last year the board posted just 12 emails that went to a majority of board members, eight of which were meeting notices.” Clearly the board must discuss issues that it rules on, and just as clearly the board under Bruce Rastetter does not want those deliberations made public.
The Case Against Murdoch and Tighe
Again, personnel issues are tricky because even when they are openly contested that may result in an asymmetric release of information. The earliest report of the punitive administrative actions taken against Murdoch comes from a story by Mike McKnight, of WOWTV, in early 2016:
Both teachers received similar letters recommending termination.
The letters contain a laundry list of at least two dozen reasons why administrators feel the teachers have short comings in the classroom; among the reasons school administrators cited failure to use methods to monitor student learning, failure to demonstrate competence in content and failure to enhance academic performance.
“After 25 years they’re saying I’m not meeting teaching standards that I was meeting before. It does not make any sense,” said Murdoch.
Tighe’s mid-semester suspension also caused elementary aged special education students to be moved into the high school.
That concerns one 7-year-old’s grandmother, Kitty Eisenhauer.
“She has a new teacher, a new building a new environment and she’s in the with high schoolers, I don’t really care for that,” said Eisenhauer.
A regents spokesman said the second grade class is in the high school, but they’re in their own room with no high school students, except for a well supervised 45 minute period.
Given that Murdoch and Tighe were suspended in the middle of the year, and that the suspensions caused elementary students to be relocated to the high school, the ISD must have uncovered particularly egregious and alarming conduct on the part of the teachers. And yet in Miller’s story on 08/13/16, the state adjudicator makes clear that’s not the case:
The women in November 2015 received letters suspending them and recommending termination, according to Aranza.
Barrick’s decision in the Murdoch case stressed she’s not guilty of any “serious misconduct or insubordination and her performance in the classroom should not be judged by guidelines or precedent involving forms of egregious behaviors.”
Despite the fusillade of charges leveled by the ISD, which were used to justify suspensions in the middle of the academic mid-year, the adjudicator’s finding proves that Murdoch at least did nothing to warrant such drastic action, let alone the tarnishing of her reputation that will inevitably follow. So what could possibly explain the actions by the ISD?
One clue comes in the timing of the letters. Only a couple of months into the 2015-2016 academic year, both teachers received letters announcing that they were suspended pending termination. While the Board of Regents’ fiscal year begins on 07/01, it’s possible that taking the teachers off the employment rolls before the end of 2015 produced some economic savings for the school. While that would obviously have nothing to do with the teachers’ performance — meaning the ISD, and by extension the regents, were lying about the teachers’ conduct simply to save a few bucks — cutting payroll costs to save money has been a time-honored tradition not only down through human history, but particularly in terms of recent history at the Iowa School for the Deaf.
1990: Murdoch hired.
2000: Tighe hired.
2003: Rebecca Gaw hired as ISD High School Principal.
2008: ISD Superintendent Prickett proposes firing two ISD faculty pursuant to Faculty Reduction in Force Policy and Procedures.
2008: From ISD Superintendent Prickett:
Iowa School for the Deaf will meet the revenue reduction requirements by not filling two staff positions for the 2008/2009 fiscal year and by reducing departmental costs in supplies, travel and general services expenses. Utility and fuel expenditures will also be curtailed. These actions will meet the $151,896 budget reduction requirements.
2009: ISD Superintendent Prickett proposes firing three ISD faculty pursuant to Faculty Reduction in Force Policy and Procedures.
2011: ISD Superintendent Prickett proposes firing five ISD faculty pursuant to Faculty Reduction in Force Policy and Procedures.
2011: Gaw hired as director of the Scranton [PA] School for Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing Children.
2012: ISD Superintendent Clancy proposes <a href="http://www.regents.iowa.gov/Meetings/DocketMemos/11Memos/April2011/0411_ITEM05.pdf“>firing two ISD faculty pursuant to Faculty Reduction in Force Policy and Procedures.
2014: During the April 23-24 Iowa Board of Regents meeting, Gaw is rehired as principal at ISD Effective July 1st. [Gaw’s previous position at ISD was principal of the high school, which, by 2014, no longer seems to exist as a separate job title. Prior to her appointment, Gaw was already serving as the Sign Language Communication Program Coordinator at the Iowa School for the Deaf. It is not clear when Gaw returned to ISD from her job in Scranton, PA, or why she left that job after less than three years.]
2014: During the April 23-24 board meeting, Steve Gettel is hired as the new Superintendent of both the ISD and the Iowa School for the Blind, effective August 1st, 2014.
2014: As reported by Jeff-Charis Carlson in the Des Moines Register on 08/11/16, during the 2014-2015 school year Murdoch is assigned to teach pre-school, “which at that time she had not taught for eight years.”
2015: In mid-March of the 2014-2015 academic year, Gaw sends a memo to Gettel recommending that “Murdoch’s contract not be renewed for the 2015-16 school year.”
2015: “Murdoch’s contract was renewed, however, and she was assigned to teach fifth grade in 2015-16, for the first time in her career.” [As per Miller’s reporting, the contracts Murdoch and Tighe signed in 2015 were for less than the year before.]
2015: In November of the 2015-2016 academic year, ISD Principal Rebecca Gaw suspends Murdoch and Tighe, pending termination.
So for twenty-four years Tina Murdoch is a perfectly acceptable teacher at ISD, until 2014, when recently returned administrator Gaw determines that Murdoch should not be offered a contract for the upcoming year. Between 2008 and 2012, however — during which time Murdoch is a perfectly acceptable teacher — the ISD superintendents fire a minimum of twelve teachers for budgetary reasons alone. (It is possible that there were more faculty terminations at ISD than those listed on the board site, which may have been accomplished in a manner that did not require disclosure.) After Gaw is overruled — apparently by Gettel — and Murdoch is rehired for the 2015-2016 academic year, less than three months months into the year Gaw notifies both Murdoch and Tighe that they have been suspended not for economic reasons, but for cause.
Had there been some sudden, documented problem with Murdoch’s teaching, Gaw’s actions might make sense. Given that the ISD had been steadily dispensing with staff for years, however, and for purely economic reasons, it’s hard not to suspect that was Gaw’s motive as well. And that’s particularly true given that Gaw didn’t simply suspend Murdoch, but Tighe too — meaning either two teachers went dangerously off the rails at exactly the same time, or Gaw simply decided to get rid of two veteran teachers in order to balance her books.
(One question I was unable to answer from all of the reporting on this story — and the reporting was substantial, particularly after the board meeting on Thursday — is whether Murdock and Tighe were the longest-tenured and/or highest-paid teachers on staff at the time. Again, Murdoch had 25 years in, and Tighe 15, when suddenly they were both painted as health hazard to the students at ISD — a claim the state adjudicator took particular pains to reject in concluding Murdoch’s case.)
Of particular note is the fact that the actions taken by ISD after Tighe’s suspension do not fit the assertion that Murdoch and Tighe were removed because of concerns about their performance. Specifically, if Tighe had to be suspended to protect the kids — and not for economic reasons — why wasn’t someone hired to finish the school year in Tighe’s classroom? Instead, not only was Tighe let go, but her class was moved to the high school, where the elementary kids had to spend time with those much older students.
From McKnight’s WOWTV report:
They are constantly supervised and safety is of primary concern. But Kitty [Eisenhauer] says moving class after removing the teacher affects a special needs seven year old. She said, “Yes I have questions about why. Were there problems because I felt they were both great teachers.”
The regents who oversee Iowa School for the Deaf won’t comment on personnel matters. But two teachers say the recommended firings are a bad sign for the deaf students they taught.
Take a moment and imagine your own seven-year-old child suddenly being dislocated from their classroom in mid-year — let alone a deaf child — and finding themselves in a high school setting, including spending time with high school kids during a “well supervised 45 minute period”. Now consider that although the actions taken against Murdoch and Tighe were deemed to be in the best interests of the students, we have clear evidence that the students were negatively affected by the ISD’s decision. If performance really was the problem — as opposed to an administrative determination to slash costs by any means available — then ISD should have demonstrated its concern for the students by hiring a teacher to replace Tighe in Tighe’s classroom, but that clearly did not happen.
The Meeting Will Come to Order for Three Minutes
As the Gazette’s Miller reported, on Wednesday the board posted a Meeting Notice for the next day, along with the Agenda for the meeting:
TELEPHONIC MEETING
BOARD OF REGENTS, STATE OF IOWA
OFFICE OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS
11260 AURORA AVENUE, URBANDALE, IOWA
1. Call to Order
2. Closed Session – Litigation (Optional)
3. ISD Teacher Termination Matter
4. Adjourn
As yet another way to subvert transparency, Rastetter’s Board of Regents often reverts to closed session. In fact, almost the entirety of the sham committee process that was used to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa was conduced under a blanket confidentiality policy, which the board then continued in force regarding Harreld, even after he was hired. Still, in an otherwise just bureaucracy there are valid reasons for discussing personnel issues in closed session, and probably particularly so in a situation where the governing body has just taken a ruling on the chin.
The audio from the Thursday meeting can be heard here, and I encourage you to listen to it if only to corroborate the observations and comments that follow. (The entire audio file is only 3:47 long, the last twenty seconds of the file are dead air, and the substantive portion of the meeting ends at the 3:00 mark.)
For context, three important reminders. First, the adjudicator’s ruling was on August 2nd, meaning the board had time to consider the implications of the ruling both at the office and board level, however informally. Second, the board’s attorney, Aimee Claeys, did indeed give Murdoch’s attorney advance notice that the board would vote to reject the adjudicator’s findings, even though Claey’s statement was subsequently walked back. Third, the board meeting and vote was compulsory under state law and the policies of the board, otherwise it would not have taken place.
The audio starts with President Rastetter calling the meeting to order, then calling the roll. Eight of the nine board members are present, with Regent Johnson absent. At the 0:42 mark Rastetter declares that there is a quorum and that the meeting can proceed. At the 0:45 mark Rastetter states the following:
The purpose of this meeting is to consider whether to reject the adjudicator’s decision in the matter of the termination of Tina Murdoch.
At the 0:55 mark Rastetter asks if there is a need to enter into closed session. Dead air follows until the 1:05 mark, when Regent Sahai begins speaking: “I have looked at the, uh….” Rastetter interrupts Sahai at the 1:07 mark and Sahai stops talking. Dead air follows until the 1:16 mark, when Rastetter again asks if anyone has an interest in entering closed session. Dead air follows from 1:20 to 1:26.
With no one calling for closed session, Rastetter moves on to item #3, the “teacher termination matter”, and calls for a motion and second to reject the adjudicator’s findings. At the 1:49 mark two regents, speaking over each other, both move and second the motion, which Rastetter sorts out and accepts by the 2:04 mark. At that point Rastetter calls for “any discussion”, but by 2:20 mark there is no call for discussion, so Rastetter initiates a role-call vote. All eight regents vote yes, and at the 2:50 mark Rastetter declares that the motion is approved.
Rastetter then asks if there is any more business to come before the board. A few seconds later, just as Rastetter is about to conclude the meeting, one of the regents pipes up and reminds everyone that “the Iowa State Fair is on, so get yourselves down here; it’s going to be fabulous.” Laughter follows. At the 3:18 mark Rastetter adjourns the meeting.
What can we conclude from that solid three minutes of board officiation? Well, on the substance of the matter three points seem obvious. First, however much Aimee Claeys may have wanted to revise her email to Murdoch’s attorney after the fact, the board did indeed do what Claeys said they would do and vote to reject the adjudicator’s findings. Second, it’s clear from the complete lack of any discussion during the three-minute board meeting that a determination must have been reached earlier, particularly given that all eight regents approved the motion without any on-the-record or closed-session conversation. (That in turn puts the lie to the assertion by Claeys and Lehman — and even by Rastetter in his statement of the purpose of the meeting — that the word “consider” had any relevance. In no sense did the board “consider” anything except whether to accept or reject the adjudicator’s findings, and given that no discussion was undertaken, it can only be assumed that all of the consideration in the matter took place beforehand.) Third, in approving the motion to deny, the board offered no rationale for its unanimous decision, or any other insight into why individual regents believed that decision was appropriate or important.
The Incredibility of Rastetter’s Board of Regents
To reiterate, personnel matters are tricky. In this specific instance, however, the board was responding to a ruling which was so overwhelmingly in favor of Tina Murdoch that there are only two possible explanations for the board’s unanimous vote to reject the adjudicator’s finding. Either there is some bombshell information that only the board is aware of, or the board’s response does not spring from the facts of the case.
At this point there is almost no possibility that the board knows something substantive about Murdoch that the adjudicator does not know, particularly given that it was the board who limited Murdoch’s testimony, not the adjudicator. Even if the board is relying on information from Gaw that was not presented to the adjudicator, that in itself would seem to be problematic. And yet clearly the board was insistent — for reasons that no regent made clear — on going to war with Murdoch. Why?
As noted in the timeline above, the ISD was shedding faculty at a prodigious rate until just a few years before Murdoch and Tighe were suspended in the middle of the academic year. During all of those years no one claimed that Murdoch and Tighe were failing in their duties, and indeed in Murdoch’s case the evidence seems clear that she was doing a good job. If the ISD wanted to get rid of Murdoch and Tighe for financial reasons I don’t know why they were not terminated in the same way the previous twelve teachers were fired. Maybe something changed in the past couple of years so that wasn’t an option, but that only makes Murdoch’s hire in 2015 — after Gaw recommended she not be rehired — all the more confusing. The opportunity to not hire Murdoch was there, Murdoch was hired anyway, then Gaw suspended Murdoch and Tighe only a few months later, impugning their integrity as teachers in order to do so.
It’s one thing to get rid of someone because you’re cheap, but okay. It’s quite another to paint someone as incompetent and question their capabilities and qualifications, particularly in caring for and education deaf children. And yet even after a neutral arbitrator ruled that Murdoch was treated unfairly by both ISD and the regents, the board unanimously voted to double-down, leading to a perfunctory three-minute meeting compelling the Iowa Attorney General to take the case.
Again, why? What was the thought process, or was there any? Even if this is simply about money, litigation is not cheap. Did any of the bright administrative lights at the board office — including the XD/CEO and COO, who are both beneficiaries of lavish salaries which the board intentionally structured so as to avoid state law — do a cost-benefit analysis regarding a protracted legal battle? Or is the board simply hoping it can crush Murdoch with legal challenges, even though it clearly seems to be in the wrong?
The nightmare scenario, of course, is that this was not a reasoned decision, but instead represents a “petty vendetta” on Rastetter’s part. While that possibility would seem to be at odds with the eight unanimous votes, it’s possible that some or perhaps even all of the other regents did not actually think about the matter, and instead simply took their marching orders from the board’s leadership, including Rastetter. What remains unarguably true is that the board did vote to go to war with Murdoch, at considerable expense to the state, despite having already lost with the adjudicator. Because we’ve been given no rationale for that decision by anyone on or at the board, we’re left to consider that decision on the merits, and in the larger context of the board’s actions over the past few years.
In doing so it seems self-evident that the most likely reason for the board’s decision is that it is led by a president who rules primarily through interpersonal dynamics, as opposed to any understanding of genuine governance. Start with the register’s profile of Rastetter last year, move to Politico’s profile written at almost the same exact time, then dig into the web for more quotes, and you’ll find the same thing over and over. As long as you’re loyal to Bruce Rastetter, he’ll be loyal to you. Unfortunately, while wildly successful at building allegiances, that particular trait is not only inherently antithetical to fairness — which most people would agree is central to the board’s mission — but also breeds institutional toxicity as crony connections replace objective qualifications and performance expectations.
In that light it is not surprising that crony corruption has become the one true hallmark of Rastetter’s board, which is in turn a result of the governor’s determination to corrupt that governing body through crony appointments. Even when human beings aspire to fairness and justice there is an innate tendency for people to form associations and alliances, which then impacts decision making. That is in turn why it is particularly critical that governing bodies remain immune to such forces, so disputes which percolate up from the front lines can be dealt with fairly and efficiently.
Unfortunately, in the Murdoch case it seems clear that the board has decided to play favorites by siding with an administrator. It may be that the board is worried about some sort of precedent, but having already suffered a defeat with the adjudicator that excuse doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead of taking the hint and cutting its losses, the board unanimously voted to spend scare state resources fighting a battle it already lost. Then again, when you can recover your own costs simply by taking more money from the students you purportedly represent, what disincentive is there to pursuing a “petty vendetta”? In fact, if you don’t like the answer you get from a neutral government body, why wouldn’t you throw the full legal might of the state at the problem if you have that option available?
If the board is playing favorites in siding with Gaw against Murdoch, that also opens up the possibility that it was the board itself which gave Gaw the authority to suspend both Murdoch and Tighe in mid-year. In fact, after Gettel apparently overruled Gaw about rehiring Murdoch, the only two possibilities would seem to be either Gettel having a change of heart after several months and allowing Gaw to suspend the two teachers, or Gaw going over Gettel’s head to the board.
In the end, however, the most relevant context for the Murdoch case is the fact that Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter engineered, implemented and oversaw a sham presidential search at a cost of $300K to state taxpayers, which ultimately resulted in the fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa. In the aftermath of that administrative abuse of power, not only did the regents not investigate Rastetter, but over the past year the regents have not called for the Iowa Attorney General to investigate any of Rastetter’s crony activities, including the highly suspect if not illegal land deal between Rastetter and ISU President Steven Leath. Yet the board had no problem siccing the AG on a teacher who spent twenty-five years working with deaf students.
Anyone willing to go to the lengths that Rastetter went to in order to hire Harreld, which required a full-on betrayal of the people of the state and the very premise of service on the Board of Regents, would have to be viewed as capable of doing the same thing at any other juncture. That in turn means the most likely explanation for why the board decided to sic the Iowa AG on Tina Murdoch, over what is a relatively trivial matter in the board’s sphere, is probably the worst possible explanation that can be imagined. That Rastetter was able to round up seven votes in advance of the meeting, in support of his own vote, tells us that either the entire board is equally corrupt, or that Rastetter has turned the board into nothing more than a rubber stamp.
The ability of the Iowa Board of Regents to use the Iowa Attorney General’s office to target individuals for retribution, while itself remaining immune to investigation from the AG’s office for its own flagrant and repeated violations of policy if not also state law, stands as testament to the complete perversion of justice which has taken place at the highest levels of state government. Tina Murdoch gave twenty-five years of her life to teaching deaf students in service of the state, and her reward for that dedication was not only to be jerked around by the administrators at the ISD, but to have the corrupt crony Board of Regents unanimously reject the findings of a neutral adjudicators and side with those administrators. That the board ended its three-minute vote to persecute Murdoch with giggly frivolity about the Iowa State Fair, to which Bruce Rastetter gave $1M to have a building named after him, was simply another reminder the board sees no human beings under its purview — just pawns to be pushed around.
The ISD situation is indeed bizarre. Hard to explain.
The indisputable issue is administrative bloat and administrative exorbitance.
Rebecca Gaw, who lasted about 1-2 years at her Penn job. came back to some administrative position (sounds like a place to warehouse her) coordinator of squat at 55,000 a year. When the old ISD prinicpal retired, Gaw was shuffled into that position at 95,000. She now makes 111,000.
So apparently at least a 10-15% raise for causing this big stink. And 110,000 as principal of aa school with 110 students. That’s right about 1000.00 per student to spit all over her teachers. http://www.iowaschoolforthedeaf.org/just-for-parents/qa-faqs/
So theoretically a school with 1000 students would pay a principal a million.
