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For three decades, the annual SXSW Festival has been rooted in discovery and innovation – be it new technologies, music, art, films, brands, burritos and beyond. ’47 joined Texas A&M University, a top international institution, in their activation that keeps this theme alive during the 2017 SXSW Interactive Conference. It wouldn’t be SXSW –– or Austin, Texas –– without ample live music and culture, so ’47 was thrilled to help inject these elements into the Texas A&M House, as the University’s sports lifestyle partner. In their takeover of the eclectic Hotel Van Zandt off Rainey Street, Texas A&M hosted the ’47 x FADER Sessions – a showcase of seminal music talent from a range of genres. By tapping into The FADER gurus, we were able to curate groundbreaking, discoverable new artists in the space, who performed live sets in front of a science-experiment-like backdrop.
The stage design was built to emphasize the live experience of a small club; we created a "speaker forest" comprised of vintage guitar amps, reel-to-reels, and old stereo components. We then reduced the standing room by half, to create a more intimate connection with the artist and visitor. The result was an experience which put up and coming artists within reach of their fans.
One of our goals for this activation was to produce short videos of each performance along with interviews with the artists. With the help of visual artist SAMO (http://samokerstromlang.com) we were able to create unique animations for each artist, which helped diversify the palette for each stage performance.
Marketing materials consisted of band posters and social posts which call back to the "speaker forest."
The set was dressed with large format prints of a gymnasium. These facilities house a range of sporting events which is what '47 is all about, but also hosts music. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video was a source of inspiration for us. Rather than searching for images of a gym, we built one in 3D which allowed us to brand it and adjust the camera to find abstract angles for the prints. We then "remixed" the images to a distorted half-tone to allow the images to fall into the background and change with the lighting.
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Launching Leadership In a Community School
FLDOE SPAR report
Title I - Parent and Family Engagement
Arrival and Dismissal Procedures
Edward H. White Leadership
Traci B. Battest, Principal
Jacksonville, Florida native Traci Bryant Battest is a graduate of the historical William Marion Raines High School. She earned a baccalaureate degree from one of the nation’s top historical institutions—Florida A&M University—before earning her master’s degree in education supervision and administration. Today, Battest makes history as the first woman to serve as principal of Edward H. White High School in Duval County. She started her career as a classroom teacher at Robert E. Lee High School and then Andrew Jackson. After seven years of stellar performance in the classroom, she was promoted to district curriculum specialist for mathematics and then to assistant principal of Englewood and Ed White high schools. We honor Traci Bryant Battest for her contribution to the field of education and for holding strong to her philosophy that all children deserve a world-class education.
1700 OLD MIDDLEBURG RD N
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Home » FILM
A Goofy Reality
By Andy Klein on May 15, 2015 in FILM
I’m here to talk about Quentin’s new movie.
Calm down: I don’t mean Quentin Tarantino’s heavily embargoed Hateful Eight, but rather Quentin Dupieux’s latest, Reality. Mr. Dupieux is not quite as well known as Mr. Tarantino — and it’s very unlikely he ever will be — but his vastly different oeuvre is singular and worthy of your time.
Dupieux got some attention back in 2011 with his second feature, Rubber — a heartwarming tale of a tire gone bad . . . a serial killer tire. He rolls around the High Desert, looking for victims. When he finds one, he starts vibrating in a sinister manner that has the power to blow up things and people. Meanwhile, several human observers, peering through binoculars, are watching the tire’s progress as a movie or performance piece, even when their reality interacts with the tire’s reality.
On one level, Reality is named after a preteen girl (Kyla Kenedy), who is sometimes presented as your basic sixth-grader and other times as an actress playing a sixth-grader. Every once in a while, our views of the sixth-grader are revealed as rushes from a movie directed by one Zog (John Glover), who shoots hours of footage of Reality (or the actress playing her) sleeping, waiting for . . . something.
Meanwhile, Bob (Jonathan Lambert, above right), the producer of Zog’s film, promises local TV cameraman Jason Tantra (Alain Chabat, above left) that he’ll back Jason’s dream project — about alien televisions causing humans’ heads to explode — only if Jason can record the greatest groan in cinema history. This distracts Jason from his day job on a cooking show that’s already falling behind schedule, because the host (Jon Heder) insists he is itching from horrible eczema rashes . . . which he doesn’t have.
Reality recovers a videocassette from the innards of a hog her father has killed and butchered, but none of the adults lets her watch it, because there can’t be a videocassette in a hog’s innards.
By the time Reality is over, the various worlds have intersected, time may or may not be occurring in a loop, Jason starts running into a doppelganger (and possibly a trippelganger), and scenes that we think are real are interrupted suddenly when their main character wakes up from what is now revealed as a nightmare.
If it’s not obvious, Reality is really goofy and almost always entertaining, particularly if (like me) you’re a metahead and can’t get enough of universes that are nestled like Russian dolls.
Rubber was simply like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Reality doesn’t top that, partly because it is like some things we’ve seen before — i.e., the later films of Luis Buñuel, movies like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. That’s not an easy comparison to live up to. While those Buñuel masterpieces are just as wacky, they feel very carefully constructed. Reality feels as though Dupieux shot whatever came into his head and then assembled the fragments after the fact.
—Andy Klein
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Pleasant Ford Agee
M, b. 21 May 1806, d. 6 November 1866
Birth*: Pleasant Ford Agee was born on 21 May 1806 at Virginia.
Marriage*: He married Mary E. Thomas on 20 January 1831 at Virginia.
Death*: Pleasant Ford Agee died in Macon County, Missouri, on 6 November 1866, at the age of 60.
Father*: John Agee b. 1749, d. 1810
Mary E. Thomas b. 2 May 1813, d. 30 Jun 1893
Joseph Booker Agee+ b. 20 Jan 1841, d. 19 Aug 1910
Mary E. Thomas
F, b. 2 May 1813, d. 30 June 1893
Birth*: Mary E. Thomas was born on 2 May 1813 at Virginia.
Marriage*: She married Pleasant Ford Agee, son of John Agee, on 20 January 1831 at Virginia.
Death*: Mary E. Thomas died in Macon County, Missouri, on 30 June 1893, at the age of 80.
Pleasant Ford Agee b. 21 May 1806, d. 6 Nov 1866
Joseph Booker Agee
M, b. 20 January 1841, d. 19 August 1910
Birth*: Joseph Booker Agee was born on 20 January 1841 at Indiana.
Marriage*: He married Amelia Herrin.
Death*: Joseph Booker Agee died on 19 August 1910, at the age of 69.
Father*: Pleasant Ford Agee b. 21 May 1806, d. 6 Nov 1866
Mother*: Mary E. Thomas b. 2 May 1813, d. 30 Jun 1893
Amelia Herrin b. 10 Apr 1838, d. 4 Jul 1913
Celsus Price Agee+ b. 10 May 1866, d. 2 Jul 1933
John Lasvages Agee b. 8 Feb 1871
Allen Mattling Agee+ b. 26 Jan 1879, d. 6 Mar 1955
Henry Booker Agee+ b. 26 Mar 1883
Amelia Herrin
F, b. 10 April 1838, d. 4 July 1913
Birth*: Amelia Herrin was born on 10 April 1838 at Missouri.
Marriage*: She married Joseph Booker Agee, son of Pleasant Ford Agee and Mary E. Thomas.
Death*: Amelia Herrin died on 4 July 1913, at the age of 75.
Joseph Booker Agee b. 20 Jan 1841, d. 19 Aug 1910
Celsus Price Agee
M, b. 10 May 1866, d. 2 July 1933
Birth*: Celsus Price Agee was born on 10 May 1866 at Elmer, Macon County, Missouri.
Marriage*: He married Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" Franks on 15 December 1889.
Death*: Celsus Price Agee died in Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon, on 2 July 1933, at the age of 67.
Burial*: He was buried on 7 July 1933 in Kamiah Cemetery at Kamiah, Lewis County, Idaho.
Census*: He appeared on the census of 6 July 1900 at Stuart, Idaho County, Idaho.
Father*: Joseph Booker Agee b. 20 Jan 1841, d. 19 Aug 1910
Mother*: Amelia Herrin b. 10 Apr 1838, d. 4 Jul 1913
Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" Franks b. 30 Oct 1868, d. 30 Jun 1954
Lula Agee b. 13 Oct 1890
Ray Agee b. 10 Oct 1893
Ruby Agee b. 8 Oct 1898
Gwendolyn Agee b. 4 Apr 1906, d. 3 Jan 1917
Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" Franks
F, b. 30 October 1868, d. 30 June 1954
Birth*: Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" Franks was born on 30 October 1868.
Marriage*: She married Celsus Price Agee, son of Joseph Booker Agee and Amelia Herrin, on 15 December 1889.
Death*: Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" Franks died on 30 June 1954, at the age of 85.
Burial*: She was buried after 30 June 1954 in Kamiah Cemetery at Kamiah, Lewis County, Idaho.
(Witness) Census: She appeared on the census of 6 July 1900 in the household of Celsus Price Agee at Stuart, Idaho County, Idaho.
Celsus Price Agee b. 10 May 1866, d. 2 Jul 1933
Allen Mattling Agee
M, b. 26 January 1879, d. 6 March 1955
Birth*: Allen Mattling Agee was born on 26 January 1879 at Elmer, Macon County, Missouri.
Marriage*: He married Iola Smith on 8 December 1905.
Death*: Allen Mattling Agee died in Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon, on 6 March 1955, at the age of 76.
Burial*: He was buried on 8 March 1955 in Greenwood Cemetery at Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon.
(Witness) Census: He appeared on the census of 6 July 1900 in the household of Celsus Price Agee at Stuart, Idaho County, Idaho.
Census: Allen Mattling Agee appeared on the census of 29 April 1910 at Glover, Idaho County, Idaho.
Census: He appeared on the census of 22 January 1920 at Kooskia, Idaho County, Idaho.
Census*: He appeared on the census of 11 April 1930 at Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon.
(Informant) Death: He was the informant on the death certificate of Celsus Price Agee on 2 July 1933 listed as Allen M. Agee, 1424 Davenport, Bend, OR.
Iola Smith d. 29 Apr 1967
Marriage*: Allen Mattling Agee married Iola Smith on 8 December 1905.
Deloma V. Agee+ b. 3 Sep 1907
Evelyn Monell Agee b. 26 Jan 1912, d. 16 May 1996
Iola Smith
F, d. 29 April 1967
Marriage*: Iola Smith married Allen Mattling Agee, son of Joseph Booker Agee and Amelia Herrin, on 8 December 1905.
Death*: Iola Smith died in Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon, on 29 April 1967.
(Witness) Census: She appeared on the census of 29 April 1910 in the household of Allen Mattling Agee at Glover, Idaho County, Idaho.
(Witness) Census: Iola Smith appeared on the census of 22 January 1920 in the household of Allen Mattling Agee at Kooskia, Idaho County, Idaho.
(Witness) Census: Iola Smith appeared on the census of 11 April 1930 in the household of Allen Mattling Agee at Bend, Deschutes County, Oregon.
Allen Mattling Agee b. 26 Jan 1879, d. 6 Mar 1955
William Agee
M, b. 21 April 1777
Birth*: William Agee was born on 21 April 1777.
Marriage*: He married Mary Anne Childress on 10 September 1796.
Father*: Isaac Godwin Agee b. 30 Dec 1752, d. Sep 1845
Mary Anne Childress b. 24 Nov 1775, d. 26 Mar 1835
Isaac Agee+ b. 8 Mar 1802
Mary Anne Childress
Birth*: Mary Anne Childress was born on 24 November 1775 at Tennessee.
Marriage*: She married William Agee, son of Isaac Godwin Agee, on 10 September 1796.
Death*: Mary Anne Childress died on 26 March 1835, at the age of 59.
William Agee b. 21 Apr 1777
Isaac Agee
Birth*: Isaac Agee was born on 8 March 1802 at Virginia.
Marriage*: He married Hannah Bounds.
Father*: William Agee b. 21 Apr 1777
Mother*: Mary Anne Childress b. 24 Nov 1775, d. 26 Mar 1835
Hannah Bounds d. 9 Mar 1864
John Bounds Agee+ b. 27 Oct 1837, d. 8 Aug 1905
Hannah Bounds
F, d. 9 March 1864
Marriage*: Hannah Bounds married Isaac Agee, son of William Agee and Mary Anne Childress.
Death*: Hannah Bounds died on 9 March 1864.
Isaac Agee b. 8 Mar 1802
John Bounds Agee
M, b. 27 October 1837, d. 8 August 1905
Birth*: John Bounds Agee was born on 27 October 1837 at Missouri.
Marriage*: He married Sarah M. Long (?) on 16 December 1858.
Marriage*: John Bounds Agee married Martha Elizabeth Hart.
Death*: John Bounds Agee died in Mountain Grove, Wright County, Missouri, on 8 August 1905, at the age of 67.
Father*: Isaac Agee b. 8 Mar 1802
Mother*: Hannah Bounds d. 9 Mar 1864
Sarah M. Long (?) b. 22 Jul 1842, d. 4 May 1873
Martha Elizabeth Hart b. 3 Apr 1858
Harry Agee b. 14 Oct 1891, d. 11 Jun 1921
Floyd Agee b. 25 Feb 1894
Sarah M. Long (?)
F, b. 22 July 1842, d. 4 May 1873
Birth*: Sarah M. Long (?) was born on 22 July 1842.
Marriage*: She married John Bounds Agee, son of Isaac Agee and Hannah Bounds, on 16 December 1858.
Death*: Sarah M. Long (?) died on 4 May 1873, at the age of 30.
John Bounds Agee b. 27 Oct 1837, d. 8 Aug 1905
Martha Elizabeth Hart
F, b. 3 April 1858
Birth*: Martha Elizabeth Hart was born on 3 April 1858 at Missouri.
Marriage*: She married John Bounds Agee, son of Isaac Agee and Hannah Bounds.
Harry Agee
M, b. 14 October 1891, d. 11 June 1921
Birth*: Harry Agee was born on 14 October 1891 at Missouri.
Death*: He died in Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon, on 11 June 1921, at the age of 29.
Burial*: He was buried on 17 June 1921 at Mountain Grove, Wright County, Missouri.
Father*: John Bounds Agee b. 27 Oct 1837, d. 8 Aug 1905
Mother*: Martha Elizabeth Hart b. 3 Apr 1858
Floyd Agee
M, b. 25 February 1894
Birth*: Floyd Agee was born on 25 February 1894.
(Informant) Death: He was the informant on the death certificate of Harry Agee on 11 June 1921 listed as Floyd Agee of Worland, Wyoming.
Robert Moore Agee
M, b. 3 July 1888, d. 11 December 1944
Birth*: Robert Moore Agee was born on 3 July 1888 at Pomeroy, Garfield County, Washington.
Marriage*: He married Nellie May Frogge on 8 May 1910 at Dayton, Columbia County, Washington.
Death*: Robert Moore Agee died in San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, on 11 December 1944, at the age of 56.
(Witness) Census: He appeared on the census of 15 June 1900 in the household of John William Agee at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Robert Moore Agee appeared on the census of 9 May 1910 in the household of John William Agee at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
Census: Robert Moore Agee appeared on the census of 1917 at Nez Perce County, Idaho.
Census: He appeared on the census of 7 January 1920 at Walla Walla, Walla Walla County, Washington.
Census: He appeared on the census of 19 January 1920 at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
Census*: He appeared on the census of 15 April 1930 at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon.
Father*: John William Agee b. 29 Oct 1845, d. 29 Jul 1935
Mother*: Elvira Jane Holt b. 26 Oct 1861, d. 24 Jul 1916
Nellie May Frogge b. 14 Jan 1894, d. 10 Feb 1965
Clay Monroe Agee+ b. 29 Apr 1911, d. 9 Dec 1962
Elbert Edwin Agee b. 17 Feb 1913, d. 2 Apr 1967
Nellie May Frogge
F, b. 14 January 1894, d. 10 February 1965
Birth*: Nellie May Frogge was born on 14 January 1894 at Missouri.
Marriage*: She married Robert Moore Agee, son of John William Agee and Elvira Jane Holt, on 8 May 1910 at Dayton, Columbia County, Washington.
Death*: Nellie May Frogge died in Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon, on 10 February 1965, at the age of 71.
Burial*: She was buried on 13 February 1965 in Ocean View Cemetery at Warrenton, Clatsop County, Oregon.
(Witness) Census: She appeared on the census of 7 January 1920 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Walla Walla, Walla Walla County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Nellie May Frogge appeared on the census of 19 January 1920 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Nellie May Frogge appeared on the census of 15 April 1930 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon.
Robert Moore Agee b. 3 Jul 1888, d. 11 Dec 1944
Marriage*: Nellie May Frogge married Robert Moore Agee, son of John William Agee and Elvira Jane Holt, on 8 May 1910 at Dayton, Columbia County, Washington.
Elbert Edwin Agee
M, b. 17 February 1913, d. 2 April 1967
Birth*: Elbert Edwin Agee was born on 17 February 1913 at Washington.
Marriage*: He married Frankie Mae Marshall on 13 June 1942 at Multnomah County, Oregon.
Death*: Elbert Edwin Agee died in Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon, on 2 April 1967, at the age of 54.
(Witness) Census: He appeared on the census of 7 January 1920 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Walla Walla, Walla Walla County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Elbert Edwin Agee appeared on the census of 19 January 1920 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Elbert Edwin Agee appeared on the census of 15 April 1930 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon.
Father*: Robert Moore Agee b. 3 Jul 1888, d. 11 Dec 1944
Mother*: Nellie May Frogge b. 14 Jan 1894, d. 10 Feb 1965
Frankie Mae Marshall b. 19 Feb 1912, d. 9 Dec 2001
Clay Monroe Agee
M, b. 29 April 1911, d. 9 December 1962
Birth*: Clay Monroe Agee was born on 29 April 1911 at Pomeroy, Garfield County, Washington.
Death*: He died in Salem, Marion County, Oregon, on 9 December 1962, at the age of 51.
Burial*: He was buried after 9 December 1962 in Forest View Cemetery at Forest Grove, Washington County, Oregon.
(Witness) Census: Clay Monroe Agee appeared on the census of 19 January 1920 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Marengo, Columbia County, Washington.
(Witness) Census: Clay Monroe Agee appeared on the census of 15 April 1930 in the household of Robert Moore Agee at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon.
(Witness) Death: Clay Monroe Agee witnessed the death of Baby Girl Agee on 17 May 1937 at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oregon.
(Witness) Death: Clay Monroe Agee witnessed the death of Gerald Robert Agee on 26 February 1939 at Elsie, Clatsop County, Oregon.
Charles Monroe "Chuck" Agee b. 26 Apr 1933, d. 19 Aug 1990
Darlene A. Agee b. 2 Jul 1934, d. 18 Jan 1997
Paul William "Bill" Agee (twin) b. 1 Jan 1936, d. 28 Jul 2006
Baby Girl Agee b. 17 May 1937, d. 17 May 1937
Gerald Robert Agee b. 4 Nov 1938, d. 26 Feb 1939
Daisy Margaret Lusby
F, b. 23 February 1903, d. 19 October 1953
Birth*: Daisy Margaret Lusby was born on 23 February 1903 at Washington.
Marriage*: She married Daniel J Agee, son of James Daniel Agee and Annie Viola Grimes.
Death*: Daisy Margaret Lusby died in Sutherlin, Douglas County, Oregon, on 19 October 1953, at the age of 50.
Burial*: She was buried on 22 October 1953 in Civil Bend Cemetery at Winston, Douglas County, Oregon.
Daniel J Agee b. 24 Sep 1904, d. 1 Sep 1989
Willis Dan "Will" Agee b. 26 Nov 1944, d. 6 Jun 2001
William Dudley Daniel
M, b. 13 November 1910, d. 17 October 1978
Isaac Agee/Cordelia Thornton Descendants
Birth*: William Dudley Daniel was born on 13 November 1910 at Oregon.
Death*: He died in Klamath Falls, Klamath County, Oregon, on 17 October 1978, at the age of 67.
(Witness) Census: He appeared on the census of 2 January 1920 in the household of Fredrick Franklin Daniel at Swan, Klamath County, Oregon.
Milit-Beg*: William Dudley Daniel began military service on 11 March 1942 at Klamath Falls, Klamath County, Oregon.
(Informant) Death: He was the informant on the death certificate of Henrietta Grace Thompson on 11 June 1954 listed as (an unknown value.)
Father*: Fredrick Franklin Daniel b. 10 Dec 1881, d. 1 Jan 1948
Mother*: Henrietta Grace Thompson b. 1 Jun 1888, d. 11 Jun 1954
Norman Orval Daniel
M, b. 1912, d. 28 March 1987
Birth*: Norman Orval Daniel was born in 1912 at Oregon.
Death*: He died in Klamath Falls, Klamath County, Oregon, on 28 March 1987.
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»2011 Wisconsin Act 13
January 2011 Special Session Date of enactment: April 6, 2011
Senate Bill 12 Date of publication*: April 7, 2011
* Section 991.11, Wisconsin Statutes 2009-10 : Effective date of acts. "Every act and every portion of an act enacted by the legislature over the governor's partial veto which does not expressly prescribe the time when it takes effect shall take effect on the day after its date of publication as designated" by the secretary of state [the date of publication may not be more than 10 working days after the date of enactment].
An Act to amend 20.866 (2) (xf) and 49.175 (1) (zh) of the statutes; and to affect 2007 Wisconsin Act 20, section 9201 (1c) (a) and 2009 Wisconsin Act 28, section 9222 (1d); relating to: state finances, the Medical Assistance program, granting bonding authority, and making appropriations.
The people of the state of Wisconsin, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows:
13,1 Section 1. 20.866 (2) (xf) of the statutes is amended to read:
20.866 (2) (xf) Building commission; refunding tax-supported and self-amortizing general obligation debt incurred before July 1, 2011. From the capital improvement fund, a sum sufficient to refund the whole or any part of any unpaid indebtedness used to finance tax-supported or self-amortizing facilities. The state may contract public debt in an amount not to exceed $309,000,000 $474,000,000 for this purpose. Such indebtedness shall be construed to include any premium and interest payable with respect thereto. Debt incurred by this paragraph shall be incurred before July 1, 2011, and shall be repaid under the appropriations providing for the retirement of public debt incurred for tax-supported and self-amortizing facilities in proportional amounts to the purposes for which the debt was refinanced.
13,2 Section 2. 49.175 (1) (zh) of the statutes is amended to read:
49.175 (1) (zh) Earned income tax credit supplement. For the transfer of moneys from the appropriation account under s. 20.437 (2) (md) to the appropriation account under s. 20.835 (2) (kf) for the earned income tax credit, $6,664,200 in fiscal year 2009-10 and $6,664,200 $43,664,200 in fiscal year 2010-2011.
13,3 Section 3. 2007 Wisconsin Act 20, section 9201 (1c) (a) is amended to read:
[2007 Wisconsin Act 20] Section 9201 (1c) (a) Notwithstanding sections 20.001 (3) (a) to (c) and 25.40 (3) of the statutes, but subject to paragraph (d), the secretary of administration shall lapse to the general fund or transfer to the general fund from the unencumbered balances of state operations appropriations to executive branch state agencies, other than sum sufficient appropriations and appropriations of federal revenues, an amount equal to $200,000,000 during the 2007-09 fiscal biennium and $200,000,000 $121,000,000 during the 2009-11 fiscal biennium. This paragraph shall not apply to appropriations to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and to the technical college system board.
13,4 Section 4. 2009 Wisconsin Act 28, section 9222 (1d) is repealed.
13,9115 Section 9115. Nonstatutory provisions; Employee Trust Funds.
(1) Allocation of certain excess reserves in the public employee trust fund to reduce employer health insurance costs during 2011. Notwithstanding any action of the group insurance board under section 40.03 (6) (d) of the statutes, from reserve accounts established under section 20.515 (1) (r) of the statutes for group health insurance and pharmacy benefits for state employees, the secretary of employee trust funds shall allocate an amount equal to $28,000,000 to reduce employer costs for providing group health insurance for state employees for the period beginning on July 1, 2011, and ending on December 31, 2011.
13,9208 Section 9208. Fiscal changes; Children and Families.
(1) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant funds. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of children and families under section 20.437 (2) (md) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $37,000,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect to support an increase in the earned income tax credit.
13,9211 Section 9211. Fiscal changes; Corrections.
(1) Adult correctional services. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of corrections under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $19,537,900 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect to increase funding for the purpose for which the appropriation is made.
(2) Transfers.
(a) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (f) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $5,362,500 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(b) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (ab) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $2,825,300 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(c) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (2) (a) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $100,200 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(d) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (3) (cg) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $71,000 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(e) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (bm) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $10,700 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(f) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (3) (a) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (a) of the statutes $36,600 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
(g) There is transferred from the appropriation account under section 20.410 (3) (cg) of the statutes to the appropriation account under section 20.410 (1) (b) of the statutes $2,138,400 in the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this paragraph takes effect.
13,9221 Section 9221. Fiscal changes; Health Services.
(1) Medical Assistance general purpose revenue appropriation. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of health services under section 20.435 (4) (b) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $142,200,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for the purposes for which the appropriation is made.
(2) Medical Assistance administration appropriation. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of health services under section 20.435 (4) (bm) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $21,000,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for the purposes for which the appropriation is made.
(3) Income maintenance appropriation. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of health services under section 20.435 (4) (bn) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $6,500,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for the purposes for which the appropriation is made.
(4) Medical Assistance trust fund. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of health services under section 20.435 (4) (w) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $6,700,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for the purposes for which the appropriation is made.
(5) Medical Assistance program benefits appropriation increase. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of health services under section 20.435 (4) (b) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $6,800,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect to fund the contribution for indigent health care in Milwaukee County.
13,9227 Section 9227. Fiscal changes; Joint Committee on Finance.
(1) Federal program supplement. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the joint committee on finance under section 20.865 (4) (m) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is decreased by $37,000,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for supplementing federal earned income tax credit payments. This subsection applies only if the appropriation decrease described in 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, section 9227 (1), has not occurred.
13,9241 Section 9241. Fiscal changes; Revenue.
(1) Earned income tax credit. In the schedule under section 20.005 (3) of the statutes for the appropriation to the department of revenue under section 20.835 (2) (kf) of the statutes, as affected by the acts of 2011, the dollar amount is increased by $37,000,000 for the second fiscal year of the fiscal biennium in which this subsection takes effect for the purposes for which the appropriation is made.
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The Sick Jewish Ritual Kapparot Exposed in This Footage
Jews and Christianity
“The Jew is not satisfied with de-Christianizing, he Judiazizes, he destroys the Catholic or Protestant faith, he provokes indifference but he imposes his idea of the world of morals and of life upon those whose faith he ruins. He works at his age old task, the annilation of the religion of Christ.” (Benard Lazare, L’Antisemitism, p. 350; Rabbi Benamozegh, quoted in J. Creagh Scott’s Hidden Government, page 58).
“Today the Gentile Christians who claim of holy right have been led in the wrong path. We, of the Jewish Faith have tried for centuries to teach the Gentiles a Christ never existed, and that the story of the Virgin and of Christ is, and always has been, a fictitious lie. In the near future, when the Jewish people take over the rule of the United States, legally under our god, we will create a new education system, providing that our god is the only one to follow, and proving that the Christ story is a fake…Christianity will be abolished.” (M.A. Levy, Secretary of the World League of Liberal Jews, in a speech in Los Angeles, California, August, 1949)
“Why should we believe in God? We hate Christianity and Christians. Even the best of them must be regarded as our worst enemies. They preach love of one’s neighbor, and pity, which is contrary to our principles. Christian love is a hinderance to the revolution. Down with love of one’s neighbor; what we want is hatred. We must know how to hate, for only at this price can we conquer the universe…The fight should also be developed in the Moslem and Catholic countries, with the same ends in view and by the same means.” (Lunatcharski, The Jewish Assault on Christianity, Gerald B. Winrod, page 44)
Judeo-Christian Heritage a Hoax: It appears there is no need to belabor the absurdity and fallacy of the “Judeo-Christian heritage” fiction, which certainly is clear to all honest theologians. That “Judeo- Christian dialogue” in this context is also absurd was well stated in the author-initiative religious journal, Judaism, Winter 1966, by Rabbi Eliezar Berkowitz, chairman of the department of Jewish philosophy, at the Hebrew Theological College when he wrote: “As to dialogue in the purely theological sense, nothing could be more fruitless or pointless. Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity; and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism. What is usually referred to as the Jewish- Christian traditions exists only in Christian or Secularist Fantasy.” There is no doubt this is true! And the fantasy exists in Christian and Secularist minds only because it was implanted there by the persistent propaganda of the masters of intrigue of the ADL-AJC Network. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that knowledgeable theologians, Jewish and Christians who constantly allude to “our Judeo-Christian heritage” are for their own specious purposes perpetuate a grotesque and fantastic hoax.
“The newly founded Society of Jesus…Saint Ignatius. His secretary Polanco, the only person present at his deathbed, was of Jewish descent. So was Lainez, one of his first and greatest converts, was of Jewish descent…In a short time, as the young Jesuit organization became a power for Catholic reform and propaganda, Jews were attracted to it, as they are always attracted to centers of influence, in such numbers that it was found difficult to keep out those who wished to destroy the order and the Church under pretext of working for them. Thus a nephew of the great and Catholic Jew Polanco followed him into the society, and caused such difficulties and dissensions that for years he nearly drove his superiors to despair.” (Philip II, William Thomas Walsh, p. 95)
“The doctrines which the Jews have been spreading throughout the lands for years could not but have helped to undermine the Church’s power.” (A Program for the Jews and Humanity, Rabbi Harry Waton, p. 272).
“So against both the Albigenses and Huguenots this (Jewish) pope now directed all his fury…The beautiful city of Beziers was razed to the ground. ‘We spared neither dignity, nor sex nor age’ writes the monk. Arnold, to his Holy Father, the pope. ‘Nearly twenty thousand human beings perished by the sword. And after the massacre the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage over it in a wonderful manner.” (A Program for the Jews and Humanity, Rabbi Harry Waton, p. 224).
“It is the Jews who originated biblical exegesis (a critical analysis of the Bible), just as they were the first to criticize the forms and doctrines of Christianity…Truly has Darmesteter written: ‘The Jew was the apostle of unbelief, and every revolt of mind originated with him.'” (Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: It’s History and Causes, London: Britons Publishing Co., 1967, pp. 149-151).
“Jewish Talmudism owes its existence today to the indifference with which it is regarded… The Jew is prejudiced against the Bible, doing what he can to destroy public honor of the Book.” (The International Jew, Vol. III, p. 16).
“Mrs. Van Hyning, I am surprised at your surprise. You are a student of history — and you know that both the Borgias and the Mediciis are Jewish families of Italy. Surely you know that there have been Popes from both of these house. Perhaps it will surprise you to know that we have had 20 Jewish Popes, and when you have sufficient time, which may coincide with my free time, I can show you these names and dates. You will learn from these that: The crimes committed in the name of the Catholic Church were under Jewish Popes. The leaders of the inquisition was one, de TorQuemada, a Jew.” (Woman’s Voice, November 25, 1953)
“A Jewish question exists, and there will be one as long as the Jews remain Jews. It is an actual fact that the Jews fight against the Catholic Church. They are free thinkers, and constitute a vanguard of Atheism, Bolshevism and Revolution…One should protect one’s self against the evil influence of Jewish morals, and particularly boycott the Jewish Press and their demoralizing publications.” (Pastoral letter issued in 1936. “An Answer to Father Caughlin’s Critics,” page 98)
“We were also at pains to ask the Governments represented at the Conference of Genoa, to make, by common agreement, a declaration which might have saved Russia and all the world from many woes, demanding as a condition preliminary to any recognition of the Soviet Government, respect for conscience, freedom of worship and of church property. Alas, these three points, so essential above all to those ecclesiastical hierarchies unhappily separated from Catholic unity, were abandoned in favor of temporal interests, which in fact would have been better safeguarded, if the different Governments had first of all considered the rights of God, His Kingdom and His Justice.” (Letter of Pope Pius XI, On the Soviet Campaign Against God, February 2, 1930; The Rulers of Russia, Denis Fahey, p. 22)
“…Bolshevism in its proper perspective, namely, as the most recent development in the age-long struggle waged by the Jewish Nation against…Christ…” (The Rulers of Russia, Denis Fahey, p. 48)
“The anti-religious campaign of the Soviet must not be restricted to Russia. It must be carried on throughout the world.” (Stephanov, quoted in J. Creagh Scott’s Hidden Government, page 59)
Because of this hatred toward Christ and the Christian way of life, we would ask: Is the Christian more dangerous to Judaism and the other religions of the world, because God forbids them to injure his brother, is the same God before whom we are both one day to appear in judgment; is that God less tremendous to the wicked, or less favorable to the just, because on His word we believe him to be one in essence, though three in persons? This hatred of the Jews which is becoming more and more frenzied, which even the pagans and infidels themselves could not justify on such pretexts as they present for public consumption. What fanatic rage must it be that blinds the Jews, when in contradiction with themselves, they applaud the toleration of the ancient Philosophers, who, though disbelieving the mysteries of Paganism, never attempted to rob the people of their religion; while on the other hand they incessantly conspire against Christians and Christianity under pretence that it contains some sort of mysteries.
Another objection not less extravagant, is that against Revelation itself. It is God, they say, whom the Christians declare to have spoken; hence there can be no further liberty of opinion in man on matters of faith. The so-called defenders of liberty and equality is then authorized to rise in arms against Christ and Christianity and its way of life which, they say, denies people of their liberty. Such is thier arguments. But to what length does their frenzy carry them? Rabbis for hundreds of years have conspired to overthrow every altar, Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, or any of the other Christian sects. What stupid idea is this? Can reason be traced through plots and conspiracies, of which the sole tendency is the overthrow of the religion of the White Race, under the pretence of liberty of worship; we have heard all sorts of false ideas to crush the God of the Christians
For 2000 years we have seen them conspire and use every artifice of cunning intrigue to rob the world of the religion of God, of Christianity. And because they utter the empty sounds of Liberty, Equality and Toleration, people mistake their utterings as that of profound men, when they are nothing but empty shells, trying to escape the judgment they know is coming. Perhaps most telling of all is that ‘it was American Roman Catholic bishops in the middle and late 19th Century who demanded the removal of Bible reading from public schools…’ Why? The full weight of history confirms that the Bible has been and continues to be opposed by those seeking to destroy freedom, but those seeking to bring mankind into bondage. This speaks volumes about the worth and the truth of the Bible. The West’s tyrants of tomorrow are even now painting heavily against it, and in particular, the 17th- century King James Version is based on the Textus Receptus (also banned by Rome) with Hebrew and Greek texts differing from all other modern verses, which come from the Judaized Alexandrian texts, and contains many errors.
Dr. Albert M. Gessman, writing in the Winter 1969 number of the conservative Jewish journal, “Issues.” After contrasting critically almost nine pages of glaring differences between Judaism and Christianity to the disadvantage of the latter, and after reviewing the back-grounds of both religions, he concludes that, “A Judeo-Christian heritage or tradition in the proper sense of that hyphenated word does not exist; it has no foundation in historical fact.” There is Edom [Esau is called Edom in Genesis 36:8. And Edom is in ‘Modern Jewry’ Jewish Encyclopedia, 1925 edition, Vol. 5, p. 41.
“A Cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ; who frequently attends Bible studies; who has a high level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools his children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong belief in the 2nd Amendment, and who distrusts Big Government.” (Janet Reno, in a speech before an ATF luncheon, Washington, D.C.)
Dr. Kevin MacDonald Destroys the Khazar Theory!
Dr. Kevin MacDonald comes on the Dr. David Duke Radio Show and effectively exposes Khazar Theory as completely a bogus concept purposely promoted by Zionists to hide their racism!
The Year 1939 – Part 2
Toward a Healthy Society
I’ve spoken before about the deliberately destructive role of the mass media in American society. I’ve talked about the psychology of liberalism, about what makes liberals do the crazy and destructive things they do. Today, though, instead of talking about the enemies of our society, the enemies of our people, let’s just talk about our people and the sort of society that we need.
You know, a society is a very complex thing: it is like a living organism. It responds to selective environmental forces, and it evolves. In past ages it was the struggle of our people to survive, the competition of our people against other peoples, other races, which determined the nature of our society. Societies which functioned well survived. Societies which didn’t function well perished. Historically, if some crazy liberal came along and were able to change all of the rules and structures in a society to suit some egalitarian fantasy of his, the society would sink like a rock, and its people would perish. And that’s what’s happening to our society today, although it may not be apparent to us because of the time scale. After the experimenters finish their deadly work, it may take a society 200 years to disintegrate completely and sink out of sight. That’s not long from a historical viewpoint, but it’s long enough so that most of the people involved never realize what’s happening to them.
The society we had in Europe up until the end of the 18th century — or one may say, the various national societies there, which really were very much alike when compared with any non-European society — this European society had evolved over a period of many, many generations of our people, and it had fine-tuned itself to our special nature; it had developed its institutions and its ways of doing things which suited us as a people and allowed us to form viable, efficient communities. And when we colonized North America and other parts of the world, we brought the essential elements of our society with us.
And what were those essential elements?
The first essential element was order. Everyone had a place in our society, whether he was the village blacksmith or the king, and he knew what that place was. He knew how he fitted in, what his responsibilities were, to whom he owed loyalty and respect, and to whom he in turn was obliged to provide guidance. It was a hierarchical society. There was no pretense that everyone was just as capable or just as creative or just as brave or just as suited for leadership as anyone else. People had social rank and social status and social authority commensurate with their social responsibilities and with their contributions to society.
The second essential feature that our society had was homogeneity. Everyone had the same roots, the same history, the same genes, the same sensibilities. Or at least, there was enough genetic similarity, there was a close enough family relationship among the people, so that people understood each other. A village, a province, a nation was like a large, extended family. People felt a sense of kinship, a sense of belonging, a sense of loyalty and responsibility that extended to the whole society. This feeling of belonging, this sense of a common history and a common destiny, this sense of identity, was the glue that held the society together and gave it its strength. And it gave men and women their individual strength too. Just knowing who they were, where they had been, and where they were going made an enormous difference in their sense of personal security, in their ability to plan ahead and be reasonably confident of what the future held for them.
This homogeneity and the consequent sense of family, of identity, was thousands of years in developing, just like the hierarchical order in our society. And we developed, we evolved, along with our society. The type of society we had become imprinted on our genes. Of course, it wasn’t a perfect society. It was full of problems and imperfections. We always were developing new technologies, for example, and our society didn’t always have time to adjust itself to these innovations before even more innovations came along. But it was a society in which we were strong and confident and more or less spiritually healthy.
You know, the opponents of social order and racial homogeneity will try to confuse the issue by pointing out that we have a longer life span today, that our infant mortality rate is much lower, that we don’t have to work as hard to support ourselves, that we can buy all sorts of shiny gadgets that our ancestors couldn’t, and so on. They want you to believe that these changes came about as benefits of the breakdown of order and the destruction of homogeneity. But they didn’t. They are all the results of technological innovation. Our medical scientists learned how to control the diseases which shortened our lives. Our scientists and engineers learned how we could work more efficiently. And they learned how to make new tools and new toys for us.
Now, to be sure, not all of the degenerative changes in our society which have occurred in the past couple of centuries have been the consequence of the destructive efforts of the Jews and the liberals. The Industrial Revolution really was a huge shock to our traditional form of society. The Industrial Revolution took people off the farms and out of the villages and packed them into factory towns like sardines in a can. This was a great strain on the old order. The new relationship between factory owner and factory workers was not as healthy a one as had existed between landowner and workers on the land, nor was the new, urban life-style as spiritually healthy as the village life-style.
Unrest and revolution were fomented from the latter part of the 18th century and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: egalitarianism, Communism, democracy, equal rights, no responsibilities, welfare programs, feminism. The old order was drowned in blood. In France the aristocrats and the landowners were butchered in response to the resentments which the liberals had stirred up among the rabble. Later in Russia the same process took place, when the Jewish Bolsheviks finally gained the upper hand and butchered not just the aristocrats, but everyone who had worked a little harder and been a little more successful than the rabble. The kulaks, the small farmers and landowners, were murdered en masse, by the millions, in order to “equalize” Russian society and destroy the last traces of the old, hierarchical order.
And into the social chaos of the 20th century the enemies of our people were able to introduce their idea of racial equality alongside their idea of social equality. We were told that the descendants of our slaves are just as good as we are — maybe better — and so they should become our social equals. We should bring them into our schools and neighborhoods, and we should intermarry with them, and we should buy Food Stamps for them with our taxes, and we should give them preference in hiring and promotions. And we should open our borders to all of the non-White wretched refuse of the Third World’s teeming shores. They also are our equals, we are told. The more diversity the better. Diversity is our strength. Et cetera. Et cetera. Blah, blah, blah.
We were too disoriented and confused by the destruction of our social order to resist this poisonous propaganda. And so here we are at the end of the 20th century. There are some people who will try to convince you that things never have been better. We certainly have more equality and less order, more diversity and less homogeneity than ever before. And that obviously suits some people, in addition to the liberals and the Jews who have been pushing for these changes.
Are these changes better for us?
The suicide statistics, the drug statistics, the crime statistics, the divorce statistics, and the mental illness statistics give us part of the answer. The statistics should help us keep our grip on reality when the Jewish media try to persuade us that we need more of the same poison they have been dishing out for so long: more equality, more chaos, more diversity.
And we should be able to look into our own souls for the rest of the answer. We should know that we need again to have an ordered, structured society, in which we all have a place and will be appreciated according to how effectively we fill that place. We should know that we need again to have a homogeneous society, in which we can feel a sense of belonging. We should know that we need a society in which we have a sense of permanence and stability, not chaos and uncertainty. We should know that we need a society in which everyone strives for quality, not for an imaginary equality. We should know that in order to be spiritually healthy again we need a society in which we can feel a sense of rootedness and responsibility, rather than the aimless, wandering, rootless, cosmopolitan, egoism which characterizes American society today.
If we are honest with ourselves we know that we all crave a healthy society again, we need it. But too many of us have let ourselves be persuaded by the enemies of our people that the type of society we need is no longer attainable. Our enemies tell us, “We have destroyed the order in your society. We have made everyone equal, and you dare not try to take that equality away. That would be like trying to take candy away from a child. We have opened the candy store and told all the children that they can have as much as they want, and it’s all free. They all will fight you if you try to change that, if you try to tell them that they must earn their candy.” And our enemies grin in triumph when they see how that demoralizes and discourages so many of us.
And they tell us, “We have destroyed the homogeneity in your society. We have replaced your homogeneity with diversity. We have brought every non-White type on the face of the earth into your midst, we have brought them in by the millions, and we have forced you to mix with them. Now there’s nothing you can do to restore your homogeneity.” And again they grin and say, “What will you do? Will you try to root out every non-White and every mongrel and send them all away or get rid of them? You don’t have the stomach for that. So you’d better just learn to live with all of these non-Whites and mongrels. Pretty soon you’ll be a minority in your own land.” And they gloat.
And it is true, of course, that many of us do not yet have the stomach to do what must be done. And so the suicide rate and the divorce rate and the abortion rate will keep rising. The government will continue building more prisons. The cults will continue thriving. And the Jews and the liberals will keep telling us how wonderful everything is, how things have never been better, how we should appreciate all of the equality and diversity.
But, you know, all the while the number of us who do have the stomach to do what must be done will be growing. Our numbers are growing, because more and more of our people are coming to understand that the only alternative is death: death for our society, death for our children, death for our kind. What the Jews and liberals have done to our society is lethal. It cannot be sustained.
Order and homogeneity, a sense of identity and belonging, are not just luxuries for us. They are essential. Without them our society sickens and dies. The liberals may not be able to understands that, and the Jews, with their media propaganda, try to keep the rest of us from understanding it, but we can see the proof of it all around us. And we are determined to do whatever we must do to have once again a society for our own kind, a society to which we can really belong and feel a sense of responsibility to, a society in which we have a place and are appreciated if we fill that place well, a society based on order and quality and structure and commonality. We will have it. We will do what is necessary.
From Free Speech, May 1997, Volume III, Number 5
Image | March 17, 2016
Ursula Haverbeck – “The Greatest Problem of Our Time” [English Subtitles]
This old German lady is breaking the law. What she says in twenty minutes in this video landed her in prison for 10 months in 2015!
Find out why, as Ursula Haverbeck challenges “The Greatest Problem of Our Time.”
Visit Ursula’s site (in German): http://ursula-haverbeck.info/
16.5 Million Europeans murdered in all 3 Holodomors
The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, “Extermination by hunger” or “Hunger-extermination”; derived from ‘Морити голодом’, “Murder by Starvation”) refers to a series of purposeful mechanized genocidal famines that took place under the Jewish Bolshevik regime during the periods of 1921-23, 1932-33 and 1946-47. Holodomor is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod meaning “hunger” and mor meaning “plague”. The expression moryty holodom means “to inflict death by hunger”. Lenin established a Jewish regime that slaughtered well over 66 million ethnic Europeans the Holodomor Genocides alone resulted in a death toll of 16.5 million. Therefore, in the minds of those that experienced the Holodomor Genocides the term will forever conjure up the kidnappings, torture and cannibalism taking place under the Jewish Bolshevik regime.
Did the Zionist Lobby Drive the US into the Iraq War?
By Paul Grubach
Source: http://codoh. com/library/document/52/
At a March 3, 2003 anti-war forum in Reston, Virginia, Rep. James Moran (D-Va. ) told a crowd of about 120 people, “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we [the United States] would not be doing this.“
The White House, several congressional Democratic leaders, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and the National Jewish Democratic Council condemned Moran’s remarks. Much of the mainstream media also chimed in with their condemnations of the seven-term congressman, and ultimately, he was forced to apologize.
In the 3/24/05 issue of the widely circulated and highly influential US News and World Report, editorialist Gloria Borger criticized Moran and attempted to rebut his claims. [1] The article is very important because it expresses in a very simple way the ideological line put out by much of the mainstream media as to why, allegedly, one should not blame the Jewish-Zionist lobby for helping to drive the US into the Iraq war.
As we shall soon see, it was in fact the Jewish-Zionist power elite and their Gentile allies that were behind this push for war with Iraq. Although the evidence in support of this claim is abundant, the fact that it is rarely discussed in the mainstream US media is a tribute to the ability of the Jewish-Zionist power elite to tailor and even censor the news.
Before reading my rebuttal, I strongly urge the reader to study the Borger article so as to get a firsthand understanding of her arguments. The essay begins by giving an account of what was said by critics of the Iraq war, like Congressman Moran and Pat Buchanan, about Jewish-Zionist involvement in the drive for an invasion of Iraq. In a tone of condemnation, Ms. Borger sarcastically claims: “In this conspiratorial world view, these men [the Jewish, neoconservative Iraq war architects] have a master plan connived years ago to do Israel’s bidding and get rid of Saddam Hussein.“
The major architect of the Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz, did formulate a plan to invade Iraq years before it took place in 2003. In 1977, Wolfowitz was put to work on the Limited Contingency Study. Its ostensible purpose was to examine possible areas of threat in the Third World. Even as far back as the late 1970s, he claimed Iraq was a direct military threat. As Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia points out, the Limited Contingency Study laid the groundwork for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. [2]
The respected online source further points out that Wolfowitz’s attachments to Jewish-Zionist agendas are deep and go back a long way, even into his teen years good evidence that his plan for a US invasion of Iraq and the interests of Israel are linked. [3]
Borger herself offers evidence that these pro-war functionaries had a plan to invade Iraq years before the actual invasion took place. She writes: “But what of those Jewish neoconservative hawks lurking inside the [Bush] administration? Didn’t some of them write memos in the late 1990s calling for, among other things, the overthrow of Saddam? Yes.“ Thank you Ms. Borger for bolstering my case.
Borger mentions Pat Buchanan’s comments in a very negative tone: “… it was a polemic in his magazine declaring that a small cabal of neoconservatives with ties to the administration are willing to ‘conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel’.“ In her view, Buchanan’s statements are self-evidently false, and they should be utterly rejected by every intelligent American
The war is in fact to a very large extent about Israel interests, as before the war began, former Supreme Allied NATO Commander, General Wesley Clark, admitted as much to a respected British news source. He acknowledged that President George W. Bush’s war plans serve, first and foremost, Jewish-Zionist interests. Being privy to the thoughts and beliefs of those in the highest levels of government, his comments carry authoritative weight: “Those who favor this attack now tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel.“ [4]
Furthermore, after the war was in progress, the American general in charge of American forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, revealed that the protection of Israel was a major reason as to why the US went to war. In the words of a Jewish Telegraphic Agency press release: “The threat of a missile attack on Israel was one reason justifying a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks said.“ [5]
Borger continues.“Never mind that if it were up to the Israelis, the United States would be looking toward regime change in Iran or Syria.“ In other words, the invasion of Iraq is not about Israel’s interests, because the Israelis would want the US to take action against Iran or Syria.
The Israelis were, and are, in fact pushing for US action against Iran. For example, in the June 25, 2003 issue of the pro-Zionist and highly influential Wall Street Journal, former prime minister of Israel Shimon Peres insisted that the US, Europe, Russia and the U. N. should take serious action against the Iranian nation. [6] The Jewish-Zionist ADL, which is a de facto agent of Israel, is now pushing for the world to act against Iran. [7]
Borger continues.“And never mind that this cabal is actually a bunch of predictable hawks who also urged action in Kosovo and Bosnia on behalf of Muslims. Forget all that.“
Here, I believe, is a formal statement of her argument.“These (largely Jewish) neoconservatives pushed for military action in Kosovo and Bosnia aggressive military actions that in no way serve Israel’s interests. Therefore, it is not fair to say that they pushed for military action against Iraq for Israel’s interests.“
This is highly misleading, if not patently false. The Jewish political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg revealed a major facet of the neoconservative agenda. He pointed out how in recent times Jews have played a decisive role in conservative Republicanism and neo-conservatism. [8] Ginsberg reveals what lies behind the conservative mask: “A number of Jews ascertained for themselves that Israeli security required a strong American commitment to internationalism and defense. Among the most prominent Jewish spokesman for this position was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary Magazine. Podhoretz had been a liberal and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. But by the early 1970s he came to realize that continued American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs – from which it followed that American withdrawal into [isolationism] represented a direct threat to the security of Israel. This was one major reason that Podhoretz broke with liberals…“
Thus, one of the main contentions of neo-conservatism is that a highly interventionist US foreign policy in areas other than the Middle East will safeguard the interests of Israel. If the US pursues an overall interventionist foreign policy it will be more likely to intervene on Israel’s behalf if the Zionist nation needs it.
This evidence directly undermines Borger’s claim. Just because the hawkish neocons advocated military action in Kosovo and Bosnia “military actions that do not overtly serve Israel’s interests in no way disproves the theory that their advocacy of the US invasion of Iraq was for Israel’s welfare. Their overall aggressive, interventionist agenda in areas other than the Middle East is ultimately tied to the welfare of Israel\. In her ongoing attempt to discredit the theory that the Zionist lobby drove the US into the Iraq war, she asks this rhetorical question: “Still, doesn’t Bush’s long-standing preference for Sharon have more to do with his disgust with Yasser Arafat than his deep affection for Richard Perle?”
Bush’s dislike of Yasser Arafat may have played a role in driving him into the neoconservative camp, but monetary contributions from Jewish Republicans undoubtedly also played a role in driving him into the pro-Iraq war, pro-Zionist camp. As Jewish scholars S. M. Lipset and E. Raab note, one quarter of Republican Party contributions come from Jewish sources. [9]
Furthermore, Bush’s main advisors and top men are members of the ardently pro-Zionist, pro-Israel Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Undoubtedly this also played a significant role in prodding Bush to accept Richard Perle’s Zionist agenda for Iraq.
The distinguished British journalist, Robert Fisk, pointed out in the respected British news source, The Independent, that: “Only The Nation among all of America’s newspapers and magazines has dared to point out that a large number of former Israeli lobbyists are now working within the American administration, and the Bush plans for the Middle East – which could cause a massive political upheaval in the Arab world – fit perfectly into Israel’s own dreams for the region. The magazine listed Vice-President Dick Cheney – the arch-hawk in the US administration – and John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for Arms Control, with Douglas Feith, the third most senior executive at the Pentagon, as members of the advisory board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) before joining the Bush government. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, is still an adviser on the institute, as is the former CIA director James Woolsey.“
Fisk continues: “Michael Ledeen, described by The Nation as one of the most influential ‘Jinsans’ in Washington, has been calling for ‘total war’ against ‘terror’ – with ‘regime change’ for Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Perle advises the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld – who refers to the West Bank and Gaza as ‘the so-called occupied territories’…“
Continuing with this line of thought, Fisk adds: “Jinsa’s website says it exists to ‘inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and Middle East’. Next month, Michael Rubin of the right-wing and pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute – who referred to the outgoing UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson as an abettor of ‘terrorism’ – joins the US Defense Department as an Iran-Iraq “expert.“
Fisk then reveals the Jewish director of Jinsa: “According to The Nation, Irving Moskovitz, the California bingo magnate who has funded settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a donor as well as director of Jinsa.“
Finally, Fisk points out that President Bush will not reveal to the American public the influence Jinsa has on his foreign policy: “President Bush, of course, will not be talking about the influence of these pro-Israeli lobbyists when he presents his vision of the Middle East at the United Nations…“ [10]
In her further attempt to disprove the hypothesis that Bush and his pro-Zionist colleagues lied the American public into the Iraq war, she proclaims: “Let’s face it: Bush is no conniving conspirator. If anything, he’s a deeply unsubtle man who forms visceral and stubborn assessments of leaders” and Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong II are at the top of his bad-guys list.
Contrary to what she writes, new evidence suggests that Bush is indeed a conniving conspirator that attempted to lie us into the Iraq war. According to a recent AFP press report: “US military intelligence warned the Bush administration in February 2002 that its key source on Al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iraq had provided ‘intentionally misleading data,’ according to a declassified report.“
The article continues: “Nevertheless, eight months later, President George W. Bush went public with charges that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein had trained members of Osama bin Laden’s terror network in manufacturing deadly poisons and gases.“
Commenting upon this sad state of affairs, Democrat Carl Levin was forced by the evidence to state the obvious: “This newly declassified information provides additional dramatic evidence that the administrations pre-war statements were deceptive.“ [11]
Furthermore, Kim Jong II’s North Korea, a dangerous enemy of the US, has publicly admitted that they have nuclear weapons. [12] Yet, Bush did not order an invasion of North Korea. But Bush did order an invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, “a nation that did not have nuclear weapons that could threaten the US. The one country that Hussein’s Iraq did pose a threat to was Israel,” further evidence that Bush’s pro-war Iraq policy serves the interests of Israel.
Once again, in an attempt to discredit the hypothesis that the Zionist lobby prodded the US into the Iraq war, Borger claims, with a rhetorical question, that the president’s advisors were not fooled by Zionist functionaries to go to war with Iraq.“Were the president’s top advisers hoodwinked?,” Borger asks.
The president’s top advisers were not “hoodwinked” or “bamboozled” into driving the US into the Iraq war. As we showed previously, these advisers are all men with an ardently pro-Zionist, pro-Israeli outlook, and they are members of the ardently pro-Zionist JINSA. These Bush advisers are actively involved with pro-Zionist interests. [13]
Borger goes on to quote Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz: “The reason for this warmongering policy toward Iraq is oil and Israel.“
Aziz has it perfectly correct. One of the main reasons for the war was oil for Israel. From another respected Internet news source, we read: „ [The] minister for national infrastructures [of Israel] Joseph Paritzky was considering the possibility of reopening the long-defunct oil pipeline from Mosul to the Mediterranean port of Haifa. With Israel lacking energy resources of its own and depending on highly expensive oil from Russia, reopening the pipeline would transform its economy.“
The article continues: “It is understood from diplomatic sources that the Bush administration has said it will not support lifting UN sanctions on Iraq unless Saddam’s successors agree to supply Israel with oil.“ The authors add this most cogent observation: “All of this lends weight to the theory that Bush’s war is part of a master plan to reshape the Middle East to serve Israel’s interests. Haaretz quoted Paritzky as saying that the pipeline project is economically justifiable because it would dramatically reduce Israel’s energy bill.“ [14]
Borger then lists what she claims is the real reason why the US went to war with Iraq: “So when a White House aide suggests that this president believes that confronting tyranny is in our interest and coincides with our values, we say there must be more to it. If confronting tyranny is truly the reason as to why Bush wants war, then we should expect that he would have threatened Israel just as ardently that he threatened Iraq. For decades, Israel has exercised tyrannical oppression over the Palestinian people, but Bush has not declared war on Israel. He is allied with Israel.“
If confronting tyranny was a reason as to why Bush goes to war, then we should expect that he would have invaded North Korea, an oppressive Stalinist entity and enemy of the US that does have weapons of mass destruction. [15] But Bush never ordered an invasion of North Korea. Of course, North Korea does not directly threaten Israel. Bush chose to invade a nation that did not have any weapons of mass destruction that threaten the US. Saddam’s Iraq posed a threat to Israel. All of this is further evidence that a primary motive to invade Iraq was for Zionist-Israeli interests.
Finally, Borger reveals to her readers “the truth.“ Jewish-Zionist forces are not in any way to blame for driving the US into the Iraq war: “Here is what is true: Jewish Americans hold no monolithic view about a possible war with Iraq. One survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee shows that 59 percent of Jews approve of a possible war while 36 percent disapprove, numbers that mirror the public at large.“
Here is what she is arguing. While a majority of Jews were in favor of the war, slightly more than a third of Jews opposed the war. So you cannot blame all Jews for driving the US into the Iraq war. Furthermore, since the relative percentage of Jews who favored the war were similar to the relative percentages of non-Jews who favored going to war with Iraq, you cannot blame the Jewish Community for driving the US into the Iraq war.
Since the Jewish Community in general wields a disproportionate share of the power and influence in the US, it is not fair to compare the percentages of Jews who favored the war with the percentages of non-Jews who favored the war, show they are similar, and then conclude that the Jewish-Zionist lobby played no major role in driving the US into the Iraq war. Since the Jewish-Zionist Community has a disproportionate share of political power and influence in the US, their wishes, activities and agenda often play a more significant role than that of the public at large. So, by the mere fact that a majority in the Jewish Community favored the war is highly significant in a political sense because they have a disproportionate share of the political power in the United States.
In all fairness, it must be emphasized that all American Jews were not and are not in favor of this war, and the entire American Jewish community is not responsible for driving the US into the Iraq war. And furthermore, there are a number of Jews who are ardently opposed to this war and they openly condemn Bush’s pro-war policies. But the fact of the matter remains is that certain powerful groups of Jews with strong Zionist sympathies in collusion with powerful pro-Zionist non-Jews did in fact drive the US into the Iraq war because it served Zionist-Israeli interests.
Borger then goes on to admit that, yes, these Jewish neoconservative hawks did write memos in the late 1990s calling for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. But these memos, she claims, should not be looked upon as George Bush’s reason and master plan for invading Iraq. According to Borger, they have no significance whatsoever, because George Bush has told the American people that the reason he invaded Iraq was to bring to an end the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein for the welfare of the world. To believe otherwise, Borger continues, “is to believe that George Bush is a liar.“ According to Borger’s view, Bush is honest and he told the American people the truth as to his real reasons for invading Iraq.
As stated previously, we now have evidence that George Bush’s pre-war statements were knowingly deceptive, and that he may very well have lied the American people into the Iraq war. [16]
Borger then goes on to quote one of the spokesmen and luminaries of the Jewish-Zionist Community, Elie Wiesel, as to the “real” reason why the US invaded Iraq. The great Holocaust guru argues that appeasing Saddam Hussein would not have led to peace. To the contrary, in order to spare the world further horror and oppression, the US had to destroy Saddam’s regime. In order to bolster his argument, the great moral beacon then invokes the Hitler analogy: “Had Europe’s great powers intervened against Adolf Hitler’s aggressive ambitions in 1938 instead of appeasing him in Munich, humanity would have been spared the unprecedented horrors of World War II.“
As the political psychologist Kevin MacDonald has noted in his work, this is an age-old Jewish tactic clothing sectarian Jewish interests in universalistic moral rhetoric in order to make it more appealing to the non-Jewish world. [17] If Wiesel were truly interested in ridding the world of dictatorial oppression, he would be calling for sanctions against his fellow Jews in Israel for their oppression of Palestinians just as he called for war against Hussein’s Iraq.
Gloria Borger’s article shows how pro-Zionist functionaries in the US media mislead and bamboozle their readership in order to protect Jewish-Zionist interests.
[1] Gloria Borger, “Blaming the Cabal,” US News and World Report, 24 March 2003. Online: http://www. usnews. com/usnews/opinion/articles/030324/24pol. htm
[2] s. v. Paul Wolfowitz, online: http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
[4] US assumes UK help in Iraq, says general, Guardian Unlimited, 20 August 2002, online: http://politics. guardian. co. uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,777700,00. html
[5] Jewish Telegraphic Agency press release, ranks: “Threat on Israel justified pre-emption,” Cleveland Jewish News. com, 10 August 2004. Online: http://www. clevelandjewishnews. com/articles/2004/08/10/news/world/aaa. txt
[6] Shimon Peres, “We Must Unite To Prevent An Ayatollah Nuke,” The Wall Street Journal, 25 June 2003.
[7] See the ADL’s advertisement in The New York Times. Online:
[8] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 204, 231.
[9] Lipset, S. M. , & Raab, E. , Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard University Press, 1995).
[10] Robert Fisk, “Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil,” Independent, 10 September 2002. Online : http://www. news. independent. co. uk/world/middle_east/story. jsp?story=332011 For the original article from The Nation that Fisk refers to and exposes the considerable number of pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobbyists within the Bush administration, see Jason Vest, “The Men from JINSA and CSP,” The Nation, 2 September 2002. Online: http://www. thenation. com/doc/20020902/vest
[11] American Free Press release, “US ntel on Iraq-Quada ties intentionally misleading: document,” 7 November 2005. Online: http://news. yahoo. com/s/afp/20051107/wl_mideast_afp/usiraqintelligence
[12] Sang-Hun Choe, Associated Press Writer, “North Korea Says It Has Nuclear Weapons,” Associated Press release, 10 February 2005.
[13] See footnote 10.
[14] See Jane’s, “Oil from Iraq: An Israeli pipedream.“ Online: http://www. janes. com/regional_news/africa_middle_east/news/fr/fr030416_1_n. htmlml. See also Ed Vuillamy, “Israel seeks pipeline for Iraqi oil,” Guardian Unlimited, 20 April 2003. Online: http://www. guardian. co. uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,940250,00. html
[17] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger, 1998).
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Category: Revisionism
Source: https://codoh.com/library/document/6785/?lang=en
By John Wear
One of the great tragedies of the 20th century was the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes in Europe after the end of World War II. The Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer – and perhaps the greatest single movement of people – in human history. A minimum of 12 million and possibly as many as 18.1 million Germans were driven from their homes because of their ethnic background. Probably 2.1 million or more of these German expellees, mostly women and children, died in what was supposed to be an “orderly and humane” expulsion.[1]
One estimate of the number of Germans expelled runs to 16.5 million: 9.3 million within the 1937 Reich borders and 7.2 million outside. The Germans within the 1937 Reich borders include 2,382,000 East Prussians, 1,822,000 East Pomeranians, 614,000 in Brandenburg east of the Oder, and 4,469,000 Silesians. The Germans outside the 1937 Reich borders include 240,000 in Memel and the Baltic States, 373,000 in Danzig, 1,293,000 in Poland, 3,493,000 in Czechoslovakia, 601,000 in Hungary, 509,000 in Yugoslavia, and 785,000 in Romania. The Russians did not expel many of their 1.8 million Volga Germans from the Soviet Union; instead, the Volga Germans were predominantly deported to other (distant) locations within the Soviet Union.[2]
Historical and Legal Bases for Expulsions
The mass expulsion of entire populations after the conclusions of armed conflicts was not in the European tradition. With the exception of the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, which sanctioned mutual expulsions after the Greek-Turkish war of 1921-1922, European nations did not contemplate nor carry out resettlement schemes prior to World War II. The Poles and Czechs, however, were determined to forcibly expel their minority populations under the auspices of international organizations. These two governments-in-exile, located in London during most of the war, sought approval from the victorious Allies for the forced expulsion of their German minorities.[3]
The Polish and Czechoslovak governments-in-exile found that the Allies were in complete agreement that the Germans should be expelled from both postwar Poland, which had annexed major portions of the former Germany, and the former Sudetenland. Documents from the Russian archives make it clear that Stalin and Molotov were fully informed about the Polish and Czech plans to deport their Germans. The Soviet leaders told the Czechs and Poles that they not only had no objection in principle to the deportations, but that they also thought positively about them.
Stalin unambiguously endorsed the expulsions in a June 28, 1945 conversation with the Czechoslovak prime minister and deputy foreign minister: “We won’t disturb you. Throw them out.” Stalin gave the Polish communist leader Władysław Gomułka advice on how to get the Germans to leave, “You should create such conditions for the Germans that they want to escape themselves.”[4]
Some provisional decisions concerning the expulsion of Germans had been made at the Tehran Conference in December 1943. Stalin wanted to keep the eastern half of Poland which he had acquired pursuant to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made with Germany. In order to compensate Poland for her lost territory, East Prussia and perhaps Upper Silesia would be ceded to Poland. Poland would gain back in the west the same amount of territory she lost in the east. Churchill demonstrated to Stalin his thoughts on a Poland shifted westward with three matchsticks. Stalin was pleased with Churchill’s demonstration.[5]
Edvard Beneš, the president of the Czechoslovak government, justifiably claimed that he had received the blessings of Roosevelt and Churchill for the transfers. Both the American and British governments were sympathetic to the Czechoslovak and Polish cases for expulsion of the Germans and, like the Soviets, had no objection in principle.
Churchill was especially callous on the subject of German expulsions. On October 9, 1944, Churchill remarked to Stalin that 7 million Germans would be killed in the war, thus leaving plenty of room for Germans driven out of Silesia and East Prussia to move into rump Germany. On February 23, 1945, Churchill dismissed the difficulties involved in transferring the German population to the west. Churchill insisted that the transfers would be easy to make since most of the Germans in the territories now taken by the Russians had already left.[6]
The question is: What moral or legal basis would allow the Allies to expel the ethnic Germans from their homes? The forced expulsion of millions of Germans was a clear violation of the Atlantic Charter signed by the United States and Great Britain in August 1941. The Atlantic Charter had promised in Point Two that there would be no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned. However, the Sudetenland Germans, East Prussians and Silesians were not asked if they wanted to stay in their 700-year-old homelands. They were thrown out against their will.[7]
British statesmen decided to repudiate the noble principles of the Atlantic Charter. In March 1944, the Earl of Mansfield stated before the British House of Lords: “The Atlantic Charter will not apply to Germany, and therefore there is no reason whatever why we should not contemplate, if not with equanimity, at least without consternation, any unavoidable sufferings that may be inflicted on German minorities in the course of their transference.”[8]
Other British statesmen including Churchill made similar statements that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Germany. During a debate in the House of Commons on February 23, 1944, Anthony Eden expressed his view of the Atlantic Charter: “There are certain parts of the Atlantic Charter which refer in set terms to victor and vanquished alike. Article Four does so. But we cannot admit that Germany can claim, as a matter of right on her part, whatever our obligation, that any part of the Charter applies to her.”
A British Labor MP later acknowledged on March 1, 1945, before the House of Commons: “We started this war with great motives and high ideals. We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, as it were, at the stake, and now nothing is left of it.”[9]
The expulsion of ethnic Germans can be viewed in the United States as both a repudiation of the Atlantic Charter and the adoption of the Morgenthau Plan. Section Two of the Morgenthau Plan, which dealt with the “New Boundaries of Germany,” stated: “Poland should get that part of East Prussia which doesn’t go to the USSR and the southern portion of Silesia.” However, the drastic territorial changes finalized at the Potsdam Conference on August 2, 1945 went beyond what even Morgenthau had envisioned. It was agreed at the Potsdam Conference that all German land east of the Oder-Neisse Rivers that was not under Soviet administration “shall be under the administration of the Polish state.”[10]
The Potsdam Conference was held from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to decide how to administer Germany after her unconditional surrender to the Allies. The goals of the conference included the establishment of postwar order, peace-treaty issues, and remedying the effects of the war, at least on its victors. Participants were the United States represented by President Harry S. Truman, the Soviet Union represented by Joseph Stalin, and Great Britain represented first by Winston Churchill and later by Clement Attlee. In a bitter blow to French pride, France was not invited to the Potsdam Conference. Although the Allies had independently agreed on the need to move the Germans out of Eastern Europe, the discussions at Potsdam indicated that the Americans and British had second thoughts on the expulsion of the Germans.[11]
President Truman at Potsdam expressed his concerns about where 9 million Germans would go. Stalin reassured Truman that most of the Germans had already left. Stalin later noted that the Poles had retained some Germans to work in the fields, but that the Poles would expel them once the harvest was in.
Churchill also stated somewhat disingenuously that “I have grave moral scruples regarding great movements and transfers of populations.” Churchill then added that perhaps the Germans who had left Silesia should be allowed to go back. Stalin told Churchill that the Poles would hang the Germans if they returned. Stalin also said that the Germans had already been driven out of Czechoslovakia, and that there was no need to contact President Beneš about the German expulsion.[12]
Despite the reservations of the Western Allies, at the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference all parties agreed to the transfer of the Eastern Germans. The Western Allies could have said no, but they wanted to avoid any breach with the Soviets. Sir Denis Allen, a member of the British delegation, recalled:
We were then all too well aware – and to a degree hard to picture in retrospect – of our ignorance of what was really happening in Eastern Europe and still more of our inability to influence events there.
If experience of the Nazi era and of war had engendered a certain numbness and indifference to human suffering, it had also bred new hope that, against all the odds, the wartime alliance might be consolidated into a workable system of post-war collaboration in Europe and in the world at large. So there was a widely shared determination not to press concern over events in the East that we could not prevent, to the point where it might maim at birth the Control Council and the United Nations; if hopes were to be frustrated, let it be the Russians and not ourselves who were seen to be responsible.[13]
The Potsdam Conference adopted Article IX of the Potsdam Protocol regarding the German-Polish border and Article XIII regarding the transfer of the Eastern Germans to what was left of Germany. The first paragraph of Article XIII reads: “The Three Governments having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”[14]
Article XIII of the Potsdam Protocol was intended to bring the then-ongoing expulsions under a regulated procedure. According to Paragraphs Two and Three of Article XIII, the Allied Control Council in Berlin was to determine how many Germans were to be resettled. Until then a moratorium on expulsion of the Germans was to be in effect. However, the moratorium was ignored, and the expulsions continued just as before, and during the conference itself.[15]
At Nuremberg the mass deportations perpetrated by the Nazis were included as part of the crimes allegedly committed by the National Socialist government of Germany. On November 20, 1945, Pierre Mounier, assistant prosecutor for France, reproached the accused for having ordered the mass deportations. Mounier stated: “These deportations were contrary to the international conventions, in particular to Article 46 of The Hague Regulations 1907, the laws and customs of war, the general principles of criminal law as derived from the criminal laws of all civilized nations, the internal penal laws of the countries in which such crimes were committed, and to Article 6(b) of the Charter.” France’s chief prosecutor at Nuremberg also denounced the mass deportations perpetrated by the Nazis as “one of the horrors of our century.”[16]
The Nuremberg court expressed the opinion that even in a total war, when a country must fight for its very existence, civil rights and in particular The Hague Convention and its Regulations on Land Warfare place restraints upon those waging war. The mass deportations perpetrated by National Socialist Germany were held to be both a war crime and a crime against humanity. The irony is that while the Nuremberg trials were in progress, the mass deportation of millions of Germans was occurring under the sanction of the same powers whose prosecutors and judges were condemning the mass deportations perpetrated by the Germans.[17]
Bertrand Russell criticized the expulsion of the Germans in a letter to the London Times:
In eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies on an unprecedented scale, and an apparently deliberate attempt is being made to exterminate many millions of Germans, not by gas, but by depriving them of their homes and of food, leaving them to die by slow and agonizing starvation. This is done not as an act of war, but as part of a deliberate policy of “peace.”
…Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace? Is it more humane to turn out old women and children to die at a distance than to asphyxiate Jews in gas chambers? Can those responsible for the deaths of those who die after expulsion be regarded as less guilty because they do not see or hear the agonies of their victims? Are the future laws of war to justify the killing of enemy nationals after enemy resistance has ceased?[18]
American historian Ralph Franklin Keeling commented on the hypocrisy of the Potsdam Agreement:
Potsdam calls for annulment of all Nazi laws which established discrimination on grounds of race and declares: “No such discrimination, whether legal, administrative or otherwise, shall be tolerated.” Yet these forced migrations of German populations are predicated squarely on rank racial discrimination. The people affected are mostly wives and children of simple peasants, workers, and artisans whose families have lived for centuries in the homes from which they have now been ejected, and whose only offense is their German blood. How “orderly and humane” their banishment has been is now a matter of record.[19]
The Early Expulsions of Germans
For more than three months prior to the Potsdam Agreement on August 2, 1945, the Polish government was expelling German citizens from what it now called the “Recovered Territories” – a reference to the fact that Poland once ruled Silesia and Pomerania under the Piast dynasty 600 years earlier. Czechoslovakia had been expelling German civilians since mid-May 1945. Although Yugoslavia and Romania had neither asked for nor received permission from the Allies to expel their German citizens, both of these countries soon began large-scale deportations of their German populations. While the expulsions of the Germans were crude and disorganized, they were neither spontaneous nor accidental. Instead, the expulsions were carried out according to a premeditated strategy devised by each of the governments concerned well before the end of the war.[20]
The expelling nations relied almost exclusively on the use of terror to propel their German minorities across the frontiers. Except for a very few instances, deportations as a result of mob actions did not cause the German expulsions. Rather, the so-called “wild expulsions” were carried out primarily by troops, police and militia acting under orders and policies originating at the highest levels of the expelling governments.
So chaotic was the process of expelling the German minorities that many foreign observers, and even many people in the expelling countries themselves, mistook the violent events of the late spring and summer of 1945 as a spontaneous process from below. The expelling governments were more than happy to allow the myth of the “wild expulsions” to grow, since this myth enabled them to disclaim responsibility for the atrocities that were essential components of the expulsions.[21]
The worst of the violence in Poland occurred between mid-June and mid-July 1945, particularly in the districts bordering the Oder-Neisse demarcation line, which were designated by the Polish Army Command as a military settlement area. The commander of the Polish Second Army expressed on June 24, 1945 the Polish position on the rapid transfer of the Germans:
We are transferring the Germans out of Polish territory and we are acting thereby in accordance with directives from Moscow. We are behaving with the Germans as they behaved with us. Many already have forgotten how they treated our children, women and old people. The Czechs knew how to act so that the Germans fled from their territory of their own volition.
One must perform one’s tasks in such a harsh and decisive manner that the Germanic vermin do not hide in their houses but rather will flee from us of their own volition and then [once] in their own land will thank God that they were lucky enough to save their heads. We do not forget Germans always will be Germans.[22]
The Germans who were forced to resettle were usually allowed to take only 20 kilograms of baggage with them, and were escorted to the border by squads of Polish soldiers. In late June 1945, at least 40,000 Germans were expelled within a few days. One commentator described what this meant to the Germans living near the Oder-Neisse line:
The evacuation of individual localities usually began in the early morning hours. The population, torn from their sleep, had scarcely 15 to 20 minutes to snatch the most necessary belongings, or else they were driven directly onto the street without any ceremony. Smaller localities and villages were evacuated at gunpoint by small numbers of soldiers, frequently only a squad or a platoon. Due to the proximity of the border, for the sake of simplicity the Germans were marched on foot to the nearest bridge over the river, driven over to the Soviet side [i.e., into the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany] and there left to their own fate.[23]
The German expellees were frequently robbed by members of the Polish militia and military units that carried out the expulsions. Food supply became an acute problem, and the uprooted Germans were often destitute and exhausted when they arrived in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. The German expellees became easy prey for Soviet occupation troops, who often stole the few belongings the Germans had brought with them. Some Germans were beaten and raped, forced to perform humiliating acts, and some were randomly killed.[24]
Not all of the cross-border traffic of Germans was in a single direction. At the end of the war, many hundreds of thousands of Germans from the Recovered Territories who had fled the Red Army’s advance to the west now returned to their homes. The returning Germans did not understand that there was not going to be a return home. The alarming spectacle of the population in the Recovered Territories of Poland actually increasing in the weeks after V-E Day was one of the factors spurring local authorities to quickly proceed with “wild expulsions” of the Germans. Polish troops and government officials used aggressive and often violent measures to prevent the unwanted Germans from returning to their homes.[25]
However great the hazards and miseries of life on the road were for the German expellees, they were usually preferable to the expulsion trains the Polish authorities began to operate. Taking up to two weeks to reach Berlin, the trains were typically not provisioned and lacked the most basic amenities. As a result the death rate on the trains soared. One passenger wrote:
In our freight wagon there were about 98 people, and it is no exaggeration to say that we were squeezed against each other like sardines in a can. When we reached Allenstein people started to die, and had to be deposited along the side of the rails. One or more dead bodies greeted us every morning of our journey after that; they just had to be abandoned on the embankments. There must have been many, many bodies left lying along the track….
The train spent more time stopping than moving. It took us more than 14 days to reach the Russian occupation zone. We rarely traveled at night….After a few days we had no more to eat. Sometimes, by begging the Polish driver, we were able to get a little warm water drawn from the engine….The nights were unbearable because of the overcrowding. We could neither keep upright nor sit down, much less lie down. We were so tightly squeezed together that it was impossible not to jostle each other occasionally. Recriminations and quarrels erupted, even attempts to exchange blows in the middle of this human scrum. The very sick suffered the worst. Typhus was widespread throughout the entire transport and the number of deaths grew with each passing day. You can well imagine the state of hygiene that prevailed in the wagon.[26]
A German priest who witnessed the arrival of German expellees at the border described what he saw:
The people, men, women, and children all mixed together, were tightly packed in the railway cars, these cattle wagons themselves being locked from the outside. For days on end, the people were transported like this, and in Görlitz the wagons were opened for the first time. I have seen with my own eyes that out of one wagon alone 10 corpses were taken and thrown into coffins which had been kept on hand. I noted further that several persons had become deranged…The people were covered in excrement, which led me to believe that they were squeezed together so tightly that there was no longer any possibility for them to relieve themselves at a designated place.[27]
The worst of the violence appears to have been taken against the German minority in Czechoslovakia. A brief but intense outbreak of revenge-taking occurred across Czechoslovakia in May and June 1945 in response to the determination of German forces to continue fighting up to, and even after, V-E Day. Foreign observers and some Czechs themselves were shocked by the scale, the intensity, and the lack of discrimination of the reprisals against German civilians. One person wrote:
The end of the occupation was the beginning of the expulsion of German civilians, if they had survived the first hours and days of brutality. Retaliation was blind. An old woman was defenestrated; a member of a visiting German orchestra was beaten to death in the street because he could not speak Czech; others, not all of them Gestapo members, were hanged, doused with gas and lit, as living torches. Enraged mobs roamed through hospitals to find easy victims there. One [of those murdered] was a Czech patient, who happened to be the father of the writer Michael Mareš, but his papers listed a Sudeten birthplace. From May until mid-October official statistics listed 3,795 suicides of Germans in Bohemia.[28]
The Ministry of Education, the Military Prison, the Riding School, the Sports Stadium and the Labor Exchange in Prague were set aside as prisons for German civilians. The Scharnhorst School was the scene of a massacre in which groups of 10 Germans were led down to the courtyard and shot. In Strahov as many as 10,000 to 15,000 Germans were herded into the football stadium. Here the Czechs forced 5,000 prisoners to run for their lives as guards fired on them with machine guns. Some Germans were shot in the latrines. As a general rule all SS men were shot, either by a shot in the back of the neck or to the stomach. Even after May 16, 1945, when order was meant to be restored, 12 to 20 Germans died daily at the Strahov Stadium. Most of the victims had been tortured first.[29]
The worst atrocities during this period in Czechoslovakia were perpetrated by troops, police and others acting under color of authority. In a compound at Postoloprty in northern Bohemia, parties of up to 250 Germans at a time were removed and shot by Czechoslovak soldiers on June 5 and 6. The precise number of Germans killed ranges from a low of 763 (the number of bodies unearthed in 1947) to a high of 2,000. In a similar incident at Kaunitz College in Brno a Czechoslovak investigation found that at least 300 Germans died as a result of torture, shooting or hanging in May and June 1945.
On June 18, 1945, Czechoslovak troops shot 265 German civilians in the back of the neck and buried them in a mass grave the Germans had first been forced to dig beside a railway station. At Lanškroun, a two-day “People’s Tribunal” conducted by a prominent member of Beneš’s party resulted in 20 people who were shot; two hanged; others tortured; and others drowned in the town’s fire pool. In the city of Chomutov on the morning of June 9, up to a dozen Germans were tortured to death in a “cleansing operation” conducted by Staff Captain Karel Prášil on a sports field in full view of sickened Czech passersby.[30]
On May 30, 1945, under threat from a trade union headed by the Communist activist Josef Kapoun, the mayor of Brno agreed to an expulsion action against German civilians that same evening. The first column of expellees was marched off in the general direction of the Austrian frontier. A second group of German expellees, rounded up from neighboring villages and towns, followed them a few hours later. The German expellees, who by now numbered some 28,000, were denied permission to cross into Austria by the Allied occupation authorities. Rather than allowing the Germans to return home, the Brno activists responsible for the expulsion confined them in a collection of impromptu camps in the border village of Pohořelice. Lacking food, water or sanitary facilities, 1,700 Germans are estimated to have died in these camps.[31] A Red Cross nurse estimated that an additional 1,000 expellees died on the march to the camps.[32]
In light of the euphemistically styled “excesses” of May and June, some Czechoslovak policymakers and western correspondents began to criticize the Czech actions. For example, F.A. Voigt, longtime diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, wrote that the Czechs themselves were adopting “a racial doctrine akin to Hitler’s…and methods that are hardly distinguishable from those of Fascism. They have, in fact, become Slav National Socialists.”[33]
The Czechoslovak government, however, never seriously attempted to rein in the agencies over which it exercised control. Czech leaders realized that nothing but the application of force on a massive scale could rid Czechoslovakia of its German population. Too much terror might result in at worst some embarrassment abroad; too little terror would prevent the success of the operation. Beneš implicitly acknowledged as much in a speech broadcast on Radio Prague: “We are accused of simply imitating the Nazis and their cruel and uncivilized methods. Even if these reproaches should be true in individual cases, I state categorically: Our Germans must go to the Reich and they will go there in any circumstances.”[34]
The Czechoslovak government introduced numerous measures discriminating against their German minority. Germans could go out only at certain times of day; they were forced to wear white armbands, sometimes emblazoned with an “N” for Nĕmec or German; they were forbidden from using public transportation or walking on the pavement; they could not send letters or go to the cinema, theater, or pub; and they could not own jewelry, gold, silver, precious stones and other items. They were issued with ration cards, but were not allowed meat, eggs, milk, cheese or fruit, and had restricted times for buying food. The Germans were also sometimes forced to work as slaves on farms, in industry, or in the mines.[35]
For many Germans an aspect of the expulsions was blatant theft. Czech president Edvard Beneš was quoted as saying: “Take everything from the Germans. Leave them only a handkerchief to sob into.”[36] Beneš declared all Germans and Hungarians to be politically unreliable and their possessions were therefore to fall to the Czech state.[37]
The Czech partisans frequently took anything that appealed to them, and sometimes simply moved into a German’s house, appropriating the former owner’s possessions. In 1945 there were many instances of farmworkers appropriating German farms, junior doctors taking over German medical practices, and junior managers taking over German businesses. There were cases of pure opportunism: Czechs who had formerly moved in German circles suddenly became the apostles of Czech nationalism and hunted down former German acquaintances. Once the wilder days were over, the new Czech Republic moved to regulate the plunder of German property so that the booty reverted to the state.[38]
Throughout the summer of 1945, trains of German expellees continued to pour into Berlin and other German and Austrian cities. The Western journalists who had traveled to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference were aghast at the scenes they encountered at the railroad stations, with dead and dying littering the platforms. Charles Bray, Germany correspondent of the London Daily Herald, described finding four dead Germans on a visit to Stettin Station, with “another five or six…lying alongside them, given up as hopeless by the doctor, and just being allowed to die.” Bray discovered the suffering of the German expellees “gave me no satisfaction, although for years I have hoped that the Germans would reap the seeds they had sown.”[39]
Several observers compared the fate of the German expellees to the victims of the German concentration camps. Maj. Stephen Terrell of the Parachute Regiment stated: “Even a cursory visit to the hospitals in Berlin, where some of these people have dragged themselves, is an experience which would make the sights in the Concentration Camps appear normal.”[40]
Adrian Kanaar, a British military doctor working in a Berlin medical facility, reported on an expellee train from Poland in which 75 had died on the journey due to overcrowding. Although Kanaar had just completed a stint as a medical officer at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, what he witnessed of the expellees’ plight so distressed him that he declared his willingness to face a court martial if necessary for making the facts known to the press. Kanaar declared that he had not “spent six years in the army to see a tyranny established which is as bad as the Nazis.”[41]
Gerald Gardiner, later to become Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, had been a member of a volunteer ambulance unit working with concentration camp survivors. Gardiner stated with regard to the expellee trains arriving in the late summer and autumn of 1945 from the Recovered Territories, “The removal of the dead in carts from the railway stations was a grim reminder of what I saw in early days in Belsen.”[42]
Robert Murphy, a career diplomat who had served as Gen. Eisenhower’s political advisor and was now the State Department’s senior representative in Germany with the rank of ambassador, became concerned about the Allied mistreatment of the German expellees. Murphy stated with regard to the German expellees:
In viewing the distress and despair of these wretches, in smelling the odor of their filthy condition, the mind reverts instantly to Dachau and Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale, but practiced not on the Parteibonzen [Party leaders], but on women and children, the poor, the infirm. The vast majority are women and children….
Our psychology adjusts itself somehow to the idea that suffering is part of the soldier’s contract…That psychology loses some of its elasticity, however, in viewing the stupid tragedy now befalling thousands of innocent children, and women and old people….The mind reverts to other recent mass deportations which horrified the world and brought upon the Nazis the odium which they so deserved. Those mass deportations engineered by the Nazis provided part of the moral basis on which we waged the war and which gave strength to our cause.
Now the situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the invidious position of being partners in this German enterprise and as partners inevitably sharing the responsibility.[43]
An eyewitness report of the arrival in Berlin of a train which had left Poland with 1,000 German expellees aboard reads:
Nine hundred and nine men, women, and children dragged themselves and their luggage from a Russian railway train at Leherte station today, after 11 days traveling in boxcars from Poland.
Red Army soldiers lifted 91 corpses from the train, while relatives shrieked and sobbed as their bodies were piled in American lend-lease trucks and driven off for interment in a pit near a concentration camp.
The refugee train was like a macabre Noah’s ark. Every car was jammed with Germans…the families carry all their earthly belongings in sacks, bags, and tin trucks…Nursing infants suffer the most, as their mothers are unable to feed them, and frequently go insane as they watch their offspring slowly die before their eyes. Today four screaming, violently insane mothers were bound with rope to prevent them from clawing other passengers.
“Many women try to carry off their dead babies with them,” a Russian railway official said. “We search the bundles whenever we discover a weeping woman, to make sure she is not carrying an infant corpse with her.”[44]
The stated rationale during the war for the transfers had been to remove a cohort of dangerous Germans – above all, fit men of military age – who might threaten the security of the countries in which they lived. Instead, it was women, children, and old men who were deported, while the fit men had been held back for slave labor.
Earl Ziemke wrote of the expelled Germans: “…Only 12% could be classified as fully employable; 65% needed relief. Contrary to agreements made before the movement to keep families together, the countries expelling Germans were holding back the young, able-bodied men. Of the arrivals 54% were women, 21% were children under 14 years, and only 25% men, many of them old or incapacitated.”[45]
The period of the “wild expulsions” had involved massive state-sponsored programs of targeted violence, resulting in a death toll of many hundreds of thousands of Germans. Yet it was an episode that escaped the notice of many Europeans and virtually all Americans. From its signing on August 2, 1945, the Allies would attempt to administer the expulsions in the “orderly and humane” manner specified by the Potsdam Agreement. However, the so-called organized expulsions turned out to be no more orderly and humane than the “wild expulsions” had been.
[1] Dietrich, John, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, New York: Algora Publishing, 2002, p. 137.
[2] MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 162.
[3] Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 108.
[4] Ibid., pp. 108-109.
[5] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 83.
[6] Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 109-110.
[10] Dietrich, John, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, New York: Algora Publishing, 2002, p. 137.
[11] Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 110.
[12] Ibid., pp. 110-111.
[13] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 86.
[14] Ibid., p. 87.
[18] Russell, Bertrand, The London Times, Oct. 23, 1945, p. 5.
[19] Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 13.
[20] Douglas, R. M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 93.
[21] Ibid., pp. 94-95.
[22] Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, pp. 214-215.
[23] Ibid., p. 215.
[25] Douglas, R. M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 103.
[27] Davies, Norman and Moorhouse, Roger, Microcosm, London: Pimlico, 2003, p. 422.
[28] Demetz, Peter, Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-1945, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 235.
[29] MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 134.
[31] Ibid., pp. 98-99. See also MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 139.
[33] Douglas, R. M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 97
[36] Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany 1944-1947, Sheridan, Colo.: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 241.
[38] Ibid., pp. 126-127, 131.
[39] London Daily Herald, Aug. 24, 1945.
[44] Wales, Henry, Chicago Tribune Press Service, Nov. 18, 1945.
[45] Ziemke, Earl, U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1975, p. 435.
Source: http://www.renegadetribune.com/talmudic-government-moves-into-christianized-europe/
By Douglas Reed
From The Controversy of Zion
Then came the event which has produced such violent results in our time: the Talmudic government moved into Christianized Europe and established itself among peoples to whom the nature of its dogma and its methods were strange and even incomprehensible. This led, in the course of many centuries, to the recurrent clash of the alien ambition and creed against native interest, which our century is again experiencing.
The nature of Westerners (more especially in the northern latitudes) is to be candid, to declare purposes, and to use words to express intention, and Christianity developed these native traits.
The force which appeared among them was of the opposite character, oriental, infinitely subtle, secretive, conspiratorial, and practised in the use of language to disguise real purposes. Therein lay its greatest strength in the encounter with the West.
The removal to Europe came about through the Islamic conquests. The Arabs, under the Prophet’s banner, drove the Romans from Palestine. By this means the native inhabitants of Palestine, who had inhabited it some two thousand years before the first Hebrew tribes entered, became the rulers of their own country, and remained so for nine hundred years (until 1517, when the Turks conquered it). An instructive comparison may be made between the Islamic and the Judaic treatment of captives:
The Caliph’s order to the Arab conquerors in 637 AD was,
You shall not act treacherously, dishonestly, commit any excess or mutilation, kill any child or old man; cut or burn down palms or fruit trees, kill any sheep, cow or camel, and shall leave alone those whom you find devoting themselves to worship in their cells”.
Jehovah’s order, according to Deuteronomy 20.16, is,
Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth”.
From Palestine, Islam then spread its frontiers right across North Africa, so that the great mass of Jews came within the boundaries of the same external authority. Next, Islam turned towards Europe and invaded Spain. Therewith the shadow of Talmudic Zionism fell across the West.
The Moorish conquest was “supported with both men and money” by the Jews, who as camp-followers were treated with remarkable favour by the conquerors, city after city being handed to their control! The Koran itself said,
Their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth”;
the Islamic armies certainly facilitated this aim.
Christianity thus became submerged in Spain. In these propitious circumstances the Talmudic government was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, and the process began, the results of which have become apparent in our generation. Dr. Kastein says:
“Judaism, dispersed as it was over the face of the globe, was always inclined to set up a fictitious state in the place of the one that had been lost, and always aimed, therefore, at looking to a common centre for guidance …
“This centre was now held to be situated in Spain, whither the national hegemony was transferred from the East. Just as Babylonia had providentially taken the place of Palestine, so now Spain opportunely replaced Babylonia, which, as a centre of Judaism, had ceased to be capable of functioning.
“All that could be done there had already been accomplished; it had forged the chains with which the individual could bind himself, to avoid being swallowed up by his environment: the Talmud”.
The reader will observe the description of events: “individuals” do not commonly bind themselves, of choice, with chains forged for them. Anyway, the Jewish captivity was as close as ever, or perhaps had been made closer. That was for the Jews to ponder.
What was to become of vital importance to the West was that the Jewish government was now in Europe. The directing centre and the destructive idea had both entered the West.
The Talmudic government of the nation-within-nations was continued from Spanish soil. The Gaonate issued its directives; the Talmudic academy was established at Cordova; and sometimes, at least, a shadowy Exilarch reigned over Jewry.
This was done under the protection of Islam; the Moors, like Babylon and Persia before, showed remarkable benevolence towards this force in their midst. To the Spaniards the invader came to bear more and more a Jewish countenance and less and less a Moorish one; the Moors had conquered, but the conqueror’s power passed into Jewish hands. The story which the world had earlier seen enacted in Babylon, repeated itself in Spain, and in later centuries was to be re-enacted in every great country of the West.
The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish reconquest, after this long ordeal, was completed in 1492 the Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled. They had become identified with the invaders’ rule and were cast out when it ended, as they had followed it in.
The “centre” of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland.
At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt, Palestine, Italy, the Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany, Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the Spanish Peninsula.
There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.
Yet in the 1500’s, when the “centre” was set up in Poland, “a Jewish population of millions came into being there “, according to Dr. Kastein. But populations of millions do not suddenly “come into being”.
Dr. Kastein shows himself to be aware that something needs explanation here, and to be reluctant to go into it, for he dismisses the strange thing with the casual remark that the size of this community, of which nothing has previously been heard, “was more due to immigration,apparently from France, Germany and Bohemia, than to any other cause”. He does not explain what other cause he might have in mind and, for a diligent scholar, is on this one occasion strangely content with a random surmise.
But when a Zionist historian thus slurs over something the seeker after knowledge may be fairly sure that the root of the matter may by perseverance be found.
Jews Take a Leading Part in the Struggle for “Emancipation”
Source: http://www.renegadetribune.com/jews-take-a-leading-part-in-the-struggle-for-emancipation/
The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.
Nevertheless, in the case of the Jews there was an obvious paradox which repeatedly baffled and alarmed the peoples among whom they dwelt: The Jewish Law expressed the theory of the master-race in the most arrogant and vindictive form conceivable to the human imagination; how then could the Jews attack nationhood in others? Why did the Jews demand the levelling of barriers between men when they built an ever stronger barrier between the Jews and other men? How could people, who claimed that God had made the very world itself for them to rule, and forbade them to mix with lesser breeds, complain of discrimination?
Now that another hundred and fifty years have passed, the answer to such questions has been given by events.
It was true that the Jewish clamour for emancipation was not truly concerned with the great idea or principle at issue: human liberty.
The judaic Law denied that idea and principle. The Talmudic governors of Jewry saw that the quickest way to remove the barriers between themselves and power over nations was to destroy legitimate government in these nations; and the quickest way to that end was to cry “emancipation!”.
Thus the door opened by emancipation could be used to introduce the permanent revolutionary force into the life of nations; with the destruction of all legitimate government, the revolutionaries would succeed to power, and these revolutionaries would be Talmud-trained and Talmud-controlled. They would act always under the Mosaic Law, and in this way the end of Babylon could be reproduced in the West.
The evidence of events in the Twentieth Century now shows that this was the plan to which the Talmudic elders worked during the third phase of the story of Zion, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. Thus there was the widest possible difference in the understanding of “emancipation” by the Christianized European peoples among whom the Jews dwelt and among the Talmudic rulers of the Jews.
For the great mass of peoples emancipation represented an end: the end of servitude.
For the powerful, secret sect it represented a means to the opposite end; the imposition of a new and harsher servitude.
One great danger attended this undertaking. It was, that the destruction of barriers between men might also destroy the barrier between the Jews and other men; this would have destroyed the plan itself, for that force would have been dispersed which was to be used, emancipation once gained, to “pull down and destroy” the nations.
This very nearly happened in the fourth phase of the story of Zion; the century of emancipation (say, from 1800 to 1900 AD) brought the peril of “assimilation”. In the century of “freedom” a great number of Jews, in Western Europe and in the new “West” oversea, did evince the desire to cast off the chains of the Judaic Law and to mingle themselves with the life of peoples.
For that reason our Zionist historian, Dr. Kastein, considers the Nineteenth Century to be the darkest age in all Jewish history, fraught with the deadly peril of involvement in mankind, which happily was averted.
He cannot contemplate without horror the destruction, through assimilation, of the Judaic barriers of race and creed. Thus he calls the Nineteenth Century movement towards emancipation “retrograde” and thanks God that “the Zionist ideology” preserved the Jews from the fate of assimilation.
The Spanish Civil War – Redux
Source: http://codoh.com/library/document/1772
By Daniel W. Michaels
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, Grigory Sevostianov (eds.), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2001, 576 pp.
Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2004, 400 pp.
The received legend about the Spanish Civil War tells the story about an embattled democratic republic crushed by reactionary forces at home and the intervention of Fascist forces from Germany and Italy. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many of its State records, several important revisionist works have appeared in Spanish, French and English that reveal for the first time the full extent of Communist influence and ultimate control of the Spanish Republic. The Yale University series “Annals of Communism” continues to lead the field in revealing the true nature and aspirations of international communism in the 20th Century. The findings of the university’s researchers today differ sharply from the image of the Soviet Union and its activities presented to the American public during the Roosevelt Administration.
Two new works from Yale have now corrected many generally held misconceptions about what actually transpired in Spain in the 1930s. The first book, Spain Betrayed, is a collection of 81 previously unpublished documents from the Russian Military Archives – reports from Soviet agents and advisers in the field during the civil war. Each document is accompanied by a commentary by one of the editors.[1] Two of the more interesting of these documents are report (Doc. 60) by General Emilio Kleber (aka Manfred Stern) and that by Georgy Dimitrov, Bulgarian Communist leader, excerpts of which are given below.
The second book upon which this review is based, is The Spanish Civil War, by Stanley G. Payne. In it the author synthesizes, updates, and draws further conclusions both from the materials obtained from the Russian Federation,[2] as well as from other previously overlooked sources, including Alien Wars: The Soviet Union’s Aggressions against the World,[3] the Spanish volume Queridos camaradas,[4] and the French source The Passing of an Illusion, the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century.[5]
On the basis of the above-listed references, the Spanish Civil War is best described today as having been a revolutionary-counterrevolutionary civil war. It was revolutionary in the sense that the Spanish government – the Republic, which was loosely composed of social democrats, Bolsheviks, anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, Trotskyites, and other left-wing factions, was gradually taken over and run by Stalinist Bolsheviks under direct orders from Moscow. It was counterrevolutionary in that the conservatives, landowners, the Army, the Church, and the Falangists rallied their forces to successfully retake the government from the Stalinists. Anarchy, bickering, and political assassinations had characterized the Republic in the decade before the actual civil war broke out. In fact, Spain was the only country in the world with a mass movement of anarchists – the disciples of Bakunin. The main weapon used by the left during this period was the general strike; the weapon favored by the right was the pronunciamento– tantamount to mobilization – declared by the military establishment. Moderation and compromise seemed not to be a part of Spanish nature in those turbulent days. The actual civil war on the battlefield broke out in July 1936 and did not end until April 1939 after some 500,000 people had died in battle or by other means and another 400,000 were forced into exile.
The first general election of the Second Republic (there were three, each successive one more Bolshevized than the one that preceded it), gave a majority to a broad coalition of the Republican Left – a middle-class radical party led by Manuel Azaña. In September 1936 Largo Caballero, called the Spanish Lenin, became prime minister of the wartime government, but by May 1937 was removed from office by the Communists who installed Juan Negrín, nominally a Socialist but actually a Stalinist stooge. Moreover, Negrín was known to be married to a Russian woman. On the Nationalist side, Franco, generally called el caudillo (the leader), assumed leadership. Franco had a reputation as a highly professional combat soldier. Commissioned in the army at the age of eighteen, he had volunteered for service in Morocco, where he distinguished himself in battle and won the respect of his subordinates. At the age of thirty-nine, he had become the youngest general in Europe since Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps the closest political analog to Franco would be the estimable Antonio Salazar who governed (1932-1968) Portugal concurrently with the Spanish ruler.
General Franco had propagandistically been presented to the English-speaking world as a fascist. In fact, Franco, was a conservative Catholic who rejected the Falangists (a movement founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his father Miguel) and put limits on their power. Franco’s authoritarian rule, called Franquismo, was totally free of the anti-Semitism and racialism that usually accompanied typical fascist movements.[6] Ironically, it was the Republic practiced the only racism displayed in the Spanish War. Posters and pamphlets issued by the Republic depicted Franco’s Moorish troops as “thick-lipped, hideously grinning, powerful turbaned figures attacking defenseless white women and bayoneting white children,” and worse.
Some observers still consider the Spanish Civil War to have been the first battle of World War II. Rather it seems now, with these new studies, to have been yet another incident of revolutionary-counterrevolutionary civil war in the post-WWI and inter-war period instigated by Communist attempts to subvert and overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe. The civil war in Russia, in which the revolutionaries emerged victorious, was the prime example and the only such civil war in which the revolutionaries prevailed. Similar revolutionary attempts were made in Finland, Bavaria, and Hungary, but were thwarted by counterrevolutionary patriots in each of those countries. Moreover, further factors that separate the Spanish experience from World War II were that during the Spanish Civil War, Great Britain and France both maintained non-interventionist foreign policies, while the United States was still in a state of shock having fallen from the frenzied heights of the “Flapper Age” to the depths of the Great Depression. Also, Spain remained neutral during World War II. And, finally, the weaponry and tactics used in the Spanish Civil War more resembled those of WWI than those of WWII. The Second World War only began when Britain and France – in the firm expectation that the US and the USSR would soon join them – declared war on Germany over a border dispute in Eastern Europe resulting from the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
Five days after the fighting began, Georgy Dimitrov, secretary of the Comintern, spelt out the basic Comintern and Soviet policy in the Spanish Civil War:
“We should not, at the present stage, assign the task of creating Soviets and try to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake. Therefore we must say: act in the guise of defending the Republic. When our positions have been strengthened, then we can go further. […] The war cannot end successfully if the Communist Party does not take power in its own hands.”
Part of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, of course, was the fact that many honorable and decent men in the Republic’s government – socialists, liberals, and the like – were gradually swallowed up by the extreme Communist left. For example, the Spanish Socialist Minister of the Navy and Air Force, Indalecio Prieto (Doc. 45), described a Communist as, “not a human being – he’s a party; he’s a line, a person with an unseen committee behind his back.” About the only glue holding the left together was their common anti-fascism, and even that was specious. The Republic was not only at war with the Nationalists, it was at war with itself.
To add to the general chaos, concurrently as Stalin and the USSR was aiding the Republic, the Soviet tyrant and his Bolsheviks was plotting and warring against the Trotskyites and other political enemies at home and in Spain, where they were still quite influential.
Because Spain in the 1930s was a very poor and troubled country whose limited resources were sorely depleted by a succession of Moorish Wars and The Great Depression, both warring parties invited and welcomed foreign intervention. Although Spain remained neutral in both world wars, the Spanish Army was constantly engaged from 1909-1926 against Abd al Krim’s Riff Berbers in Morocco. The Soviet Union came to the aid of the Republic while Italy and Germany responded by helping the counterrevolution. As in Europe generally after World War I, Fascist parties promoting extreme nationalism were formed as a reaction to Communist takeovers or to thwart attempted Communist takeovers. With regard to Spain, the USSR was the only foreign power to intervene politically in Spain before the Civil War. Historian Payne states explicitly: “The USSR was the only power that had been intervening systematically in Spanish affairs before the beginning of the Civil War, operating its own political party within the country and at long last achieving some success.”
The first official Marxist Party in Spain was the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) established in 1879; the [Stalinist] Communist Party of Spain (PCE) was formed in 1920 by amalgamating several of the smaller left-wing parties. An anti-Stalinist Trotskyite Workers Unification Party (POUM) was hastily assembled in 1935. As early as January 1919, with Lenin still alive and ruling, the first Comintern agent, Mikhail Borodin (aka Mikhail Gruzenberg), arrived in Madrid accompanied by his assistant Jesús Ramírez (aka Charles Phillips, an American socialist) to organize the many splintered left-wing groups.
Under Stalin, Soviet personnel assigned to Spain were chosen with care, although many of them could not rightly not yet be called Stalinists. The Great Terror and purge of Trotskyites was just getting underway in the mid-1930s and would be reflected in the fate of some of Stalin’s appointments in Spain. (Those that were not able to defect to the West were executed when they returned to the USSR). Stalin appointed Marcel Rosenberg, who had been a delegate to the League of Nations, as ambassador to Spain. General Jan Berzin (aka Peteris Kjusis) headed the military staff dispatched to Spain. Berzin, who was the head of the GRU from 1924 to 1938, Soviet Military Intelligence, arrived in Madrid in 1936 and became commander of Soviet Forces in the Spanish Civil War. Major General Walter Krivitsky (aka Samuel Ginzberg) as NKVD rezident in the Netherlands was responsible for Soviet military intelligence throughout Europe.
Aleksandr Orlov (aka Leiba Feldbin) filled the most important post of NKVD intelligence chief and security control. As NKVD rezident in Spain, Orlov was charged with both intelligence collection and counterintelligence. Orlov established the Servicio de Investigación Militar in which he trained agents for the Soviet Union. The American spy Morris Cohen was one of his students.
Stalin, who always prized the importance of writers and filmmakers in shaping public opinion (he called them ‘engineers of the mind’), assigned his personal friend, Mikhail Koltsov, as the Pravda correspondent in Spain. Ilya Ehrenburg, another agitprop star, moved between Paris and Madrid. Much of the propaganda coverage issued from Moscow was picked up and echoed by Western journalists who either sympathized with the Communists or were blind to what was going on. Thus, the propaganda, echoed and reechoed in the world press, soon became the myths and legends of today. And were it not for a small group of revisionist scholars, the myths and legends would have become history.
The American media and “intellectuals,” with few exceptions, were openly sympathetic to the Republic, and succeeded in misleading many Americans into sharing their sympathies. They were and remain heartbroken when the Communist revolution in Spain was squelched. To this day, General Francisco Franco receives only negative commentary in America. Famous journalists like Walter Duranty (N.Y. Times, Herbert Matthews (N.Y. Times), and Louis Fischer (The Nation), who were better propagandists than journalists, were very influential in disarming American opinion about the threat of Communism. In literature and the motion picture industry, the reality is, Payne notes, that if the Louis Jordan of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls had ever existed, he would have been working for the NKVD. “Mountains of mendacity,” was Paul Johnson’s phrase describing the pro-Soviet lies that circulated about the Spanish Civil War. “No episode in the 1930s has been more lied about than this one.” Fortunately, better minds in the U.S. Defense Department recognized the true value of Spain and Franco to the defense of the West and hastened to include Spain in NATO in the 1950s.
Much has been written about the International Brigades, totaling about 40,000 men recruited by the Communist Parties in the West. In the early 1930’s Stalin had not yet removed Trotskyites and other undesirables from his government. The Comintern was still very active and Stalin, under its influence, supported the Popular Front movement in Europe and the Americas. Communist Parties were asked to recruit volunteers to support the Republic and demonstrate Communist solidarity. General Emilio Kleber, a Soviet Commissar, acted as liaison between the Spanish Minister of Defense and the French Communist Andre Marty, who was in charge of recruiting the International Brigades in Albacete.
In the United States, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was at first made quite popular in the press as aiding the Republic. Some of its members, after having experienced reality in Spain, returned home disillusioned and later honestly reported what was actually happening. One such was the novelist William Herrick, who wrote quite frankly: “Yes, we went to Spain to fight Fascism, but democracy was not our aim.” During the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade further disgraced themselves by following Communist Party orders to oppose United States’ entry into the war. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Brigade again raised the Red Banner. Shortly after WWII, the Lincoln Brigade was put on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. From Britain the renowned George Orwell and other notables learned about Communism the hard way in Spain.
What lessons did the major interventionist powers draw from the Spanish Civil War? Surprisingly, the authors tell us, the Soviet Union devoted an extraordinary amount of time in reviewing the lessons learned there with respect to weaponry, tactics, and strategy, assuming the Spanish experience would be the model for future revolutionary wars. The Soviet Ministry of Defense published numerous books, training manuals, and articles for the Red Army on their experience. On the other hand, the German command concluded that the Spanish conflict was a special kind of war from which it would be a mistake to draw any major new conclusions or lessons. In the reviewer’s opinion, it would be wrong to conclude that the USSR placed that much importance on the Spanish experience. Perhaps, the Trotskyites did consider Spain important, expecting similar revolutions in other Western countries, but Stalin and the Soviet Armed Forces under Marshal Zhukov were already employing large-scale, deep penetration and encirclement tactics, such as would be used in WWII, in the late 1930s in Manchuria against the Japanese.
The Spanish Civil War, historian Payne asserts in conclusion, was fought between extreme rightist and leftist forces, neither of which wanted to create a modern liberal state. “The left lost the military struggle but more often than not won the propaganda war.” Through the successful propaganda war in which for many decades the Republic was depicted as representing democratic government, Communists and Soviet intelligence agents were able to operate almost without suspicion, especially in Britain and the United States.
The veteran Stalinist NKVD official Pavel Sudoplatov explained:
“Stalin in the Soviet Union and Trotsky in exile each hoped to be the savior and the sponsor of the Republicans and thereby the vanguard for the world Communist revolution. We sent our young inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors. Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations. Our subsequent initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republic lost, but Stalin’s men and women won.”
Author Payne confirms this assessment:
“The Soviet institution that most benefited from involvement in the Spanish war was the NKVD, which used the war for deep penetration into the military and the political structures of the Republic. They created cells, which they planned to expand significantly in order to increase secret operations in other European countries and the United States.”
By way of providing a consensus of opinions based on a close review of all these recent investigations and access to Soviet sources, historian Payne lists some of the main conclusions of individual researchers:
The Soviet documents, Spanish historians, and Payne all agree that Stalin – proceeding in his usual cautious manner – intended by his intervention in Spain to convert that tortured nation into the first Western “Peoples Republic,” a forerunner of the Peoples Republics he later established in Eastern Europe. At times Western analysts have mistaken Stalin’s innate cautiousness for a change in Soviet policy. In reality, he rarely deviated from his ultimate intention even if it meant, “One step backwards, two steps forward.”
The editors of Spain Betrayed (Radosh, Habeck, and Sevostianov) conclude:
“As some historians have long suspected, the documents prove that advisers from Moscow were indeed attempting to ‘Sovietize’ Spain and turn it into what would have been one of the first ‘Peoples Republics,’ with a Stalinist-style economy, army, and political structure.”
Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, ending their careful study of Comintern policy, write, “the process is well-known and was clearly outlined in the Spain of 1937. Thus, without complete institutional similarity, it can be said that the policy of the Comintern in Spain pointed, without doubt, to the model of the ‘Peoples Democracy’.”
François Furet writes of the Spanish Civil War:
“I do not consider it accurate to write, as Hugh Thomas does,[7] that after the anarchist defeat of May 1937 and the formation of the Negrín government, “two-counterrevolutions “ faced each other: that of Franco and that led by the Spanish Communist Party, in the shadow of the new prime minister. This definition suits Franco, but not the other side. It is true that the Communists suffocated a revolution in Barcelona, but only to substitute one of their own. They suffocated the popular revolution, annihilated the POUM, subjugated Catalan separatism, regimented anarchism, split the left and right of the Socialist Party – that is, Caballero and Prieto, respectively, obliged Azaña and Negrín to follow them. But with that the Spanish Republic had lost its spark. […] What was being tested in Spain was the political technique of ‘Peoples Democracy’, as it would be practiced in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945.”
Stalin’s favorite Spanish Communist, Dolores Ibárruri (aka La Pasionaria) wrote in her autobiography years later that in the Republican zone:
“The democratic, bourgeois Republic was transformed into a Peoples Republic, the first in the history of contemporary democratic revolutions.”
Senior Russian Army officers and military historians, Sarin and Dvoretsky, conclude:
“Judging from numerous papers that we have examined, Stalin began to see the Spanish government as some kind of branch of the Soviet government obedient to dictates from Moscow. […] In this unnecessary war, many hundred of young Soviet men suffered and died for no good purpose. Stalin and his team pursued an unrealistic goal: to turn Spain into a Communist country beholden to the Soviet Union as the first step to creating Communist governments in other countries of the western world.”
The Communist Party explained its defeat in Spain in terms of standard Stalinist shturmovshchina (policy of correcting mistakes made in planning and organization based on the belief that Stalinist Communism was infallible and any failure in policy had to be the result of human error or treachery), namely, that the PCE had been defeated by its own errors and failing to act with sufficient audacity. Among the many Stalin had executed for their failure were Ambassador Rosenberg, the Russian Military Attaché, Gorev, General Berzin, General Kleber, and countless unknown others considered “enemies of the [Stalinist] State.”
Other factors were considered to explain the Soviet intervention. Geopolitically speaking, a Communist victory in Spain would have militarily outflanked Germany and seriously weaken its position in Europe. Diplomatically, Stalin patiently renewed his attempts to enlist Britain and France in a triple alliance against Germany. Apparently, Britain at that time was not yet ready to conclude such an alliance, so Stalin entered into the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact which provided an additional two years for Stalin to put all his chips in order.
The Yale University “Annals of Communism” series with its Russian-American collaboration has provided the best insight into actual Communist plans and intrigues in the 20th Century. In the case of Spain, it appears that Germany and Italy were quite right to have intervened and upset Stalin’s plans.
[1] Radosh was a former Communist whose uncle fought on the side of the Republic; Habeck is an assistant professor of history and coordinator of the Russian Military Archive Project at Yale; Sevostianov is senior researcher at the Institute of Universal History in Moscow.
[2] Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of fourteen books, mostly on aspects of Spanish history.
[3] O. L. Sarin and L. S. Dvoretsky. Alien Wars: the Soviet Union’s Aggressions against the World. Presidio, Novato, California, 244 pp.
[4] Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo. Queridos camaradas: la Internacional Comunista y España, 1919-1939, Planeta, Barcelona, Spain, 1999, 532 pp.
[5] François Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, 596 pp.
[6] Roger Griffin. Fascism. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1995, p. 186.
[7] Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War. Modern Library (revised edition). New York, 2001, 1096 pp.
Albert Einstein: Time Magazine’s Undeserving Person of the Century
In 1999 Albert Einstein was named Time Magazine’s person of the 20th century.[1] This article will discuss whether Einstein deserved this award.
Albert Einstein is regarded by many people as the greatest physicist of the 20th century.[2] His unique contributions are said to have revolutionized physics.
However, many physicists dispute the revolutionary nature of Einstein’s discoveries. Physicist Frank J. Tipler writes:
Most physicists now recognize that Einstein’s theory of relativity is not a revolutionary theory at all but a completion of classical physics. Einstein’s most subtle biographer, Abraham Pais, has conceded this, but also maintained that Einstein’s invention of quantum mechanics, in his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, was still revolutionary.
I disagree. Einstein’s invention of quantum mechanics was, once again, a conservative innovation – conservative in the traditional sense of preserving the classical structure of Newtonian physics.”[3]
Christopher Jon Bjerknes accuses Einstein of plagiarism. Bjerknes writes:
Many people knew that Einstein did not hold priority for much of what he wrote. He, himself, was keenly aware of it. It is not uncommon for grandiose myths to accrue to overly idealized popular figures, such as Albert Einstein. Theoretical Physics, as a field, was small, and not well known in the period from 1905-1919. Theoretical physicists were not well known, and, since those in the field knew that Einstein was a plagiarist, they largely ignored him…
Einstein evinced a career-long pattern of publishing “novel” theories and formulae after others had already published similar words, then claimed priority for himself. He did it with E = mc². He did it with the so-called special theory of relativity and he did it with the general theory of relativity.[4]
While I don’t understand physics well enough to know if Bjerknes’s analysis is accurate, it is certain that many physicists had little regard for Einstein in his later years. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, visited the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in January 1935. In a letter to his brother Frank, Oppenheimer conveyed his reaction to the occupants of Fine Hall at Princeton: “Princeton is a madhouse: its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate & helpless desolation. Einstein is completely cuckoo…”[5]
Oppenheimer also said in private that Einstein had no understanding of or interest in modern physics, and that Einstein had been wasting his time trying to unify gravitation and electromagnetism.[6]
Physicist Freeman Dyson was a colleague of Einstein’s from 1948 to 1955 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dyson had a strong desire to meet and know Einstein when he arrived at the Institute. However, after reading Einstein’s recent scientific papers, Dyson decided they were junk. Dyson spent the next seven years avoiding Einstein so that he would not have to tell Einstein his work was junk.[7]
Physicist David Bodanis writes about Einstein’s later years: “Einstein’s peers regarded him as a has-been. Even many of his closest friends no longer took his ideas seriously.[8]
Einstein Supported Zionism
In an article published in the November 26, 1938 edition of Collier’s magazine, Albert Einstein explained how the social creed and morality inbred in most Jews, which he attempted to live by, was part of a long and proud tradition. Einstein wrote: “The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.”[9] Einstein later wrote that Karl Marx lived and sacrificed himself for the ideal of social justice.[10]
Einstein wrote about the Jewish tradition: “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence – these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”[11]
Einstein came to embrace the cause of Zionism. He wrote to a friend in October 1919: “One can be an internationalist without being indifferent to members of one’s tribe. The Zionist cause is very close to my heart…I am glad that there should be a little patch of earth on which our kindred brethren are not considered aliens.” Einstein further declared: “I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew, I am from today a supporter of the Zionist effort.”[12]
Einstein worked hard to promote Zionism and to establish the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He wrote to German/Jewish chemist Fritz Haber:
Despite my emphatic internationalist beliefs, I have always felt an obligation to stand up for my persecuted and morally oppressed tribal companions. The prospect of establishing a Jewish university fills me with particular joy, having recently seen countless instances of perfidious and uncharitable treatment of splendid young Jews with attempts to deny their chances of education.[13]
Einstein traveled to America, Singapore and other places to help secure funding for Hebrew University.[14]
Einstein was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel. He wrote after Israel was founded:
In this hour one thing, above all, must be emphasized: Judaism owes a great debt of gratitude to Zionism. The Zionist movement has revived among Jews the sense of community. It has performed productive work surpassing all the expectations any one could entertain. This productive work in Palestine, to which self-sacrificing Jews throughout the world have contributed, has saved a large number of our brethren from direct need. In particular, it has been possible to lead a not inconsiderable part of our youth toward a life of joyous and creative work.
Now the fateful disease of our time – exaggerated nationalism, borne up by blind hatred – has brought our work to a most difficult stage. Fields cultivated by day must have armed protection at night against fanatical Arab outlaws. All economic life suffers from insecurity.[15]
Einstein ignored in this writing that Israel was formed through the ethnic cleaning of approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were ruthlessly expelled from their homes. Entire cities and hundreds of villages in Israel were left empty and repopulated with new Jewish immigrants. The Palestinians lost everything they had and became destitute refugees, while the Jewish immigrants stole the Palestinians’ property and confiscated everything they needed.[16] This is why the “fanatical Arab outlaws” Einstein referred to arose to counteract these illegal Zionist actions.
Einstein also praised the great and lasting contributions of Rabbi Stephen Wise to the cause of Zionism. Einstein wrote about Wise: “There are those who do not love him, but there is no one who has ever denied him recognition and respect, for everybody knows that behind the enormous labors of this man there has always been the passionate desire to make mankind better and happier.”[17]
Einstein was even invited by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on November 16, 1952 to become President of Israel if elected by the Parliament. Einstein turned down this offer because the Presidential office required an understanding of human relations – something Einstein felt he was deficient in. Einstein wanted to deal only with science and nature.[18]
Einstein Hated Germans
Albert Einstein hated the German people. Einstein wrote to an old Jewish friend in the summer of 1942: “Due to their wretched traditions the Germans are such a badly messed-up people that it will be very difficult to remedy the situation by sensible, not to speak of humane, means. I keep hoping that at the end of the war, with God’s benevolent help, they will largely kill each other off.”[19]
In a tribute “To the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Einstein wrote in 1944 that the Germans “deliberately used the humanity of others to make preparation for their last and most grievous crime against humanity.” Einstein held the German people responsible for electing Adolf Hitler and acquiescing in what Einstein felt was Hitler’s unutterable crimes. He could not find forgiveness in his heart for such “calculated moral degradation.”[20]
Einstein believed in the official Holocaust story[21], and his hatred of Germans continued after the war. Jamie Sayen writes:
Personally, he could not bring himself to forgive the Germans for the crimes of the Nazis and he rejected all reconciliatory efforts. In 1951 President Theodor Heuss of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) invited Einstein to join the Peace Section of the old Prussian order Pour le mérite. Einstein had been a member prior to 1933 but, in accordance with his postwar refusal to be associated publicly with any German organization he declined Heuss’s invitation. “Because of the mass murder which the Germans inflicted upon the Jewish people,” he explained, “it is evident that a self-respecting Jew could not possibly wish to be associated in any way with any official German institution.”[22]
Einstein was convinced that militarism was so deeply ingrained in the spirit of the German people that world peace was not possible while Germany possessed an army. He thought the Germans could not learn through experience because they always managed to rationalize their failures with irrational explanations. Einstein warned a woman about Germans after the war: “You will find them affable, intelligent, and they will seem to agree with you, but you must not believe a one of them.”[23]
Einstein supported the Morgenthau Plan and wanted to see Germany transformed from an industrial nation into an agricultural country. He wrote to his Jewish friend James Franck: “I am firmly convinced that it is absolutely indispensable to prevent the restoration of German industrial power for many years…I firmly object to any attempt from Jewish quarters to reawaken the kind of soft sentimental feelings which permitted Germany to prepare a war of aggression without any interference on the part of the rest of the world – and this long before the Nazis came to power…”[24]
Einstein would not even permit his books to be sold in Germany after the war. Einstein wrote to German chemist Otto Hahn: “The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations. The conduct of the German intellectuals – viewed as a class – was no better than that of the mob.”[25] Einstein also protested the American use of German scientists after the war to help in the “war on communism.”[26]
Einstein’s national and tribal kinship became starkly clear in his own mind as World War II ended. He wrote: “I am not a German but a Jew by nationality.”[27] In a letter dated October 12, 1953 to Jewish physicist Max Born, Einstein referred to Germany as the “land of the mass-murderers of our kinsmen.”[28] This was Einstein’s opinion, and he never deviated from it.[29]
Alleged Pacifist
Albert Einstein decided to live in the United States and not return to Germany after Hitler obtained power. He said in a widely reported public statement: “As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail…These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.”[30]
Einstein felt close to the American Friends of Peace and regarded himself as a pacifist. However, his emphasis shifted toward ensuring peace “through the creation of an international organization embracing all major states…with a sufficiently strong executive power at its disposal.” Einstein thought a world government was the best defense against fascism.[31]
Einstein’s deep distrust of Germany caused him to forsake his alleged pacifism. Jürgen Neffe writes:
He imagined the country “Barbaria” capable of anything. A “uranium bomb” in the hands of Germans would be like an “axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” He had not forgotten how consistently the Germans had adapted scientific achievements in employing poison gas for military purposes in World War I under the leadership of his friend Fritz Haber. He declared on the spot that he was prepared to go to the top level of the administration to warn of the danger.[32]
Einstein wrote a letter in conjunction with physicists Edward Teller and Leo Szilard that President Roosevelt received on October 3, 1939. This letter warned of the possibility that an atomic bomb using uranium might be built. On March 7, 1940, Einstein followed up with a more-urgent second letter to Roosevelt which stated: “Since the outbreak of war, interest in uranium has intensified in Germany. I have now learned that research there is carried out in great secrecy and that it has been extended to another of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute of Physics.”[33]
The fact that two atomic bombs later hit Japan and not Germany was in Einstein’s view a great catastrophe. Germany was the only country against which Einstein would have condoned using the atomic bomb. Any degree of force was acceptable to Einstein to defeat Germany–even the atomic bomb, even war to achieve peace. After Germany’s defeat, which Einstein regarded as a necessary conquest of the Germans collectively embroiled in guilt, the use of the atomic bomb was no longer justified.[34]
Einstein returned to his alleged pacifism after World War II. Since the only justifiable war – the one against the Nazis – had ended, Einstein felt obliged more than ever to voice his advocacy for world peace.[35]
Einstein was selected as Time magazine’s person of the 20th century primarily because of his contributions to physics early in his career.[36] Many physicists, however, had little regard for Einstein as a physicist in the later part of his career. Also, several quantum physicists made major contributions to the advancement of physics and were as qualified as Einstein to be selected for Time magazine’s award.
Einstein made repeated racist statements about Germans while extolling the virtues of his Jewish tribe. With the exception of a few German scientists, Einstein considered all non-Jewish Germans to be a bad breed and referred to Germans as “the blond beast.”[37] Einstein had hoped at the end of World War II that the Germans, with God’s benevolent help, would largely kill each other off. Einstein’s statements about Germans were deeply racist, yet Time magazine ignored Einstein’s racism and chose him to be its person of the 20th century.
Albert Einstein did not deserve Time Magazine’s award. The mass media has promoted Einstein into an almost God-like figure. Christopher Jon Bjerknes writes:
It appears that the physics community and the media invented a comic book figure, “Einstein”, with “E=mc²” stenciled across his chest. The media and educational institutions portray this surreal and farcical image as a benevolent god to watch over us…
To question “Einstein”, the god, either “his” theories, or the priority of the thoughts he repeated, has become the sin of heresy. “His” writings are synonymous with truth, the undecipherable truth of a god hung on the wall as a symbol of ultimate truth, which truth is elusive to mortal man – no one is to understand or to question the arcana of “Einstein”, but must let the shepherd lead his flock, without objection. Do not bother the believers with the facts![38]
[1] Lacayo, Richard, Albert Einstein: The Enduring Legacy of a Modern Genius, New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2011, p. 8.
[2] Fölsing, Albrecht, Albert Einstein: A Biography, New York: Viking, 1997, p. xi.
[3] Brockman, John (editor), My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World’s Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, p. 80.
[4] Bjerknes, Christopher Jon, Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist, Downers Grove, Ill.: XTX Inc., 2002, pp. 158, 234.
[5] Schweber, Silvan S., Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 265.
[6] Ibid., p. 276.
[7] Brockman, John (editor), My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World’s Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, pp. 110-111.
[8] Bodanis, David, Einstein’s Greatest Mistake: A Biography, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, p. xii.
[9] Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, pp. 445, 624.
[10] Einstein, Albert, Out of My Later Years, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950, p. 249.
[11] Einstein, Albert, The World as I See It, New York: Citadel Press, 1984, p. 90.
[12] Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 282.
[14] Ibid., pp. 293, 306.
[15] Einstein, Albert, Out of My Later Years, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950, pp. 262-263.
[16] Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, pp. 161-162.
[18] Holton, Gerald and Elkana, Yehuda (editors), Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 294-295.
[19] Sayen, Jamie, Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima, New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1985, pp. 145-146.
[22] Sayen, Jamie, Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima, New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1985, p. 146.
[24] Clark, Ronald W., Einstein: The Life and Times, New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 601.
[26] Jerome, Fred and Taylor, Rodger, Einstein on Race and Racism, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 105.
[28] Born, Max, The Born-Einstein Letters, New York: Walker and Company, 1971, p. 199.
[30] Fölsing, Albrecht, Albert Einstein: A Biography, New York: Viking, 1997, p. 659.
[32] Neffe, Jürgen, Einstein: A Biography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 379.
[36] Lacayo, Richard, Albert Einstein: The Enduring Legacy of a Modern Genius, New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2011, pp. 8-9.
[38] Bjerknes, Christopher Jon, Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist, Downers Grove, Ill.: XTX Inc., 2002, pp. 161-162.
Image | May 30, 2019
Dirty Little Secrets Of WWII
The Hidden, Awkward Origins of World War 2
By Jason Collett
The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close to events. Just consider the following:
Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Britain during the years immediately preceding WW2 was the father of the famous American Kennedy dynasty. James Forrestal the first US Secretary of Defence (1947-1949) quotes him as saying „Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister) stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war“. (The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p.129).
Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, in a report to the Polish Foreign Office in January 1939, is quoted approvingly by the highly respected British military historian Major-General JFC Fuller. Concerning public opinion in America he says „Above all, propaganda here is entirely in Jewish hands when bearing public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of countries Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous centre in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps President Roosevelt has been given the power… to create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for.“ (Fuller, JFC: The Decisive Battles of the Western World vol. 3 pp 372-374.)
Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador in Berlin until 1938, the year before the war broke out, found anti-Semitism in Germany ‘understandable’. This was because before the advent of the Nazis, „the stage, the press, medicine and law [were] crowded with Jews among the few with money to splurge, a high proportion [were] Jews the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia, a movement desperately feared in Germany, were Jews. One could feel the spreading resentment and hatred.“ (Hugh Wilson: Diplomat between the Wars, Longmans 1941, quoted in Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh, Hodder 1976).
Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin ‘said further that the hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews and enemies of the Nazis, which was what Hitler thought himself’ (Taylor, AJP: The Origins of the Second World War Penguin 1965, 1987 etc. p 324).
Is all of this merely attributable to terrible ‘anti-Semitism’?
The economic background to the war is necessary for a fuller understanding, before casting judgement on the originators of these viewpoints.
At the end of the First World War, Germany was essentially tricked [see Paul Johnson A History of the Modern World (1983) p24 and H. Nicholson Peace making 1919 (1933) pp13-16] into paying massive reparations to France and other economic competitors and former belligerent countries in terms of the so-called Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson. Germany was declared to be solely responsible for the war, in spite of the fact that ‘Germany did not plot a European war, did not want one, and made genuine efforts, though too belated, to avert one.’ (Professor Sydney B Fay The Origins of the World War (vol. 2 p 552)).
As a result of these massive enforced financial reparations, by 1923 the situation in Germany became desperate and inflation on an astronomical scale became the only way out for the government. Printing presses were engaged to print money around the clock. In 1921 the exchange rate was 75 marks to the dollar. By 1924 this had become about 5 trillion marks to the dollar. This virtually destroyed the German middle class (Koestler The God that Failed p 28), reducing any bank savings to a virtual zero.
According to Sir Arthur Bryant the British historian (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):
‘It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities… They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation.. But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions. The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions (in spite of constituting) less than one percent of the population.
The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed.. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly.. Every year it became harder and harder for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation.. At this time it was not the ‘Aryans’ who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination.. It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed and lavishly displayed by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle.“
Goodness gracious, Sir Arthur! What made you get out of the wrong side of the bed?
Strangely enough, a book unexpectedly published by Princeton University Press in 1984, Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans and the „Jewish Question“) essentially confirms what Bryant says. According to her, ‘Jews were never a large percentage of the total German population; at no time did they exceed 1% of the population during the years 1871-1933.’ But she adds ‘Jews were over-represented in business, commerce, and public and private service.. They were especially visible in private banking in Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private Jewish banks, as opposed to only 11 private non-Jewish banks.. They owned 41% of iron and scrap iron firms and 57% of other metal businesses.. Jews were very active in the stock market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80% of the leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating Jews from prominent positions, 85% of the brokers on the Berlin Stock exchange were dismissed because of their „race“.. At least a quarter of full professors and instructors (at German universities) had Jewish origins.. In 1905-6 Jewish students comprised 25% of the law and medical students.. In 1931, 50% of the 234 theatre directors in Germany were Jewish, and in Berlin the number was 80%.. In 1929 it was estimated that the per capita income of Jews in Berlin was twice that of other Berlin residents..’ etc etc.
Arthur Koestler confirms the Jewish over-involvement in German publishing. ‘Ullstein’s was a kind of super-trust; the largest organization of its kind in Europe, and probably In the world. They published four daily papers in Berlin alone, among these the venerable Vossische Zeitung, founded in the eighteenth century, and the B.Z. am Mittag, an evening paper.. Apart from these, Ullstein’s published more than a dozen weekly and monthly periodicals, ran their own news service, their own travel agency, etc., and were one of the leading book publishers. The firm was owned by the brothers Ullstein – they were five, like the original Rothschild brothers, and like them also, they were Jews.’ (The God that Failed (1950) ed. RHS Crossman, p 31).
Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wrote an anti-German tract called Germany Puts the Clock Back (published as a Penguin Special and reprinted five times between December 1937 and April 1938). He nevertheless notes ‘In the all-important administration of Prussia, any number of strategic positions came into the hands of Hebrews.. A telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial offices could result in the suspension of any periodical or newspaper in the state.. The Jews came in Germany to play in politics and administration that same considerable part that they had previously won by open competition in business, trade, banking, the Press, the arts, the sciences and the intellectual and cultural life of the country. And thereby the impression was strengthened that Germany, a country with a mission of its own, had fallen into the hands of foreigners.’
Mowrer says ‘No one who lived through the period from 1919 to 1926 is likely to forget the sexual promiscuity that prevailed.. Throughout a town like Berlin, hotels and pensions made vast fortunes by letting rooms by the hour or day to baggageless, unregistered guests. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood..’ (pp. 153-4). Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. He adds ‘Most of them (the night clubs and vice-resorts) were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews.. among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.’ (pp. 144-5).
Douglas Reed, Chief Central European correspondent before WWII for the London Times, was profoundly anti-German and anti-Hitler. But nevertheless he reported: ‘I watched the Brown Shirts going from shop to shop with paint pots and daubing on the window panes the word „Jew“, in dripping red letters. The Kurfürstendamm was to me a revelation. I knew that Jews were prominent in business life, but I did not know that they almost monopolized important branches of it. Germany had one Jew to one hundred gentiles, said the statistics; but the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, according to the dripping red legends, had about one gentile shop to ninety-nine Jewish ones.’ (Reed Insanity Fair (1938) p. 152-3). In Reed’s book Disgrace Abounding of the following year he notes ‘In the Berlin (of pre-Hitler years) most of the theatres were Jewish-owned or Jewish-leased, most of the leading film and stage actors were Jews, the plays performed were often by German, Austrian or Hungarian Jews and were staged by Jewish film producers, applauded by Jewish dramatic critics in Jewish newspapers.. The Jews are not cleverer than the Gentiles, if by clever you mean good at their jobs. They ruthlessly exploit the common feeling of Jews, first to get a foothold in a particular trade or calling, then to squeeze the non-Jews out of it.. It is not true that Jews are better journalists than Gentiles. They held all the posts on those Berlin papers because the proprietors and editors were Jewish’ (pp238-9).
The Jewish writer Edwin Black notes ‘For example, in Berlin alone, about 75% of the attorneys and nearly as many of the doctors were Jewish.’ (Black,The Transfer Agreement (1984) p58.
To cap it all, Jews were perceived as dangerous enemies of Germany after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, ‘The one man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.’ (p 369). This was the culmination of a worldwide boycott of German goods led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany. The boycott was particularly motivated by the German imposition of the Nuremberg Laws, which ironically were similar in intent and content to the Jewish cultural exclusivism practiced so visibly in present-day Israel (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem p 7).
Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat, a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed less than five percent of Russia’s population, they formed more than fifty percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):
‘It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all, Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.
‘To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.’ Other authors agree with this:
„There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War 1.. The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years.. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists… led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation.“ (Sarah Gordon Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ Princeton University Press (1984) p 23).
„The second paroxysm of strong anti-Semitism came after the critical role of Jews in International Communism and the Russian Revolution and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 30s Anti-Semitism intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.. Such feelings were not restricted to Germany, or to vulgar extremists like the Nazis. All over Northern Europe and North America, anti-Semitism became the norm in ‘nice society’, and ‘nice society’ included the universities.“ (Martin Bernal, Black Athenavol. 1 pp. 367, 387).
„The major role Jewish leaders played in the November (Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor in confirming (Hitler’s) anti-Semitic beliefs.“ (J&S Pool, Who Financed Hitler, p.164).
Hitler came to power in Germany with two main aims, the rectification of the unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the destruction of the Soviet/ Communist threat to Germany. Strangely enough, contrary to the mythology created by those who had an opposing ethnic agenda, he had no plans or desire for a larger war of conquest. Professor AJP Taylor showed this in his book The Origins of the Second World War, to the disappointment of the professional western political establishment. Taylor says, „The state of German armament in 1939 gives the decisive proof that Hitler was not contemplating general war, and probably not intending war at all“ (p.267), and „Even in 1939 the German army was not equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior to the French in everything except leadership“ (p104-5). What occurred in Europe in 1939-41 was the result of unforeseen weaknesses and a tipping of the balance of power, and Hitler was an opportunist ‘who took advantages whenever they offered themselves’ (Taylor). Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Hitler wanted peace with Britain, as the German generals admitted (Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill 1948, Pan Books 1983) with regard to the so-called Halt Order at Dunkirk, where Hitler had the opportunity to capture the entire British Army, but chose not to. Liddell Hart, one of Britain’s most respected military historians, quotes the German General von Blumentritt with regard to this Halt Order:
„He (Hitler) then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but ‘where there is planning, there are shavings flying’. He compared the British Empire with the Catholic Church saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent. The return of Germany’s colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere..“ (p 200).
According to Liddell Hart, „At the time we believed that the repulse of the Luftwaffe in the ‘Battle over Britain’ had saved her. That is only part of the explanation, the last part of it. The original cause, which goes much deeper, is that Hitler did not want to conquer England. He took little interest in the invasion preparations, and for weeks did nothing to spur them on; then, after a brief impulse to invade, he veered around again and suspended the preparations. He was preparing, instead, to invade Russia“ (p140).
David Irving in the foreword to his book The Warpath (1978) refers to „the discovery… that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire.“
This gives a completely different complexion, not only to the war, but to the successful suppression of this information during the war and afterwards. Historians today know only too well where the boundaries lie within which they can paint their pictures of the war and its aftermath, and the consequences of venturing beyond those boundaries, irrespective of the evidence. Unfortunately, only too few of them have been prepared to have the courage to break out of this dreadful straitjacket of official and unofficial censorship.
David Irving Discusses the Inevitable Slow Demise of “Battleship Auschwitz”, Flagship of the Holocaust Legend.
Source: https://codoh.com/library/document/6705/
David Irving discusses the inevitable slow demise of the “Battleship Auschwitz”, flagship of the Holocaust legend.
Hitler’s Social & Cultural Policies, Goals and Achievements
Deanna Spingola’s radio-interview with Matt Koehl
Deanna Spingola’s guest Matt Koehl, the author of The Good Society, talked about the economic advances of the Third Reich and National Socialism which eschewed both Communism and Capitalism, two disastrous, speculative systems. (Thursday, November 1, 2012)
The masters of deceit would have us believe that Hitler’s Germany was a nightmare world, a brutal dictatorship characterized by terror, hatred, slave labor and genocide. Workers’ rights were trampled on, the youth conscripted and dragged off to fight in endless wars and women reduced to mere brood cows. People went hungry because the evil Nazi economy placed “guns before butter,” and science and technology were held in thrall to the capitalist-military war machine.
The truth about Hitler’s Germany is exactly the opposite of this horror-filled fantasy. Rather, the National-Socialist order was modern and progressive. The economy was efficient and productive, with full employment that generated a high standard of living for the working class. Mothers and children were honored, respected and cherished. There was free health care and free higher education for all. It was, indeed, a good society!
David Irving – The Faking of Adolf Hitler for History
The British Historian David Irving, speaking on “The Faking of Adolf Hitler for History” identifies some of the many FRAUDULENT historical documents that have been quoted AND referred to over the many years by “conformist historians” of the Third Reich era.
Even many of Mr. Irving’s opponents DO admit.., that Mr. Irving’s knowledge of Hitler and wartime Germany in unrivalled !! Mr. Irving is the author of numerous books on this era of history.., many of them having been “best sellers”.., including his monumental work (3 volumes in one book!).., titled “Hitler’s War”…
As always.., after watching.., do your best to “pass it on”…..
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News and In depth
Blogs and opinion
The year 1636 is printed on many a UU student’s sweater. Photo: Bart Weerdenburg, UU
Englification hinders accessibility and depth of education
Loudly voice your objections to the advance of English at the university. That’s the message university council members Floris Boudens (VUUR) and Sebastian Wijnands (De Vrije Student) send their successors. More than ever, students have a voice in discussions on education, but that means students need to speak up as well.
Read in Dutch
By Floris Boudens, Sebastian Wijnands
The year 1636 is displayed on the sweaters of many UU students. This was the year Voetius, in a speech, promoted the illustrious school to university. At the time, the university was exclusively open to wealthy men. The language used was Latin, which didn’t exactly contribute to the accessibility of scientific education.
This centuries-long tradition wasn’t abolished until 1846, when Cornelis Willem Opzoomer held his inaugural lecture in Dutch for the first time. The use of Latin remained mandatory until 1897. The switch to Dutch included a move to democracy; away from aristocracy. ‘Opzoomeren’ became a verb in the Dutch dictionary, meaning something like ‘keeping good contact with neighbours’. Because language connects, and Opzoomer understood that like no other. Dutch universities are anchored in Dutch society. They’re not separate entities: universities are paid for by society, and educate people for that same society.
English as new lingua franca?
In our time, we’re on the road to a new lingua franca: English. The question is whether that’s a wise thing to do. Let students at least think about this in depth, and don’t let the discussion be voiced entirely by managers or ‘prominent people’. In diverse media, these people have voiced their opinions. In newspaper De Volkskrant, a plea is printed to our representatives in The Hague (‘Members of parliament, the future of the Netherlands is in your hands’).
DUB also regularly publishes the opinions of notables, such as the rector (in Dutch ed.), and the Social Sciences dean. It’s our opinion that students should also have a say in this debate, and that’s why we’re addressing this piece to our student representatives.
The reason more and more is done in English, is the goals the university has in terms of internationalisation, creating a global generation, or an international classroom. For a while now, science has wondered whether we should be in service of the international community or Dutch society. The past, at least, teaches us that by using a non-Dutch language for science, the gap between the people and academia grows. Social geographer Josse de Voogd is a lot less subtle in his text (in Dutch, ed.) ‘An English-teaching university is a middle finger to society’.
Cosmopolitan bubble
De Voogd states that Englification isn’t the same as internationalisation. By speaking English at an international campus, you don’t learn about different cultures, you create aa cosmopolitan bubble. We’re not the first, then, who see that internationalisation isn’t the same as Englification. And yet, more and more programmes are taught in English, with the hope that it makes these programmes more attractive to the international community. If all universities strive to create an international classroom, we’re all attracting the same students, which doesn’t benefit the university’s profile: it creates sameness, or as the Dutch say, ‘unity sausage’.