The ISD Superintendent too blew up his salary from 160,000 to 200,000! A 20% increase in one year. 200,000 for 110 students. damn! (although ISD sports more programs than just on-site school, but so do other Iowa schools) That’s nice scratch for herding 110 students and a handful of teachers.
Someone here has incredible political clout. Gaw (who obviously wants to dominate everything ISD — google it) was unhappy in PA running back to Iowa in about a year. (The reason there is no principal for 2 years is that ISD was ‘searching’ for a person; when Gaw came back the placeholder (Slater) retired)
One explanation for dumping 2 teachers is that ISD has to come up with salary money of at east 50,000 (Gaw plus Gettel’s raises)….or firing one full time teacher.
Obviously that coup was to fire Murdoch in spring 2015. That (apparently) Gaw move didn’t work. The new superintendent was either too timid, or perhaps not yet corrupted. So Gaw got her wish mid 2016 school season, with some trumped up BS.
My fantasy is that Tighe, a respected co-worker of Murdoch saw this for was it was and raised a stink, standing against corruption. I suspect (without data) she took on Gaw and Mettel, perhaps even went up to the Regents. Thus she sealed her fate, and was thrown in the meat wagon to the executioner too.
It also looks like Gaw and Rastetter had long been allies. Taking on administration of the BOR means execution — with prejudice. Therefore these two teachers were unjustifiably ‘fired’ their reputations smeared, and the newspaper headlines trumpeted their ‘firing’. (someone’s PR machine went into overdrive at this point with PR releases to smear them). The teachers hired an attorney who represented them and you know the rest.
Why did Rastetter react this way?
– He gets really pissed at subordinates who oppose him
– He knows the entire episode is trumped up, and unjustified; therefore it must be covered-up and hidden so data is not discovered for court — go into executive session
– You also see how Rastetter controls dissension on the BOR: crushes it. You oppose Oberfuhrer Rastetter and you are executed.
Certainly Tighe and Murdoch’s attorney will bring defamation suits against Gaw, ISD, Rastetter, and the BOR; any smearing of their reputations (google them, they are outstanding) is a tortious defamation. So the BOR has to keep this quiet.
So I am thinking this is a financial let-go of teachers, and likely retaliation for subordination. Or the final episode of long-standing feuds. To prevent future defamation suits, the BOR has to crush the teachers, and thus bring in the Iowa AG. Not only does that leave legal tracks it starts exhausting their resources for lawyers….how long can 50,000 a year teachers hire an attorney?
My impression of the Murdoch case is that the regents are fighting the adjudicator’s finding not on the basis of the facts of the case, but on the premise that they even have to pay attention to the facts of the case.
They simply want statutory authority to do whatever the hell they want whenever they want to do it, and they’re going to piss away more state funds pursuing that right when they should settle.
On Monday three Iowa state senators, each of whom chairs a committee or subcommittee with oversight of the Iowa Board of Regents, sent a letter to the board asking for information and reassurances about the upcoming UNI presidential search. Here is the full text of that letter:
[As] State Senators, we have been contacted by Iowans who are concerned about different issues regarding the Board of Regents. One especially timely concern that has been raised is how the search for a new president at the University of Northern Iowa will be conducted. We share that concern.
The Board of Regents has few if any duties that are more important than the election of presidents for our universities. Iowa Code § 262.9(2) (2015). The most recent presidential selection process at the University of Iowa did not adhere to the high standards Iowans expect from our Board of Regents.
Given the problems with that selection process documented by University of Iowa faculty and students, the American Association of University Professors, and the news media, we encourage you to use a fair and transparent process in the selection of the next president of the University of Northern Iowa, a process that actually and fully involves the faculty and students in the spirit of shared governance. Hiring a different search firm, as has been done, may be one small step toward a better process, but more needs to be done.
Please reply to this letter with the specific steps the Board of Regents is taking to ensure a fair and transparent process in the selection of the next UNI president. We look forward to hearing from you.
The assessment of the state senators regarding the 2015 regents’ search, which culminated in the appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, is clear. That search “did not adhere to the high standards Iowans expect….” In support of that assertion, the senators specifically mentioned the AAUP’s involvement, which included an investigation and eventual sanction of UI:
The board acted throughout in bad faith, and not toward the faculty alone. The board allowed prominent administrators from major institutions of higher education to believe they were participating as candidates in an honest, open search when the process in actuality was being manipulated to reach a foreordained result.
Three critical terms appear in the senators’ letter: “fair”, “transparent” and “shared governance”. None of those terms applied to the fraudulent UI search engineered, implemented and overseen by Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter, and abetted by multiple co-conspirators including other members of the board. While the letter from the state legislators takes it as a given — as proven – that the UI search was a betrayal of fairness, transparency and shared governance, there has been no such acknowledgement from either the Iowa Board of Regents or the traitors at the University of Iowa who abetted the board in that fraud.
Here is the entirety of every single statement from Bruce Rastetter regarding the AAUP sanction:
Late Saturday, Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter issued a statement defending the regents UI search.
“The Board of Regents ran a fair process in the search for president at the University of Iowa,” he said, “and we are very pleased with the progress that President Harreld is making.”
Here is the entirety of every single statement from J. Bruce Harreld — who himself abetted his own fraudulent hire — regarding the AAUP sanction:
Here is entirety of every single statement from UI administrator Jean Robillard — who was both the chair of the 2015 search committee and interim university president when Harreld was appointed — regarding the AAUP sanction:
[This space intentionally left blank.]
Despite being a key player in the betrayal of the students, faculty and staff at UI, not only has Robillard never suffered any consequence for his abuses of power, he has never commented on the AAUP’s sanction. In fact, other than Harreld’s quote, the entire response from the University of Iowa came from the current and former Faculty Senate Presidents, who dutifully stepped up and denied any involvement on the part of the university.
Despite the AAUP’s findings and sanction, and despite the assumption of failure if not wrongdoing in the senators’ letter, there has been no acknowledgement or admission of improper conduct by any of the people who stole the UI presidential election in 2015. Not one single individual has suffered any negative consequence as a result of their deceit, nor has any individual admitted that a fraudulent search took place. Instead, while the entire world knows that an abuse if not crime was perpetrated by the board, the Iowa Board of Regents and its co-conspirators insist to this day that the search was fair and transparent, and that the board honored its obligations to shared governance.
The Regents Respond
Instead of the regents’ reply coming from board President Rastetter, the response was sent by President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland. On first reading the general tone of Mulholland’s rhetoric seemed positive, if not conciliatory:
“First and foremost, we will be conducting an open and transparent process, very similar to the last UNI presidential search process,” Mulholland wrote in the letter sent on Tuesday to Democratic senators Jeff Danielson, Rob Hogg, and Brian Schoenjahn.
She said the UNI search process will bring candidates to campus in November “for meetings with constituent groups prior to the Board of Regents interviews of the finalists in December.”
“The (American Association of University Professors) guidelines for university presidential searches provided the backbone for the UNI process,” Mulholland wrote.
Note, however, that in explaining how the UNI search will proceed, Mulholland entirely omits the 2015 UI search from the board’s history. Instead of promising fairness, transparency and shared governance “very similar to” the last presidential search — meaning the 2015 UI search — Mulholland specifically cites “the last UNI presidential search process”. In Mulholland’s world the UI search simply never happened, and thus does not need to be accounted for.
Equally promising was Mulholland’s announcement in her response to the senators that one of the co-chairs of the search committee would be a member of the AAUP, who was also a critic of the 2015 UI search:
The Iowa Board of Regents is appointing Daniel J. Power, a UNI professor of management information systems, to co-chair the 20-member committee tasked with vetting applicants to replace former UNI President Bill Ruud, who moved to Ohio earlier this summer.
Power was one of four Iowa delegates to the Association of American University Professors’ national meeting in June. During that meeting, the delegates voted unanimously to sanction UI and criticize the regents for flaws in the search process that led to last year’s hiring of UI President Bruce Harreld.
Power said Tuesday that he had to catch a plane, so he wasn’t on the convention floor during the vote. Had he been there, however, he would have supported the resolution criticizing the regents for ignoring faculty input before hiring Harreld.
“I would like to make sure (the UNI) search helps get the University of Iowa off that sanction list,” Power said. “I know the regents are going to make the decision, but it’s important to establish the criteria and basis for that decision.”
Unfortunately, belying the optimism of Mulholland’s letter — if not also betraying the nefarious intent of the board — was the revelation that Power’s co-chair would be none other than Mulholland herself. In practical terms Mulholland’s appointment negates Powers’ authority on the committee because she functions as a perpetual standing veto. Relative to the senators, however, who wrote the board insisting on fairness, transparency and an upholding of shared governance during the 2016 UNI search, Mulholland’s appointment can only be seen as a provocation because she proved last year that she either has no conception of what those words mean, or that she could care less what they mean.
Mulholland and the 2015 UI Search
As constituted by the Board of Regents itself, the 2015 UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee included three regents: Rastetter, Dakovitch and Mulholland. None of the regents chaired that committee, however, because it was apparently known well in advance that UI administrator Jean Robillard would happily sell out the school at every possible turn. Still, during the search all three regents on the committee did play an important part in fixing the search in Harreld’s favor, yet none of those regents has ever acknowledged any wrongdoing in that regard.
Specifically, on July 30th, 2015, Mulholland, Dakovich and two other regents who were not on the search committee, met in secret — in two meetings of two — with J. Bruce Harreld at Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames. While those meetings subsequently spawned a lawsuit alleging a violation of the state’s Open Meeting laws, even the facts that are currently known about those meetings betray the willingness of Mulholland and the other regents to subvert the search process in two distinct ways. Not only did none of the regents insist that all of the other candidates be afforded the same opportunities to meet with members of the board — meaning the meetings were unfair — but all five of the regents who factored into those meetings kept those meetings secret from at least one other regent until well after Harreld’s fraudulent appointment, meaning there was no transparency even at board level.
With that in mind, here is how Regent Mulholland reacted when the secret regent meetings were finally reported in the press:
McKibben, Dakovich and Mulholland each said Friday that they maintained an open mind throughout the final stages of the search — not making up their minds until after closed-session interviews with the four finalists Sept. 3.
“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.
Having gone to the personal trouble of driving hundreds of miles to participate in a secret meeting with Harreld, and having kept that meeting secret from the pubic, press and even fellow regents, when Mulholland’s betrayal was finally exposed she simply denied that her actions were of any relevance to Harreld’s sham appointment. As to any commitment on her part to shared governance, after the regents betrayed the faculty, staff and students at UI by appointing Harreld over the overwhelming objections of the UI community — thereby triggering the AAUP’s investigation and eventual sanction — Mulholland had this to say:
Critics of the search point to Rastetter’s role in setting up the July 30 meetings with Harreld as one more piece of evidence that Harreld already was the predetermined favored candidate and that the other three finalists — two university provosts and a college president — didn’t really have a chance.
“In my role as a regent, we honor the shared governance of the university faculty and staff,” Mulholland said. “But shared governance is really different from shared decision-making.”
Whether Mulholland was incompetently oblivious or willfully hostile to the meaning of shared governance, she again denied complicity to any wrongdoing even as that wrongdoing was baldly apparent. Less than a week later, the AAUP pointed out that she was indeed wrong in her assertion:
Shared governance is shared decision-making. Mulholland displays her ignorance of how the University of Iowa works. Or more nearly she is showing the meaning of the new normal she and her colleagues are pushing with Bruce Harreld’s selection as president of the University of Iowa.
When the AAUP investigators arrived on campus to investigate Harreld’s fraudulent hire, Mulholland not only stonewalled, she took the point in blocking the AAUP investigators from speaking to any of the co-conspirators:
By letter of September 29, the Association’s national office staff informed board president Rastetter, interim university president Jean Robillard (who had chaired the search committee), and president designate Harreld that the AAUP’s executive director had appointed the undersigned as an ad hoc consultative committee to visit the campus. The AAUP staff invited their cooperation. On behalf of the board of regents, its president pro tem, Dr. Katie Mulholland, responded that the board would decline to meet. Her letter is set out at the close of this report as appendix A. Interim President Robillard wrote simply to echo Dr. Mulholland’s letter. Mr. Harreld did not reply.
Even when the AAUP sanction was finally ratified, Mulholland joined Rastetter, Harreld and Robillard in having nothing to say about what was an unprecedented punishment for a university of Iowa’s standing:
“We read the report — actually we saw a draft of it long ago, and there isn’t any reason to discuss it further,” said Katie Mulholland, who is president pro tem of the regents as well as chairwoman of the board’s Academic and Student Affairs Committee. “We’re going to move forward with the (University of Northern Iowa) search and let our actions speak.”
By her own conduct, Regent Mulholland either knows nothing about or cares nothing about fairness, transparency or shared governance. She is, instead, an abuser, and it is a measure of the regents’ undiminished arrogance and malevolence that they have appointed her as co-chair of the 2016 UNI search. Indeed, as promised by Mulholland herself, the Iowa Board of Regents is speaking with its actions, and what it is saying is that despite the abuses the board perpetrated only a year ago, it can still do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
Enabling An Abuser
The appointment of Katie Mulholland as co-chair of the UNI search means the board has no intention of ceding power that it is not forcibly compelled to relinquish. Again, there has never been a single word or act on the part of the board which acknowledges responsibility for the abuses which led to the AAUP’s explicit sanction of the University of Iowa, and its implicit sanctioning of the regents. Even now, Regent Mulholland simply elides over the UI search as if never took place. Again, from Mulholland’s response, yesterday, to the letter from the three state senators:
In the context of the 2015 UI search that statement from Mulholland is vile mockery. It is an appropriation — a taking — of authority from the AAUP, which is yet another organization she willfully betrayed and worked to impede only a year ago. Now here she is, after effectively granting herself authority to speak on behalf of UNI, simultaneously ignoring her complicity in an undisputed violation of the AAUP’s guidelines while touting those same guidelines as testament of her administrative integrity.
Reading Mulholland’s quote above you would not know that between the UNI search in 2012 and the UNI search in 2016, the regents also conducted a presidential search at UI which culminated in a premeditated and remorseless betrayal of shared governance on that campus. Speaking of which, here is how the 2015 UI search was sold in its earliest stages, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 01/25/15:
As University of Iowa prepares to undergo its own search for a new leader after President Sally Mason last week announced plans to retire this summer, the Board of Regents has hinted it will follow the same public vetting process it used when filling vacancies at Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa.
No law or policy exists requiring the board to publicize names of finalists to fill presidential vacancies at its public universities. But in those recent searches for new heads at ISU and UNI, the board did release finalists’ names and invite community members to weigh in.
“They were inclusive, open and transparent,” Regents President Bruce Rastetter said last week about the ISU and UNI presidential searches. “And we will follow a similar model and timeline as what we did in those two searches.”
As we now know, what Bruce Rastetter said about the UI search a year and a half ago was such a monstrous lie that he should have been — and still should be — thrown out of the Board of Regents for his own flagrant violations of the board’s core values. And yet, not only is Bruce Rastetter still president of the regents, one of the people who helped him subvert the 2015 UI search just named herself co-chair of the 2016 UNI search.
The unstated premise with the upcoming UNI search is that the Board of Regents will straighten up and fly right, and in so doing demonstrate that they finally learned their lesson. The reality is that not only have the individual members who perpetrated the 2015 sham UI search refused to acknowledge their complicity or show contrition, but Mulholland’s appointment as co-chair of the 2016 UNI search is a flagrant and hostile act of defiance. It may be that the political and governmental dynamics surrounding the search are obscuring that reality, but Mulholland’s appointment as co-chair, if not her appointment to the committee itself, is clearly a repudiation of the goals the senators have for the UNI search.
To see why, imagine that in 2015 Katie Mulholland was a member of a governing board with administrative authority over children, women, or minorities. Now imagine that Mulholland did not simply look the other way when those children, women or minorities were abused, but that she materially participated in that abuse. Would anyone suggest that Katie Mulholland be allowed to go back to her position of authority on that governing board, let alone be allowed to appoint herself co-chair of a committee responsible for making a critical hire? In fact, wouldn’t the first step in any process of rehabilitation be admitting to and accepting responsibility for wrongdoing, if not also showing contrition?
Such questions answer themselves, yet here we are not only with President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland calling the shots regarding the UNI search, but taking control of the search by appointing herself co-chair — while all the while denying any complicity in the 2015 debacle at UI. In what world is that permitted? In what world does someone commit any kind of abuse — whether an abuse of power or an abuse of individuals, such as the three finalists at UI who turned out to be mere window dressing for a search the AAUP described as “”nothing more or less than a crude exercise of naked power” — then get to step into the exact same situation all over again as if nothing happened?
The bottom line regarding the current crony majority on the Iowa Board of Regents is that they have created an environment hostile to fairness, transparency and shared governance, and Katie Mulholland is one of the regents directly responsible for that hostility. That she will now be the co-chair of the 2016 UNI search is not simply arrogant or contemptuous on her part, it is an administrative invalidation of the objective conclusions which have been reached regarding the fraudulent 2015 UI search. To anyone genuinely concerned with fairness, transparency or shared governance, seeing Katie Mulholland name herself co-chair for the UNI search is as repugnant as it would be to see any abusive individual retain and wield power.
Silence is Complicity
We do not allow abusive individuals to continue perpetrating their abuse. If we do — if we simply fall silent, as has happened far too often in human history — we are not only complicit in any further abuse, but we forfeit the right to complain about past abuses. And that’s the real danger in allowing Katie Mulholland to make herself co-chair of the 2016 UNI search. The University of Iowa is still saddled with an unqualified and illegitimate president as a result of Mulholland’s abuse, and allowing her to co-chair the UNI search committee makes it much more difficult for that community to seek appropriate relief.
The great irony in all this is that nothing Katie Mulholland says about the 2016 UNI search will have any legitimacy because all the right things were said in advance of and during the 2015 UI search, which turned out to be a $300K scam at taxpayer expense. As should also be abundantly clear, Regent Mulholland did not appoint herself co-chair to make sure the search is fair, transparent and respectful of shared governance, but to make sure the regents get their preferred candidate, whether or not that candidate is already known to them.
The only reason why the regents named Power as co-chair was for the publicity value, because Mulholland as co-chair negates his authority. With twenty total members, all the regents have to do is stack the committee with ten solid votes and they will get the candidate they want, while Power and the other eight committee members give the rigged proceedings the appearance of shared governance. Then again, the damage done by allowing Mulholland to serve as co-chair will not be limited to the internal dynamics of the search.
While the board would prefer to deny the reality of the abuses it perpetrated in 2015, not only is the entire world aware of those abuses, but the AAUP sanction was clearly directed at the board as well as UI. As such, it can already be assumed that the pool of candidates interested in working for a such a corrupt body — and university presidents in Iowa work for the regents, not the schools they preside over — has been diminished, if not skewed in favor of precisely those candidates who would happily take a six-figure paycheck in exchange for selling the UNI faculty, staff and students down the river. The fact that Katie Muholland — she of “shared governance is different from shared decision making” fame — is now not only co-chair of the committee, but was free to make that appointment, tells prospective candidates everything they need to know about who is still in power when it comes to higher education in Iowa. But that’s not the worst of it.
Because of the manner in which William Ruud was driven out at UNI — as a result of the board’s passive-aggressive refusal to offer him a new contract — even the most hopeful members of the 2016 UNI search committee will be negotiating against themselves before they begin to recruit and vet candidates. Because the board has never explained its treatment of Ruud, and because the UNI community will rightly hope to avoid losing yet another president in three years, the committee will find itself settling for candidates who can get along with the toxic leadership at the board, instead of searching for candidates who can best lead the school. (As to the particular qualities that might satisfy the board over time, the UNI committee has only to look to the crony toads at ISU and UI.)
The sad fact — as evidenced by the ease with which Mulholland appointed herself co-chair — is that until the corrupt crony core of the Iowa Board of Regents is driven from office, nothing is going to change. Simply by virtue of the presence of Rastetter, Mulholland, McKibben and others, the candidates that Iowans would most hope to attract to higher education in the state will be the candidates least likely to apply. That the board has not suffered one whit for its rampant cronyism — to say nothing of the demonstrable fraud perpetrated during the 2015 UI search — tells even a casual observer that the board’s power remains undiminished.
If there is any will to oppose the board, the first act must be removing Regent Mulholland as co-chair of the 2016 UNI search, giving sole responsibility for the committee to Dan Power, who is clearly qualified in that regard. Ideally, proceedings would then also be brought against Mulholland and other regents for their repeated betrayal of the core values of the board, if not also to establish the basis for a criminal investigation into whether the $300K 2015 UI presidential search constituted actual fraud. What is not acceptable is acting as if the abuses which took place during the UI search did not happen. That the board clearly believes it can do so, and that it can install Mulholland as co-chair of yet another presidential search after her complicity in, and refusal to take responsibility for, the fraudulent 2015 UI search, makes clear that the Iowa Board of Regents still does not believe it is accountable to anyone.
One thing the BOR may have improved is the search agency they chose: AGB. That search firm appears to be less secretive and more principled than other firms. Of course the BOR are master manipulators who will carry out their agenda — look for some puppet to be appointed as president of UNI.
Mulholland is an interesting case. She was a domineering, know-it-all superintendent in her prior career. She is deceptive and conniving: she changed political affiliation in a lame attempt to balance the BOR; She was openly hostile to the AAUP investigation; and her quotes are not only seriously silly, but deflective of the issues.
You can bet Mulholland dances to the music Rastetter and Branstand play in smug arrogant way.
Agreed, her appointment is a crude attempt to control the search while superficially pretending to be open and fair.
This may be somewhat off-topic but I am struggling to put the corruption that you document into a larger political context.
As the Board of Regents continues to act as a political cabal that is accountable to no one it is interesting to consider that in the larger context of the radical political realignment of this election year. The President of the BOR, the governing body of public higher education in Iowa, has aligned himself with the GOP Presidential candidate who is clearly acting as the leader of a white nationalist movement and making the Republican Party their home. In an academic context Trump repeatedly declares that “political correctness has gone too far.”
As students return for the fall semester think about what that means on a public college campus governed by a President that was fraudulently appointed by Trump supporter Bruce Rastetter. Attacking “political correctness” has been the thirty year conservative attempt to delegitimize the academic documentation of the past and current realities of racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination.
Four things about political correctness can be true at the same time. 1) Racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination are historical and current realities. 2) Academic discourse regarding all forms of discrimination sometimes spirals into theoretical blather in the hothouse of late adolescent moral development. 3) Nearly every college student, including white males who benefit from discrimination, experience phases of using some sense of victimhood of discrimination to escape personal responsibility and nearly all of them outgrow it. 4) Many white males of all ages, whether they benefit directly or indirectly from discrimination, use inflated and distorted examples of academic discourse to discredit and deny the realities of discrimination. Rinse, repeat.
Now throw a white nationalist Presidential candidate with his supporter and advisor Bruce Rastetter into that multicultural adolescent moral hothouse. Add in the fact that a significant portion of undergraduates, graduate students as well as residents, fellows and staff doctors at UIHC are foreign born from every corner of the globe including many non-resident Muslims. Then you can add in the star quarterback on the football team who was an apparent supporter of Trump during primaries into the mix as well as many Trump supporting football fans who will make several inebriated pilgrimages to their shrine on campus this fall.
Whether or not he wins Trump is mainstreaming white nationalism into every corner of our culture. How the hell does Bruce Rastetter think he can govern public academia in this state while supporting a potential President who is a white supremacist? How delusional do you have to be to think you can square that circle? Do we fully understand how explosive this October may become on campuses as well as every major city? Does anybody think that Bruce Harreld is capable of competently managing a campus with these potential conflicts?
I think your questions are all inevitable, particularly because we don’t have a working rationale for the corruption which is so evident. We see it, but we don’t see how it fits, so we look for that over-arching theme.
Some of these issues you raise have come up in the comments before over the past year. As you note, however, things have taken a decidedly ugly turn with Rastetter’s open support of what is rapidly becoming a de facto white-supremacist/nationalist presidential candidate.
Generally, I think most Americans respect everyone’s right to have their own political views, even if those views are nauseating. What is and should be problematic for Rastetter (and Branstad as well) is that he’s not simply a passive observer waiting to cast a vote, but a contributor to what has become an anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-democratic political movement.
The main reason why I think Rastetter is getting a free pass is because everyone (rightly, in my view) assumes he’s simply supporting Trump because he (Rastetter) is a mercenary. He holds no allegiance to anything except exploiting the moment, and if he had the chance he’d do the exact same thing no matter who won the Republican primary.
Personally, I have two reasons for side-stepping such issues. First, the defining characteristic of the co-conspirators who engineered Harreld’s fraudulent appointment is that they’re liars and cheats, and that’s pretty much all I need to know. Second, those liars and cheats would very much like to transition the conversation to questions of ideology and politics, instead of the fact that they’re liars and cheats.
As for Harreld, he lied himself into office, he sucker-punched the students with tuition hikes while they were off campus, and now he’s positioning himself with photo-ops showing him helping students moving into the dorms. It can fairly be assumed that he is completely incapable of being anything other than a front for Rastetter’s policies, which is of course why he was hired in the first place.
I take your point that ideology and politics can be a diversion from the corruption and cronyism in the BOR. But consider that Rastetter could have declined to openly support Trump as many Republicans have. That is what I would expect most governing officials of academia would do in any election. It would be prudent to do so, as GHW Bush would say, especially considering that Trump is a polarizing public figure who will probably lose and may drag down his supporters with him.
The fact that he did choose to be an open supporter and advisor begs the question; why? If he is trying to divert the conversation away from cronyism then perhaps he is feeling some degree of heat for his actions thanks in part to your continued scrutiny. But diverting the conversation by supporting a white nationalist seems like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. If that is the case, congratulations for helping to fry his ass.
Another possibility is that he thinks Trump may win and the upside of being on the Trump train outweigh the risks. Or that Trump may lose but he represents the future of Republican Party and Rastetter gains status as a power broker by openly supporting him.
Overall it seems to indicate that he probably wants to rid himself of the BOR (after he appoints another crony at UNI) so he can be a more overt political actor. If that is the case it probably doesn’t change the corrupt direction of the BOR until there is a major criminal investigation or a significant political change in the Statehouse.
I think the biggest problem in thinking about all this is that you have to ignore the veneer of respectability these people maintain. Whether Rastetter, Robillard or Harreld, the only question they asked during the 2015 UI search was, “What can I get away with?” Not what was right, not what was best for the students, not even what was ethical or legal, but only what each of them could do to exploit that search in their favor.
That’s the level of corruption that is in play. So when Rastetter looks at the 2016 presidential race, he doesn’t do anything except ask the same question, and the answer is obvious. Nobody holds him accountable for anything he does, so if he sucks up to the party establishment at the worst possible time they’re going to remember him two or four years from now. And that’s really all there is to it.
There may be an over-arching philosophy in the background, but the impetus is the failed part of each man’s integrity which allows him to simply lie and cheat in order to get what he wants. If Rastetter, Robillard or Harreld did the same thing to you on the street they would be rightly labeled punks or con artists. Put them in blue blazers and give them power,. however, and they become the guiding lights of higher education in Iowa, immune even to serious scrutiny from the press.
Got it, now I understand why you keep the focus on corruption.
It should also be pointed out that the academic side of the Iowa BOR is flailing and failing:
1. The Iowa BOR blew opportunities for foreign studies. http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/iowa-regents-drop-ball-on-study-abroad-recommendations-20160815
2. Talk about cronies in the sandbox, unadvertised hires: http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/university-of-iowa-iowa-state-hired-hundreds-without-searches-20160814
3. And with fanfare Guv-for-beyond-life Branstad announced his anti-bullying center at UNI; he forgot to fund it. http://wqad.com/2016/08/18/branstads-bullying-prevention-office-has-zero-funds/
Malfeasance.
That report on the collapse of the ‘study abroad’ program was telling. I can imagine Rastetter taking one look at that program, immediately realizing he couldn’t exploit it for any possible gain, then throwing it on the scrap heap.
The BoR no longer exists to educate students, the students exist to fund Rastetter’s (and Branstad’s) burgeoning crony higher-ed empire. If the students, faculty and staff aren’t performing as expected, they either need to be incentivized to make more money for the machine, or incentivized to leave.
The Iowa BOR corruption when put into context means:
1. Rastetter loves being a power broker which enhances his public profile (he personally interviewed all the GOP candidates at his AgFest); he really needs to be seen at the man who revitalized Terry Branstad and now wants to be the man who controls the (arguably) highest profile entity in the state — the state’s universities.
2. Like despots everywhere, Rastetter and Branstad need their operative and their agents in key positions. Thus you see Leath as president of ISU, Braun effectively running U of Iowa (or the BOR) along with the unqualified Harreld, and PR people clearly in Bruce and Terry’s pocket.
3. This fits with ALEC’s game plan of controlling hearts and minds: you eliminate critics and opponents of say, climate denial, you privatize all aspects of public enterprises, and you guarantee continued power.
4. This all leads to power, influence and importantly monie$ for you and your cronies. Your cronies all owing you favors.
What happens next? Look at the overall game plan of these operatives: privatize public initiatives; selling off public assets; consolidating power; and operating as much as you can under the cover of hidden agendas.
Expect more sweetheart contracts for cronies, more crony appointments, more centralized power in Des Moines (and I believe with Leath named as Chancellor of the Iowa BOR), more elimination of distasteful faculty and courses, and more selling off parts of the system — likely medicine, etc.
Not Ken Burns says
Don’t forget Wisconsin. Scott Walker and his ilk are dismantling public higher education. Just take note of the comments of its senior senator who is up for reelection this year:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ron-johnson-ken-burns_us_57b76074e4b0b51733a379de?section
“We’ve got the internet ― you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying differently lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need destructive technology for our higher education system.”
“If you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas.”
A simpleton’s solution to a nonexistent problem. Why? To kill off those liberal professors who are profiting from the ill-gotten gains of their “cartel.”
Hail ALEC!
More about this foolishness here:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/gop-senator-save-money-replacing-instructors-ken-burns-videos?utm_content=buffer78197&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer
Almost a year ago now a small cabal of high-ranking administrators at the Iowa Board of Regents and the University of Iowa conspired to fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld as president of that school. Two months later, in early November, Harreld finally took office after conducting interviews with the local press in which he completely rewrote his origin story as a candidate, while also revealing yet another of the secret meetings that he held with his co-conspirators in order to poach that job. Despite Harreld’s manifest illegitimacy, however — which prompted actual censure by the UI faculty before he could take office — the former business executive took the helm at Iowa and began making the kind of bold changes that only a visionary leader can make.
For example, after only being on the job for two months — and apparently being hungover from Iowa’s invitation to the 2016 Rose Bowl — J. Bruce Harreld negotiated and signed a massive contract extension and pay raise for Iowa’s athletic director, Gary Barta. What made that contract particularly noteworthy at the time — beyond the fact that no one in UI administration even acknowledged the deal until a month later, and then only after it was outed by two intrepid AP reporters — was that Gary Barta and the UI athletic department were facing not one but two federal investigations into complaints of gender discrimination:
From the Gazette’s Max Walker, on 06/03/15:
The University of Iowa announced Wednesday it had received notice from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of an investigation related to the firing of former field hockey coach Tracey Griesbaum.
Four of her former players filed a complaint in January with the OCR after they said the university refused to look into whether gender played a role in Griesbaum’s firing.
Following on that complaint, which was filed in May of 2015, a second and related complaint was filed with the OCR in September of 2015 — meaning after J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently installed as president. So whatever else Harreld did or did not know at the time about the University of Iowa, or academic administration, or campus sexual assault, when January of 2016 rolled around and Harreld started shoveling piles of money into Gary Barta’s bank account, he knew that Barta was a potential legal liability to the school, to say nothing of an alleged discriminator on the basis of gender. (If you dig into the decisions Barta made, and how he retaliated against individuals, it’s not pretty.)
There was one key difference between the two federal complaints, however, and Harreld knew about that difference when he negotiated Barta’s new contract. Unlike the first complaint in May, the September complaint was not divulged to the university. Other than notice that a complaint had been filed, UI administration knew nothing about the contents other than the allegation of gender discrimination.
For that reason, in November of last year the university — at that point under the direct stewardship of visionary business executive J. Bruce Harreld — contacted the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and requested the release of the complaint through the Freedom of Information Act. After the university’s request was denied that meant not only did Harreld know that his AD was facing two potential investigations when he gave that Barta a fat new contract, but Harreld knew he was flying blind with regard to the seriousness of the second complaint. Yet Harreld went ahead and made it rain on Barta anyway.
At almost the exact same time that Barta’s new contract was finally being disclosed in the press, and belatedly acknowledged by UI, the OCR announced that it would be visiting the UI campus to conduct a broad investigation triggered by the second gender bias complaint. From the AP’s Ryan Foley, on 02/12/16 — five days before Foley also helped break the story of Barta’s new contract:
The University of Iowa is facing a wide-ranging federal civil rights investigation into allegations that its athletics department does not provide equal opportunities for female athletes, correspondence obtained by The Associated Press shows.
The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education is looking into gender bias allegations in 13 areas, including how the department counts participation levels, awards scholarships, schedules practices and games and delivers services such as tutoring, medical attention, housing and dining. A team of investigators will visit the Iowa City campus in April, according to documents released Thursday under the open records law.
The department’s equipment, locker rooms and facilities are also part of the review, which comes as its men’s basketball and football teams have been enjoying high national rankings.
It is entirely possible that Harreld decided to sit on news of Barta’s contract because he learned in the interim that a much broader federal investigation was coming down the pike. Still, in a post in mid-February, summing up the blur of storylines, DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland flagged two important points. First, Harreld was not required to give Barta a new contract in the face of the ongoing investigations, but he did so anyway despite the chilling effect that might have on women involved in athletics. Second, the fact that the University of Iowa was rebuffed in its attempt to get its hands on the September complaint was itself richly ironic. As reported by Foley:
The Department of Education rejected the university’s request for the 29-page document under the Freedom of Information Act, saying its disclosure could interfere with the investigation.
“We still don’t know the basis for the complaint, which is concerning for us. We do not believe we are being accorded due process,” university lawyer Carroll Reasoner wrote to a federal official last month. She’s appealing the Department of Education’s decision to withhold the document.
As DesMoinesDem noted, Reasoner had previously refused to make information about crony contracts and polls available to the press. As for Reasoner’s insistence on due process, it seems self-evident that if the University of Iowa had done more than close ranks around AD Barta, the federal government probably wouldn’t be conducting multiple gender discrimination investigations, nor would the Office of General Counsel — including the General Counsel herself, Carroll Reasoner — be contending with gender discrimination lawsuits. (The very fact that Reasoner’s boss, J. Bruce Harreld, and Reasoner’s former boss, interim president Jean Robillard, both conspired to hijack UI’s presidency at taxpayer expense, would also seem to undercut any claims of injustice on Reasoner’s part.)
One big reason why Harreld may have decided it was safe to enrich Barta despite the potential liability and risk to the school, let alone to Harreld’s reputation, is that Harreld had the full faith and support of Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter — who also happens to be the architect of the fraud that catapulted Harreld into office. Rastetter’s support may have been particularly reassuring when Harreld learned, in early March, that UI was about to be hit with the second of two gender discrimination lawsuits, pairing up nicely with the two federal gender discrimination investigations. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 03/03/16:
“We’re aware that President Harreld wanted to extend that contract, and it’s his decision,” Regent Bruce Rastetter, president of the board, told reporters last week. “Those lawsuits are indeed separate. The board takes them seriously, and if there are issues around that — with the athletic director or anyone in the athletic department — they’ll be dealt with independently of the contract.”
When your boss tells you it’s okay to ignore gender discrimination investigations and lawsuits while throwing piles of state money at the target of those investigations and lawsuits, you’re probably going to feel confident about your decision making. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Rastetter also stuck Harreld with full responsibility for rewarding Barta despite the alleged abuses — which is curious given that Harreld had only known Barta for a few months at the time the new deal was signed, while Rastetter had known Barta for years. (Among other pursuits, Rastetter is a half-hearted Hawkeye sports booster, and for close to a decade has happily touted a $5M donation he gave to the Iowa athletic department. As of last report, however, Rastetter had actually contributed only $1.5M.)
In mid-April, with two gender discrimination lawsuits and two federal investigations in play, and with a team of OCR investigators on campus pursuant to the second undisclosed complaint, J. Bruce Harreld and UI Provost P. Barry Butler sat down for an extended interview with the school newspaper, the Daily Iowan. On the subject of the ongoing investigation, both Harreld and Butler portrayed the OCR’s visit not as a serious concern, but as a fabulous opportunity to get feedback on the athletic program — as if the federal investigators were the functional equivalent of a focus group:
DI: Sticking in the world of athletics, given the Title IX complaints, investigators were on campus this week. Have you met with them and how have those conversations gone? What’s your take on this situation?
Harreld: They haven’t asked to meet, and I have not met. They’ve been on campus since midday on Monday to my understanding and meeting with a whole host of people. They’ve been meeting with many of the coaches, many of the athletes, they’ve measured locker room sizes, they’ve felt the material that we use in every sport’s jersey. They’ve gotten into scoreboards, they’ve gotten into fields, they’ve gotten into everything. And it’s good for them. They’ve met with our athletics director, who has been shepherding with his whole staff the whole process. We welcome them. We benchmark in academics, we have outside —
Butler: We always have outside groups come in and look at academics, it’s no different. You want to get a third person coming in and looking; it’s good.
Harreld: Accreditation is a process that’s relatively formalized. We actually said to ourselves, of course it was a federal team, but why not embrace this as an opportunity to learn something.
Butler: Quite frankly, I think it’d be beneficial for all schools to have a third set of eyes to see what you’ve not seen yourself.
Harreld: A couple times through the week, I called and they said it’s going very, very well. We’ll see the report, and then we’ll have to figure out what’s in the report. You can’t predict that, but I think the spirit has been very open. We’ve really embraced it. Stay tuned.
Note the complete absence of concern regarding the actual basis for the investigation. Between them Harreld and Butler do not mention gender discrimination at all, and instead talk as if they hit the jackpot by getting a free government inspection. In fact, when Harreld says, “And it’s good for them,” he goes so far as to suggest that the university is doing the feds a favor.
Whether you are an ardent Hawkeye sports fan or not, if you are a woman on the campus of the University of Iowa and you read that interview, there is no way you did not notice that the highest ranking administrator (a man) and his trusty sidekick (another man) were downplaying even the possibility of wrongdoing on the part of the AD. Again, somehow, after only six months on the job, without even knowing the basis of the second complaint — and despite his explicit responsibility to support gender equity — J Bruce Harreld had become so completely allied with Gary Barta that there was no daylight between them.