Additionally, this policy doesn’t benefit diversity at all. International students are generally students from wealthier families who, throughout the world, from the beaches on Bali to SoHo in London, live in their own circles. This results in a closed community that often excludes first-generation students. This is especially poignant given the goals of internationalisation. Those who think internationally, would be better off involving students who aren’t as used to a cosmopolitan environment. By creating more importance for their place in academic society, ‘internationalisation’ would also contribute to emancipation in our own country. Instead of this, then, more Englification: for and by a small group, aimed at cosmopolitisation and uniformity of academic existence.
Students’ exchange has value
Still, English in science does have some value. By writing research in English, exchanging research results internationally is easier. Furthermore, there are many disciplines that are done in English where it makes sense: International Business and Economics, Global Sustainability Science, etcetera. Exchange programmes for students, if they’re accessible to every student, are also of great value. Different perspectives from different cultures can contribute to creating solutions to modern-day issues. We’re not writing because we oppose English, we’re writing because we’re worried about the lack of vision, the lack of student participation, and the lack of a meaningful balance between our own language and other languages.
Utrecht University is struggling with its language policy. In the past year, the university council has repeatedly asked the Executive Board how it’s possible that students of certain programmes, who have been taught in Dutch for years, suddenly have to write their theses in English – without, in our view, sufficient substantiation. The response is always simply a referral to the university’s language policy.
The language policy: paper and practice
The language policy is known, and focuses mainly on Dutch Bachelor’s programmes and English Master’s programmes, unless there’s a reason to deviate from this. The reasons for different choices, however, aren’t properly defined. Faculties create their own, broad definitions. Within the university, there are cases in which courses were Englified because doing so prepared students for their English-taught Master’s programmes. With that reasoning we could, despite the current language policy, switch to English in every single Bachelor’s programme. That’s undesirable.
For that reason, the university’s language policy should be maintained better. The reasons for diverting from the policy should be checked more thoroughly. The Executive Board consistently says this is a role for the decentralised co-determination boards (faculty councils and programme committees), as they have the last word. This is even documented in the law. It is, however, not always clear to faculty councils and programme committees that they have this right, leading to situations in which managers are able to Englify their programmes with weak arguments.
Last year, the university council, in agreement with the Executive Board, created the language policy. The UU is relatively restrained in its Englification compared to other universities in the Netherlands. We’re happy about that. For the long term, however, the accessibility and in-depth education in Utrecht are also threatened by ongoing Englification. Education loses depth because students are best at expressing themselves in their mother tongue, which is Dutch for almost 90 percent of students. In other languages, they constantly struggle to find the right words, and their vocabulary is limited. The same is true for many teachers. For this reason, it’s harder to go in depth within education. Furthermore, students are often more hesitant to speak up in class when they’re not allowed to do so in their mother tongue.
It’s the job of co-determination groups to join in the debate about our educational language in name of the student. That’s why we’re addressing them: put the subject on the agenda, finetune points of view with your constituency, and don’t simply agree with every proposal for Englification. Co-determination: the future of Dutch is in your hands.
‘Not every teacher can teach in English without any training’
Minister: recruitment agencies for internationals are undesirable
About DUB
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25 July 2018 — Culture desk
An Artist Explores Her Uncertain Identity on a Ballymun Canvas
by Lois Kapila
Photos by Lois Kapila
In the 1980s, there was a vote on where Cedarwood Road was, exactly.
Was it in Ballymun? Or was it in Glasnevin North, perhaps? Or part of one of the other neighbourhoods that spread out around it.
The exurb seemed unsure of itself. Locals disagreed over where they were.
“It was so divisive,” says Michelle Boyle, an artist who lived as a child at 102 Cedarwood Road in the 1970s and 1980s. “I guess I felt I was mirroring that in my own sense of identity.”
Boyle had been adopted at a young age. She grew up mixed-race in a largely white neighbourhood.
“There was an oddness of that. I did feel on the outside of things,” she said, on a recent Monday at the kitchen table of her home in Virginia in County Cavan.
In the exhibition “Outside the Urban” – which is on at Axis Ballymun until 24 August – Boyle explores her uncertainty about her identity during her early years, and her resolution of that through a search for her birth parents and discovery of an Indian inheritance.
A Visual Record
Boyle had little formal training in how to draw and paint, she says.
As a child, she would take the 19N bus into town for free drawing classes at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square. “That was where I learnt to draw,” she says. “With big sheets of paper on the ground.”
In later years, she would travel to galleries and sit in front of paintings to reflect on how the artist had constructed them. “That has been my art education,” she said.
Boyle says she thinks a lot about the difficulties that those born and adopted in Ireland have in tracing their pasts. As she was born in England – and sent to Ireland for adoption – it was easier for her to find her birth parents, she says.
Since her paintings are hanging on the walls of the Axis Ballymun, Boyle flicks through images of them on the laptop on the kitchen table as she explains where they came from.
One, Strangers now, foster children, is of a woman, with a blank and emotionless face, in a huddle of babies. There are three bunched at her feet. Another three in her arms. It is painted in muted pinks, blues, and browns.
The painting is based on a photograph, Boyle says. She heard a man on the radio name a foster home in Donabate and recognised it from her adoption papers. She had been there as a baby.
She hadn’t known about the place and learnt only later that it was a badly run private institution. “The children were very neglected and starved,” she says.
Boyle lived there for four or five months before her adoptive mother picked her out.
“It’s almost like an advertisement,” she says of the image. “These are the babies we have in stock at the moment.”
The title is a reminder, she says, of how tough it is for people who were in foster homes to get their records. Often, they didn’t even know where they were.
For Boyle, the exhibition and her works were one way to take control back from those who would refuse to share what they held of others’ memories.
“For me it felt very important was that I created a visual record of a history that I didn’t feel I had any ownership to,” she says.
On Cedarwood Road
In the 1970s and 1980s, Cedarwood Road felt neither urban nor rural, she says.
Her adoptive parents came from Donegal, she says. “So they were rural people, as were a lot of other people on the road.”
Some of the paintings in the exhibition show her family stood in the garden, the landscapes of Ballymun with its fields and towers in the background.
The largest canvas shows her home at 102 Cedarwood Road, segmented as in a doll’s house. There’s a Sacred Heart on the wall, as there always was, she says.
A large Indian doll lies in the foreground of the painting. It was a Christmas present one year that became symbol of her confusion when she was younger over who she was.
She overheard her mother tell a neighbour that Boyle was half Indian, she says. Boyle understood that as Native American Indian.
It was only years later that she began to question that. “I was getting it all muddled up, it was getting confused.”
Aifric Ní Ruairc, the project coordinator at Axis Ballymun, said the exhibition reflects how the suburb has faced challenges in its own identity. “We have that here in Ballymun,” she says.
Now that the towers are gone, and with the landscape still blighted by the empty shopping centre, many in the community are still trying to figure out what the suburb is now, she says.
Finding a New Medium
In her twenties, Boyle says she wasn’t too interested in tracking down her birth parents or wondering about where her origins lay. She travelled the world and was having too good a time, she says.
That changed in later years. “When I started to have my own children, it became an issue. Where I was from, and all that,” she said.
It took her eight years to track her mother to Mexico and when she found her, she wasn’t interesting in building a relationship. Her father in India, though, when she found him, was different.
“It took me on a very different journey,” she said. “For the first time, I recognised myself in his family and in his children. For the first time, I saw myself.”
“It was like drawing a circle around myself. It was for the first time feeling centred, and as if I had an identity,” she said.
That then opened up a whole new world, she says. “I hadn’t really realised I was half Indian, I hadn’t embraced that part of myself at all,” she says.
For the last five years, she has been going over to India to paint for periods of time and developing her work there.
Much of her work had always been about identity and absence, and the absence of a mother. But in the last couple of years, she has reconciled this, using her art as a medium to work through the issues that the blanks in her early life threw up.
Now she has several projects on the go in the spacious studios at the back of the house. One room has tables for yarn and other materials for days when she is feeling more tactile.
In another, she shows the larger “Incidental Icons” she has worked on. The portraits are painted on blocks of wood, inspired by the Fayum portraits of Egypt, and taken from the faces in the photographs that fill daily newspapers, which are disposed of as the news cycle moves on.
“There was something for me about giving a permanence to those images. It’s an ongoing project,” she says. The faces are anonymous, yet people can relate to them.
“The distance of space and time closes when you’re looking at an image,” she says.
She has also started to work a lot more in watercolours, she says.
She spreads out some watercolours on the large table in her studio: there are bright blue skies, and the sandy yellows of a Portuguese landscape. Some show the rocky shores of Maine, others the bright-green plants in an Indian garden.
Her work has changed with her visits to India, she says. She works more in watercolours because they are mobile so she can sketch and paint on the move, but also because of the vivid colours and the fluidity of the paint.
“It’s so giving, it’s such a beautiful medium to work in,” she says. “There’s definitely more of a joy coming into the work, I’d say.”
After tracking down and learning more about her birth parents, Boyle feels at ease. “I needed to know those things,” she says.
The change in sense of belonging can be seen in her work now. Going forward, she is more focused on other people’s narratives, she says. “It’s not about me anymore.”
The sombre shades and darker works of a decade ago have made way for more brighter colours, too. “I can’t anymore truthfully stay in that way of painting because it’s not where I am anymore,” she says.
Boyle has a background in archaeology and anthropology. So, she says, much of her education had focused on the impact of culture and context in making us who we are.
But she thinks slightly differently about it now as her relationship with parts of India grows. “There’s also a much deeper level of inheritance, I think,” she says.
It’s something she describes as almost non-verbal. “Is it possible that you can actually inherit a sensibility for a place? I definitely feel that,” she says.
Boyle says she has found a peace. But it struck her as she put together the “Outside the Urban” exhibition, that she couldn’t say the same for Ballymun.
The suburb still seems lost to her. She felt as if she has arrived in a place of knowing her identity. But “it’s terrible that a place can almost go through the same sort of traumas”.
The exhibition is showing at Axis Ballymun until 24 August.
race and identity
Lois Kapila: Lois Kapila is Dublin Inquirer's managing editor and general-assignment reporter. Want to share a comment or a tip with her? Send an email to her at info@dublininquirer.com.
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25 July 2018 issue
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by Zuzia Whelan
A Documentary Shares Three Mothers' Experiences of Homelessness
Homeless? South Dublin Council Might Ask for an Affidavit as Proof
by Lois Kapila and Cónal Thomas
A Group of Young Men Push for a Stables in Cherry Orchard
by Cónal Thomas
Understand your city
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Court Rules That Utah County Can't Rely on Unproven “Highway†Claims
Victory: Ruling protects public lands from arbitrary seizure
Denver, CO —
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a Utah county may not override federal rules meant to protect wildlife, streams, archeological sites, wilderness and monuments by relying on unproven highway rights of way.
Conservationists filed the suit after Kane County, Utah, ripped out signs posted by the Bureau of Land Management in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, a wilderness and national recreation area, which were meant to protect areas from damage by off-road (ORV) and other vehicles. The county also attempted to buck federal authority by placing its own signs inviting ORV use in the very same places the BLM had prohibited it.
The court resoundingly rejected the county's attempt to take the law into its own hands, reasoning that the county's actions violated the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. That clause provides that federal law supersedes local or state laws involving federal issues where the two conflict. The court also held that the county must first prove that the rights it claimed were valid before federal managers had to accommodate them.
The county claims it owns the routes under a Civil War-era law titled R.S.2477. Although repealed, R.S.2477 allows agencies, groups and individuals to assert rights-of-way across federal lands if they can prove extended pre-existing use. In Utah alone, there are more than 10,000 R.S. 2477 highway claims for primitive trails in national parks, forests, wilderness areas, and lands proposed for wilderness protection.
"This is a great day for the protection of our national parks, monuments and wilderness areas in Utah and across the country," said Ted Zukoski, one of the Earthjustice attorneys who handled the case. "All of the judges agreed that Kane County broke the law when it posted signs opening closed routes on public lands without proving they have a right of way."
Zukoski noted that there's still plenty of motor vehicle access across federal lands in Kane County. Nine-hundred and eight miles of routes remain open in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument under the federal management plan.
The ruling also did not affect the ability of local governments to work cooperatively with federal land managers on management of major open roads crossing federal lands.
"This case is important because it will thwart the abusive efforts by some counties to hamstring protection of federal lands by merely claiming that old trails, cow paths and streambeds are actually county highways immune from federal law," explained Heidi McIntosh, one of the attorneys who brought the case. "R.S. 2477 is not a get-out-of-jail-free card."
"This is a common-sense ruling that should work for everyone," said Phil Hanceford of The Wilderness Society. "It leaves plenty of room for counties and the government to maintain a road system that gets people out to their public lands, while protecting the values Americans enjoy at one of the country's most extraordinary natural treasures. And anyone who has been to these amazing natural places knows they are treasures worth protecting."
The lawsuit was brought by Earthjustice, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and The Wilderness Society.
Read the opinion (PDF)
Ted Zukoski, Earthjustice, (303) 996-9622
Protecting Utah’s Lands from Off-Road Vehicles
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Erica Nicole Hilton
Writing/Publications
Erica Hilton is a digital media innovator, strategic communicator, and culture observer. She is a doctoral candidate in Mass Communications at Penn State University, conducting research that meets at multiple intersections of public relations, digital media, diversity and inclusion, media representation.
Before attending Penn State University, Erica resided in Washington, DC where she worked as an Online Activism Manager with the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), managing its web presence, including the international website, issue-based blog, and its social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
In addition to Erica’s work in digital media, she has also earned media placements within the top 20 DMAs, written speeches for executive-level government officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and produced commercials and videos. Other previous experience includes maintaining two organizations’ electronic newsletters, email marketing, website content management and developing an internal blog for a federal agency. Also, Erica has hosted workshops and participated in panels on digital media and online branding at three different universities. In addition to writing on behalf of organizations, Erica has contributed to Huffington Post, Femsplain and PR Daily.
Erica earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Arts summa cum laude from Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU) in May 2011, where she served as SGA Student Body President and a member of the Board of Trustees. In 2012, Erica earned a Master of Arts degree in Public Communication from American University (AU).
View ericahltn’s profile on Facebook
View ericahltn’s profile on Twitter
View ericahltn’s profile on Instagram
View ericahltn’s profile on LinkedIn
Erica Hilton
Doctoral Candidate. StratComm. Public Relations. Digital Media. Diversity and Inclusion. Educator. Health Foodie.
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David Reardon
David C. Reardon
Pacific Western University (Hawaii)
Founder of the Elliot Institute; activism
David C. Reardon is an American electrical engineer and anti-abortion activist. He is the founder of the Elliot Institute, a pro-life advocacy group,[1] and the author of a number of articles and books on abortion and mental health. Reardon was described in the New York Times Magazine as the "Moses" of the "post-abortion movement".[2]
3 Elliot Institute
7.1 Pro-Choice
7.2 Pro-Life
A graduate of the University of Illinois department of electrical engineering,[3] Reardon began researching the effects of abortion in the mid-1980s. Reardon subsequently received a “Ph.D” in biomedical ethics from Pacific Western University (Hawaii), a correspondence school offering classroom instruction.[3][4][5]
Reardon describes his position on abortion as both "pro-life" (believing a human fetus is deserving of protection) and "pro-woman" and "anti-abortion" (believing abortion hurts women).[6] In a 2002 article in Ethics & Medicine, Reardon argued that in order to be effective, pro-life efforts had to present "a moral vision that consistently demonstrates just as much concern for women as for their unborn children."[7] Reardon appealed to the pro-life movement to support his "pro-woman/pro-life" strategy writing:
For the purpose of passing restrictive laws to protect women from unwanted and/or dangerous abortions, it does not matter if people have a pro-life view. The ambivalent majority of people who are willing to tolerate abortion in "some cases" are very likely to support informed consent legislation and abortion clinic regulations, for example, because these proposals are consistent with their desire to protect women. In some cases, it is not even necessary to convince people of abortion's dangers. It is sufficient to simply raise enough doubts about abortion that they will refuse to actively oppose the proposed anti-abortion initiative. In other words, if we can convince many of those who do not see abortion to be a "serious moral evil" that they should support anti-abortion policies that protect women and reduce abortion rates, that is a sufficiently good end to justify NRS efforts. Converting these people to a pro-life view, where they respect life rather than simply fear abortion, is a second step. The latter is another good goal, but it is not necessary to the accomplishment of other good goals, such as the passage of laws that protect women from dangerous abortions and thereby dramatically reduce abortion rates.[7]
Reardon's findings conflict with the view of the American Psychological Association, as well as other scientists and researchers, that abortion carries no greater mental-health risk than carrying a fetus to term.[8][9]
Media coverage[edit]
In a Washington Monthly article titled "Research and Destroy", author Chris Mooney profiled Reardon as an example of what he describes as "Christian conservatives [who] have gone a long way towards creating their own scientific counter-establishment."[4] He also notes that Reardon's findings conflict with those of the American Psychological Association, which in 1990 had rejected "the notion that abortion regularly causes severe or clinical mental problems", and with the conclusions of former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.[4]
In a front-page story for the New York Times Magazine, Slate editor Emily Bazelon described the growth of post-abortion counseling ministries around the United States as part of an effort by the pro-life movement to outlaw abortion by stressing its purported psychological effects. She describes Reardon as arguing that the pro-life movement will "never win over a majority... by asserting the sanctity of fetal life", and therefore should focus on disseminating information that abortion is psychologically harmful to women as a more effective strategy.[2]
Bazelon goes on to say:
For anti-abortion activists, this strategy offers distinct advantages. It challenges the connection between access to abortion and women's rights — if women are suffering because of their abortions, then how could making the procedure readily available leave women better off? It replaces mute pictures of dead fetuses with the voices of women who narrate their stories in raw detail and who claim they can move legislators to tears. And it trades condemnation for pity and forgiveness. "Pro-lifers who say, 'I don't understand how anyone could have an abortion,' are blind to how hurtful this statement can be," Reardon writes on his Web site. "A more humble pro-life attitude would be to say, 'Who am I to throw stones at others?'
When researchers attack his findings, Reardon writes to the journals' letters pages. "Even if pro-abortionists got five paragraphs explaining that abortion is safe and we got only one line saying it's dangerous, the seed of doubt is planted," he wrote in his book. [2]
Reardon has been described in the Boston Globe as someone who "wants Congress to impose strict barriers to abortion." The Boston Globe also wrote:
This dual role of advocate/researcher is becoming more common, especially as advocacy groups realize they can sway more opinions by asserting that their research is based on science, rather than simply on personal belief. [David] Reardon, like many people who play this dual role, insists he can objectively look at the data without being influenced by his personal viewpoint.[1]
According to the website of the Elliot Institute, which Reardon founded, he is "a frequent guest on Christian radio and Christian television talk shows and has been a frequently invited speaker state and national conventions for crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations."[10] Reardon addressed the National Pro-Life Religious Council in 1998, where he discussed emotional reactions to abortion in the context of the disputed entity of "post-abortion syndrome".[11][12]
Elliot Institute[edit]
Reardon is the founder and director of the Elliot Institute, which in 2005 reported that it had two full-time and one part-time employees.[13] According to its web site, the Elliot Institute studies "the effects of eugenics, abortion, population control, and sexual attitudes and practices on individuals and society at large."[14] The Institute was described by USA Today as an "anti-abortion organization focusing on the physical and psychological effects of abortion."[15]
The Elliot Institute has endorsed model legislation regarding informed consent provisions for women considering abortion and bills that would increase the liability of physicians who provide abortions that are deemed "unsafe or unnecessary".[16] The Elliot Institute is also leading an effort to build a coalition of groups to advocate for laws that would create a preemptive ban on human genetic engineering.[17]
Reardon and the Elliot Institute opposed The Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, and proposed a competing initiative which would have prohibited any embryonic stem cell research which resulted in the destruction of a human embryo, as well as some other types of genetic research, in Missouri.[18] The Elliot institute created the website ElliotInstitute.org which mimicked the site of a pro-stem-cell-research group, the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures. The group sued the Elliot Institute in federal court for alleged copyright and trademark violations. Consequently, the Elliot Institute website was ordered temporarily shut down by a federal judge.[19]
Christianity and abortion
Priscilla K. Coleman
^ a b Science in support of a cause: the new research, by Michael Kranish. Published in the Boston Globe on July 31, 2005; accessed November 27, 2007.
^ a b c Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?, by Emily Bazelon. Published in the New York Times Magazine on January 21, 2007; accessed November 27, 2007.
^ a b Politicized Science: How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda, by Pam Chamberlain. Published in The Public Eye by Political Research Associates, Summer 2006. Accessed February 17, 2008.
^ a b c Mooney, Chris. (October 1, 2004). "Research and Destroy" Archived April 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. Washington Monthly. Retrieved February 11, 2007.
^ PBS NOW transcript, show #329, aired on PBS on July 20, 2007; accessed November 27, 2007. In the transcript, PBS senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa describes Reardon: "With a PhD from an unaccredited online institution, he's turned out dozens of studies that supposedly prove abortion is dangerous to women's mental health."
^ David C. Reardon. Making Abortion Rare: A Healing Strategy for a Divided Nation (1996) Acorn Books. See especially Chapter Two where Reardon discusses the terms pro-life, pro-woman, anti-abortion, pro-choice and pro-abortion.
^ a b Reardon DC (2002). "A defense of the neglected rhetorical strategy (NRS)". Ethics Med. 18 (2): 23–32. PMID 14700036. Full text in pdf here
^ Research and Destroy Archived April 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
^ Schmiege S, Russo NF (December 2005). "Depression and unwanted first pregnancy: longitudinal cohort study". BMJ. 331 (7528): 1303. doi:10.1136/bmj.38623.532384.55. PMC 1298850. PMID 16257993.
^ Elliot Institute Website Retrieved November 19, 2007
^ Real Audio from the National Pro-Life Religious Council website Retrieved November 19, 2007
^ "Pastors Gather to Meet Challenge of Pro-Life Ministry." Publication: National Right to Life News
^ Elliot Institute 2005 Year End Report
^ Elliot Institute Website "About Our Coalition"
^ No Abortion-Breast Cancer Link, by Rita Rubin. Published in USA Today on February 26, 2003; accessed March 6, 2008.
^ Elliot Institute Website "Politics"
^ Elliot Institute homepage
^ Missouri State Government website
^ Court Shuts Down Anti-Stem-Cell Web Site for Copyright Violations, by Donna Higgins. From news.findlaw.com, originally published March 27, 2006. Accessed January 7, 2008.
Books by Reardon
Nancyjo Mann; Reardon, David C. (2002). Aborted Women: Silent No More. Acorn Publishing. ISBN 0-9648957-2-2.
Reardon, David C. (1996). Making abortion rare: a healing strategy for a divided nation. Randburg, South Africa: Acorn Books. ISBN 0-9648957-6-5.
Reardon, David C. (1996). The Jericho Plan: Breaking Down the Walls Which Prevent Post-Abortion Healing. Randburg, South Africa: Acorn Books. ISBN 0-9648957-5-7.
Sobie, Amy; Reardon, David C.; Makimaa, Julie (2000). Victims and victors: speaking out about their pregnancies, abortions, and children resulting from sexual assault. Randburg, South Africa: Acorn Books. ISBN 0-9648957-1-4.
Reardon, David C.; Burke, Theresa Karminski (2002). Forbidden grief: the unspoken pain of abortion. Randburg, South Africa: Acorn Books. ISBN 0-9648957-8-1.
PubMed list of Reardon-authored studies
Pro-Choice[edit]
"Who Is David Reardon and Why Is He Living in Missouri?" on website of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
"The Emotional Effects of Induced Abortion" Planned Parenthood (National)
"Beware of Meaningless Studies by Anti-Choice 'Researchers'" Pro-choice Action Network
Politicized Science: How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda, by Pam Chamberlain. From Public Eye, published by Political Research Associates
Pro-Life[edit]
"David C. Reardon, Biographical Sketch" The Elliot Institute
DAVID REARDON: A GODSPY INTERVIEW Godspy: Faith at the Edge
Interview with David Reardon of the Elliot Institute, Zenit, May 12, 2003.
SNAC: w6qv6c7x
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Reardon&oldid=897753330"
American anti-abortion activists
American psychology writers
American medical researchers
University of Illinois alumni
American health activists
People from Springfield, Illinois
Year of birth missing (living people)
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Municipality in Hedmark, Norway
Engerdal kommune
Hedmark within
Engerdal within Hedmark
Coordinates: 61°53′N 12°2′E / 61.883°N 12.033°E / 61.883; 12.033Coordinates: 61°53′N 12°2′E / 61.883°N 12.033°E / 61.883; 12.033
Østerdalen
Administrative centre
• Mayor (2007)
Reidar Åsgård (Ap)
2,197 km2 (848 sq mi)
Area rank
#24 in Norway
#368 in Norway
0.8/km2 (2/sq mi)
• Change (10 years)
Engerdøl[1]
Official language form
www.engerdal.kommune.no
Data from Statistics Norway
Engerdal is a municipality in Hedmark county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Østerdalen. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Engerdal. The new municipality of Engerdal was created on 1 January 1911 from parts of the municipalities of Tolga, Trysil, Ytre Rendal, and Øvre Rendal.
1.2 Coat-of-arms
2.1 National parks
4.2 Attractions
General information[edit]
The first element is the river name Engera and the last element is dal, the word for "valley" or "dale". The river name is derived from the name of the lake Engeren, and this is probably derived from the Old Norse word ongr which means "narrow".
Coat-of-arms[edit]
The coat-of-arms is from modern times. They were granted on 8 February 1991. The arms show two pieces of a horse harness (the hames) in gold on a green background. The two objects symbolize the ties between horse and man and at the same time the connection between work and recreation.[2]
The municipality is located in the northeast part of Hedmark county. It is bordered by Sweden to the north and east, the municipality of Trysil to the south, Rendalen to the west, and Os and Tolga to the northwest.
The greater part of Lake Femunden and roughly half of the Femundsmarka National Park also lie within the boundaries of the municipality.
National parks[edit]
Engerdal consists of two national parks. Femundsmarka National Park was founded in 1971 and is situated in the north-east of the municipal. The area is popular for its many lakes and attracts a lot of sport - fishers every year. The same lakes are also perfect for padling the canoe. Due to its large continuously, untouched and protected area, the national park is one of Southern-Scandinavia largest and the area has become a base for many rare animal species.
The second national park, Gutulia National Park is much smaller, but has a more vigorous complex of trees and bogs. It was founded in 1968 and the many large, but old pines dominates the area.
The most important industries in the municipality are agriculture and travel and tourism. The area of agricultural activity constitute 13,000 acres, which includes about 60 operating units. Due to a harsh climate the agricultural activity is mainly based around production of domestic animals, such as sheep and milk production. Another important activity is forestry. The total area of forestry make up 1,000,636 acres, where 517,680 of this is in fact productive land. 40 percentage of the forest consists of spruce and 60 of pine The main owner of the land is the Norwegian state, while the rest is divided between private land owners and some belongs to the municipality; Engerdal kommuneskoger (KF).
Due to growth in building secondary residences in the municipality, recreation and leisure activities has become important for those visiting Engerdal and this have had a positive effect on the municipality's travel and tourism industry. Tourists visiting Engerdal will experience a great wilderness with outdoor activities and adventures. Today, a great complex of attractions, activities and museums will reflect the municipals long history and many of them have become important businesses for economic growth, also keeping the cultural heritage intact.
Blokkodden Villmarksmuseum is an outdoor museum situated along highway 26 in Drevsjø. Its aim is to document the historical exploitation of the wilderness and natural resources in the municipal. You will experience the cultural heritage dated all the way back from the 1700th century and you will get an impression of how people lived and worked here in the past.
Engerdal is the only municipality in Hedmark county with a full-time working Sami community, and it marks the current southernmost border of the traditional Sami region, Sápmi, within Norway. The museum, therefore, exhibit artifacts and buildings from this culture.
The museum is open everyday from 1 July to 12 August. Guided tours are available and people can participate in special local arrangements, such as learning about "Falkefangst". About 300–400 years ago, this was a way of hunting Falcons in the mountains.
Attractions[edit]
In 1886 the steamship company Fæmund was established and they invested in a wooden steamship, which today holds the same name: M/S Femund II. From then and still going today, the steamship cargos important goods for the locals and has become an important transportation for tourists wanting to visit the national parks along the lake.
The old steamship seen at the harbour
People[edit]
Gjermund Eggen
Egil Hylleraas
Scandinavian Mountains Airport
^ "Navn på steder og personer: Innbyggjarnamn" (in Norwegian). Språkrådet. Retrieved 2015-12-01.
^ Norske Kommunevåpen (1990). "Nye kommunevåbener i Norden". Archived from the original on 2007-07-15. Retrieved 2008-12-21.
Media related to Engerdal at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of Engerdal at Wiktionary
Information about Femundsmarka National Park[permanent dead link]
Information about Femundsmarka National Park ‹See Tfd›(in Norwegian)
[1] The municipality's official home page
Municipalities of Hedmark
Glåmdal
Odal
Solør
Våler
Hedmarken
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Engerdal&oldid=880840491"
Villages in Hedmark
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Kilmory, Arran
Scottish Gaelic: Cill Mhoire
Kilmory church
Location within North Ayrshire
NR961218
Lieutenancy area
KA27
55°26′53″N 5°13′23″W / 55.448°N 5.223°W / 55.448; -5.223Coordinates: 55°26′53″N 5°13′23″W / 55.448°N 5.223°W / 55.448; -5.223
Kilmory (Scottish Gaelic: Cill Mhoire) is a small village on the south coast of the Isle of Arran, located on the coastal road between Lagg and Kildonan. Kilmory is also the parish of the western side of the Isle of Arran.[1]
Southwest of the village are the Kilmory Cairns (including Torrylin Cairn), a set of Neolithic chambered cairns in which skeletal remains and a flint knife were found.[2][3]
Kilmory is situated on the southern coast of the Isle of Arran. Visitors to Kilmory are drawn by the natural environment of the area, including a long beach.[citation needed]
The Torrylinn Creamery at Kilmory
The village itself is no more than a few houses, a shop, a church,[4] and a post office. At the East end of the village is the Torrylinn creamery, which produces Arran Dunlop,[5] a silver medal winner in the British Cheese Awards 2002.[citation needed]
In early 2007, the village suffered a loss of amenities, with the village shop, tearoom and public bar all closing. The post office was relocated to the Public Hall and opens there from 10am to 3pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.[6]
As there is longer a local public bar, the village established a social club, the 1934 Club, based at the public hall. This opened in the spring of 2013.[7] Full membership is open to residents and those who work in the district, associate membership is available to anyone sponsored by two existing members, and temporary membership is available to anyone wishing to avail themselves of the facilities.
^ "Parish of Kilmory Map". Scottish Places. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Torrylinn Water, Arran". Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Arran, Torlin". Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Arran, Kilmory Parish Church". Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Overview of Torrylinn Creamery". Scottish Places. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Post Office Kilmory - Isle of Arran (North Ayrshire) • Opening Hours". OpeningHoursPostOffice.co.uk. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
^ "Cheers! Kilmory Social Club opens for business". The Arran Banner. 19 March 2013. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kilmory, Isle of Arran.
Canmore - Arran, Kilmory, Culanachaidh site record
Main villages
Smaller villages and settlements
Mountains and hills
Goat Fell
Beinn Tarsuinn
Caisteal Abhail
Cìr Mhòr
Creag Ghlas Laggan
Tighvein
Sleeping Warrior
Brodick Castle
Lochranza Castle
Kildonan Castle
Hutton's Unconformity
Bruce's Castle
Arran whitebeams
Glenashdale Falls
The Arran Banner
Arran distillery
Surrounding islands
Holy Isle
Pladda
Hamilton Isle
Islands of the Clyde
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kilmory,_Arran&oldid=881339947"
Villages in the Isle of Arran
Articles containing Scottish Gaelic-language text
This page was last edited on 1 February 2019, at 22:38 (UTC).
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Newman and Baddiel in Pieces
Find sources: "Newman and Baddiel in Pieces" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Babara Jones
Harry Thompson
20 September (1993-09-20) –
20 December 1993 (1993-12-20)
Newman and Baddiel in Pieces is a sketch comedy television show written by and starring comedians Robert Newman and David Baddiel, produced by Harry Thompson, and broadcast on BBC2 from 20 September to 20 December 1993.
A Spin-off from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the show combined monologues and observational routines from each of the two comedians (often with very dark themes) and character comedy. Its title sequence was an animated version of Munch's painting The Scream (to the tune of "Another Flavour" by The Sundays), with Newman and Baddiel revealed as the artist's friends in the background, standing near a waterfront theatre in which they were appearing. Audience applause between sketches was frequently accompanied by an animated theatre full of applauding The Scream characters.
The series was repeated under the title Newman and Baddiel: Rest in Pieces, with new title animation showing the duo lying in state in an open grave. The new titles were due to the Munch estate still owning copyright on the image of The Scream, as used on the original version.
1 Characters and sketches
1.1 Albert
1.2 The Poltergeist
1.3 J.J.
1.4 Emma
1.5 Jarvis Montgomery
1.6 History Today
1.7 People of Restricted Seriousness
1.8 Safety First
1.9 Disappearing World
1.10 MTV Unplugged
1.11 Special Case
2 Celebrity guests
3 Critical review
Characters and sketches[edit]
Newman and Baddiel both made observational comedy monologues to camera, in sets representing their respective flats. Their monologues were usually done independently from one another, although occasionally they would share scenes. The monologues were intermingled with numerous sketches and recurring characters. These included:
Albert[edit]
Albert was an elderly "character actor" (played by Denys Graham) who would occasionally interrupt either of the performers to ask if he could play a role in the next sketch in order to earn money to pay for a dialysis machine for his daughter Sally, whose picture he would look at from within a locket. But against Albert's wishes, he was always cast in the role of a stunt double, which seemed particularly inappropriate given his frail, elderly physique and his reliance on a walking stick. In the final episode, Albert discovered that this supposed 'dialysis machine' was not actually a dialysis machine at all, but a vibrator.
The Poltergeist[edit]
The Poltergeist was an apparently evil spirit that haunted David Baddiel's flat. In each episode, the poltergeist would attempt to terrify the duo, but fail spectacularly (in one instance, when attempting to mess up the room by moving everything around, he ended up tidying up). In the last episode it was shown that David Baddiel was aware of the poltergeist's presence but was not remotely afraid of it as he called out 'Can you feed the cat please' when leaving on tour.
J.J.[edit]
J.J., played by Simon Greenall, was David Baddiel's new flatmate, introduced in the 4th episode when David asked Rob to bring him a flatmate in order to prove he could get along with other people easily despite Rob's claims to the contrary. Unfortunately, J.J. turned out to embody every personality trait that annoyed Baddiel, including the tendencies to say "da-daa!" and append "as you do!" to sentences.
Emma[edit]
Emma was David Baddiel's girlfriend who often stayed over in his flat. Although Baddiel introduced their relationship in the first episode as a secure and idyllic one, it quickly became obvious that this was not the case. Through the series, David becomes gradually more suspicious that she is having an affair with another man, occasionally confiding his suspicions to Rob, unaware that Rob is the man in question.
Jarvis Montgomery[edit]
Played by Rob Newman, Jarvis was a predatory lothario in a smoking jacket who would cruise the streets of Soho looking for youthful partners to fulfil his lust, and making risqué double entendres which apparently shocked him ("Now I don't want to come over all Prince Charles... oh God!!!"). Standing in a dark alleyway, Jarvis would deliver a monologue in each episode detailing his latest debauched activities ("I must remember to try smuggling drugs through customs again", alluding to Jarvis's contentment at being body cavity searched, for instance). Newman continued to use this character in his early solo shows shortly after splitting from Baddiel. Jarvis would often conclude his monologue by leading the audience to an obvious punchline, then not delivering it, instead he would state "The fact that you expected me [to do x] and I disappointed you ... turned me on."
History Today[edit]
"History Today" was the only sketch from The Mary Whitehouse Experience reprised for the duo's own series. The sketch followed much the same format as before, of two elderly, scholarly professors introducing an historical discussion show on TV, which quickly turned into a barrage of playground-style insults and name-calling. Baddiel played the first of the two professors, who was never named but would introduce the topic of debate for each 'episode', while Newman played Professor F. J. Lewis, Emeritus Professor of History at All Souls' College, Oxford, who would always be the first to start the insults. The first professor would often try to return the discussion to the original topic of debate, but would never achieve much luck as Professor Lewis would continue nonetheless to fire endless playground insults at him, to which the first professor would semi-reluctantly but all too easily resume doing himself. The humour lay largely in the manner in which the professors maintained their well-spoken, formal tones despite the childishness of their insults. Many of the sketches even began with Baddiel's character apologising to the viewer for the previous episode's diversion from the chosen topic. The series of sketches was the inspiration for numerous office/playground copycats to recite its catchphrase of "You see that <insert pathetic, broken, or obsolete object>? That's you that is."
People of Restricted Seriousness[edit]
Presented in a documentary-style format, this sketch detailed the lives of a group of people afflicted with a rare condition called Restricted Seriousness, which deformed parts of their bodies so that they appeared like novelty joke-shop items and thus caused them to be laughed at by the rest of society. The main character was Julius (played by Baddiel) whose nose appeared like a plastic joke-shop nose and together with his rug-like facial hair gave him an appearance remarkably like Groucho Marx, and interfered largely with his profession as an undertaker. Determined to be taken seriously by other people, Julius attended a weekly support group for people with the condition, which was run by an unnamed character played by Newman, whose plastic-looking bald head and fuzzy green hair gave him a 'nutty professor' appearance. Other significant characters in this sketch included Daniel, who has enormous joke-shop ears and hands which interfere with his work in a centre for the deaf, and Helen, Julius' girlfriend, who has plastic-looking 'breasts of Restricted Seriousness'.
Safety First[edit]
A short sketch in the form of a TV safety warning presented by a character named Brian Coat, played by Baddiel. Brian Coat was a humourless and over-zealous safety officer, in hard hat, who caused the accidents he was trying to prevent. He would willingly set up an accident, then state "Y'see, there was no need for that to happen!" before walking away from the scene completely unapologetically.
Disappearing World[edit]
Similar to the "Safety First" sketch, this short sketch took the form of a TV environmental warning presented by a character called Shenley Grange, played by comedian Sean Lock (who supported the duo on their groundbreaking tour which culminated in a sell-out of the 12,000-capacity Wembley Arena). In a similar fashion to the latter sketch, Shenley Grange would issue a warning about a particular endangered species, before executing some kind of action himself that would end up killing the animals featured.
MTV Unplugged[edit]
This sketch was a parody of the MTV Unplugged phenomenon, in which the duo would turn up pretending to be techno acts The Orb or Utah Saints, and would look embarrassedly at the audience as an unplugged version of their style of music was, in fact, complete silence.
Special Case[edit]
In a series of sketches in one episode of the series (later revived for the duo's tour), Newman played a mentally unstable man with a condition which would cause him to suddenly shout out loud in public or do whatever was the most inappropriate action for the situation he was involved in. These included shadow-boxing a local gang, shouting "You absolute prostitute!" at his girlfriend when trying to console her, and repeatedly throwing his boss' hat out of a top-story window in his workplace. However, the constant muttering of the character was revealed not to be him wrestling with his "internal demons", but rather having a crisis of self-confidence ("Oh, I just know I'm gonna shout something out and it's gonna be so embarrassing!").
Celebrity guests[edit]
Over the show's seven episodes, several celebrity guests were featured, one of whom was Bullseye scorer and darts commentator Tony Green in a cameo, reprising his calming schtick used on the Bullseye contestants prior to an important round, with the intention this time of getting the insomniac Baddiel to sleep. Other celebrities who appeared on the show included Mariella Frostrup, Robert Smith (of British rock band The Cure, whom Newman had previously parodied on The Mary Whitehouse Experience), Jimmy Hill and Suzi Quatro, all playing themselves.
Critical review[edit]
The characters were tepidly received by critics; however, the stand-up comedy was roundly slammed for being too morbid, self-indulgent and unfunny. The two rarely performed any non-character material together, suggesting little writing as a partnership, and the comedy output suffered. Tension was evident between the pairing too, and this was confirmed when they announced they would no longer be working together at the conclusion of the "Live and In Pieces" tour that followed the series.
The other duo from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Punt and Dennis (Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis), also wrote and presented their own sketch show, called The Imaginatively Titled Punt & Dennis Show. This, despite getting a more mainstream slot on BBC1, was not too well received either, though it was not subjected to the same vitriol that some critics laid at Newman and Baddiel, which famously led to Private Eye printing a special letters page from their correspondence on the show, entitled The Great Newman & Baddiel Debate.
Newman and Baddiel have not worked together since the show ended. Newman became a successful novelist, activist and anti-capitalism campaigner; Baddiel joined forces with Frank Skinner for a number of successful TV and music projects and also wrote three novels.
Newman and Baddiel in Pieces on IMDb
Newman and Baddiel in Pieces in the Comedy Guide at BBC Radio 4.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newman_and_Baddiel_in_Pieces&oldid=862627775"
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20+ chemistry courses online
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Believe it or not Evansville Community Theatre is still alive. We have taken a couple of summers off but we’ve been itching to get something, anything, going. So in an effort to relaunch we are pleased to announce auditions for the fall radio production of Frankenstein.
If you think you might want a part, auditions are this Saturday, August 12 and Monday August 14 at our new home, John M Evans Hall, 104 West Main Street in Evansville. (Yes we finally have a home but that’s another story.)
Just because we haven’t done a play for a while doesn’t mean the Board hasn’t been busy – we’ve been looking at our organization and deciding how to best move forward. With any small community theatre it’s a struggle–a balance of having enough volunteers and money to produce a show. When we have a production in process the people naturally come to help out, but they soon drift away after the production is over.
We have looked at the organization from all angles over the last several months and continue to develop our ideas and mission and just how we fit in this community. The journey has been exciting, scary, and daunting but we keep at it because we feel that theatre plays an important role and adds another dimension to our growing community.
Over the next several weeks we will be letting you know about our progress, about our new home, about our revamped organization. And if you want to get involved now–be part of our planning, throw out new ideas, and help promote our group–drop us a message on Facebook or e-mail. We are looking for you!
If you want to audition for our radio production of Frankenstein check out our Auditions page at etctheater.com.
Sharon and Chris
The fact of the matter is Chris Felton, our sign language interpreter, and Sharon Cybart, the White Witch, had discussed it before but many productions don’t lend themselves to sign language interpretation. This time though, Chris looked over the script and felt it was workable. So not long after the rehearsals moved to the high school Chris started showing up with a script, a stool, and a watchful eye.
Then during tech week she sat in front of the stage on a short ottoman and proceeded to take on the role of all of the actors. Honestly, during tech week, I didn’t have much time to notice, I focused a few lights on her and we discussed the basic light cues I would use, but I was more concerned with the lights on stage.
Chris no longer carries her certification but still volunteers from time to time on occasions such as these. Chris taught in Madison for 40 years, interpreted for Deaf students at UW Madison, and has even signed the musical Annie at the Fireside Theatre and a poetry reading by the late Maya Angelou.
So on Sunday, when she took her seat in front of the stage and started interpreting the pre-show announcement, my finger was on the slider that ran her light. Her arms and hands moved fluidly through the scenes and when she placed her hands in her lap at the end of each, it was my cue to dim her light as well. For an hour and a half she interpreted while a dozen from the Deaf community got to see a show.
Chris taught the cast to sign both “thank you” and “I love you” before the show and the cast used them in the curtain call. And in return the members of the Deaf community that came signed “I love you” as the curtain closed.
While it may not rank up there with all of her accomplishments, Chris can now add that she is the first to interpret an Evansville production. And because of all of her hard work to be a part of this show, a group of people who don’t have many opportunities to enjoy theatre got a chance to do just that.
We’re very pleased that Chris will be there Friday evening (July 17) to do one more show.
Categories Back Stage, Events, Show Announcements, Theatre News
Sign Language Interpreted Show Friday, July 18!
It’s been a long week of rehearsals, refining the rough spots, finishing the costumes and props, painting and decorating the set, setting lights, checking the sound. We’ve done all we can do and now it’s time to finally share ECT’s production of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
Since early May, the cast has been working toward tonight–finding their character, memorizing their lines, understanding where they needed to go an when. The set was built, the costumes were begged, borrowed, and sewn, the backdrop was painted.
Each night, with the performances well on the horizon, the cast directed by Dave, and the crew, under the watchful eye of Melissa, worked with this weekend in mind.
We did this all in the hopes that people will come and see the show.
So come see a beautiful and engaging production of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe this weekend.
Cast photo by Marissa Haegele, other photos by Kathleen Yurkonis
This side.
Until the Evansville High School Class of 2015 graduated, we practiced on the Middle School stage. It doesn’t compare to the EHS stage but I marvel at old pictures that show past large musical productions that were held there. The pit band didn’t have a pit, often it appears they were set to the back of the stage. And there aren’t any wings to speak of, so I can’t imagine how there was room
for set pieces, let alone actors, back there. Yep, we are spoiled now.
Most theatre groups don’t get on stage until a few weeks before the performance, so we are lucky to get on five or six weeks before opening night. That said, the rehearsals in the Middle School are more of the actors working on lines and getting to know each other and because the stage is only half the width it’s hard to really work on where the actors should be on the stage.
How about over there?
Entrances, exits, where to stand, how to time the delivery of the lines is difficult because it will take longer and require a completely different timing on the big stage.
So everyone was happy last week when they arrived at the EHS Performing Art Center (PAC). The directors can move and reassemble each tableau–known in stage terms as blocking.
Hannah said it was feeling like high school again as she told the story about a normal week with the high school director: “Monday: ‘all of you come in from the left and stand there, no, maybe a little further downstage.’ Tuesday: ‘No, no, it’s not working for me, try upstage and to the right, that will be much better.’ Wednesday: ‘It’s not speaking to me on the right, it just isn’t, well, right. Let’s try front and center!’ Thursday: ‘I just think it works best on the left and downstage.'” With that she threw up her hands and walked off.
Sure Hannah, that way works.
Sometime Director Dave is standing on the floor in front of the stage, sometimes on the stage, sometimes sitting a few rows back in the seats. Melissa isn’t quite as transient but tries to judge it from the audience perspective. They talk to each other and then to the actors, the actors make suggestions and then they run the scene all over again.
Dave on the floor.
In another few weeks, after Dave and Melissa have tried scenes upstage and down, stage left and stage right, and all of the combinations in between, they will finally decide the best place on stage and there simply won’t be time to change it any more.
And after this first week of rehearsals on an empty stage where things were starting to feel right, a small crew came in on Saturday and built the platforms that will become the set. So that means we will need to reconsider the blocking one more time. At least.
Dave on stage, Melissa (19) hangs tight.
Finally, A Show
Maybe the best meeting is the second meeting. At the first meeting we have to go over the rules, fill out forms, answer questions and get acquainted with our new cast mates.
For those of us who have done this before, we know that this is the beginning of a two month journey and some of us find a bit of comfort knowing that the last several months of struggle to get this point are finally over. But the real comfort comes when we finally sit down on a sunny Tuesday evening with the sun pouring in the windows and, in a large circle, the first actor says the first line.
We have officially begun.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe isn’t a musical so there isn’t a vocal director or a pit band which seems like it should simplify things, but it doesn’t necessarily. There is still a lot to think about–costume and make-up, lighting an imaginary world, creating props and special effects, building and painting a set and choreographing a battle scene. But that’s a few weeks away.
Right now we are happy the actors, in a large circle, are reading their lines. We’re happy they’ve signed on for the fun and challenges that lie ahead. We are finally in May and the business of theatre has turned back into the art of theatre.
Finally a show.
Categories About, Back Stage, Events, Show Announcements, Theatre News
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is Cast
We are pleased to announce our cast for Evansville Community Theatre’s summer 2015 production of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe!
Check out the What’s New page at our website to see the list.
We will have our first meeting for the cast and parents of the children on Tuesday, May 12 at the J.C. McKenna Middle School.
We’re excited to welcome all of the actors to our summer production and we look forward to a great show!
Additional Auditions Tuesday May 5th
Come audition for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Auditions are for adult roles and children 8 and up.
Audition Da tes
6:00pm – 8:00pm Tuesday, May 5, 2015
J.C. McKenna Middle School Auditorium
307 South 1st Street, Evansville, WI
July 10, 11, 12, 17 and 18, 2015
at the Evansville High School Performing Arts Center
Rehearsal Schedule: Rehearsals start in May and will be weekday evenings, some Saturdays may be required as we get closer to the production.
Check out the Auditions page at ecttheater for more information and sides to prepare.
Categories Auditions, Events, Show Announcements, Theatre News
AUDITIONS THIS SATURDAY!!!!
9:00am – 1:00pm Saturday, April 25, 2015
6:00pm – 9:00pm Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Check out the Auditions page at ectstagelignt for more information and sides to prepare.
Sucked In by the Vortex
Once the production shifts from the middle school rehearsal space to the high school there is a sudden shift in the momentum. The crew has been patiently waiting to get into the workshop to start building and painting and the cast is anxious to work on the stage.
There’s Saturday workdays and everyone, actors included, shows up to build or paint or help with props. On rehearsal nights, the actors are working on stage while the crew continues in the shop. At some point the paths of both intersect and some of the actors that aren’t on stage pick up a paint brush to fill in the down time while the crew is building on stage among the actors.
Building Mushnik’s Shop
And then, in the final week before tech week, the suction of the play is so great that everyone involved is moving from their work, to the theater, to home to get some sleep, and back to work again. The actors start arriving earlier then the scheduled rehearsal so they can work together on the rough parts of songs or scenes. The choreographer is working with everyone on dance steps, and, from time to time, an actor will appear on stage in a costume for the directors to review.
Everybody paints
The pit band and the sound board operator arrive and the light designer is working in the afternoon when the theater is empty and darkness isn’t an issue. The producer even had a meeting with the Front of House Manager, to finalize what is needed there.
Floor work
Today is kind of a de facto day off for everyone but a large group was at the school early in the morning converting a trailer to a float for the 4th of July parade.
Costume team and the Director
Mushnik, Seymour, and Audrey rehearse.
The vortex has come to full rotation and everyone who is involved is sucked in. When you go into the theater it is filled with energy, activity, and the sense that in a week the curtain will open. Will we be ready?
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US Government declares Osama bin laden’s son wanted for terrorism threat
1 Mar, 2019 EducationTell Uncategorized 201 views 0
…offers $1m for information to capture him
Following on the heels of his father, Hamza bin Laden, son of the leader of the deadly terrorist group, al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, has issued terror threats and has been declared wanted by the United States government.
The United States is hunting for Hamza bin Laden and is willing to pay up to $1 million for information on his whereabouts.
The US State Department said Hamza, whose father was the arrowhead of the September 11, 2001 bombing in the US and was killed by US Navy Seals in Pakistan in 2011, is emerging as a leader in the al Qaeda terror network.
“He has released audio and video messages on the Internet, calling on his followers to launch attacks against the United States and its Western allies, and he has threatened attacks against the United States in revenge for the May 2011 killing of his father by US military forces,” it said in a statement.
READ EFCC invasion, arrest of Atiku’s finance director
The State Department said when his father was killed, items seized from his hiding place in Pakistan indicated he was grooming Hamza bin Laden to replace him as the leader of the terror group.
The younger bin Laden is married to the daughter of the lead hijacker in the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the State Department said.
As American officials hunt him down, United Nations member states are required to freeze Hamza bin Laden’s assets, and comply with a travel ban and arms embargo, according to the State Department bureau of counter-terrorism. US officials estimate Hamza bin Laden is between ages 30 and 33.
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World’s first big-screen OLED installed in Germany
Technology breakthrough enables flexibility of size and shape
The first screen of its kind, the Diamond Vision OLED, measuring 8.8sqm (3.84 m by 2.3 m (h)) with a depth of just 9.9cm, has been installed at the material Research Center recently opened by the chemical and pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany.
The new technology is a pioneering step forward, using organic light emitting diodes (OLED) as a light source, which due to its structure and composition is fully scalable and can be arranged into flexible forms and shapes.
The ‘Diamond Vision OLED’ screen is located in the lobby of Merck’s new research centre. Merck KGaA is one of the leading producers of organic base materials for innovative OLED technology and will use the screen as an information system for presentations and events. It has a resolution of 1,280 x 768 Pixel and weighs around 480kg.
“OLED is literally growing in size and format and has the potential to become the technology of choice for the digital signage industry in the near future. It is a significant achievement that we have been able to develop this pioneering technology with our Japanese colleagues“, explains Lars Dörholt, Deputy Division Manager, Visual Information Systems at Mitsubishi Electric Europe’s German branch.
‘Diamond Vision OLED‘ by Mitsubishi Electric is designed for indoor use and with its newly developed picture management technology, delivers seamless and vivid images. The screens deliver a wide viewing angle of approximately ±80degrees vertically and horizontally, while generating a maximum brightness of 1.200 cd/m2. Achieving double the contrast of comparable LED products, Mitsubishi Electric’s OLED-Displays are particularly well suited for use in bright environments such as shopping malls, stations or airports.
The new screen image is composed of square modules with a standard size of 38.4 cm (128 x 128 Pixel by module). Due to the modular nature of the product there are virtually no limits in terms of size, scalability, form or design. As a result, displays no longer have to be flat, but can now cover uneven or curved/convex surfaces. Each module weighs only 8 kilograms and the minimum viewing distance could be reduced to 2meters. With a depth of only 9.9cm the OLED displays are particularly well suited for the installation in halls or waiting areas.
With its new large screen technology capabilities, developed in cooperation with Tohoku Pioneer Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric is targeting new areas of application that could never have been achieved with conventional products due to limitations in size, format, amount of light or other restricting factors.
News from Mitsubishi Electric
Leave a Comment » | AV Technology, Built Environment, Digital Signage, Event Industry, News, Stadia & Public Areas | Permalink
Diamond Vision takes the flag at Silverstone
Silverstone has renewed its contract with Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision for the supply of big screen systems for the F1 Santander British Grand Prix. The contract will see the UK screen hire specialists providing giant video screens to the world-famous racing circuit for a further two years.
The F1 Santander British Grand Prix is one of the UK’s biggest sporting events, drawing huge crowds from all over Europe. Providing the big screen systems for an event this size is no small task, as Diamond Vision managing director Steve Halliday relates; “This year we will be providing a total of 21 screens around the circuit, consisting of a mixture of mobile and modular systems. Getting so many systems in and operational over a short period of time is a logistical challenge. But having worked with Silverstone for a number of years now, we’ve gained an excellent working relationship with the circuit and knowledge of the site, so it doesn’t present too many problems.”
The majority of screens supplied to Silverstone will consist of Mitsubishi’s OD10 10mm outdoor LED screen. The OD10 is widely used by many hire companies across Europe, where it has earned a reputation for rugged reliability as well as excellent image quality. A total of nine Diamond Vision mobiles – each a fully self-contained OD10 screen system – and 12 modular systems of varying sizes will be distributed around the circuit. Content in the form of live action from around the site and spectator information will be provided by Silverstone TV.
As well as the race itself, Silverstone plays host to an impressive variety of non-racing events over the weekend and the Mitsubishi screens are themselves an integral part of the overall entertainment package on offer at the Silverstone circuit. Steve Halliday says, “In 2006, the Grand Prix weekend coincided with the World Cup. We relayed the matches to huge crowds around the circuit, which was greatly appreciated by the F1 fans.”
Based in Kent, Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision is one of the longest-established screen hire businesses in Europe. The company operates a fleet of nine fully self-contained mobile LED screens and holds large quantities of modular Diamond Vision screen in pitch sizes ranging from 8mm to 25mm. The company has a long association with major sporting events such as the World Ski Cup, the Red Bull Air Race and the FIA GT Touring Car Championship, and provides support for big screen projects and installations world-wide. More information on the Diamond Vision system and Mitsubishi Electric’s range of professional display systems can be found at http://www.MitsubishiDisplayEngineering.com
Leave a Comment » | Business, Digital Signage, Event Industry, Stadia & Public Areas | Tagged: giant screens, LED | Permalink
Mitsubishi Electric screens deliver peak performance at Audi Alpine FIS Ski World Cup
Sub-zero temperatures, treacherous icy roads and remote mountainous venues are all in a days work for Mitsubishi Electric’s Diamond Vision screens as they provide the big-screen action for this year’s Audi Alpine FIS Ski World Cup tour currently progressing across Europe.
Commencing in November last year, the competition visits 32 resorts across Europe, Canada and the USA before reaching its climax this month at Bormio, Italy. Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision provides LED screens for all the European Audi Alpine World Cup events, following the tour as it wends its way from Norway, through northern, central and southern Europe before reaching the Alpine ski resort of Bormio. This is the eighth consecutive year that Diamond Vision has provided LED screens for Audi Ski World Cup organisers, the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS).
Due to its very nature, just getting access to each race venue provides a major logistical challenge, as Diamond Vision Operations Manager Steve Wood relates; “We operate truck-mounted mobile 44 m² LED screens for most of the venues, but access for the 40′ articulated units is sometimes a little tricky on icy mountain roads. Frequently the mobile rigs need to be towed into position. However even that’s not an option in several of the venues. In these cases, we use modular screens of between 30m² and 70m², flown into position by helicopter.”
Once in position, the screens are expected to operate reliably under extremely harsh conditions. Temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celcius, ice storms and blizzards are not unusual, providing a stiff test of the Mitsubishi screen’s reliability and endurance. Steve Wood comments, “In the last eight years we have experienced some really severe weather conditions, but the Mitsubishi screens have proved themselves to be very reliable and resilient. To date we’ve had no significant failures and have always had our screens operational for every race day, regardless of conditions.”
While the crews generally work on two-week rotations, most of the hardware stays on the road for the whole duration of the tour. “Reliability is obviously important for us as we have limited opportunities for running repairs,” says Steve. “The build quality of the Mitsubishi screens is a major factor in our being able to operate effectively in such harsh conditions over a period of months.”
Mitsubishi Electric’s Diamond Vision screen system is operated by most of Europe’s top screen hire companies, where its reputation for rugged reliability and excellent image quality has made it one of the most widely used screen systems in the world. Available in mobile, modular and fixed installation versions, and in a variety of pitches from 3mm to 25mm, it is also one of the most versatile. For more information on the Diamond Vision system, visit http:www.mitsubishidisplayengineering.com
Leave a Comment » | AV Technology, Digital Signage, Event Industry, Stadia & Public Areas | Tagged: diamond vision, giant screens, LED | Permalink
New company promises event organisers more bang for their buck
Event organisers are “Missing out on significant revenue opportunities through ineffective media management”, claims the founder of a new business that aims to put live event organisers firmly in charge of their valuable media assets.
The new company, Event Integration, is the brainchild of Christopher Milnes, former Managing Director of big-screen specialists Massteknik UK and well-known personality within the European event production industry. Event Integration combines hardware and media content management into a truly integrated solution that allows organisers to make the most of the wide range of revenue opportunities that now exist through concerts, festivals, sporting fixtures and public gatherings.
“What we are trying to achieve,” explains Christopher, “Is the bringing together of all the disparate elements of a major event to ensure that the event producer has the opportunity to derive maximum value from their brand. An integrated approach which encompasses the whole event – from design to rights management and out-of-home advertising – is massively important in fully developing the commercial aspects of an event.” With technology moving rapidly, Christopher warns that some producers are missing out: “Organisers sometimes fail to grasp the potential that exists today, meaning that opportunities often remain significantly underexploited.”
The key to Event Integration’s approach is its ability to manage both the hardware and media aspects of an event. Christopher continues, “We provide the delivery infrastructure, such as LED screens and OB facilities, as well as collateral equipment such as plasma screens in hospitality areas; but we also provide and manage the media content. Having both elements under the management of a single entity means that it is far easier to leverage the value of this content. For example, in the short term such as onward transmission to live TV, or in the longer term, such recording and offline editing for later release.” Event Integration also provides the means to capitalise on the value of an event’s media delivery channels through sponsorship, DVD sell-through and even e-commerce. “With 3G services now widely available”, comments Christopher, “An event’s video screens can effectively become point-of-purchase advertising for music or video downloads. With the technology available to us on-site, we now have the capability to produce, market and deliver media content virtually in real time through webcasts and download. For an organiser or event sponsor, that’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool to have at their disposal.”
Event Integration began trading in the Summer and has already been in action in Europe and the Middle East. “The response from clients to our combination of on-site media management and event hire services has been extremely positive,” says Christopher. “Clients have been quick to realise the kind of value that we can add to their event. We expect next year is going to be rather busy!”
Leave a Comment » | Business, Event Industry | Permalink
Genesis concert backdrop uses 9 million LEDs
From LEDs magazine
Phil Collins and his mates have pulled out all the stops on their comeback tour, with a massive LED stage backdrop.
An astonishing backdrop containing more than 9 million LEDs has been created for the Genesis “Turn It On Again” world tour. XL Video UK has supplied 15,089 Barco O-Lite LED panels with 270 control boxes, plus 102 Mitsubishi 16:8 high-resolution LED panels.
The O-lite panels make up a spectacular back wall measuring 13 metre high and 55 metre wide. This is surrounded and topped by 7 lighting towers (“ribs”) reaching heights of up to 28 metres, with the entire structure resembling a giant conch shell. This was designed by Mark Fisher/Stufish.
The screen provides a 3D-curved wall and an elegant architectural backdrop immediately behind the performance area. It is an interactive canvass for video playback, graphics images and IMAG which are integrated with lighting effects (designed by Patrick Woodroffe), helping to create the show’s unique visual identity.
The O-lite modules are fitted into customised touring frames designed by XL Video and made by Brilliant Stages. They are populated at different pitches to give multiple resolutions across the whole surface.
The O-Lite screen ends with two elliptical Mitsubishi LED screens at either side of the stage.
According to Stufish’s project executive designer Jeremy Lloyd, the O-lite screen is by far the most complicated that’s ever been created in terms of engineering and processing,. It presented a real challenge to the video boffins who take care of the processing, mapping and programming of the hard drives that feed it with provocative and engaging images.
The show also incorporates a few interesting video special effects, one of which is a head shot during the song “Mama” for which the band wanted to replicate an image from the track’s original 1980’s promotional material. This is done live by Phil Collins activating (via foot pedal) a small light positioned at his feet while his face is framed with a tight camera shot – giving a ghostly shimmering halo of light around his face. The XL crew has rigged up a little camera in the pit so Collins can see the image this is producing and tweak it to his liking by moving his head in relation to the light.
Stuart Heaney of Blink TV, leads a video team of 14, has been involved in the Genesis project since January, and part of the overall video brief was the design of special dollies to house and transport the O-Lite sections on tour. These were built by Brilliant Stages, and are an important part of some extremely meticulous pre-planning by Heaney, the XL Video and Stufish teams and tour riggers.
The entire video setup takes three and a half hours each day to install, and 2 hours and 40 minutes to pack up ready to move to the next venue. With 90 trucks and over 250 crew, the Genesis tour is wending its way through Europe, before going to the US until the end of the year.
Leave a Comment » | AV Technology, Event Industry | Permalink
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Posts Tagged ‘Alexander Payne’
Second City Blues
Posted in Movie Blog, tagged Alexander Payne, Amour, Birmingham, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Cannes Film Festival, IMAX, Nebraska, Palme d'Or, second city, Shane Carruth, Upstream Colour on December 7, 2013| 3 Comments »
As a movie fan I am relatively well located. Living just a short drive from the centre of a major UK city, England’s so called second city, Birmingham, I have access to many cinemas including a great independent and a multiplex with an IMAX screen. However I am beginning to feel a little short changed.
For the second time this year a much hyped movie doesn’t appear to be coming anywhere near my city. The first was Upstream Colour (2013) Shane Carruth’s long anticipated follow up to Primer (2004). More recently Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), the controversial Palme d’Or winner from this years Cannes Film Festival. Earlier in the year Amour (2012) received a single screening after it had won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Had it not won, it is unlikely that it would have made it to a multiplex.
Back to my local multiplex I mentioned above. They have over 80 UK cinemas. Five of them are showing Blue Is the Warmest Colour. All but one of the five are in London. While I accept that we don’t get as many of the smaller movies as they do in the capital, but if they are unable to show a Palme d’Or winner in England’s second city what is the point of modern technology? The modern technology that is supposed to make it easier and cheaper for cinemas to show more films making smaller films more accessible and available.
Upstream Colour and Blue is the Warmest Colour are set for release on DVD on 30th December and 17th March respectively, I fear these will be my first opportunities to see them. I am also confident they will find their way onto FIlm4 before too long. This however isn’t the point, I don’t just want to watch movies, I want to watch them where they are made to be seen, on a giant screen in a cinema.
Before you feel too sorry for me, I do get to see more films than many people and will most likely be going to see Alexander Payne’s Nebraska tomorrow.
Coming Soon – January 2012
Posted in Movie Blog, Movie Of The Month, tagged Alexander Payne, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton, Carey Mulligan, Chris Gorak, Clint Eastwood, Coriolanus, Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Gina Carano, Haywire, Hunger, J Edgar, Kate Beckinsale, Leonardo DiCaprio, Man on Ledge, Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Ralph Fiennes, Shame, Steve McQueen, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg movie, The Darkest Hour, The Descendants, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Iron Lady, Timur Bekmambetov, Underworld Awakening, War Horse on December 20, 2011| 1 Comment »
With just two more movies to see this year: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (making a total of 108 movies seen at the cinema this year) I am already looking forward to the new year. I am led to believe the early part of the year can be a bit of a barren time for American cinema goers but here in the UK the new year is often the time to see the Oscar bait movies that week get a few months later.
With two academy awards from sixteen nominations, nothing says Oscar like Meryl Streep. The Iron Lady tells the story of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. From the clips and trailers I have seen, it looks interesting, the only doubt, the directors, Phyllida Lloyd’s only other feature appears to be Mamma Mia!
I have heard nothing but good things about Shame despite the unusual and controversial subject matter, sex addiction. After the excellent Hunger (2008), the re-teaming of director Steve McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender must be a good thing. The addition of co star Carey Mulligan and I am really looking forward to this one.
Clearly Ralph Fiennes’ doesn’t believe in making life easy for himself, making his directorial debut with an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The updated setting is reminiscent of Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995), looks interesting.
I understand J,Edgar has had mixed reviews on the other side of the Atlantic but with Clint Eastwood in the directors chair and Leonardo DiCaprio in the starring role it has to be worth seeing.
There is already Oscar talk about George Clooney in The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne (Election 1999 & Sideways 2004). I don’t know much about it but Clooney on good form remains a watchable movie star reminiscent of the stars from the golden age of cinema, I’m in!
Bizarrely, the two films I am most looking forward to aren’t going to feature at the Oscars, they are more what is (condescendingly) referred to as “genre movies”. As one of the few people who liked The Girlfriend Experience I am always interested in Steven Soderbergh’s more experimental ideas. Like with The Girlfriend Experience Soderbergh has gone for an unexpected lead actress for the action movie Haywire, former Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano. He has surrounded her with an impressive supporting cast including: Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton. As I said it won’t win Oscars but it looks like its going to be fun.
There are two real guilty pleasure franchises around at the moment, we have to wait until later in the year for the next Resident Evil movie, but Underworld Awakening is out in January. Nearly a decade after the first Underworld movie Kate Beckinsale is back in her most iconic role (and costume). From the trailer it looks as dumb as the previous movies, but I really don’t care, I can’t wait!
Other movies coming out in January include: War Horse. Thanks to a really cheesy trailer, I can honestly say I have never been less excited by a new Steven Spielberg movie. I know nothing about The Darkest Hour other than what I have seen in the trailer but with director Chris Gorak who impressed with his debut Right at Your Door (2006) and Timur Bekmambetov credited as a produce I will give it a go. Another movie I now nothing about other than the trailer is Man on Ledge. The trailer makes it look a lot like Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), that isn’t a bad thing.
Check back on the 1st of February to find out what I actually saw and what I thought of them.
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“A Memory of Light” by Robert Jordan & Brandon San...
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The Burn Zone by James K. Decker (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)
Order "The Burn Zone" HERE
Read Friend And Foe, a guest post by James K. Decker
AUTHOR INFORMATION: James K. Decker was born in New Hampshire in the seventies, and has lived in the New England area since that time. He developed a love of reading and writing early on, participating in young author competitions as early as grade school, but the later discovery of works by Frank Herbert and Issac Asimov turned that love in to an obsession.
He wrote continuously through high school, college and beyond, eventually getting published under the name James Knapp, with the publication of the Revivors trilogy (State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero). State of Decay was a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and won the 2010 Compton Crook Award. The Burn Zone is his debut novel under the name James K. Decker. He currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife Kim.
OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: Plagued by overpopulation, disease, and starvation, humanity was headed for extinction—until an alien race called the haan arrived. And then the real trouble began.
It’s been a rough day for Sam Shao. As part of a program that requires humans to act as surrogates to haan infants, Sam has been genetically enhanced to bond with them. So when three soldiers invade her apartment and arrest her guardian for smuggling a dangerous weapon into the country, Sam can sense that something isn’t right. One of his abductors is a haan masquerading as a human, and the supposedly fragile haan seems to be anything but.
Racing through the city slums, trying to stay one step ahead of the mysterious haan soldier, Sam tries to find the man who, in her twenty years, has been the only father she’s ever known. Could he truly have done what he is accused of? Or did he witness something both human and haan would kill to keep hidden? The only thing certain is that the weapon is real—and lost now somewhere in a city of millions.
Fighting the clock, Sam finds an ally in Nix, a haan envoy devoted to coexisting with humans, or so it seems. But what she really needs are answers. Fast. Or else everything she knows—and everyone she loves—will burn.
FORMAT/INFO: The Burn Zone is 374 pages long, divided over thirty-one numbered chapters. There is also an acknowledgements page. Narration is in the first-person with Sam Shao as the sole narrative voice.
February 5, 2013 marked the paperback and e-book publication of The Burn Zone via Ace-Roc books. The cover art is provided by Dave Seeley.
ANALYSIS: The Burn Zone is a book that managed to register itself on my radar due to its intriguing blurb details. I earlier didn’t know that this book was by the same person who had previously written the Revivors trilogy. I had read the first book and while I wasn’t able to review it, I was impressed by the author’s imagination and story settings.
The Burn Zone begins on an alternate Earth, which is remarkably similar to ours and is set in the near future wherein an alien race has crashed into a facsimile of the nation of China. These aliens called the Haan have take refuge among the local population and the government has helped them with it. The addendum being that the Haan help them with their nation’s security and weapons technology. The Earth’s population has grown beyond what can be sustained and so now massive amounts of the population face hunger pangs and have to make do with food being used as currency. The Haan add to this issue by demanding massive amounts of food for themselves and they justify their food needs by providing this alternate Chinese nation with futuristic technology that has propelled them ahead of the other worldly nations. This action has a dual effect of making this nation the most strongest in terms of technology and military might and the most detested by the rest of the world as well.
With this background, we are introduced to the main character of Sam Shao who is a surrogate mother to a Haan infant she has named Tanchi. She is leading a content life (of sorts) waiting for her godfather Dragan to return to Hangfei from his current assignment on the border towards the Pan-Slav Emirates. She is shocked when Dragan returns unexpectedly and with dire news. The state police who have quite a few charges of grave magnitude against him follow him and the end result is a scuffle that causes even more hassles for Sam, Dragan and the future of Hangfei. Thus begins the first volume in the Burn Zone series by James Decker.
Here’s what impressed me about this book, at its heart this book is a thriller through and through. It comes in the wrappings of SF and Alternate history however the storyline follows the tenets of a thriller. The author has carefully developed his premise of Aliens who have crash-landed and are in a situation similar to the one showcased in District 9. Albeit their situation and the world settings are very much different than those of the extra-terrestrial creatures in the film. This world is carefully peeled over the course of the story and for some this might be a make-or-break factor in their enjoyment of the storyline. I thought the author has done some excellent world-building in presenting a world that is beset by hunger issues and then nicely showcased the possible scenarios in which the human society might have adapted to such harsh conditions. I enjoyed reading about the various criminal or seedy activities that were shown in this book in relation to the demands of the society and this evolution felt very realistic.
There are some negative factors to this new series as well, beginning with the pace of the storyline, it is very tepid in the first 80—100 pages as the author introduces the world, the main character and her surroundings. While I understand the author was laying the setup for the book and this series, as a reader I had to really plow through these pages to get to the real meat of the story and so I would like to warn new readers of the same. Secondly with this being a first person narrated story, it is very important that the main protagonist be an intriguing one and in this regards, the story suffers as Sam Shao isn’t that attention grabbing. Of course we do learn about her back-story and are towards the later third of the novel, she does come into her own. However as main characters go, she wasn’t the strongest one I have read about. Thirdly and lastly this is a per peeve of mine, but in SF and Alternate-historical stories, I always like to have a map to see how the story in developed in terms of geography and with the story moving around and with all the places and nations mentioned. I thought the presence of a map and glossary would have helped deepen our understanding of the world presented within.
CONCLUSION: James K. Decker is definitely an author with some cool tricks up to his sleeve, he obviously couldn’t show all of them in this book but the potential is seen and I for one will definitely be reading the sequel to see how he further develops the story and the world. Give The Burn Zone a try if you want to see a hybrid SF-Thriller, with a well-developed world and massive conflicts looming. The Burn Zone is a surprisingly interesting read and will definitely find its fans.
Melissa (My World...in words and pages) said...
Hmmm, thanks for sharing this one. I'm curious. Sounds like one I just might enjoy. And thanks for the heads up on the first 80 or so pages. :)
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Texans title hopes, NFL power rankings, Josh Allen and more
The Houston Texans have most of the pieces to make a championship run, but can they all stay on the field for once?
As the old adage goes, your best ability is availability in the National Football League. If the Houston Texans can get some of that from their best players this season, they might very well be playing into February.
The Texans appeared primed for a postseason run a year ago, but injuries derailed those dreams. J.J. Watt and Whitney Mercilus were injured on the same drive in a Week 5 game, scuttling both for the campaign. Less than a month later, Deshaun Watson suffered a torn ACL in a non-contact practice, putting him on the shelf and Tom Savage under center. The result was predictable. Losses.
Houston finished 4-12 but didn’t even have the customary silver lining of high draft picks, having traded away its first-round choice for Watson and it’s second-round selection as a penalty for signing Brock Osweiler. Still, the roster is brimming with talent on both sides of the ball, after retaining all key players while adding Tyrann Mathieu and Aaron Colvin to the secondary.
In short, the Texans have the best roster in the AFC … if it can stay healthy.
The if is a huge one considering all the question marks in that department. Watt hasn’t played a full season since 2015, the previous two being derailed by back and knee injuries. At 29 years old, it’s fair to wonder if Watt can get back to his previous form, or anything remotely close to it.
While Mercilus was significantly injured for the first time in 2017 with a torn pec, there’s always the question of bouncing back. While not on Watt’s level, Mercilus is an important figure on the defense, totaling 19.5 sacks in the two years prior to last. His bookend, Jadeveon Clowney, has his own injury woes. The former No. 1 overall pick has played only 47 games in four seasons, making him a perennial injury risk.
Then there’s Mathieu, the headlining acquisition of Houston’s free-agent class. The Honey Badger is dynamic when right, but too often in the tub. In his five seasons, Mathieu has missed 14 games with a variety of injuries, although it must be noted he played a full season for the first time last year.
Offensively, Watson is the chief concern. While the talent is evident, so is a checkered history of being available. The national champion at Clemson tore his left ACL while with the Tigers in 2014, the same year he sustained a broken right hand. The torn ACL from 2017 was in his right knee, but the pattern of fragility continues on.
For Watson, his biggest concern should be the line charged with protecting him, easily the worst position group on the team.
All told, the Texans have the goods to dethrone the New England Patriots and storm into the Super Bowl for the first time in franchise history. They just have to stay healthy.
Top 10 toughest quarterbacks of all time
1. Jim Kelly, Buffalo Bills
2. Brett Favre, Green Bay Packers
3. Joe Namath, New York Jets
4. Bobby Layne, Detroit Lions
5. Steve Young, San Francisco 49ers
6. Norm Van Brocklin, Philadelphia Eagles
7. Steve DeBerg, Kansas City Chiefs
8. Phil Simms, New York Giants
9. Dan Fouts, San Diego Chargers
10. Billy Kilmer, Washington Redskins
“I don’t know how many times I can answer this question. When they clear him, he’ll be cleared. I’m not going to put myself in a box, I’m not going to put my quarterback in a box. I’m not going to do that. And I’m not going to go on a limb and I’m not going to say that. So either ask it a different way or otherwise you’re going to get the same answer.”
– Philadelphia Eagles head coach Doug Pederson on Carson Wentz’s status
Less than two weeks away from the NFL’s opening night, Philadelphia quarterback Carson Wentz hasn’t been cleared for contact. The Eagles have played coy on whether Wentz or Nick Foles will start Week 1, perhaps the biggest league-wide storyline from now until Sept. 6.
If Wentz can’t play early on, or isn’t 100 percent, the Eagles become significantly more vulnerable to NFC powerhouses such as the New Orleans Saints, Los Angeles Rams and Minnesota Vikings. With the conference so loaded, every game is critical in the race for home-field advantage.
While Foles was terrific in the playoffs, it’s a large ask for him to repeat that performance.
Matt Verderame and Josh Hill bring you a new episode of Stacking The Box every Monday, which can be found on iTunes! On Tuesdays, Verderame and Hill are joined by Mark Carman and Ashley Young for the video show, found on FanSided’s Facebook Live page at 12:30 p.m. ET!
Random stat
The Seattle Seahawks were founded in 1976. They didn’t win the first game after a bye week until 1995.
Info learned this week
1. Josh Allen struggles (and so do Bills) in third preseason game
The Bills aren’t likely to be very good this season, and their performance on Sunday was an indication of why. First-round quarterback Josh Allen started for Buffalo against the Cincinnati Bengals and was boxed around, sacking the Wyoming product five times in the first half.
Allen, who showed flashes throughout the preseason, got his first taste of action with the first team and struggled mightily, completing 6-of-12 attempts for 34 yards. While much of the issues can be traced to a non-existent offensive line, Allen still showed why he’s raw, and why sitting him for a year is the right decision.
Buffalo isn’t the only team that would be wise to give its rookie quarterback a virtual redshirt season. The Baltimore Ravens should (and will) allow Lamar Jackson to mature behind Joe Flacco, while Baker Mayfield should sit early on behind Tyrod Taylor for the Cleveland Browns. Mayfield has ample talent, but much like Allen in Buffalo, the supporting cast isn’t ready to help along a youngster under center.
2. Bridgewater continues to perform, earn trade value
The Jets never have a reliable quarterback. Suddenly, they appear to have two. New York is likely to start rookie Sam Darnold in Week 1 after a strong preseason, leaving veteran Teddy Bridgewater as a backup and an extremely valuable commodity.
Bridgewater, who went 11-of-15 for 104 yards against the Giants on Friday, has looked fantastic throughout the preseason. The Jets, who are without a second-round pick in the 2019 NFL Draft after trading theirs to the Colts this spring, should be hunting for capital.
So which teams would presumably be in the market for Bridgewater? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers make the most sense considering Jameis Winston is suspended and has underwhelmed when on the field (and certainly off it).
Additionally, the Denver Broncos, Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals would also be intriguing options. In Denver, Bridgewater would be a quality insurance plan in case Case Keenum regresses. For the Bengals and Dolphins, he would push Andy Dalton and Ryan Tannehill respectively, perhaps usurping them if things go sideways.
3. Cowboys’ Frederick announces illness
On Wednesday, Dallas Cowboys All-Pro center Travis Frederick announced on Twitter that he has Guillain Barre Syndrome. The illness is thankfully curable, but expect the Cowboys to be without him for a few months, likely landing Frederick on the Physically Unable to Perform list. If that move takes place, the former University of Wisconsin star will be out for the first six weeks of the season.
Dallas is dealing with major injury issues up front. In the team’s second preseason game, guard Zack Martin was forced to leave with a knee injury that might keep him out of the season opener on Sept. 9 against the Carolina Panthers. Even if Martin returns, the absence of Frederick will be pronounced for Ezekiel Elliott and Co.
4. Jaguars should be concerned about offense
The Jacksonville Jaguars recked the AFC Championship Game last season, largely on the back of their defense and in spite of Blake Bortles. Still, management signed Bortles to a three-year extension, believing he could yet turn the proverbial corner. If the preseason is any indication — and it may well not be — that isn’t the case.
Bortles has been minding at best, throwing three interceptions over the last two weeks, including a pair against the Atlanta Falcons on Saturday. In addition, the Jaguars may be without top receiver Marqise Lee for the season after an ugly knee injury. If Lee is done for 2018, Jacksonville will be without its three best receivers from a year ago, with Allen Hurns and Allen Robinson gone via free agency.
5. Decker calls it a career
Eric Decker called it quits on Sunday afternoon, announcing the move via Twitter. Decker played eight seasons in the NFL, starring with the Broncos and Jets before finishing up with the Tennessee Titans. Decker signed with the New England Patriots on Aug. 3, but he no longer felt he could contribute.
All told, the former University of Minnesota star caught 439 passes for 5,816 yards and 53 touchdowns. His best years came in 2012-13 with Peyton Manning, averaging more than 1,100 yards with 24 touchdowns in that span.
Decker won’t end up in Canton, but he had a quality career.
George Blanda played in the NFL until he was 48 years old before finally retiring in 1975, still the oldest player to grace the league. Blanda played in four decades, starting with the Chicago Bears before catching on with the Baltimore Colts, the Bears again, the Houston Oilers of the American Football League and finally, the Oakland Raiders.
During his 26 years in the NFL, Blanda played linebacker, quarterback and kicker. It’s safe to say we’ll never see the likes of him again.
No team is being more forgotten about this season than the Arizona Cardinals.
Situated in the desert with little media coverage and a middling roster, the Cardinals are the forgotten son in a large family. The play in a division loaded with stars, and yet they have only three in Chandler Jones, David Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald. The latter is a sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famer, and yet his quiet manner and intellect almost makes him to boring to turn into a headline.
Most assume the Cardinals will finish toward the bottom of the standings, something they have done for most of their history. Yet a closer look reveals a team that, with good health, could be a sneaky contender for a playoff spot. Arizona trotted out Blaine Gabbert for much of last season, didn’t have Johnson, and still went 8-8.
The Cardinals are an afterthought and understandably so, but the talent is there for a surprise run.
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Home > Erik Richard
Erik Richard
NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory
Business Phone:
Work: (303) 497-3536
Chemical Sciences Division
First Author Publications:
Richard, E., et al. (2006), High-resolution airborne profiles of CH4, O3, and water vapor near tropical Central America in late January to early February 2004, J. Geophys. Res., 111, D13304, doi:10.1029/2005JD006513.
Richard, E., et al. (2003), Large-scale equatorward transport of ozone in the subtropical lower stratosphere, J. Geophys. Res., 108, 4714, doi:10.1029/2003JD003884.
Richard, E., et al. (2002), A fast-response near-infrared tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer for in situ measurements of CH4 in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics, 75, 183-194, doi:10.1007/s00340-002-0935-3.
Co-Authored Publications:
Tuck, A. F., et al. (2013), Molecular velocity distributions and generalized scale invariance in the turbulent atmosphere, Faraday Discussions, 130, 181-193, doi:10.1039/b410551f.
Popp, P., et al. (2009), Stratospheric correlation between nitric acid and ozone, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D03305, doi:10.1029/2008JD010875.
Marcy, T., et al. (2007), Measurements of trace gases in the tropical tropopause layer, Atmos. Environ., 41, 7253-7261, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2007.05.032.
Pittman, J. V., et al. (2007), Transport in the subtropical lowermost stratosphere during the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers-Florida Area Cirrus Experiment, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D08304, doi:10.1029/2006JD007851.
Thornton, B. F., et al. (2007), Chlorine activation near the midlatitude tropopause, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D18306, doi:10.1029/2006JD007640.
Weinstock, E., et al. (2007), Quantifying the impact of the North American monsoon and deep midlatitude convection on the subtropical lowermost stratosphere using in situ measurements, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D18310, doi:10.1029/2007JD008554.
Popp, P., et al. (2006), The observation of nitric acid-containing particles in the tropical lower stratosphere, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 6, 601-611, doi:10.5194/acp-6-601-2006.
Canty, T., et al. (2005), Nighttime OClO in the winter Arctic vortex, J. Geophys. Res., 110, D01301, doi:10.1029/2004JD005035.
Jost, H., et al. (2004), In-situ observations of mid-latitude forest fire plumes deep in the stratosphere, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L11101, doi:10.1029/2003GL019253.
Konopka, P., et al. (2004), Mixing and ozone loss in the 1999-2000 Arctic vortex: Simulations with the three-dimensional Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere (CLaMS), J. Geophys. Res., 109, D02315, doi:1028/2993HD993682.
Marcy, T., et al. (2004), Quantifying Stratospheric Ozone in the Upper Troposphere with in Situ Measurements of HCl, Science, 304, 261-265, doi:10.1126/science.1093418.
Ray, E., et al. (2004), Evidence of the effect of summertime midlatitude convection on the subtropical lower stratosphere from CRYSTAL-FACE tracer measurements, J. Geophys. Res., 109, D18304, doi:10.1029/2004JD004655.
Pfister, L., et al. (2003), Processes controlling water vapor in the winter Arctic tropopause region, J. Geophys. Res., 108, 8314, doi:10.1029/2001JD001067.
Hanisco, T. F., et al. (2002), In situ observations of HO2 and OH obtained on the NASA ER-2 in the high-ClO conditions of the 1999/2000 Arctic polar vortex, J. Geophys. Res., 107, 8283, doi:10.1029/2001JD001024.
Salawitch, R., et al. (2002), Chemical loss of ozone during the Arctic winter of 1999/2000: An analysis based on balloon-borne observations, J. Geophys. Res., 107, doi:10.1029/2001JD000620.
Gao, R., et al. (2001), Observational evidence for the role of denitrification in Arctic stratospheric ozone loss, Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 2879-2882.
Neuman, J. A., et al. (2001), In situ measurements of HNO3, NOy, NO, and O3 in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere, Atmos. Environ., 35, 5789-5797.
Neuman, J. A., et al. (2000), A fast response chemcial ionization mass spectrometer for in situ measurements of HNO3 in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, Rev. Sci. Instrum., 71, 3886-3894.
Note: Only publications that have been uploaded to the ESD Publications database are listed here.
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Our Left 4 Dead 2 servers are the cheapest prices on the market, meaning that you can now play your favorite game for less. With server hosting you are able to jump in and out of your game with out the fear of your world not being online because your friend who is hosting it on their machine is not on. With 24/7 access and great customer support we will have playing in no time.
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Left 4 Dead 2 is the sequel to the highly acclaimed best-selling cooperative multiplayer first-person-shooter Left 4 Dead published by Valve, creators of the Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike franchises. The game launched in 2009 for the PC and the Xbox 360 console then in 2010 for mac OS X and finally in 2013 for Linux.
Left 4 Dead 2 improves on the cooperative gameplay focus and the Source Engine used to develop the first title in the franchise by adding new player characters, new melee weapons, and new enemy characters. The game takes place in the same environment of the original title – the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic but gives us four new survivors to focus on as players struggle to fight through hordes of the Infected - zombie-like psychotics. Survivors fight through five campaigns each consisting of several areas linked by safe houses – save checkpoints where players can re-equip, with the ultimate goal of escaping each campaign’s final fight area.
Gameplay is continuously adjusted by the A.I. Director 2.0, a dynamic monitor that can procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and area pathways in addition to adjusting the enemy population and even the effects and sounds of an area to match the player’s performance. Most campaign levels find the Survivors attempting to fight their way through scores of Infected to reach a safe house and close the door once they are all safely inside. The final level in each campaign requires the Survivors to call for rescue and then either survive a prolonged battle against waves of Infected until rescue finally arrives, thread their way through a highly challenging array of Infected to reach an escape vehicle, or collect and utilize fuel cans to enable their own escape.
The game debuted at the E3 conference in 2009 in a trailer shown by Microsoft during their press event. Prior to its release, Left 4 Dead 2 garnered a combination of positive and negative reactions from the media and the community at large, mostly due to an unusually high volume of controversy surrounding the game’s graphic content and cover art. Post-release reviews were overwhelmingly positive and the controversy died down. On December 25, 2013 and only for twenty four hours, Valve released the game on Steam, free for new players. The Christmas giveaway also included a special achievement called "Ghost of Christmas Present," awarded to veteran players who helped the free holiday players survive in the game's campaign mode.
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Movie review: Basmati Blues
Welcome to a review of a movie you have never heard of. I only really find out about it when I was buying a ticket to its screening. This is Basmati Blues.
IMDb summary: A brilliant scientist is plucked out of the company lab and sent to India to sell the genetically modified rice she created – which she doesn’t realize will destroy the farmers she thinks she’s helping.
Writing and Directing
Basmati Blues was written by Dan Baron (who also directed the film), Jeff Dorchen, and Danny Thompson. These filmmakers either don’t have anything else or anything worthy of note on their IMDb pages. Also, they have made this movie back in 2012-2013 and it has been kept from release for 5 years (definitely for a reason(s)). Even now, it has only been released in a handful of countries (either in the cinema or on DVD). I think that the US premiere date is still a couple of months away and even when the picture does come out, there won’t be any advertising for it. So, how bad is it?
Basmati Blues has been justified online as Hollywood’s homage to Bollywood. That justification was an answer to the critique that the movie was just appropriating the culture of India. Whether that was truly the case, I’m not entirely sure. The film seemed to be a somewhat collaborative project between the East and the West (based on a mixture of English and Hindu names in the credits), while the familiar Bollywood traits – songs, dances, bright colors, slapstick humor – seemed to have been celebrated in this picture. Nevertheless, the movie’s lead and the villain were white. The shades of the white savior narrative were present too (at least the said saviour wasn’t male so maybe that’s better? It isn’t). The idea that farmers in India would be so trusting of a Western corporation was just plain stupid. People from the East have little reason to trust the West and, if the West still doesn’t get why, we are gonna be stuck in the current global relations for a long time.
Anyways, even if you divorce the content of the film from its context, it still had problems. The fact that it was sort of a musical about science (at least in the beginning) seemed like a bizarre combo. The villain was so cartoonish – his whole evil corporation belonged in a Sunday morning animation (and he wasn’t cartoonish in a right way for the performance to be seen as a parody). The main character was annoying too – she seemed to be highly intelligent in the lab but clueless about the world, the different cultures, and just life in general. The love story aspect was cliche, cheesy, and predictable (really Hollywood-y). I guess at least from the structural point of view, the film was well-written as the plot ideas that were introduced during the first act, did come back in the third (the horse, the monkey seeds).
Visuals and Music/Dance
Basmati Blues looked okay. The views of India were nice, but then again, I could have watched a documentary to see more of them. A lot of noticeable green screens were used for musical numbers. The numbers themselves were fine. The songs weren’t that catchy and I wanted to see more choreographed dances. Again, I should probably watch a true Bollywood film rather than a Hollywood knockoff to see the things that were lacking here. Genre-wise, Basmati Blues have been classified as a comedy and while it certainly had intentional moments of humor, I was mostly laughing at the unintentional ones (which is both bad and good).
One person who wishes this film would never come out is Brie Larson, who played the lead. She wasn’t awful in the movie but she also wasn’t great. Her performance here is a far cry from her outing in Room (for which she won an Oscar) and I don’t think that it comes close to her other films either, like Free Fire, The Glass Castle or even Kong.
Somebody who should be even more ashamed of their work on this movie is Donald Sutherland, who was literally a cartoon villain. He recently played a very distinct villain in The Hunger Games but in that franchise, he had a layer of menace and sophistication. I don’t know what he was going for in this film.
The two romantic leads (cause, of course, there had to a love triangle) were played by Utkarsh Ambudkar (TV actor) and Saahil Sehgal. Both of them were as good as the script allowed them to be.
In short, Basmati Blues was either Hollywood’s homage to or appropriation of Bollywood. No matter which side of that argument you stand on, I think we can all agree that the final project wasn’t great. And yet, if you are somebody who can enjoy a movie ironically, you might find Basmati Blue hilarious, absurd, or both.
Trailer: Basmati Blues trailer
January 5, 2018 Lou Tagged basmati blues, basmati blues film, basmati blues movie, basmati blues musical, basmati blues review, bollywood, brie larson, catching fire, cinema, cinema review, cinematography, comedy, comedy movie, culture, dan baron, dance, donald sutherland, film, film review, film reviews, filming, films, free fire, independant film, india, indie, indie film, kong, kong skull island, mockingjay, motion picture, motion picture review, motion pictures, movie, movie film, movie preview, movie review, movie reviews, movies, music, musical, rice, romance, room, saahil sehgal, science musical, sutherland, the glass castle, the hunger games, the mindy project, utkarsh ambudkar Leave a comment
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In “The Wedding Party” sequel, Nonso has continued his romance with Deirdre, the bridesmaid from London. Nonso manages to propose by accident, while on a dinner date, and sets off a chain of events too powerful to stop.
Rule number one
Stephanie and Tega are best friends since they were five years old. They did everything together, they had never even gotten into a fight before until now. This is story about a friends, a boy and a major fight.
Chief Daddy
A small village in Nigeria without drinkable water, sustainable farming and fishing has one resource: oil. This story is based on true events; the violent havoc that ensued between the militants and government due to the oil corporations’ greed, which had a ripple effect throughout the global oil industry.
The Arbitration
TIFF Rising Stars OC Ukeje and Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama join a stellar cast of Nollywood heavyweights in this whip-smart courtroom drama about lust, betrayal, and the price of ambition.
Mother Of George
A story about a woman willing to do anything and risk everything for her marriage.
Country: Nigeria, United States of America, USA
Painted Lies
A lavish wedding escalates into pure Lagosian chaos, in this wild romcom produced by media mogul Mo Abudu.
A cash-strapped man and his pregnant wife buy a beautiful new home at a bargain price, only to learn that they aren’t the only occupants.
Seyi, a 24-year-old Nigerian-American, works on Wall Street. Desperate to succeed because of his outsider status-due to class and race-he commits a crime, insider trading, which brings his entire world crashing down on him. Seyi’s troubled circumstances force him finally to confront his tumultuous relationship with his ailing father, his romantic relationship with his privileged white girlfriend, and his racial and immigrant backgrounds-with nothing less at stake for him than his soul.
FIFTY captures a few pivotal days in the lives of four Nigeria women at the pinnacle of their careers. Meet Tola, Elizabeth, Maria and Kate four friends forced at midlife to take inventory of their personal lives, while juggling careers and family against the sprawling backdrops of the upper middle-class neighbourhoods of Ikoyi and Victoria Island in Lagos. They live and work in the resurgent, ever-bustling, 24-hour megacity of Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa’s biggest and most vibrant economy.
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TV Shows/
Texas Flip and Move
Watch Seasons :
A property-flipping competition with a twist involving hauling the house to a new location.
Genre : Reality, Reality-TV
Actors : Casey Hester, David Richter, Dona Snow, Randy Martin, Stacy Silfies, Toni Snow Barksdale
Networks : DIY Network
IMDb: 5.5 / 2
Release : 2015
Texas Flip and Move 1×1
Gone 1×7
Dare to Live
A music-infused docuseries in which Rory Kramer takes his artist friends (Justin Bieber, Steve Aoki, Iggy Azalea, The Chainsmokers and More) to the farthest reaches of their comfort zones and across the globe.
Genre: Adventure, Reality, Reality-TV
Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta is the Atlanta based spin-off of Love & Hip Hop. It premiered on June 18, 2012, on VH1 and chronicles the lives of several women who are involved with hip hop. The second season premiered on April 22, 2013, with new cast members: Atlanta DJ and radio personality Traci Steele plus DJ Babey Drew, Traci’s ex and father of their son Little Drew.
Everest Air
The real-life adventures of a high-altitude helicopter rescue team patrolling Mount Everest are followed in this series, which begins with life and limb being risked to extract two separate injured climbers, both from 21,000 feet. Also: The ARS team provide emergency medical relief to a local boy suffering from a potentially fatal condition.
Genre: Documentary, Reality
Tiny House, Big Living
Couples learn what it really means to downsize when they take the plunge into the tiny house real estate market. At an average size of only 180 square feet, watch as clients meet with their builders, or decide to build these tiny homes all by themselves, and follow along through the construction process until the house is complete.
The Grill Dads
Hit the road with Mark and Ryan, BFF dads with a combined love of all things grilled, fried, creative and downright flavorful. They’ll showcase some of the most-epic bites to leave you wanting more-and perhaps serve up a few dad jokes while they’re at it.
More than a game changer in reality television, TV One’s ‘The Next:15’ is disrupting the genre as the series breaks the “fourth wall” between the producers and the talent, revealing what happens not only on camera, but what normally happens behind it too. This docu-series follows the lives of six reality stars – Tiffany “New York” Pollard (Flavor Of Love), Claudia Jordan (The Real Housewives of Atlanta), Jennifer Williams (Basketball Wives), Karamo Brown (The Real World: Philadelphia), Laura Govan (Basketball Wives: LA), and Raymond “Benzino” Scott (Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta) – whose infamous television debuts have come and gone and are all attempting to generate their next 15 minutes of fame.
The Ultimate Fighter is an American reality television series and mixed martial arts competition produced by the FX Network and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It previously aired for fourteen seasons on Spike TV. The show features professional MMA fighters living together in Las Vegas, Nevada, and follows them as they train and compete against each other for a prized contract with the UFC. The series debuted on January 17, 2006, with its first episode, “The Quest Begins”. To date, there have been twenty seasons of the show, two per calendar year. Each season features either one or two weight classes in the tournament.
The historic Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar fight in the first season drew millions of viewers to the show and launched the sport into the mainstream. Because of this success, The Ultimate Fighter was regarded as instrumental to the survival and expansion of the UFC and mixed martial arts into the mainstream. Many current and past UFC fighters are alumni of the show, with some competitors going on to become coaches in future seasons. The show has undergone multiple format changes since its inception, including the introduction of the wildcard bout. Many winners have gone on to compete for UFC championships with some becoming UFC champions.
Genre: Action, Reality, Reality-TV, Sport
Party Down South
40 minmin
From the producers of Jersey Shore comes the most outrageous Party Down South. Follow eight young, brazen adults for one wild summer of extreme fun. Their summer vacation spot, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, may never be the same after these fast friends work, party and bond with one another over their common love of the South.
Genre: Music, Reality-TV
Border Wars
Border Wars is an American documentary television series on the National Geographic Channel. The program follows agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other divisions of the Department of Homeland Security as they investigate and apprehend illegal aliens, drug smugglers, and other criminals violating immigration to the United States and customs laws. The series also follows Air Interdiction Agents, and Marine Interdiction Agents who patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as southern Florida and Puerto Rico.
Genre: Documentary, Reality-TV
A Night with My Ex
Ex-couples are brought together for one night in a multi-camera-rigged one-bedroom apartment, with no producers and no interruptions, to hash out their unresolved issues. Viewers witness startling confessions, wild hook ups, and shocking resolutions in a format where anything can – and does – happen.
Forged in Fire: Knife or Death
The country’s most experienced bladesmiths, martial artists and knife experts slice, stab and chop their way through a blade-shattering gauntlet for a chance at winning a $20,000 grand prize.
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Category Archives: Abengoa Solar
>Greening California, SB X8 34, And Our Renewable Energy Revolution
SB X8 34 is not the latest robotics model. It is a new bill from California.
SB X8 34 authored by Senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, will help further streamline and speed up the permitting and siting process for large-scale renewable energy projects. These are the projects that will provide Californians with jobs and greater energy independence and attract investment to the Golden State.
Today, at the world’s largest operating solar plant, the NextEra Harper Lake Solar Electric Generating System (SEGS) facility in Hinkley, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to announce a new joint program to make it easier to conserve land for endangered species and for developers to build renewable energy projects in California.
Mojave Desert Photo Courtesy Data.gov
“I cannot think of a more appropriate place to underscore that renewable energy is not ‘pie in the sky’ than here at the edge of the Mojave Desert where the largest solar plant in the world is generating clean, cost-efficient renewable energy for California communities,” Secretary Salazar said during a tour of the facility.
There are more than 240 proposed renewable energy projects in California that could produce nearly 70,000 MW of clean energy annually.
These proposed projects throughout the state include solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and small hydro facilities.
In addition to touring the NextEra Harper Lake facility today in Hinkley, the Governor and Secretary Salazar toured a 250 megawatt (MW) proposed solar facility, the Abengoa Mojave Solar project. The proposed Abengoa site is seeking funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) and will create over $1 billion of capital investment and more than 1,200 jobs in the local region. The Governor’s action today will help the Abengoa project and other renewable energy projects seeking Recovery Act funding.
“Our bold and innovative vision for California has made us a pioneer in renewable energy, green jobs and environmental protection and, as a result, we are seeing an energy revolution in California,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “California now has more than 240 proposed renewable projects looking to build and create jobs. Today’s action will help speed up the process for some of these large projects to break ground this year and qualify for federal stimulus funding. By working together, we can increase renewable energy development, create thousands of jobs and preserve our state’s cherished natural resources”
To better coordinate the state’s efforts to increase renewable energy and create jobs, the Governor’s Administration will hold The Governor’s Renewable Energy Policy Conference at the University of California, Riverside on Wednesday, March 24.
Solar Farming
SBX8 34 will ensure state regulatory agencies have the resources necessary to focus on the state’s stringent environmental review process and permit renewable energy facilities. The bill creates further efficiencies by:
Establishing the Renewable Energy Development Fee Trust, a revolving fund that renewable energy developers can pay into through project-assessed fees determined by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the Department of Fish and Game (DFG). The fees will be used for the state and its federal partners to implement project mitigation measures including purchasing private lands related to habitat restoration, and monitoring and transaction costs connected to offset impacts to biological resources from construction.
Ensuring the needed environmental reviews occur in a timely manner by authorizing the CEC and DFG to assess application fees on projects at an amount that would fully fund dedicated staff to work exclusively on applications.
Speeding up CEC review by allowing for the free flow of information in a more timely manner by removing communication barriers between outside state agencies and CEC commissioners.
The Governor urged the legislature to continue working to help streamline the permitting and construction of renewable energy projects throughout the state in a signing message attached to SBX8 34.
The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan was also formed to create a science-based, stakeholder driven process to identify geographic areas designated for renewable energy development, and conservation and declining species management. This plan is currently scheduled to be completed in 2012 and is meant to provide a long-term road map to development and conservation in the California desert.
The following excerpt by: David Danelski, The Press-Enterprise
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his aides gathered at the graffiti-scarred ruins of an old feed and farm supply store as they waited for U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar to arrive for a tour of the future solar energy site.
The crumbling building and more than 1,700 acres around it, mostly former alfalfa fields, have been acquired by Abengoa Solar, which is seeking approval to build a 250 megawatt thermal generation plant about nine miles northwest of the San Bernardino County town of Hinkley.
“It will go as far the eye can see along those transmission lines,” Scott Frier, Abengoa’s chief operating officer, said to Schwarzenegger and Salazar as he showed them a map of project site.
The governor and Salazar also visited the control center for the nearby 160 megawatt solar plant, NextEra Harper Lake Solar Electric Generating System, the largest operating solar plant in the world.
Filed under Abengoa Solar, CEC, Gov. Schwarzenegger, Green Blog Network, Greening California, Mojave Desert, NextEra Harper Lake, Renewable Energy Conference, SB X8 34, Secretary Ken Salazar, Species Conservation
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Greta Van Fleet Drops First Single from Upcoming Album
If there was any question whether the group would be able to continue their great potential beyond the Black Smoke Rising EP, “When the Curtain Falls” alone should prove that won’t be an issue.
by Kat Fortner
Michigan rock & roll band Greta Van Fleet has finally released a highly-anticipated single -- the first from an even more highly-anticipated, full-length debut album -- and it did not fall short of expectations.
The band, which consists of young brothers Josh Kiszka, Jake Kiszka, and Sam Kiszka along with family friend Danny Wagner, was just signed to Lava Records in March of 2017, but has made significant waves since. Their label defines them as “arena-rock” and it couldn’t be more true -- with just one EP under their belt, GVF is already on the tail end of a sold-out headlining summer tour that included stops at festivals like Coachella along the way.
“When the Curtain Falls” does not stray from the classic rock sound that makes Greta Van Fleet so noteworthy and exceptional. Lead vocalist Josh Kiszka is only twenty-two, but wails and hits high notes so effortlessly that even the oldest of classic rockers are bound to be jealous. If the group is experiencing any pressure from being often compared to Led Zeppelin by fans and critics alike, it doesn’t show -- although there is something undeniably nostalgic about their sound and image, they’re blazing a trail in the rock & roll scene by making that very sound and image appealing to a wide range of audiences. While modern-day rock may boast great qualities in its own right, there’s something evocative and overwhelmingly familiar about the edgy blues-rock sound GVF produces, even for younger demographics.
If there was any question whether the group would be able to continue their great potential beyond the Black Smoke Rising EP, “When the Curtain Falls” alone should prove that won’t be an issue. Although there is no set date for the album yet, there’s been implications that we can definitely expect something before the year is over. Greta Van Fleet seems determined to make a name for themselves in rock -- not by copying an old sound, but taking something classic and reincarnating it with a fresh twist that rock music didn’t know it needed until they came along.
Listen to “When the Curtain Falls” on Youtube below. Also available on all streaming platforms.
Kat Fortner July 17, 2018 michigan rock band, greta van fleet, new music, new album, rock, arena rock, stadium rock, brothers, led zeppelinComment
Chance the Optimist...or Chance the Petty Ex?
Armon Sadler July 20, 2018 chance the rapper, 4 new singles, i might need security, workout
Who Should Collaborate More?
Collin Shamley July 17, 2018 hip hop collaborations, drake and rihanna, drake, rihanna, quavo young thug travis scott, ty dolla $ign, h.e.r., daniel caesar, chance the rapper, noname, jhene aiko, swae lee
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Spain Supplement 2005
Published: 23 July, 2008
Despite the drought that has gripped Spanish wine regions in 2005 (with early reports suggesting yields will be down between 15 and 40%, depending on who you listen to) the Iberian nation can wipe the sweat from its brow and look to the future with a renewed sense of optimism.
Charity wine challenge
Bibendum has joined forces with the NSPCC for its latest fine-wine quiz.
Tio Pepe back in Hell's Kitchen
Tio Pepe is sponsoring Hell's Kitchen USA, the American version of the show that once again features top chef Gordon Ramsay.
Argentina: who's crying now?
Wines of Argentina Annual Trade Tasting
Date: Tuesday 20 September 2005
Venue: Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground, London NW8
Time: 10am-5.30pm
The Wines of Argentina Annual Trade Tasting will take place on Tuesday 20 September at the Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground. Approximately 70 producers have registered to participate, and a separate, themed tasting will look at Malbec and More', for which exhibitors have been asked to submit wines that retail at 5.99 and above. For further information, please contact Tina Coady: call or fax 01480 384 806, or e-mail t.coady@ntlworld.com
Across the Andes: Colchagua and Mendoza
On a balmy evening last March, at the tail end of the Chilean summer, a group of local vineyard workers from the Colchagua Valley gathered on the terrace of Franois and Jacques Lurton's house in Lolol to enact a song-and-dance dramatisation of the local grape harvest. Soulful and entertaining, this involved a slightly gawky but winsome teenager in a fetching cowboy hat plucking' the grapes from a busty matriarch, doing double duty as a vine', as she sang about the trials and tribulations of the harvest, as well as the challenges facing the itinerant grape pickers.
Constellation's shooting star
Was there ever anybody better at selling himself than Chris Carson? If ours had been a job interview I'd have given him the job. In fact, I'd probably have given him my job. It says a lot for the resilience of the Sands family of Constellation that they're still in charge.
The Interview: Stuart Elmes, Assistant general manager, Pacific Oriental, London
Is the City clientele different from that of other parts of London?
The City clientele is very civilised, although in some ways it is a very clinical audience. They don't really want us to talk that much. It's really about providing them with food and beverages, then leaving them to discuss the business that they need to. We don't check back on customers, which is very different after working in a hotel. We try to drum into the staff an awareness of body language. Could there possibly be a problem? If so, then we will ask if everything is satisfactory. We don't really get into conversations with people, apart from finding out the pet likes and dislikes of some of our regular customers.
More accessible' Laphroaig launched
Islay malt producer Laphroaig has launched a more accessible' single malt, partly matured in 100-litre quarter casks'.
Waverley on a Promise with 1.6M investment
On-trade giant WaverleyTBS is investing 1.6 million to raise awareness of the South African brand Cape Promise in the
run-up to Christmas.
Thresher unveils plans for Wine Rack revitalisation'
Multiple specialist Thresher has announced details of its plans to revitalise' Wine Rack.
TV chef gets creative with cocktails
TV chef James Tanner has created a series of cocktails
with Plymouth Gin.
Zonin warns of Italian crisis'
The world of Italian wine is in trouble. If we don't come out
of this crisis in a hurry, I see thousands of jobs being lost
in vineyards, in cellars, in distribution and in the media,' according to Gianni Zonin, one of Italy's principal wine producers with 1,800 hectares of vineyard spread over 11 estates.
Italian wine on the Web
Cento Per Cento is a new Web-based wine supplier, dealing exclusively with Italian wines.
2005 Country Reports
All the country reports from the Harpers Wine and Spirit Directory 2005, packaged together in one downloadable file.
Please note that as the 42 pages are taken from the Harpers Wine and Spirit Directory 2005, page numbers are not concurrent.
INAO halts Beaujolais yield revolt
The INAO has seen off an attempt by members of l'Union Viticole du Beaujolais to derail proposals designed to shore up Beaujolais's depressed prices through a yield reduction.
New Master of Wine
Fergal Tynan is the latest person to pass his Master of Wine exam, becoming the third MW of 2005.
Juliet Cole
Juliet Cole, wife of Michael Peace MW, died last month after a long illness.
Sake/vodka blend
Cellar Trends is to distribute WOKKA SAKi, an 80:20 blend of British vodka and Japanese sake, and a subtle essence of Asian fruit'.
Cadbury to sell off European drinks arm
Cadbury Schweppes put its European drinks business up
for sale last week.
Casa Silva to Thierry's
Family-owned and run Chilean wine producer Via Casa Silva is to move its Doa Dominga brand to Thierry's.
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O’Quinn and Covington face off on Christmas day
By Tolly Carr
Former HBCU stars featured on huge day in the NBA.
It’s a short list of HBCU players currently playing in the NBA and the two marquee names on the list will face one another on Christmas day. Kyle O’Quinn’s New York Knicks (17-15) and Robert Covington’s Philadelphia 76ers (14-18) will open up the NBA Christmas schedule at noon on Monday. The former Norfolk State and Tennessee State stars respectively, are also big contributors to their teams.
Knicks forward Kyle O’Quinn hoops with kids at his alma mater, Norfolk State.
Representing Norfolk State
O’Quinn the ex-Spartan isn’t taking over the scoring load from the departed Carmelo Anthony but he is a role player that provides energy and durability. He is one of only three Knicks to have played in every game ahead of Monday’s match-up. O’Quinn is also the third leading rebounder (5.9) and second leading shot blocker (1.09) on the team despite playing just 16 minutes per game. He’s averaging 6.4 points per game so far this season. If the playoffs were to start today the Knicks would be in as the eighth seed. New York hasn’t made it into the playoffs since the 2012-`13 season.
Representing Tennessee State
Former TSU star Robert Covington has been lighting things up this year from behind the three point line in Philadelphia. He’s shooting 39.6 percent from downtown while averaging 14.8 points per game. How much of a weapon does that translate into? Covington is fifth in three point shots made per game in the NBA, behind two duos of sharp shooters from Golden State and Houston. The playoff prognosis for Philly isn’t quite as good at the present moment. They would not make it in if it started today.
These two don’t play the same position and may never guard one another, but they are both north of 6’9″ so it’s not out of the equation. If a switch on a pick and roll happens and you happen to see Norfolk State guarding Tennessee State on a nationally televised NBA game, then consider that your Christmas gift.
Related Items:featured, Kyle O'Quinn, NBA, Norfolk State, Robert Covington, Tennesee State
City of brotherly love welcomes former NCAT Aggie
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Tag Archives: Mark Bomback
Action, D, Drama, Science Fiction
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review
I feel that most filmgoers agree that rebooting franchises is one of the most nauseating trends in modern cinema. Reboots usually contain weak plots, bank on the special effects used in the film to sell tickets, and never live up to the original work. I have yet to meet anyone who claims that they prefer the recent Robocop or Total Recall movies to the originals. Because of this, many people were naturally skeptical when Rise of the Planet of the Apes was released in summer 2011. It didn’t help that an attempt to reimagine this franchise had already failed with Planet of the Apes in 2001, one of director Tim Burton’s few disappointments. Rise, however, was met with both critical and commercial success, so naturally, a sequel was in order. Now we are treated to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is a sequel to the franchise reboot. The movie also has a new director, Matt Reeves, who has replaced Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt. You can clearly see why I was worried when this film was announced. Continue reading Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review →
Amanda Silverandy serkiscaesarcharlton hestondawn of the planet of the apesGary Oldmanheavy metalJason ClarkekobaMark Bombackmatt reevesmauriceprequelrebootRick Jaffa
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March 22, 2016 hhsindian Leave a comment
Have you ever thought about what was happening on this very day, at this very moment, many centuries ago? Maybe a crown was being placed on Henry V at his coronation 6,000 years back, or maybe Rosa Parks was boarding a bus on a trip that would be monumental for decades to come.
Every day, we walk in the ancient footprints of those who ate, talked, and created the history that we are familiar with today. I think that it would be quite interesting if we took a look at some of these footprints and acknowledged the people who formed them. So many of these historical people partook in significant events, and thus created an endless record of events for this week, March 20-26. Still, it is fascinating to highlight just a few to think about as we go through our upcoming week.
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe left her footprint in the nation after she published her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin for public viewing. Stowe’s book had national reverberations in the country as American citizens from the North reached a new level of awareness about the horrors of slavery in the South (even though critics argued her account was exaggerated). Stowe awakened the Northern public to a stronger anti-slavery effort, and thus helped to bring emancipation to blacks everywhere in the United States in the 1860s. Now, we can skip a little over 110 years later to 1969 on the very same day, and make it in time to see The Beatles singer John Lennon tie the knot and wed Yoko Ono in scenic Gibraltar.
March 21 has been a big day for history. In Eisenach, Germany in 1685, composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born to a life in which he would compose dozens of musical works that strongly enhanced the Baroque period of classical music in Western Europe. In 1790 on this day, Thomas Jefferson became an important part of President Washington’s cabinet as Secretary of State. About 170 years later, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the release of prisoners from San Francisco’s Alcatraz prison for, among other reasons, the inhumanity he saw there.
Over the course of the rest of this week in history, two albums produced by The Beatles were released; RCA debuted its first color televisions in 1954; and in 1989, the largest American oil spill took place in Alaska. This Tuesday marks the day of the very first movie witnessed by an audience in Paris in 1895, along with the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765. Ten years after the passing of the Stamp Act, colonist Patrick Henry inspired revolutionary sentiment in 1775 on March 23 with his famous quote, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
On this Thursday in history, the Tudor dynasty in England ended, finishing its line of succession of 118 years from 1485 to 1603. Then amidst World War II in 1941, on the very same day, Britain was attacked by Germany in North Africa.
This week closes with the anniversary of Maryland’s founding on March 25, 1634 and the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790, which made it so that a United States citizenship applicant had to have lived in the nation for two years prior. This Saturday, March 26, marks a saddening day of death for Ludwig van Beethoven, a different German composer, in 1827 and for American poet Walt Whitman in 1892.
Our trip through time, of course, has only touched upon the births, deaths, and happenings of people and events of national and worldwide attention. We are missing galaxies of information and miles and miles of footprints. But thinking about even these several events is fascinating. How interesting is it to think that John Lennon would have so many milestones during this one week? Or that so many hugely influential artists have died and been born within this span of time? Even more than fascinating, the act of remembering is important, and acknowledging the people who filled the footprints that we follow every day is a wonderful and illuminating thing which we should never stop doing—that is, until we can leave our very own footprint in the world.
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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 25: Competitors prepare to shoot during Archery on day six of the Invictus Games Sydney 2018 at the Hockey Centre on October 25, 2018 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images for The Invictus Games Foundation)
The inaugural Invictus Games were held in London in September 2014. HRH Duke of Sussex, Patron of the Invictus Games Foundation, and the organising committee of the London 2014 Games always hoped that this event would be the beginning of the ‘Invictus’ story and that other cities and countries around the world would take up the challenge.
Since then, the Invictus Games have been held in Orlando, USA in 2016 and Toronto, Canada in 2017. The fourth iteration of the Invictus Games is taking place in Sydney, Australia this October from the 20th-27th. The fifth edition of the Invictus Games will be held in The Hague, The Netherlands in 2020, 75 years after the city’s liberation.
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Home News Review: The Wind In The Willows - "An Enchanting Journey Into The Winter Season"
Review: The Wind In The Willows - "An Enchanting Journey Into The Winter Season"
Posted on Dec 5, 2014 | By London Theatre Direct
The Wind in the Willows - ★★★★
The Wind in the Willows is an enchanting journey into the winter season. Commissioned by the Royal Opera House, this much loved magical tale of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad is brought to life through dance, song and the wonderful music composed by Martin Ward.
Will Tuckett choreographs and directs this inspired production of The Wind In The Willows at The Vaudeville Theatre. He asks you to use your imagination as you are transported from the study of narrator Kenneth Graham to the banks of the riverside, as we join in the misadventures of the mischievous Mr Toad and his friends through the inspired stage design of The Quay Brothers.
The narrator is played by Alan Titchmarsh who embarks on his West End debut, endearing and heart-warming, he’s a loveable storyteller that makes you want to order a hot chocolate and get snuggly. He sits in his Grandfatherly chair, book in arms and provides a voice for the animals as they bring his story to life on stage and he playfully interacts and participates in their adventure.
The charmingly designed costumes by Nicky Gillibrand are Edwardian inspired and offer great character to the animals from the very suave Ratty to eccentric Mr Toad. Melancholy Badger dressed with top hat and a smoking pipe, is the wisest of them all and hatches a plan to spring Toad from jail after a reckless driving incident, only to find his beloved Toad Hall has been overrun with weasels and stoats. The puppetry of the weasels are skilfully executed with real life detail and mannerisms as they snake and crawl across the stage with panto-baddie jeer.
This really is great a festive treat, especially for children, there’s even some interval antics as Mr Toad runs around the auditorium being chased by police as kids were chuckling behind me. But don’t get me wrong, this is a great show for adults too, there’s a really magical moment just before the interval but I won’t spoil it for you… you’ll just have to journey to the riverside yourselves this Christmas for a truly inventive and warm re-creation of a classic tale.
Wind in the Willows runs until 17th January at the Vaudeville Theatre.
Reviewed by Rebecca Usher
@Rebecca_Usher
London Theatre Review: The Night of the Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre
Posted on Jul 17, 2019 | By Jack Hudson | share
It’s sometimes odd to be crammed into a warm auditorium, amongst your tribe of fast-paced, fidgety Londoners &n... Read more
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Berlin Numbers - 11 crazy Berlin facts
posted in // True Berlin
More kebab shops than Istanbul and more bridges than Venice – Berlin is full of surprises! And even though you probably already know a lot of things about the German capital, learning never stops. This is why we’re happy to present you 11 crazy facts about Berlin that you didn’t know yet. So no matter if you want to tickle that thrill of anticipation for your next trip to Berlin or you’re just the kind of person who gets a kick out of annoying their friends with fun facts about basically anything – here are some things you probably don’t need to (but still should) know about Berlin:
Roughly 1,600…
…kebab shops line the streets of Berlin – that’s more than in Istanbul! While kebab-style roasted meat has been around for millenia, the idea to put it into a pita sandwich with salad is actually a Berlin original and not from Turkey. Doner kebab has been served since 1972 and these days no less than 60 tons of kebab meat are consumed in Berlin every single day.
There are 180…
…museums in the German capital. On the average, it rains on 106 days every year. So even if you used every rainy day of the year to visit one museum, you would have still seen just over half of them.
For almost 400 years…
…Berlin’s oldest restaurant has been running. The establishment of tavern Zur letzten Instanz in what is now Berlin Mitte dates back to the year 1621. Even Napoleon once sat next to the cozy tiled stove and was served soup. That’s how old this place is. But no worries, everything they cook is fresh and actually really good, so go for it.
…trees are found in the parks and along the streets of the German capital. More than a third are lime trees, thus Berlin’s most famous avenue “Unter den Linden” (“Beyond the Limes”) is somewhat eponymous for the entire town. And yes, it’s somebody’s job to actually count them. All of them. If that isn’t German, what is? Just as impressive: roughly 44% of the city are green areas, making Berlin one of the greenest and close-to-nature cities in the world.
Some 2.2 km long…
…ist the world’s longest biergarten – which can be found every year in August on Karl-Marx-Allee during Berlin International Beer Festival. About 340 breweries from 87 countries serve over 2,400 different kinds of beer here. Cheers!
Not one, not two, but three…
…full-fledged opera houses exist in Berlin – that’s more than any other city in the world has. Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper, and Komische Oper make for a total of almost 600 opera performances every year. That’s top of the world – shared with Vienna.
No less than 1,700…
…bridges span across the rivers, canals, and railroad tracks of the German capital. Fun fact: Berlin has more bridges than Venice. In fact, there are only two cities in Europe with more bridges: Amsterdam and Hamburg.
16 times around the world…
…is the distance that all trains and busses of the Berlin Travel Authority (BVG) cover every day – that’s approximately 2.28 billion kilometers per year. Subway, busses, trams, and ferries carry more than 1 billion passengers annually – metro trains not included.
People from 185 different countries…
…live in the German capital – that’s only 8 short of absolutely all countries that exist. Berlin is a melting pot of races, cultures, and religions, something that is apparent almost everywhere you go in this city. By the way, the overwhelming majority of the 3.5 million residents are decidedly pro-immigration. Open-mindedness is of great importance here.
…currywursts are being sold annually in Berlin. The scalded sausage has been served with spicy curry ketchup since 1949 when a smart snack stand owner invented the street food classic in Berlin Charlottenburg. Currywurst is Berlin’s most iconic snack – even a Currywurst Museum exists.
Roughly 50,000 people…
…go out and party at a club in Berlin during an average weekend. Techno clubs are most successful here, making Berlin the techno capital of the world. There are approximately 120 nightclubs in town, and that’s without concert venues, live-music bars, and other venues. There’s no curfew or closing day, you can party every night of the week – and even during the day. Some clubs, like Kater Blau, are open non-stop from Friday through Monday.
picture: Datei: #163588842 | Urheber: rh2010 – fotolia
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Men's Wearhouse
Moores Clothing for Men
K&G Fashion Superstore
Twin Hill
Yaffy
Communicate with the Board
Men's Wearhouse Corrects Quarterly Cash Dividend Figure
Quarterly dividend increased 28.6% from $0.07 to $0.09 per share
HOUSTON, Jan. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Men's Wearhouse (NYSE: MW) announced that its Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.09 per share on the Company's common stock, payable on March 26, 2010 to shareholders of record at the close of business on March 16, 2010. The Company erroneously reported a 25% increase to $0.10 per share earlier today.
Founded in 1973, Men's Wearhouse is one of North America's largest specialty retailers of men's apparel with 1,271 stores. The Men's Wearhouse, Moores and K&G stores carry a full selection of designer, brand name and private label suits, sport coats, furnishings and accessories and Men's Wearhouse and Tux stores carry a limited selection. Tuxedo rentals are available in the Men's Wearhouse, Moores and Men's Wearhouse and Tux stores.
For additional information on Men's Wearhouse, please visit the company's website at www.menswearhouse.com.
CONTACT: Neill Davis, EVP & CFO, Men's Wearhouse (281) 776-7000
Ken Dennard, DRG&E (713) 529-6600
SOURCE Men's Wearhouse
© 2019 Tailored Brands. All Rights Reserved.
Sustainability Report CA Transparency in Supply Chains Act Privacy Policy Disclaimer Sitemap
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Home » Programs » Ph.D. » Liaison and Coordination with the Graduate School and...
The challenges in fulfilling degree requirements are myriad, including such issues as personal motivation, developing a passion for research and a clear research trajectory, being well organized, avoiding or managing health, financial or relationship problems, and maintaining positive momentum and speed throughout the program. Various graduate deans, dissertation advisors and former doctoral students address such issues; see https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/disslist.html, which is available through the School of Information Doctoral of Philosophy program site (under “Dissertation Proposal and Defense”): http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/programs/phd.php.
Nevertheless, this Section addresses some of the key points about coordinating with the UT Graduate School and other UT units, including the School of Information, to fulfill degree requirements. For the most part, the Graduate School’s requirements and those of other UT “parent” units provide a framework for (and take precedence over) School of Information degree requirements. Accordingly, this Section also addresses working, as appropriate, with several UT units, including the Graduate & International Admissions Center (GIAC), Registrar, International Office, Dean of Students, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Office of Research Support and Compliance.
General degree requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy are summarized in the Graduate Catalog: http://catalog.utexas.edu/graduate/degree-requirements/doctor-of-philosophy/ Requirements stated in the Graduate Catalog supersede information issued by the School of Information and other schools and departments. School of Information degree requirements elaborate on Graduate Catalog requirements and (as stated earlier) are summarized at: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/programs/phd.php. In developing your Plan of Study, it is useful to articulate these two sets of requirements to provide your own general framework. It is generally advisable to continually consult the Graduate School web site for updates on travel scholarships, application deadlines, and so on.
The following subsections briefly discuss how to coordinate your efforts with the Graduate School and other UT units. No attempt is made here to duplicate the information provided by the Graduate School and these other units. Instead, the following paragraphs point out a few critical tasks and refer you to basic sources of information.
Graduate & International Admissions Center and International Office
GIAC provides graduate application and reapplication information for US citizens and residents and for international applicants. It also provides information about living in Austin and a general orientation to UT graduate education, including interdisciplinary programs. See http://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/grad/.
Note that the International Office provides an array of services for international students, including English as a Second Language (ESL) programs and services for all graduate students who might wish to pursue part of their education abroad or participate in multi-cultural research. See http://www.utexas.edu/international/.
The Graduate School provides voluminous information for graduate students, and it pays to consult this site for answers to basic program questions and updated information and forms. The Ph.D. degree is a research degree, not a professional degree. You must comply with Graduate School and School of Information guidelines for fulfilling course and research methods requirements, forming supervisory and dissertation committees, developing a Plan of Study, taking qualifying exams, applying for admission to candidacy, participating in reviews of progress, and proposing, writing, defending, submitting, and publishing a dissertation, and ensure the successful completion and submission of all required paperwork. Note that the Graduate School site provides links to online forms and deadlines, funding, employment, student services, and professional development. Notice also a booklet on GradGuide.
The Graduate School site index can serve as a good reference resource to answer various degree requirement questions and to provide problem-solving guidance. Site index topics include, for example, awards, authorization to teach graduate courses, conditions for employment, copyright tutorial, deadlines, candidacy and graduation forms, Graduate School Personnel and their duties, leaves of absence, portfolio programs, etc. You should be thoroughly familiar with all Graduate School publications and their site throughout your program. See http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/.
The Registrar provides essential information for program planning and fulfilling degree requirements, including the issuance of catalogs, course schedules and calendars, information on registration, transcripts, grading and graduation. Their “Questions and answers” feature can be useful for finding information about privacy of your information, getting a UTEID, updating your information, financial and advising bar removal, etc.
See http://registrar.utexas.edu/.
Office of Research Support and Compliance
This Office (also referred to as the “Institutional Review office” or sometimes as the “Human Subjects” office) is important for planning, scheduling and conducting research to guard the rights, welfare, privacy and confidentiality of those involved in your research, either directly or indirectly. Whether or not you think that your research project is exempt from Institutional Review Board (IRB) review (or less formal review), you should consult the resources of this Office to answer your questions, and file necessary forms for approval of your project as necessary. Also work with your School of Information faculty advisor and Department Review Chair (DRC) to clear your study if the study is not clearly exempted from review. All School of Information doctoral students should read the Office’s feature on “Human Subjects” and consult their “User Guide.” Training in human subjects and research compliance is also provided, as are forms and templates.
See http://www.utexas.edu/research/rsc/.
Graduate and International Admissions Center: http://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/
Graduate Studies, Office of: http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/
Bursar (Cashier's Office), Office of Accounting:
http://www.utexas.edu/business/accounting/services/
Center for Teaching and Learning: http://ctl.utexas.edu/
Rick Cherwitz's site: https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/disslist.html
UT Dissertation Advice: http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/etd/questions.html
How to write a literature review:http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/literature-reviews/
How to write a dissertation http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.dissertation.html
Dissertation Advice: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/dissertations/
Alternative Printing / Publishing Avenues for your Dissertation: http://www.lulu.com/
Ph.D. Handbooks
PhD Student Handbook (Ver. Fall 2017) - Students admitted Fall 2017 or Fall 2018
PhD Student Handbook (Ver. Fall 2016) - Students admitted Fall 2016
PhD Student Handbook (Ver. Fall 2009) - Students admitted prior to Fall 2012
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Peter Newman
Professor of Sustainability
Company / Institute
Track 1: LIMITLESS CITIES and urban futures: planning for scale
Peter Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He has written 20 books and over 340 papers on sustainable cities including Cities and Automobile Dependence in 1989 which has been called one of the most influential books in urban planning. His book on Green Urbanism in Asia in 2013 was based on his teaching in the National University of Singapore with Masters students from across Asia. In 2014 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contributions to urban design and sustainable transport. Peter has worked in local government as an elected councilor, in state government as an advisor to three Premiers and in the Australian Government on the Board of Infrastructure Australia and the Prime Minister’s Cities Reference Group. He is a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC on Transport and his latest book is Resilient Cities: Overcoming Fossil Fuel Dependence. He is Editor-in-Chief of Sustainable Earth, a new Nature journal and in 2018 was made WA Scientist of the Year.
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Temporary Resident Visas
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Quebec Temporary Foreign Workers
The United Kingdom (UK) is one of the most attractive places in the world to live and do business. It is renowned for having a stable democratic government and being home to some of the best educational institutions in the world.
Being granted residency or citizenship in the UK offers many advantages:
A diverse and multicultural society represented by large cultural and ethnic communities;
A superior standard of education, a broad network of state and private schools, and more than 150 universities and higher education institutions;
One of the best free medical care services in the world;
A member of the G8;
A key member of the EU, which means greater business opportunities throughout Europe;
An unrivalled financial business center (London);
An attractive tax regime for high net worth investors classed as “UK resident, non-domicile”;
The travel mobility and security of a UK passport.
Applicants must invest no less than 100% of the specified investment amount of their capital in the UK by way of UK government bonds, share capital or loan capital in active and trading UK registered companies.
The higher the investment (and therefore the net personal assets required), the faster the applicant will obtain their stay for settlement (ILR).
Full investment: £2 million
Stay for settlement (ILR): 5 years
Full investment: £10 million
Citizenship Requirements
If you have lived in the UK for five or more years, you are eligible to apply for UK citizenship as long as you meet the following residency requirements:
You have been absent from the country for no more than 90 days (three months) in the 12 months preceding the application. The total number of days spent outside of the UK for the entire five-year qualifying period should not exceed 450 days (i.e. three months of every year, or 75 percent of your time);
You are of good moral character and are not in breach of any immigration laws;
You can demonstrate a good knowledge of UK life and culture, and a basic level of English or Welsh, or Scottish Gaelic languages.
If you would like us to perform a free assessment to determine if you qualify, please click here.
If you would like to schedule a consultation, or ask us a question, please click here.
"United Kingdom" News
Toronto Tech Firms Hiring more International Workers
More international workers are being hired by technology companies in the Toronto region thanks to a fast-track work visa program introduced by Canada’s government last year, a new study reports. Of the 53 high-growth tech companies who responded to the MaRS Discovery District survey, 45% reported hiring international candidates in 2017 and 53 percent experienced a jump in international applications in 2017 over 2016.
Read more ... 109
Canada attracts more international students than United Kingdom
Every year more international students are coming to Canada to study than to the United Kingdom (UK). Tighter immigration rules in the UK could be named as one of the main reasons why the country has now been overtaken by Canada in the competition for these students.
U.S. and Canadian Immigration Policies: A Comparison
North America immigration policies are constantly changing. Canada and the United States used to select migrants from the British and European countries. Now both Canadian and U.S. immigration policies have changed significantly. Immigration issues are currently more highlighted in both countries these days. Canada is in election mode, with many new Canadians expected to vote for the first time.
Read more ... 71
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in Philosophy & Religion, Science & Technology, Trending
10 Amazing Life Lessons You Can Learn From Albert Einstein
by The Power of Ideas April 21, 2017, 11:07 am
Everyone is familiar with the work of Albert Einstein, and he has long been regarded as one of the greatest scientists in recorded history.
While his ground-breaking scientific discoveries helped to redefine our understanding of the natural world, his contributions to society go far beyond his theories of relativity. More than 60 years after his death, Einstein’s unique perspectives continue to inspire generations of people to open their mind to the possibilities of the universe.
These 10 life lessons from Albert Einstein highlight how his philosophical ideals can change your life for the better, starting today. After reading these lessons, check out our article about his wife, Elsa Einstein.
1. We are all Equal
“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”
In the grand scheme of the universe, we are all one. By respecting others, we respect ourselves.
2. There is Great Value in the Wonder of a Child
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
By looking at the world through a child’s eyes, we can rediscover the spark of our own imagination.
3. Failure is a Necessary Part of Success
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
Some of the greatest discoveries in history were a result of mistakes. Never give up.
4. Curiosity is the Key to Innovation
“The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
Curiosity is the driving force behind innovation and discovery. Never be afraid to question the world around you.
5. Your Thoughts Create Your Reality
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Thoughts are powerful, and what we choose to focus on manifests the reality we live in.
6. Don’t be Afraid to Stand out from the Crowd
“What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.”
You have a unique voice to share with the world. Don’t let the beliefs of others hold you back from your true potential.
7. Violence is Never the Answer
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
We will never know peace until we learn to set down our weapons, both in the world and in our own lives.
8. Embrace the Moments of Solitude
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
By finding solitude in the company of yourself, you will reconnect to the creativity within your own mind.
READ THIS: Eduard Einstein: The tragic life of Albert Einstein’s forgotten son
9. Genius is Only a Matter of Perspective
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Our differences make us who we are, and by embracing our unique nature we can begin to release the judgements that separate our world.
10. Live in the Here and Now
“I never worry about the future. It comes soon enough.”
All we have is this moment in time. There is no peace in remaining trapped in the past or worrying about what is to come in the future.
Originally published on Hack Spirit.
12 of History’s Greatest Philosophers Reveal the Secret to Happiness
25 profound Zen Buddhism quotes on letting go and experiencing true freedom and happiness
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A Studio Ghibli theme park is in the works
Published Apr 25, 2018 07:31pm
The fantasy world of renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki will come to life as a theme park, set to open in Japan in 2022
Miyazaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Japan's premier animation studio
The fantasy world of Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki will come to life as a theme park set to open in central Japan in 2022, the regional government said Wednesday.
Miyazaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Japan's premier animation studio, and renowned internationally for works including Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Studio Ghibli has released a basic concept for the vast park to be built by 2022 near Nagoya in Japan's Aichi region.
It will feature rides and forest trails based on the master animator's popular fantasy films, including My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Howl's Moving Castle, according to the Aichi government.
The park will also be dotted with the European-themed brick towers that appear frequently in Miyazaki's work, as well as giant installations of spider- and boar-shaped spirits in imaginary landscapes that evoke Japan's mythical and idyllic past.
The park will be built at the Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park in Nagakute city, the local government said.
Its construction cost and other details were yet to be decided, an Aichi official told AFP.
Miyazaki is among the world's most acclaimed animators, with huge followings in Japan and abroad.
Spirited Away won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2003, the first Japanese film to do so, and also scooped the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, among other major gongs.
Studio Ghibli already operates the hugely-popular Ghibli Museum on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Tickets for the museum only go on sale at the beginning of each month and regularly sell out within hours.
Studio Ghibli co-founder, director Isao Takahata dies at 82
Here's the trailer for The Glassworker, Pakistan's first hand-drawn anime film
I want to show the west we can make animation as well as them, says Usman Riaz
XOXO, Gossip Girl is officially getting a spin-off
Game of Thrones sets record with 32 Emmy nominations
After the World cup final, here is a Kane Williamson appreciation post
These Pakistani celebs are giving us some major travel inspiration on Instagram
Mahira Khan has to choose between love and fame in Superstar's trailer
Zahid Ahmed is playing an ex-air force pilot smitten by Sanam Jung in Main Na Janoo
Not good for the industry to release all the films on Eid, says Shaan Shahid
Sheheryar Munawar gets the crowd dancing in latest Parey Hut Love song
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AMERICA’S GOT TALENT: Season 7 EXCLUSIVE, First Day Sneak-Peek!
Posted on April 22 2012 by Editor
EXCLUSIVE! Set Report! Spoiler Alert! The “largest talent show on earth” is back and entering into it’s seven season on NBC. This time, the show is back with a new appeal by adding sock-radio host […]
EXCLUSIVE! Set Report! Spoiler Alert!
The “largest talent show on earth” is back and entering into it’s seven season on NBC. This time, the show is back with a new appeal by adding sock-radio host Howard Stern to the judging panel who joins Howie Mandel, in his third season of judging, and Sharon Osbourne in her sixth season on the show.
Howard Stern (L) replaces Piers Morgan as new judge.
HOLLYWOOD JUNKET was on set on the first day Howard Stern joined the cast in downtown Los Angeles at the Orpheum Theater where the live auditions were held. Sharon said of returning to the show on her first day back, “It’s very overwhelming. Seven is a lucky number. We are in season seven”. Stern commented on his first day by stating “I was honored when they asked me to be here. I’ve been fired by NBC many times!” This day broke Stern-in as a new judge and was a day that showed-off a lot of child contestants.
The first act was a 110 marching band that performed “Let’s Dance” by Lady Gaga. “I don’t think you could go on as $1 million act”, said Stern. Stern was less then thrilled by the second act as well which was “spot” with Park Rangers. “I think it’s a colossal waste of time” he said.
The third act was a male dancer and left Mandel saying, “You are a real good dancer”. Then proceeded to elaborate. “After watching the show six years and there’s more that I haven’t seen before. You have to be different”.
A young boy named Eric Garcia was the fourth act of the day as he displayed his karate skills. Stern’s response was, “I tried Karate several times and I hurt my groin with Steven Seagal. Now he can’t lift his leg. You could kick Steven Seagal’s butt”. The fifth audition was followed by a little girl who sang an Adele song.
An unexpected surprise came in the sixth audition when a Howard Stern look-alike stepped out onto the stage. Mandel said, “You look like Howard Stern like 20 years ago!” Stern was not impressed as he stated “It’s not enough to look like me. You have to say something too”. This Stern look alike was sent packing and left with no love from the judges.
Another young child performed in front of the judges with a popping routine. Stern responded to her act with “It’s still early.” Mandel said, “He doesn’t think you’re ready”. The contestant stated, “My Dad tries to practice with me, but I don’t understand what he’s trying to do”. The judges overall liked the girl. Sharon was the first to send her to Vegas. Stern had said that “It’s not really about being on TV, selling tickets,” and that she’ll be ready when she’s ten, then followed it with “I’m going to have to say a gentle no”. Mandel said “yes”. Then Stern said he’d give her one more chance just before sending her to Vegas.
Stay tuned for our second day on the set in Los Angeles report coming-up! “America’s Got Talent” premieres May 14th on NBC.
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Careers at Homebase
We are changing the future of local business. Join us.
We all have our favorite small coffee shop, or cafe we go to on the weekends, or bookstore full of shelf after shelf of must reads. It’s the local businesses that bring life to our neighborhoods and make our own lives a little bit easier. At Homebase, we’re working to make life a little bit easier in return, for the employees, managers, and owners of these local businesses.
The paperwork and administration of hourly work is an unnecessary burden, especially given advances in technology. It’s causing headaches and uncertainty for millions of hard-working people, and it’s costing local business owners over a billion hours of wasted time every year.
We believe in these entrepreneurs, and we believe in the people who work in these businesses. We are on a mission to eliminate this paper so that owners, managers, and employees can focus on the things they love. And we’re already helping over 100,000 businesses.
At Homebase, you will join a hardworking, smart, energetic team committed to changing the lives of hourly workers, which make up one-third of the US economy. You’ll become part of a team that brings local business expertise from Intuit, Square, OpenTable, Yelp, and First Data. Based in San Francisco and Houston, Homebase is backed by leading venture investors Baseline Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and Khosla Ventures, who believe in transforming hourly work the way we do.
We’d love for you to join our fast-growing team. We can’t wait to meet you.
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(180211) -- GAZA, Feb. 11, 2018 (Xinhua) -- A Palestinian newborn baby is seen inside a hospital in Gaza City, on Feb. 11, 2018. The test-tube baby, named Mujahid, has been born with the smuggled sperm of his father who has been sentenced for seven years in Israeli jail. Many Palestinian women with husbands serving long terms in Israeli jails have resorted to sneaking sperm out and getting pregnant. (Xinhua/Wissam Nassar) - Wissam Nassar -//CHINENOUVELLE_chinenouvelle0227/Credit:CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/1802120635 (Newscom TagID: sfphotosthree244078.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]
May 2019 Media Watch – JVP Health Advisory Council
Rachel 05 July 2019 From our Staff and Members/Health Advisory Council/Media Watch Newsletter
Welcome to the monthly Health and Human Rights Media Watch. Members of the Health Advisory Council monitor relevant organizations and websites and compile a list of important news and issues which are summarized here. These newsletters will be posted on our website and archived as a resource. If you wish to join this effort, contact contact.alicerothchild@gmail.com. Please feel free to share the newsletter with your colleagues and communities and encourage them to join the JVP Health Advisory Council. Thanks to all who have contributed!
Why the Gaza protests won’t stop.
A Human Rights Watch (HRW) Research Assistant recounts her experiences interviewing participants of the past year’s Great March of Return. Over the past year, HRW staff investigated many of the cases of Gaza protesters identified by the UN Commission of Inquiry who were killed or injured by the IDF. HRW found that the IDF “repeatedly fired on protesters who posed no imminent threat to life … (which) contravene international human rights law standards, acts that may amount to war crimes…”
Echoes of Sharpeville Massacre in the Gaza March of Return
Samer Badawi writes about the echoes of Apartheid-era South Africa’s Sharpeville Massacre in the Gazan March of Return, as well as it being a cautionary tale for Palestinians. In the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, South African police forces opened fire on a crowd of 5,000 to 7,000 unarmed people who were protesting pass laws. 250 people were shot, many in the back while fleeing; 69 of them were killed, including 10 children. It was a turning point in the struggle against Apartheid, but it would take another 34 years before democracy finally came to South Africa. Despite it being the site of the signing of South Africa’s democratic constitution, today the town of Sharpeville itself is often forgotten, as is the neglected memorial to those massacred.