A little over a month later Harreld cemented his allegiance to Barta in spectacular fashion during an interview with KGAN reporter Karen Fuller, on 05/27/16. From a previous post on Fuller’s story:
In that context we now have J. Bruce Harreld supporting Barta, on the record, to a degree that seems to defy credulity. From Fuller’s report [3:15]:
“The people he’s hired, the way he’s run the inst…the athletic department is world class, and we should be really, really proud of it. And I’m glad that he’s a — on the team, and I’m glad he’s a friend.”
The fact that Harreld starts to refer to the athletic department as “the institution” is obviously a concern. If you, as the actual president of “the institution”, have to stop in mid-sentence and remind yourself who’s in charge of what, you’re clearly not playing from a position of strength. Another possible explanation for that brain cramp, however, is that J. Bruce Harreld was so focused on selling what he was about to say that he forgot how to say it.
The following screencap doesn’t do the moment justice, but what you see here is J. Bruce Harreld giving you a deeply-emoted, paternalistic, you-can-trust-me squint:
Harreld starts and ends his impassioned squint over the following words in the above quote: “…world class, and we should be really, really proud of it…”. Setting aside Harreld’s acting ability, there is no equivocation in his words. And Harreld is not simply telling the camera how he feels about Barta, he’s telling everyone how they should feel about Barta.
The bar for filing a gender discrimination complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is fairly low. Triggering the kind of full-blown, on-site investigation that descended on the University of Iowa only a month earlier, however, required meeting a much higher test. So when J. Bruce Harreld said that “…the way he’s run the inst…the athletic department, is world class…” there is no way for him to walk that back. The moment when those words came out of Harreld’s mouth — fully informed as he was of the magnitude of the investigation that was under way — J. Bruce Harreld sold out every woman on campus in order to pledge his personal and professional oath of loyalty to Gary Barta.
All of which brings us to this story from the Gazette’s Erin Jordan on this past Friday, 08/19/16:
The federal government has again denied the University of Iowa’s request to make public a gender equity complaint filed last fall against the Athletic Department.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating UI athletics and sent investigators to campus in April.
The probe centers on allegations the UI fails to provide equal athletic opportunities to men and women in 13 areas, including facilities, practice times, travel budgets and equipment.
The UI requested to see the 29-page complaint filed Sept. 2, but the OCR declined in November. The university appealed that decision and was denied again July 25, according to correspondence The Gazette obtained from the UI this week through an open records request.
So what prompted the UI OGC to try to pry the complaint loose a second time? More from Jordan:
Federal investigators in April interviewed UI coaches, student athletes, trainers and equipment managers in Iowa City. Investigators followed up with a request for more information in a June 17 letter to UI President Bruce Harreld.
Information sought included copies of team promotional materials, 2016-17 budgets, number of student athletes, number of participants in intramural and club sports, modes of transport for all team events and the number of recruiting visits by each coach.
This is what administrative panic looks like. After pooh-poohing the on-campus investigation in April, and going full-on groupie over Barta in late May, two weeks later the feds requested more information. That in turn prompted the OGC to try to get its hands on the September 2015 complaint for the second time, but once again the OGC got stuffed.
The fact that the OCR investigation is continuing, but the university has no idea where that investigation is headed, must be a real nightmare to everyone at the school. (Maybe like the kind of nightmare people go through when they are mistreated and persecuted on the basis of gender or race, or discriminated against in any way that is prohibited by federal law.) And that’s particularly true for Harreld now that football season is here, because that would seem to give Harreld the best chance to suck up to the bro culture that has been the gateway to his own success over the years.
If the feds have the audacity to drop the hammer on the athletic department in the next four or five months, not only isn’t there going to be anywhere for Barta to hide, Harreld will be even more exposed. When you’re the AD everyone expects you to cut corners and rig things in favor of the power sports, so being a gender-discriminating weasel is par for the course. When you’re a university president, however, you’re not actually supposed to sell out half of the population on your campus, even if you actually do believe that women are somehow less deserving.
Whether Harreld’s minders on the Board or Regents, or a rabid pack of powerful alums, or a screechy voice in his head, compelled Harreld to give Barta a rich new contract after only two months in office, nobody forced Harreld to trivialize the OCR’s on-campus investigation, and certainly no one forced Harreld to squint his eyes and declare that Barta was “world class”. If Harreld had any genuine leadership skills, or just plain human decency, he would have withheld judgment on Barta so as not to appear biased himself, even if he genuinely believed that the accusations of gender discrimination were patently false. But Harreld didn’t do that. Instead, with violations and illegalities yet to be determined, Harreld went on television and declared that not only was Gary Barta his man, but that everyone should be “really, really proud” of Gary Barta.
From that moment on Harreld forfeited any right to say that he’s disappointed or shocked or surprised if the feds do determine there were civil rights violations in UI athletic department, because Gary Barta is no longer someone Harreld inherited when he took office, Gary Barta is someone J. Bruce Harreld personally and professionally vouched for as president. And I think Harreld gets that, because for the second time he tried to get his hands on the September complaint, and not because he’s suddenly concerned about doing the right thing for women on campus. The reason Harreld wants to see that file is because the investigation isn’t going the way he thought it would, and Harreld himself is massively exposed to any negative findings.
If the feds do determine that Gary Barta discriminated on the basis of gender, any governmental penalties will be the least of Harreld’s problems. Not only will Barta lose his job, but that will make the two gender discrimination lawsuits harder to fight as well. To all that we can add another big hit to the school’s already rocky gender-equity reputation, which will take years to improve. And that’s assuming the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents and the corrupt administrative leadership at Iowa are willing to hire an AD who will move the athletic department beyond being the old boy’s club it has clearly become. (If Barta gets canned, the people hiring the next AD at Iowa will be the same people who ran the fraudulent presidential search that resulted in J. Bruce Harreld.)
This is how university presidents fail. They play politics and favorites when it is their job to ensure that everyone on campus is treated fairly. Making matters that much worse for Harreld, the stakes are never higher than they are with collegiate athletics. In fact, Harreld got an important lesson in that regard only a week after taking office, when the Harvard-trained, business-centric president of the Missouri System was forced to resign after open revolt on the football team. Less than six months later, for whatever reason, J. Bruce Harreld decided the time was right to give AD Gary Barta the squinty-eyed bro hug of all bro hugs, and in so doing Harreld sold out not only every woman involved in UI athletics, but every woman on campus.
Spending time over the past year looking into the fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa has taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the entrenched crony corruption that defines state government under Governor Terry Branstad. Where there should be a system of checks and balances protecting the citizens of the state, there is instead a crony bureaucracy devoted to corporate welfare at the expense of the state’s citizens. For example, on this past Sunday, 08/21/16, Barbara Rodriguez of the Associated Press reported that the state of Iowa simply stopped enforcing its own Medicaid regulations during the transition to private, for-profit delivery of those critical healthcare services:
The state agency overseeing Iowa’s transition to a privatized Medicaid program waived any possible sanctions against three insurance companies during the first two months of the new system, and it didn’t inform health advocates or lawmakers about the plans.
The Iowa Department of Human Services issued no written warnings or corrective action plans in April and May to the insurance companies that now run the state’s Medicaid program, according to information obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request. Fees for any purported violations were also waived.
How does a decision like that get made, when it is literally antithetical to the purpose of the IDHS? Well, to grasp the mindset involved, all you have to do is stop thinking of citizens as a relevant constituency, and instead concern yourself with the companies who are making money off of those citizens:
Processing Medicaid claims in a timely manner and resolving appeals and grievances are among several performance requirements that are subject to sanctions.
[Spokeswoman Amy Lorentzen] McCoy said DHS wanted to take a “collaborative approach” during the first two months.
“We wanted to really focus on the problems and on fixing them, not just being punitive,” she said. “So taking the time to really examine what the issues are, allowing the opportunity to fix those before you go into that sanctioning process.”
What should be a shocking lapse in judgment is just another example of the thorough perversion of state government that is Governor Branstad’s legacy. Not only is the IDHS under the governor’s executive purview, but it is overseen by the Council on Human Services, which is comprised of seven individuals appointed by the governor. Unfortunately, because the governor and his political cronies are more interested in proving that his for-profit “collaborative approach” to healthcare is a smashing success than they are with ensuring a minimum basic standard of service, such betrayals are inevitable. (Because any failings on the part of those for-profit companies would make that “collaborative” project seem like less than a rousing success, the state of Iowa simply looked the other way for two months.)
Despite staring at the brazen fraud of the Harreld Hire for close to a year, it only recently dawned on me that the entirety of state government in Iowa is dictated by a corrupt, crony ethos in which there are no checks on abuses of power. If citizens want accountability in government — if they want their government not to be corrupt — then they are obligated to initiate the policing process by complaining about any injustice. Unfortunately, such citizen complaints are usually heard by a board which was appointed by the governor, which also usually has the unilateral right to ignore such complaints without initiating even a cursory investigation. And of course absent such a complaint, no one in state government will do anything to challenge even the most blatant of governmental lies.
For example, as has been documented here endlessly, on the day of his fraudulent appointment J. Bruce Harreld told a flat-out lie about the origins of his candidacy, which he then replaced with a new candidate origin story two months later, just before taking office. That lie by Harreld in turn exposed Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter and UI VP for Medical Affairs (and then-interim UI president) Jean Robillard as key members of the conspiracy which engineered Harreld’s fraudulent hire — at a cost to Iowa taxpayers of over $300K for the sham search, and $800K per year for Harreld’s illegitimate services. Given other documented improprieties surrounding Harreld’s appointment, including lies on his resume, you might think someone in state government would have looked into Harreld’s lie about how he came to be appointed, but there is no law enforcement or regulatory agency responsible for doing so. In fact, as I have learned, the Iowa Attorney General does not actually work for the citizens of the state, but exists to defend the state against citizen complaints — including, for example, a lawsuit that was filed against Rastetter and four other regents for secret meetings they held with Harreld in July of 2015. (That lawsuit is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow [08/24/16] at 8:15 a.m., room 210, of the Polk County Courthouse.)
As to the Board of Regents itself, given that it was responsible for both the fraudulent search and Harreld’s sham appointment, you can imagine that the individual board members and the highest-ranking employees at the board office would not be eager to investigate their own glaring and indefensible abuses of power. Unfortunately, such oversight failings are not an aberration, but instead reflect an intentional systematic weakening of state government that has taken place under Branstad. For example, only a few weeks ago Jayson Clayworth of the Des Moines Register reported that Branstad appointed a nonjournalist to a board seat which is supposed to be held by a journalist:
A Clive resident who has never worked as a journalist was recently appointed to one of three seats on the Iowa Public Information Board intended to be filled by media representatives.
The board was created by the Legislature and began its work in 2013 to enforce Iowa’s open meetings and public records laws. The board is to be made up of nine board members, three each representing government, news media and the public, according to state rules.
Gov. Terry Branstad last month appointed the board’s former director, Keith Luchtel, as one of the media representatives. Branstad also named him special adviser for government transparency. Both positions are unpaid.
Here, in a single act, we have a pure distillation of the crony corruption that exists as a result of Branstad’s diseased governing philosophy. The board which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the state Open Meeting law, and ensuring the availability of public records, was not only corrupted by Branstad’s appointment, but in a single stroke Branstad also gave that same individual authority over transparency matters. Even though the IPIB goes to the heart of the ability of the free press to do its job, Branstad showed no hesitation in appointing a career crony administrator to a seat reserved for a working journalist. (Of equal concern is the fact that Branstad elicited almost no blowback from the press when that appointment was announced, despite the fact that it was an affront to every working reporter.)
Bruce Rastetter and Conflicts of Interest
Given the lack of self-policing in state government, combined with the conversion of the state’s oversight boards into ideological checkpoints dominated by political cronies, it’s not surprising that Regents’ President Rastetter — himself a ruthless political fixer for the Branstad machine — has had an entirely free hand in corrupting the Iowa Board of Regents. Because Rastetter has oversight of the entire regents enterprise, he can not only turn a blind eye to the abuses and lies of Harreld or Leath or any other crony on the regents’ payroll, but conveniently ignore his own abuses as well. (Again, as president of the regents, even the Iowa Attorney General works for Rastetter.)
Because there are no laws preventing the following simultaneous associations, Bruce Rastetter is currently both the president of the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s three public institutions of higher learning, and an advisor to the presidential campaign of a candidate who is fomenting voter intimidation efforts across the country. Where some state officials are actively banned from being involved in politics, no such prohibitions apply to the Board of Regents, giving Rastetter free reign not only to exploit his position on the national stage, but to broker political power across the state.
Because each regent is a volunteer in state service, it is assumed that the members of the board will have day jobs or other pursuits in life. For example, Regent Johnson is a student at the University of Northern Iowa, and Regent Sahai is a physician. What may never have been anticipated, however, is that someone like Regent Rastetter would come along, whose line of work is brokering power in both business and political contexts. As such, while a corrupt version of Regent Johnson might avail herself of a few board paperclips, and a corrupt version of Regent Sahai might borrow a set of scrubs from UIHC after a board meeting on the UI campus, the actual living, fire-breathing, crony version of Regent Rastetter is perfectly positioned to exploit every facet of the $5B Regent Enterprise for economic or political gain, either directly or indirectly.
Strictly in terms of business, Rastetter’s company — Summit Agricultural Group, including its subsidiaries — has long had a close if not intimate relationship with Iowa State University. So close, in fact, that after giving ISU President Steven Leath and his wife a personal tour of land in the surrounding area, Rastetter’s company made a $1.15M real estate purchase on their behalf with only one week’s notice, after it turned out that the Leaths could not afford to buy that land themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the person with oversight of such issues, Rastetter has so far declined to take a close look at the matter to see if he violated ethics guidelines at the board, or to see if Leath violated ethics guidelines at ISU.
In order to goad any governmental inquiry into those same questions, an enterprising citizen would have to file a complaint with the politically appointed Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board. As with many aspects of state government in Iowa, the obscure IECDB not only has oversight regarding particular statutes, but authority to rule on complaints without conducting an actual investigation. As also seems to be the case with many facets of state government, even if you know a particular board has responsibility for enforcing a particular state law, that board may not make it easy for you to allege a violation. (On the home page of the IECDB there is no clear link for filing a complaint, even though the board is the only agency charged with handling complaints about violations of the state’s Gift Law. You will find information about how to file a complaint on the site’s FAQ, but only if you scroll down to the very last question.)
Setting aside politics and state government entirely, the number of questions that could be and should be asked about Rastetter’s business relationships with entities governed by the Board of Regents is almost endless. For example, to what extent do Rastetter or his partners gain a competitive advantage because Rastetter is the president of the regents? In that position he not only learns but actually determines where funding will be directed before anyone else has that information, giving him a leg up in positioning himself or his cronies to take advantage.
From a Des Moines Register editorial at the beginning of August, titled “Corporate Welfare Run Amok‘:
Some of Iowa’s biggest corporate giveaways are executed quietly and without public debate. As reported by the Iowa Fiscal Partnership, the state’s most lucrative business tax credit program is the Research Activities Credit.
As the name implies, it discounts the tax bill of companies conducting research in Iowa. But Iowa’s penchant for corporate welfare has reached the point where 186 companies last year wound up paying nothing in taxes or had such a surplus of credits that the state actually cut them a check. It was essentially a tax refund on taxes that were never actually paid. In 2015 alone, these payments totaled more than $42.1 million.
This isn’t “surplus” money the state had laying around. It’s money that came directly out of the pockets of Iowans who do pay their taxes. The state was simply the middle man, extracting the money from businesses and individuals who recognize their financial obligation to support fire departments, schools and road crews, and handing it over to a select group of corporations who don’t want to be burdened with such matters.
Given that Rastetter’s company has engaged in research affiliated with a state school — both prior to and during Rastetter’s tenure as board president — have any of Rastetter’s companies filed for a Research Activities Credit as a result of doing business with the Board of Regents? How about business partners or associates, or members of Rastetter’s family? Or would that be a matter for the board itself to look into?
On another front, the growing influence of business interests at the board has repeatedly led to talk about the value of student internships at the state’s schools, yet it’s never clear what the students are getting for the work they put in. Conversely, given that internships are free labor it’s not at all hard to see how businesses might be eager to get their hands on student interns in large numbers, perhaps even on a perpetual basis.
Currently, the [ISU] Research Park’s tenants employ more than 1,700 people and up to 300 ISU student interns throughout the year. Former tenants of the park, which have grown and moved out to their own facilities, employ over 2,500 Iowans.
Even the recent appropriation of the AIB campus by the regents has been sold on that basis:
Both the sports and recreation management and enterprise leadership programs are among the fastest growing undergraduate majors on the UI campus and well-suited for the Des Moines market “because of the significant number of student internship opportunities in the greater Des Moines area,” according to the board.
Have Rastetter’s companies ever used student interns, and if so how often? How about Rastter’s family members and business partners? (Rastetter’s brother owns a company that makes gestation crates.) Are student interns from the regent schools getting course credit for their work, or some other tangible benefit, or are they just hoping that whatever they’re doing will be of benefit down the road, or perhaps lead to a job opportunity at that company? Across the entire regents enterprise, is anyone keeping track of the total number of intern hours put in by students enrolled at the state’s schools, and which companies are involved?
Rastetter’s business reach, to say nothing of that of his friends, associates and partners, is so great, that every deal the Board of Regents makes could conceivably involve a conflict of interest. For example, the Gazette’s Erin Jordan and Vanessa Miller reported last week that a food contract between Sysco and UIHC would remain secret. A check of the partners page at Rastetter’s company turns up an alt-img tag which reads “Sysco”, but the image it is associated with refers to a different partner:
The most likely explanation for that tag is that Sysco used to be a partner of SummitAg, but when that link was repurposed someone forgot to change the associated tag. While it’s of course entirely possible that SummitAg no longer does business with Sysco, it’s also possible that SummitAg still has business ties to that company, which may have been a conflict of interest when the UIHC deal was signed. (Only a few months ago another regent, Mary Andringa, resigned abruptly just before news of a conflict of interest was reported in the press.)
Bruce Rastetter and the Business of Biofuel
To see how pervasive Rastetter’s potential conflicts of interest truly are, consider this otherwise innocuous report back in mid-April, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, after the University of Iowa received permission from state regulators to “expand its use of biofuels and continue experimenting with environmentally friendly options”:
As long as emissions meet an overall capped level, the university now has the freedom to “run whichever pieces of equipment make the most sense for the university,” Fish said.
“One of the things that happens with this permit is that it makes it easier for us to increase our levels of biomass,” he said. “We could hope to push past some of our previous levels of biomass usage because we have this in place.”
The university in 2010 created a 2020 vision that laid out sustainability targets — including increasing energy use to 40 percent of total consumption. The university reached 14.4 percent last year, and it has peaked at 32 percent this year — as the UI’s sustainability team continues to diversify its biomass portfolio.
Seizing the media moment, fraudulent president J. Bruce Harreld tossed in his two cents, including mentioning one word that he has no business using:
The agreement, which is unique in the state, took several years of collaboration between UI and DNR officials. And UI President Bruce Harreld on Tuesday thanked the state for its cooperation.
“We really appreciate the trust that you’re placing in us,” Harreld said. “It’s going to give us a lot more flexibility, hopefully to not only meet our goals, but to help others around the state and the country meet their goals as well as we get more innovative.”