March gives people a reason to live, but it is complicated, dead and wounded everywhere.
Hasan al-Kurd, one of the organizers of last year’s Great March of Return in Gaza, says in an interview with +972 that the protests gave people in Gaza a reason to live. A year later, he reflects on the shocking rate of protest-related injuries one sees everywhere in Gaza, how Hamas took over the nonviolent effort, and what he would do differently today.
The Great March and the trauma for children.
‘A void no one can fill’: Gaza’s children face trauma of losing friends, family in protests
Israeli forces have killed some 40 children in the Great March of Return – another psychological scar for a generation of Palestinians living under siege. According to the commission, another 1,642 children have been injured by live ammunition, shrapnel, rubber-coated steel bullets and direct tear gas canister hits.
The price of heavy metal contamination from Israeli weaponry in Gaza.
Heavy metal contamination from weaponry (such as white phosphorus, mercury, selenium, etc) was found in wounds and creates lasting contamination of the environment and the population in Gaza. This results in an increase in birth defects from 39.5/1000 in 2006 to 63/1000 in 2010 and increase in preterm and low birth weight babies and perinatal deaths. Surveillance of reproductive health is the best tool to detect risk of exposure to teratogens (and potentially carcinogen) environmental contamination by heavy metals.
Research by Paola Manduca
Patient’s husband arrested at Erez Crossing after receiving cancer treatment in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the Israeli authorities stationed at Beit Hanoun “Erez” Crossing for arresting a patient’s companion, from the Gaza Strip, while returning to the Gaza Strip. The patient was with his wife and was being treated for cancer at al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem. This is considered a violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It also constitutes a form of inhuman and degrading punishment.
Qatar opens hospital in Gaza.
Qatar opened the first prosthetic hospital, Hamad Hospital, and a disability rehabilitation center in the Gaza Strip, overcoming obstacles that delayed the much-needed project in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Gaza children’s mental health rapidly deteriorating.
A study conducted by the Norwegian Refugee Council found that 68 percent of schoolchildren in areas close to the Israeli perimeter fence have clear indications of psychosocial distress.
Medic shot by Israeli forces in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem.
Israeli forces shot and killed 17-year-old Sajed Mizher, a volunteer first responder with Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) while he was on duty in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank on March 27, 2019 and clearly identifiable by his orange vest.
Defense of Children International Palestine
Al Haq
Four young men shot in West Bank.
B’Tselem reported on 4 young men who were shot to death without justification in March and April (“Expendable Lives,” 17 April 2019) by the Israeli forces. Muhammad Shahin, 23, was watching clashes between stone-throwers and security forces from a distance in the town of Salfit on 12 March 2019 and was shot and killed. Ahmad Manasrah, 22, was helping a family whose car got stuck near the Nashash/Efrat North checkpoint on 20 March 2019; he was shot and killed, and several members of the family who got out to check the car were also shot. Volunteer paramedic Sajed Muzhar, 17, was killed on 27 March 2019 while wearing a medical crew vest as he was trying to help a wounded man at the a-Duheisheh Refugee Camp. Muhammad Dar ‘Udwan, 24, was shot from behind on 2 April 2019 in Kafr ‘Aqab while fleeing Israeli security forces.
New medical school in the Jewish settlement of Ariel.
The Sheldon Adelson-funded school at Ariel University in the Jewish settlement of Ariel plans to allocate 70 positions as part of a greater national effort to increase the number of medical students in Israel.
OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
UNRWA announces maintenance programs in schools and health centers.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced a large program of maintenance projects to ensure quality of construction and accessibility of 268 schools and health centers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, as well as Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
Listen to recordings from the Palestinian Childhoods: Human Rights, Mental Health and Resistance conference.
The conference addresses the mental health of children and families in the OPT and explores the psychological and relational aspects of oppression, denial of human rights, the experience of arrest and imprisonment, as well as resistance. The conference is a joint initiative between CREHE (Centre for Researching and Embedding Human Rights), Birkbeck, University of London, and the UK/Palestine Mental Health Network, sponsored by the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and supported by Friends of Birzeit University.
Listen to recordings of presentations:
the opening address by Victoria Brittain;
the two keynote presentations by Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Dr. Samah Jabr, and a response from Prof. Jacqueline Rose;
two panel discussions;
the workshop led by Dr. Marwan Diab
Backdoor Broadcasting Company
US AID laying off most of its Palestinian staff in the West Bank and Gaza.
Under orders from the Trump administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development is preparing to lay off most of its Palestinian aid workers in its West Bank and Gaza mission. Last year, the Trump administration cut half a billion dollars in Palestinian aid, including money to care for Palestinian cancer patients and food to address a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Leading member of African National Congress reflects on similarities between the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and todays BDS struggle in Palestine.
In this editorial in The Guardian (UK), Ronnie Kasrils, a leading member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era and a former South African government minister, reports on the similarities between the global movement against South African apartheid and the current-day BDS movement for Palestinian rights. This includes his being banned me for life from attending meetings or publishing by South Africa’s apartheid government, and now a public meeting in Vienna at which he was scheduled to speak in support of Palestinian freedom, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, was cancelled by the museum hosting the event under pressure from Vienna’s city council, which opposes BDS.
Prisoners smuggle sperm for IVF as a form of resistance.
Palestinian families continue a unique form of resistance by smuggling sperm out of prison and utilizing in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive children; 49 Palestinian prisoners have thus managed to father children from Israeli prisons.
Hunger striking prisoners reach an agreement.
After 8 days on hunger strike, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons reached an agreement improving some of their conditions, though 6 Palestinian administrative detainees continued a weeks-long hunger strike.
Addameer
In Israel, Human Rights Watch Official’s Deportation Reinstated.
An Israeli court in April upheld government’s order to deport Omar Shakir, a US citizen and the HRW Israel and Palestine director. The court found that HRW’s research and advocacy calling for businesses to stop enabling abuses in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank constitutes a call for boycott. This is the first time the government has relied on a 2017 amendment to the Law of Entry to deport someone who is already lawfully present in the country.
The court that describes as “boycott-promoting activities” HRW’s research on the activities of businesses, including the global tourism companies Airbnb and Booking.com, and its recommendation that they cease operating in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The contradictions between “peace plans,” the worsening occupation, and the myth of democracy in Israel. Even in the New York Times.
In an op-ed originally published in The New York Times (“Democracy, Israeli Style: An election, a peace plan and an endless occupation,” 7 April 2019), B’Tselem Executive Director Hagai El-Ad writes that peace plans dating all the way back to the Nixon administration, as well as those that followed, made many promises to eliminate the occupation. Those plans are long forgotten, and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has only deepened, expanded, and evolved. Israel’s real feat has been achieving all of this with impunity from the rest of the world, while still holding on to its public relations label as a “vibrant democracy”. The April 9th election is no a celebration of democracy but a painful reminder of Israel’s deeply undemocratic reality.
Segregated Israeli hospitals.
Three Israeli hospitals have admitted for the first time that they segregate Jewish and Arab women giving birth, at the women’s request.
The ongoing crisis for Sudanese asylum seekers, life in limbo.
Just one Sudanese asylum-seeker has been given refugee status by Israel, which affords certain rights, such as work permits and housing assistance. Two-hundred more hold humanitarian visas, which allows them to work.
The rest are on temporary visas that need to be continually renewed and keep refugees from bedding in roots.
AOC Defends Aid Cut to Israel, Says Caging Kids Unacceptable
New York Congressional Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) indicated her support of Minnesota Congressional Representative Betty McCollum’s bill that cut U.S. military and economic aid from being used by Israel to imprison Palestinian minors. She defended her position stating “Simply put: I don’t believe in caging kids. Pretty straightforward value. I don’t care if it’s American kids, Mexican kids, or Palestinian kids. I vote against funding it on the US border, too. It would be inconsistent with my values to fund it anywhere.”
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Melvins’ documentary “The Colossus of Destiny” Kickstarter
The filmmakers of the forthcoming Melvins’ documentary, “The Colossus of Destiny – A Melvins Tale,” have launched a Kickstarter campaign featuring artwork donated by Haze XXL, Brian Walsby, Arik Roper, Skinner and Mackie Osborne (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/26674096/the-colossus-of-destiny-a-melvins-tale).
The film, which is currently under production with an anticipated early 2016 release, is the creation of Bob Hannam and Ryan Sutherby. The pair, who met through a mutual affection for the Melvins, began work on the officially authorized documentary in late 2014.
“We kept asking ourselves why no one had ever made a film about the Melvins,” explained Hannam. “What an incredible story and twisted tale both Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover have taken. There aren’t many bands who can say they’ve influenced some of the most popular artists of our generation and done it in every instance according to their own rules, still as important, if not more so, some 32 years after forming.”
“The Colossus of Destiny – A Melvins Tale” follows the band’s journey, from the backwards waters of the Chehalis River in Washington, through the Golden Gate of Northern California and finally, into Los Angeles where Osborne and Crover both reside. The film features lengthy interviews with Osborne and Crover as well as
present and ex band members, collaborators and many other musicians from bands
such as Mudhoney, The Jesus Lizard, Soundgarden, Butthole Surfers, Sleep, Babes In
Toyland, Neurosis and Redd Kross to name but a few.
www.melvinsmovie.com
www.facebook.com/melvinstale
Written by JuiceMagazineMarch 25, 2015Submit Comment
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KRSN AM 1490 is Crystal Radio Award Finalist
on May 2, 2012 - 2:39pm
KRSN Morning Show Co-host Nancy Coombs, left, with Station Co-owners David and Gillian Sutton. Photo by Carol A. Clark/ladailypost.com
KRSN News:
KRSN AM 1490 station owners David and Gillian Sutton traveled to Las Vegas, Nev., to attend the National Association of Broadcasting Convention April 15-17.
At the beginning of March, they learned they were finalists for the prestigious Crystal Radio Award.
Since 1987, the NAB Crystal Radio Awards have recognized radio stations for their outstanding year-round commitment to community service.
Crystal Radio Award finalists were chosen by a panel of judges representing broadcasting, community service organizations and public relations firms.
On April 17, the Suttons attended the Crystal Radio Award Luncheon to learn whether KRSN would be recognized as a top 10 radio station in the country.
Unfortunately, they were not but here is why they made the finals"
KRSN has been Los Alamos’ radio station for 67 years.
KRSN serves a community of 17,000 and residents in Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe counties.
KRSN is the only radio station that broadcasts local news, weather and high school sports specifically for Los Alamos.
The KRSN staff includes David and Gillian Sutton, Nancy Combs, Alexis Palmaffy, Joe Pestovich, sportscasters Gene Mortensen and Rick Picard and volunteers, all dedicated to keeping the community informed and entertained.
"We pride ourselves in serving the community’s interests," Gillian said.
KRSN conducted more than 500 public service interviews in 2011, providing information on issues and actions happening around the community.
As the Las Conchas Fire - New Mexico’s largest wildfire in history - burned around Los Alamos causing a week-long full town evacuation, KRSN remained in town to broadcast information on the fire's status and keep the public informed of new developments.
KRSN’s signature community service event is the annual Empty Bowls Project.
In 2011, KRSN raised more than $12,000 for Self Help Inc.
"We've donated over 6,600 Public Service Announcements with a value of over $74,000," David said. "Our sports casting included 74 games of eight varsity sports. We are a dedicated small market radio station serving Los Alamos."
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Underoath's Aaron Gillespie on exit from band: 'I was mentally sick'
Wednesday, September 02, 2015 11:00 AM PT
With their reunion tour now set to commence in March 2016, Underoath participated in the latest episode of the BadChristian podcast. Notably, Gillespie opened up about his sudden departure from the band in 2010:
"I was going through a lot of weird emotional shit. I needed to be medicated; I had this crazy anxiety. It's so weird to talk about now in my 30s, but I always thought something was wrong with me. So I just spent all of my time on tour with Underoath kinda' thinking I was dying or was sick, and it sounds funny to say, but I really made that a polarizing thing in my life. Like, 'These guys were out to get me and they think I'm an asshole,' and I was an asshole, to be frank. Looking back on it now, it's so childish and immaterial to what was happening when they were trying to help me all along. I was sick, like, mentally sick, and I know that sounds way dramatized, I have never really talked about this before."
Gillespie subsequently described the events that led up to his exit following a show in Milan, Italy:
"I just thought I was sick. I don't even remember what the hell it was; some bullshit disease that I dreamed up. I had just kept missing soundchecks and I would take a weird taxi to some strange-ass hospital. Tim [McTague, guitar] sat me down with everyone else and said, 'Dude, this is a selfish action.' I don't really remember the logistics of the conversation, or what exactly was said, but the reality of it was true. You know people always have that cheesy saying, 'The truth hurts,' and I was like, 'Shit, I'm pissed now.' Then I somehow rationalized in my brain that I was actually sick and actually had to leave, and I was like, 'Well, screw it, I'm done.' It was a really knee-jerk reaction for me. I guess I've never really given a correct answer, but the truth is that I was just mentally stupid. When I go back and think about it, it's just so strange."
McTague later explained that Gillespie wasn't the only source of issues:
"I remember the last conversation I had with Aaron as a member of Underoath, and it was so brutal. Looking back, it's all water under the bridge, but some of the things that were said were just… no one was acting right. And it was a lot easier to say the guy who has the actual 'problem' is the cause of all this, y'know?"
You can listen to the entire podcast here.
[via Alternative Press]
Related: Underoath, Aaron Gillespie
• Underoath announces reunion show
• Underoath recruits ex-Norma Jean drummer
• Underoath drummer/singer leaves band
• Korn, Alice In Chains, Underoath tour
• Underoath, Asking Alexandria to tour with Breaking Benjamin
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Retraumatization: The Increased Risk of HIV Transmission among Abuse and Assault Victims
While the transmission of HIV and the causes of HIV-related death are actually more complicated—and even more nuanced—than public discussion would let on, a few presumptions about it remain fairly accurate.
For women who are marginalized in their communities, who are victims of abuse or assault, and who are economically or socially dependent on a spouse, the risk of them contracting HIV or dying from multiple complications from AIDS is simply greater than that of women fortunate enough to not be subjected to these circumstances. Take these scenarios:
The power dynamic in an abusive relationship may prohibit women from being able to protect herself from a partner who refuses to wear a condom
Women in poverty and those who need to rely on a partner for financial support may have greater risk of comorbid infections than women of economic independence. They are less likely to have the health insurance and relationship with a healthcare provider that would support HIV testing and provide the essential—and expensive—HIV medications to ensure a healthy life and lower the risk of co-morbid infections
People without social support, living in fear of what an HIV-positive diagnosis means, or those who have reason to fear stigma around personal behavior when seeking treatment are less likely to know where to access treatment or seek it out because of that fear, stigma and lack of support
Common sense would seem to support these statements. But until recently, the pathways of infection were not always clear, and while the conclusions above seemed certainly reasonable, specific data to support them had been difficult to collect. Two recent studies led by a UCSF-researcher have changed that. One synthesized what is known about PTSD and exposure to trauma among HIV-positive women, and the other explored the root of this relationship.
The results were remarkable. HIV-positive women had between two and six times the rates of childhood and adult physical and sexual abuse, and PTSD. The snapshot of risk behaviors among HIV-positive women was sobering:
Sample size Number (%) of participants with each characteristic
Any sexual activity in the past 6 months 113 61 (54.0%)
With a main partnerMedian number of main partners (if any) 61 43 (70.5%)1 (range 1–2)
With casual partnersMedian number of casual partners (if any)a 61 23 (37.7%)1 (range 1–25)
Sex with any HIV negative or unknown serostatus partners (if sexually active) in the last 6 months 61 51 (83.6%)
Disclosure of HIV status less than all of the time with these partners 51 29 (56.9%)
Using condoms less than all of the time with these partners 51 31 (60.8%)
Detectable viral load 51 30 (58.8%)
Disclosure of HIV status less than all of the time, and using condoms less than all of the time, and a detectable viral load 51 16 (31.4%)
Substance use (any, recent)
Cigarettes 110 71 (64.5%)
Alcohol 111 50 (45.0%)
Marijuana 111 39 (35.1%)
Crack/cocaine, heroin, and/or methamphetamines 111 45 (40.5%)
IDUb 112 11 (9.8%)
IDU who share needles 11 5 (45.5%)
IDU who have a detectable viral load 11 6 (54.5%)
aOne participant had a very high number of sexual partners (N = 250) and was excluded from the analysis; b IDU injection drug use; ©2012 Machtinger, et al. (retrieved December 16, 2012.)
There were striking findings in terms of both HIV treatment failure and the impact of the above risk behavior in these women, bringing us the first real data hoping to explain this relationship. Those who suffered from recent trauma had more than four times the odds of anti-retroviral (ART) failure while on treatment than HIV-positive non-victims—and this was seemingly not due to self-reported poor adherence to the medication. One potential explanation offered by the study authors is that abuse and trauma interfere with an individual’s ability to stay on a consistent medication schedule, which is essential for control of the virus. Other studies have confirmed that abuse manifest as control, in which a male partner prevents his HIV-positive female partner from accessing services at a clinic out of fear that the stigma of HIV would be attached to him.
HIV-positive victims of recent trauma also all reported experiencing what the study calls “coerced sex,” and have over three times the odds of un-traumatized women of having sex with HIV-negative or status-unknown individuals. They had greater than four times the odds of inconsistent condom use, potentially exposing those casual partners to the virus. While high-risk sex behavior is always a factor in HIV-transmission, HIV-positive individuals who adhere consistently to HIV treatments are significantly less likely to infect HIV-negative partners during sex. So the lack of treatment adherence among traumatized HIV-positive women combined with the risky sex behavior is a great concern.
Interestingly, these figures were only significant among women who experienced recent trauma, indicating that the ongoing—not merely one occurrence—circumstances of abuse are the key to the relationship between HIV-infection and HIV-related illness and death. This can actually be seen as a snapshot of hope—if we are able to offer abuse, assault, and PTSD victims the appropriate support to heal from the experiences, we may be able to weaken the HIV/trauma relationship.
These studies draw a clear line between victims of assault and trauma and both the spread of HIV within their communities and the increased risk of HIV-related illness and death. But interestingly, the risk goes much deeper than these socioeconomic circumstances. The conversation around HIV transmission is generally split into one of two categories: social and behavioral—risky activity, injection drug use, the prejudicial judgment of sex workers; and medical and clinical—how the virus infiltrates the immune system, takes over cells, and how it is and isn’t suppressed with antiretroviral medications. What isn’t usually discussed is the possible combination of these two categories and how together they create a perfect storm for potential infection.
Recent studies have shown that those individuals suffering from PTSD had significantly higher rates of cytomegalovirus (CMV) in their body. A virus that is found in between 50%-80% of adults in the United States, CMV remains largely undetected—latent, suppressed, unproblematic—in healthy individuals. It’s also seen as a marker of immune health and function, and of the body’s ability to control potential infections. Given that 30% of American women with HIV/AIDS have PTSD (five times the national average), the potential relationship between their HIV-status and even further compromised immune function could lead to a myriad of comorbid infections and premature death. Other research has also shown that additional biological mechanisms may prevent ART-treatment from being as effective as possible, including high cortisol (stress hormone) levels. Not only do these victims have to fight against abuse and assault, they have been left without the essential social support to decrease risky behaviors that may expose others to the virus, and their own bodies are in revolt.
Collecting this kind of information is difficult. It requires consistent and positive communication between women and providers, unobstructed access to medical care and uninterrupted ART treatment, and of course, in this example, most importantly—removal from an abusive environment.
The combination of immunosuppression due to PTSD, the detectable rates of HIV in traumatized women whose viral loads are not suppressed by consistent anti-retroviral treatments, and the concurrent risk behaviors of abused HIV-positive women, all contribute to higher rates of HIV-infection in communities, as well as the potential for co-morbid infections and HIV-related death. Until these women are able to find the essential social and community support, free from abuse and trauma, and until their access to care and preventative measures are fully realized, the relationship between trauma and HIV will only deepen.
Author Larkin CallaghanPosted on December 17, 2012 December 12, 2017 Categories Epidemiology and Population Health, Feminism, Sexism, and Gender Issues, Health Behavior and Health Education, Mental Health, Public Health, Rape and Sexual Assault, Reproductive and Sexual Health, Women's HealthTags abuse, domestic violence, health behaviors, HIV/AIDS, IPV, prevention, PTSD, publiv health, risk behavior, traumaLeave a comment on Retraumatization: The Increased Risk of HIV Transmission among Abuse and Assault Victims
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Tag: violence against women
The DSK Decision and the Definition of Consent
I have held off writing about the DSK case being tossed out because honestly, I can’t really bear it. Plenty of other news sources and bloggers have reported on the reasons why I feel this is a catastrophic blow to victims of sexual assault, and reiterating it would likely only upset me and readers even more. However, a news story reported in my hometown paper, The Chronicle, got me thinking about the definitions of consent and what it means to be a person worthy of a trial, and I thought I’d tie these two instances together.
According to the DSK decision, if one has lied in the past they are considered unworthy of a trial in the eyes of the DA – whose goal seems to be focused solely on winning as opposed to determining if in this particular instance one is lying. Let’s look at the specific lies in question – namely, the reason behind Diallo’s asylum in the United States and her recounts of the story.
First, the defense is claiming that since she allegedly lied on her asylum application about being gang raped in her home country, she cannot be trusted in this accusation of DSK. Had she lied? Yes, she admitted to that. Does that matter in this specific case of DSK assaulting her in the hotel room when a forensic examination, including a medical exam, proved to be consistent with her story? No. When she lied on her asylum application – as many, many people do (an interesting and poignant piece in the New Yorker recently profiled this in a case example) – she did so to escape a country in which she felt constantly at risk and in danger and wanted to protect her daughter from the same fate. Should the fact that many people do this – and lie about repeated gang rapes in particular – immediately excuse the lie? No. But it does put it in the context of a reality that should not go unexamined. While lying in previous instances can make a case harder to win, and isn’t something I’m championing or condoning, when you look at her reasons for a falsehood on her asylum application, it make no sense that she would then risk a job she was grateful and proud to have gotten as a hotel housekeeper, raising in her daughter in New York, by having what the defense claims was consensual sex in the middle of her cleaning duties.
In regards to the changing of her story, it is well known and understood by trauma experts that women who have experienced sexual assault (and not just sexual assault, but any traumatic event, for both genders) often recall the order of events differently and clarify them as time goes on, due to the effects of the shock, denial, and the coping mechanism of blocking out of painful incidents. This does not mean that the assault didn’t happen, particularly since this reaction has been seen and understood many times over by many other rape and assault victims.
What I also find interesting in these cries about credibility is how gendered they are. DSK has a notorious history in France of being too forward and sexually aggressive with women; in my mind this causes some credibility issues for him as well, as he claims in this instance it was only consensual. It also reminds me of the fact that one of the NYPD officers acquitted this summer had a history of sexually harassing women, unsubstantiated arrest of a woman and blocking the filing of a report of the woman whom he sexually harassed – yet this was not seen as hampering his credibility. Nor was the fact that he made false 911 calls that routed him back to the apartment of the East Village victim and denied ever sleeping with her and then promptly changed his story to one of doing so but using a condom and assuring it was consensual. If we’re saying Diallo has credibility issues, I’d say these two need to join her on that wagon.
In the San Francisco case, we are confronted with a similar – though not the same – situation; one of assessing the validity of the accuser based on previous actions or claims. A SF lawyer (who specializes in sexual harassment cases, interestingly) is accused of raping three women, ages 19 – 36, whom he met over Craigslist while searching for partners interested in dominant-submissive rough sex. Two of the women had consented to having sex with this man on previous occasions before filing specific incidents of assault and rape. The man’s attorney has used this as evidence that the women were consensual partners, interested in engaging in sex and agreeing to what the man proposed in his post.
It seems we need a reminder of the definition of consent.
It does not matter if a woman is a prostitute. It does not matter if a woman had sex with you consensually in the past. It does not matter if in an email a woman expressed interest in specific sexual roles, positions, and activity. What matters is if in the specific encounter at hand, both parties have expressed the desire to go forward, and that if one withdraws that consent at any point it is the responsibility of the other to stop. The women could have easily agreed over an email exchange to engage in dominant-submissive sex, arrived at the man’s home still agreeing to it, and agreed to it right up to the minute they were to begin. But if in that minute she decided she no longer wanted to do this or was hesitant and unsure and wanted to wait, and he went ahead anyway – then it becomes rape.
Rape and sexual assault cases are notoriously difficult to try. They are usually he said/she said situations, at best aided by forensic evidence. Each case is unique, each has elements that are often not introduced or examined until a trial begins – this exemplifies the importance of scrutiny and juries who devote days to understanding the nuances and details of cases that are not reported or perceived by the media.
Setting the precedent that previously engaging in sexual activity, lying, or expressing interest in sexual experimentation eliminates your chances for a fair trial regarding the specific assault case at hand pushes us into the realm of implausibility. It is also worth noting that despite outcries of false accusations, the most frequently repeated results of studies regarding false claims and filings of rape show that the real rate of these is between 2% at its lowest and 7% at its highest (American Prosecutors Research Institute). But the media sheds so much light on the false claims that people presume it is much higher. The vast majority of rape and sexual assault charges never see the spotlight – perhaps because they aren’t dangerous enough or don’t involve high-ranking political figures or people whom media isn’t able to coin as gold-diggers and attention mongers because of their social or socioeconomic status. The bottom line is that each story deserves to be closely and carefully examined, and not discarded because a DA thinks he can’t win the case. District Attorney Vance is quoted as saying “If we don’t believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot expect a jury to.” I would venture to say that given the outcry over his decision, many people would like to hear the full story (and who do in fact think that the issue of reasonable doubt is in question) from both sides, with all the available evidence and fleshed out arguments. The issue of the truth, and seeking it, should take the precedence over one’s doubt at a courtroom victory.
Author Larkin CallaghanPosted on August 26, 2011 August 27, 2011 Categories Feminism, Sexism, and Gender Issues, Media, Politics, ViolenceTags credibility, Diallo, DSK, feminism, media, politics, rape, sexism, sexual assault, trial, violence against women, women in mediaLeave a comment on The DSK Decision and the Definition of Consent
How Images and Ads Impact Self-Image and Human Development
I got a lot of traffic and messages about a piece I wrote regarding Duke Nukem. People in the gaming community condemned it for its lack of originality, how it strayed from the original premise of apparently ostensibly mocking the ’80s action-hero genre, and how it overall disappointed those who are used to more complex and engaging videos. Some replies also included people needing to “get over it” when discussing images of coerced sexual activity or the game’s encouragement of merging violent and sexually explicit content together (I don’t post comments that are condescending or don’t encourage dialogue), something I found…disturbing. My initial argument, however, did not change – that is, that the imagery and the actions the gamer supposes in this video are tragically abusive and in fact detrimental to both men and women.
Many gamers also respond that they know when they are playing a game, and that their non-virtual socializing is not impacted by the game’s content. This, along with the recent news that the American Medical Association finally condemned the use of photoshopping in advertising campaigns and photo shoots, got me thinking about what repeated exposure to images and actions actually does to our brain and with who and what we identify.
A well-known study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that repeated exposure to images and advertisements ultimately were processed in people the same way actual experiences were processed. That is, if you see or watch something enough times – in a video game, in a fashion magazine in which models are photoshopped to near obscurity, in a parent abusing your sibling – you begin to process it as though it was you yourself experiencing the act and identify with the “player” (model, game character) you are watching. You see enough pictures of a model like this:
Courtesy fashion-o-lic.com
And you begin to think you are supposed to align yourself with her, that this image is what is normal (the image on the right was criticized heavily in 2009 for being so drastically photoshopped). After so many exposures, you begin to mold yourself after her, to think that since this is how we project women for adoration in our culture, that you should begin appropriating yourself to match her image. Just like a gamer, after so many exposures, can begin to mold themselves after the image of the character they are impersonating in a game. And while they may not go out on a shooting spree, they are desensitized to the effects of that reality, just as they are desensitized to the effects of coerced sex in a game, which can lead to difficulty distinguishing that from a healthy sexual relationship.
As I have also discussed in previous posts, a foundational theory in behavioral science and education is the Social-Cognitive Theory, which has informed educators and psychologists for years in explaining that people learn by watching, and that even one observation of a behavior can influence perspective. It also importantly points out that while full on adoption of behaviors witnessed may not occur, the more we see, the more our attitudes and beliefs about them change. This can be good and bad. It can make us more accepting of others’ opinions and outlooks, and it can also desensitize and normalize the opinions and behaviors that are harmful.
We’re humans. We learn by watching, by then mimicking and imitating what we observe. It doesn’t happen all at once, which is why fashion moguls or game designers claim they have no real impact. Are girls entering periods of self-mandated starving as soon as they open this month’s Vogue? Are adolescent boys heading to the hills for a sawed off shotgun fight after the first round of Duke or stealing cars after playing the new Grand Theft Auto? No, of course not. But can it impact their sense of compassion, affect their interpersonal relationships? Can it make violence seem less threatening, less damaging, and less impacting than it is? Yes. Can that change the way people behave, from nuance to imitation? Sure. Even researchers who admit that it won’t necessarily turn children violent admit that’s likely true (and, interestingly, still disallow their children to play). Human development takes time – language acquisition, understanding of and the processing of visual messages, being able to comprehend meaning from a block of text – these are all cognitive functions that take years to develop and perfect, and their influence lies in the words and actions of children’s families, friends, teachers. Unfortunately, messages of gender have been largely commandeered by the media. And the repeated exposure, over years, to these specifics of models’ physical appearance has resulted in the erosion of self-confidence that many girls and women – and boys and men – experience as young children becoming adolescents. And the repeated exposure, over years, to the specifics of war, sexual violence, and the presentation of hyper-masculinity, can also result in the erosion of what kind of impact violence truly has, as they become desensitized, and what a healthy understanding of and relationship with the opposite sex is (as opposed to its portrayal in my Duke Nukem piece). As the study articulated, it’s about changing people over time, it’s about how perceptions and perspectives change when a new definition of the norm that is not contested or dissected – a Ralph Lauren model, a Duke Nukem – enters the picture. Women who suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia, while not blaming the fashion industry, have emphatically articulated that it certainly has had an impact as it normalized this destructive self-image and behavior.
I think it’s also relevant here to bring up the Supreme Court’s decision about a week ago to shoot down California’s attempt to ban the sale of violent video games to children. Timothy Egan, a Times columnist, had a great commentary on this, noting how ridiculous it seems for there to be a perpetual ban on nudity and sexually explicit images, but not on virtually dismembering a human or sexually assaulting a woman. It does seem…well, more than troubling, that a game in which a player can simulate murder and rape is protected by free speech but a bare breast is the height of vulgarity. (I found a great post from a female gamer about this kind of sexual violence in video games, and I agree with her assertion that sexual expression can in fact exist without it also involving violence and degradation.) I don’t think any of the representations of sexuality that I have seen in video games are appropriate for children because they overwhelmingly associate it with abuse and/or coercion (I’ve done a lot of viewing in the past couple days after my Duke Nukem post). To say that sexuality would have a more harmful impact than violence seems questionable, when representations of both are equally unhealthy.
It should also be said that I am far from someone who believes nudity and sexuality itself is vulgar. I celebrate and support healthy (and protected!) sexual expression in any way the individual consents and desires. I firmly believe that discussions of sex and sexuality should be brought up early on, so children can ask questions, be informed, protect themselves when they do engage in sex, and have an understanding of what a respectful, consensual sexual relationship is. I also believe that when these discussions in families don’t take place, and when sex is a taboo topic, that it is a disservice to these children, and that any confusion they have about sex or uncertainty about what a healthy sex life actually is will be magnified by the messages the media sends them. I’m an advocate of early onset, comprehensive sexual health and reproductive health education. Sex shouldn’t be confusing, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized. Sexual violence, however, and a misappropriation of the presentation of sexual relationships that are abusive, coercive, and violent, should be condemned.
This is also why a diversity of exposures is important. It’s important to not be inundated with the same message over and over again. Advertisers know that repeated exposure is key to getting people to buy what they want to sell. If you see an image of a Coke bottle once, it won’t register with much impact. If you see it every time your favorite TV show breaks for commercial, when you’re leafing through the pages of a magazine, when you’re driving down a freeway and it’s up on a billboard, when you’re listening to the radio and it breaks for the Coke jingle – it adds up, as do afternoons in front of a game console, as do hours reading “women’s” magazines and fashion spreads, as do episodes of spousal or child abuse, (which we know increases the likelihood of the child being in an abusive relationship him/herself and hampers healthy development – the others are logical extensions, to a lesser degree). We have to have enough positive images, positive games, positive and healthy discourse about relationships to not just equal the stream of negative imagery and messaging, but to overtake it. Positive, healthy messages, not abusive, harmful, violent messages, have to be in the majority. The norm. It’s nice that the docs finally said so.
Author Larkin CallaghanPosted on July 8, 2011 December 12, 2017 Categories Advertising, Child Development and Child Health, Feminism, Sexism, and Gender Issues, Media, Mental Health, Pop Culture, Public Health, ViolenceTags body image, child development, eating disorders, education, feminism, gender, human development, media, mental health, public health, sexism, sexuality, violence against women, women in media3 Comments on How Images and Ads Impact Self-Image and Human Development
Abortion Isn’t That Simple, Mr. Douthat
Ross Douthat, one of the NY Times conservative columnists whose pieces I occasionally force myself to read, wrote an article yesterday about sex-selective abortion. In short, he claimed that the reason 160 million women were “missing” (that is, the reason they were so outnumbered in many countries like India and China, as well as other nations in the Balkans and Central Asia) was because they were “killed” via sex-selective abortion. In his words, the women weren’t “missing,” they were “dead.” (He also claims that the author of the book he cites, Mara Hvistendahl of the book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” appropriates the issue to one of patriarchy, of greater social issues and inequities – which I agree with. He then says that “the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence,” saying that she is more upset by the idea of abortion itself than she is about the issues surrounding abortion. Don’t you think that’s for her to decide? And doesn’t it seem she’s already decided what she thinks based on her book?)
Douthat, however, manages to contradict the crux of his argument near the start of his column.
He begins by saying “female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less.” He then quotes Hvistendahl as saying “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.
If this were the case – if in fact women had become truly empowered in their respective lands – culturally, politically, economically – then why would they be aborting based on the opposite – that men in their communities are still holding the cards? Are they imagining that men still hold positions of power and wealth in their countries, or are they living the ramifications of that painful reality everyday? Women do have some increased autonomy in many of these regions. But guess what? This autonomy has likely served to highlight the still very real inequities and disparities that exist in their communities, which contributes to the rates of sex-selective abortion. If women see which sex has the higher status, and one of the few autonomous decisions they can make is to choose the sex of their baby – they are likely going to choose the one with more status. This upsetting power dynamic shows just how far away true empowerment is for many of these women and their communities. If they felt their children would have the same opportunities if they were female than if they were male, the sex selection abortion Douthat decries would actually decrease. It is not the responsibility of the female fetus to ensure she is treated with the same respect and equality as the male fetus. Douthat seems to really care about female fetuses – but seems less interested in addressing the massive social, political, and economic issues that create so many difficulties for them once born. (His colleagues Paul Krugman and Nick Kristof seem to have handles on that. Too bad they were off yesterday.)
It seems that Douthat wants to push for the feelings of regret and remorse about abortion itself, separate from the issues surrounding it. Does sex-selection abortion sadden me? Yes. Does aborting a fetus that indicates it will have Down Syndrome sadden me? Yes. You know what else makes me sad? That a woman cannot afford a baby because she is single and has no familial or community support; because she has an abusive partner (homicide is the number one cause of death for pregnant women); because she has a low-wage hourly job that offers no maternity leave which could help her stay well while carrying the baby if needed; because she has no health insurance meaning she can’t access quality pre-natal care to make sure her baby would be healthy since we are systematically closing down those facilities that offer services for women who are uninsured (and also help provide birth control to prevent pregnancy!); because she has no way to pay for day care and she may have to quit her low-wage job to care for her baby; because she would then have no money for all the supplies, food, and developmental tools her baby would need to thrive which can lead to malnutrition, behavioral problems, child depression; because she could then become part of the 29.9% of families in poverty that are headed by single women, and her child could become part of the 35% of those in poverty who are under 18 years of age – the poverty rate for households headed by single women is significantly higher than the overall poverty rate.
We’ve cut child welfare services that aid women by the tens of millions in the past few years. Georgia alone cut over $10 million in Child Welfare Services. We’ve also cut subsidies that support adoption agencies – the organizations that help women find families that may be able to care for her baby were she to carry it to term – and who make sure these families are actually fit to do so! TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) provides women and families with aid so that children can be raised in their own homes or with relatives, instead of being placed in foster care and becoming wards of the state. How much have we cut from TANF? 17 of the poorest states, with some of the highest poverty rates in the nation, have already stopped receiving funds.
Birth control, one might say? Sure – birth control is expensive, so if she doesn’t have health insurance, she isn’t likely to be able to afford birth control (hey, Planned Parenthood can help with that, too! Seeing a pattern?) And if her partner refuses to wear a condom? If she is in an abusive relationship, if she fears leaving her partner, if she relies on her partner for added economic security – she’s much less likely to argue with him about the condom use. Or even feel that she has the agency to begin a negotiation discussion at all.
These facts make me sad. And all of these facts might lead a woman to decide she can’t have a baby. And many things not listed here may lead a woman to decide that she will not have a baby. And that she will have an abortion. Is it my decision? No. It’s not. It’s not yours or Ross Douthat’s, either. Again, Douthat represents the contingent of pro-lifers who want to make it seem like pro-choicers are cheering the performing of abortions right and left. What we are cheering is the right for women and respect of women to make their own decision based on their very specific personal circumstances. And given the fact that the medical establishment has not agreed with the pro-life camp in claiming that fetuses before a month into the third trimester can feel pain (reacting to stimuli does not equal pain, to reiterate, and pain without a cerebral cortex is seen by physicians as not possible), which has most recently become the pro-life camp’s wildly off-base rationale for preventing a woman’s right to choose, and given the fetus’ place of residence in the woman’s uterus as a part of her body, not as a human, these issues that Douthat sees as “sideline” are actually very much at the center of the argument. Bottom line – it’s the woman’s body. It’s the woman’s choice. She will be the one carrying it, she will be the one birthing it. No one else. So why should anyone else decide?
Additionally, it is not a crime for a woman to not want children. Since she is able to give birth, it is her decision as to when and how that will happen. Everything about her life and future will change once she has a baby. So she needs to be sure she is ready for that. How can one disagree with that? Douthat may not like it, but “the sense of outrage that pervades his story” (see what I did there? 😉 ) seems to me more rooted in his anger and frustration with his opinion not being considered by women in these decisions and not being able to control what a woman decides to do about what is going on in her body.
All of the things I listed – the job issues, the healthcare issues, the family and community issues, the issues that arise when a child doesn’t have access to food, clothing, and developmentally appropriate stimulation – are the causes. So why don’t we start figuring out how we can mitigate those facts and issues instead of attacking the effect – the abortion – which is a decision women come to after weighing all of those facts and issues just discussed. Douthat’s fear tactics of talking about female fetuses strewn across Indian hospitals is scary imagery. So is this:
Photo thanks to ehow.com
Photo via Captain Hope's Kids Blog
Photo property of streetkidnews.blogsome.com
Want less abortions? How about providing health insurance, that covers both birth control and pre-post natal care? How about equal pay for equal work, so women are more financially and economically secure, providing them with the resources to stay out of poverty and keep their children out of it, too? How about child care in work environments, helping women who cannot afford day care can stay in their jobs and remain a part of the economy? While we’re at it, how about great public schools and clean community centers, so women know their children are being intellectually fed and socially stimulated in safe environments that help keep them out of more dangerous and potentially life-threatening social circles? How about comprehensive sex education so men and women know how to protect themselves not only from pregnancies but from diseases that can endanger a fetus and create complications during birth and cause health issues for them and their children – creating more expense, particularly if one has no health insurance.
Let’s talk then. And how about you follow me on Twitter?
Author Larkin CallaghanPosted on June 28, 2011 February 18, 2012 Categories Child Development and Child Health, Education, Feminism, Sexism, and Gender Issues, Health Behavior and Health Education, Mental Health, Politics, Women's HealthTags abortion, child health, education, feminism, mental health, politics, violence against women7 Comments on Abortion Isn’t That Simple, Mr. Douthat
Ed Schultz, the NYPD, and the Burden of Victims
Three fairly prolific things have happened in the past three days that all incorporated the ways in which women are attacked in the public eye, how the media shapes the representation of female victims, and what we think are crimes worthy of solving and what kind of help is worth giving.
Let’s start with Ed. Given the obviously hard liberal bent of this blog, I’m guessing most of you have already determined that my views are aligned with many on MSNBC, despite not usually watching TV for my news (I prefer to read my news, because I hate commercials and because I’d rather get the straight facts than deal with a sensationalized version of a story with a reporter’s personal opinion bending it one way or another). This past week, Ed Schultz referred to Laura Ingraham as a slut.
This frustrated me for a number of reasons. First of all, I don’t care about Laura Ingraham’s sex life. I don’t care how many people she’s slept with, who they are, or what they’ve done. Why does Ed? Why does anybody? To use that as a platform of attack is insulting, crude, sexist, and entirely irrelevant to the argument. Schultz was angry and wanted to be mean – and the best way to be mean to women in America is by calling them out as sex-crazy animals. It’s a double shot – you’re calling them dirty and you’re calling them immoral. Is that the way we’re mean to men in America? No. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Secondly, just take a quick, cursory look at Ingraham’s website. There are…so, SO many things that I would rather have had Schultz tackle regarding Ingraham’s absurd political ideology than calling her a slut. Without even clicking through, I can see about ten things that Schultz’s usually incisive wit and on-target analysis would have been better poised to take on. The last thing I want someone like Ingraham getting is an increased audience size due to sympathy culled because a TV personality called her a bad name. I would much rather have her getting an increased audience size due to a TV personality calling out her intense and callous right-wing agenda and seriously out there hard-core conservative rants against what she sees as Obama’s socialist agenda. He could have killed her mission with facts. Instead, he propped her mission up with an insult.
Next up – the acquittal of the two NYPD officers charged with raping a woman in her East Village apartment in 2008 after supposedly “helping her home.” The officers were called to escort a woman home who was apparently so incapacitated that she could not manage on her own. They entered her apartment, supposedly helped her into bed, and then faked 911 calls multiple times through the night so they could return to her apartment, “talk to her” and “cuddle with her” when she wasn’t wearing underwear. In their words, they were “checking in on her” and one of the officers even said he was “counseling” her on her alcohol use since as a former addict himself, claiming to recognize she may have a problem with alcohol. She reported that she awoke to a man taking off her tights and penetrating her. He said all he did was “cuddle” with her. When a conversation that she had taped became public – she went to his precinct to confront him and ask him if he had used a condom – he back-peddled and agreed that sex had occurred but that it had been consensual. He said, as quoted on the tape, that “yes, I used a condom, you don’t have to worry about diseases or anything.” She insisted on an answer to this to protect her health because she was too drunk to knowingly consent to sex. A story change like that alone – going from “we just cuddled” to “actually, we did have sex” should make one highly suspicious of his defense. It is not the job of an NYPD officer to decide that he should be counseling a woman he was called to escort home. Why, if you were so concerned with her safety, would you fake 911 calls to go back into her apartment? You could have easily reported that you were concerned and noted that you felt there was a need for her to be checked in on.
Ultimately, all the cops were found guilty of was “official misconduct.” Faking 911 calls and repeatedly entering a woman’s apartment without her consent and “cuddling” with her while she wasn’t wearing underwear? How will this precedent serves those charged with rape on the stand in the near future? If a man enters my apartment and crawls into bed while I’m not wearing underwear to “cuddle” with me while I am too incapacitated to agree to it, “misconduct” does not describe how I would categorize those events. More like…breaking and entering and assault. The defense of the officers was insulting – they claimed that she was way too drunk to make it home on her own, but that she was sober enough to consent to sex. Seems like a woman can’t win.
When a few people on the jury were asked how they came to this conclusion, one man said that they “just didn’t believe the woman’s testimony” when it was read back. They also said they felt there were holes in both her and the cops’ stories. Yet they chose to not believe the victim. I understand the concept of reasonable doubt, yes – but, in this case, we had the testimony of a cop whose story had holes in it because he was trying to cover up his actions, and the testimony of a woman whose story had holes in it because she was drunk. If she was too drunk to have a cohesive testimony, what makes one think she is sober enough to consent to sex? It seems that this definition makes people more uncomfortable than the act of the non-consensual sex itself. An NYPD officer, above all, should know this (they go through sexual assault training – did he forget?), and should be in the position of protector. I simply cannot get beyond the idea that if one thought she was so drunk, so utterly incapacitated that you needed to check on her over and over again throughout the night, why – I just have to know – would one think she was in any state to have sex?
And lastly, news recently hit that New York, undoubtedly tight on funds, has proposed cutting the special victims unit teams at hospitals that serve women who were recently sexually assaulted and raped. SVUs are the group of professionals equipped to deal with the aftermath of an assault. They gather forensic evidence from rape kits, which collect DNA and have helped track down and identify many assaulters in the past. (There are already backlogs of hundreds of unexamined rape kits in many U.S. cities, something that rightfully angers and frustrates advocates who point out that these kits are often the most reliable evidence one has in linking an attacker to a victim.) They also provide the essential mental health support for women immediately after a sexual assault, and also help connect her to services that can continue the necessary ongoing mental health support in the future. It seems like a no-brainer that these services should be offered.
These three distinct stories are each, in their unique ways, indicative of one perspective that desperately needs to change – people hate women who have a sexual identity. They blame them for being sexually active and sexually expressive; if a woman has historically had a lot of sex partners, they make sure to bring this to light during a rape accusation and claim that she must have agreed to it, it must have been consensual because she loves sex so much! When they want to insult women they use terms that are charged with implications of having too much sex (Schultz doesn’t actually care how much sex Ingraham is having – he was furious with her political idiocy, and instead of calmly articulating that and making a much needed point about her fact-less rantings, he chose to sling a comment that he thought would be more hurtful – that we socially have decided is more hurtful – one that charged she was sexually ravenous), and use that to delegitimize her. Ingraham lobs a lot of softballs for liberals; why not attack her weak political ideology instead of attacking her supposed sexual proclivity?
Why cut the services that are so obviously needed for women who, after an assault or rape, feel incredibly vulnerable, angry, confused, and scared? Why would you not want a forensic team to gather evidence that could help arrest and implicate a rapist? Why would you not want a team of mental health professionals to support the victim immediately, to help her process it, to continue to help her process it, decreasing the likelihood of her struggling with depression, chronic fear and fatigue, incredible anger, and a serious lack of faith in the criminal justice system? All I can think of is that these people…don’t believe these are real issues. They don’t believe the women who are assaulted and who try to seek justice and healing after their attacks. It seems as thought the burden of being assaulted rests on women here just because they are women. It’s much easier to denounce having sex than have to go after someone who assaulted a woman. But what these people need to remember is that rape isn’t actually about sex, it’s about power over the victim. And these three stories offer up sensational examples of how the greater social power structure perpetrates this dynamic and supports and fosters the rape culture. By acquitting the NYPD officers we’ve shown that those in power will not be questioned, by removing SVU services we’ve told women that they are losing the resources that would have helped them regain personal power and that would have legally stripped their assaulters of theirs. And Ed, who thankfully apologized, showed that those who have a handle on the media, and who are lucky enough to have their voices projected farther than most, can still knock a woman (even those who are ostensibly on their same level in terms of exposure) down by calling her a slut.
Author Larkin CallaghanPosted on May 29, 2011 May 19, 2016 Categories Feminism, Sexism, and Gender Issues, Media, Politics, Pop Culture, ViolenceTags feminism, law, media, media personality, NYPD, politics, rape, sexual assault, SVU, violence against womenLeave a comment on Ed Schultz, the NYPD, and the Burden of Victims
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Yale showcases new campaigns at Locksmiths' Exhibition
Yale will be showcasing a series of exciting new marketing campaigns alongside an array of mechanical and digital security products at 2013's Locksmiths' Exhibition.
Following the success of Yale's first TV campaign, visitors to stand A2 can discover more about the range of security solutions from Yale, including digital door locks, TS007 cylinders and handles and the range of Doormaster replacement multipoint locks.
Lauren Ashfield, Trade Marketer for Yale UK, said:
"We hope to generate greater demand for locksmiths in 2013 by running a number of consumer friendly campaigns to create awareness of home security.
"The Locksmiths' Exhibition has always been a firm favourite for us, and hopefully this year's show will demonstrate Yale's commitment to locksmiths and the industry as a whole."
The first 5 orders of £750 or more each day will receive a free Yale branded waterproof coat.
Visit stand A2 at the East Midlands Conference Centre between 2nd and 3rd March 2013 to see the latest security solutions and campaigns from Yale.
Alternatively, please visit www.yale.co.uk for further information.
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Jack Cardiff, Oscar-winning cinematographer of Black Narcissus, dies aged 94
British director of photography worked with all the greats, from Alfred Hitchcock to John Huston, before turning his hand to directing
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 April 2009 17.13 BST
‘The best in the world’ … that’s what Marilyn Monroe said of Jack Cardiff, both seen here on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957. Photograph: BFI
Jack Cardiff, the Oscar-winning British cinematographer who began his career in the silent era, has died at the age of 94. The man who went by the nickname “Jack O’Lantern” shot films for Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston and was once hailed as “the best in the world” by Marilyn Monroe.
Born to a family of music-hall entertainers, Cardiff began his career as a clapper-boy and production runner in the 1920s, before finding fame as a cinematographer for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. He brought a sensual, otherworldly glow to A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes, and won an Oscar for his work on Black Narcissus, recreating the Himalayas on a soundstage at Pinewood studios. His other films include The Vikings, The Barefoot Contessa and The African Queen.
Cardiff branched into directing in the late 1950s and scored a global hit with his adaptation of Sons and Lovers. In 1968 he rustled up a cult, counter-culture road movie with Girl on a Motorcycle, featuring Marianne Faithfull as a libidinous girl biker.
Cardiff continued to work until well into his dotage, with his last credit as a cinematographer coming on the 2007 miniseries The Other Side of the Street. He was awarded an honorary Oscar for his services to film in 2001. “Simplicity,” he once reflected, “that’s the secret of good lighting and good cinematography. Always keep it simple.”
April 22, 2009 at 4:58 pm Leave a comment
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Other countries | Deutsch
Fleet /
Airbus A320-200 /
New boost for a successful series
The planes of the Airbus A320 family have been one of aviation’s biggest success stories for several years. From 2015/2016 onward, they will be joined by a new generation of neo versions. Although based largely on tried and tested structures, their new engines and redesigned wings will yield very significant savings in kerosene consumption.
The planes of the neo series have engines that cut fuel consumption by up to 15 percent. The name neo coined by Airbus for the planes of the next A320 generation isn’t merely a reference to their pioneering technical design features. It also stands for New Engine Option. Because the buyer can choose between two different types. The aircraft ordered by Lufthansa will be powered by Type PW1000G engines.
These mighty power packs are built under the supervision of US corporation Pratt & Whitney, but the Munich jet engine manufacturer MTU Aero Engines is significantly involved in their production. The new engines incorporate a very advantageous novel design feature. Two components that were formerly linked to each other now function independently of each other. The low-pressure compressor now revolves at around three times the speed of the fan located farther forward in the engine. In conventional jet engines these components are attached to one and the same shaft and, consequently, revolve at the same speed – a speed that is not in the optimal range for either component.
Separation of the function of these two components has yielded a very significant increase in the new engine’s efficiency. And this in turn brings not only savings in kerosene consumption but also a reduction in exhaust emissions. The bottom line is that an Airbus A320neo will be able to claim a reduction of some 3,600 tons of carbon dioxide emission in one year of operation, plus a double-digit percentage cut in nitrogen oxides (NOx). The PW1000G engines will also be considerably quieter than conventional jet engines; noise pollution at ground level will be halved.
Overview model: Airbus A320-200
© Airbus S.A.S.
And that’s not all. The neo family has even more benefits to offer. Like, for example, an increase of up to 950 kilometers in the A320neo’s operating range. Despite all these genuine improvements in performance, the structures of the planes of the neo family are largely identical to those of the existing models. And this is an important advantage for airlines like Lufthansa; it means that newly delivered aircraft can be quickly integrated into existing maintenance schedules, also that pilots will not require costly retraining programs.
Airbus plans to continue production of aircraft powered with the existing engine. These will have the suffix ceo = Current Engine Option. Buyers of the A320ceo can now also opt for delivery with so-called sharklets. These upturned wingtips are similar to the wingtip feathers of some bird species and can enhance an aircraft’s aerodynamics as well as cutting fuel consumption, increasing range and load capacity and reducing noise pollution.
Sharklets will be a standard feature of the neo series. That is another good reason for Lufthansa to opt for the new A320 generation. The result is that the A320 will in future have an even more important role in the Lufthansa fleet. The airline placed its first order for 30 planes of the neo series (25 A320neos and 5 A321neos) back in 2001, and followed this up with a second order for 70 more (35 A320neos and 35 A321neos) in 2013. These new aircraft will not only replace older aircraft of the same type. The Boeing 737s currently operating on Lufthansa’s short- and medium-haul routes are being phased out and will be partially replaced by the A320neo on these routes.
© Deutsche Lufthansa AG
More about the A320 family
Revolution in the Cockpit
1987 was the year civil aviation finally arrived in the digital era – with the A320 family. It was in the new short- and medium range Airbus aircraft that many systems that are now standard in most modern aircraft celebrated their premiere. Airbus still uses the A320’s original cockpit philosophy
More about Airbus A320-200
Panorama photo: cabin
Galley, aisle, seat and window – all details in a pin-sharp 360° view
A bird’s-eye view of the cabin. Zoom in for details: seat configuration, position of the galley and lavatories and (emergency) exits
Panorama photo: cockpit
All details of the cockpit in a pin-sharp 360° view
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Articles, News and Press
Home » Articles » A Magna Carta for Ethiopia?
A Magna Carta for Ethiopia?
Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam, A Magna Carta for Ethiopia?, in Open Salon, 1st March, California State University, San Bernardino, CA., USA.
Click here for article source.
I am celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum or the Great Charter of English Liberties.
Whoa! Hold it! I understand your question!
Why is a guy born in Africa (Ethiopia) now living in America celebrating a document written by a bunch of disgruntled and rebellious English barons quarrelling with a feudal monarch over taxes and restoration of their feudal privileges in Medieval England 800 years ago?
No, I do not like feudalism or monarchies. I grew up in feudal Ethiopia. I saw wretchedness, decadence and decay. The first government I ever knew was a monarchy. A swift stroke of the socialist sickle put that monarchy to eternal rest. For me, feudalism and monarchies are quaint anachronisms. I recall reading Karl Marx describing feudalism as the cradle of capitalism. In 1974, the impetuous and feckless junior officers in the Ethiopian military thought they could make a beeline to socialism from feudalism on the wings of martial law.
I am certainly not celebrating the Magna Carta because King John was a philosopher king. John was the consummate scoundrel. He was treacherous, traitorous, greedy and cruel. John was the kind of royal villain who “can smile as he murdered”. They said, “Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of King John.”
John was a vindictive tyrant. He arrested, detained and jailed his subjects at will. He exacted outrageous taxes to fill his coffers, sate his greed and wage war so he could enrich himself even more. His “scutage” tax (payment by a feudal landowner to be excused from military service or provide a knight) on the barons and “amercements” (fines) were elaborate extortion schemes.
John was so greedy that he dispossessed his subjects of their land, horses, carts, corn and wood without legal process. He used the Royal Forests as a major source of revenue and made it the citadel of corruption in his reign. He literally sold justice. Since the royal system of justice had complete jurisdiction over all matters in the kingdom, litigants were required to pay the monarch fees. Depending on the state of his cash flow at a particular moment, John would regularly sell legal rights and privileges to the highest bidder. John surrounded himself with mercenary thugs who fought his wars. He meddled in the affairs of religion. He was a power hungry power monger.
If my description of King John sounds like the average African dictator or thugtator of the 21st Century, the similarities are not that far-fetched. Today, from one end of Africa to the other, African dictator’s arrest, jail, harass and intimidate their opposition at will. African dictators use their kangaroo courts to persecute their opponents, subvert justice and even sell it to the highest bidder out in the open. They dispossess their poorest citizens of their forested ancestral lands, and hand over millions of hectares to foreign “investors” literally for pennies, which in turn burn down the forests to establish their commercial farms. They massacre their citizens who oppose them without raising arms. They jail, torture and exile their political opposition. They steal hundreds of millions of dollars from their people every year and fatten their foreign bank accounts. They meddle in religion and promote communal strife to cling to power. They are warmongers visiting death and destruction on their people. They commit crimes against humanity and genocide. At least two African “heads of state” have been indicted by the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. Like King John, African dictators “can smile as they murder” but they can also murder as they smile. ‘Tis true, Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of African dictators and thugtators.
Why am I celebrating the English Magna Carta?
To answer my own question, I have to go back some fifty years when I was a teenager in Ethiopia. I was a bookish type. I was very fortunate to have access to the great works of world literature and philosophy. I was quite familiar with the American literati of the 1960s. I also read popular works of fiction in Amharic.
I was most fascinated by the law. From a very young age, I was exposed to the world of litigation. I tagged along to observe court proceedings in the high courts in Addis Ababa and other courts in outlying areas. I remember vividly the legal scribes sitting under makeshift kiosks on the side streets outside the court compounds cranking out pleadings in exquisite Amharic penmanship with a Bic ballpoint pen. I enjoyed listening to silver-tongued lawyers and discerning judges talking and arguing points of law, particularly procedure, and not just in the courtroom. The eloquence of diction, cogency of arguments and spellbinding oratory of some of the lawyers and the razor sharp questions and incisive wit of the judges back then left a lifelong impression on me. They were great role models for me.
I read the Ethiopian Penal and Civil Codes in Amharic in bits and pieces, especially after listening to the lawyers and judges arguing about them. I especially liked criminal and civil procedure (sine sirat). The civil procedure code (Fitha Beher) was less than 245 pages bound in a small volume. The criminal procedure code was a mere 69 pages appended to the penal code. Neither was hard reading at all.
I was most fascinated by legal arguments over violations of procedural rules. Did the police investigate the alleged crime the right way? Was the arrest made on probable cause? Did the police preserve the evidence properly? Were the documents presented in a civil case properly authenticated? Is there sufficient basis to grant an injunction (Mageja)?
I still have my original collection of Ethiopian Codes to this day, one-half century later (see picture above). I now know that the criminal and civil procedural rules in the Codes were highly advanced even by today’s standards. True, oxidative degradation (aging) has taken a toll on my one-half century volumes. The paper is turning yellow and the glue on the spine of those volumes dried out and separated long ago; but I still peruse the Codes from time to time to marvel at how modern and advanced those procedures were.
Thirty years later, I had my chance to stand up for one of the greatest procedural protections of the American people in the California Supreme Court, the right against self-incrimination guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As I walked the steps of that Court in Sacramento, CA for oral argument, I looked up at the imposing Ionic columns and for a brief moment remembered the great lawyers and judges in my childhood, and I smiled.
There was also H.I.M. Haile Selassie’s 1955 Revised Ethiopian Constitution. I never witnessed a constitutional argument in any case I observed in court, or any discussion of it outside of court. I occasionally heard learned judges and lawyers referring to “The Constitution” (Hige Mengist) from time to time, but none of their discussions registered or resonated in my mind.
As I studied that Constitution over the years, I became fascinated by the uncanny similarity of Chapter III to the American Bill of Rights. Chapter III could be described as the “Ethiopian Bill of Rights”. H.I.M. Haile Selassie’s adoption of such broad liberties for his subjects even in principle testifies to some irrepressible modernizing impulse he cherished at the core of his extreme political conservatism as a monarch. Yet, few enjoyed those constitutional liberties. Like most monarchs in history, H.I.M. outlived his usefulness.
I would wager to say Chapter III of the 1955 Revised Constitution of Ethiopia, with a few exceptions, is a virtual carbon copy of the American Bill of Rights and other amendments to the U.S. Constitution:
No one shall be denied the equal protection of the laws… No one within the Empire may be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law… No one may be deprived of his property except… by judicial procedures established by law… Ethiopian subjects shall have the right to assemble peaceably… No one may be arrested without a warrant issued by a court… Every arrested person shall be brought before the judicial authority within forty-eight hours of his arrest… In all criminal prosecutions the accused… shall have the right to a speedy trial and to be confronted with the witnesses against him, to have compulsory process… for obtaining witnesses in his favor at the expense of the Government and to have the assistance of a counsel for his defense [at government expense]. (It was not until 1963 that poor defendants in the United States got the right to government-appointed counsel in state criminal prosecutions, 8 years after it was guaranteed in the Imperial Constitution.) No person accused of and arrested for a crime shall be presumed guilty until so proved…. No one shall be punished twice for the same offence… No one shall be subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment… All persons and all private domiciles shall be exempt from unlawful searches and seizures… no one shall have the right to bring suit against the Emperor… No one within the Empire may be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law… The present revised Constitution… shall be the supreme law of the Empire…
The 1994 Ethiopian Constitution of the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) is equally beneficent in words with its grant of liberties and freedoms. Under Chapter III “HUMAN RIGHTS” are listed the following liberties which virtually replicate the American Bill of Rights:
No one shall be deprived of his liberty except in accordance with such procedures as are laid down by law…. arrested or detained without being charged or convicted of a crime except in accordance with [due process]… Everyone shall have the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Anyone arrested on criminal charges shall have the right to be informed promptly and in detail… of the nature and cause of the charge against him. Everyone shall have the right to keep silent and be warned promptly [and] that any statement he may make may be used in evidence against him. Everyone shall have the right to be brought before a court of law within 48 hours after his arrest. Everyone shall be entitled to an inalienable right of habeas corpus… Anyone arrested shall have the right to be released on bail. Everyone charged with an offence shall be entitled to a public hearing before an ordinary court of law without undue delay… Everyone charged with an offence shall be adequately informed in writing of the charges brought against him. Everyone charged with an offence shall have the right to defend himself through legal assistance of his own choosing and to have free legal assistance assigned to him by the government… [The] Constitution is the supreme law of the land….
The TPLF copied and pasted much of the American Bill of Rights into its constitution and promptly shredded it into pieces.
Where did H.I.M. Haile Selassie get his ideas about civil liberties and personal freedoms in the 1955 Revised Ethiopian Constitution?
Where did the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front get its ideas about civil liberties and personal freedoms in its 1994 Constitution?
There is no question that H.I.M. Haile Selassie adopted the bulk of the American Bill of Rights right down to the phraseology as highlighted above.
There is also no question the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front got its ideas about civil liberties and personal freedoms from the 1955 Revised Ethiopian Constitution.
So, the $64 thousand dollar question is: Where did the Americans get many of their ideas about important individual liberties and freedoms?
They got it from the Magna Carta. The enumerated liberties in the American Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution) dealing with freedom of petition (1st amendment), due process of law (5th and 14th amendments) which covers a whole slew of individual liberties, taking and just compensation (5th amendment), neutral magistrate (4th amendment), no excessive bails and fines (8th amendment), speedy public trials, confrontation of accusers, jury trial and impartial jury (6th amendment), supreme law of the land (Art. VI), writ of habeas corpus (Article I, Section IX), as well as freedom of travel and of privacy and other rights have their origins in the Magna Carta.
There lies my answer to my question. I am celebrating the Magna Carta because a good part our DNA for constitutional liberties and freedoms as Ethiopians trace its lineage to the Magna Carta. This fact may come as a surprise to some; but it is undeniable that the genotype of Ethiopian constitutional liberties carries with it the inherited instructions of the genetic code of the Magna Carta. However, I do not believe that heritage or lineage is unique to Ethiopia. The phenotype of every modern constitution that aspires and pledges to protect individual liberties may be different, but all can trace their genotypes directly to the Magna Carta.
What is Magna Carta?
The Magna Carta was the first legal document drafted by the ruled and imposed on the rulers. It is the first bold effort by the ruled to subjugate their rulers to the rule of law. It is the first effort undertaken to create a binding political contract between the rulers and the ruled, with the ruled writing the rules and securing for themselves and their posterity specific written guarantees of liberties and property protections. Of course, the document was tailored for English baron of freeholders against the exercise of royal arbitrary power.
There have been great legal codes before the Magna Carta beginning with the Ten Commandments. The Code of Justinian assembled collections of laws and legal interpretations of the Roman jurists. The Romans also made the law accessible to the plebeians by recording it in the Twelve Tables and posting it in the Roman Forum so that the plebeians are aware of their rights and protect themselves against abuse of power by the patricians. Solon’s Laws aimed to resolve conflict between the landed aristocracy and peasantry in ancient Athens. Solon’s Laws made it possible for any Athenian, not just a wronged party, to initiate a lawsuit. It also established an appellate process for review of the decisions of the magistrates to a court of the citizens at large. The Hammurabic Code of ancient Babylon consisted of 282 laws dealing with a whole range of issues including household and family matters, civil liability and even military service. That Code is today remembered for its draconian punishment of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.
None of the legal documents preceding the Magna Carta were predicated on the principle of the rule of law. None of the laws originated in the sovereignty of the common people nor were they enacted with their consent. The common people had little say in the making of the laws that were imposed upon them. They were expected to obey and follow the laws and live out their miserable lives in quiet desperation. The commoners never dared to impose limits on the powers of their rulers.
Prior to the Magna Carta, King John and his royal predecessors had ruled using the principle of vis et voluntas (“force and will”). John did whatever he wanted because he believed as the king he was above the law and accountable to no earthly power (save perhaps the Holy See). It was a generally accepted fact of medieval English politics that English monarchs should rule in accordance with the prevailing social customs and the common law (judgment and decrees of the courts) aided by the able counsel of the leading members of the kingdom. John’s predecessor Henry II in fact had introduced functional legal procedures which provided protections against deprivation of property without legal process.
The question was what to do if the king disregarded his own laws, the laws of his predecessors, ignored custom and simply refused to be bound by a judicial decree or anything else?
Such was the problem the barons had with King John in the years preceding 1215. John was dismissive and oppressive of the barons. He waged war on them. He sent bailiffs to jail them without evidence or proof of wrongdoing. He demanded feudal payments and taxes from them. He refused to comply with his own laws and shunned the existing legal process.
The barons wanted restraints on John’s arbitrary powers. They wanted him to abide by his own laws and the customs of the land. In June 1215, a group of angry armed barons showed up at Runnymede, a water-meadow alongside the River Thames, not far from London to “discuss” their grievances with King John. They were actually there to deliver an ultimatum to John: Stop your tyrannical ways or prepare to deal with a rebellion and most likely civil war.
John was in no position to negotiate. He had recently suffered an ignominious defeat following his invasion of France. The barons bore the financial burdens of paying for John’s mercenary army by paying “scutage”. They had no interest in John’s feud with the French king and would not support him. John had lashed out against the barons for their refusal to support his military adventures. John’s negotiating position had also been weakened by his ongoing problems with Pope Innocent III in Rome as early as 1208. His attempts to interfere in the appointment of bishops and meddle in the church’s financial affairs earned him a papal excommunication in 1209.
The rebellious barons who showed up at Runnymede in June 1215 were not happy campers. A month earlier, they had taken control of London and felt they had a strong negotiating hand. They had their Articles of the Barons drafted and all they needed was John’s signature. There was not much left for John to wheel and deal. The “negotiations” concluded on June 15, 1215 when King John reluctantly affixed his royal seal on the Magna Carta. John averted a civil war and made peace with his rebellious barons and regained their allegiance.
Although John signed the Magna Carta, he had no intention of upholding its terms despite his express agreement to do so “in good faith and without any evil intention” (Cl. 63).
Within weeks, the Magna Carta agreement was unravelling. John was particularly bothered by the provision dealing with implementation of the Magna Carta. He found clause 61, the security clause, particularly odious. In that clause, he felt he had given away the royal store of power. He had conceded that “the barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the realm as they wish, who with all their might are to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have granted”. He had effectively brought himself under baronial supervision and monitoring. Clause 61 was a clever move by the barons because they knew John was a snake in the grass.
John did not disappoint. He sent messengers to the Pope in the summer of 1215 requesting annulment of the Magna Carta. The barons struck back by refusing to give up the city of London unless and until John implemented the Magna Carta. In August 1215, Pope Innocent III issued a “papal bull” (an official letter with a seal “bulla”) declaring the Magna Carta “illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people”, and “null and void of all validity forever”.
In September 1215, civil war broke out between King John and his barons. As usual, John enlisted his army of mercenaries to fight the barons. The barons in turn invited the heir to the French throne to come and become king. The French invaded England in 1216. John died of dysentery during that war.
Henry III succeeded John to the throne at age 9. In November 1216, a revised version of the Magna Carta was issued to regain the loyalty and support of the barons. In 1217, yet another version of the Magna Carta was granted after the expulsion of the French. When Henry reached the age of 18, he issued a significantly revised version which was enrolled on the statute book by King Edward I in 1297.
What is in the Magna Carta of 1215?
The Magna Carta is a document of extraordinary insight, foresight and breadth in terms of its articulation of “English liberties.”
It covers a variety of issues ranging from methods of lodging specific grievances regarding land ownership to the regulation of the justice system, taxes (“scutage” and “socage” [periodic payments for using land], and removal of fish from various rivers and standardization of various weights and measures and so on.
The most notable clauses (Cl.) of the Magna Carta spell out the nature of “English liberties” and resonate to the present day through multitudes of modern constitutions and international human rights treaties and conventions.
In the 1215 Magna Carta, King John agreed to recognize and accept a whole slew of liberties guaranteed to his subjects (barons) that are stunning by the standards of any age. Specifically, he agreed to
• observe the Charter and the liberties set forth therein of his “own free will with good faith and [to bind his] heirs forever” (Cl.1);
• impose “no scutage (taxes) unless by the common council of our kingdom (Cl. 12);
• that “Common Pleas [ordinary lawsuits] [so that they] shall not follow our court, but shall be held in a fixed place” (Cl. 17);
• exempt “A free-man [from being] amerced [given an arbitrary fine] for a small offence… (Cl. 20);
• prohibit his “sheriffs, constables, coroners, [and] bailiffs [from] holding
• pleas of [which should be dealt with by] our Crown” (Cl. 24);
• prohibit his “constables and bailiffs [from] taking the corn or other goods of any one, without instantly paying money for them” (Cl. 28); or “tak[ing] the horses or carts of any free-man without the consent of the said free-man (Cl. 29); or “tak[ing] another man’s wood, for our castles or other uses” (Cl. 31);
• terminate use of the ‘writ of præcipe [order to show cause] by which a free-man may lose his court [right of trial in his own lord’s court]” (Cl. 34).
• prohibit the practice in which a “ bailiff shall put any man to his law, upon his own simple affirmation, without credible witnesses produced for that purpose” (Cl. 38);
• stop the practice of “seizing, imprisoning, dispossessing, outlawing, condemning or committing to prison any free man except by the legal
• judgment of his peers, or by the laws of the land” (Cl. 39);
• not to “sell, deny, or delay right or justice” (Cl. 40);
• guarantee that it “shall be lawful to any person to go out of our kingdom, and to return, safely and securely (Cl. 42);
• appoint only “justiciaries, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs [unless they] know the laws of the land, and are well disposed to observe them” (Cl. 45);
• compensate and make “immediate” restitution to those who have been “disseised [wrongfully removed from possession of property] or dispossessed by us, without a legal verdict of their peers, of their lands, castles, liberties, or rights” (Cl. 52);
• make restitution of “all fines that have been made by us unjustly, or contrary to the laws of the land; and all amercements [fines] that have been imposed unjustly, or contrary to the laws of the land” (Cl. 55);
• agreed to the appointment of “twenty-five barons [elected freely] who shall with their whole power, observe, keep, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties which we have granted to them [in the Magna Carta] (Cl. 61).