While I think everyone agrees that getting Iowa off of coal and making use of renewables would be a good thing, most informed individuals would also agree that one of the last people anyone should trust is J. Bruce Harreld — albeit perhaps just ahead of Bruce Rastetter. And that raises an interesting question. Who exactly will be providing the biomass for all of those “environmentally friendly” experiments? And of those providers, how many will be taking a Research Activites Credit as a result of doing so? (From a certain cynical point of view, biomass experimentation at the University of Iowa could be seen as a Research Activities Credit generator, with any actual power being generated representing an ancillary benefit.)
blockquote>The UI began using oat hulls as biomass fuel in its main power plant more than 13 years ago. Since then, the main power plant has expanded its use of biomass fuels to include wood chips and Miscanthus grass. UI Facilities Management and the UI Office of Sustainability continue to investigate and develop other innovative biomass fuel sources.
Now, if you were paying attention during the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses, you may have noticed that Iowa Governor Terry Branstad — who packed the Iowa Board of Regents with political cronies, including his biggest political contributor, Bruce Rastetter — came out in pointed opposition to one particular Republican candidate for one specific reason:
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a renewable fuels summit in his home state, Gov. Terry Branstad made it clear that he believes Cruz’s stance on ethanol subsidies should be a deal-breaker for Iowa Republicans. Cruz has pledged to phase out the federal mandate requiring a certain amount of ethanol and other biofuels be blended into the U.S. fuel supply. Cruz, Branstad said, “hasn’t supported renewable fuels, and I think it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support him,” according to the Des Moines Register. Asked if he wants to see Cruz lose on Feb. 1, the governor responded: “Yes.”
About that “renewable fuels summit“, it turns out that Branstad’s oldest son was a key organizer. It also turns out that Bruce Rastetter is interested in biofuels. So much so, in fact, that at one time he considered it his solemn crony duty to pass along commercial propaganda in an attempt to influence scholarship at the University of Iowa:
Rastetter, who has worked in biofuels for years but now is phasing out of the business, sent an email to U of I President Sally Mason on Jan. 30 asking that the biofuels industry be given the chance to educate veteran U of I professor Jerald Schnoor so he wouldn’t be “uninformed.” Schnoor, an environmental engineering professor who has taught at the university since 1977, had been quoted in a national online magazine raising concerns about water consumption by ethanol plants.
“Sally, the industry would appreciate being able to provide factual information so this professor isn’t uninformed. Is there a way to accomplish that? Thanks Bruce.”
Schnoor, who has been prominent in the field of sustainability and the effects of climate change, is co-founder of the university’s Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research.
Quirmbach, who heads the Senate Education Committee and has taught economics at ISU for 23 years, called such a message from a regent to a university president “interference” and said it has “severe implications” for academic freedom.
“I think that’s out of line,” Quirmbach said. “If they don’t like what one researcher has published, then do your own research.”
“I think it’s very disappointing,” Quirmbach added. “The role of the Board of Regents ought to be to protect the university from political meddling, but lately, the opposite is happening.”
Rastetter said he was simply passing along an email, thinking Mason might want to call a meeting among Schnoor and the ethanol backers. He said he didn’t read the article and is not endorsing it or the ethanol lobby’s.
“Sharing information is bad? Give me a break,” Rastetter said. “I would think both sides would welcome that. That is the first and only activity I have had on this issue.”
Gov. Terry Branstad, who appointed Rastetter to the Board of Regents, isn’t buying the criticism, either. “These allegations are absurd and baseless,” said Branstad spokesman Tim Albrecht.
As for the claim that Rastetter is getting out of the biofuels business, that seems to be contradicted by a recent story about Rastetter’s company helping to build a $100M ethanol plant in Brazil:
The Iowa-based Summit Agricultural Group has broken ground on a 60 MMgy corn ethanol plant in Brazil.
Plans for the $115 million ethanol plant in Mato Grosso, a west-central agricultural state, have been in the works for about a year and a half. Ethanol Producer Magazine wrote about the project first in September 2014. Summit is building the $115 million plant in Lucas do Rio Verde in Mato Grosso, together with Fiagril. Plant construction is expected to be completed in mid-June 2017.
So — given all of that heavyweight crony involvement, and UI’s ability to now experiment with various biofuels, along with the Iowa Board of Regents’ propensity for both tolerating and engineering no-bid crony contracts, what assurances do the people of Iowa have that this new and laudable variance by state regulators will not simply be milked for whatever it’s worth by corrupt individuals who have demonstrated that intent in the past? And the answer, of course, is none.
Now factor in the regents’ newly relaxed crony contract rules, which are managed solely at the discretion of yet another crony in the board office — and can now be granted at up to $50,000, instead of the $25,000 previous limit — and it’s not hard to imagine that there will be a line of people who are eager to provide biomass to the University of Iowa at non-competitive crony prices. Will anyone check to see who’s involved, or what they’re being paid? Will anyone check to see if Rastetter is taking advantage of the program, either directly or indirectly?
One thing we can say for sure is that there is no way the DNR would have approved that permit if Branstad’s political machine did not want it approved. Whether that means somebody is up to something or not, given how many projects are undertaken at the state’s universities, this one example should make clear the scale and gravity of the oversight responsibilities faced by the Iowa Board of Regents. That the current president of the board actually went to the trouble of running a fraudulent search at taxpayer expense in order to install his own toady president at the state’s flagship school should also make clear that the last person interested in effective government oversight is Bruce Rastetter.
From the moment of his fraudulent appointment in early September of last year, to the final days of the 2015-2016 academic season in May, J. Bruce Harreld had what anyone would call a rocky start to his presidency at the University of Iowa. Whether commenting that someone “should be shot“, holding an antagonistic town hall (and only one, after promising three for the year), categorically declaring that there was “no there, there” with regard to a high-ranking administrator’s run-in with local law enforcement, or, most recently, failing to respond to, let alone take ownership of, the unprecedented AAUP sanction against the school, Harreld’s performance as president was exactly that — a performance. And it was a shockingly bad performance at that.
To put Harreld’s failings in context, however, it must also be remembered that upon becoming the illegitimate president at Iowa, Harreld was gifted with the UI Office of Strategic Communications as a media minder, and with the full faith and support of the Iowa Board of Regents, and even the backing of Governor Terry Branstad’s political machine. And yet week after week, month after month, Harreld kept putting his foot in it, coming off less like a president and more like a pugnacious brat. So apparent was Harreld’s unfitness for office, in fact, that he himself hired a private media advisor to help him burnish his image, only to then suggest days later that people who weren’t prepared to do their jobs should be shot. (And no, Harreld never realized that he himself was the poster boy for his metaphorical call to arms.)
Over the course of the 2015-2016 academic year, again and again, J. Bruce Harreld proved that he simply does not have the temperament to be a university president. From premeditated lies on his resume, to the orchestrated lie that Harreld told to obscure the conspiracy which appointed him, to the compulsive lie he seems to have told about having a “severe spinal problem”, Harreld demonstrated a persistent inability to be honest. At the same time, Harreld betrayed an emotional need to hit back at anyone who questioned the legitimacy of his illegitimate presidency.
Having had the summer months to step back and reassess, however, and having myriad media advisors at his beck and call, it seemed likely that Harreld would figure out some way stop embarrassing himself and the school every time someone asked him a simple question. And that assumption in turn shows just how wrong a person can be. While Harreld did indeed generate a bit of positive momentum this past weekend, as a result of carefully staged photo-ops and appearances — including helping a few students move into their dorms despite his “severe spinal problem” — in reporting from the first three days of the 2016-2017 academic year, J. Bruce Harreld reverted completely to form.
J. Bruce Harreld and the AAUP Sanction
In mid-June the AAUP sanctioned the University of Iowa for abuses committed during the 2015 presidential search. Subsequent to that sanction not only did J. Bruce Harreld — the sitting president of the University of Iowa — having nothing official to say, he foisted the school’s entire response onto the current and former presidents of the Faculty Senate, who dutifully stepped up and perpetuated the lie that the university itself was not equally complicit in those abuses. (One of the two main drivers of the sham search which led to Harreld’s fraudulent appointment was UI VP for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard, who was also — by the good graces of the Iowa Board of Regents — the chair of the search committee and interim UI president at the time.)
Until a few days ago, the only on-the-record comment from Harreld regarding the AAUP sanction came from an obscure story in the Corridor Business Journal, on 06/21/16:
Given that AAUP sanctions are potentially crippling, and that it is virtually unheard of for a school of Iowa’s prestige to be sanctioned, in that context Harreld’s sparse comments were the equivalent of administrative drool. Which is why it also seemed a safe bet that Harreld and his crack media team would sit down over the summer and come up with a better answer than the one offered above, should the subject of the AAUP sanction came up again. (A particularly likely event, given that Harreld had consistently made himself unavailable on the issue to the beat reporters covering UI.) Yet once again, what seems to have been an eminently safe assumption proves just how wrong a person can be.
On Monday of this week — which was also the first day of classes for the 2016-2017 school year — J. Bruce Harreld was indeed asked about the AAUP sanction during a radio interview. From a Press-Citizen story by Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 08/22/16:
Now, if you knew nothing at all about the AAUP, Harreld’s answer might sound coherent. But as Charis-Carlson pointed out in his report, Harreld failed to make an important distinction.
Again, Harreld and his crack media team had over two months to come up with a coherent response to the AAUP sanction, yet what Harreld uttered on the first day of classes was simply an extended version of his prior comment that the sanction was “bizarre”. Considerably worse for Harreld, however, is the fact that there are only two possible interpretations of Harreld’s answer, and they’re both bad. Either Harreld does not understand the difference between the AAUP functioning as a bargaining unit on one hand and as a widely respected professional association on the other, or, he does understand the difference and intentionally misled listeners about that distinction.
Remember — this is the same man who purportedly saved IBM from “near bankruptcy”, who earned a snazzy MBA at Harvard, and who was deemed so great at transformational change that his co-conspirators risked their own personal and professional reputations to jam him into office using a fraudulent taxpayer-funded search. Yet somehow, even with months to get up to speed on the AAUP prior to the sanction, and months afterward to come to terms with the AAUP after the sanction, J. Bruce Harreld — towering business genius — still cannot articulate the difference between the AAUP as a bargaining unit and as a watchdog. So which is it? Is J. Bruce Harreld a blithering idiot, or an opportunistic liar? (Careful readers would be correct in pointing out that Harreld could be a blithering idiot and an opportunistic liar, but here we are concerned specifically with his incapacity to comprehend the AAUP as an organization.)
Lending irony to Harreld’s professed confusion, at the exact same moment when he is either demonstrating or feigning ignorance regarding the AAUP’s function as a standard bearer, the members of the Iowa Board of Regents, as well as those involved with the ongoing presidential search at the University of Northern Iowa, apparently have no such problem. In fact, while Harreld is mistakenly or malevolently focusing attention on the AAUP’s role as negotiating body, the UNI search committee has just agreed to stringently abide by the AAUP’s standards for academic searches. Why the former business exec turned illegitimate president at Iowa is still confused, while so many status-quo academic types at UNI seem to have no trouble comprehending the importance of the AAUP’s guidelines — and, by implication, why it would be wrong to summarily ignore those guidelines — remains a mystery.
J. Bruce Harreld and the SummitAg Seminar
Whether you believe J. Bruce Harreld is too stupid to grasp the difference between the AAUP’s organizational functions, or you believe Harreld used his prominence and standing as president of the University of Iowa to intentionally mislead Iowans about the difference between those functions, the fact remains that the AAUP sanction came about because a tight-knit cabal of co-conspirators ran a sham search which culminated in Harreld’s illegitimate hire. (And Harreld himself is one of those co-conspirators.) As such, it might be assumed that those co-conspirators would now do everything possible to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, but because said co-conspirators possess a level of arrogance that defies credulity, that assumption would once again prove spectacularly wrong.
On Tuesday of this week, 08/23/16, the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson published an extensive and incisive look at the issue of cronyism between university presidents and the boards that oversee them. In that report, Charis-Carlson also broke news of an extended presentation J. Bruce Harreld gave at Regents’ President Rastetter’s private-sector business:
Harreld also spent time earlier this summer at the Alden headquarters for Rastetter’s Summit Agricultural Group, according to the public calendar UI officials provided to the Press-Citizen.
The calendar notes that, for five hours on June 7, Harreld was scheduled to “discuss culture and cultural change in smaller organizations.”
“President Harreld is often asked to speak on the topic of organizational change, given his success in business and background as a faculty member at the Harvard Business School,” Jeneane Beck, a UI spokeswoman, via email Friday. “He was asked by Bruce Rastetter to speak with the top four leaders of Summit Agricultural Group about organizational culture and cultural change in smaller organizations. He was not paid, and Regent Rastetter did not attend.”
The Iowa Board of Regents met in Ames on June 8th and 9th, and during those meetings, in his role as president, Harreld updated the board on the University of Iowa. The day before, on June 7th, apparently also in his role as UI president, Harreld spent at least five hours giving the “top four leaders” at Rastetter’s business what amounts to a private seminar on “culture change” at no cost to Rastetter himself. While UI spokesperson Jeneane Beck is undoubtedly correct that Harreld was not paid by SummitAg, however, that does not mean Harreld was not compensated for his time.
To see why, note that June 7th was a Tuesday, meaning a regular business day. Unless Harreld performed his five-hour song and dance after hours, we can conclude that the meeting at SummitAg took place during business hours. (An assumption supported by the fact that the presentation was on his presidential calendar.) We also know that J. Bruce Harreld makes $800K a year ($200K in deferred compensation), which, over a standard 2,000-hour work year equates to an hourly rate of approximately $400. (As a salaried worker Harreld may work more than 40 hours per week on average, though vacation time would also have to be taken into account.) Five hours of genius-grade talk at $400 per hour would mean J. Bruce Harreld pocketed $2,000 from the taxpayers of Iowa during the course of his ‘free’ speaking engagement at SummitAg.
Rather than exonerating Rastetter, the fact that Rastetter’s company did not pay Harreld any money — meaning Rastetter got five hours (or more) of sage business advice from Harreld for free, while the taxpayers of Iowa picked up the tab for Harreld’s time — raises obvious questions. Chief among them is why the president of the University of Iowa spent the better part of a work day giving a free five-hour seminars to any group, let alone a small group of businessmen who work for his boss. Is that part of Harreld’s job description? Is that what the state legislature expects Harreld to do with his time? Is that what the people of Iowa expect? While it’s clear how Rastetter benefited, how, specifically, does that five-hour expenditure of time and taxpayer funds help Iowa as a school? Was there nothing better that Harreld could have done with those five hours — like boning up on the AAUP’s various roles in higher education across the country?
And the questions keep coming. Why is Harreld giving free five-hour seminars on “culture change” to small groups of businesspersons, while UI students have to pay tuition to get the same content and access? Is Harreld willing to give a free five-hour seminar to four students in a dorm room, simply because they ask him to do so – as was purportedly the only reason Harreld spent five hours at his boss’s private place of business? If not, what criteria are used to determine who gets free, five-hour seminars from Harreld? Also, how many free, five-hour seminars has Harreld given to private places of business since he took office, and which businesses received those taxpayer subsidized seminars?
As for Harreld’s visit to Alden, were any travel or meal expenses reimbursed apart from those related to the regents’ meetings the next two days? And what about travel time? While Harreld was scheduled to be at SummitAg for five hours, he had to be on the road or in the air to get there, further increasing the amount of time lost to the university, at $400 per hour.
Is it any reason people think the Iowa Board of Regents is corrupt, and that Harreld is nothing more than a tool of the board, and in particular of Bruce Rastetter in all his incarnations? If J. Bruce Harreld has given no other five-hour talks to private companies, let alone five-hours talks to four individuals or less at a private company, the only reasonable conclusion is that Harreld did so at SummitAg not because it was part of his job, but because his appearance ingratiated him to the man who writes his checks. Less than a year after Rastetter arranged for secret meetings between Harreld and four other regents at Rastetter’s SummitAg offices in Ames, a compliant J. Bruce Harreld schlepped his way to Alden, Iowa to give away knowledge that students at the University of Iowa are obligated to pay for. Why Rastetter’s “top four leaders” did not travel to Ames instead of compelling Harreld to travel to them, or did not travel to Iowa City — either for a private seminar with Harreld, or to audit lectures Harreld was scheduled to give — remains a mystery.
J. Bruce Harreld and the Reflexive Need to Retaliate
On Monday of the first week of classes at the University of Iowa, business super-genius and $800K-per-year president J. Bruce Harreld either couldn’t comprehend or lied about the AAUP sanction. On Tuesday of the first week of classes it was disclosed that business super-genius and $800K-per-year president Harreld spent five or more hours, at taxpayer expense, helping his boss’s private-sector employees make more money. That of course brings us to Wednesday, which featured business super-genius and $800K-per-year president Harreld’s inner brat busting out at the mere mention of a perceived indignity the year before.
As we have discussed on multiple occasions, J. Bruce Harreld simply does not have the temperament to be a university president. He is used to the established hierarchical chain of command common in business, and the implicit expectation of deference if not obedience such hierarchies assume. In an educational setting, where truth at least theoretically outweighs any mercenary means of getting ahead, Harreld falters when forced to defend words and deeds that he would clearly rather forget — and would order everyone else to forget if he could.
As reported on Wednesday, 08/24/16, by RadioIowa, J. Bruce Harreld had this to say about the new academic year:
The former business executive took over the job in November of last year amid protests from some faculty and students over his lack of academic background and the way his hiring was handled. Harreld says he hopes that’s all behind him.
“From my perspective, we’re now hard at work on the real issues of moving the university forward. It feels like we’re a lot calmer and more focused in a lot of ways,” Harreld says. Students moved in last week and fall classes started Monday in Iowa City.
“We just moved in almost 6,000 new students — we didn’t see any people running around campus complaining about things — other than we had so many refrigerators and TV’s to move in,” according to Harreld. He says he’s had good meetings the deans last week and also had a day-long faculty retreat.
“So at least from my perspective it feels like we are getting settled down and back to the real issues that in my view count much more,” Harreld says.
Harreld’s reference to the campus being “calmer” is of course true. Last year, after Harreld’s shocking appointment, and two months later, when Harreld finally took office, there were indeed protests by people who felt betrayed by Harreld and his co-conspirators at the board and university. Now, a full year later, and following on the sanction by the AAUP, it is not only clear that those protests were justified, but that greater revolt would likely have taken place had everyone known then what they know now. Meaning J. Bruce Harreld and his co-conspirators got off easy, at least for the time being.
Despite that reality, however, note how Harreld reflexively trivializes the outpouring of frustration from those who were the victims of his co-conspirators’ abuse. Instead of offering any understanding by linking the obvious fact of the protests with the equally obvious fact of the sanction, Harreld uses the word “calmer” to imply that anyone who protested his appointment was hysterical or irrational. Being J. Bruce Harreld, however — and perhaps sensing that he didn’t get his pugnacious point across as strongly as he would have liked — Harreld then doubles down on his belittling of the protests by characterizing the protesters as “running around campus complaining about things”. Is that how a university president talks, even if that’s how he feels? Or is that more like how a petty, vindictive crank talks when he thinks he’s been slighted on the respect he deserves?
Again, if you only look at the facts, the people who were “running around campus complaining about things” turned out to be more right about the violations (if not actual crimes) which occurred than they knew at the time. Meaning they were right to complain — or, more appropriately, to sound the alarm — as anyone should in response to abuse of any kind. Are people who report fires “running around” and “complaining”? How about people who report sexual abuse or theft?
Where is the diplomat, the peacemaker, in the quote above? Where is the ‘bigger man’ in J. Bruce Harreld? And of course the answer — as demonstrated repeatedly over the entirety of last year and the first three days of this week — is that there isn’t one. J Bruce Harreld is neither a great leader nor a transformational visionary. He is, instead, a petty, punitive man who, almost a year after the fact, could not stop himself from compulsively discrediting and invalidating people who had been proven factually correct in their “complaints”.