The Magna Carta also included un-libertarian terms. It provided that, “no man shall be apprehended or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other man except her husband” (Cl. 54). A widow could not be “compelled to marry, so long as she wishes to remain without a husband. But she must give security that she will not marry without royal consent (Cl. 8). Six hundred years later, the British philosopher John Stuart Mills wrote, “I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised…” American women got the constitutional right to vote in 1920. There are still countries in the world in the second decade of the 21st Century where women do not have the right to vote.
The Magna Carta also included a streak of the millennia-old bigotry against Jews. It provided, “If anyone has borrowed anything from the Jews and die before that debt be paid, the debt shall pay no interest so long as his heir shall be under age… And if any one shall die indebted to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower and shall pay nothing of that debt…” (Cls. 10, 11.)
Although the 1215 Magna Carta contained 63 clauses when it was first granted, only a few remain part of English law today. In 1969, the Statute Law (Repeals) Act repealed almost all of the 1225 Magna Carta, except Clauses 1, 9, 29. It has also been superseded by the Human Rights Act of 1998.
The legacy of the Magna Carta as I see it
Learned scholars, lawyers, judges and others will continue to argue about the relevance and significance of the Magna Carta for another 800 years. Did the Magna Carta give all persons in the kingdom or just the “free barons” the right to justice and a fair trial? Did it have any relevance to the unfree peasants (“villeins”) who had to apply to their own lords for justice? Did the Magna Carta guarantee the right to trial by jury? Establish the supremacy of the principle of the rule of law? Institutionalize the due process of law? Did it establish for the very first time a constitutional framework (social contract) between government and citizens? Make practical the idea of individual liberty? Institutionalize the principle of the law of the land to which all (including kings, prime ministers, presidents, congresses, parliaments, etc.,) must submit?
Despite scholarly disagreements, there is substantial consensus that the Magna Carta inspired the framers of the American Constitution (1787) and the drafters of the American Bill of Rights [first ten amendments] (1791) in their quintessential pursuit to limit the arbitrary exercise of governmental power. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] (1948), which has been signed by virtually every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe also reflects the text and spirit of the Magna Carta. When Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the UDHR, she dreamt of a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” with respect to equality, dignity and rights. I agree with her. I do not believe there is Ethiopian “rights”, American “rights”, English “rights”, Chinese “rights”, Egyptian “rights”… I believe there is only human rights.
For me, a dyed-in-the-wool and unapologetic Ethiopian- American constitutional lawyer and scholar, the Magna Carta has enormous symbolic appeal. I understand the Magna Carta as a quintessentially procedural legal document predicated on the twin principles of government accountability and transparency. Those who exercise power shall be held accountable under the supreme law of the land for their actions and omissions by a set of rules and standards. The relationship between the rulers and the ruled must be strictly regulated by a set of clear procedures. No ruler shall have the power to deprive any citizen of life liberty or property without due process of law. I believe the Magna Carta is the first constitutional document in human history to put the brakes on the arbitrary exercise of power and shield individual liberty from the vagaries and capriciousness of those corrupted by power.
William Gladstone who served as British Prime Minister on four separate occasions in the 19th Century, mindful of the Magna Carta observed, “As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” ‘Tis true that imperfect Constitution which turned a blind eye to slavery, is, undoubtedly, a work of extraordinary collective genius.
My view of liberty is a very simple one. I believe liberty predates government. I do not believe government can “grant” rights and freedoms to its citizens. Government, being the collective invention of citizens, exists only to protect the lives, liberties and properties of its citizens.
I have this wacky way of explaining my views on the relationship between government and citizens. I regard government as a watchdog (almost literally) for its masters, the people. (Pardon me if I sound like I am maligning man’s and woman’s best friend with my descriptive metaphor. ) The only function of this watchdog is to protect the lives, liberties and properties of its masters. This watchdog is naturally treacherous and must be watched at all times with eagle eyes and extreme vigilance by its masters. This watchdog has an inbred and ineradicable trait of always turning against its masters unless it is held tightly on a very short chain leash. The constitution is the chain leash on the “government dog”. The shorter the leash, the better and safer it is for the dog’s masters. Thomas Jefferson aptly observed, “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. The masters of the dog should never fear the dog.
That is why I believe all government officials, leaders, institutions and anyone exercising power should be chained at all times with the “supreme law” of the land, placed under eternal vigilance and held strictly accountable for their actions and omissions. James Madison, one of the foremost framers of the American Constitution wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” I would say if governments did not degenerate into demons, men and women could bring out their best and aspire to be angels.
I wholeheartedly agree with John Adams, the second president of the United States who observed, “There is danger from all men [and women]. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man [or woman] living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned, “The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.” Could he have been foretelling the present fate of Africa?
On July 28, 2014, President Obama told a town hall meeting of Young African Leaders, “Regardless of the resources a country possesses, regardless of how talented the people are, if you do not have a basic system of rule of law, of respect for civil rights and human rights, if you do not give people a credible, legitimate way to work through the political process to express their aspirations, if you don’t respect basic freedom of speech and freedom of assembly … it is very rare for a country to succeed.”
Ethiopia needs to succeed as a nation and as a people. Africa needs to succeed as a continent. Today, Ethiopia is in its end stage of becoming a completely failed state. So are many other African countries. I doubt there is a single, not one, African state that would not collapse within days (not weeks) but for Western charity and loans. Contemporary African regimes exist because they are bankrolled by the tax dollars of the Western countries. That is such a bitter pill to swallow!
Over the past five years, cynicism and pessimism have whittled down my hopes and dreams for the rule of law and a peaceful transition to multiparty democracy in Africa. Every day I ask myself, “Is there any hope for Africa?” For Ethiopia? Does Africa’s destiny hang in the balance between the audacity of hope and the rapacity of despair? Is Africa condemned to a future of civil wars, genocides, anarchy, lawlessness and crimes against humanity? Does Africa’s best hope hang on the strings attached to its multilateral loans and aid? Will Africa be buried under a mountain of international debt while predatory foreign investors officiate at its funeral? Is Africa doomed to become the permanent object of charity, sympathy and pity for the rest of the world? Is Africa floating on a turbulent sea of hope or drowning in an ocean of despair? Is there something buried deeply in the African ethos (character), logos (logic of the African mind), pathos (spirit/soul) and bathos (African narrative of the trivial into the sublime) that makes Africans extremely susceptible to the triple deadly cancers of brutality, despotism and corruption? Is Africa the infernal stage of Dante’s “divine comedy”?: “Abandon all hope, you who enter [live] here [in Africa].”
I am sure there will be some among my readership who would question and even criticize me for joyfully celebrating the Magna Carta. After all, it is a document of white people. (I have got to tell the truth!) It is the founding document of the wicked colonial oppressors and the rest of it. The Magna Carta could not possibly have relevance to Black, Brown, Yellow and, yes, Green people. With the exception of Green people, I ask the rest to look at their own constitutions. I would like to ask them where the liberties enshrined in their dusty constitutions originated. I would be glad to know which one of their liberties they are willing to surrender to their governments.
Elie Weisel said, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.” So I have chosen to dream about the path of hope – the rule of law administered through a competent independent judiciary to promote freedom, justice and equality– for Ethiopia and the African continent and forswear the path of despair. It is not easy to hope and dream when an entire continent is enveloped and trapped in a long night of dictatorship and oppression. It is in such melancholy state that I find myself reflecting on the words of Henry Francis Lyte:
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see:
O thou who changest not, abide with me!
I must confess to my readers the great sadness I feel as I conclude this joyful commentary on the Magna Carta.
I am deeply, deeply pained by the irony that I can freely celebrate and cherish an English charter of liberties written 800 years ago which is not even law today, yet I cannot do the same for the Ethiopian Constitution written only twenty years ago to usher a new era of freedom, justice and equality because it is not worth the paper it is written on!
It is time for an Ethiopian Magna Carta!!!
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The Roberts Lab: Innovation and Collaboration
Elizabeth Roberts, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, established the Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab in 2016
by Elizabeth Noll & Helen Lund
It’s 9 a.m. on Tuesday, and that means it’s time for the weekly meeting at the Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab. Ten students and two professors are crammed into a room the size of a walk-in closet. There’s one window, which looks out over a nice bit of brick and green copper—a corner of West Hall, the home of the Department of Anthropology on the edge of the Diag.
“It’s energetic and cozy,” laughs Liz Roberts. “We love the window.”
Elizabeth Roberts, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, established the Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab in 2016 for two reasons: to help her manage the mountains of data she’s gathering from MEXPOS, her cross-disciplinary project in Mexico City, and to train a generation of undergraduates in qualitative ethnographic methods and data analysis. After two years, she’s created a new model for data gathering and analysis in socio-cultural and medical anthropology. Innovative and interdisciplinary, with the lab at its core, her “bioethnographic” process combines elements of ethnography, public health, and environmental engineering. This dynamic allows contributions from each field to strengthen each other, for a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
ELEMENT spawns MEXPOS
In 2012, Roberts joined a decades-long University of Michigan public health project called ELEMENT (Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants) with the goal of using ethnographic research to inform the study’s quantitative public health data on biological and environmental factors that impact human and development. ELEMENT has followed mother and child pairs for more than two decades, to gain insight into how exposure to environmental toxins such as metals and chemicals affect pregnant women and their children.
Mexican Exposures (MEXPOS) is the product of Roberts’ ethnographic work within ELEMENT. It is a collaborative project that combines data from ethnography and public health.
Roberts worked intensively with six ELEMENT participant families from two geographically distinct working-class areas in Mexico City in 2014 and 2015, and continues to work with them during summers.
“My interest was in partnering with a project so that we could work together to create new methods for making knowledge about health and inequality,” says Roberts. “They produce biological knowledge. I'm producing ethnographic knowledge, and we are going to put it together in an innovative bioethnographic approach.”
When Roberts returned to the U.S. in 2015, she struggled to handle the volume of data she’d brought back.
“I was overwhelmed by the amount of data,” she recalls. “The fieldwork is ongoing and never-ending.”
In a typical year, she says, a single ethnographer might generate hundreds of pages of field notes By comparison: in one year, Roberts’ research generated more than 100,000 pages of field notes and transcripts, and over 30,000 photographs. And since the research is ongoing, the amount of data keeps growing.
Conversations with colleagues Abigail Bingham and Jason De León, also faculty in the UM’s anthropology department, led her to think about borrowing the biological and archaeological anthropology models: professors lead labs where undergraduates work with the data.
Roberts decided what she needed was a data coding lab, even though cultural anthropologists rarely share their raw field notes with others.
The Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab
In the Lab
To get started, she needed funding and a physical space for the lab. Once she had the room, she needed chairs, a table, a flat screen TV, and a whiteboard, which she acquired with the help of the anthropology department. When the dust had cleared, the Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab was open—with two workers. One was her original postdoc, Camilo Sanz, and one was Roberts herself.
Fast forward three years, and the little lab is bursting with activity. In order to operate, the lab needs at least six students per semester. Lab work counts as either a class or an independent study. They have no trouble filling the spots, say Roberts and her current postdoctoral research fellow, Mary Leighton, even though to be considered a student must interview with both of them, read Spanish, and come with recommendations from GSIs or professors.
Roberts is delighted by the fact that her lab attracts students from other disciplines. Among this semester’s students are two Spanish majors, two microbiology majors, two premed majors, and one in gender and health.
“We are getting students who never thought about anthropology before,” she says. “This turns out to be a very cool way to educate undergraduates. We are providing them with hands-on experience.”
The students, for their part, seem equally delighted. Fully half of the team (five students) volunteered over the past summer. Not for money or for class credit—simply because they wanted to keep working on the project.
Each student is responsible for a slice of the data: one person handles food inventories, another focuses on data from prenatal visits, and another on data from beauty parlor conversations. Students can set their own hours, within a specified time range of lab open hours. This ensures that they are often clustered in the tiny lab together, rather than working individually. Attending the weekly lab meetings is a requirement.
“We insist that they code together,” Roberts says. “There are these cross-cutting conversations... They innovate things together that then become part of the protocol.”
UNAM scientists collecting water samples from household tinacos, May 2015
Faith Cole, a senior majoring in anthropology, Spanish, and international studies (global environment and health), has already worked in the lab for three semesters. She explained in an email how working in the lab is central to her studies.
“In many ways, the interests that inform my thesis about medical diagnosis in Mexico using MEXPOS data are in conversation with the objectives and interests of the MEXPOS project as a whole,” she wrote. “For example, [I’m interested] in the locality of health and a broad conception of the forces that converge to shape health in specific places. Working on a project through Dr. Roberts’ lab is a great way to research something you’re particularly interested in, with the support and feedback of a whole team of undergraduates, as well as Dr. Roberts and Dr. Mary Leighton.”
Andrew Mitchel, a senior majoring in anthropology and Spanish, believes that this interdisciplinary, collaborative research will ultimately help improve lives in the participants’ communities.
“This research is a way to connect anthropology and public health together, to help understand the cultural context of exposure and environmental conditions,” wrote Mitchel in an email. “On campus, the project fosters cross-disciplinary work between these same two fields, and for students involved, like me, it becomes a talking point.”
Graduates credit the lab with teaching them to think collaboratively and preparing them for doing field research and analysis.
Hannah Marcovitch, who graduated from UM with an anthropology degree in 2017, used Roberts’ work as a starting point for her honors thesis. Marcovitch carefully reviewed details about food-related aspects of Roberts’ field notes and became the coding authority on food, earning her the title “Food Czar.” Marcovitch also collaborated with ELEMENT and public health researchers to create more comprehensive assessments of dietary data and is now working to publish her findings with both Roberts and the public health team.
“This work has, in some ways, been a guinea pig for the larger Mexican Exposures projects. My attempt at actually combining anthropological and epidemiological methods has been among the project’s first. As the Mexican Exposures project matures, the collaborations will undoubtedly be increasingly synthetic and sophisticated,” wrote Marcovitch in an email.
Clara Cullen, another 2017 graduate, feels that her time in the lab helped prepare her for her current endeavors. The experience taught her how to approach a project from a bioethnographic perspective.
“My work with Dr. Roberts’ lab has been instrumental in preparing me to collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of researchers as I now do on a daily basis through my Fulbright research,” wrote Cullen, who now works in Ecuador. “Working with Dr. Roberts and her team showed me the power of interdisciplinary work and combining the social and natural sciences. As a result, I will be applying to medical school in the near future and hope to continue qualitative medical research throughout my career.”
Postdoctoral researcher Mary Leighton, who since joining the Anthropology Department in August 2017 has run the coding lab and refined its protocols and methodology, also finds the interdisciplinary aspect of the lab to be a critical part of its success. Leighton brings to the project a background in science and technology studies and research expertise studying transnational and interdisciplinary scientific collaborations.
“I was looking at collaborations between archaeologists in the U.S., Canada, Chile, and Bolivia, who worked in South America, and why those collaborations sometimes falter. It’s not always to do with language and money. It’s just to do with different understandings of what it means to be an academic and what it means to be a scientist,” said Leighton. “People assume that they’re talking about the same thing but they’re actually talking about something completely different. So I was excited by this project because of the many layers of collaboration.”
Roberts Lab team members December 2017
While a table full of students bring coherence to her data, Roberts reminisces about the families she lived with in Mexico City.
“With this project I have a kind of a depth that I didn’t have in my previous ethnographic projects,” said Roberts. “I have spent an extraordinary amount of time with these six families and their neighbors. The idea is that we will be able to put their lives in relation to all kinds of things happening to and in their bodies. I’m hoping that will be interesting and useful for them. That’s something we hope is really useful for Mexico City too, in relation to how these neighborhood systems shape health and inequality and people’s life trajectories.”
Across the continent, in a small room at the corner of the UM campus, students are finding their life trajectories shaped by a different force: the time they spend in the Roberts Ethnographic Coding Lab.
Students interesting in joining the coding lab can read more here.
Faculty; Undergraduate
Anthropology; Research; Undergraduate Education
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In “Let Us Be Raucous,” Lynne Handy calls out truths as she sees and remembers them. Childhood memories come to life in the first poems, including reactions to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Biographical events propel the next section—an apology, suicides, an inability to cope with loss. The poet revives in “Door,” and becomes militantly feminist, particularly in “Memo” and “Testimony.” She addresses national and world issues in “Mother Goose for Militant Children” and “Little Elephant,” then segues into verses about friendship, mysticism, and nature. “Dina, Warrior Child,” a short story, tells of a small girl waging war against Death. “Walls” describes the severing of a girl’s relationships with her mother and Jesus. In “Me Too,” an oilman tries seduction at a library fete.
Let Us Be Raucous is a shout, both jubilant and anguished, from the poet’s heart.
When poet Maria Pell agrees to write a biography of deceased writer Edwina Frost, she has no clue that the horror fiction maven’s ghost will tag along. Complicating matters is the discovery of a child’s bones on Frost property. How does Louise, Edwina’s aloof sister, figure into the story? Her Poe-quoting cousin James? Then there’s the Spanish poet who writes of peacocks…
Maria loves her housemate, Mathieu. So does her gorgeous red-headed neighbor, Sybi, who shares photos of dried monkey heads to help with his article on voodoo. As Maria’s jealousy grows, will she suffer the same fate as Edwina? Will a malevolent spirit possess her? Read The Untold Story of Edwina to find out.
KIRKUS REVIEWS BOOK REVIEW:
A poet writing a posthumous biography of a horrornovelist colleague gets caught up in an investigation of bones found buried on the author’s property in Handy’s (Spy Car and Other Poems, 2016, etc.) thriller.
Maria Pell seems a good choice to write the biography of the recently deceased Edwina Frost, the “Queen of Horror Fiction.” She and Edwina both taught at the same university, and Edwina’s nephew, U.S. Senate hopeful Hugh Bentley, feels that Maria will be more sympathetic than others who might be looking for dirt. Around the same time, authorities find skeletal remains of a 1yearold boy on Edwina’s land. The boy’s body had been in the ground for half a century, and his head trauma suggests murder. Maria, who’s communed with dead poets before, believes that Edwina’s spirit may be aggressively trying to reach her. Maria reads Edwina’s unfinished manuscript, but it doesn’t get her mind off the dead boy, especially when she considers the possibility that Edwina or her despised sister, Louise, had a secret child. There are plenty of other things to make Maria anxious, as well, such as an anonymous caller warning her not to delve into the writer’s life, and her feeling that someone (or something) is with her in Edwina’s house. But one threat lies closer to home: Maria is certain her lover, Mathieu, is having an affair with coquettish neighbor Sybi. Overall, Handy’s novella is more mystery than horror. The author smartly keeps the existence of Edwina’s spirit predominantly ambiguous; as a result, readers will think that there’s a good chance she’s only in Maria’s head. Edwina, in fact, seems more like a manifestation of negative feelings, from her own animosity toward her sister to Maria’s envy of the younger Sybi. Mystery abounds regarding the boy’s identity and that of his killer, which Maria ultimately unravels. The status of Mathieu’s fidelity, too, is unknown until the end, and Maria’s perspective on it will earn readers’ sympathy, even when she eavesdrops on him. She becomes more unhinged as the story continues; Handy doesn’t make it easy for readers, who will wonder whether Maria is possessed by the need to find Edwina’s truth, by a vengeful spirit, or perhaps by both.
A mystery novel with a sympathetic protagonist whose apparent descent into madness makes her no less riveting.
Spy Car and Other Poems is Lynne Handy’s debut chapbook. The locales of her poetry range from an excavation site in Greece to a modern city street where she finds Tupac’s rose thrusting up through the concrete. In her work, she embodies the hard-headed realism of her Yankee forebears, but also digs into southern roots to bring forth mystery and longing. The poet’s love for history is reflected in many of her verses. Some poems are brazenly personal, revealing harsh secrets. Spy Car is a journey for the adventurous.
If poetry is a car, this debut collection hums and purrs like an expertly tuned machine.
Good poetry is about pressure—how much force one can pack into, and wring from, the fewest words—and it’s clear from the get-go that Handy is fully aware of the nature of that struggle. One can hear it in “Something Like a Sonnet for Lucie Brock-Broido,” when she writes, “she lifts her pen to torque / A primer for divining spells.” Much can be divined from the poet’s choice of the verb “torque.” Another author might have opted for the more conventional word “write.” Torque, by contrast, is rotational force: the power that carries an object around a fixed point, and with this simple word, Handy gives readers a whole picture—of pen pressed down to page on the fulcrum of a poet’s knuckle. Poetry, she seems to say, is pressure and, thus, work. Her verse is chock full of such little joys, of words and phrases that, when pressed, give way to images, stories, and worlds. A high point is the title poem, in which the speaker marvels at her grandson’s rehabilitation of an old sports car: “he replaced / the brakes, ignition, clutch hydraulics, / pumps, belts, hoses, and the choke. / Its bracken chassis overhauled, / the vintage MGB positively preened.” Later, the young mechanic takes her on a ride, and they sweep “along Illinois highways, / eyes riveted through a shared windshield.” To her credit, Handy doesn’t romanticize the relationship between grandmother and grandchild, but she does show what they hold in common: the clear windshield, the road, or perhaps the work. This is a book about rehabilitating language, and readers are sure to enjoy the ride.
A book that takes old words, spruces them up, and puts them out on the highway again.
It is 1949 in a seaside town in Mexico, and Caterina lives happily as a cherished daughter of a wealthy family. She has only one worry: she has no early memories of her childhood. Increasingly, strange images drift into her mind—a gazebo, a farm, a blonde woman. She has no idea that she is really someone named Cate Miller, who was kidnapped from her Indiana farm family ten years earlier. In her fifteenth year, her life changes again. This time she will remember the past.
Cate survives an automobile accident in California that kills her Mexican parents. The police uncover her true identity and return her to her biological family, who gave her up for dead years ago. Against a backdrop of social change, Cate, who is tied to both the past and the present, struggles to achieve her dreams. A Catholic, she believes in the tenets of her faith with childlike obedience—but as she learns more of life, she finds a less orthodox route to the divine through the poems of Federico García Lorca.
This is an epic, sweeping story that sneaks up on you. It traces a complex life in a not so simple era. The themes are courageous – race, religion, guilt, loss, longing, fate, family dynamics and cultural differences. You’ll find more if you look. The story leaves you satisfied in a way you may not expect. I’m glad I picked it up. – Char
I was intrigued enough by the back cover description of this book to agree to read it. But I gave no promise that I would like it or that I would write about it.
Well… Here I am.
Writing about it.
About 50 pages into the nearly 500 page book… our little 15 year old Mexican protagonist finds her world turned completely upside down.
Curious about the lack of baby pictures and her family’s strange answers when she has questions about her early childhood memories; she isn’t hugely shocked when she discovers she is NOT the daughter of a wealthy coastal Mexican family. She is returned to her real ‘family’ and realizes her world was previously turned upside down back when she was 5 years old and was abducted away from her bland Indiana farm family.
Here she is in a 1950s Midwestern farm community. Passionately Catholic. Lively and curious, plus affectionate, well-read and in love with the poetry of her literary hero Federico Garcia Lorca. Yet her new-old-real-but-seem-fake family is stingy in their affection and at one time might have been religious but currently helped tear down the old church to farm more land.
Who are these people? And where are her true roots?
See my full review on my blog… GoodNCrazy.com
Lynne Handy has written an attention-grabbing book entitled In the Time of Peacocks. The story spans two countries, Mexico and the United States, and several generations.
We follow Catarina Montserrat y Vega as she survives a devastating automobile accident that kills her parents. Her recovery unravels an old mystery and an even larger life-changing event for her.
She yearns for her pleasant life in Gaviotas de Plata, Mexico, as she strives to accept her new life and family in the United States. We meet her mother, father and 2 sisters, who are the antithesis of her personal beliefs. Later, we meet her future husband, Joel, and her new friends, as well as several ancillary characters.
Catarina finds it difficult to accept her new life, but eventually settles on her new name, Cate Miller and her new identity in the Miller household.
“It was settled! She would be Cate Miller, probably make up with Joel, and when the time came, marry him.”
Ms. Handy weaves several social and religious issues into the lives of the characters in a way that helps the reader understand the different points of references in the story. Ms. Handy’s main characters are well defined in the narrative as well as in their dialogue.
Ms. Handy’s storytelling style is straightforward and easily read. I had to force myself to put the book down so that I could deal with other things demanding my time. Her descriptions are colorful in the Mexican scenes and very meaningful in the United States outlook.
Lynne Handy is a freelance writer and poet. She holds an undergraduate degree in history and a graduate degree in Library and Information Science. She is a member of the OLLI Writers Café, Kentucky State Poetry Society and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Now retired, she lives in Illinois, where she is working on her next book. – Katherine Boyer
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MATT POMROY
Editor: Style / Fashion / Watches / Food / Luxury
Kareem “Biggs” Burke On Why The Nike Air Force 1 is The Greatest Sneaker of All Time
mattpomroy / December 13, 2017
Celebrating its 35th anniversary, the Nike Air Force 1 is now indisputably one of the all-time classic sneakers. Kareem “Biggs” Burke was the co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records and he tells Vogue Man about growing up in Harlem, the cultural home of the Air Force 1, and what it means to him…
“Harlem was a melting pot and a lot of things happened in this small space. It’s only about 50 or 60 blocks but people refer to Harlem like it’s a borough or state in itself, and so many things and trends came out of Harlem that it changed the way that people dressed, acted and walked, all around the world.
“The Nike Air Force 1 was something that my crew and I wore a lot and the Air Force 1 became synonymous with Harlem, so they even got the nickname in New York of Uptowns and that just stuck. Now, that made sense to me being a Harlemite, but I guess people from Baltimore wouldn’t want to hear that.
“These sneakers were as aspiration thing for kids growing up in Harlem, especially someone like me who was evicted and lived in a shelter for quite a few years. When I eventually got my first pair of Air Force 1s – the first sneakers of any kind that I bought with my own money – it was like, “I finally made it” because I’d seen people wearing them all the time and I couldn’t afford it. When you’re hungry and you see someone eating pizza all the time, time you get some it’s like, best pizza in the world. When I could buy my first pair that was a great day.
The original Nike Air Force 1 advert. The shoe wasn’t even shown and instead it focused on the air as this was the first sneaker to have the air bubble built in that would become synonymous with Nike shoes in the second half of the decade.
“The fact it became a Harlem thing was by chance. Kids just started wearing them and it was something that exploded. You’d usually knew if someone was from Harlem by the way they dressed, talked or even walked, but you saw the Nike Air Force 1 that would be the first signal that this guy must be from Harlem. By 1988 it was a cultural phenomenon. I was in tenth grade and everyone in Harlem was wearing the sneaker at that time.
“Nike was dominating so much back then in New York and that’s what everyone I knew was wearing. Adidas was a bit earlier on, but Harlem and Nike were synonymous. It was an easy match and made sense.
The Nike Air Force 1 original three-quarter size.
“Back in the 1980s, it was pretty common for people to chase you for your trainers. People would get mugged for sneakers, especially if you weren’t from that neighborhood. Kids would chase you to get your sneakers. It never happened to me, luckily.
People would get mugged for sneakers, especially if you weren’t from that neighborhood
“They were currency back then, but it’s funny because they’re even more currency now if you think about the resale market. So, I’m sure the same thing is happening to some extent in those neighborhoods, but back then it was a real thing. More kids in the ‘80s would hang about outside together on the street, but now with social media things are more spread out and you don’t have the same activities in the neighborhoods.
“Hip hop, basketball and sneakers all feed off each other 100%. When you’re playing basketball and you’re on that layup line you’re either listening to music that they’re playing or you’ve got your headphones on to get you in that zone for whatever game it is that you’re about to play.
“But at that time all the hip hop artists wanted to be athletes and athletes wanted to be hip hop artists. Now though, the athletes may not want to be the hip hop artists but they want to emulate the lifestyle and now they have the money they do what hip hop artists do, with the fashions and jewelry.
I was buying 100 pairs at a time and for seven years I only wore a pair of sneakers once
“When I was at Rock-a-Fella records I was buying 100 pairs at a time. I only wore a sneaker once and went seven years without wearing the same pair of sneakers twice. A friend of mine—rest in peace—Ali Mo, once pointed out that I had scuffs on my sneakers and I thought, “never again” so for six or seven years I went without wearing the same pair of sneakers twice.
“After I’d worn them I’d either give them to family members or take them up to Harlem and give them to kids in the area. The Air Force 1 was definitely the main sneaker that I wore during this time, but I would play with Nike Dunks and Air Jordans too.
“In the newer releases of theAir Force 1s the silhouette has stayed the same but they’ve upgraded the leather and people are clamoring to it again. But really, it’s the sole of sneaker culture. The silhouette is one of the best silhouettes made ever in sneakers.
“The Nike Air Force 1 is the number one. Period. It’s just so classic – we play basketball in it, we wore it to hang out, to go to clubs, to wear everyday, it was everything and became a uniform.”
For Vogue Man Arabia
December 13, 2017 in Interview, Style. Tags: fashion, menswear, music, new york, nike, rap, shoes, Style, trainers
Why Puma’s Yassine Saidi is the Most Influential Man in Streetwear
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Exit Notes
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Millicent Todd Bingham
Millicent Todd Bingham - Millicent Todd Bingham (February 5, 1880–December 1, 1968) was the daughter of astronomer David Todd and writer Mabel Loomis Todd, who penned the first popular science book on eclipses and who, through a maelstrom of complicated family dynamics and antagonisms, ended up as the steward of Emily Dickinson’s body of work. For two decades, Mabel had been the lover of the poet’s brother. Amazon.in - Buy Peru: A Land of Contrasts book online at best prices in India on Amazon.in. Read Peru: A Land of Contrasts book reviews & author details and. Here are a few titles I’ve gathered from my ongoing hunt for good books, including novels to anticipate in 2019, more Lucia Berlin stories, and the 2017 Prix Goncourt winner..
Tufts University professor Julie Dobrow, who is currently writing a dual mother/daughter biography of Mabel and Millicent, will speak as part of the Amherst Historical Society’s History Bites Lunchtime lecture series on Friday, May 9. Her talk will focus on Millicent Todd Bingham’s fascinating life and the ways in which she believed her values embodied those of her Puritan ancestors, even two centuries later.. Todd, the beautiful, young and energetic wife of an Amherst College professor, had literary ambitions of her own. She also was peculiarly entwined with members of the Dickinson family, including an intense and passionate extra-marital relationship with Emily and Lavinia’s older brother, Austin. Lavinia (also known as Vinnie) sensed that Mabel would be willing to take on the task of preparing Emily’s poetry. Millicent Todd Bingham and Mabel Loomis Todd. 10480 Millicent Todd Bingham helping her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, edit letters at the "big house" on Hog Island, Maine..
Julie Dobrow’s new book, “After Emily,” details how Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, were instrumental to the fame of Amherst poet Emily Dickinson, shown above.. Though they are primarily known for their work as the women who brought Emily Dickinson’s work to light, Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham’s lives were so much more. Their successes stretched into diverse fields and allowed them to live fulfilling lives.. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955. First Edition. Hardcover. The book, with map endpapers, is Near Fine, with a VG or better unclipped dustjacket fading to spine and light chipping to spine head and tail . INSCRIBED by Bingham to a friend on half-title page in May 1955. Bingham’s mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, was the first editor with.
Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham. Harper and Brothers. $3.00. Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson..
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Global Business News
India’s Foreign Collaborations
Growing Wings Globally
By Mehk Chakraborty Posted On: June 2017 in Industry , News - Biz@India ,
The aviation industry in India, that aims to become the largest in the world by 2030, has found a boost in global players.
India is the ninth largest civil aviation market in the world and is poised to become the third largest aviation market by 2020. The country’s aviation industry has seen a boost from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and collaboration, which is now permitted up to a 100 pc in many categories under the sector. With an inclination of turning to a public-private partnership model for development of airports, growth in low cost carriers, enhanced regional connectivity and policy changes to ease FDI, India is looking to sustain the momentum of its growth in the aviation sector.
Investment rules
The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), India’s oldest business organisation that routinely releases reports on a number of industries, co-authored a report in early 2016 that predicted India’s rapid growth in aviation. The report, with KPMG’s input, highlighted how, “The National Civil Aviation Policy (NCAP 2016) is likely to provide a significant fillip to the industry. The various fiscal and monetary incentives, liberal policies focused on ‘ease of doing business’ and enhanced push for regional and global connectivity are extremely positive.”
The NCAP 2016, with inputs from the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) stated that up to 100 pc FDI is allowed on airports, with an automatic route for greenfield airports and government approval required after 74 pc in brownfield airports. Maintenance and Repair Overhaul (MRO) organisations, flying and training institutes and ground handling services, with security and sectoral regulation clearance allows 100 pc FDI. India’s current FDI policies also give way for 100 pc investment in certain airport transport services, which are non-scheduled, alongside helicopter and seaplane services. Investment requiring government approval above 49 pc for foreign organisations and individuals, but 100 pc for Non-Resident Indian (NRIs), includes sectors of scheduled and regional air transport service.
The past few years in India have seen a push to attract FDI in numerous industries and the aviation industry in the country is no exception. Data shared by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) shows FDI inflows in air transport (including air freight) from April 2000 to March 2016 standing at a staggering EUR 835.70 million. “Indian aviation offers significant long-term opportunities for global aviation players. The Indian government and industry are already working together closely,” said Sidharth Birla, the former president of FICCI, when the report on aviation was launched. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) also predicts that by 2034, it is expected that Asia-Pacific will be the biggest market for global aviation.
Invested in India
India has already seen an upward trajectory in terms of investments from global players such as Airbus and Boeing in the civil aviation industry. As far as collaboration, merger and acquisition deals go, according to data provided by the Government of India (GoI), examples include Etihad Airways, Jet Airways, Tata Group, Singapore Airlines as well as AirAsia. In a major collaboration to build machine parts Airbus SAS signed an agreement with Karnataka-based Aequs Aerospace to supply over 100,000 titanium machined parts for its A320 new engine option aircraft. In a joint venture, American plane maker Boeing Company, and Tata Advanced Systems Ltd (TASL), a fully owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, are set to manufacture c.
“The world is focused on Indian aviation – from manufacturers, tourism boards, airlines and global businesses to individual travellers, shippers and businessmen. If we can find common purpose among all stakeholders in Indian aviation, a bright future is at hand,” said Tony Tyler, former director general and CEO, International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Keen to boost international ties, MoCA has signed various Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with countries such as Finland, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Oman and Ethiopia. Through these MoUs, India looks to boost co-operation between the countries in terms of additional seats, sharing of airlines codes, increased frequencies and additional points of call. This was undertaken in Turkey during the International Civil Aviation Negotiations (ICAN) 2015.
Collaborative outlook
Various government bodies in the country are looking to enhance further collaborations and projects with foreign players who aren’t plain investors. These bodies participate in international forums and serve as platforms for boosting foreign presence in the country while handling policy at the same time. The AAI under MoCA in India takes care of the creation, upgradation, maintenance and management of civil aviation infrastructure both on the ground and air space in the country. As a member of an independent body of worldwide airports, Airports Council International, AAI has tried to learn from global bodies on best practices, regulations and safety measures, which it later translates into the workings of the Indian aviation sector.
The aviation sector regulator for India, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has set up an International Cooperation Group (ICG). The group handles all the international programmes with organisations on matters relating to policy, technical, and safety matters with the main aim of enhancement of aviation safety in India. It is an organisation that is increasingly collaborating with foreign players, through MoUs, for a number of institutes and projects. The DGCA has also signed an agreement with United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) for India Aviation Safety Technical Assistance Phase II, to bring in systemic improvements in the area of operation, airworthiness and licensing. Dr Guruprasad Mohapatra, chairman, AAI, states that, “AAI collaborates with many foreign players, for sharing best practices, experiences, technology and training. The government of India with the US Trade Development Authority has a MoU with MITRE, for technical and managerial assistance in development of a technical research and development centre in ANS activities.” He adds, “We are also organising Air Navigation Service Provider Management Advanced Master Programme at Hyderabad, which is a joint project between Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (ENAC), French National Aviation University affiliate of DGAC, French Civil Aviation Authority and Civil Aviation Training College (CATC), AAI.”
Some challenges ahead
Due to the booming growth of the aviation sector, multiple investment opportunities are available, yet two key areas remain where foreign and private players can invest, while also contributing to the strengthening of the aviation sector. One of the opportunities of investment is in MRO facilities in the country. As Union Budget 2016-17 reforms show, MRO operations have been given attention by the government. Another such opportunity is in the Indian airports themselves, which the AAI hopes to develop more of, in order to make 250 airports in the country operational by 2020.
A major challenge that remains though is the lack of skilling, which applies to all technical fields in India, including aviation as a key sector. However, with foreign investment, interest, collaboration and projects aiming to change the same, skilling in aviation sector is gaining ground. Recently, Airbus announced setting up of a first-of-its kind Centre of Excellence for aviation skills training, in collaboration with government of Telangana, National Skill Development Corporation India and Aerocampus France. These kind of initiatives where knowledge exchange takes place, can go a long way.
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Darłowo – ducal castle
plan of the castle in the 14th century according to J. Nekanda-Trepka
reconstruction of the first phase of the castle from the second half of the 14th century according to J. Nekanda-Trepka
plan of the expansion of the castle according to Z.Radacki
In 1352, the area of the island on the Wieprza River and Mill Canal in Darłowo was bought by the prince of Słupsk, Bogusław V. Shortly thereafter, a brick castle was built. The work of Bogusław V was such a representative building, that in 1372 a congress of Pomeranian dukes took place in its walls. The successor of Bogusław V, Kazimierz IV, survived his father by only 4 years and probably did not pay too much attention to Darłowo. Only prince Warcisław VII could complete the construction during his reign in the years 1377 – 1394. After the death of Warcisław, a widow lived there, Adelaide of Brunswick, and her brother-in-law, Barnim V moved his residence to Słupsk.
The castle regained its interest in 1449, when the dethroned king of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the son of Warcisław VII, Eryc I, took refuge in it after the escape from Visby. In 1449-1459 he rebuilt the castle following the model of his former seat, Kronborg castle.
After the death of Eric in 1459, the eastern part of the Wolgast Duchy was taken over by the princely line from Wolgast in the person of Eryc II. The prince stayed mainly in the castles of Słupsk and Szczecinek, and Darłowo was used by the separated wife of Eryc II – Zofia, who in 1454 gave birth to the prince Bogusław X in Darłowo castle. He took over the rule of the Szczecin-Słupsk Duchy in 1474, and after four years as the only heir had already ruled the whole, unified West Pomeranian Duchy. The small dimensions of the courtyard of the Darłowo castle were probably the reason for prince Bogusław X’s subsequent expansion of the castle. However, it was still too small for the growing needs of the prince’s court. The initiator of another expansion, significantly changing the silhouette of the castle was prince Barnim XI in the first half of the 16th century.
In 1622, prince Bogusław XIV handed over the castle to Denmark, and in 1773, the king of Denmark, Christian VII Oldenburg, handed over the castle to king of Prussia, Frederick II the Great. The stronghold gradually lost its importance and underwent significant, early modern transformations, especially after the fires in 1624, 1679 and 1680. In 1830, the western wing was demolished and a part of the deteriorated stronghold (southern wing) was adopted as a prison. Eventually, during the interwar period, the castle was renovated and transformed into a museum.
second phase of expansion from around 1449-1459
third phase of expansion from around 1480
fourth phase of expansion from the first half of the 16th century
The first castle was erected on the largest of the four islands, surrounded by a moat from the north, and from the west by the waters of the Wieprza River. From the south, the castle was adjoined by wood and earth outer ward with a brick gatehouse leading to the island. According to later inventories, the outer ward housed a brewery, bakery, stables and garden.
The castle was built on a square plan with dimensions of 31×35 meters. Two gates led to it: one in a high, 23-meter, four-sided, three-story tower extended by 3.4 meters in front of the southern curtain and equipped with a foregate, and the other, leading to the town, which had a double passage for pedestrians and horses. The bartyzan was hanging above it. The south gate tower was to protect the castle, the town and the port from an unexpected attack from outside. In its ground floor, apart from the gateway, there was an annex for the doorman. On the first floor there was a chapel, as indicated by a niche with smaller niches on the sides, rich blendes profiling and rib vault. The only connection with the chapel was a staircase, placed in the thickness of the outer wall with the passage to the ground floor of the southern wing. From this also a separate string of stairs in the thickness of the walls reached the second floor of the gate tower, housing a windowless chamber designed for the treasury. The room on the third floor served the guards, and the tower was topped with a battlement. Under the gate passage there was also a vaulted prison cell, accessible from the east wing.
The internal development consisted of several buildings added to the walls along the eastern and southern curtains. On the eastern side, a three-storey residential building for the crew was built, connected on the ground floor with a large, four-span hall, which served as a representative knight’s hall (6 x 21 meters), illuminated from the courtyard with four large ogival windows. From the courtyard, one entered it through a south, wide, windowless vestibule, which, like the great hall, was originally covered with a wooden ceiling. The staircase in the wall thickness led to the first floor. In the north wall from the side of the courtyard there was an entrance to the staircase leading to the porch of the guards in the crown of the walls. Originally this entrance was located about 1 meter above the ground. In the south-east corner, a two-storey residential building, called Zwischenbau in the sources, was erected and was probably intended for the prince’s administrator. The tower was adjoined by a double-bay south wing, the largest building at that time, which housed a hall in which the castle’s life was concentrated and on the floors the residential rooms of the prince’s family. In the first phase, the castle received a modest exterior decor, limited to decorative blendes and friezes above the gates. The perimeter walls, about 15 meters high, had shooting holes at the porch height.
plan of cellars according to Z.Radacki: A-period 1352-1373, B-period 1377-1394, C-period 1449-1459, D-around 1480, E-around 1538, F-period 1624-1630
cross-section of the gate tower according to Z. Radacki
plan of the second and third storey of the gate tower according to Z. Radacki
The fifteenth-century stage of the extension of Eryc I enriched the design of the castle. In addition to covering the representative knights’ hall with stellar vault, he erected a two-storey western wing, measuring 23.4 x 7.2 meters, adjacent to the walls. At that time, an external perimeter wall was also created.
Around 1480, at the time of prince Bogusław X, the west wing built by Eric was demolished, and from the outside, along the entire length of the western perimeter wall, a new three-story wing was added (phase III of expansion) with dimensions of 10.6 x 36 meters. From that time it was a representative residential wing. It contained utility rooms on the ground floor and court chambers on the first and second floor. To increase the dimensions of the courtyard, the prince also dismantled the inner bay of southern wing, which lost its importance, becoming the seat of the administrator of the castle and the knights’ crew.
In the fourth phase of expansion in the first half of the 16th century, prince Barnim XI raised the east wing by two floors, demolished the buildings on the south side and erected a staircase tower in their place. Knight’s hall was than extended by one span northwards, and the tower was increased by an additional utility and defense floor, reaching 26 meters in height. In 1571, a new gate building was erected on the rectangular plan on the north side. Above the passage, it housed utility rooms.
The castle has survived to modern times without the demolished western wing and part of the east wing near the gate tower. The original silhouette of the castle was also changed by the piercing of early modern windows and reduced, unfortunately, by the loss of the stellar vault in the great hall of the eastern wing. In the restored castle of Pomeranian dukes, you can visit the high tower, birds exhibition, maritime exhibition with many thematic expositions, antique furnitures, torture tools and the collection of eastern art. The dates and times of the castle opening can be seen on the official website here.
castle gate in main tower, photo: J.Strzelecki Wikimedia Commons
castle from the north side
main castle tower and sixteenth-century turret with a staircase
Leksykon zamków w Polsce, L.Kajzer, S.Kołodziejski, J.Salm, Warszawa 2003.
Pilch.J, Kowalski S., Leksykon zabytków Pomorza Zachodniego i ziemi lubuskiej, Warszawa 2012.
Radacki Z., Średniowieczne zamki Pomorza Zachodniego, Warszawa 1976.
Webpage zamekdarlowo.pl, Historia zamku.
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LimKitSiang.com
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Depressing to catch up on developments back home in past nine days after being abroad
It is depressing to catch up on developments back home in the past nine days after being abroad.
The country seems to be stuck in time, dominated by petty issues with the obsession of navel-gazing instead of being inspired by great dreams and aspirations for the people and country.
The speech by the UMNO Deputy President, Mohamad Hasan that the 15th general election will be called by next year is the typical example of such narcissistic preoccupation Mohamad Hassan said when officiating the Sepang UMNO division meeting: "Don't worry, this is a half-term government, not a one-term government. It will not last.
"I am confident Pakatan Harapan won't last long. I expect the election would be called between May to December next year."
It is a triple irony that Hassan has unfurled the banner of Pakatan Harapan as a half-term instead merely a one-term government hours after Ahmad Zahid Hamidi unilaterally announced his return from garden leave to resume the mantle of UMNO President, which was itself hours after former UMNO President Najib Abdul Razak had prepared the ground for Zahid’s return from garden leave by declaring that Zahid does not require consent from the party’s supreme council to make his return as held by other UMNO leaders, like Khairy Jamaluddin.
At first, UMNO leaders who had never expected to be ousted in the 14th General Election consoled themselves with the belief that their sojourn in the wilderness will be a very short one as the Pakatan Harapan government would disintegrate in a matter of months because of inter and intra party differences of the Pakatan Harapan parties.
But as the few months dragged into more months without any sign of Pakatan Harapan disintegration, the three by-elections in Sungai Kandis, Seri Setia and Balakong were used as building blocks for creating the MCA/UMNO/PAS unholy alliance to topple the Pakatan Harapan government before 15th General Election in 2023.
The MCA/UMNO/PAS get-together was the most irresponsible, unprincipled, toxic and opportunistic alliance in Malaysian history as it is not founded on principles or any noble objective, but based on the selfish interests of the leaders to topple the Pakatan Harapan Government to save many of them from long jail sentences for corruption and to return to the kleptocracy, abuses of power and injustices of the Najib government which was thrown out peacefully and democratically in the 14th General Election on May 9, 2018.
This unholy alliance with the superimposed “Malu Apa Bossku” campaign seemed to have developed some traction in the Cameron Highlands, Semenyih and Rantau by-elections, but the momentum of these three by-elections were pulverised by the historic Pakatan-Warisan victory in the Sandakan by-election, which also rendered a knockout blow to the “Malu Apa Bossku” campaign.
This morning, Vivian Goh was sworn in as Member of Parliament for Sandakan after polling a historic 16,012 votes, winning with a stunning majority of 11,521 votes in the by-election on May 11, 2019.
It took nearly two months for the Opposition to recover from the Sandakan blow, as talk of a one-term Pakatan Harapan government vanished but such a chicanery has returned with a vengeance with the new talk of a “half-term government”.
In the past six decades, Malaysia has slipped down the international rankings of excellence and good governance, losing out to countries which were previously at par or more backward than Malaysia like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and even to countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Malaysians regardless of race, religion, region or politics should be united with a common Malaysian Dream to establish a New Malaysia as a top world-class nation, now that Malaysians have saved Malaysia from the trajectory of a failed, rogue and kleptocratic state.
But this does not appear to be the case, with a sex video continuing to haunt and hound the nation in the past nine days while the national conference of a religious-based political party held recently was oiled with lies and falsehoods to engender hate and distrust of race against race, religion against religion, culture against culture – the recipe for disaster for any multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural nation.
Can Malaysians unite to build a New Malaysia where we can become a top world-class nation in every field of human endeavour; compete with the rest of the world instead of dissipating our energies and resources fighting among ourselves; restore the rule of law and good governance, and transform a global kleptocracy into a leading nation in integrity?
We are told today that Islam does not allow declaration of assets, but to these same people, Islam has not stopped them from spreading lies and falsehoods, sowing hatred and distrust, as well as support kleptocrats, kleptocracy and abuses of power.
In the second year of Pakatan Harapan government, we must see more progress to establish the fundamental principles of a New Malaysia and reset nation-building policies to achieve the five pillar promises of the Pakatan Harapan General Election Manifesto, viz:
Reduce the people’s burden;
Institutional and political reforms;
Spur sustainable and equitable economic growth;
Return Sabah and Sarawak to the status accorded in Malaysia Agreement 1963; and
Create a Malaysia that is inclusive, moderate and respected globally.
It is not possible to achieve a New Malaysia overnight but the Pakatan Harapan Manifesto for the 14th General Election must remain the lodestar to guide Malaysia towards the achievement of the Malaysian Dream by all Malaysians, regardless of race, religion, region or politics.
Lim Kit Siang MP for Iskandar Puteri
Media statement by Lim Kit Siang in Parliament on Monday, 1st July 2019
DapMalaysia.org
RoketKini.com
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September 2016 , Volume 35, Issue 3, pp 1011–1011 | Cite as
The piggybacking stingray
Mark G. Meekan
Luke Trevitt
Colin A. Simpfendorfer
Reef Site
Electronic Supplementary Material Indian Ocean Coastal Water Host Species Indonesia
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s00338-016-1429-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
The pink whipray, Himantura fai, is a large (maximum disc width 146 cm) ray that occurs in coastal soft-sediment habitats in the Indian Ocean, northern Australia and parts of Southeast Asia to Micronesia in the western Pacific (Last and Stevens 2009). Behaviourally, the species is unique because multiple individuals often piggyback on members of the same species (Last and Stevens 2009) and on other, larger stingrays. The photographs shown in Fig. 1 were taken in 2015 in water 20–30 m deep at the wreck of the Yongala off Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef (19°18.274′ S, 147°37.341′ E) and show pink whiprays piggybacking on a smalleye stingray (Dasyatis microps, distributed in the Indo-West Pacific from Mozambique to Arafura Sea; Fig. 1a is a new record of the occurrence of this species in Australian coastal waters) and on the blotched fantail ray (Taeniurops meyeni; Fig. 1b). The reasons for this behaviour are unknown, although it has been observed for this species in other locations such as Indonesia and the Maldives (W. White pers. obs.). One possibility is that piggybacking is a predator defence strategy that allows the smaller rays to appear larger than they actually are and breaks up silhouettes on which predators can focus. There may also be some hydrodynamic or foraging advantage to the smaller rays in travelling with larger species in this manner, although this does not explain why these rays piggyback on other rays resting on the seabed (see Electronic Supplementary Material, ESM, Fig. S1) or at cleaning stations. Reports of interspecific behavioural interactions among elasmobranchs, other than in the context of predation, are relatively rare. A better understanding of the piggybacking behaviour and associated advantages it provides to the pink whiprays (and possibly also the host species) may help to identify key evolutionary drivers of stingray behaviour and ecology.
a Pink whipray, Himantura fai, piggybacking on a smalleye stingray (Dasyatis microps) swimming near the seabed. In other photographs of this event (ESM Fig. S1), a group of 6–11 pink whiprays can be seen accompanying the smalleye stingray. b Pink whiprays piggybacking on a blotched fantail ray (Taeniurops meyeni) at a cleaning station. Note the cleaner wrasses Labroides dimidiatus on the dorsal surface of the rays
338_2016_1429_MOESM1_ESM.tif (11.6 mb)
Supplementary material 1 (TIFF 11857 kb)
Last PR, Stevens JD (2009) Sharks and rays of Australia. CSIRO Publishing, MelbourneGoogle Scholar
1.Australian Institute of Marine SciencePerthAustralia
2.Yongala DiveAlvaAustralia
3.College of Marine and Environmental SciencesJames Cook UniversityTownsvilleAustralia
4.CSIRO Australian National Fish CollectionHobartAustralia
Meekan, M.G., Trevitt, L., Simpfendorfer, C.A. et al. Coral Reefs (2016) 35: 1011. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-016-1429-9
Accepted 25 February 2016
International Coral Reef Society
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The Emigrant Communities of Latvia
The Emigrant Communities of Latvia pp 35-68 | Cite as
Emigration from Latvia: A Brief History and Driving Forces in the Twenty-First Century
Mihails Hazans
Part of the IMISCOE Research Series book series (IMIS)
In recent years, Latvia has established itself as one of the top two countries with the most intensive emigration among EU/EFTA member states. This chapter starts by describing the demographic context and the scale of emigration post-2000, followed by a brief history of the main population flows (migration, refugees and deportation) from and to Latvia in the twentieth century. It then offers a more detailed analysis of emigration during the first 15 years of the twenty-first century including a closer look at the four waves of recent emigration: (i) the pre-EU accession wave, 2000–2003; (ii) the post-accession wave, 2004–2008; (iii) the crisis-driven wave, 2009–2010; and (iv) the post-crisis wave, 2011–2016. For each wave, description of the economic and social context is given within a conceptual framework using insights from human capital theory, the new economic theory of migration, network theory and migration systems theory. Institutional factors are also emphasised. Together with some survey-based evidence, this leads to a set of hypotheses about the nature of the four emigration waves. Our own compilation of data from receiving countries (which reveals problems with Latvia’s official migration statistics) is used for documenting the dynamics of the scale and main destinations of this emigration. Empirical analysis of the changes in the reasons for and intended duration of emigration, its effects on the structure and demographic potential of the population and changes in emigrant profiles and selectivity with respect to human capital and ethnicity is based on a number of independent data sources, including the Latvian Labour Force Survey (2000–2015), the Database of Immigrants in OECD Countries (DIOC 2010/2011), and The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey conducted worldwide in 2014.
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In recent years, Latvia has experienced waves of intense emigration, establishing it as one of the worst-affected among EU/EFTA member states. This is true with respect to both post-crisis emigration rates of working-age nationals (Fries-Tersch et al. 2017, Fig. 7–8) and the total (as of 2015) mobility rates of working-age nationals (Fries-Tersch et al. 2017, Fig. 9).1 Remarkably, this finding is robust with respect to data source: the emigration rates come from migration statistics, while mobility rates are based on EU Labour Force Survey (LFS) data.
Emigration from Latvia is an interesting subject not only because of its intensity. In many other high emigration countries, population is a redundant factor, but this is not the case in Latvia. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, loss of population due to emigration has been reinforced by negative natural change in all three Baltic countries, as well as in Bulgaria and Romania (Fig. 3.1). In 17 years (2000–2016), Latvia and Lithuania have lost the largest population shares (about 20%) among EU countries. Moreover, Latvia and Lithuania are among the top three countries (after Bulgaria) with the largest negative natural population changes during this period.
Fig. 3.1
Natural change of population and net migration, 2000–2016. EU28+Norway. (Source: Calculation with Eurostat data. For the Baltic countries data and Poland, the migration statistics of destination countries have been used to correct national net migration data (see Hazans 2013, 2015a, 2016a, 2017a), thus increasing estimates of net migration outflows by 0.7–1.9 points for the Baltic countries and by 4.6 points for Poland)
This contrasts with positive demographic developments in the main destination countries of Baltic migrants – the UK, Ireland, the Nordic countries, and Germany. Only Germany features negative natural change, but it is not as big as in Latvia and has been more than compensated by positive net migration (Fig. 3.1).
Natural decrease of Latvia’s population has been driven both by low total fertility rate (TFR)2 and high mortality (especially among men).
Latvia’s population is ageing steadily. Between 2000 and 2015 the percentage share of children and teenagers shrank, while the shares of those aged 40–64 and especially 65+ grew. The working-age population in Latvia is shrinking faster than in any OECD country except Japan (OECD 2016). In that period 2000–2015, the old age dependency ratio (OADR, 65+/15–64) in Latvia was higher and growing faster than in the main destination countries of Latvian migrants (except for Germany). According to the Eurostat baseline projection, by 2050 this ratio is expected to reach 60%, compared to 51% in Germany, 46% in Ireland and 40% in the UK and Norway (Fig. 3.2; see Fries-Tersch et al. 2017, Fig. 15 for similar evidence regarding OADR 65+/20–64 in 2030).
Old age dependency ratio 2000–2015 and forecast for 2020–2050. Latvia and the main destination countries of Latvian emigrants. (Source: Eurostat data and main scenario projections. Note: The old age dependency ratio (OADR) is the ratio of population aged 65+ to those aged 15–64)
While at the start of the twenty-first century (covering the period 2000–2016) Latvia has been a country of labour emigration, in the twentieth century Latvia saw periods of economically motivated immigration, times of humanitarian catastrophes and associated outflows of refugees and displaced persons, as well as mass deportations during periods of occupation and episodes of ethnically and politically driven emigration. There was also mass immigration of labour and military personnel which was centrally planned by the Soviet regime and, in addition, immigration of their families.
This chapter starts with a brief history of the main population flows (migration, refugees and deportation) from and to Latvia in the twentieth century before describing the scale, main destinations and dynamics of emigration in the early twenty-first century, as well as its effect on the size and demographic potential of the population. It proceeds by analysing the four waves of recent emigration:
The pre-EU accession wave, 2000–2003;
The post-accession wave, 2004–2008;
The crisis-driven wave, 2009–2010 and
The post-crisis wave, 2011–2016.
The economic and social contexts of these emigration waves will be considered and a conceptual framework and set of hypotheses about their nature will be offered, using the human capital theory, the new economic theory of migration and the network theory, and institutional factors will be emphasised. The chapter also analyses changes in ethnic composition and educational profile of the four waves of emigrants.
Issues such as labour market outcomes and the life satisfaction of emigrants and returnees will not be considered, nor will the economic impact of emigration (see Hazans 2013, 2015d, 2016a, c, 2017a, b, 2018).
3.2 Latvian Migration in the Twentieth Century3
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. During the second part of the nineteenth century, after the end of indentured servitude and gradual lifting of other restrictions on human mobility, intensive rural-urban migration resulted in rapid urban growth. Riga’s population almost quadrupled between 1863 and 1897. Growing cities attracted economic migrants from other parts of the Russian empire as well as from Germany and other European countries. At the same time, substantial numbers of Latvians moved outside Latvia’s territory. By the end of the nineteenth century more than 10% of all ethnic Latvians were part of diaspora, including 112,000 in the Russian Empire (spread from provinces nearby Latvia to Siberia) and 35,000 living in the West.
‘Migration systems’ (see Bakewell 2014 and references therein) to and from Latvia kept working in the early part of the twentieth century. Russian, German and Jewish communities in Latvian cities and towns were strong and to some extent self-sufficient, and knowledge of Russian, German and other languages was widespread. These were important elements of inward migration systems which, in turn, strengthened these communities. By 1913, only one-third of Riga’s residents were native born. Most of Riga’s adult population spoke both Latvian and another language: 80% of men and two-thirds of women aged 20+, according to the 1925 census. Outside Riga this rate was lower, but it was still significant: above 50% among men and almost 30% among women.4
Apart from economic migrants, significant numbers of Jewish refugees from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland entered Latvia (and other Baltic provinces) in the 1880s and early twentieth century. This was to escape the growing anti-Semitism and violent pogroms. Economic reasons also played a role in Jewish migration to Latvia, but these are difficult to quantify. Many of these Jewish immigrants moved on, to the United States and Palestine.
Important elements of the migration systems outwards were the numerous well-organised Latvian colonies, organisations and religious communities outside Latvia. There were also special preferential regime for new settlers in many Russian provinces, and by 1897, more than 70 colonies of Latvian farmers were established across the Russian Empire. Many Latvians settled in cities and found jobs as professionals, blue collar or service workers. Between 1897 and 1913, the number of Latvian schools outside the country more than trebled, increasing from 14 to 52, while the size of the Latvian diaspora increased to approximately 220,000, including 45,000 in the West (mostly in the United States). Following the 1905 Revolution about 5000 political refugees and 2652 deportees constituted a relatively small but important part of emigration from Latvia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Despite intensive migration both to and from Latvia, the migration balance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was significantly positive. During the period 1900–1913, the increase in Latvia’s population due to net migration was 13% (nearly 1% per annum) of the initial population, or 264,000 persons5 (see Fig. 3.3).
Net migration and net migration rate by sub-period of the twentieth century (% of the initial population). (Source: Data cited in Zelče (2011) and the National History Museum of Latvia (2016), Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2016a, b, 2017a, b), OECD (2017), and author’s own calculation)
During World War I and the Russian civil war, around one million Latvia’s residents moved to other territories (mostly in Russia) as refugees, displaced persons, evacuees or after being mobilised into armed forces. In 5 years Latvia lost 37% of its population (Fig. 3.3). Around half died outside Latvia, while others settled in Soviet Russia, Estonia, Lithuania and Germany. Less than one-third returned after the war. Many former Latvian soldiers, known as ‘Red Riflemen’ settled in Russia after the war, serving in the new Soviet government’s security forces or as Bolshevik Party functionaries, while others resumed their lives as civilians in some of the Latvian colonies or in cities.
In 1918, the independent Latvian state was created. Over the next 10 years, around 300,000 people returned to Latvia, most of them in the period 1919–1921. Net migration during the 4.5 years between the 1920 and 1925 censuses was 200,000 people, or 13% of the country’s population in 1920 (Fig. 3.3). Political refugees and deportees accounted for a small but not negligible part of these migration flows. More than 10,000 people moved to Soviet Russia or were expelled from Latvia for engaging in ‘anti-state activities’, while around 15,000 moved to Latvia fleeing the Soviet regime.
The period between 1925 and 1938 was characterised by the low intensity of migration. The annual average net migration rate was 0.04% in 1925–1929 and 0.02% in 1930–1938 (Fig. 3.3). Land reform largely eliminated the motivation among farmers to emigrate. The economic situation was perceived as good by the majority of the population. Self-employment accounted for more than 60% of total employment, while the unemployment rate was below 1%. Nevertheless, about 5000 people moved from Latvia to the US between 1920 and 1939, while 2700 moved to Brazil and 4500 to Palestine.
The largest Latvian diasporas in the 1920s and 1930s were found in Soviet Russia (151,400 according to the 1926 census), the US (38,000), Lithuania (30,000), Estonia (12,300) and Brazil (7000).
From a migration perspective, the decade between 1939 and 1949 can be described as an ‘era of displaced persons and refugees’ for Latvia (Zelče 2011, p. 62). In 1939–1940, 51,000 ethnic Germans left for Germany in a ‘repatriation’ programme launched by Hitler’s government. Another 10,500 Germans followed during the winter of 1941, after Latvia’s incorporation into the USSR. Overall, these two waves reduced Latvia’s population by 2.6%.
On 14 June 1941, 15,424 people (0.8% of Latvia’s population) were deported as ‘class enemies’ by the Soviet regime. Some were arrested and sent to camps in Northern parts of Russia. Administrative deportees were settled in Siberia, the Kazakh Republic and elsewhere. About 40% of the 1941 deportees died in camps or in exile. In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR and Latvia was occupied by the Nazis, prompting around 53,000 people to leave Latvia for other regions of the USSR; some were evacuated while others found their way as refugees. Overall, in the period 1939–1941 Latvia lost about 6.6% of its population as repatriates, deportees and refugees (Fig. 3.3).
According to conservative estimates, another 242,000 people (13.4% of the population) were lost due to different types of forced migration in the period 1942–1945. This figure covers:
Those who were mobilised and sent outside Latvia in the ranks of the Nazi army or the Red/Soviet Army (excluding those who were killed during the war);
Those who chose (or were forced) to work in Germany during the war;
Refugees who left Latvia for Germany and other Western countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden) at the end of the war (or immediately after it) to avoid life under the Soviet regime.
The total also accounts for return migration from other parts of the Soviet Union which started in 1945 (estimated inflow in that year is 15,000 persons).
Most refugees, as well as members of the Latvian Legion who had served as soldiers in the German army, ended up in Displaced Persons camps, but in 1947 a programme began to close these camps, and refugees began to move to countries which were ready to receive them. This was the starting point of the post-war wave of the Latvian diaspora. About 45,000 went to the US; Australia and Canada received about 20,000 each; 17,000 ended up in the UK; 15,000 settled in Germany, 4000 in Sweden, 5000 in South America and 5000 elsewhere. One of the key elements facilitating the respective migration systems was the International Refugee Organisation (IRO 1947–1951), succeeded by the UNHCR, as well as Latvian organisations existing previously in the host countries.
Latvia, re-occupied by the Soviet Union since 1945, experienced a mass return of refugees and military personnel between 1946 and 1948, as well as the inflow (partly centrally managed) of migrants from other parts of the Soviet Union. These factors increased Latvia’s population by more than 323,000, or 21%, in just 3 years (Fig. 3.3).
Return migration and immigration continued in 1949–1950, but the migration balance in this period was negative (equalling a loss of almost 16,000 persons, or 0.8% of the population) due to the forced deportation of 42,125 people (2.2% of population) to Siberia or the Far East of the USSR on March 25, 1949. Later (mostly in 1956–1957, after the denunciation of Stalinist repression at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party), around 80% of those exiled in 1949 returned to Latvia (Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia 2017b).
Between 1951 and 1990, immigration into Latvia from other parts of the Soviet Union continued at high (although decreasing) rates: from 9.5% in 1951–1960 to 6.6% in 1961–1970; 5.1% in 1971–1980 and 3.8% in 1981–1989 (Fig. 3.3). As the result, the share of ethnic Latvians in Latvia’s population fell from 77% in 1935 to 52% in 1989.
Key elements which kept this migration system going included:
Centralised decision making on the allocation of resources, including the labour force;
Mandatory prescription of their workplace for university graduates for a period of at least 3 years;
Russian language as the official language in all parts of the Soviet Union;
The standard of living being higher in Latvia (and other Baltic republics) than elsewhere in the Soviet Union (except Moscow and Leningrad).
Emigration from Latvia under the Soviet regime was almost impossible. The exception (which became possible under international pressure) was the emigration of Jews: about 13,000 emigrated to Israel, Germany, the US and Canada between 1968 and 1980, and another 16,000 left in the subsequent 9 years up to 1989. Some Poles and Germans were also able to emigrate thanks to family reunification agreements.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, after the restoration of Latvia’s independence in 1990, the country lost 6.7% of its population to migration in two parallel processes (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4).
Latvia’s net migration 1990–1999, by destination. (Source: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2017c, d) and statistical offices of EFTA countries)
First, especially in the first half of the decade, there was a vast outflow of the Russian-speaking population to Russia and, to a smaller extent, other CIS countries.6 For some of these emigrants this was, in fact, forced family migration: significant numbers of Soviet Army staff had to leave Latvia, and their family members joined them. For many others, emigration was triggered by dramatic changes in a number of fundamental life domains – changes which affected their social and economic status, self-perception, relationships with others and perspectives on life. The political regime changed from being a global superpower, a multi-national Communist empire with the Russian language being both the lingua franca and the main official means of communication, to a neo-liberal national state previously occupied by that very superpower, where the official communication between all state and municipal institutions and the civil and business population was only in the Latvian language. The change of language substantially weakened the labour market position of those without good Latvian language skills (Hazans 2010, 2011a). In addition, many of the large manufacturing enterprises and research institutes closed down in the early 1990s. Some of them had previously been part of the Soviet military-industrial complex which had employed large numbers of the post-war immigrants and their descendants. Finally, citizenship of the new independent state was granted only to those who were citizens of the Latvian Republic between 1918 and 1940 and their descendants, while others were offered a choice between a Latvian ‘non-citizen’ passport or applying for Russian citizenship (see Muižnieks 2006). These ‘push’ factors, together with strong family, social and professional networks the post-war immigrants to Latvia had in Russia and other CIS countries, as well as their relatively easy access to Russian citizenship, contributed to the rise of the Latvia-CIS migration system in the 1990s. Transformation of all 15 Soviet republics into independent nation states also worked as a ‘pull’ factor, as ethnic Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, etc. living in Latvia in Soviet times considered moving back to their respective countries.
Secondly, the fall of the Iron Curtain allowed for pioneer emigration (Bakewell et al. 2011) to the West. This was mostly economically motivated, but also included student migration, international family formation and so on. Both ethnic Latvians and Russian-speakers were found among these pioneers. Some of them relied on help and information support from the rich social infrastructure created in the Western countries by the post-war Latvian refugees (see Zelče 2011, pp. 64–66 and references therein) or from less formal social networks among Russian-speaking emigrants from the Soviet Union in Germany, the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Other pioneers were able to find their own way themselves or by using professional or business contacts in the West acquired while working in Latvia. In the early 1990s, the majority of emigrants to the West went to destinations outside Europe, but it was the other way around in the late 1990s (Fig. 3.4). By the end of the twentieth century, the post-Soviet Latvian diaspora in OECD countries accounted for about 21,000 people (see Fig. 3.5 for details).
Post-Soviet emigrants from Latvia in OECD countries by the end of the twentieth century. (Source: OECD (2008, 2017) and author’s own calculation. Note: UK data refer to 2001. Data for Germany refer to all nationals of Latvia residing in Germany by the end of 1999 and therefore might also include some Soviet-era emigrants)
Finally, there was some return migration in the 1990s of ethnic Latvians (both from the West and from the CIS countries) to Latvia after independence was restored.
During 1989–1999, the net migration of ethnic Latvians was positive at 1.8%, while the net migration of the minority population was negative at −16.8% (Table 3.1). The population share of ethnic Latvians increased from 52% in 1989 to 57.7% in 2000.
Net migration of Latvia’s population by main ethnic groups, 1989–2016
−7.1%
−11.3%
Latvians
Ukrainians
Belarussians
Source: Calculation based on the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2017e, f)
It is likely that data for 1989–1999 over-estimate the absolute net migration of Latvians and minorities because, during this period, Soviet passports were changed to Latvian ones, and many of those born in ethnically mixed families changed their ethnicity from Russian to Latvian, Polish, etc. Data for 2000–2016 rely on the 2011 Census data and therefore should be considered with a degree of care (see Hazans 2013, p. 68, p. 72, pp. 109–110). The data refer to the total migration rather than the migration of nationals
3.3 Emigration of Latvia’s Nationals in the Early Twenty-First Century: The Context, Scale and Main Destinations
Emigration from Latvia in the early twenty-first century was to a large extent shaped by two milestones. First, EU accession in 2004 gave Latvian citizens immediate access to the labour markets of the UK, Ireland and Sweden (as well as of all the new member states), while the other EU-15 countries gradually opened their labour markets during 2006–2011. This new possibility attracted thousands of Latvians. However, the economic crisis in Latvia of 2008–2009 and its economic and social consequences sent even more Latvians abroad, including those who had never considered such a move before.
The driving forces of emigration in the early twenty-first century and the changing profile of emigrants are discussed in greater detail in Sects. 3.5 and 3.6. Here we focus on developments regarding the scale and main destinations of that emigration.
Figure 3.6 presents the outflows of Latvia’s nationals (i.e. holders of Latvian passports: both citizens and non-citizens) to the main OECD destinations and compares the data from receiving countries with the official Latvian emigration statistics. Due to problems in the 2011 Census (see Hazans 2013, p. 68, p. 72, pp. 109–110 for details) the official data have been obtained by an indirect method and it appears that they strongly over-estimate outflows in 2000–2003 and 2008 but under-estimate emigration during the post-accession period 2005–2007, as well as during the post-crisis years 2010–2016.