However much credit you want to give Harreld for his prior business experience, J. Bruce Harreld has shown that he will lie to your face, then turn around and blame you for expressing outrage at having been deceived. Then again, despite purportedly being an expert on managing culture change in large organizations, the only culture change Harreld has brought to the University of Iowa is the culture of cronyism and corruption that defines the people who installed him in office. (If Harreld is willing to spit reflexive bile at a reporter on the record, after having had all summer to work on his media manners, he must be a real piece of work behind closed doors.)
Finally, as to the “real issues” that in Harreld’s view “count much more”, what Harreld means is gaming Iowa’s national college rank so he looks like a success to people who only pay scant attention to his performance. Not only has that objective been his solitary focus since before taking office, Harreld now has millions of dollars at his disposal in a slush fund financed on the backs of students as result of the recent tuition hikes. In fact, because Harreld finally has the means to push his self-serving agenda throughout the entire school, in the next post we’ll look at the inevitable damage J. Bruce Harreld is about to do as a result of his single-minded obsession.
(J. Bruce Harreld managed to get through Thursday without reminding everyone why he is unfit for a job that he’s being paid $800K to perform — meaning when he isn’t otherwise called away to give private on-site seminars at his boss’s company. How Harreld managed to avoid calling even more negative attention to himself for the first time this week — other than perhaps by simply keeping his mouth shut –remains a mystery.)
Here is an good overview of where academia is headed from the econ blog Naked Capitalism;
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/credentialism-and-corruption-vile-college-administrators-edition.html
Especially liked this comment, couldn’t Rastetter find a cheaper neoliberal robot than Harreld?
Is anyone working on automating the work of the administrators? Seems like it would save tons of money and be fairly easy to boot. Rather like Zaphod’s suggestion about replacing Arthur Dent’s brain with an electronic one: “All you would have to do is program it to say ‘What?’ and ‘I don’t understand’ and “Where’s the tea?’ and who would know the difference?”
Or are those jobs sacred due to friend of a friend of a friend, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours networks?
Ha. The only thing that can’t be automated is teaching — the squillionaire fad for MOOCs died fast — and that’s just what they want to get rid of.
In fact, yes, they can automate administrators. If a college president can leave the college for weeks or months and not have their absence noticed, a forward-thinking administration could just purchase a dummy and have it periodically emit random neoliberal platitudes.
Perhaps the Japanese sex doll manufacturers could branch out.”
I’ve tried to get my mind around where a lot of the costs are coming from in higher-ed, and every time I go down that road I end up at the explosion of the administrative class, and in particular administrator’s salaries — which they bestow on each other.
It’s been overlooked, but Harreld is now in the top fifteen in presidential compensation in the U.S., as a result of Rastetter’s largesse. There’s no justification for the money he’s making, but he’s still making it.
As I’ve said before, this is a looting on so many levels.
Uh…as I recall, this year we saw the largest number of profs jumping ship that we’ve seen in quite a while. It’s not because the market for professors has improved. On the contrary, that gets worse and worse.
When your key employees can’t get away from you fast enough, this is not “calming down”. Sounds to me like Harreld’s giving one of those Snowball/Napoleon-type speeches about progress.
I’ve been fighting this weird vibe the last day or two about Harreld’s response to the AAUP sanction, because it is beyond incompetent. Take your average press intern on a political campaign and they could string a couple hundred words together which meant nothing and admitted nothing but sounded lofty. Harreld’s had two shots at it now, and both times he crapped his pants.
It’s like I’m missing something that has him paralyzed, but I don’t see it. Which then convinces me that he really is just incapable.
That Harreld is still talking about making lots of “world class” hires into the teeth of the AAUP sanction may explain part of his incapacity, because that was his entire justification for raising tuition — and his main means of raising Iowa’s school rank. But still, it’s pretty shocking to see how bad he is at something so basic.
(And yes, I agree about the exodus. And it’s not going to change if the regents manage to avoid abusing UNI. If I’m the AAUP I don’t life the UI sanction until the regents hire a real prez at that school.)
Let me digress for a second.
A friend of mine went to the UIHC emergency room recently. Despite being seriously ill, he was not given a bed but was wheeled into a hallway, along with 10-12 other patients.
This is the United States of America…with the best educational system the greatest research, best health care, the largest army and navy, arguably the most powerful modern country and the UIHC cant even find a curtain for 20% of the patients in their emergency room.
As you say the UIowa president makes 800,000; Robillard and the UIHC CEO make about 1,000,000 each. There is a shiny new multi-million dollar hospital for children. And poor devils who are seriously sick, get wheeled into a hallway like it is Syria.
Utter failure of leadership, from Branstad’s cronies to Robillard’s deception, to the wholly unqualified corrupt university president.
Not only are student’s parents and citizens screwed, patients too.
My concern with UIHC is that all of the things that should be going one way seem to be going the other way. Patient care, cost overruns, faculty leaving in droves, and on and on.
I don’t know if the legislature is truly aware of the blind spot they now face with Rastetter acting as Robillard’s enabler, and neither man having any accountability to anyone. I also don’t know if there’s anyone at UIHC with the guts to out Robillard — and given the conspiracy of silence regarding Robillard’s central role in the Harreld fraud, I seriously doubt it.
If you look around Iowa City you see new UIHC buildings, new clinics, each extending the reach of UIHC, but also requiring staff, support, resources. If you go to UIHC, you see the effect — dimmer lights, duller paint, clinics that don’t have any patients in them, long wait times to see doctors, long wait times for appointments.
Just as Rastetter is trying to destroy the higher-ed ecosystem in the state, Robillard is so fixated on big-footing competitors in IC that he’s over-extended the hospital, which is saying something.
I am seriously, seriously concerned about where this is headed.
1) UIHC has record-breaking revenues right now. There is no possible way this could be happening unless Branstad’s Medicaid fiasco was designed to line crony pockets, including UIHC. Also, someone really needs to look carefully at Ken Kates in all of this.
2) Robillard has over one million dollars that he is planning to use to “invest” in one or two physician faculty rock stars he plans to bring to campus. This means not investing in junior faculty development and support that would keep faculty on campus. Faculty UIowa brings here as rock stars will almost always leave within 5-years. Junior faculty with potential to be rock stars who are mentored and supported sometimes stick around. But rock stars will certainly drive up the rankings.
RIP says
It’s much more that $1M!
At least one big name is already on the way.
If there’s enough money, then a few medical school ‘stars’ will come here to establish their empires. All the while, the ‘core’ of UI will continue to wither.
I trust you on the numbers, Paula, but I’ve also learned that nobody at UI/UIHC reports all of the relevant financial data. It’s entirely possible they’re making money hand over fist in terms of income, and yet expenses are whittling that down significantly. (I just don’t know.)
The damage done from concentrating on ‘stars’ as opposed to making sure the entire organization is healthy is not just limited to business. You see the same effect in entertainment/TV, where stars are brought in to shore up sagging shows, and sports, where a start player can put people in the seats even though the team is going nowhere. None of that solves the underlying problem.
My concern about UIHC only grows. This is not an institution that should be experimenting, except through clinical research. It should be refining and stabilizing practices that feed the core mission and competencies. Instead, Robillard is treating it like his personal business laboratory, focusing almost entirely on profits — to Rastetter’s glee — and neglecting his most basic professional obligations.
My guess is that it’ll be necessary to find someone who’ll pay for an independent audit of FOIA-able UIHC records, including the weirdness of the investment records. Which in the end are probably not weird when set against what similar institutions are doing; just weird, which is to say unconscionable, when one considers the mission of a public hospital.
That’d be quite specialized work, of course. And they’d be the ones who’d make the list of what documents would be necessary to request, at which point the real yelling would begin. I wonder who does that work.
Oh, that doesn’t look all that difficult. You could probably make do with a former senior auditor for one of the companies that does internal audits — Anderson, PwC, those places — but it’d probably be better to find a former senior person from a hospital CFO’s office, preferably someplace on the same scale. Then it’s just a matter of paying them to tell you what to ask for and how to respond to the various lies about why you don’t need it and can’t have it.
Then it’s just a matter of finding the money to pay them, which won’t be trivial, but…heh. Well, I can think of some interested parties, also watchdog groups. It might take a little while to set up, but it seems like it ought to be doable.
Anyway, yeah, the world-class whosis. Words. They’d better find at least one or they won’t be able to make a parade float about it.
One possible silver lining is that if Robillard is looking to do something splashy, that might signal that he’s either thinking of getting out or being eased out. The nightmare scenario is that Robillard will hire or appoint his own successor, and I don’t see anyone who could stop him. He could simply announce it, and threaten to roast Harreld and Rastetter over the 2015 search if they opposed him.
You give Robillard too much credit. He is a wet puppy. He will name the person suggested by whichever-big-boy-he-seems-enamored-with-at-the-moment (probably someone Stead declares to be good). It’s unfortunate that the CoM executive dean has so many X chromosomes. It’s possible she could be a good dean, though prone to cronyism in certain circumstances. Probably not one to run the hospital though. Mess indeed.
[on a side note, they have taken steps to make more bed-space available so hopefully there won’t be so many people in the hall. Thanks Obama.]
In a couple of weeks U.S. News & World Report will release its college rankings for 2017. (One of the ways U.S. News monetizes its freely distributed annual rankings is by secreting data from prior years. Instead of adding new web pages by calendar or academic year, U.S. News overwrites rankings each year, making prior data unavailable without payment. For that reason, some of the links in this post will remain live but point to the wrong information when the 2018 rankings are released.)
As regular readers know, from the moment when J. Bruce Harreld first spoke to the University of Iowa community at his candidate forum last September, his singular obsession as a prospective president — and later as the fraudulently appointed president of the school — was aspiring to greatness. In subsequent talk after talk, month after month, Harreld defined greatness in practical, attainable terms as nothing more than gaming Iowa’s national college ranking. Repeatedly, ceaselessly, before he knew anything of substance about the University of Iowa, Harreld hammered home the importance of spending critical time and scarce resources on improving Iowa’s college rank, purportedly as a means of attracting and retaining “world class” faculty.
To whatever extent J. Bruce Harreld and his co-conspirators may have genuinely hoped that diverting money from students and education to gaming the U.S. News rankings would make it easier to hire “world class” faculty, those hopes were dashed when the AAUP sanctioned the University of Iowa for abuses committed during Harreld’s sham hire. As a result, prospective faculty the world over has now been put on notice that both Iowa and the Iowa Board of Regents are run by corrupt individuals who care nothing about shared governance, integrity, fairness or honesty, and that includes J. Bruce Harreld himself, who abetted and actively covered up that fraud.
Still, from Harreld’s obsessive rhetoric, and his belief that programs and people are either “world class” or garbage, it has been made abundantly clear that Harreld still intends to pursue the gaming of Iowa’s college ranking, if only to demonstrate his worth to people who will otherwise pay little or no actual attention to his performance as president. (Put another way, Harreld’s ranking crusade is a marketing gimmick for Harreld himself.) This manic pursuit was in turn the reason why Harreld recently jammed punitive tuition hikes down the throats of the students at Iowa, raising millions of dollars for a slush fund that will be administered at his discretion. Now, finally armed with the economic leverage to which he has clearly long been accustomed, Harreld has the means of compelling, inducing and extorting change among faculty who would otherwise prefer to focus on their actual jobs. As a result, Harreld is now poised to turn the entirety of UI administration to the task of gaming Iowa’s ranking, using proven corrupt strategies which we previously detailed in an extensive post on that very subject.
In 2015, Iowa’s U.S. News Ranking was 71, which is essentially what it was for five straight years under Sally Mason. In 2016, Mason’s last official year, Iowa’s U.S. News Ranking fell off a cliff to 82, raising questions not only about what changed, but whether someone at UI administration cratered the rankings so as to make Harreld look good when they inevitably bounced back. (If that sounds insane, remember the fraud that was orchestrated in order to hire Harreld, and the lie that Regents’ President Bruce Rastetter orchestrated with regard to Iowa’s 2015 legislative funding request, simply to make Harreld look good after his rigged appointment.)
Although Harreld was on the job at UI for the majority of the 2015-2016 academic year, he probably did not have the leverage or resources necessary to move the ranking needle much over that time. That does not mean, of course, that Harreld won’t claim responsibility for any gains, just as he will point to a continuing slide as justification for whatever shifty plan he already has up his sleeve. What it does mean is that the real damage Harreld will do by devoting time, attention and precious resources to gaming Iowa’s ranking starts now, as Harreld begins his first full year on the job flush with student cash, and now much more aware of the pressure points that he can exploit among the faculty and administrative staff.
The National College Ranking Lie
If you’ve only been on the internet for five minutes in your entire life, you know that human beings like rankings. Best car in a given class. Best restaurant in a given city. Best movie in a given year. Best ranking of bests on a given topic.
The obvious problem with rankings is that subjectivity is almost always involved, and quite often dominates. Even when results are objective, however — as is the case in athletics, where winners and losers are clearly determined — agreeing on the ranking of best teams or individuals in a particular sport can still be fraught with legitimate debate. Even when head-to-head playoffs determine a champion — as opposed to relying on a final year-end poll, as was the case until recently in college football — key injuries or random bad weather may factor into the outcome.
Compared to the relative objectivity of sports rankings, then, it should be apparent that no matter which criteria are used to determine the rankings of colleges and universities, and no mater how objective those rankings may seem, the entire process is subjective because it hinges on which factors are and are not included. For example, if there’s no place to include the number of sexual assaults on campus, or the reporting of sexual assaults is not standardized across schools, then a college could be highly ranked even though its campus is a predator’s playground.
Another problem with rankings is that they are almost always numerical, leading to the false perception that there must be substantive differences between any two ranks. While everyone would probably like to be 1st in a pertinent ranking, it’s entirely possible that ending up 1st or 2nd could be the result of nothing more than noise in the formula used to calculate the result. And if that’s the case (and it is), it’s all the more likely that the difference between being 81st, 82nd or 83rd is meaningless, yet in a numerical list those differences appear absolute. (At Iowa’s current rank of #82 among four-year universities, movement up or down of four spots or less in this year’s ranking will most likely be the result of statistical noise, not a reflection of any substantive change is Iowa’s academic value or worth.)
In a moment we will get into why J. Bruce Harreld’s determination to game Iowa’s college rank is a failure of leadership, but for now it’s important to understand that the fuzziness of such rankings precludes any real determination of the educational quality being delivered. Yes, the schools at the very top of any ranking will certainly have some advantages, but as anyone knows who has been in high school or even junior high, there is a massive difference between being an esteemed or veteran teacher and being a good teacher. For every high-flying faculty member at a highly-ranked school there are tens if not hundreds of equally qualified and better teachers on a given subject at colleges and universities around the country. (At the bleeding edge of any academic discipline there will be exemplary departments, and those are often clustered around money and prestige, but most college rankings concern undergraduate education, not graduate-level programs.)
While it’s possible to rank almost anything, it should be equally clear that many if not most rankings have no real utility. Not only will nobody to decide to go to the University of Iowa because it is 82nd instead of 83rd, no one will decide not to attend UI because it is 82nd instead of 81st. Of primary concern, rather, will be tuition cost, distance from home, cost-of-living, and myriad other factors, only some of which will affect the rankings. Meaning that apart from making money for the people who generate and promote said rankings, and giving the marketing weasels at every school another mushy metric to promote, college rankings produce almost no useful benefit — and that’s true even if they are organically derived, as opposed to being intentionally manipulated, as Harreld intends to do.
Were rankings genuinely intended to be useful to students, the first change you would see would be grouping similarly ranked schools by category instead of ranking them numerically. At the top you would have schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and a few others, which seem to have more of the top faculty. The remaining categories, in no particular order, would be schools grouped by sizes and types, within which all schools would be of the same academic standard, just as with the schools at the top of the heap.
To be clear, it is undeniably useful to be able to compare ‘sticker prices’ for schools, just as it is with motor vehicles. It’s also undeniably useful to have some sense of the ‘features’ at a school, as it is when buying a new car or truck. However, the factors that go into a given student ultimately choosing a particular school are as varied as the factors that go into choosing a particular make and model of four-wheel transport. (You might prefer to drive a sports car, but if you live on a gravel road, chances are you’re going to need ground clearance, four-wheel drive, and durability.)
Complicating matters to the point of obscurity is the fact that education as a product is incredibly nebulous. While some metrics which are used to produce a given ranking could conceivably help students avoid truly awful schools, by and large the academic benefit for any student is determined not by where they go but what they themselves put into the educational process. If a student attends one of the best schools in the country but is drunk or high half the time, that student may still get great marks because of grade inflation, and land a high-paying job because of networking among alums, but that student will have learned nothing. Conversely, a student forced by life circumstance to attend a lesser-ranked school may still transform their existence through single-minded devotion to that academic task.
Even coming to conclusions about the benefit of a particular school over a given student’s lifetime is impossible because of all the variables involved, which makes rankings in themselves all the more absurd. If a four-year education was somehow critical to an individual’s immediate well-being it might be worth delving into ranking differences, but that’s not the case with education. Yes, any consumer wants to make a good purchase as opposed to a bad one, and that’s particularly true given the massive amount of time and money involved in acquiring even an undergraduate degree, but in terms of immediate risk there just isn’t any correlation. Going to one of the best schools in the country won’t guarantee your success in life, nor will attending an average or middling school doom you to mediocrity.
Unfortunately, that fuzziness makes it that much more difficult to perceive the damage J. Bruce Harreld is about to do by perverting the University of Iowa’s academic mission. If the strength or weakness of an education cannot in itself be quantified, let alone predicted over a lifetime, then any negative effects from changes which are made to specifically improve a school’s rankings will also be virtually impossible to perceive. That does not mean there won’t be negative effects — just that it will be very hard to detect them unless you specifically know what to look for. (And as the gatekeeper-in-charge, Harreld isn’t going to provide the information necessary to make such determinations — just as he has precluded UI from releasing the total amount raised by his abusive tuition hikes.)
One way we could lift the veil a little bit, however, would be to look for similar failings in rankings which are both more vital and informative, and by chance we can do exactly that without even leaving the University of Iowa campus. Because while the 2017 academic rankings for UI are not yet out, and Harreld is only now embarking on his first full year as the school’s illegitimate president, across the Iowa river the 2017 rankings for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics were released a couple of weeks ago, and UIHC has been under the control of the same man for close to a decade.
UIHC’s National Hospital Rank
If you’re familiar with UIHC or its reputation, take a moment and think about the criteria that would make you feel good about receiving care at that hospital. (If you’re not familiar with UIHC, think instead about any large general hospital you’re familiar with.) What would you consider to be positive indicators of care, and what would be a red flag?
On 08/02/16 the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported on the 2017 UIHC rankings by U.S. News and World Report. Here is the headline and subhead of her story:
University of Iowa hospitals again ranked nationally in seven specialties
Some programs drop, others climb
If you’re familiar with UIHC that will all seem par for the course. Not only is UIHC the largest hospital in the state, by far, and not only does it have an excellent reputation in the Midwest, but it includes medical departments which are respected around the world. It is also inevitable that in any ranking system some programs will rise and fall, perhaps by a little as a result of noise in the data, or by a lot if there are substantive changes in a particular department or its personnel.
Now here are the opening paragraphs of Miller’s piece:
The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics again has been ranked among the best hospitals in the nation, according to new U.S. News & World Report data.
The state’s biggest hospital — located on the UI campus in Iowa City — earned top accolades in seven specialties, which is the same as last year and two fewer than in 2014.