Gross outflows of Latvian nationals to main OECD destinations, 2000–2016 (destination countries’ data vs. official Latvian statistics). (Source: Eurostat and OECD (in some cases also national statistics) data on immigration of foreigners by nationality; Ireland and the UK data on allocation of social security numbers. Note: Due to data limitations, Latvian official data for 2000–2010 refer to total outflows (including foreigners))
Before Latvia’s accession to the EU, emigration from Latvia occurred at rather low rates (about 0.25% of population per annum), but immediately after accession in 2004, the UK, Ireland and Sweden opened their labour markets for nationals of the new member states, and outflow from Latvia almost tripled. It increased further in 2005, most likely due to the network effect, and after that never fell below 1% of the population per annum. The outflows reacted to economic developments in Latvia in a predictable way: the flow declined during growth periods (2005–2007 and 2011–2016) but increased explosively during the crisis, reaching 2.5% of the population in 2010.
There were also dramatic changes in the shares of different destinations in the total outflow (see Fig. 3.6) reflecting both institutional and economic developments. In 2004, Ireland was the destination of 40% of emigrants, followed by the UK with 26%; both countries sharply increased their shares compared to the pre-accession period due to the opening of their labour markets. In 2005 the UK almost doubled its share, while Ireland’s share fell to 30% and further to about 20% in 2007–2008; meanwhile, the share of non-English speaking countries (many of which opened their labour markets in 2006–2007) increased. With the onset of the economic crisis which strongly hit Ireland’s labour market, Ireland’s share continued its decline and after 2011 never went above 5%.
Since 2005, the UK has kept the largest share of Latvian emigrants – almost half of them in 2005–2008 and more than 60% in 2009–2010. However, with the opening of the German labour market in 2011, the share going to the UK started to decline; it was just above 40% in 2014–2015 and dropped below that level in the Brexit referendum year, 2016. Uncertainty surrounding the post-Brexit status of labour migrants from Latvia and other new member states during the period after the Brexit referendum (see e.g. Lulle 2018, Lulle et al. 2018) has made the UK a less popular choice among emigrants from Latvia.
Outflow from Latvia to Germany was rather stable in absolute terms in 2000–2008, but its share went down from 30% in the pre-accession period to 8% in 2005–2007 and 10% in 2008. With the beginning of the crisis and especially since 2011, the outflow to Germany started to increase. Recently its share is about 30%. The shares of the other main destinations in the post-crisis period are also relatively stable: about 10% of emigrants go to the Nordic countries; slightly more go to other EU/EFTA countries, and less than 5% go to non-European OECD countries.
Further evidence on the dynamics of emigration during 2000–2016, this time in terms of net emigration, is presented in Table 3.2, which compares four periods covering 4 or 5 years each based mostly on the statistics of the receiving countries.
Net emigration of Latvia’s nationals, 2000–2016
Percent of the population at the beginning of 2000
Effective annual rate of net emigration
Source: Eurostat, OECD, national statistical offices and author’s own calculation
Net emigration is the difference between emigration and immigration (i.e., the opposite of net migration). The effective annual rate of net emigration is a constant emigration rate which, if applied every year, would result in the given net outflow during the period
We find that the effective annual rate of net migration has doubled in the post-accession period compared to the pre-accession one, and more than doubled again during the crisis and first two post-crisis years (2009–2012) compared to the post-accession wave. During the latest post-crisis years (2013–2016) the rate was slightly higher than in the post-accession period.
3.4 Emigration and Demographic Potential
This section discusses the impact of emigration on Latvia’s population structure and demographic potential. Like elsewhere in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (see IMF 2016, p. 12), those who left have been younger than those who stayed. However, due to unusually high emigration rates, the shrinking of the young and middle aged cohorts in Latvia has been particularly pronounced (Table 3.3), thus accelerating population ageing and distorting the age structure.
Net migration of Latvian nationals by selected age cohorts, 2004–2014
Age, 2004
Net emigration by cohort has been calculated from the Latvian LFS microdata as the decrease in the annual average size of selected cohorts over two five year periods (2004–2009 and 2009–2014), less age-specific mortality over relevant periods. Total net migration is that over five-year periods 2004–2008 (see Table 3.2) and 2009–2013 (estimated by Table 3.2 method)
In the 10 years between 2004 and 2014, the cohorts aged 15–19, 20–24 and 25–29 years in 2004 lost 21.7%, 17.9% and 14.4% respectively of their members to migration, while the overall loss of population due to migration during this period was just 9.4%.
Even when comparing adult working-age individuals only, the emigrant population appears to be much younger than the stayers (Fig. 3.7).
Age distribution of adult working-age emigrants from Latvia and stayers therein, 2014. (Source: Calculation with microdata of The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey and the Latvian Labour Force Survey 2014)
In addition to the falling size of the reproductive age cohorts, Latvia’s demographic potential is undermined by the fact that – at least in the post-crisis period – families with children or planning to have a child are more likely to emigrate, as shown in Fig. 3.8. This figure is based on a representative household survey conducted in Riga in 2012.
Share of households with one or more potential emigrants, by presence of children and plans to have children in the next 3 years. (Source: Hazans (2014, p. 10), based on a representative survey of households in 2007)
In a more general setting, Hazans (2018, Table A5) using four waves (2013–2016) of representative surveys of Latvia’s population, shows that among people aged 18–34, those having a child under 18 in the family (with other things being equal) are significantly more likely to move to work abroad in the near future. Among men, the same effect was also found at the end of the crisis period; namely late 2010 to early 2011(see Hazans 2013, Table 4.8).
Figure 3.9 compares the proportion of emigrants living abroad with children aged below 18 – or having children this age in Latvia with the proportion of stayers living with children under 18 in Latvia. In both cases, the children of the emigrant or stayer and their partner’s children are accounted for.
Incidence of having children aged below 18 among emigrants from Latvia and stayers therein, 2014, by age and gender. (Source: Calculation using microdata of The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey and the Latvian Labour Force Survey 2014. Note: For emigrants: the children were living in the same household abroad or were left behind in Latvia. For stayers: the children were living in the same household in Latvia. Emigrants’/stayers’ own and their partner’s children are included)
It appears that emigrants of both genders aged 18–24 are much more likely to have children than their counterparts in Latvia, while the reverse is true among those aged 25–44. In the age group 45–64, there is only small difference between emigrants and stayers. Overall, in 2014 about 30% of male emigrants aged 18–64 and about 40% of their female counterparts had adolescent children. Among stayers these proportions were slightly lower, mainly due to smaller shares of reproductive age cohorts (Fig. 3.9).
3.5 Four Waves of Emigration in the Early Twenty-First Century
The history of emigration from Latvia during 2000–2016 can be divided into four episodes:7
The pre-accession period, which we denote as 2000–2003;
The post-accession period of economic growth, which we refer to as 2004–20088;
The crisis period: 2009–2010;
The post-crisis period: 2011–2016.
During this relatively brief time, the main reasons for emigration, the rates of emigration and the most popular destinations for emigration – as well as the profile of the emigrants and their plans – have changed substantially several times.
3.5.1 The Conceptual Framework
Economic and sociological literature provides the conceptual framework for understanding migration patterns and the way these patterns change over time in response to economic, political and social developments in the source and destination countries. According to the (neoclassical) human capital model of migration (Borjas 1987, 1999; Sjaastad 1962), an individual decides to move if the expected utility in the destination country, net of the monetary, effort and psychological costs of migration, exceeds utility in the home country.
Apart from the earnings expected at home and abroad, this calculation should account for other factors affecting utility – job finding and job losing probabilities, the emigrant’s legal status, career prospects, working and living conditions, the generosity of the social security system, social and cultural norms, perceived life prospects for children, etc.
The New Economics of Migration (Stark and Bloom 1985) emphasises that migration decisions are often taken by families, households or even larger groups, rather than individuals, and stresses the role of risk, both at home and abroad. Uncertainty has to be considered as the location-specific factor reducing utility; it also has to be taken into account from the perspective of the diversification of the family portfolio of human capital.
Furthermore, the New Economics of Migration points to the role of relative income in migration decisions as opposed to absolute income, and shows that falling income differentials may not discourage migration.
Migration systems theory (Bakewell 2014; de Haas 2010; Mabogunje 1970) and social network theory (Carrington et al. 1996) emphasise transnational links between people, families and communities which, along with other circumstances, support and sustain clustered migration flows.
3.5.2 The Pre-accession Wave: Personal Characteristics
Before joining the EU, unemployment in Latvia was at a two-digit level, while GDP per capita (at PPP) was well below 50% of the EU-15 average. The earnings of an unskilled worker in the UK, Nordic countries or Germany looked very attractive in comparison with average earnings in Latvia. These strong push and pull factors resulted in a sizeable emigration potential, which was larger among the Russian-speaking minority population (Hazans 2012, Fig. 6.2).
However, actual emigration rates in the early 2000s were low, due to the need for work and residence permits, but also because of high transportation and communication costs, the limited availability of good quality internet connections and the absence of convenient, extensive information sources regarding job opportunities and living and working conditions abroad. During the 4-year period before accession (2000–2003), the net outflow of Latvia’s nationals was 1.4% of the initial population (Table 3.2).
To understand who were the likely movers in the pre-accession period, one should notice that migration costs were lower for people with professional or at least private contacts in potential destinations, with good foreign language and ICT skills, and the opportunity to use the internet for private purposes at a workplace. Clearly, all these attributes are found more often among university graduates. On the other hand, the absence of a favourable legal framework, restricted access to reliable information and difficulties in searching for jobs ‘from overseas’, coupled with a high risk of fraud by domestic firms recruiting workers for jobs abroad in the early 2000s, suggested that emigration required high degrees of initiative and the willingness to accept risk. However, a less risky, less initiative-led option was to access migration networks from previous waves of migration to the US, Canada, Australia, Sweden and Germany, as well as from and to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Most emigrants – driven by their own initiative rather than their networks – were oriented towards relatively new directions, mainly the United Kingdom and Ireland, where the language barrier for them was lower than in the rest of the EU, while migration costs were lower than to other English-speaking countries. The pre-accession wave of emigration thus featured substantial positive selectivity regarding human capital and other personal characteristics, an over-representation of Russian speakers and a high degree of geographical diversification.
3.5.3 The Post-accession Wave: Institutional and Market Factors
During Latvia’s first 5 years in the EU, i.e., before the effect on migration patterns became apparent of what is now called the ‘Great Recession’, migration flows were shaped mainly by institutional and market factors.
The gradual implementation of the free movement of labour within the EU (see Kahanec et al. 2016, Table 1) substantially lowered both the monetary and non-monetary costs of searching for a job abroad and the process of migration, as well as the human capital threshold (in terms of skills, initiative and risk-taking) for labour migration. Together with a high – and growing – demand for migrant labour in the EU15, this triggered a sharp and, to a large extent, persistent increase in emigration rates (see Table 3.2 and Fig. 3.6). This in turn lowered migration costs further via migrant networks and the rich social and media infrastructure existing within the rapidly growing Latvian diasporas in Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere in the ‘old’ member states (see Hazans and Philips 2010; OECD 2012). Another significant factor was the drop in the price of international telecommunications and air travel due to growing markets and technological change.
In addition, strong pull factors were at work, such as higher incomes and better working conditions abroad, as well as factors relating to family and/or friends. Together, these factors covered about 80–90% of the potential emigrants from Latvia (Hazans 2012, Table 6.3).
On the other hand, due to strong economic growth in Latvia, the unemployment rate was falling while real income was rising (Hazans 2016a, Fig. 1), gradually reducing the expected gains from emigration. Thus, during the second part of the post-accession period, the motivation to move abroad driven by push factors was falling, and the motivation to return among recent emigrants was on the rise.
Overall, in the 5 years post-accession Latvia lost 3.2% of its population to emigration (Table 3.2).
In the migration-friendly post-accession environment, emigrants’ self-selection in terms of human capital was driven mainly by their expected gains in terms of income and working conditions rather than the individual’s comparative advantage in lowering migration costs. These gains were, on average, greater for people with secondary education or lower (see Hazans 2016a, p. 310 for details). Hence, one should expect that the post-accession emigrants from Latvia were less well educated as a group than pre-accession ones, either in an absolute (composition) or relative (selection) sense, or both.
The effect of ethnicity and citizenship on the propensity to emigrate has also changed. Due to strong economic growth and the labour shortage caused by emigration (Hazans and Philips 2010, Sect. 7 and Fig. 12), as well as a gradual improvement in state language skills among young and middle-age minorities (Hazans 2010, Fig. 3, 2011a, Tables 8.8–8.9), the labour market position of ethnic minorities in 2004–2007 was steadily improving (see Hazans 2016a, Fig. 6), thus weakening important push factors for this group. On the other hand, a substantial part of the minority population – those without Latvian citizenship – was not covered by the legal provisions for the free movement of labour within the EU. This worsened their mobility opportunities in comparison to citizens.
The above considerations suggest that, compared with the pre-accession period, post-accession emigrants from Latvia feature a significantly lower proportion of ethnic minorities, especially non-citizens.
Another important feature of this emigration wave is its mixed nature. While migration was to a large extent short-term and/or cyclical (see e.g. Hazans and Philips 2010, Sect. 6, Figs. 9 and 10), the Latvian diasporas abroad were steadily growing (Hazans 2015a, p. 11), suggesting that many emigrants have chosen to settle in destination countries.
3.5.4 Crisis-Driven Emigration: Lost Jobs, Lost Perspectives, ‘the New Movers’, and the Shift Towards Permanent Emigration
During the years of the Great Recession (2009–2010), significant economic push factors were at work; mainly joblessness and wage cuts, but also the implied inability to pay back credit.
The psychological shock was no less painful: a large proportion of people of working age, including those who managed to keep their jobs, lost confidence in the future (Hazans 2011b, 2013). Consumer confidence, satisfaction with the government and trust in the parliament dropped dramatically (Hazans 2015a, pp. 3–4; 2016a, Fig. 2).
Finding a Job in Western Europe was not as easy as before the crisis. The role of diasporas and informal networks increased as a consequence. Yet it was much easier than in Latvia. The rate of unemployment was very low in Norway, the Netherlands and Austria, and modest in the UK, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. The lifting of restrictions on the free movement of workers from EU8 countries by Belgium, Denmark and especially Norway from May 2009 further facilitated labour migration to these destinations.
Moreover, nominal earnings continued to rise across the old member states, while real earnings did not decline (European Commission 2011, graphs I.1.8, III.A3.5). Thus, the expected gains from emigration in terms of employment and earnings increased in comparison to the pre-crisis period.
In addition, as long-term joblessness was becoming more widespread in Latvia, the issue of social protection, which previously had been neglected by the middle class, gained importance as a factor driving migration decisions. A feature of Latvian social security was a very low income replacement rate for the long-term unemployed through unemployment benefit, even when social assistance and housing benefits are accounted for (European Commission 2011, graphs II.2.3- II.2.4).
Moreover, child benefits in Latvia were extremely low in comparison with those paid in the main destination countries of Latvian emigrants.
High and persistent unemployment, a weak social security system, lost perspectives – these were the factors that converged to make emigration a real option in the minds of many Latvians, even those who had not considered such a possibility before (Hazans 2011b, 2012, 2013; McCollum et al. 2017). There were two kinds of these ‘new movers’: (i) individuals who were inherently not very mobile for whom this was the only way out of financial difficulties; and (ii) people who were not satisfied with developments in Latvia and with their own prospects there, even if they were not experiencing economic hardship at that moment. In this way, the post-accession migration system was substantially transformed and expanded.
Unlike the pre-accession emigrants, most of those who left during and after the crisis were not risk-takers. On the contrary, they perceived staying as too risky, and the destination countries were seen as a safe haven. This implied a strong shift from the temporary emigration of ‘breadwinners’ towards the long-term or permanent emigration of entire families. The post-crisis emigrants, as opposed to the pre-crisis group, are much more oriented towards long-term or permanent emigration, are interested in legal employment and social security and are more likely to move as entire families (Hazans 2013, Table 4.6). According to The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey, by 2014 about 70% of emigrants had lived in their host countries for three or more years (Hazans 2018, Fig. 4).
The longer emigrants live in a host country and the higher their education level, the smaller the proportion is of them with a spouse, partner or adolescent child left in Latvia, and the larger the proportion that is living with a partner and/or a child or children aged under 18 abroad (Fig. 3.10).
Fig. 3.10
Post-2000 emigrants’ partners and children in Latvia and abroad, by duration of stay in the host country and completed education level, 2014. (Source: Calculation with The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey data)
Econometric analysis of the return intentions of emigrants (Hazans 2015b, c) shows that having family members remaining in Latvia positively affected the probability of their return. Conversely, having their family living with them abroad negatively affected the probability of the emigrant’s return – i.e., made them more likely to stay abroad.
By 2014, two-thirds of high-educated emigrants lived abroad with either a partner or a child aged under 18 (or both), and only 15% had a partner or a child left in Latvia. For medium-skilled emigrants these proportions were, respectively, 59% living abroad with either a partner or a child aged under 18 or both), and only 19% with a partner or a child left in Latvia, while for the low-educated the figures were 54% with a partner or child living with them and 26% with close family remaining in Latvia (Fig. 3.10).
How and why did the crisis change the profile of emigrants? The crisis increased joblessness particularly among those without higher education and even more among those without secondary education (Hazans 2012, Fig. 6.3, 2013, Table 4.5). On the other hand, the relative labour market position of ethnic minorities (especially non-citizens) deteriorated during the crisis (Hazans 2010, Fig. 9, 2013, Table 4.5; 2016a, Fig. 6). At the same time, the state language proficiency requirements in the private sector were tightened and became almost universal in terms of the occupations covered (Hazans 2010, p. 151, 2011a, p. 187). Finally, while Latvian non-citizens and residents with citizenship of Russia and other CIS countries were still not covered by the free mobility provisions, the share of this category among the working-age minority population declined – not least because during the post-accession period many had passed the exams and received Latvian citizenship in order to become eligible for the free mobility provisions. Hence, based on domestic economic factors alone, one should expect a significant increase in the proportions of the low-skilled and Russian-speakers among the crisis-period emigrants9.
While economic considerations do not suggest that the crisis should intensify the brain drain, such a hypothesis emerges from the dominant perception in Latvia of the crisis as systemic. This is because people who have invested in higher education are usually future-oriented and more concerned with lost perspective and disappointment in the quality of governance. The latter point is in line with the IMF (2016: Fig. 5) finding that in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the quality of institutions has a stronger impact on the emigration of skilled workers than unskilled workers. Indeed, in early 2011, more than half the highly-educated potential emigrants reported only non-economic reasons for their plans to leave the country, while among the lower and medium-educated this proportion was below one-quarter and one-third (Hazans 2013, Fig. 4.13).
Evidence from The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey conducted in 2014 confirms that during the crisis the importance of both economic and non-economic push factors, better social security abroad, as well as family-related factors sharply increased compared to the pre-crisis period (Hazans 2016a, Fig. 7)10. Moreover, family reasons apart, these changes were more pronounced among the high-educated and also persisted after the crisis (Fig. 3.11).
Motivation for emigration, by education level and period of emigration. (Source: Calculation with The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey data (Hazans 2018, Fig. 8). Note: Respondents could choose all relevant reasons from 17 given (the median number of reasons is 4 for the high-educated and 5 for others). See OECD (2016, Fig. 2.7) for a detailed list of reasons in each group)
Figure 3.12 highlights three important messages. First, net emigration outflow from Latvia during the six crisis and post-crisis years (2009–2014) was much larger than during the nine pre-crisis years (2000–2008). Secondly, the largest increase in the number of emigrants is found among the highly-educated. Thirdly, the increase in the number of highly-educated emigrants was driven mainly by those who were not motivated by economic push factors. This provides empirical support to the hypothesis that the crisis intensified brain drain from Latvia and boosted the importance of non-economic reasons for emigration.
Increase in the number of settled emigrants from Latvia between 2000 and 2008 and 2009–2014, by education level in 2014 and the presence of economic push factors as reasons for emigration. (Source: Hazans (2018, Fig. A6). Note: Economic push factors include financial difficulties, the inability to make ends meet and inability to find a job in Latvia. The results are qualitatively similar when the education level completed in Latvia is used)
Note that data in Fig. 3.12 also account for higher education completed after emigration; i.e. measuring the total brain drain rather than ‘diploma’ drain (see Hazans 2016a), but the results are qualitatively similar when the education level completed in Latvia is used.
3.5.5 The Post-crisis Wave (2011–2016): Emigration as ‘the New Normal’
In the first 3 years after the Great Recession, despite an economic recovery, there have been no clear signs of a considerable slowdown in emigration from Latvia – it has remained well above the pre-crisis level (Table 3.2; Fig. 3.6). In 2014–2016, emigration outflows fell by roughly one-quarter but were still above the level of the last pre-crisis years 2007–2008 (Fig. 3.6).
By 2011, 82% of Latvia’s population aged 18–65 had some relative or friend with foreign work experience (Hazans 2011b, Box 2.25), while a recent survey put that figure at 91% among those aged 18–74 (LETA 2017). This suggests that work abroad has become an integral part of the Latvian national identity (Hazans 2013), and in the post-crisis period, emigration is ‘the new normal’ (Hazans 2016a). Powerful migration networks significantly reduce information and job search costs, as well as psychic and adaptation costs for potential emigrants, which explains the persistently high emigration potential. According to surveys, this was more than 20% of the population aged 18–64 in 2013–2015, but dropped to15% in 2016 (Fig. 3.13). Migration flows are shaped by migrant networks, along with already-formed but not yet implemented intentions for emigration.
Emigration intentions in Latvia, 2013–2016 (population aged 18–64), by completed education level. The survey question was: ‘How big is the probability that in the near future you might move to work abroad’? (Source: Calculations with representative population survey data conducted by SKDS)
Paradoxically, growing vacancy rates and falling unemployment in Latvia (Hazans 2018) might contribute to these emigration intentions by reducing the risk for potential emigrants in case emigration appears to be working out unsuccessfully or their return is triggered by family reasons.
Pull factors have gained in importance among the drivers of emigration and while economic reasons for emigration remain widespread, non-economic ones are becoming increasingly important (Fig. 3.11; Hazans 2016a, Fig. 7; OECD 2016, Fig. 2.5). In terms of destinations, Germany, which opened its labour market for EU-10 workers in 2011, increased its share in outflows from Latvia (Fig. 3.6). This has had an impact on the composition of these migration flows, as Germany is more attractive than, say, the UK, for middle-aged skilled manual workers.
3.6 The Evolution in Composition of the Four Waves of Emigrants
3.6.1 Ethnicity
Figure 3.14 presents empirical evidence on the ethnic composition of the four recent waves of emigrants.11 As seen in Panel A, the share of minorities among the individuals working abroad but still considered household members at home is U-shaped, reaching its lowest point in 2006–2008, when the ethnic gaps in employment and unemployment were at their lowest values (Hazans 2016a, Fig. 6), and increasing during the crisis, when the relative labour market position of ethnic minorities deteriorated. The corresponding selectivity index12 (which accounts for the fact that the minority share in Latvia’s population was declining over time and is smaller among the youth and the middle-agers than among the elderly) follows the same pattern, in line with expectations stated in Sects. 3.5.3 and 3.5.4.
Ethnic composition and selectivity of emigrants from Latvia, 2000–2016. (Source: Calculation with data of Latvian LFS, UK Population Census 2011 (ONS Tables CT0255, CT0333), and Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2017g). Note: In Panel B, the data cover only England and Wales. In panel C, data for years before 2011 are not available)
Russian speakers were over-represented among mobile workers still attached to their Latvian households in the whole period between 2000 and 2015, as indicated by the positive values of the selectivity index.
Panel B of Fig. 3.14 is based on the data of the UK Population Census 2011 and refers to Latvia-born residents of England and Wales who arrived in the UK in the period 2000–2011 (before the Census). For 2005–2011, these data (free from the restriction that the emigrants are still considered household members in Latvia) also suggest that the proportion of non-Latvians among emigrants is slightly above 40% (i.e. higher than among stayers) and supports our expectation that the proportion of ethnic minorities among post-accession emigrants was smaller than before. Panel B does not feature an increase in the minority selectivity index caused by the crisis; this might have to do with the nature of the Census data (recent crisis-driven migrants, especially the low-skilled, were less likely to take part in the Census).
Finally, Panel C covers only the post-crisis period and indicates that minorities were substantially over-represented among emigrants. This is in line with changes in language policy and the labour market position of minorities, as described in Sect. 3.5.4, as well as with intention-based evidence in Hazans (2013, Table 4.8, 2016b, pp. 8–10).
3.6.2 Education Level
By early 2011, emigrants from Latvia who had lived in OECD countries for up to 10 years featured larger shares of the tertiary-educated than their age peers in Latvia, and this was especially pronounced among early post-crisis emigrants (Fig. 3.15). On the other hand, the low-educated were also somewhat over-represented among Latvian emigrants in European OECD countries. Emigrants in the main non-European destinations appear to be much better educated; a finding consistent with the idea that a migration-friendly institutional environment in the EU lowers the human capital threshold for potential migrants.
Skill composition and selectivity of twenty-first century emigrants from Latvia. OECD countries, early 2011. (Sources: Calculation with data of OECD 2014 and Eurostat data Hazans 2018, Fig. 9)
Latvian mobile workers still considered household members back home appear to be less well-educated than settled emigrants, suggesting that highly-skilled emigrants are more likely to stay in their destination countries for prolonged periods or permanently. This finding emerges from a comparison of LFS-based data (Fig. 3.16) with the Census-based data in Fig. 3.15.
Skill composition and selectivity of Latvian mobile workers reported as household members back home, 2000–2015. (Source: Calculations with the Latvian LFS data (builds on Hazans 2018, Fig. 10). Notes: The selectivity indexes compare mobile workers with Latvia’s population aged 18–64 in the same period)
The selectivity indices in Fig. 3.16 compare mobile workers with Latvia’s population aged 18–64 in the same period, thus measuring the effect on the working-age population.
University graduates were over-represented among pre-accession mobile workers. In line with the expectations outlined in Sect. 3.5.3, the share of the high-educated and the corresponding selectivity index drop in the post-accession period. The share and selectivity of the low-skilled increases – reflecting the effect of free mobility provisions which lowered the human capital threshold for moving – while there are also higher expected gains for the lower and medium-skilled).
During and after the crisis, the share and selectivity index of the high-educated among the mobile workers was above pre-crisis levels (consistent with findings from Fig. 3.15 for settled emigrants and in line with expectations in Sect. 3.5.4), but fell again in 2013–2015. The latter observation should be considered with care, because it might indicate either smaller outflows of the high-educated or a switch to full-family emigration (which is not observed in LFS data). The share (and selectivity index, not shown in Fig. 3.15) of the low-educated stayed above pre-crisis levels throughout 2009–2015, reflecting the fact that the low-skilled suffered more and for longer from recession-related joblessness.13
Data from The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey confirm a substantial university diploma drain from Latvia to various EU/EFTA destinations during the whole period between 2000 and 2014 (Fig. 3.17). This increases over time, except for the most recent period. The shares of the high-educated among emigrants were well above those found in respective periods among stayers of the same age as emigrants, as indicated by the positive values of the age-adjusted selectivity index at departure (ranging between 0.51 and 0.78 for the total outflow to EU/EFTA).
Shares and selectivity of the high-educated among adult emigrants from Latvia, 2000–2014, by destination and arrival period. (Source: Calculation with The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey data and Eurostat data (builds on Hazans 2018, Fig. 7). Note: The selectivity index at departure compares, for each destination and arrival period, the share of emigrants who left Latvia aged 15+ with a completed tertiary education with the share of tertiary-educated stayers in that period, assuming the same age distribution as for those who moved from Latvia during that period)
Figure 3.17 also illustrates how the share of the tertiary-educated among emigrants further increased during their stay in the host countries, reaching, by 2014, 45% (on average across destinations and arrival periods).
Latvia’s accession to the EU in 2004 has boosted the diploma drain in absolute terms, but in relative terms it became less intensive than before, as suggested by the falling selectivity index (Fig. 3.17). Moreover, for the UK, which was the main destination after accession, the share of the high-educated among post-accession emigrants surveyed in 2014 is lower than among their pre-accession counterparts. This is consistent with theoretical expectations (see Sect. 3.5.3) based on institutional and market factors: the free movement of labour lowered both migration costs and the human capital threshold.
Evidence from The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey (shares of university graduates at departure found in Fig. 3.17, as well as the stock selectivity index presented in (Hazans 2018:Fig. 7) suggests that during the crisis, the diploma drain and brain drain from Latvia was more intensive than before, reflecting a rise in general disappointment and non-economic reasons for emigration among the high-educated and the future-oriented (see Hazans 2011b, 2012, 2013, 2016a, as well as Fig. 3.11 above). This trend also continued after the crisis, except for the UK.
3.7 Conclusion
This chapter presents a brief history of migration to and from Latvia and the evolution of its driving forces in the early twenty-first century. The empirical findings from a number of independent data sources are in line with expectations based on a theoretical analysis of the economic, social and institutional context of four emigration waves and the underlying migration systems.
In the twentieth century, Latvia experienced two world wars and three occupations. Thousands of economic migrants, refugees and displaced people moved from Latvia in some periods and to Latvia in others. Net annual migration rates featured large swings from −7.5% to −2.9% during the two world wars to 2.8% and 6.9% in the post-war periods.
Migration to Latvia from other parts of the Soviet Union continued at high (although decreasing) rates until 1989. Key elements which kept this migration system going included: (i) centralised decision-making on the allocation of resources, including the labour force; (ii) the Russian language as the Soviet Union’s lingua franca (iii) a higher standard of living in Latvia than almost elsewhere in the Soviet Union. As the result, by 1989 the share of ethnic Latvians in Latvia’s population fell to just above one-half.
However, the last decade of the twentieth century has seen a massive outflow of the Russian-speaking population from restored independent Latvia to Russia and other CIS countries. On the Latvian side, the rise of this migration system was triggered by dramatic changes in political regime, prevailing historical narrative, language environment, structure of labour demand, and, for many, loss of citizenship. Key elements for the post-war immigrants to Latvia included strong family, social and professional networks in Russia and other CIS countries, as well as relatively easy access to citizenship there.
By 2000, due to outflow of the Russian-speakers and – though much smaller in scale – the return of ethnic Latvians from the West and Russia, the population share of ethnic Latvians had reached almost 58%.
The 1990s also saw pioneer emigration to the West. The migration system emerging at this time was a hybrid one, relying either on support from the rich social infrastructure created in the West by the post-war Latvian refugees or from less formal social networks among Russian-speaking emigrants from the Soviet Union. A third factor was the ability of the pioneers to find their way themselves. By the end of the twentieth century, the post-Soviet Latvian diaspora in OECD countries accounted for around 21,000 people, implying net migration of less than 1% of the population in 10 years.
The pre-accession emigration wave (2000–2003) featured substantial positive selectivity on human capital and other personal characteristics, an over-representation of Russian-speakers and a high degree of geographical diversification. During this wave, the net outflow of Latvian nationals was 1.4% of the initial population.
The post-accession wave (2004–2008) was shaped by:
The gradual implementation of the free movement of labour within the EU;
The high and growing demand for migrant labour in the EU15;
Advances in information and communication technologies;
Falling prices for international telecommunication and air travel and
The availability of free information via EURES consultants and the European Mobility Portal.
All these factors substantially lowered the monetary and non-monetary costs of labour migration and the human capital threshold, as well as the related uncertainty, such as the risk of failed migration. This triggered a sharp and – to a large extent – persistent increase in emigration rates, which further lowered migration costs via the expanding migrant networks.
Post-accession emigration was mainly driven by pull factors, while the role of push factors declined during the period especially for ethnic minorities, due to strong economic growth and developing labour shortages in Latvia. On the other hand, a substantial part of the minority population – i.e., those without Latvian citizenship – was not covered by the free movement of labour within the EU.
Summing up, it can be seen that in comparison with the pre-accession period, the post-accession emigrants from Latvia were, as a group, less well-educated and featured a significantly lower proportion of ethnic minorities, especially non-citizens. The post-accession migration was, to a large extent, short-term and/or cyclical, yet many emigrants have chosen to settle in their destination countries, and the Latvian diaspora abroad grew steadily. The net outflow of nationals from Latvia in the five post-accession years accounts for 3.2% of its population at the beginning of 2000.
During the years of the Great Recession (2009–2010), both economic and non-economic push factors gained importance among the reasons for emigration. Factors such as high and persistent unemployment, a weak social security system and lost perspectives converged to make emigration a real option in the minds of Latvia’s residents, even for those who had not considered it before. The expected economic gains from emigration also increased in comparison to the pre-crisis period.
The post-accession migration system has been substantially transformed and expanded. The crisis triggered a strong shift from the temporary emigration of breadwinners towards the long-term or permanent emigration of entire families. Both gross and net emigration rates have increased sharply. The annual rate of net migration during the crisis and the first two post-crisis years (2009–2012) was more than twice as high as during the post-accession wave. The net outflow of Latvia’s nationals in 2009–2012 accounts for 5.3% of country’s population at the beginning of 2000.
The crisis has led to the deterioration of relative labour market positions of the low-educated and of the Russian-speakers; as a result, the proportions of these groups among the emigrants has increased significantly. On the other hand, the crisis intensified the ‘brain drain’ from Latvia and boosted the importance of non-economic reasons for emigration, especially among the high-educated.
In the post-crisis years, despite economic growth in Latvia, working abroad has become an integral part of the Latvian national identity. Emigration, actual or planned, is ‘the new normal’. While the economic reasons for emigration remain widespread, non-economic ones have become increasingly important. Migration flows are shaped by migrant networks, along with already-formed but not yet implemented emigration intentions. Minorities and university graduates remain over-represented among emigrants. Emigration potential is persistently high, and only a small percentage of the emigrants return or plan to return (Hazans 2015b, p.10, 2015d, 2016a, p.335). Moreover, one in four returnees plans to move abroad again (Hazans 2016c, Table 3, 2017b, p. 40).
In conclusion, despite the passing of the economic crisis in Latvia, the impact of the normalising of emigration has profound consequences for the future. The brain drain of university graduates continues and few of the emigrants have plans to come back. What is even more worrying is that of those emigrants who have returned to Latvia after the crisis, one in four is planning to leave to work abroad again.
Latvia ranks second in both cases – after Lithuania in the former and after Romania (before Portugal and Lithuania) in the latter.
Latvia’s TFR was well below that found in most destination countries in 2000–2014 but is recovering since and is expected to stabilise at about 1.85.
This section combines information compiled from various sources by Zelče (2011) and the National History Museum of Latvia (2016) with our own elaboration on data from the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2016a, b, c, 2017a, b, c) and OECD (2008, 2017).
Calculations by the author based on data from the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (2016c).
Ironically, 100 years later (in 2000–2014), Latvia lost the same number of people to migration.
The CIS included the republics of the former Soviet Union except for the Baltics.
This section builds on the author’s previous work (Hazans 2011b, 2012, 2013, 2016a).
The crisis hit Latvia at the end of 2008, but its effect on emigration first appeared only in 2009.
See Hughes (2005) and Ivlevs (2013) for some theoretical considerations, and Hazans (2013, Table 4.8, 2016b) for empirical evidence on intentions.
McCollum et al. (2017) present similar findings (apart from family reasons) based on another, smaller survey.
This section builds on the author’s previous work (Hazans 2016a, 2018). On Russian-speaking emigrants from Latvia, see also Ivlevs (2013), Lulle and Jurkane-Hobein (2016).
The selectivity index SI = ln(PM/PS), where PM and PS are shares of minorities (or any other group of interest) among movers and stayers. The SI is positive if minorities are over-represented among movers (Hazans 2011b, 2016a).
McCollum et al. (2017) also find a higher share of the lower-skilled among post-crisis emigrants.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
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1.Faculty of Business, Management and EconomicsUniversity of LatviaRīgaLatvia
Hazans M. (2019) Emigration from Latvia: A Brief History and Driving Forces in the Twenty-First Century. In: Kaša R., Mieriņa I. (eds) The Emigrant Communities of Latvia. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham
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Handbook of Clinical Psychology Competencies
Handbook of Clinical Psychology Competencies pp 153-180 | Cite as
Translating Science into Clinical Practice
Thomas L. Sexton
Christopher W. Hanes
Jeremy C. Kinser
In this chapter, we propose a developmental framework of competencies for the integration of science and practice. We believe a shortcoming of traditional competency models stems from the tendency to view science and practice as distinct entities that need to be linked rather than addressing their dialectical relationship. We argue that competencies for translating science into practice must acknowledge the inexorable link between the two. To accomplish this conceptual shift, we articulate the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to define competencies pertinent to the realization of the scientist-practitioner. Four primary attitudes outlined include scientific mindedness, curiosity about how things work/what works, acceptance of ambiguity, and embracing the dialectical nature of science and practice. Core domains of knowledge identified include an understanding of scientific methods, familiarity with clinical intervention research, understanding the role of evidence based practice, and specification of clinical practices. We also propose skills necessary for the translation of science into practice. Skills include assessing scientific findings, consuming research through a levels of evidence lens, practicing research based clinical intervention protocols, and becoming a local scientist. We believe these three domains encompass both basic and expert competencies that are necessary for learning, developing, and functioning as a profession within the scientist-practitioner paradigm.
American Psychological Association Clinical Question Core Attitude Cognitive Behavioral Technique Sociocultural Variable
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© Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2010
1.Indiana UniversityBloomingtonUSA
Sexton T.L., Hanes C.W., Kinser J.C. (2010) Translating Science into Clinical Practice. In: Thomas J.C., Hersen M. (eds) Handbook of Clinical Psychology Competencies. Springer, New York, NY
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F1: Former champion Raikkonen leaving Ferrari for Sauber
Associated PressSep 11, 2018, 5:45 PM EDT
MARANELLO, Italy (AP) Kimi Raikkonen is leaving Ferrari for Sauber and will be replaced by rookie Charles Leclerc.
Raikkonen, who won the 2007 Formula 1 title with Ferrari, will be heading back to Sauber next season while Leclerc will take his seat alongside Sebastian Vettel.
The 20-year-old Leclerc is touted as one of the most talented young drivers in F1 and had been widely expected to move to Ferrari if Raikkonen left.
The young driver from Monaco had earned praise from across the F1 paddock – including from world champions Vettel and Lewis Hamilton – after a strong showing in his debut season with Sauber.
during the Formula One Grand Prix of France at Circuit Paul Ricard on June 24, 2018 in Le Castellet, France.
“Dreams do come true,” Leclerc wrote on Twitter. “I’ll be driving for (at)scuderiaferrari for the 2019 Formula 1 World Championship. I will be eternally grateful to (at)scuderiaferrari for the opportunity given.”
Raikkonen will be back with the team where he started his F1 career in 2001. The Finn signed with Sauber for the next two seasons.
“Signing Kimi Raikkonen as our driver represents an important pillar of our project, and brings us closer to our target of making significant progress as a team in the near future,” Sauber team principal Frederic Vasseur said Tuesday. “Kimi’s undoubted talent and immense experience in Formula One will not only contribute to the development of our car, but will also accelerate the growth and development of our team as a whole.”
Raikkonen has 20 wins and 100 podium finishes in his F1 career. Nine of those wins came with Ferrari, where he had been since 2014. He also was with the team from 2007-09 before leaving to compete in the World Rally Championship for two years. He returned to F1 in 2012 to drive for Lotus, where he stayed until rejoining Ferrari two years later.
“During these years, Kimi’s contribution to the team, both as a driver and on account of his human qualities, has been fundamental,” Ferrari said in a statement. “He played a decisive role in the team’s growth and was, at the same time, always a great team player. As a world champion for Scuderia Ferrari, he will always be part of the team’s history and family. We thank Kimi for all of this and wish him and his family a prosperous future.”
Leclerc, a member of Ferrari’s driver academy, won the GP3 title in 2016 and the F2 title in 2017 before joining Sauber in F1 this season. His highest finish was sixth place at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“It’s been a great pleasure to support Charles Leclerc in his rookie year in Formula One,” Vasseur said. “Since his arrival, he has given the team great motivation. We have constantly improved and we will work hard until the end of this season to achieve the best possible results together. We are aware of Charles’ talent and are confident that he will have a bright future.”
Tags: Charles Leclerc, Formula 1, Kimi Raikkonen, sauber f1 team, scuderia ferrari
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Brown, Harry
About the author: Harry Brown holds a PhD from Ohio University. Since 1970 he has taught American literature and creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University; at EKU he has also served as Poetry Editor for Scripsit, Associate Editor of The Chaffin Journal, and Director of the summer Creative Writing Conference. In 1994 Brown was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and received a Senior Fellowship at the mary Anderson Center for the Arts; in 1995 he was named an EKU Foundation Professor. He has published four collections of poetry with Mellen: Paint Lick Idyll; Measuring Man; Ego’s Eye, and Everything Is Its Opposite.
Ego’s Eye and Other Poems
2001 0-7734-3583-2
Ego’s Eye ridicules snobbery, conformity, and opportunism, takes a humorous look at birds and cats including Jett the castrate, Cat Cool Hand, and Mrs. Robin and concludes with poems of irony, the real ‘spice of life’.
Everything is Its Opposite
Measuring Man
Poems on disparate topics, several of which take their subject from Biblical literature.
Paint Lick Idyll and Other Poems (hardcover)
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Lizzie Richies
Lizzie Riches was born in London in 1950 and grew up near Epping Forest where she first developed a love of natural history. Lizzie went to Camberwell School of Art and to Goldsmiths College, but felt out of step with painting styles of the late sixties preferring to develop her own visual language.
Riches lived for many years in rural Suffolk (Metfield, Mendham and Bungay) and lately by the sea in Cromer, Norfolk. She has exhibited with London’s Portal Gallery since 1976. In 1990 London Transport commissioned a painting as part of ‘Art in the Underground’. Lizzie has regular exhibitions with Portal in London and has exihibited with Portal in Chicago, in the Berkshires, the Palais Royal in Paris and in New York.
Lizzie frequently undertakes commissions, including a series of paintings for P&O’s luxury cruise liner ‘Aurora’. Webster’s Wine Publishers commissioned eighteen paintings depicting the character and history of classic and noble grape varieties for a book by Oz Clarke. In 2000 Leopold Joseph Private Bank acquired several major paintings for their boardroom. In the same year Lizzie undertook an eighty foot mural for a country house in Kent.
She is represented in the private collections of Ringo Star, Sir Roy Strong, Nicholas Rothschild, Jackie Collins and Quentin Letts and in the corporate collections of Prudential and Life, Accenture, P&O, and The Sainsbury Collection. She was commissioned for London’s Art in the Underground series and has an entry in the Dictionary of 20th Century British Artists and in Who’s Who in the Arts.
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I am researching about how to build the semantic web in a new and accurate way, from the foundations on linguistics, mathematics, logics, computers, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and many areas of knowledge…
Posted in Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, tagged Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on June 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I am not spamming the Wikipedia pages, neither Britannica.
I realize that all of you already know how to read the Wikipedia pages, and more, all the scientific literature about the “semantic web”…
I am researching about how to build the semantic web in a new and accurate way, from the foundations on linguistics, mathematics, logics, computers, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and many areas of knowledge and lot of people ask me:
Where did you read this or that? Then is useful for them to get the feedback to post step by step all the researching that I am doing!
Do you understand this new way of working and researching?
Please take a look about my theorem: The Limit of the “Semantic Web“, and you could realize what I am saying…
If you take a look on the Ninety-two posts below down, then you could realize that you understand the entire frame and the background that is needed to build the semantic web…
My next step is to review the original paper “Minds, Machines and Gödel” (“Minds, Machines and Gödel: A Retrospect”), and introduce the concept of “Time” on logic…
All of the foundations of the semantic web researching on Internet are on the basis of “Description logic”, who is a family of “knowledge representation” languages, but as my theorem has established this is the wrong way!
Then “the right way” is on the basis of the foundations on linguistics, mathematics, logics, computers, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and many areas of knowledge, where I am researching in a hard way…
Francisco Antonio Ceron Garcia
fcerong @ gmail.com
Computability theory (computer science)
Posted in Semantic Web, tagged Semantic Web on June 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »
For the branch of mathematical logic called computability theory, see Recursion theory.
In computer science, computability theory is the branch of the theory of computation that studies which problems are computationally solvable using different models of computation.
Computability theory differs from the related discipline of computational complexity theory, which deals with the question of how efficiently a problem can be solved, rather than whether it is solvable at all.
3.3.1 The halting problem 3.3.2 Beyond recursive languages
3.1 Power of finite state machines 3.2 Power of pushdown automata 3.3 Power of Turing machines
5.1 Infinite execution 5.2 Oracle machines 5.3 Limits of hyper-computation
1 Introduction 2 Formal models of computation 3 Power of automata 4 Concurrency-based models 5 Unreasonable models of computation 6 History of computability theory 7 See also 8 References
[edit] Introduction
A central question of computer science is to address the limits of computing devices. One approach to addressing this question is understanding the problems we can use computers to solve. Modern computing devices often seem to possess infinite capacity for calculation, and it’s easy to imagine that, given enough time, we might use computers to solve any problem. However, it is possible to show clear limits to the ability of computers, even given arbitrarily vast computational resources, to solve even seemingly simple problems. Problems are formally expressed as a decision problem which is to construct a mathematical function that for each input returns either 0 or 1. If the value of the function on the input is 0 then the answer is “no” and otherwise the answer is “yes”.
To explore this area, computer scientists invented automata theory which addresses problems such as the following: Given a formal language, and a string, is the string a member of that language? This is a somewhat esoteric way of asking this question, so an example is illuminating. We might define our language as the set of all strings of digits which represent a prime number. To ask whether an input string is a member of this language is equivalent to asking whether the number represented by that input string is prime. Similarly, we define a language as the set of all palindromes, or the set of all strings consisting only of the letter ‘a’. In these examples, it is easy to see that constructing a computer to solve one problem is easier in some cases than in others.
But in what real sense is this observation true? Can we define a formal sense in which we can understand how hard a particular problem is to solve on a computer? It is the goal of computability theory of automata to answer just this question.
[edit] Formal models of computation
In order to begin to answer the central question of automata theory, it is necessary to define in a formal way what an automaton is. There are a number of useful models of automata. Some widely known models are:
Deterministic finite state machine
Also called a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), or simply a finite state machine. All real computing devices in existence today can be modeled as a finite state machine, as all real computers operate on finite resources. Such a machine has a set of states, and a set of state transitions which are affected by the input stream. Certain states are defined to be accepting states. An input stream is fed into the machine one character at a time, and the state transitions for the current state are compared to the input stream, and if there is a matching transition the machine may enter a new state. If at the end of the input stream the machine is in an accepting state, then the whole input stream is accepted.
Nondeterministic finite state machine
Similarly called a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), it is another simple model of computation, although its processing sequence is not uniquely determined. It can be interpreted as taking multiple paths of computation simultaneously through a finite number of states. However, it is possible to prove that any NFA is reducible to an equivalent DFA.
Pushdown automaton
Similar to the finite state machine, except that it has available an execution stack, which is allowed to grow to arbitrary size. The state transitions additionally specify whether to add a symbol to the stack, or to remove a symbol from the stack. It is more powerful than a DFA due to its infinite-memory stack, although only some information in the stack is ever freely accessible.
Turing machine
Also similar to the finite state machine, except that the input is provided on an execution “tape”, which the Turing machine can read from, write to, or move back and forth past its read/write “head”. The tape is allowed to grow to arbitrary size. The Turing machine is capable of performing complex calculations which can have arbitrary duration. This model is perhaps the most important model of computation in computer science, as it simulates computation in the absence of predefined resource limits.
Multi-tape Turing machine
Here, there may be more than one tape; moreover there may be multiple heads per tape. Surprisingly, any computation that can be performed by this sort of machine can also be performed by an ordinary Turing machine, although the latter may be slower or require a larger total region of its tape.
[edit] Power of automata
With these computational models in hand, we can determine what their limits are. That is, what classes of languages can they accept?
[edit] Power of finite state machines
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (April 2009)
Computer scientists call any language that can be accepted by a finite state machine a regular language. Because of the restriction that the number of possible states in a finite state machine is finite, we can see that to find a language that is not regular, we must construct a language that would require an infinite number of states.
An example of such a language is the set of all strings consisting of the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ which contain an equal number of the letter ‘a’ and ‘b’. To see why this language cannot be correctly recognized by a finite state machine, assume first that such a machine M exists. M must have some number of states n. Now consider the string x consisting of (n + 1) ‘a’s followed by (n + 1) ‘b’s.
As M reads in x, there must be some state in the machine that is repeated as it reads in the first series of ‘a’s, since there are (n + 1) ‘a’s and only n states by the pigeonhole principle. Call this state S, and further let d be the number of ‘a’s that our machine read in order to get from the first occurrence of S to some subsequent occurrence during the ‘a’ sequence. We know, then, that at that second occurrence of S, we can add in an additional d (where d > 0) ‘a’s and we will be again at state S. This means that we know that a string of (n + d + 1) ‘a’s must end up in the same state as the string of (n + 1) ‘a’s. This implies that if our machine accepts x, it must also accept the string of (n + d + 1) ‘a’s followed by (n + 1) ‘b’s, which is not in the language of strings containing an equal number of ‘a’s and ‘b’s. In other words, M cannot correctly distinguish between a string of equal number of ‘a’s and ‘b’s and a string with (n + d + 1) ‘a’s and n + 1 ‘b’s.
We know, therefore, that this language cannot be accepted correctly by any finite state machine, and is thus not a regular language. A more general form of this result is called the Pumping lemma for regular languages, which can be used to show that broad classes of languages cannot be recognized by a finite state machine.
[edit] Power of pushdown automata
Computer scientists define a language that can be accepted by a pushdown automaton as a Context-free language, which can be specified as a Context-free grammar. The language consisting of strings with equal numbers of ‘a’s and ‘b’s, which we showed was not a regular language, can be decided by a push-down automaton. Also, in general, a push-down automaton can behave just like a finite-state machine, so it can decide any language which is regular. This model of computation is thus strictly more powerful than finite state machines.
However, it turns out there are languages that cannot be decided by push-down automaton either. The result is similar to that for regular expressions, and won’t be detailed here. There exists a Pumping lemma for context-free languages. An example of such a language is the set of prime numbers.
[edit] Power of Turing machines
Turing machines can decide any context-free language, in addition to languages not decidable by a push-down automaton, such as the language consisting of prime numbers. It is therefore a strictly more powerful model of computation.
Because Turing machines have the ability to “back up” in their input tape, it is possible for a Turing machine to run for a long time in a way that is not possible with the other computation models previously described. It is possible to construct a Turing machine that will never finish running (halt) on some inputs. We say that a Turing machine can decide a language if it eventually will halt on all inputs and give an answer. A language that can be so decided is called a recursive language. We can further describe Turing machines that will eventually halt and give an answer for any input in a language, but which may run forever for input strings which are not in the language. Such Turing machines could tell us that a given string is in the language, but we may never be sure based on its behavior that a given string is not in a language, since it may run forever in such a case. A language which is accepted by such a Turing machine is called a recursively enumerable language.
The Turing machine, it turns out, is an exceedingly powerful model of automata. Attempts to amend the definition of a Turing machine to produce a more powerful machine are surprisingly met with failure. For example, adding an extra tape to the Turing machine, giving it a 2-dimensional (or 3 or any-dimensional) infinite surface to work with can all be simulated by a Turing machine with the basic 1-dimensional tape. These models are thus not more powerful. In fact, a consequence of the Church-Turing thesis is that there is no reasonable model of computation which can decide languages that cannot be decided by a Turing machine.
The question to ask then is: do there exist languages which are recursively enumerable, but not recursive? And, furthermore, are there languages which are not even recursively enumerable?
[edit] The halting problem
Main article: Halting problem
The halting problem is one of the most famous problems in computer science, because it has profound implications on the theory of computability and on how we use computers in everyday practice. The problem can be phrased:
Given a description of a Turing machine and its initial input, determine whether the program, when executed on this input, ever halts (completes). The alternative is that it runs forever without halting.
Here we are asking not a simple question about a prime number or a palindrome, but we are instead turning the tables and asking a Turing machine to answer a question about another Turing machine. It can be shown (See main article: Halting problem) that it is not possible to construct a Turing machine that can answer this question in all cases.
That is, the only general way to know for sure if a given program will halt on a particular input in all cases is simply to run it and see if it halts. If it does halt, then you know it halts. If it doesn’t halt, however, you may never know if it will eventually halt. The language consisting of all Turing machine descriptions paired with all possible input streams on which those Turing machines will eventually halt, is not recursive. The halting problem is therefore called non-computable or undecidable.
An extension of the halting problem is called Rice’s Theorem, which states that it is undecidable (in general) whether a given language possesses any specific nontrivial property.
[edit] Beyond recursive languages
The halting problem is easy to solve, however, if we allow that the Turing machine that decides it may run forever when given input which is a representation of a Turing machine that does not itself halt. The halting language is therefore recursively enumerable. It is possible to construct languages which are not even recursively enumerable, however.
A simple example of such a language is the complement of the halting language; that is the language consisting of all Turing machines paired with input strings where the Turing machines do not halt on their input. To see that this language is not recursively enumerable, imagine that we construct a Turing machine M which is able to give a definite answer for all such Turing machines, but that it may run forever on any Turing machine that does eventually halt. We can then construct another Turing machine M‘ that simulates the operation of this machine, along with simulating directly the execution of the machine given in the input as well, by interleaving the execution of the two programs. Since the direct simulation will eventually halt if the program it is simulating halts, and since by assumption the simulation of M will eventually halt if the input program would never halt, we know that M‘ will eventually have one of its parallel versions halt. M‘ is thus a decider for the halting problem. We have previously shown, however, that the halting problem is undecidable. We have a contradiction, and we have thus shown that our assumption that M exists is incorrect. The complement of the halting language is therefore not recursively enumerable.
[edit] Concurrency-based models
A number of computational models based on concurrency have been developed, including the Parallel Random Access Machine and the Petri net. These models of concurrent computation still do not implement any mathematical functions that cannot be implemented by Turing machines.
[edit] Unreasonable models of computation
The Church-Turing thesis conjectures that there is no reasonable model of computing that can compute more mathematical functions than a Turing machine. In this section we will explore some of the “unreasonable” ideas for computational models which violate this conjecture. Computer scientists have imagined many varieties of hypercomputers.
[edit] Infinite execution
Main article: Zeno machine
Imagine a machine where each step of the computation requires half the time of the previous step. If we normalize to 1 time unit the amount of time required for the first step, the execution would require
time to run. This infinite series converges to 2 time units, which means that this Turing machine can run an infinite execution in 2 time units. This machine is capable of deciding the halting problem by directly simulating the execution of the machine in question. By extension, any convergent series would work. Assuming that the series converges to a value n, the Turing machine would complete an infinite execution in n time units.
[edit] Oracle machines
Main article: Oracle machine
So-called Oracle machines have access to various “oracles” which provide the solution to specific undecidable problems. For example, the Turing machine may have a “halting oracle” which answers immediately whether a given Turing machine will ever halt on a given input. These machines are a central topic of study in recursion theory.
[edit] Limits of hyper-computation
Even these machines, which seemingly represent the limit of automata that we could imagine, run into their own limitations. While each of them can solve the halting problem for a Turing machine, they cannot solve their own version of the halting problem. For example, an Oracle machine cannot answer the question of whether a given Oracle machine will ever halt.
[edit] History of computability theory
The lambda calculus, an important precursor to formal computability theory, was developed by Alonzo Church and Stephen Cole Kleene. Alan Turing is most often considered the father of modern computer science, and laid many of the important foundations of computability and complexity theory, including the first description of the Turing machine (in [1], 1936) as well as many of the important early results.
[edit] See also
Automata theory
Abstract machine
List of undecidable problems
Computability logic
Important publications in computability
[edit] References
Michael Sipser (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. PWS Publishing. ISBN 0-534-94728-X. Part Two: Computability Theory, chapters 3–6, pp.123–222.
Christos Papadimitriou (1993). Computational Complexity (1st edition ed.). Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-53082-1. Chapter 3: Computability, pp.57–70.
Computable knowledge
Topics and
Alphabet of human thought • Automated reasoning • Commonsense reasoning • Computability theory • Formal system • Inference engine • Knowledge base • Knowledge-based systems • Knowledge discovery • Knowledge engineering • Knowledge representation • Knowledge retrieval • Logic programming • Ontology • Question answering • Semantic reasoner
Proposals and
Zairja • Ars Magna (Ramon Llull, 1300) • Calculus ratiocinator & Characteristica universalis (Gottfried Leibniz, 1700) • Dewey Decimal Classification (Melvil Dewey, 1876) • Begriffsschrift (Gottlob Frege, 1879) • Mundaneum (Paul Otlet & Henri La Fontaine, 1910) • Logical atomism (Bertrand Russell, 1918) • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921) • Hilbert’s program (David Hilbert, 1920s) • Incompleteness theorem (Kurt Gödel, 1931) • Memex (Vannevar Bush, 1945) • Cyc (1984) • True Knowledge (2007) • Wolfram Alpha (Stephen Wolfram, 2009)
Dr. Know (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) • The Librarian (Snow Crash)
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_theory_(computer_science)“
Categories: Theory of computation
Computer science (or computing science) is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems.[1][2][3] It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that describe and transform information; the fundamental question underlying computer science is, “What can be (efficiently) automated?”[4] Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems, and human-computer interaction focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, and universally accessible to people.
The general public sometimes confuses computer science with vocational areas that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.[5]
3.1.1 Theoretical computer science
3.1 Theory of computation 3.2 Algorithms and data structures 3.3 Programming methodology and languages 3.4 Computer elements and architecture 3.5 Numerical and symbolic computation 3.6 Applications
9.1 Webcasts
1 History 2 Major achievements 3 Fields of computer science 4 Relationship with other fields 5 Computer science education 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links
Main article: History of computer science
The early foundations of what would become computer science predate the invention of the modern digital computer. Machines for calculating fixed numerical tasks, such as the abacus, have existed since antiquity. Wilhelm Schickard built the first mechanical calculator in 1623.[6] Charles Babbage designed a difference engine in Victorian times[7] helped by Ada Lovelace.[8] Around 1900, punch-card machines[9] were introduced. However, all of these machines were constrained to perform a single task, or at best some subset of all possible tasks.
During the 1940s, as newer and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors. As it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s, with the creation of the first computer science departments and degree programs.[4][10] Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own right.
Although many initially believed it impossible that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study, in the late fifties it gradually became accepted among the greater academic population.[11] It is the now well-known IBM brand that formed part of the computer science revolution during this time. IBM (short for International Business Machines) released the IBM 704 and later the IBM 709 computers, which were widely used during the exploration period of such devices. “Still, working with the IBM [computer] was frustrating…if you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again”.[11] During the late 1950s, the computer science discipline was very much in its developmental stages, and such issues were commonplace.
Time has seen significant improvements in the usability and effectiveness of computer science technology. Modern society has seen a significant shift from computers being used solely by experts or professionals to a more widespread user base.
[edit] Major achievements
This section requires expansion.
The German military used the Enigma machine during World War II for communication they thought to be secret. The large-scale decryption of Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park was an important factor that contributed to Allied victory in WWII.[12]
Despite its relatively short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society. These include:
Started the “digital revolution”, which includes the current Information Age and the Internet.[13]
A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationally unsolvable and intractable problems.[14]
The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction.[15]
In cryptography, breaking the Enigma machine was an important factor contributing to the Allied victory in World War II.[12]
Scientific computing enabled advanced study of the mind, and mapping the human genome became possible with Human Genome Project.[13] Distributed computing projects such as Folding@home explore protein folding.
Algorithmic trading has increased the efficiency and liquidity of financial markets by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other statistical and numerical techniques on a large scale.[16]
[edit] Fields of computer science
As a discipline, computer science spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of algorithms and the limits of computation to the practical issues of implementing computing systems in hardware and software.[17][18] The Computer Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) – which is made up of representatives of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, and the Association for Information Systems – identifies four areas that it considers crucial to the discipline of computer science: theory of computation, algorithms and data structures, programming methodology and languages, and computer elements and architecture. In addition to these four areas, CSAB also identifies fields such as software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking and communication, database systems, parallel computation, distributed computation, computer-human interaction, computer graphics, operating systems, and numerical and symbolic computation as being important areas of computer science.[17]
[edit] Theory of computation
The study of the theory of computation is focused on answering fundamental questions about what can be computed, and what amount of resources are required to perform those computations. In an effort to answer the first question, computability theory examines which computational problems are solvable on various theoretical models of computation. The second question is addressed by computational complexity theory, which studies the time and space costs associated with different approaches to solving a computational problem.
The famous “P=NP?” problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems,[19] is an open problem in the theory of computation.
P = NP ?
Computability theory Computational complexity theory
[edit] Theoretical computer science
The broader field of theoretical computer science encompasses both the classical theory of computation and a wide range of other topics that focus on the more abstract, logical, and mathematical aspects of computing.
Mathematical logic Automata theory Number theory Graph theory Type theory Category theory Computational geometry Quantum computing theory
[edit] Algorithms and data structures
O(n2)
Analysis of algorithms Algorithms Data structures
[edit] Programming methodology and languages
Compilers Programming languages
[edit] Computer elements and architecture
Digital logic Microarchitecture Multiprocessing
[edit] Numerical and symbolic computation
y = sin(x) + c
Bioinformatics Cognitive Science Computational chemistry Computational neuroscience Computational physics Numerical algorithms Symbolic mathematics
[edit] Applications
The following disciplines are often studied from a more theoretical, computer science viewpoint, as well as from a more practical, engineering perspective.
Operating systems Computer networks Computer graphics Computer vision Databases
Computer security Artificial intelligence Robotics Human-computer interaction Ubiquitous computing
[edit] Relationship with other fields
Despite its name, a significant amount of computer science does not involve the study of computers themselves. Because of this, several alternative names have been proposed. Certain departments of major universities prefer the term computing science, to emphasize precisely that difference. Danish scientist Peter Naur suggested the term datalogy, to reflect the fact that the scientific discipline revolves around data and data treatment, while not necessarily involving computers. The first scientific institution to use the term was the Department of Datalogy at the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1969, with Peter Naur being the first professor in datalogy. The term is used mainly in the Scandinavian countries. Also, in the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested in the Communications of the ACM – turingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician, and applied epistemologist.[20] Three months later in the same journal, comptologist was suggested, followed next year by hypologist.[21] The term computics has also been suggested.[22] Informatik was a term used in Europe with more frequency.
The renowned computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra stated, “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” The design and deployment of computers and computer systems is generally considered the province of disciplines other than computer science. For example, the study of computer hardware is usually considered part of computer engineering, while the study of commercial computer systems and their deployment is often called information technology or information systems. However, there has been much cross-fertilization of ideas between the various computer-related disciplines. Computer science research has also often crossed into other disciplines, such as cognitive science, economics, mathematics, physics (see quantum computing), and linguistics.
Computer science is considered by some to have a much closer relationship with mathematics than many scientific disciplines, with some observers saying that computing is a mathematical science.[4] Early computer science was strongly influenced by the work of mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, and there continues to be a useful interchange of ideas between the two fields in areas such as mathematical logic, category theory, domain theory, and algebra.
The relationship between computer science and software engineering is a contentious issue, which is further muddied by disputes over what the term “software engineering” means, and how computer science is defined. David Parnas, taking a cue from the relationship between other engineering and science disciplines, has claimed that the principal focus of computer science is studying the properties of computation in general, while the principal focus of software engineering is the design of specific computations to achieve practical goals, making the two separate but complementary disciplines.[23]
The academic, political, and funding aspects of computer science tend to depend on whether a department formed with a mathematical emphasis or with an engineering emphasis. Computer science departments with a mathematics emphasis and with a numerical orientation consider alignment computational science. Both types of departments tend to make efforts to bridge the field educationally if not across all research.
[edit] Computer science education
Some universities teach computer science as a theoretical study of computation and algorithmic reasoning. These programs often feature the theory of computation, analysis of algorithms, formal methods, concurrency theory, databases, computer graphics and systems analysis, among others. They typically also teach computer programming, but treat it as a vessel for the support of other fields of computer science rather than a central focus of high-level study.
Other colleges and universities, as well as secondary schools and vocational programs that teach computer science, emphasize the practice of advanced programming rather than the theory of algorithms and computation in their computer science curricula. Such curricula tend to focus on those skills that are important to workers entering the software industry. The practical aspects of computer programming are often referred to as software engineering. However, there is a lot of disagreement over the meaning of the term, and whether or not it is the same thing as programming.
Computer science portal
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Main article: Outline of computer science
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Information and communication technologies for development
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Philosophy of computer science
^ “Computer science is the study of information” New Jersey Institute of Technology, Gutenberg Information Technologies
^ “Computer science is the study of computation.” Computer Science Department, College of Saint Benedict, Saint John’s University
^ “Computer Science is the study of all aspects of computer systems, from the theoretical foundations to the very practical aspects of managing large software projects.” Massey University
^ a b c Denning, P.J. (2000). “Computer Science: The Discipline” (PDF). Encyclopedia of Computer Science. http://web.archive.org/web/20060525195404/http://www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/dif8916/denning.pdf.
^ “Common myths and preconceptions about Cambridge Computer Science” Computer Science Department, University of Cambridge
^ Nigel Tout (2006). “Calculator Timeline”. Vintage Calculator Web Museum. http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_time-line.html.
^ “Science Museum – Introduction to Babbage”. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/babbage/index.asp. Retrieved on 2006-09-24.
^ “A Selection and Adaptation From Ada’s Notes found in “Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers,” by Betty Alexandra Toole Ed.D. Strawberry Press, Mill Valley, CA”. http://www.scottlan.edu/Lriddle/women/ada-love.htm. Retrieved on 2006-05-04.
^ “IBM Punch Cards in the U.S. Army”. http://www.pattonhq.com/ibm.html. Retrieved on 2006-09-24.
^ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/EDSAC99/statistics.html
^ a b Levy, Steven (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-19195-2.
^ a b David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967, ISBN 0-684-83130-9.
^ a b http://www.cis.cornell.edu/Dean/Presentations/Slides/bgu.pdf
^ Constable, R.L. (March 2000) (PDF). Computer Science: Achievements and Challenges circa 2000. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cis-dean/bgu.pdf.
^ Abelson, H.; G.J. Sussman with J.Sussman (1996). Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd ed.). MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-01153-0. “The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology — the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.”
^ Black box traders are on the march The Telegraph, August 26, 2006
^ a b Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (28 May 1997). “Computer Science as a Profession”. http://www.csab.org/comp_sci_profession.html. Retrieved on 2008-09-01.
^ Committee on the Fundamentals of Computer Science: Challenges and Opportunities, National Research Council (2004). Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field. National Academies Press. ISBN 978-0-309-09301-9. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11106#toc.
^ Clay Mathematics Institute P=NP
^ Communications of the ACM 1(4):p.6
^ IEEE Computer 28(12):p.136
^ Parnas, David L. (1998). “Software Engineering Programmes are not Computer Science Programmes“. Annals of Software Engineering 6: 19–37. doi:10.1023/A:1018949113292. , p. 19: “Rather than treat software engineering as a subfield of computer science, I treat it as an element of the set, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, ..”
[edit] Further reading
Association for Computing Machinery. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System. 1998.
IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. Computing Curricula 2001: Computer Science. December 15, 2001.
Peter J. Denning. Is computer science science?, Communications of the ACM, April 2005.
Donald E. Knuth. Selected Papers on Computer Science, CSLI Publications, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996.
Peter J. Denning, Great principles in computing curricula, Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2004.
[edit] External links
Wikibooks has more on the topic of
Wikiversity has learning materials about Portal:Computer Science
Computer science at the Open Directory Project
Directory of free university lectures in Computer Science
bibliography/ Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
CS Directory and resources
Photographs of computer scientists (Bertrand Meyer‘s gallery)
[edit] Webcasts
UCLA Computer Science 1 Freshman Computer Science Seminar Section 1
Berkeley Introduction to Computers
Major fields of computer science
Mathematical logic · Set theory · Number theory · Graph theory · Type theory · Category theory · Numerical analysis · Information theory
Automata theory · Computability theory · Computational complexity theory · Quantum computing theory
Analysis of algorithms · Algorithm design · Computational geometry
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Parsers · Interpreters · Procedural programming · Object-oriented programming · Functional programming · Logic programming · Programming paradigms
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Computer accessibility · User interfaces · Wearable computing · Ubiquitous computing · Virtual reality
Artificial life · Bioinformatics · Cognitive Science · Computational chemistry · Computational neuroscience · Computational physics · Numerical algorithms · Symbolic mathematics
NOTE: Computer science can also be split up into different topics or fields according to the ACM Computing Classification System.
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science“
Categories: Computer science
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2009)
Computational complexity theory is a branch of the theory of computation in computer science that investigates the problems related to the resources required to run algorithms, and the inherent difficulty in providing algorithms that are efficient for both general and specific computational problems.
2.1 Big O notation 2.2 Worst case analysis 2.3 Axiomatic analysis
4.1 Time and space complexity 4.2 Decision problems 4.3 Resources 4.4 Complexity classes
5.1 P = NP 5.2 Hard 5.3 Complete 5.4 Incomplete 5.5 Graph isomorphism 5.6 The NP = co-NP problem
6.1 Theory vs. practice
1 Definitions 2 Analysis 3 History 4 Computational complexity theory topics 5 NP completeness and other open questions 6 Intractability 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links
[edit] Definitions
An engineer might ask “As the size of the input to an algorithm increases, by what factor does the running time and memory requirements increase? And what are the implications of that?” In other words, complexity theory, among other things, investigates the scalability of computational problems and algorithms. In particular, it places practical limits on what computers can and cannot do.
A problem is a collection of related questions, where each question is a finite string, not enumerated but written in an algebra called Big O notation, where the actual amount of resources uses numbers only to represent orders of magnitude and not the exact resources used by a particular machine.
[edit] Analysis
Main article: Analysis of algorithms
[edit] Big O notation
Main article: Big O notation
The time complexity of a problem is the number of steps that it takes to solve an instance of the problem as a function of the size of the input, using the most efficient known algorithm. If an instance has length n and can be solved in n2 steps we can say the problem has a time complexity of n2.
But of course, the exact amount of resources will depend on what machine or language is being used. To avoid that difficulty, the Big O notation is generally used (the O stands for the “order” of the calculation). If a problem runs in O(n2) on one computer, then (barring perverse effects) it will also run in O(n2) on all others, even though it may take longer or shorter depending on what resources they have. So this notation allows us to generalize away from the details of a particular computer.
For example, searching an unsorted list of words for a particular word will take, on average, half the time of the size of the list, because if one starts from the beginning or end one must (on average) inspect half the words in the list before finding it. If the word does not exist, one must inspect the whole list to discover that fact, so actually it could be worse, depending on how likely it is that a word in the input is in the list.
But a binary search algorithm is logarithmic in time over size (it is O(log n)). By analogy, humans roughly know where an entry would be in a phone book or dictionary, and use strategies quickly to get to their target, such as using headwords or a thumb index quickly to get roughly to the right place, then use a linear search when they are close to the target.
It is important to note that most computational complexity theory is useful in other engineering fields and has made contributions to mathematics that would be of interest even if computers did not exist.
The master theorem can be useful to calculate the time complexity of a recursive algorithm.
[edit] Worst case analysis
Main article: Best, worst and average case
A common approach to computational complexity is the worst-case analysis, the estimation of the largest amount of computational resources (time or space) needed to run an algorithm. In many cases, the worst-case estimates are rather too pessimistic to explain the good performance of some algorithm in real use on real input. To address this, other approaches have been sought, such as average-case analysis or smoothed analysis.
[edit] Axiomatic analysis
Main article: NP-complete
An axiomatic approach to computational complexity was developed by Manuel Blum. He introduced measures of complexity such as the size of a machine and measures of the computational overhead of recursive functions. The complexity of algorithms are special cases of the axiomatic complexity measure. Blum axioms help in the study of computational complexity in the most general cases.