Several of its rankings improved from 2015 and several slid, including its gynecology rating that went from No. 29 last year to No. 49 this year and its neurology and neurosurgery ranking that went from No. 33 last year to No. 47 this year.
Specialties that saw improvement include the hospital’s ears, nose, and throat department, which climbed from No. 8 to No. 5; the UI’s urology department, which improved from No. 40 to No. 34, and the cancer unit, which bumped up from No. 39 to No. 34.
If anything stands out it’s the plunge in the rankings for gynecology and neurology, but absent a deep dive into the data those changes could be caused by almost anything — meaning it’s hard to know if they’re consequential in terms of patient care. In fact, if you’re looking for a gynecological or neurological consult, the downward trend is probably more concerning than the numbers themselves, but even at that there’s also nothing that would keep you from seeking treatment if you were in need. For the same reason, it would also be difficulty for Miller or any other reporter to say something truly useful about the meaning behind those specific numbers without doing additional reporting and writing an extensive article.
As a result, what gets the most notice — and what is intended to get the most notice — is the headline, subhead and opening paragraph or two, which, in combination with the very nature of rankings themselves, tends to paint a rosy picture. You can see that persistent effect by doing a Google search for other stories about UIHC’s rankings, which use the same headline keywords over and over: “Nationally Ranked”, “Among Nation’s Best”, “Among Nation’s Elite”. And it’s all factually true — but it’s not the whole story.
To be clear this is not a problem with Miller’s reporting, or the reporting of any other reporter. It is, inherently, a problem with rankings, which are often for-profit, meaning the parasitic ranking agencies are themselves motivated to spread positive news because it ingratiates them to the institutions being ranked. (The same inherent conflict of interest affects stock analysts and bond-rating agencies.)
You can see that effect simply by clicking on the U.S. News and World Report for UIHC, and perusing the specific rankings. Were I a prospective patient, I would indeed find a lot of useful information displayed on the UIHC page. It is also conceivable that the same overview for another hospital might contain some very bad news indeed. On the UIHC page, however, there are no apparent red flags, which is of course reassuring. To be sure there are some oddities, but even those are countered by apparent positives. (For example, the UIHC Ophthalmology Department — which has consistently ranked high over the years — scores only 11.7 out of 100, but is listed as the 7th best ophthalmology program in the country.)
Toward the bottom of the main UIHC page there is a section devoted to specific procedures, and again UIHC seems to do pretty well – meaning there are no apparent red flags. In fact, in most areas UIHC is good and in some areas it seems to be great. As it happens, however, while writing this post I read a story about how colorectal cancer was the number two cancer killer in the U.S., so I naturally clicked on the ‘scorecard’ to see how UIHC ranked for Colon Cancer Surgery.
While U.S. News rated UIHC as “High Performing” for that procedure, here is what I found when I clicked the link for details:
Survival chances at this hospital 30 days after undergoing this procedure.
Worse than average
How well hospital keeps patients who had colon cancer surgery from being unexpectedly readmitted in the first 30 days after discharge.
Number of patients
Relative number of inpatients age 65 and over who had this procedure or condition in 2012-14.
High (Range: 55 to 84)
Treating patients with blood clots
How often hospital uses an appropriate combination of blood thinners with patients diagnosed with blood clots.
Nearly meets standard (Range: 90-94%)
Now, momentarily setting aside your reaction to that information, imagine that you’re a patient with colorectal cancer and you’re researching different medical facilities where you can have that procedure. Are you going to UIHC, or are you running in the opposite direction?
If you’re in Iowa, one of the most likely places you would flee would be to the Mayo Clinic, just across the state line in Rochester, Minnesota. While Mayo gets the same “High performing” rating from U.S. News for colon cancer surgery, if you click on the ‘scorecard’ for that procedure you will find that Mayo bests UIHC in exactly those areas you would be most concerned about as a prospective patient. (The fact that U.S. News considers both Mayo and UIHC “High performing” for colon cancer surgery, despite wide variance in outcomes, is yet another example of how the rankings themselves are often presented with positive spin.)
Also, note how much more useful “Worse than average” is in making your decision, compared with a numerical ranking. Were the U.S. News college rankings broken into five groups — “Much better than average”, “Better than average”, “Average”, “Worse than average”, and “Much worse than average” — that would be significantly more useful to prospective students than having to figure out what the difference was between schools at #38 and #55. (Because that would be considerably less useful to the marketing departments at those schools, however, numerical rankings persist.)
I am not by my nature easily shocked, and I am not claiming that my eyes popped out of my head when I read that UIHC was “Worse than average” for a common procedure performed on a high number of patients. What I can tell you is that it never, ever occurred to me that UIHC would be rated “Worse than average” for any procedure. I will also add that such a poor rating was not unique to colorectal cancer surgery. Here’s what I found on the ‘scorecard’ for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Repair, which U.S. News also rated UIHC as “High Performing”:
How well hospital keeps patients from being readmitted after this procedure in the first 7 days after discharge.
Worst? Worst??? Again, I don’t want to go off the deep end here, but it never occurred to me for a second that UIHC could be “Worst” at anything in terms of national rankings. Maybe not “Best”, but definitely not “Worst.”
My first thought was that perhaps the rarity of AAAR skewed the results, but no — UIHC saw between 57 and 91 cases. My second thought was that unfortunately AAAR is not the kind of problem where you get to consult rankings and pick and choose who solves that problem. If you’re lucky, you might live long enough to get to a hospital where someone knows what to do, but even then the odds say you still won’t make it.
As a matter of basic public health, then, if not also reputation, you would think any hospital even remotely qualified to perform AAAR would do everything possible to be at least average at the surgery — as UIHC is — and average at preventing readmissions, which UIHC clearly is not. (Which also suggests that the rating for the success of the surgery may be overly optimistic.)
Are there a lot of factors that go into those alarming UIHC ratings? Yes, of course. By the same token, however, some factors which might point to problems apart from medical practice can also be ruled out. That’s particularly true on the nursing side, where UIHC has been designated a Magnet Hospital three times running, and the UI College of Nursing is perennially highly ranked. Whatever the ultimate reason for those poor procedure ratings, however, the responsibility ultimately falls to the leadership at UIHC, which brings us back to the one man who has had iron-fisted control over that institution for close to a decade.
Jean Robillard and the UIHC Rankings
Along with being Vice President for Medical Affairs at UI — and, incidentally, one of two key co-conspirators behind J. Bruce Harreld’s fraudulent appointment as president — Jean Robillard currently is and previously was the Dean of the UI College of Medicine. So to whatever extent Robillard is or is not involved in day-to-day operations at the hospital (no pun intended) — which is run on the business side by CEO Ken Kates — Robillard clearly has a great deal of influence over, and buck-stopping responsibility for, the performance of the entire UI medical-industrial pipeline.
As we have also just seen, it is incredibly easy for UIHC to tout its achievements and successes while trusting that the rankings agencies will bury bad news or red flags behind multiple clicks at the bottom of a web page. Likewise, because reporting in the press often comes from press releases that the hospitals themselves put out, only when you drill down into the details — and then only if said details are reported — can you get a real picture of how good a hospital is at actual procedures they might perform on you.
Note also that money does not factor into hospital rankings, while it is a key component of academic scores. There are ethical reasons for that, of course, but it is also an indicator of how critical healthcare is compared to higher education. Although college ought to be available to everyone, it is still an elective pursuit, not an existential imperative. The pertinent question in a medical context is whether the physicians and hospitals being ranked are good or bad at the procedures being rated, and in the two examples cited above UIHC is clearly below par, if not well-below par.
So how does that happen? How does a prestigious hospital, highly if not nationally if not globally ranked in specific departments, end up being “Worse than average” or “Worst” at anything? In fact, those results are all the more inexplicable given the totality of circumstances at UIHC.
Headlines declaring that UIHC is the best hospital in Iowa may seem impressive, but UIHC effectively has no competition in the state. There are other good hospitals in Iowa to be sure, but in terms of scale and breadth of services, nothing close. (The closest in the region would again be the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.)
Unlike many if not most other hospitals across the country, UIHC is also a state-run institution. Because it functions under the auspices of the Iowa Board of Regents — and here we will momentarily ignore the rampant crony corruption at the board — and is tightly integrated with the UI College of Medicine, UIHC not only profits by being vertically integrated into the state’s healthcare network, but it is backed by the full faith and credit of the state. (The latitude afforded by that standing was recently demonstrated when Robillard blew the construction budget of the new Children’s Hospital by $68M, then solved that problem by raising prices 6% across the board. Because UIHC provides so many state and specialty services, and has limited competition, it effectively holds a monopoly on a large number of patients, which it can squeeze whenever it wants.)
One of the inherent problems with gauging leadership is that you can never do an apples-to-apples comparison. With seed crops you can plant different varieties in the same ground and compare yields, but you can’t put multiple individuals in the same leadership position and compare their performance. Largely for that reason alone, Jean Robillard is often touted as a great administrator — again, ignoring the premeditated conspiracy he perpetrated in order to hire Harreld — when even a cursory review would suggest that whatever Robillard has accomplished, he’s done so with the odds heavily stacked in his favor. And yet somehow UIHC is still rated as “Worst than average” or “Worst’ for critical procedures. How can that not be the result of failed leadership?
Given that most hospitals face intensive competition, and UIHC does not, and most hospitals would be rocked by a $68M cost overrun, and UIHC was not, how is it that most hospitals do better at performing colon cancer surgery, while UIHC fares worse? As for being ranked “Worst” at anything, that fact alone calls into question what Jean Robillard is concerning himself with as VP for Medical Affairs and dean of the UI College of Medicine, if not making sure that all care at UIHC is at least “Average”.
Fortunately, as it turns out, we can actually answer that question. From a 02/25/16 Gazette article by Vanessa Miller, regarding Robillard’s unilateral decision to kick Debra Schwinn to the curb and claim the deanship of the College of Medicine for himself:
During the board’s meeting Thursday, Regents President Bruce Rastetter praised the restructuring as innovative and forward thinking, and he challenged Robillard to use the new role to shorten the length of time it takes to get a medical degree, in part, in hopes of addressing student debt.
“You’ve often had discussions and thoughts around shortening the length of time of medical school from four years to three years,” Rastetter said. “It intuitively made sense to me each time you talked about that. I would just want to encourage you to continue now with your dual leadership role and ability to work on that.”
Robillard, in essence, said absolutely.
“If there is a way to look at that and try to reduce the time for graduation, either by streamlining college for those who want to go to medical school or looking at the time of medical school, I think these are things that we have to do,” Robillard said.
If you haven’t been following the aftermath of J. Bruce Harreld’s hire last fall, the first thing you need to know here is that Bruce Rastetter is the other key co-conspirator who fraudulently jammed Harreld into the UI presidency. As such, when these two men talk in public about big plans for the future, you can be guaranteed that A) they laid the groundwork for those plans long ago, and B) they’re up to no good.
The second thing you need to know is that one of the big reasons why Rastetter loves hims some Robillard is that Robillard’s successes have come from leveraging UIHC’s market muscle to expand services and crush competition. To anyone concerned about actual patient outcomes — including those people unfortunate enough to have their abdominal aorta explode — the idea that Robillard is about to speed med students through school in three quarters of the normal time probably seems horrifying. Because Bruce Rastetter made all of his money in hog lots and ethanol, however — meaning commodities, as opposed to services — such a plan makes “intuitive” sense. (If there is one person on the face of the earth that you do not want determining your medical care, or the educational preparedness of the doctors who treat you, it is Bruce Rastetter.)
Leaders determine which issues get attention and which issues are ignored. The very fact that UIHC is receiving below average marks for any common procedure in the U.S. News & World Report rankings screams negligence, particularly given all of UIHC’s institutional advantages as a state-controlled teaching hospital. Yet as we’ve just seen, UIHC is not even average in some life-critical procedures and outcomes relative to the rest of the country.
As if to drive that point home with emphasis, a little over a week ago — after I had most of this post blocked out — Vanessa Miller reported the following story in the Gazette, on 08/19/16:
Speaking Friday to University of Iowa medical students, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack scolded the institution for not doing enough to train its soon-to-be health professionals on a staggering opioid abuse epidemic that claims thousands of lives a year nationally.
“The university is more and more, every single day, becoming more of an outlier,” Vilsack told a crowd inside the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, pointing to a growing number of schools that have updated their training based on new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
The idea that the former governor of the state, and current Secretary of Agriculture, came to Iowa City and ripped UIHC for falling behind in fighting one of the most obvious current public health concerns is beyond embarrassing. Along with Robillard’s radical plan to re-imagine medical education — which no one but Bruce Rastetter is calling for — and potentially fatal weaknesses in specific medical procedures, the evidence would seem to suggest that Jean Robillard is the problem at UIHC, and now also at the UI College of Medicine.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no chance that anyone will be able to hold Robillard accountable. In fact, ever since he and Rastetter conspired to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld, Robillard has effectively functioned as a fourth regent president, as opposed to the vice president of anything.
Ironically, in the run-up to the hiring fraud perpetrated by Rastetter and Robillard, Robillard not only frequently talked about Harreld’s visionary capacity for transformational change, Robillard tied that ability to current issues at UIHC, even to the point of inviting Harreld to campus to speak to 40 or so movers and shakers in UIHC administration. On the eve of taking office, however, Harreld suddenly announced that he would not be involved in the decision making at UIHC, because Robillard had everything under control. From an 11/01/15 article by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson:
The one area on campus that probably will see the least direct interference from Harreld is UI Health Care, which includes the UI Hospitals and Clinics, the Carver College of Medicine and the UI Physicians group practice .
“I think that’s in very good hands,” Harreld said of the leadership of Jean Robillard, UI’s vice president for medical affairs and a member of the presidential cabinet. “Not to say they don’t have issues. But what you find in healthy organizations is they always have issues that they’re working on.”
Had J. Bruce Harreld been elected president on the merits of his candidacy and experience, he would now have authority over Robillard and everyone else at the University of Iowa. Because Harreld is instead a puppet hired by Rastetter and Robillard, he has no authority except that granted to him by those two men, which is why Robillard now functions like a rogue president at UIHC. Adding to the irony is that the very premise Robillard used as cover for the fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld — that the university needed someone with a fresh perspective — is exactly why Robillard is failing University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
J. Bruce Harreld and UI’s National College Rank
The damage Jean Robillard has done to UIHC by taking the focus off medical procedures and patent care, and instead paying attention to a demented new vision of medical education, is the same damage J. Bruce Harreld is about to do to the rest of the campus, and for the same reason. Where Robillard is more concerned with turning out medical warrior entrepreneurs and expanding the UIHC footprint than with delivering the best healthcare services possible, Harreld is concerned with turning a profit and improving Iowa’s national ranking as opposed to delivering the best educational services across the entire campus
Again, nowhere in the run-up to Harreld’s sham appointment was there any emphasis on improving Iowa’s national rank. That was not the focus of the search committee, it was not in Rastetter’s charge to the search committee, and it wasn’t the focus on the conversation surrounding the search. And yet, in only a matter of days, president-elect J. Bruce Harreld — who knew literally nothing about the University of Iowa when he was hired — unilaterally decided that school resources would be devoted to his pet cause to the exclusion of any other concern. (We know this because Harreld later rigged the budgeting process to force all administrative plans to comport with his determination to raise Iowa’s collegiate rank.)
Like Robillard, Harreld will focus attention where he wants it, allowing other aspects of the school — including core education — to languish. The less important a given aspect of study or educational services is to Iowa’s U.S. News ranking, the less attention those aspects will get. Unfortunately, unlike basic medical procedures at UIHC, no one will ever have visibility to the resulting damage, or to Harreld’s manifest responsibility for same. Like Robillard, however, any improvements in UI’s ratings will be touted as success, even as key parts of the school rot.
So deeply has Harreld managed to burrow his self-invented mandate that the new UI Five-Year Strategic Plan — which Harreld initially tried to rush through in only a matter of weeks, after the previous plan took over a year — specifically defines Harreld’s obsession as a long-term objective:
A newly released draft planning document for the University of Iowa calls for building on UI’s innovative history — and its “will to dare” — as the university strives “to recover its status as a top-20 public research university.”
“The Hawkeye will to dare is rooted in students, faculty and staff who have resolutely tackled the hurdles of the past and who will boldly face the challenges of today and tomorrow,” reads the preface to “The University of Iowa Strategic Plan, 2016-2021.”
U.S. News and World Report ranks UI as 34th among the nation’s 629 public universities and as 82nd among all 2,474 American four-year universities.
Fortuitously, scholars have actually researched what it takes to raise a university’s ranking from the mid-thirties to top-twenty:
If it wanted to move into the top 20, [the University of] Rochester would have to do a lot on several of the various factors U.S. News uses to rank colleges. To move up one spot because of faculty compensation, Rochester would have to increase the average faculty salary by about $10,000. To move up one spot on resources provided to students, it would have to spend $12,000 more per student. Those two things alone would cost $112 million a year.
To get into the top 20, [it] would also have to increase its graduation rate by 2 percent, enroll more students who were in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class, get more alumni to give, cut the acceptance rate and increase the SAT and ACT scores of incoming students. Some of those things, like offering aid money to highly qualified students, might further increase the expense.
But that’s not all, the paper argues. Rochester would still have to do well in the rankings magazine’s “beauty contest.”
Because 15 percent of the ranking is based on reputation among other administrators, even massive expenditures year after year and huge leaps in student quality and graduation would not be enough. The reputation score as judged by its peers would need to increase from 3.4 to 4.2 on a scale of 5, something that has only a .01 percent chance of happening, the paper said.
It is inevitable that there will be parasitical publications ranking everything under the sun, including colleges and universities. The single most critical defense against the toxicity of such rankings, however, is leadership which protects the parts of the school which are not measured, but which are still important. Instead, the two corrupt administrators who went out of their way to run a fraudulent presidential search in 2015 ended up hiring a man whose sole administrative vision is gaming the University of Iowa’s national college rank by any available means.
Administering to a school ranking is as derelict as teaching to a test. It is an admission of incompetence, if not a declaration of outright hostility to the entire premise of education. Any college or university president who devotes time, attention and critical resources to gaming their school ranking is demonstrating not leadership but salesmanship, and fully embracing the mantra of marketing over the obligation of teaching students how to think and learn. Unfortunately, because he is an inveterate snob, J. Bruce Harreld sees the world only in terms of “world class” and failure, meaning anything that is not “world class” might as well go in the trash. (And by “world class” Harreld of course means ‘good for UI’s national ranking’.)
About the only positive difference between Robillard and Harreld is that Harreld’s narrow-minded focus on rankings probably won’t kill anybody. What it will do, however, is short-change students on the education they could have gotten in exchange for funding Harreld’s self-aggrandizing pursuit of a meaningless number. And yet given Harreld’s long history as a marketing weasel, as well as the fact the he had no prior experience in academic administration when he was hired, it can’t even be said that his obsession is a surprise. What is clear is that anyone who has remotely considered spending time and money on improving a school’s U.S. News ranking has concluded that doing so is a mistake.
Here is what the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) — an advocacy group whose board of directors is a rogue’s gallery I would not expect to agree with on any issue — had to say about the appointment of J. Bruce Harreld, on 09/04/15:
Higher education is facing many challenges and institutions wedded to the status quo will have a bleak future. Governance for a new era requires boards to be laser-focused on examining candidates from inside and outside academic circles. The ranks of business and government offer many, excellent individuals committed to higher education who have been and are excellent presidents—Mitch Daniels at Purdue, David Boren at the University of Oklahoma, Hank Brown at the University of Colorado, Arthur Rothkopf at Lafayette, to name only a few.
Rigidity at a time of immense change is counterproductive and, sadly, a reason that public confidence in higher education is declining as higher education faces challenges of both quality and cost. The Regents are to be commended; this search process with four publicly-announced finalists is noteworthy for its inclusiveness and transparency when most searches simply put one candidate forward.
While ACTA probably did not know that Harreld was fraudulently appointed, or that Mitch Daniels would play a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t role in Harreld’s sham hire, it’s worth noting that ACTA’s views on the gaming college rankings, and specifically the U.S. News & World Report rankings, are quite clear. From 09/09/14:
The (in)famous US News & World Report annual college rankings list is out.
This year’s rankings were accompanied by a brief discussion of the many issues currently plaguing the minds of prospective students and their families. From student loan debt to high unemployment among recent grads, there’s a lot to worry about. That, US News concludes, is “why choosing a college that fits academically and financially is so important.”
Yet, despite drawing attention to academic outcomes and soaring tuition, US News makes its ranking decisions with an eye not to these issues but to a school’s selectivity and reputation. And as ACTA’s Vice President of Policy Michael Poliakoff explains in a statement today: “Reputation, student selectivity and alumni donations have very little to do with whether a student will receive a solid education and be ready for career and citizenship.”
(Other entertaining ACTA reads include Study the Liberal Arts: You Can Get a Job!, and the essential America Has to Stop Paying Lip Service to STEM.)
If J. Bruce Harreld’s obsessive interest in Iowa’s national ranking lies outside the bounds of ACTA’s ideology, it can safely be said that Harreld himself is the outlier. And yet his fetish isn’t really surprising given that one thing bonding Rastetter, Robillard and Harreld together is their fixation on exploiting every aspect of higher education for profit, as opposed to student (or patient) outcomes. Which may be why the other thing those three men have in common is that they all lied and cheated in order to give J. Bruce Harreld the job he now holds, which he could not have acquired honestly on the merits of his own candidacy. (If you know anyone at ACTA, they might want to know that their poster boy for transformational change turned out to be a sham in more ways than one.)
UI’s flirted with “get a degree without hardly going to college” arrangements before; they vanish pretty fast because in the end the kids figure out they’re garbage. It doesn’t hurt that everyone they talk to from secretaries to full professors tells them that yes, the program exists, but is basically hooey and a bad idea if they want to get into a reasonable grad program. I can see Robillard trying to set up a deal that’ll guarantee kids admission to med school if they do well in the 3-year baloney program — they like pluses in these things, so maybe it’ll be a 3+3, three years of undergrad and three years in med school — but I don’t know where you’re supposed to go from there. In the end you still have to do a residency, and you’re competing with everyone else, so you actually have to be at least as competent as the next frightening fresh grad. If you aren’t, the residency institutions will figure it out pretty fast.
If you actually look at med school curricula, it does at first blush look like there’s plenty to cut. I mean how often will your GP have to consider biochemical aspects of your illness, rilly? Or read path slides? Or, or, or. But the answer is “depends on how much he or she really wants to save your life”, because medicine is still a generalist’s game. Knowing a lot about a lot is still important. Otherwise…well, otherwise your ranking is Worst.
The other thing is that boosterism only goes so far. I came here from a place that was well aware of its own cruddiness. Iowa, when I got here, wasn’t at all cruddy. Really pretty darn well-maintained. But the boosterism generated in a time like that does eventually run out, and people do figure it out, especially in a time of rapid communication with Outside. Where a game like that ends is in massive brain drain, leaving those who genuinely can’t go anyplace else standing around in a circle hung with banners and assuring themselves of how great they are anyway, if unappreciated, and lamenting the fact that the feds are on their backs and not giving them money. I mean you can just drive straight south and see what it looks like.
What would be helpful, though, is for Jeff or Vanessa to do a nice story on those subscores.
At the national level it’s been a little frightening seeing how easy it really is for a fascist movement to take hold. (Were it not for democracy and the free press, I have no doubt that Trump supporters would have already organized themselves into local bands of enforcers, roughing people up who disagreed with them.)
At the state level, I’m still gobsmacked by the pervasive corruption coming from Branstad and his machine — which includes Rastetter and the regents. There is no real oversight, and as a result there is no accountability.
Locally, at UI, my biggest disappointment is how eager people in key positions of power were to either participate in the hijacking of the presidency, or to simply go along to get along. This was not a routine expression of political power in an administrative context, it was a theft — a hijacking — of millions of dollars in salary alone.
I don’t know who will finally put all that together in the press, but somebody will, and when they do it will stick. Even if no new facts are disclosed, there’s already enough in play to bring these people down.
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David and Catherine Meinen say palliative care has helped them cope with their daughter Zoe's medical conditions. Zoe (far right) with her siblings Camden and Hannah.
Palliative Care Doctor Helps Empower Families
After shifting from emergency medicine to palliative care, Patricia O’Malley, MD, helps make the lives of very ill children like Zoe Meinen happier and more comfortable.
Published 4 years ago by Jennifer Nejman Bohonak in Children, Patient Care
After 31 years in the Pediatric Emergency Department at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, Patricia O’Malley, MD, has shifted her considerable energy to the hospital’s Pediatric Palliative Care Service, where she is trying to make life better for children who are facing serious illness or lifespan limiting conditions.
The physician will help parents feel empowered to make medical decisions that could improve the quality of their child’s life.
Palliative Care Inspiration
Even in the emergency department, Dr. O’Malley often worked with such families. “I loved being the doctor children with serious, life-limiting illnesses saw again and again,” says Dr. O’Malley, who co-founded the pediatric emergency department and served for 25 years as its director. “These families inspired me to become a palliative care physician.”
Patricia O’Malley, MD, with Zoe Meinen during a recent hospitalization.
During her years in the emergency department, Dr. O’Malley also trained in pediatric palliative care and gained her certification in the field. “I think of palliative care as the art and science of using our medical knowledge to enhance joy, comfort, autonomy, safety and meaning in children’s lives when their future is uncertain,” she explains.
Friends say Dr. O’Malley is perfectly suited to provide such care. “Pat has always had the time to listen to both the child and the parent,” says Paula O’Keeffe, a longstanding emergency department volunteer and an MGHfC donor. “Docs who listen are also very kind, and Pat embodies kindness.”
Quality of Life Focus
Catherine and David Meinen learned as much when they met with Dr. O’Malley about their 6-year-old daughter, Zoe, who had been diagnosed with an extremely rare, and often fatal, brain tumor at age 3.
As a result of the tumor, and the chemotherapy and radiation used to treat it, Zoe became severely disabled, and she experienced terrible psychological trauma and physical pain for three grueling years. Zoe was symptomatic so frequently that she was constantly eligible for hospitalization, tests, and treatments. She experienced so many side effects, though, that her quality of life, and the quality of life for her whole family, decreased rather than improved.
“I think of palliative care as the art and science of using our medical knowledge to enhance joy, comfort, autonomy, safety and meaning in children’s lives when their future is uncertain.”
Catherine wanted to try integrating a palliative care approach, but David was skeptical and thought it meant giving up the fight for their daughter’s life.
Looking Beyond Crisis
To explain such care, Dr. O’Malley and Sandra Clancy, patient advocate and program manager for the Pediatric Palliative Care Service, visited the family in their home. Dr. O’Malley posed the question, “Given the medical realities, what do you want Zoe’s life to look like?” The Meinens say they had never considered that they had any control over what Zoe’s life could look like – they had always just tackled one medical crisis after another.
“Dr. O’Malley told us, ‘You don’t have to diagnose and treat every symptom if you think it will decrease Zoe’s quality of life,’ “ Catherine recalls.
Then, Dr. O’Malley scheduled a meeting with Zoe’s parents and medical team, including specialists in palliative care, pain management, psychiatry, oncology and neurology, and they made a plan of care.
Patricia O’Malley, MD, with hospital leaders, (from left) Ronald Kleinman, MD, physician-in-chief of MGHfC; Ari Cohen, MD, chief, division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, and David Brown, MD, chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Later, when Zoe was taken to Mass General’s Emergency Department for severe respiratory distress, David Ebb, MD, Zoe’s oncologist, was so dedicated to protecting Zoe and her family from the trauma of unwanted medical interventions, that he proactively informed the team of the family’s desire to decide on all interventions, rather than be subjected to protocols, even if Zoe’s life was in danger.
Empowered for Better Choices
Subsequently in the pediatric ICU, Catherine was invited to meet with the attending physicians during shift changes to discuss potential scenarios and interventions so that the incoming team was aware of the integrated palliative approach. Dr. O’Malley explained medical information, including life-supporting medicines and machines. These actions made Catherine feel very safe in such a precarious situation.
Both David and Catherine say they wish it were protocol for a palliative care physician to be present when a family is learning that their child has a condition that is likely to involve severe, chronic trauma or be life-limiting. They believe this would have empowered them to make better choices for their family from the very beginning.
To celebrate the quality of life Dr. O’Malley made possible for Zoe, the thankful family recently hosted a fundraiser for MGHfC’s pediatric palliative care program.
You can support the Pediatric Palliative Care program by making a donation online. For more information about supporting the pediatric palliative care program, please contact us.
Editor’s note: After the publication of this story, Zoe Meinen passed away peacefully at home, in her parents’ arms on Feb. 7, 2016. Catherine and David Meinen request that donations in Zoe’s memory be made to the Pediatric Palliative Care program.
Support Pediatric Palliative Care
Your donation will help enhance joy, comfort, autonomy, safety and meaning in children’s lives.
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Ankara Should Learn from Pakistan (Pakistan Observer)
M D Nalapat
Friday, December 19, 2014 - General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq was a pious soldier, very different from the whiskey-swilling Yahya Khan, who ran Pakistan before Z A Bhutto took over following the war with India. Certainly such piety is to be applauded, but when a similar mindset is sought to be imposed by the use of state power on the whole of population, problems erupt. The reality is that we are human beings and are therefore far from perfect. Each of us, even those regarded as “good” or “very good” have character flaws. When the Day of Judgment arrives, each of us will be judged as what we are, human beings, and it will not be expected that any of us will be perfect. The good and the bad will be judged not in accordance with criteria enunciated by those claiming to understand and interpret divine but by standards unknown to human beings and indeed not understood by them.
Those people are wrong who believe that human beings can be made perfect, or that personal piety as defined by scholars is sufficient to enable entry into the heavenly space. Even the “imperfect” may qualify, if they have enough good qualities inside themselves, enough faith and devotion, and good deeds done without a selfish motive. Faith and devotion can be shown even by those who do not follow the rules of piety laid out by scholars, for after all, the measures used on Judgment Day are unknown to the human mind. Some of the most productive individuals in the world - including poets and writers - have followed the example of Yahya Khan rather than Zia where alchohol is concerned. As for dress, it is not the outer wear but the inner self which defines purity or otherwise. Even if a young lady wears denims, she may be innocent while a lady wearing a dress approved by some scholars as suitable for women to wear may be less than innocent in reality. An individual who abstains from temptations considered negative may yet do harm to humanity, while an individual with a more liberated lifestyle (such as a scientist) may do much good.
It is no accident that those countries with a high degree of personal freedom are usually those countries where much intellectual progress is made. The more laws get passed to restrict activity, the less room there will be for innovation and enterprise. While laws should certainly be passed and enforced for acts such as violence or trickery, personal behaviour that does not negatively impact others ought to be left to the personal choice of the individual. Few of the societies with highly restrictive laws have much success in ensuring that citizens obey their dictates.
The war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan added fuel to General Zia’s efforts to convert the population of Pakistan into models of what he regarded as piety. These days, there is much condemnation from NATO member-states of the activities of armed religious extremists in locations across the world, but in the 1980s,President Ronald Reagan gave speeches backing armed struggle of the sort that was being waged in Afghanistan. Religious passions were whipped up by skilful use of school curricula as well as lirerature created for the purpose. Hundreds of thousands of youths were sent to war in Afghanistan, where finally the Soviet Union had to admit defeat and retreat.
However, afterwards, many such individuals and the groups they had joined took on a more fanatic hue, and the results are obvious. While the example of Yahya Khan is an unsuitable precedent to follow, there is little doubt that rule under the more modern and moderate Ayub Khan was ultimately better for Pakistan than several of the changes introduced by General Zia. Had millions of young minds in Pakistan been taught modern education,the country would have been in the lead of the knowledge revolution. Violence is evil, and needs to be condemned. Only a state where there is security of life and freedom of the individual makes the progress needed to ensure that its citizens constantly improve their lives. In the GCC, it is no accident that Dubai is a much more attractive investment destination than Riyadh or Teheran, or that ordinary citizens in Kuwait have a better quality of life than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia.
This has been said more than a decade ago and bears repetition: “Sabahism” (moderate rule) is better than “Wahabbism”. The people of a country should have the freedom to choose rather than be dictated to Interestingly, while the first took over power via the military and the second has been elected to office, the example of General Zia is being followed by Recip Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who too is seeking to make the people of his country more piouis, of course based on his own ideas of what piety entails. Just as Zia made Pakistan the reliable partner of those fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Erdogan has made Turkey the most important backer of the armed groups fighting against Bashar Assad in Syria. Ankara gives various kinds of assistance to such groups and does so openly. The problem is that a fighter who is “moderate” this month may sign up with “extremists” the next month, after he has been given cash and weapons. Days ago in Aleppo, ISIS got control of a huge stockpile of weapons that had been given by NATO and its regional partners to the “moderate opposition” to Assad.
The fact is that much of this “moderate” force switched sides to ISIS as soon as they entered the environs of Aleppo from Turkey. The US-UK policy of arming the “moderate opposition” is ensuring that a plentiful supply of advanced weapons falls into the hands of ISIS soon after such weapons get distributed by the anti-Assad coalition. Indeed, several fighters active in beheadings and enslavement in Syria and Iraq are sending their families across the border into Turkey and Jordan to be looked after in refugee camps, while they themselves fight. Those who get wounded cross over to Turkey, get medical attention and return to the battlefield as soon as they are fit.
Turkey has become as important for extremist fighters in Syria and Iraq as Pakistan was to the fighters battling the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And just as there has been a deadly blowback to Pakistan from Zia’s policy, in a few years Turkey will suffer an increasingly toxic blowback from its policy of assisting extremists against regimes regarded with hostility by Erdogan. And just as the US backed Zia, Washington is now standing alongside the Turkish President. Hopefully,Ankara will realize before it is too late that empowering fanatics is a short-sighted policy for any democracy to follow. Erdogan needs to move away from General Zia’s path and return to Kemalism.
http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=258374
Richard C. Lambert 23 March 2017 at 17:06
I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.
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Gujarat victory critical for Modi (Pakistan Observer)
Geopolitical Notes From India | M D Nalapat
ELECTRONIC voting machines (EVMs) are geared towards generating results much faster than paper ballots, yet in India, election results get released days and sometimes weeks after polling. In contrast, the United States voter usually knows within hours of the close of polling as to which candidate is the winner. During the November 8,2016 Presidential elections, assuming Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got some sleep that night, by morning it was evident that the Democratic nominee had lost. Despite having worked for the prize for nine years before 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the nomination to Barack Obama and the election to Donald Trump.
The US election system is complex, with several millions of ballots having to be counted, and yet results are declared within hours. Why EVMs are transported to sundry locations and thereafter stored for considerable periods of time in other places is another of the myriad administrative procedures extant in India that make no sense to the rational mind. Add to this the assumption by the Election Commission of India (EC) that the average voter is the most impressionable human being on the planet, and it will be understood why elections to the state assembly have taken place in Himachal Pradesh (HP) some weeks ago, but the results will be declared only on December 18, together with the Gujarat results.
The Election Commission believes that the declaration of results for HP would so influence the mind of voters in Gujarat as to somehow gravely affect the result. The fact is that election campaigns in a democracy are meant to influence minds rather than put people to sleep (as they would, if each of the EC’s many formal and advisory regulations concerning the conduct of campaigning were to get carried out not only in letter but in spirit. The EC has not explained the expert psychiatrists and psychologists it would have consulted to determine that voters in Gujarat would be so powerfully affected by election results in Himachal Pradesh as to suddenly swerve from the preferences they would have held earlier. Commonsense indicates that the voter can be trusted to digest information about other poll battles and yet calmly exercise her or his franchise. But commonsense is not a favoured virtue within the dovecotes of bureaucracy, where colonial-era perceptions about the population co-exist with colonial-era laws, practices and procedures. The Constitution of India mandates that the country should be socialist. Every leader swears by Mahatma Gandhi. Even the present Prime Minister, Narendra Damodardas Modi, is a fervent admirer of the leader from Porbander, making it a point to pay homage to a statue of the Mahatma if he finds one in any country he visits. Mahatma Gandhi lived a very simple life, whether it be his diet (squashed vegetables and occasionally coarse cereal) or his places of stay, which were often huts in the poorer parts of the city he was visiting. In contrast, ministerial bungalows in Lutyens Delhi that are occupied by the successors to the British colonial masters are the same as were the official residences of the “sahibs” whose era was thought to have ended on August 15, 1947. Googling “Nalapat Saraph” may reveal the extensive research carried out by Dr Anupam Saraph and this columnist on the subject of election fraud through tampering with electronic voting machines. Even if the machine shows on a screen the party the voter chose in the booth, that is not fail-safe, as it is possible to still introduce trojans that ensure (for example) that every other vote for a particular party (or every fifth vote) gets transferred to another party.
The only reliable method is to ensure a paper receipt for each vote, that can latter be tallied in case of doubt about the results. Although corruption is not unknown within the higher bureaucracy, it has traditionally been assumed that the bureaucrats manning the Election Commission of India are not just honest but masters of such technical subjects as the inner workings of electronic voting machines (EVMs). The EC has time and again assured the populace that EVMs are tamper-proof and that the lengthy period between casting ballots and knowing the result does not in any way vitiate the tally of votes cast by electors in each poll. That is fortunate, for in states with a high degree of literacy and awareness such as Gujarat, any result other than that reflecting the will of the people would generate a storm of protest, the way Z A Bhutto’s victory in the 1977 polls created an upwelling of anger that cleared way for Chief of Army Staff General Zia ul-Haq to remove Prime Minister of Pakistan from office.
Largely because of a decline in the rate of growth and the consequent public disquiet that this has caused, the Congress Party senses the chance for a comeback victory in a state that has been the fief of the BJP for two decades. However, the party in power in both the centre as well as in the state has a powerful weapon in the form of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is still far and away the most popular politician yet in the country, with many more people being counted among his ardent admirers than those who strongly oppose him. These perceptions will make a difference in the polls, as the BJP will need to ensure that its supporters feel sufficiently enthused to go out and vote rather than remain at home, especially because those against the Prime Minister seem motivated enough to cast their ballots in large numbers. Even if the BJP has a natural majority in the state, that would not be an effective majority unless the level of participation in polling of its supporters is as high as that of backers of the Congress Party.
Winning Gujarat is essential for Prime Minister Modi, to ensure that his party remains on the front foot for the 2019 national polls. But even a good showing (although short of a majority) by the Congress Party would be seen as a plus for Brand Rahul. However, the incoming President of the Congress Party will need to retain power in Karnataka state elections early next year, to prove that the Congress Party under his leadership can stop the Modi juggernaut in a manner that Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi failed to achieve. Gujarat and Karnataka are two state elections that are of overwhelming importance for both Prime Minister Modi as well as his prime challenger, incoming Congress President Rahul Gandhi.
https://pakobserver.net/gujarat-victory-critical-modi/
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