An important aspect of the theory is to categorize computational problems and algorithms into complexity classes. The most important open question of complexity theory is whether the complexity class P is the same as the complexity class NP, or whether it is a strict subset as is generally believed.
Shortly after the question was first posed, it was realised that many important industry problems in the field of operations research are of an NP subclass called NP-complete. NP-complete problems have solutions that are quick to check, yet current methods to find those solutions are not “efficiently scalable” (as described more formally below). If the NP class is larger than P, then NP-complete problems admit no polynomial-time algorithm and any all-purpose solution to the problem is not efficiently scalable.
The fact that the P vs. NP problem has not been solved, prompts and justifies various research areas in the theory, such as:
spotting and solving special cases of common computational problems
the study of the computational complexity itself
finding heuristic solutions
researching into the hierarchies of complexity classes
exploring multivariate algorithmic approaches such as Parameterized complexity.
The first publication on computational complexity appeared in 1956.[1] But this publication in Russian was for a long time unknown in the Western world.
The beginning of studies in computational complexity can be attributed not only to Trahtenbrot,[2] but also to Rabin.[3][4][5][6][7]
Hartmanis and Stearns’ paper[7] became the most popular in this area. As a result, some researchers attribute the beginning of computational complexity theory only to Hartmanis, Lewis and Stearns.[8]
Andrey Kolmogorov‘s research in the theory of algorithms influenced the development of computational complexity theory. A notable early discovery was the Karatsuba algorithm in 1960, for the multiplication of two numbers. This algorithm disproved Kolmogorov’s 1956 conjecture that the fastest multiplication algorithm must be O(n2), and thus helped launch the study of algorithms in earnest. In 1967, Manuel Blum developed an axiomatic complexity theory based on his axioms and proved an important result, the so called, speed-up theorem.
The field was subsequently expanded by many researchers, including:
Manuel Blum
Allan Borodin
Michael Fellows
Michael R. Garey
Oded Goldreich
Juris Hartmanis
David S. Johnson
Richard Karp
Marek Karpinski
Leonid Levin
Christos H. Papadimitriou
Alexander Razborov
Leslie Valiant
Andrew Yao
On August 6, 2002, the AKS primality test was published in a paper “PRIMES is in P”[9] by three Indian computer scientists. They showed a deterministic primality-proving algorithm they had made. The algorithm determines whether a number is a Prime number or Composite number in polynomial time, and was soon improved by others. The key significance of AKS is that it was the first published primality-proving algorithm to be all of general, polynomial, deterministic, and unconditional. The authors received the 2006 Gödel Prize and the 2006 Fulkerson Prize for their work.
[edit] Computational complexity theory topics
[edit] Time and space complexity
Complexity theory attempts to describe how difficult it is for an algorithm to find a solution to a problem. This differs from computability theory, which describes whether a problem can be solved at all: a branch of science probably made most famous by Alan Turing‘s essay On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.
[edit] Decision problems
Much of complexity theory deals with decision problems. A decision problem is one where the answer is always “yes” or “no”. Some problems are undecidable, or at least seem so, so complexity theory can be used to distinguish problems where it is certain to get a correct “yes” or “no” (not necessarily both). A problem that reverses which can be relied upon is called a complement of that problem.
For example, the problem IS-PRIME says “yes” if its input is a prime and “no” otherwise, while the problem IS-COMPOSITE says “yes” if the number is not prime. Either may be unpredictable when the correct result would be “no”, they may say “yes” or perhaps never finish even if they were actually going to produce the right result, given an infinite number of monkeys.
Decision problems are often interesting to researchers because a problem can always be reduced to a decision problem. For instance, a problem HAS-FACTOR may be:
Given integers n and k find whether n has any prime factors less than k.
If we can solve this problem with known maximum resources we can use that solution to solve the next problem FACTORIZE without many more, using a binary search on factors of k until we find the smallest, divide out that factor and repeat until all the factors are found (i.e. we end up with 1 or 0).
[edit] Resources
Complexity theory analyzes the difficulty of computational problems in terms of many different computational resources. A problem can be described in terms of many requirements it makes on resources: time, space, randomness, alternation, and other less-intuitive measures[vague]. A complexity class is the class of all problems which can be solved using a certain amount of a certain computational resource.
There are other measures of computational complexity. For instance, communication complexity is a measure of complexity for distributed computations.
A different measure of problem complexity, which is useful in some cases, is circuit complexity. This is a measure of the size of a boolean circuit needed to compute the answer to a problem, in terms of the number of logic gates required to build the circuit. Such a measure is useful, for example, when designing hardware microchips to compute the function instead of software.
Perhaps the most studied computational resources are for determinism in time or space. These resources represent the amount of time or space needed by a deterministic computer. These resources are of great practical interest, and are well-studied.
Some computational problems are easier to analyze in terms of more unusual resources. For example, a nondeterministic Turing machine is a computational model that is allowed to branch out to check many different possibilities at once. The nondeterministic Turing machine has very little to do with how we physically want to compute algorithms, but its branching exactly captures many of the mathematical models we want to analyze, so that nondeterministic time is a very important resource in analyzing computational problems.
Many more unusual computational resources have been used in complexity theory. Technically, any complexity measure can be viewed as a computational resource, and complexity measures are very broadly defined by the Blum complexity axioms.
[edit] Complexity classes
A complexity class is the class of all of the computational problems which can be solved using a certain amount of a certain computational resource.
The complexity class P is the class of decision problems that can be solved by a deterministic machine in polynomial time. This class corresponds to an intuitive idea of the problems which can be effectively solved in the worst cases.[10]
The complexity class NP is the set of decision problems that can be solved by a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. This class contains many problems that people would like to be able to solve effectively, including the Boolean satisfiability problem, the Hamiltonian path problem and the vertex cover problem. All the problems in this class have the property that their solutions can be checked efficiently.[10]
Many complexity classes can be characterized in terms of the mathematical logic needed to express them – this field is called descriptive complexity.
[edit] NP completeness and other open questions
[edit] P = NP
Main article: Complexity classes P and NP
See also: Oracle machine
The question of whether P = NP (can problems that can be solved in non-deterministic polynomial time also always be solved in deterministic polynomial time?) is one of the most important open questions in theoretical computer science because of the wide implications of a solution.[10] If the answer is yes, many important problems can be shown to have more efficient solutions that are now used with reluctance because of unknown edge cases. These include various types of integer programming in operations research, many problems in logistics, protein structure prediction in biology, and the ability to find formal proofs of pure mathematics theorems.[11][12]
The P = NP problem is one of the Millennium Prize Problems proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute the solution of which is a US$1,000,000 prize for the first person to provide a solution.[13]
Questions like this motivate the concepts of hard and complete
[edit] Hard
A class of problems X is hard for a class of problems Y if every problem in Y can be transformed “easily” (that is to say, it may take a lot of effort but the person solving the problem knows a solution exists) into some problem in X that produces the same solution. The definition of “hard” (or rather “easy”) problems differs by context. For P = NP, “hard” means NP-hard— a class of problems that are not necessarily in NP themselves, but to which any they can be reduced to an NP problem in polynomial time.
[edit] Complete
The class X is complete for Y if it is hard for Y and is also a subset of it.
Thus, the class of NP-complete problems contains the most “difficult” problems in NP, in the sense that they are the ones most likely not to be in P. Because the problem P = NP is not solved, being able to reduce another problem, Π1, to a known NP-complete problem, Π2, would indicate that there is no known polynomial-time solution for Π1. This is due to the fact that a polynomial-time solution to Π1 would yield a polynomial-time solution to Π2. Similarly, because all NP problems can be reduced to the set, finding an NP-complete problem that can be solved in polynomial time would mean that P = NP.[10]
[edit] Incomplete
Diagram of complexity classes provided that P ≠ NP. The existence of problems in NP outside both P and NP-complete in this case was established by Ladner.[14]
Incomplete problems are those in NP that are neither NP-complete nor in P. In other words, incomplete problems can neither be solved in polynomial time nor are they hard problems.
It has been shown that if P ≠ NP then there exist NP-incomplete problems.[14][15]
[edit] Graph isomorphism
An important unsolved problem in this context is, whether the graph isomorphism problem is in P, NP-complete, or NP-incomplete. The answer is not known, but there are strong hints that the problem is at least not NP-complete.[16] The graph isomorphism problem asks whether two given graphs are isomorphic.
[edit] The NP = co-NP problem
Co-NP is the class containing the complement problems (i.e. problems with the yes/no answers reversed) of NP problems. It is believed[who?] that the two classes are not equal; however, it has not yet been proven. It has been shown[15] that if these two complexity classes are not equal no NP-complete problem can be in co-NP and no co-NP-complete problem can be in NP.
Every problem in P is also in both NP and co-NP. Integer factorization is an example of a problem in both NP and co-NP that is not known to be in P.
[edit] Intractability
See also: Combinatorial explosion
Problems that can be solved but not fast enough for the solution to be useful are called intractable[17]. Naive complexity theory assumes problems that lack polynomial-time solutions are intractable for more than the smallest inputs. Problems that are known to be intractable in this sense include those that are EXPTIME-complete. If NP is not the same as P, then the NP-complete problems are also intractable in this sense. To see why exponential-time algorithms might be unusable in practice, consider a program that makes 2n operations before halting. For small n, say 100, and assuming for the sake of example that the computer does 1012 operations each second, the program would run for about 4 × 1010 years, which is roughly the age of the universe. Even with a much faster computer, the program would only be useful for very small instances and in that sense the intractability of a problem is somewhat independent of technological progress. Nevertheless a polynomial time algorithm is not always practical. If its running time is, say, n15, it is unreasonable to consider it efficient and it is still useless except on small instances.
The graph shows time (average of 100 instances in msec using a 933 MHz Pentium III) vs.problem size for knapsack problems for a state-of-the-art specialized algorithm. Quadratic fit suggests that empirical algorithmic complexity for instances with 50–10,000 variables is O((log n)2). The data comes from [18]
[edit] Theory vs. practice
What intractability means in practice is open to debate. Saying that a problem is not in P does not imply that all large cases of the problem are hard or even that most of them are. For example the decision problem in Presburger arithmetic has been shown not to be in P, yet algorithms have been written that solve the problem in reasonable times in most cases. Similarly, algorithms can solve the NP-complete knapsack problem over a wide range of sizes in less than quadratic time (see graph) and SAT solvers routinely handle large instances of the NP-complete Boolean satisfiability problem.
Algorithmic efficiency – discusses practical methods for improving an algorithm’s efficiency
Amortized analysis
Cyclomatic complexity
Game complexity
List of computability and complexity topics
List of important publications in computational complexity theory
List of open problems in computational complexity theory
The master theorem can be used to analyze the running time of recursive algorithms.
Parameterized Complexity
Performance analysis – the measurement of an algorithms performance at run-time
The Complexity of Songs
^ Trahtenbrot (1956).
^ Rabin, M. O. (1959). “Speed of Computation of Functions and Classification of Recursive Sets”.: 1–2, Proc. 3rd Conference of Scientific Societies.
^ Rabin, M. O. (1960), Tech. Report 2, Degree of Difficulty of Computing a Function and a Partial Ordering of Recursive Sets, Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Jerusalem
^ Rabin, M. O. (1963). Real-time computation. Israel Journal of Math. pp. 203–211. , Hartmanis, Lewis and Stearns
^ Hartmanis and Stearns (1964)
^ a b Hartmanis and Stearns (1965)
^ Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman (1976)
^ Agrawal, Manindra; Kayal, Neeraj; Saxena, Nitin, “PRIMES is in P”, Annals of Mathematics, 160 (2004), 781–793
^ a b c d Sipser, Michael (2006). “Time Complexity”. Introduction to the Theory of Computation (2nd ed.). USA: Thomson Course Technology. ISBN 0534950973.
^ Berger, Bonnie A.; Leighton, Terrance (1998). “Protein folding in the hydrophobic-hydrophilic (HP) model is NP-complete”. Journal of Computational Biology 5 (1): p27–40. doi:10.1089/cmb.1998.5.27. PMID 9541869.
^ Cook, Stephen (April 2000). The P versus NP Problem. Clay Mathematics Institute. http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/Official_Problem_Description.pdf. Retrieved on 2006-10-18.
^ Jaffe, Arthur M. (2006). “The Millennium Grand Challenge in Mathematics“. Notices of the AMS 53 (6). http://www.ams.org/notices/200606/fea-jaffe.pdf. Retrieved on 2006-10-18.
^ a b Ladner, Richard E. (1975). “On the structure of polynomial time reducibility” (PDF). Journal of the ACM (JACM) 22 (1): 151–171. doi:10.1145/321864.321877. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/330000/321877/p155-ladner.pdf?key1=321877&key2=7146531911&coll=&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618.
^ a b Du, Ding-Zhu; Ko, Ker-I (2000). Theory of Computational Complexity. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-34506-0.
^ Arvind, Vikraman; Kurur, Piyush P. (2006), “Graph isomorphism is in SPP”, Information and Computation 204 (5): 835–852, doi:10.1016/j.ic.2006.02.002
^ Hopcroft, et al. (2007), p. 368
^ Pisinger, D. 2003. “Where are the hard knapsack problems?” Technical Report 2003/08, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Aho, A.V., Hopcroft, J.E., and Ullman, J.D. (1976) The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley P.C.
Arora, Sanjeev; Barak, Boaz, “Complexity Theory: A Modern Approach”, Cambridge University Press, March 2009.
Blum, Manuel (1967) On the Size of Machines, Information and Control, v. 11, pp. 257–265
Blum M. (1967) A Machine-independent Theory of Complexity of Recursive Functions, Journal of the ACM, v. 14, No.2, pp. 322–336
Downey R. and M. Fellows (1999) Parameterized Complexity, Springer-Verlag.
Fortnow, Lance; Homer, Steve, (2002/2003). A Short History of Computational Complexity. In D. van Dalen, J. Dawson, and A. Kanamori, editors, The History of Mathematical Logic. North-Holland, Amsterdam.
Goldreich, Oded. Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Hartmanis, J., Lewis, P.M., and Stearns, R.E. (1965) Classification of computations by time and memory requirements, Proc. IfiP Congress 65, pp. 31–35
Hartmanis, J., and Stearns, R.E. (1964) Computational Complexity of Recursive Sequences, IEEE Proc. 5th Annual Symp. on Switching Circuit Theory and Logical Design, pp. 82–90
Hartmanis, J., and Stearns, R.E. (1965) On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms, Transactions American Mathematical Society, No. 5, pp. 285–306
Hopcroft, J.E., Motwani, R. and Ullman, J.D. (2007) Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, Addison Wesley, Boston/San Francisco/New York
van Leeuwen, Jan, (ed.) Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume A: Algorithms and Complexity, The MIT Press/Elsevier, 1990. ISBN 978-0-444-88071-0 (Volume A). QA 76.H279 1990. Huge compendium of information, 1000s of references in the various articles.
Mertens, Stephan, “Computational Complexity for Physicists”, Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 4, no. 3, May/June 2002, pp 31–47
Trahtenbrot, B.A. (1956) Signalizing Functions and Table Operators, Research Notices of the Pensa Pedagogical Institute, v. 4, pp. 75–87 (in Russian)
Trahtenbrot, B.A. Complexity of Algorithms and Computations, NGU, Novosibirsk, 1967 (in Russian)
Wilf, Herbert S., Algorithms and Complexity, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1986. ISBN 0130219738
The Complexity Zoo
Important complexity classes (more)
P • NP • co-NP • NP-C • co-NP-C • NP-hard • UP • #P • #P-C • L • NL • NC • P-C • PSPACE • PSPACE-C • EXPTIME • NEXPTIME • EXPSPACE • 2-EXPTIME • PR • RE • Co-RE • RE-C • Co-RE-C • R • BQP • BPP • RP • ZPP • PCP • IP • PH
Semantic Web’s Terms & Companies & People & Organizations
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Tim Berners-Lee | John Goodwin | Dave McComb | Paul Miller | Amit Sheth | Nova Spivack | Christine Connors | Alex Iskold | Janie Davies | Jeremy Carroll | Jim Rapoza | Paul Allen | Richard MacManus | Steven Pinker | Ben Adida | Andy Plesser | Bill Gates | Chris Morrison | Chris Augustin | Dan Brickley | David Crystal | David Barnes | Gabor Karsai | Holger Knublauch(TopQuadrant) | David Michael | Devin Wenig | Jason Gaedtke | Jim Hendler | Johann Johannson | John Turato | Josh Dilworth | Julia Kent | Karel Teige | Laura Bennett | Lee Feigenbaum | Marc Horowitz | Mark Greaves | Matthew West | Michael Singer | Neil Roseman | Nikita Ogievetsky | Paolo Dellapiana | Phil Muncaster | Philippe Le Hegaret | Roberto Maria Clemente | Stefan Decker | Stephen Conroy | Stephen Solocof | Steve Ballmer | Steve Ganz | Taylor Cowan | Thomas Tague | Tim O | Tom Morris | Venky Harinarayan | Walter Perry | Yossi Vardi | Dean Whitney | David Provost | David J. Neff | Hiroshi Yasukawa | Hideki Isozaki | Henry Blodget | Harry Chen | Harry Barfoot | Hanson Dodge | Hamish Cunningham | Greg Farr | Gordon M | Gord Hotchkiss | Golda Velez | Gilberto Gil | Geraldine Peters | George Lucas | George Box | Geoff Brown | G. Daniel Martich | Frank Gilbane | Fay Foley-McDunnough | Evans Hadoop | Eva Oliveira | Erika Preuss | Erik Collier | Erick Schonfeld | Eric Hoffer | Eran Shir | Emma Tonkin | Eddy Choi | Draper Fisher Jurvetson | Douglas Turnbull | Douglas Reeves | Dominic White | Dirk-Willem van Gulik | Diane Mueller | Dewey Decimal | Dave Roberts | Dave Raggett | Clay Shirky | Christopher Bancroft | Christian Dupuis
MIT | European Union | City University London | Securities and Exchange Commission | SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE | National Council for the Blind | Ireland Centre For Inclusive Technology | Digital Enterprise Research Institute | Carnegie Mellon University | Center for Semantic Excellence | Collective Intelligence | European Commission | German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment | Information Integration Intelligence | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers | Missouri Council for History Education | Mozilla Foundation | Northeastern University | ABAP | Palm Springs Unified School District | Pittsburgh Medical Center | SAP Integration and Certification Center | Silicon Valley | sixth Arab Computer Society | Stanford | University of Pittsburgh | UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation | U.S. Government | VocaLink’s Euro Payment Service | NASD | New York University’s Stern School of Business | New School for Design | National University of Ireland | National Institute of Health | Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology | Mohawk College | Mohawk Applied Research Centre for Health Informatics | MIT Media Lab | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ManTech MBI’s government | LSDIS Lab . | Lake Washington School District | LA school district | Knowledge Society | Knowledge Organization | Knowledge Media Institute | Knewco’s mission | Ken North Computing LLC Panel | Keio University in Japan | Kansas State University | Joint Information Systems Committee | Jeff Gray Institute | Japan Branch Office | International WIC Institute | International Telecommunication Union | International Software & Productivity Engineering Institute | International Society | international child protection and development charity | Institute of Traffic Safety | Institute of Technology | Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering | Institute for Traffic Safety | Institute for Technology Assessment | Information Systems Department | Information Society | Imperial College | IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization | Highland Consumer Fund | Global | Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Education Center | Founders Fund | Federal Systems Division | federal government’s sports administration | Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research | Euro Payment Service | Environmental Systems Research Institute | Division of Research & Education Systems | Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum | Center for Coordination Science | Churchill Club | Cerebra University | Center Party | Department of Information Technology | Department of Defense | Department of Control and Transport Automation | Department of Control | Department of Computing | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | Defense Logistics Information Research Program’s Technical Solutions Council | Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency | Dalian University of Technology | Cyc Foundation | Cortex Intelligence | Control and Transport Automation Budapest University of Technology and Economics | Consortium | Computer Writing and Research Lab | Columbia University in New York | Columbia University | California Institute of Technology | Business Intelligence for HR
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2007)
For other uses, see Information (disambiguation).
The ASCII codes for the word “Wikipedia” represented in binary, the numeral system most commonly used for encoding computer information
Information as a concept has a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.
Many people[who?] speak about the Information Age as the advent of the Knowledge Age[citation needed]or knowledge society, the information society, the Information revolution, and information technologies, and even though informatics, information science and computer science are often in the spotlight, the word “information” is often used without careful consideration of the various meanings it has acquired.
2.1 Measuring information entropy
1 Etymology 2 As a message 3 As a pattern 4 As sensory input 5 As an influence which leads to a transformation 6 As a property in physics 7 As records 8 Information and semiotics 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links
[edit] Etymology
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known historical meaning of the word information in English was the act of informing, or giving form or shape to the mind, as in education, instruction, or training. A quote from 1387 English text: “Five books come down from heaven for information of mankind.” It was also used for an item of training, e.g. a particular instruction. “Melibee had heard the great skills and reasons of Dame Prudence, and her wise information and techniques.” (1386)
The English word was apparently derived from the Latin accusative form (informationem) of the nominative (informatio): this noun is on its turn derived from the verb “informare” (to inform) in the sense of “to give form to the mind”, “to discipline”, “instruct”, “teach”: “Men so wise should go and inform their kings.” (1330) Inform itself comes (via French) from the Latin verb informare, to give form to, to form an idea of. Furthermore, Latin itself already even contained the word informatio meaning concept or idea, but the extent to which this may have influenced the development of the word information in English is unclear.
As a final note, the ancient Greek word for form was “μορφή” (morf -> morphe, Morph) and also είδος eidos (kind, idea, shape, set), the latter word was famously used in a technical philosophical sense by Plato (and later Aristotle) to denote the ideal identity or essence of something (see Theory of forms). “Eidos” can also be associated with thought, proposition or even concept.
[edit] As a message
Information is a term with many meanings depending on context, but is as a rule closely related to such concepts as meaning, knowledge, instruction, communication, representation, and mental stimulus. Simply stated, information is a message received and understood. In terms of data, it can be defined as a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn. There are many other aspects of information since it is the knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction. But overall, information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it.
Information is the state of a system of interest. Message is the information materialized.
Information is a quality of a message from a sender to one or more receivers. Information is always about something (size of a parameter, occurrence of an event, value, ethics, etc). Viewed in this manner, information does not have to be accurate; it may be a truth or a lie, or just the sound of a falling tree. Even a disruptive noise used to inhibit the flow of communication and create misunderstanding would in this view be a form of information. However, generally speaking, if the amount of information in the received message increases, the message is more accurate.
This model assumes there is a definite sender and at least one receiver. Many refinements of the model assume the existence of a common language understood by the sender and at least one of the receivers. An important variation identifies information as that which would be communicated by a message if it were sent from a sender to a receiver capable of understanding the message. In another variation, it is not required that the sender be capable of understanding the message, or even cognizant that there is a message, making information something that can be extracted from an environment, e.g., through observation, reading or measurement.
Communication theory provides a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome. For example, we can say that “the signal contained thousands of bits of information”. Communication theory tends to use the concept of information entropy, generally attributed to Claude Shannon, see below.
Another form of information is Fisher information, a concept of R.A. Fisher. This is used in application of statistics to estimation theory and to science in general. Fisher information is thought of as the amount of information that a message carries about an unobservable parameter. It can be computed from knowledge of the likelihood function defining the system. For example, with a normal likelihood function, the Fisher information is the reciprocal of the variance of the law. In the absence of knowledge of the likelihood law, the Fisher information may be computed from normally distributed score data as the reciprocal of their second moment.
Even though information and data are often used interchangeably, they are actually very different. Data is a set of unrelated information, and as such is of no use until it is properly evaluated. Upon evaluation, once there is some significant relation between data, and they show some relevance, then they are converted into information. Now this same data can be used for different purposes. Thus, till the data convey some information, they are not useful and therefore not information.
[edit] Measuring information entropy
The view of information as a message came into prominence with the publication in 1948 of an influential paper by Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” This paper provides the foundations of information theory and endows the word information not only with a technical meaning but also a measure. If the sending device is equally likely to send any one of a set of N messages, then the preferred measure of “the information produced when one message is chosen from the set” is the base two logarithm of N (This measure is called self-information). In this paper, Shannon continues:
The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey. A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information. N such devices can store N bits…[1]
A complementary way of measuring information is provided by algorithmic information theory. In brief, this measures the information content of a list of symbols based on how predictable they are, or more specifically how easy it is to compute the list through a program: the information content of a sequence is the number of bits of the shortest program that computes it. The sequence below would have a very low algorithmic information measurement since it is a very predictable pattern, and as the pattern continues the measurement would not change. Shannon information would give the same information measurement for each symbol, since they are statistically random, and each new symbol would increase the measurement.
It is important to recognize the limitations of traditional information theory and algorithmic information theory from the perspective of human meaning. For example, when referring to the meaning content of a message Shannon noted “Frequently the messages have meaning… these semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages” (emphasis in original).
In information theory signals are part of a process, not a substance; they do something, they do not contain any specific meaning. Combining algorithmic information theory and information theory we can conclude that the most random signal contains the most information as it can be interpreted in any way and cannot be compressed.[citation needed]
Michael Reddy noted that “‘signals’ of the mathematical theory are ‘patterns that can be exchanged’. There is no message contained in the signal, the signals convey the ability to select from a set of possible messages.” In information theory “the system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design”.
[edit] As a pattern
Information is any represented pattern. This view assumes neither accuracy nor directly communicating parties, but instead assumes a separation between an object and its representation. Consider the following example: economic statistics represent an economy, however inaccurately. What are commonly referred to as data in computing, statistics, and other fields, are forms of information in this sense. The electro-magnetic patterns in a computer network and connected devices are related to something other than the pattern itself, such as text characters to be displayed and keyboard input. Signals, signs, and symbols are also in this category. On the other hand, according to semiotics, data is symbols with certain syntax and information is data with a certain semantic. Painting and drawing contain information to the extent that they represent something such as an assortment of objects on a table, a profile, or a landscape. In other words, when a pattern of something is transposed to a pattern of something else, the latter is information. This would be the case whether or not there was anyone to perceive it.
But if information can be defined merely as a pattern, does that mean that neither utility nor meaning are necessary components of information? Arguably a distinction must be made between raw unprocessed data and information which possesses utility, value or some quantum of meaning. On this view, information may indeed be characterized as a pattern; but this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
An individual entry in a telephone book, which follows a specific pattern formed by name, address and telephone number, does not become “informative” in some sense unless and until it possesses some degree of utility, value or meaning. For example, someone might look up a girlfriend’s number, might order a take away etc. The vast majority of numbers will never be construed as “information” in any meaningful sense. The gap between data and information is only closed by a behavioral bridge whereby some value, utility or meaning is added to transform mere data or pattern into information.
When one constructs a representation of an object, one can selectively extract from the object (sampling) or use a system of signs to replace (encoding), or both. The sampling and encoding result in representation. An example of the former is a “sample” of a product; an example of the latter is “verbal description” of a product. Both contain information of the product, however inaccurate. When one interprets representation, one can predict a broader pattern from a limited number of observations (inference) or understand the relation between patterns of two different things (decoding). One example of the former is to sip a soup to know if it is spoiled; an example of the latter is examining footprints to determine the animal and its condition. In both cases, information sources are not constructed or presented by some “sender” of information. Regardless, information is dependent upon, but usually unrelated to and separate from, the medium or media used to express it. In other words, the position of a theoretical series of bits, or even the output once interpreted by a computer or similar device, is unimportant, except when someone or something is present to interpret the information. Therefore, a quantity of information is totally distinct from its medium.
[edit] As sensory input
Often information is viewed as a type of input to an organism or designed device. Inputs are of two kinds. Some inputs are important to the function of the organism (for example, food) or device (energy) by themselves. In his book Sensory Ecology, Dusenbery called these causal inputs. Other inputs (information) are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a later time (and perhaps another place). Some information is important because of association with other information but eventually there must be a connection to a causal input. In practice, information is usually carried by weak stimuli that must be detected by specialized sensory systems and amplified by energy inputs before they can be functional to the organism or device. For example, light is often a causal input to plants but provides information to animals. The colored light reflected from a flower is too weak to do much photosynthetic work but the visual system of the bee detects it and the bee’s nervous system uses the information to guide the bee to the flower, where the bee often finds nectar or pollen, which are causal inputs, serving a nutritional function.
Information is any type of sensory input. When an organism with a nervous system receives an input, it transforms the input into an electrical signal. This is regarded information by some. The idea of representation is still relevant, but in a slightly different manner. That is, while abstract painting does not represent anything concretely, when the viewer sees the painting, it is nevertheless transformed into electrical signals that create a representation of the painting. Defined this way, information does not have to be related to truth, communication, or representation of an object. Entertainment in general is not intended to be informative. Music, the performing arts, amusement parks, works of fiction and so on are thus forms of information in this sense, but they are not necessarily forms of information according to some definitions given above. Consider another example: food supplies both nutrition and taste for those who eat it. If information is equated to sensory input, then nutrition is not information but taste is.
[edit] As an influence which leads to a transformation
Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern. Consider, for example, DNA. The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that influences the formation and development of an organism without any need for a conscious mind. Systems theory at times seems to refer to information in this sense, assuming information does not necessarily involve any conscious mind, and patterns circulating (due to feedback) in the system can be called information. In other words, it can be said that information in this sense is something potentially perceived as representation, though not created or presented for that purpose.
If, however, the premise of “influence” implies that information has been perceived by a conscious mind and also interpreted by it, the specific context associated with this interpretation may cause the transformation of the information into knowledge. Complex definitions of both “information” and “knowledge” make such semantic and logical analysis difficult, but the condition of “transformation” is an important point in the study of information as it relates to knowledge, especially in the business discipline of knowledge management. In this practice, tools and processes are used to assist a knowledge worker in performing research and making decisions, including steps such as:
reviewing information in order to effectively derive value and meaning
referencing metadata if any is available
establishing a relevant context, often selecting from many possible contexts
deriving new knowledge from the information
making decisions or recommendations from the resulting knowledge
Stewart (2001) argues that the transformation of information into knowledge is a critical one, lying at the core of value creation and competitive advantage for the modern enterprise.
When Marshall McLuhan speaks of media and their effects on human cultures, he refers to the structure of artifacts that in turn shape our behaviors and mindsets. Also, pheromones are often said to be “information” in this sense.
[edit] As a property in physics
Main article: Physical information
In 2003, J. D. Bekenstein claimed there is a growing trend in physics to define the physical world as being made of information itself (and thus information is defined in this way) (see Digital physics). Information has a well defined meaning in physics. Examples of this include the phenomenon of quantum entanglement where particles can interact without reference to their separation or the speed of light. Information itself cannot travel faster than light even if the information is transmitted indirectly. This could lead to the fact that all attempts at physically observing a particle with an “entangled” relationship to another are slowed down, even though the particles are not connected in any other way other than by the information they carry.
Another link is demonstrated by the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment. In this experiment, a direct relationship between information and another physical property, entropy, is demonstrated. A consequence is that it is impossible to destroy information without increasing the entropy of a system; in practical terms this often means generating heat. Another, more philosophical, outcome is that information could be thought of as interchangeable with energy. Thus, in the study of logic gates, the theoretical lower bound of thermal energy released by an AND gate is higher than for the NOT gate (because information is destroyed in an AND gate and simply converted in a NOT gate). Physical information is of particular importance in the theory of quantum computers.
[edit] As records
Records are a specialized form of information. Essentially, records are information produced consciously or as by-products of business activities or transactions and retained because of their value. Primarily their value is as evidence of the activities of the organization but they may also be retained for their informational value. Sound records management ensures that the integrity of records is preserved for as long as they are required.
The international standard on records management, ISO 15489, defines records as “information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”. The International Committee on Archives (ICA) Committee on electronic records defined a record as, “a specific piece of recorded information generated, collected or received in the initiation, conduct or completion of an activity and that comprises sufficient content, context and structure to provide proof or evidence of that activity”.
Records may be retained because of their business value, as part of the corporate memory of the organization or to meet legal, fiscal or accountability requirements imposed on the organization. Willis (2005) expressed the view that sound management of business records and information delivered “…six key requirements for good corporate governance…transparency; accountability; due process; compliance; meeting statutory and common law requirements; and security of personal and corporate information.”
[edit] Information and semiotics
Beynon-Davies [2] explains the multi-faceted concept of information in terms of that of signs and sign-systems. Signs themselves can be considered in terms of four inter-dependent levels, layers or branches of semiotics: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and empirics. These four layers serve to connect the social world on the one hand with the physical or technical world on the other.
Pragmatics is concerned with the purpose of communication. Pragmatics links the issue of signs with that of intention. The focus of pragmatics is on the intentions of human agents underlying communicative behaviour. In other words, intentions link language to action.
Semantics is concerned with the meaning of a message conveyed in a communicative act. Semantics considers the content of communication. Semantics is the study of the meaning of signs – the association between signs and behaviour. Semantics can be considered as the study of the link between symbols and their referents or concepts; particularly the way in which signs relate to human behaviour.
Syntax is concerned with the formalism used to represent a message. Syntax as an area studies the form of communication in terms of the logic and grammar of sign systems. Syntax is devoted to the study of the form rather than the content of signs and sign-systems.
Empirics is the study of the signals used to carry a message; the physical characteristics of the medium of communication. Empirics is devoted to the study of communication channels and their characteristics, e.g., sound, light, electronic transmission etc.
Communication normally exists within the context of some social situation. The social situation sets the context for the intentions conveyed (pragmatics) and the form in which communication takes place. In a communicative situation intentions are expressed through messages which comprise collections of inter-related signs taken from a language which is mutually understood by the agents involved in the communication. Mutual understanding implies that agents involved understand the chosen language in terms of its agreed syntax (syntactics) and semantics. The sender codes the message in the language and sends the message as signals along some communication channel (empirics). The chosen communication channel will have inherent properties which determine outcomes such as the speed with which communication can take place and over what distance.
Accuracy and precision
Complex system
Complex adaptive system
Data storage device#Recording medium
Exformation
Free Information Infrastructure
Information broker
Information superhighway
Information ladder
Information mapping
Information processor
Information sensitivity
Informology
Infornography
Meta-information in linguistics
Philosophy of information
Propaganda model
Receiver operating characteristic
Satisficing
Shannon–Hartley theorem
^ The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, p. 379, (July 1948).
^ Beynon-Davies P. (2002). Information Systems: an introduction to informatics in Organisations. Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK. ISBN 0-333-96390-3
Alan Liu (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, University of Chicago Press
Bekenstein, Jacob D. (2003, August). Information in the holographic universe. Scientific American.
Luciano Floridi, (2005). ‘Is Information Meaningful Data?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70 (2), pp. 351 – 370. Available online at Oxford University
Luciano Floridi, (2005). ‘Semantic Conceptions of Information’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online at Stanford University
Stewart, Thomas, (2001). Wealth of Knowledge. Doubleday, New York, NY, 379 p.
Young, Paul. The Nature of Information (1987). Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Ct.
Look up information in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Semantic Conceptions of Information Review by Luciano Floridi for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Principia Cybernetica entry on negentropy
Fisher Information, a New Paradigm for Science: Introduction, Uncertainty principles, Wave equations, Ideas of Escher, Kant, Plato and Wheeler. This essay is continually revised in the light of ongoing research.
How Much Information? 2003 an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year (study was produced by faculty and students at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley.)
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From Logic to Ontology: The limit of “The Semantic Web”
Posted in Semantic Web, tagged Semantic Web, Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on June 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Physics’s Spanish Royal Society
fcerong@gmail.com
The limits of the semantic web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) are not set by the use of machines themselves and biological systems could be used to reach this goal, but as the logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic) that is being used to construct it does not contemplate the concept of time, since it is purely formal logic and metonymic lacks the metaphor, and that is what Gödel’s theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel’s_incompleteness_theorems) remark, the final tautology of each construction or metonymic language mathematical (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic), which leads to inconsistencies. The construction of the Semantic Web is a undecidible problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem).
This consistent logic is completely opposite to the logic that makes inconsistent use of time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan), inherent of human unconscious, but the use of time is built on the lack, not on positive things, it is based on denials and absences, and that is impossible to reflect on a machine because of the perceived lack of the required self-awareness is acquired with the absence.
The problem is we are trying to build an intelligent system to replace our way of thinking, at least in the information search, but the special nature of human mind is the use of time which lets human beings reach a conclusion, therefore does not exist in the human mind the halting problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) or stop of calculation.
So all efforts faced toward semantic web are doomed to failure a priori if the aim is to extend our human way of thinking into machines, they lack the metaphorical speech, because only a mathematical construction, which will always be tautological and metonymic, and lacks the use of the time that is what leads to the conclusion or “stop”.
As a demonstration of that, if you suppose it is possible to construct the semantic web, as a language with capabilities similar to human language, which has the use of time, should we face it as a theorem, we can prove it to be false with a counter example, and it is given in the particular case of the Turing machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine) and “the halting problem”.
One solution for the problem to build the semantic web could be the use of Non-formal or Inconsistency Logic (https://methainternet.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/non-formal-or-inconsistency-logic-lacans-logic-godels-incompleteness-theorems).
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Vice President Mike Pence To Visit Kennedy Space Center To Mark Apollo 11's Moon LandingUS Vice President Mike Pence will travel Saturday to Florida to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
CBS4 Exclusive: Accused Dadeland Mall Shoplifters Busted & Expensive Purses Recovered
By Peter D'Oench January 24, 2014 at 6:26 pm
Filed Under:CBS4, Crime, Dadeland, Dadeland Mall, Jimmy Choo, Miami, Miami Police, Peter D'Oench, Saks Fifth Avenue, St. Laurent
High-End Purse Snatchers (Source: CBS4)
MIAMI (CBS4) – Miami Police have recovered thousands of dollars of high-end purses after a “smash and grab” robbery at Dadeland Mall on Friday.
CBS4 news crews were there exclusively at Northeast 1st Avenue and 78th Street as two of the suspects were taken into custody and more than $12,000 worth of purses were recovered from their Chevrolet Malibu.
Some of the items were St. Laurent and Jimmy Choo purses and had price tags on them. The prices were valued at between $1500 and $2500 each. At least a half dozen purses were recovered, police said.
They say a third suspect was arrested near the Dadeland Mall.
Police say they stole the items after smashing a glass counter near the entrance to a Saks Fifth Avenue store.
An alert Miami Police officer who was aware of a BOLO or a Be-on-the-lookout bulletin spotted the suspects’ car and it was pulled over at Northeast 78th Street and Northeas 1st Avenue.
“We received notice about a vehicle fitting that description,” said Miami Police Sgt. Marvin Sanders in an exclusive interview with CBS4’s Peter D’Oench.
“With that description officers came to the area and we pulled over the car and we asked the individuals to get out,” said Sanders. “At that time we realized they had the merchandise in the car.”
“I feel very good about the work our people did,” he said. “I am very proud of my guys. I mean they got the description and came to the area really, really fast. They were able to take the individuals into custody and get the merchandise. This seems like a good case.”
So far the suspects have not been identified and there is no word on charges against them.
Miami-Dade Police say they will check with their Robbery Clearinghouse to see if they are connected to any other crimes.
“This will send a message that you can’t get away with this?” asked D’Oench.
“That’s right,” said Sanders. “At least in the City of Miami we will catch you.”
Peter D'Oench
Peter D'Oench is a reporter for CBS4 News. More from Peter D'Oench
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Julian Assange and the degraded spectacle of Britain’s Guardian
By Robert Stevens
The levelling of 17 charges against Julian Assange by the United States under the Espionage Act stands as a condemnation of the near decade-long witch-hunt led by Britain’s Guardian against the WikiLeaks founder.
For years the Guardian portrayed Assange as a self-promoting egotist who exaggerated the dangers he faced from the US. The measures enacted against Assange not only confirm his every warning but represent a direct threat to the Guardian and its staff.
The Guardian was one of five newspapers that Assange worked with in 2010, in publishing the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and thousands of US diplomatic cables. These were leaked to Assange by Chelsea Manning and are now the subject of a total of 18 charges, carrying a collective maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. If Assange is prosecuted and found guilty, then the Guardian, its editor and many others could face the same danger.
The news of the Espionage Act charges being levelled against Assange prompted the Guardian to issue a disgraceful editorial with a headline summarising its main content: “The Guardian view on Julian Assange: send him to Sweden.”
It stated of the Espionage Act charges, “[W]hether or not the documents should have been published, their publication should not be punished by the American justice system, which could impose a cumulative sentence of 180 years on the latest charges.”
The editorial has just six paragraphs, with the last two setting out the Guardian ’ s aim: It concluded, “Then there is the rape charge that Mr Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place. This is serious and deserves a proper trial, which will never happen if he is sent to America.
“Ultimately, the decision on his future will lie with the home secretary, who may well still be Sajid Javid by the time it must be made. Mr Javid should defend the principle at stake and send Mr Assange to Sweden at the end of his sentence here.”
What does this amount to? Let’s be done with Assange and get him off our backs for good by sending him to Stockholm.
Under conditions in which the WikiLeaks journalist is facing life in prison or worse, with a Grand Jury panel in the US ready to add more charges to the indictment, which could carry the death penalty, the Guardian cannot bring itself to defend him.
The editorial was followed by an op-ed piece published by Alan Rusbridger on May 26. Rusbridger was the Guardian’s editor when it published the material provided by Assange. The message was that the “untrustworthy and dislikable” Assange still had to be defended as he is being persecuted for simply carrying out journalism.
Rusbridger, who makes no reference to Sweden, warns his colleagues, “Assange is a problematic figure in many ways. But the attempt to lock him up under the Espionage Act is a deeply troubling move that should serve as a wake-up call to all journalists. You may not like Assange, but you’re next.”
The Guardian is blinded by political hatred of Assange. Both the editorial and Rusbridger’s piece assume to take the moral high ground by stating that WikiLeaks issued leaks unredacted, in contrast with their own “responsible” journalism. It states, “The Guardian disapproved of the mass publication of unredacted documents...and broke with Mr Assange over the issue.”
However, as WikiLeaks pointed out in relation to the stash of classified diplomatic cables it gave to the Guardian, the editorial “conveniently leaves out” that it was the newspaper itself—through a book authored by its journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding—that disclosed the password to the digital file Assange had given them in confidence.
As the investigative journalist John Pilger noted, after Leigh and Harding “turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password,” their “hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie” with “not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks.”
It has never been proven that a single publication by WikiLeaks has ever placed anyone in harm’s way. But if Assange’s “crime” is supposedly to have published material in an unredacted form, then it is the Guardian, including Rusbridger, Leigh and Harding, that should be in the dock.
The only people arguing for Assange to be indicted on such a basis are the worst political scoundrels.
The entire Guardian editorial is based on a pack of lies and slander. Assange has never been charged with rape, and the Guardian knows it.
Despite its previous unrelenting character assassination of Assange, the Guardian, editorially, has usually been careful to note that he has only ever faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
On April 11, in its last editorial published on Assange—on the day that he was illegally dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by the Metropolitan Police—the Guardian wrote, “He entered the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced allegations of rape and molestation (which he denies), citing fears that Stockholm would hand him to the US.” [our emphasis]
This has now been dropped as the Guardian witchfinders scream “Send him to Sweden,” with a strapline reading, “The founder of WikiLeaks faces charges of espionage in the US and rape in Sweden. He should stand trial for rape.”
On May 27, after being contacted by Emmy Butlin, a representative of the Julian Assange Defence Committee, and no doubt others, who stated that the Guardian had no right to publish such lies, the newspaper issued a corrective now tagged onto the end of its editorial: “This article was amended on 27 May 2019: to omit a misinterpretation of a remark by Chelsea Manning; and to clarify that the Swedish rape charge process is ongoing.”
The “misrepresentation” referred to is the Guardian’s initial statement that Chelsea Manning had “started a hunger strike” to protest being imprisoned for refusing to testify in a Grand Jury against Assange.
But on the far more important claim that Assange has been charged with rape, the Guardian invents an entirely new legal category of the “rape charge process.” This is linked in the body of the editorial to an August 20, 2012, article published in the Labour Party-supporting New Statesman. But even this scurrilous piece does not claim that Assange is charged with rape.
The Swedish authorities, who reopened the “investigation” against Assange after he was torn out of the Embassy against his will, have stressed that he has not been charged.
The Guardian ’s editorial proves the extent to which it has overturned the 1921 mission statement of its former editor, C.P. Scott, published daily in its editorial pages, that “facts are sacred.”
The editorial is aimed at distancing the Guardian even further from Assange. It even advises, “From a US perspective, the Espionage Act is quite the wrong instrument to use against journalists or even their sources.”
“Send him to Sweden” confirms that the Guardian hopes to see Assange locked up for years, only without his facing charges that might threaten them, too.
Free Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange!
National strike against Ecuadorian government demands Assange’s freedom
CNN peddles intelligence agencies’ lies against Assange
The Assange precedent: Journalists in Britain threatened with Official Secrets Act
Australian government seeking to prosecute journalists over exposure of war crimes
UK: Bed shortages cause increasing reliance on emergency beds in NHS hospitals
Hundreds protest over drowning of refugee schoolgirl in UK
UK: SEP wins support for Julian Assange at Durham Miners’ Gala
BBC Panorama witch-hunts Corbyn and Labour Party on bogus anti-Semitism charges
Media Issues
Canada’s Liberal government steps up internet censorship with creation of new media fund
Racialism and money-grubbing: The New York Times explains why “more critics of color” are needed
The Campaign to Free Julian Assange
The Persecution of WikiLeaks
SEG (New Zealand) holds rally in defence of Assange and Manning
Rally in Melbourne demands freedom for Julian Assange
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MaryLee Rose LeCocq
Memorial Video
Send Flowers Add Memory Light Candle Add Gesture Add Condolence
Obituary of MaryLee Rose LeCocq
MaryLee Rose LeCocq passed away peacefully on August 31st 2018 at the age of 61, in the arms of her loving husband and in the comfort of her own home in Bellingham. She was an inspiration to all those around her and is known for her strength, compassion, and grace. MaryLee loved her family deeply and is survived by her husband, Charles, and her son, Ryan, as well as her mother, Joan, sister, Joni, and brother, Ric Rose. MaryLee had a lifelong appreciation of the arts that ran deep in her soul and inspired her to leave a legacy of beauty, music, and art behind for her loved ones and community. MaryLee was a recipient of the Bellingham Mayor’s Arts Award, served multiple terms as a board member for the Whatcom Art Museum and received it’s Volunteer of the Year award, she was a twenty-five year director of the board at Peoples Bank, and became an avid painter later in life.
MaryLee was born in Seattle, WA on April 1st, 1957 and was the daughter of a local stockbroker, Robert Rose. She grew up in Seattle in the Laurelhurst neighborhood and spent summers at her family cabin in one of her favorite places, Indianola, WA. MaryLee also loved spending time with her grandmother, Jacquetta Blanchett Freeman, also a patron of the arts, at her home on Lake Washington. Like her grandmother, she too enjoyed her membership at the Sunset Club in Seattle.
MaryLee earned her bachelor’s degree in Commercial Design from the University of Washington’s School of Architecture and, during that time, formed a lifelong friendship with her closest sisters from Kappa Kappa Gamma. After graduating, MaryLee moved to San Francisco and started her career with a national design firm. She met and fell in love with her husband Charles several years later in Seattle and they were married at the St. Bridget Catholic Church in 1985. MaryLee then joined her husband Charles in Bellingham and operated her own business, LeCocq Interiors, for nearly a decade before giving all of it up to raise her son, Ryan, whom she adored. Some of MaryLee’s fondest memories were of skiing in Sun Valley with her devoted husband of 33 years. MaryLee was an affectionate wife and mother, a faithful daughter, and a generous friend.
MaryLee knew her fate long before it arrived and did everything in her power to negotiate more time for herself so she could teach her family and community what she had learned along the way. She will always be remembered for her grace and serenity; her poise in the face of adversity; her natural beauty and elegance; and her eagerness to give all she had to those around her. MaryLee fought for her life with strength and courage and while her body was buried on Friday, September 7, 2018, her unbroken spirit lives on.
MaryLee
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Finally! Job market returns to 2008 peak
by Annalyn Kurtz @AnnalynKurtz June 6, 2014: 11:07 AM ET
It took two years to wipe out 8.7 million American jobs but more than four years to gain them all back.
That's according to the Department of Labor's latest jobs report, which shows the U.S. economy added 217,000 jobs in May. With that job growth, there are now more jobs in the country than ever before.
The last time we were near this point was January 2008, just before massive layoffs swept throughout the country, leading the unemployment rate to spike to 10%. The unemployment rate is unchanged at 6.3% for May, and much has improved since the worst of the crisis.
Related: Happy to have a #newjob
Yet, this isn't the moment to break out the champagne. Given population growth over the last four years, the economy still needs more jobs to truly return to a healthy place. How many more? A whopping 7 million, calculates Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
President Obama's administration was quick to point out that the recovery is still incomplete by their standards.
"We're moving in the right direction, but we have a lot more work to do," said Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. "There are way too many people who are still on the sidelines."
As of May, about 3.4 million Americans had been unemployed for six months or more, and 7.3 million were stuck in part-time jobs although they wanted to work full-time. Both these numbers are still elevated compared to historic norms, and are of concern to Federal Reserve officials, who will meet in two weeks to re-evaluate their stimulus policies.
Overall, this has been the longest jobs recovery since the Department of Labor started tracking jobs data in 1939. Economists surveyed by CNNMoney predict it will take two to three more years to return to "full employment," which they define as an unemployment rate around 5.5%.
Related: The American Dream is out of reach
I worked in finance. Now I'm a nurse
These jobs are still missing: The jobs that have been created over the last few years are not necessarily the same ones that were lost. Blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and construction accounted for about half of all the positions lost in the crisis, and they've been painfully slow to return.
States that were hardest hit by the housing bust, like Nevada and Arizona, have had the slowest comebacks and still haven't fully recouped all the jobs they lost.
These are the jobs we've gained: States like North Dakota and Texas have come out well ahead of the pack. North Dakota has 30% more jobs now than it did in early 2008, and Texas has 9% more jobs than it did back then.
Nationwide, industries like health care, professional services and leisure and hospitality have not only recovered, but are at all-time highs for jobs. Whereas low-wage jobs dominated the first part of the recovery, now middle wage jobs appear to be growing as well.
Related: The economic recovery in 17 charts
Justin Hirsch, president of JobPlex, specializes in recruiting mid-level managers and young executives for companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Over the last year, he's seen an increase in top companies looking for human resources managers -- which could be a good sign of more job growth to come.
"The labor market, from our perspective, seems to be improving," he said. "If anything, corporations are very hungry for great talent."
Did you land a new job? Share your photo with CNNMoney on Instagram by using the hashtag #newjob.
New grads from the class of 2014 may face a better job market, but they'll also be competing against workers whose careers have taken a detour over the last few years.
"Will employers have the patience for the individual who had to disrupt their career path over the last few years? Or will they just go back to hiring fresh grads?" said Rich Thompson, chief human resources officer, for Adecco Group North America. "It's going to be really interesting to see."
CNNMoney (New York) First published June 6, 2014: 8:34 AM ET
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Don’t “mess” with laws on freedom of religion, fix them!
September 20, 2018 September 20, 2018 / MurrayCampbell
At the start of the week, a news reporter stood outside on a North Carolinian street during Hurricane Florence, facing the heavy rain and struggling against winds. It looked as though he might be blown over at any moment. As he clenched his muscles and defied the hurricane’s power, two men passed by behind him, walking casually and without any trouble or concern caused by the winds.
Not all news is fake, but sometimes journalists exaggerate their case or they forget to mention other pertinent information. Maybe it’s due to ignorance, while at other times there is an agenda which they reckon can’t afford nuance or balanced reporting. I cannot say which is the case for Wednesday’s Editorial in The Age, “No need to mess with laws on freedom of religion”. Let’s assume the best and that the writer, Alex Lavelle, is simply not on top of the issues he is addressing.
Lavelle has stated a simple case, arguing Australia does not need further religious protections. Responding to the Prime Minister’s suggestion that religious freedoms require legislative protections, Lavelle contends,
“There is a real risk such undue interference by government, which could undermine separation between church and state in a secular democracy, might unleash further discrimination, including the refusal to employ or provide goods and services to people of other religions or from the queer community. In short, Mr Morrison risks needlessly reducing the rights of many.”
Two important corrections need to be made.
First, existing laws do not adequately protect people of faith.
Alex Lavelle cites Section 116 of the constitution, which reads,
‘‘The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.’’
His point is that Section 116 provides adequate protections for religious people in Australia. What Lavelle ignores or is perhaps unaware of, is that Section 116 has been interpreted so narrowly by the High Court that no successful litigation has ever been brought under it. Also, this section of the Constitution only binds the Commonwealth, not the States and Territories, and most of the growing problems in relation to religious freedom have arisen at a state level where S116 cannot help.
When it comes to state laws, protections for religious freedom are inconsistent and often weak. In Tasmania, you can find yourself in serious trouble for doing nothing more than teaching the basics tenets of one’s religion. And in NSW, religion is not even a protected attribute for anti-discrimination law.
Second, examples of religious restrictions are real and growing
The second major problem with this editorial is Lavelle’s reason as to why Australia is considering religious protections. He suggests,
“The issue exists only because former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull commissioned a review by former Liberal Party minister Philip Ruddock to assuage minority concerns about same-sex marriage.”
This is simply not the case, or at the very least, it is not the full story. The Ruddock Inquiry was initiated because there already is an issue relating to religious freedoms in Australia, and there are concrete reasons for thinking such freedoms will be further weakened and even denied.
Recent examples abound:
Archbishop Julian Porteous wrote to Catholics, explaining Catholic teaching on marriage, and he soon found himself facing the anti-discrimination laws of Tasmania
A Presbyterian preacher in Hobart wrote a blog article in which he addressed same-sex marriage from a Bible and pastoral perspective. The Anti-discrimination commissioner accepted a complaint against him.
A Queensland doctor is currently in trouble with the Medical Board for committing the horrendous crime of retweeting a selfie of Lyle Shelton and author Ryan Anderson (and expert in transgenderism), with Lyle encouraging people to read Anderson’s book.
In 2016, the Sydney University student body attempted to deregister the Evangelical Union, because it required students to affirm, “Jesus is Lord”.
Last September at the University of Sydney, a mob of 200 students violently attacked a small group of Catholic students who were peacefully handing out literature on marriage and encouraging a ‘no vote’ during the marriage plebiscite.
Churches were vandalised in the lead up to the marriage plebiscite.
A young university student asked another student if she would like prayer. He was told by university authorities that he had challenged a student’s beliefs, and was subsequently suspended. The university informed him that he was to attend fortnightly counselling and that he would be forcibly removed should he step foot on the university campus.
The Victorian State Government is seeking to ban ideology that does not fully embrace transgenderism and homosexuality. It may become unlawful to even question a person’s sexual self-identity or to present the Biblical view of abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. Federal Labor is also putting forward for their national platform, policies that will include as child abuse, any persons (including parents) who do not support young children in transitioning from one gender to another.
The chief executive of a Queensland Baptist agency sent an email to staff, calling for people to respect differing views on marriage while also presenting his case against same-sex marriage. One employee complained and a case was taken to Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.
We praise Qantas when they wrap themselves in rainbow colours and when their chief executive officer publicly advocates gay marriage, but it’s deeply offensive and outrageous for a religious person to express an alternate view in their organisation (and a religious organisation at that!)? Had the Baptist chief executive sent an email to staff in favour of same-sex marriage, the outcome would be vastly different. To begin with, the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission would almost certainly be disinterested. On the off chance that he sent an email in which he advocated for a ‘yes’ vote in last year’s plebiscite, and one of his staff complained to the Baptist Union of Queensland, and he was reprimanded as a result, can you imagine the public outcry? How dare Baptists stifle this man’s freedom to voice an opinion and to share his views amongst his staff!
The Federal member of Goldstein, Tim Wilson, was asked about the particular case on Sky News only two weeks ago. Mr Wilson said,
“it’s not a good trend. It’s not a good principal, and it’s certainly inconsistent with the very basis of free speech”
He also pointed out how in the workplace free speech needs to be used “reasonably and respectfully”, and from what he had seen, this Queensland Baptist case hadn’t crossed that line.
Maybe Alex Lavelle is unaware of these and many other examples that have been disclosed in recent times. Perhaps he is unaware that his own newspaper has reported on some these cases. Perhaps he is also unaware of Fairfax journalists who have written articles arguing for the restriction of religious freedoms. To cite two examples,
Auberry Perry,
“This survey offers us a conscious opportunity to make a firm stand in support of a secular government and to reject discrimination or favouritism based on religion. It’s our opportunity to say that religion has no part in the shaping of our laws. A vote against same-sex marriage is a vote for religious bias and discrimination in our legislation, our public schools, our healthcare, and ultimately, in the foundation of our social structure.”
Matt Holden,
“‘the best guarantee of religious freedom is keeping religion out of politics”.
I imagine that a decade ago most Australians would probably have agreed, there is little need to offer legal reform in relation to religious freedoms, for most Australians accepted that we should have freedom of association, and be free to speak and to have a conscience that accords with our religious convictions. Australia has changed and is changing. The move away from cultural and philosophical pluralism and toward domesticating and conditioning religion according to the zealotist rules of humanistic secularists is no mere trickle.
We can choose to ignore the evidence and to proffer that there is no issue, but we can only pretend for so long before that leaky tap spills over the sink and floods the entire house. The agenda to squeeze out religious beliefs from politics and schools and businesses and universities is all too real, and the fact that many cases are already reaching anti-discrimination tribunals demonstrates that there is a problem. Even if some of these cases are being thrown out or overturned, the tide is persistent, and without proper and positive protections in place, we will see an increasing number of religious Australians losing their freedom to believe and practice their faith.
Australia, Culture, politics, Uncategorized
Alex Lavelle, freedom of religion, ruddock reivew, Scott Morrison
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Chris Mathews on A response to John Tait’…
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Selected Critical Comments on Franke’s Works (ordered from oldest to most recent works, scrolling down)
“. . . these may very well be some of the most important pages written on Dante in the last decade, if not the last half century. As Franke undertakes his rigorous theoretical definition and exploration of the terms that will continue to preoccupy him throughout his book, the reader is privileged to follow, from sentence to sentence, the workings of an outstanding philosophical intellect applying itself, at the highest level, to a text that eminently deserves but rarely receives such treatment. The case for Dante’s simultaneous historicity and contemporaneity, for what Franke calls ‘the synergism between interpretation theory and Dante’s interpretive practice’ (p. 4), is made here with a force and a precision that raise it to the level of genuine eloquence. . . . The introduction—like the rest of the book—should be read and pondered by anyone who cares about Dante, or poetry, or history, or theology, or interpretation, or truth, or, quite simply (and in the philosophical dialect dear to Franke), our human being-in-the-world.”
—Steven Botterill (editor-in-chief of Dante Studies), Comparative Literature vol. 50, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), p. 179
“All this of course has been much debated by scholars, most interestingly I think by William Franke (1996), who weaves it into his brilliant Heideggerian reading of Dante as a whole.” — David M. Black, “Dante’s ‘Two Suns’: Reflections on the Psychological Sources of the Divine Comedy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 98:6, pp 1619-1717, December 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/[Article DOI].
“A decade ago, in Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), William Franke observed, “Professional Dante criticism sometimes has a tendency to avoid or bracket the unanswerable, ultimate, philosophical, and theological questions that are nevertheless cause for perennial wonderment on the part of the readers of the poem…. That the project of the Commedia is to reveal theological truth may be said to be fairly widely accepted even among specialists…. Nevertheless, we as critics are content on the whole to leave Dante’s theological affirmations opaque, treating them as natural enough for someone of Dante’s time and temperament, but not seriously allowing that they could have any claim upon us in reading his poem today” (181-83). Franke is pointing to a paradox of contemporary Dante reception: the Comedy has ever more readers, ever fewer of whom are equipped to make any sense of, much less accept, the profound medieval and Catholic understanding of man and the world, and the claims to prophetic truth or revelation, that form the very motivation and substance of the poem. If we ignore all that–philosophy, theology, God, Catholic belief and morality, afterlife, providential view of history, salvation and damnation, the call to conversion–aren’t we missing the whole point of the poem, its challenge to us? BOOK REVIEWS 685 Those who seek to engage the Comedy’s challenge, its moral-existential claim on the reader, can either try to make Dante’s philosophical-theological understanding live again and matter for the modern reader (including Catholics), or else they can attempt to translate that challenge into terms more familiar or palatable to our own time, in particular into the language of psychology or of movements in contemporary philosophy. In The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), I pursued the first path; in Dante’s Interpretive Journey, William Franke pursued the second. Franke read the Comedy through the lens of the existential-ontological hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer, to see how the text and the philosophy could illuminate each other. A decade later, Christine Baur’s book takes up precisely the same project. The essential principles, and the outlines of much of the analysis, were already laid out by Franke, a fact that Baur, despite her frequent citations from Franke, perhaps does not sufficiently acknowledge. Franke’s book is philosophically more penetrating than Baur’s, and it analyzes the hermeneutic philosophical method in relation to the Comedy with greater objectivity and critical sophistication. But Baur develops the outline of Franke’s analysis in much greater (sometimes repetitive) detail, and extends it to passages and questions not treated by Franke. Her book is carefully structured, with an almost Scholastic articulation of argument, and her analysis is lucid, precise, exhaustive, and often strikingly perceptive.”
— Christian Moevs, The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 72/4 (2008):684-688 (through comparison with Dante’s Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to Freedom in the “Divine Comedy.” By CHRISTINE O’CONNELL BAUR. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
“These two volumes successfully realize a massive project: to propose and delineate a new field of discourse that provides a fresh approach to Western thought as a whole. In short, William Franke demonstrates the centrality of apophaticism, ‘what cannot be said,’ to the Western tradition, from Plato (and before) to Derrida (and beyond). . . . Franke’s work is nothing short of brilliant. . . . Franke shows incredible breadth of knowledge, critical acumen, and creative prowess throughout . . . . . [The] two volumes [are] essential reading for philosophers, theologians, literary scholars, intellectual historians, critical theorists—in short, anyone interested in an illuminating and vital perspective on just about any facet of Western arts and letters.”
—Hackett Review
“. . . One of the most important and original contributions to the discussion of apophasis in recent years. . . . Franke’s historical and disciplinary range, in light of his well-written and compelling essays, provides an illuminating insight into the pervasiveness of apophatic discourse. . . . Few others, maybe no others, provide the same clarity, coherence, and scope; few, maybe none, provide the same provocation to think further and more deeply, to think otherwise the tradition from which we come.”
—Bailey Review
“As an introduction to the phenomenon of apophatic discourse, Franke’s anthology is a great success. It often displays astounding breadth of knowledge and scholarship on the part of its editor. . . . This volume offers the only introductory anthology of negative theology that I know of, and it is superb.”
—Bruce Milem, The Heythrop Journal, 51, no. 1 (2010): 174-175
“The genius of Franke’s two-volume critical anthology on apophatic discourses is the work’s breadth and depth of engagement with the concept in variously distinct and even conflicting contexts.”
“The last and perhaps most commendable attribute of this volume for students in need of a reader like it is the remarkable quality of Franke’s critical introductions for each text. These introductions demonstrate a depth and range of insight available only through careful and thorough research. It may be enough to merely collect these various sources in one place, but Franke has gone much further than that with the critical preparations he provides the reader for each new text. Each work sampled in the anthology receives a combination of the following: explanation of the historical context for the text, biographical details about the author, brief examination of the critical issues related to interpreting the text, discussion of the history of reception for the text, and thematic connections for the unit and the anthology to the particular text under consideration. In many cases, Franke provides his own translation of the works that he adds to his collection, and his attention to detail in this translation effort is evident on nearly every page. These characteristics alone inspire great confidence in the editor’s careful consideration of and familiarity with the long, strange story of apophatic literature in Western culture. The additional benefit of introducing each work so carefully provides scholars both a convenient and reliable guide for apophatic texts previously unknown and also makes this collection an excellent resource to use with students in undergraduate and graduate courses. On What Cannot Be Said will be a leading resource for anyone studying apophasis and negative theology for many years to come.
Worley Review of On What Cannot Be Said_ Apophatic Discourses in Philos (click above to download complete review)
“Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language is a profound and radical study that holds many surprises . . . [W]e have long been convinced of the relevance of studies in religious thought, philosophy, and anthropology to literary scholarship. Poetry and Apocalypse gives evidence of the importance of literature and literary hermeneutics to religion, philosophy, and anthropology.”—Dorothy Z. Baker, Comparative Literature Studies
“The book’s stated objective is ‘a postmodern negative theology of poetic language’ (ix) that is both theoretical and practical, contributing to both literary theory and theology and promoting peace through radical openness to dialogue, and it is to Franke’s credit that the result is both challenging and accessible.” —Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion
” . . . a performed negative theology. At such wakes and festivals, it is the praxis of recursive conversations—Poetry and Apocalypse being an excellent example—that disclose, indirectly, possibilities of transcendent openness.” —Larry D. Bouchard, Religion and Literature
“Poetry and Apocalypse will appeal to critics who credit a Christian interpretation of Joyce’s texts in part because its premises are carefully argued and theoretically balanced.” —Lee A. Jacobus, James Joyce Quarterly
“The importance of Poetry and Apocalypse resides in the clarity of Franke’s views of the necessary relations between literature and theology as well as the authority that these views have by dint of being grounded in his deep knowledge of canonical sacred and secular literature over the centuries. I should also say that Franke is his own man; he does not represent a ‘school’ or even a fashion, and his book marks an original contribution to the growing field of religion and literature.” —Kevin Hart, Monash University and University of Notre Dame
“This is an ambitious book. It takes on big topics, difficult writers, and a range of discourses. Authors who venture into topics like ‘poetry and apocalypse’ are usually comfortable with big ideas and forays into theoretic discourse that shy away from concrete literary analysis. Among Franke’s virtues is his ability to do both in a prose that is graceful and accessible.” —Peter Hawkins, Boston University
“Franke’s theory of poetic language as negative theology is persuasive and helpful in illuminating the complex relationship between religion and literature.” —Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion
‘Written in elegant and astonishingly readable prose, William Franke’s volume gives a lucid portrait of a fundamental question that lies at the heart of Dante’s Divine Comedy and has resurfaced in contemporary French philosophical reflection: poetic theology as a radical, transgressive mode of knowledge. In mapping the ground of this fascinating debate, William Franke places Dante at the boundaries of thought and recovers the timeliness of his spiritual vision. This book is a must-read for historians of religion, Dante scholars, literary critics, and adepts of cultural studies.’ — Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University, USA
“Can language meaningfully point us to the divine? Is it possible for us to transcend our humanity to touch the mystery which surrounds it? How might the idolatrous projections of our ego be transgressed? These are just some of the questions provoked by William Franke’s scintillating book. By bringing Dante’s Paradiso and French Theory into mutually illuminating dialogue, Franke invites his readers to explore the outer limits of sense and meaning, and to consider seriously the theological implications of the unknowing at the heart of literary expression. His reflections will spark the interest not only of Dante scholars, theologians and literary theorists, but of anyone interested in probing the connections between literature and theology.” – Vittorio Montemaggi, University of Notre Dame, USA
“Overall, Franke’s argument is both balanced and nuanced; he presents Dante as neither reactionary nor revolutionary, but, rather, as devout transgressor. Franke skillfully incorporates other arguments about transgression, such as Giuseppe Mazzotta’s claim that Dante transgresses and transcends ethics in Paradiso to a world “of ludic play and aesthetic performance” (107). Franke also does an excellent job of distinguishing Dante’s thought from French philosophy while addressing the similarities between medieval apophaticism and French deconstructionism. He does not wish to turn Dante into a deconstructionist philosopher, nor does he attempt to transform deconstructionist philosophy into medieval theology. Rather, he puts them into fruitful conversation with each other.” –T. Niebuhr, Christianity & Literature 63 (September 2014): 533-536
“William Franke has brought the harvest of French theory (especially Blanchot, with some Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and, in an appendix, a good dose of Levinas) to bear upon Dante’s Paradiso, focusing on the notion of transgression. He ably traces the many senses in which Dante’s text, so apparently intent on affirming order, is in fact transgressive, and obsessed dualities, such as between the human and the divine, undone in a trasumanar. . . . Franke is wonderfully, persistently clear, as precise as one can be in elucidation of French thought. The exercise of reading those texts with and against the Paradiso illuminates both, as well as what is at stake for both literature and philosophy or theology.” – Christian Moevs, Religion & Literature 47/2 (Summer 2015): 166-68
“Franke’s reflections on the relationship between Dante and modern French theory are thought provoking and lead to many interpretative insights.His particular emphasis on the poetics of apophaticism,meanwhile,makes a distinctive contribution to the wider reappraisal of Dante’s theology within contemporary scholarship.” – George Corbett, Speculum 89/4 (2014) 1139-40
A Philosophy of the Unsayable – Reviews
“William Franke is an articulate spokesman for what cannot be said not only with regards to modern European poetry but also with respect to contemporary theology. A Philosophy of the Unsayable is essential reading for everyone working in religion and literature and in modern theology.” — Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia
“By now, it would seem that there could be no more to say about not-saying. Apophatic language and negative theology have been accused of meaninglessness, nihilism, and even ill-concealed ontologies. In this lovely and surprising book, William Franke not only deftly undoes these criticisms but shows that apophasis underlies and strangely grounds all language and thought, even of those very discourses that most vigorously reject it. A Philosophy of the Unsayable demonstrates with elegance that there is indeed more to say, and more that is both meaningful and important.” — Karmen MacKendrick, Professor of Philosophy (Joseph C. Georg Endowed Professorship of Philosophy, 2009-12), Le Moyne College
“William Franke is an eminent scholar in comparative literature, who is schooled in philosophy and religion. He is recognized as one of the most creative contemporary thinkers working at the double intersection of philosophy and literature and philosophy and theology. A Philosophy of the Unsayable shows an intellectual grasp of a dizzying array of discourses and sheds real light on all thinkers who are discussed.” — Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
“William Franke is a major voice in current discussions of “Religion and Literature.” One thing that makes him unusual, as well as highly valuable, is that unlike most people in the area he has a broad knowledge of philosophy, both ancient and modern; another unusual characteristic of this author is that his writing is firmly based in meticulous scholarship in several European languages. I have long been an admirer of his work, and I am pleased to say that the substantial typescript I have been given to read, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, has all the desirable qualities I have just indicated. There is one further quality that makes Professor Franke an author that Notre Dame University Press will want to retain: he writes a remarkably clear and engaging prose.”—(Senior scholar writing anonymously for UNDP)
“William Franke has emerged as our foremost purveyor of what cannot be said.. . .this is a remarkable text, and deserves close attention at every level. Like all important texts, it raises questions for further interrogation.”
– Andrew W. Hass, editor of Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press).
“Franke’s book is . . . a thoughtful, provoking and often helpful exploration of an intellectually and spiritually demanding discourse.” — George Pattison, Theology 111 (2): 144-46
“Ultimately, what Franke seems to be questing for in his “philosophy of the unsayable” is the possibility of a form of faithful and non-nihilistic pluralism. If all discourses, preeminently theological discourses, find their true orientation towards something that cannot be said, but something which nonetheless elicits a frequently prolix and often doxological linguistic saying, then all discourses have a hidden unity beyond their irreducible differences. That is not an immanently obtainable unity, but a unity in distension towards what cannot, by its very I’lature, be obtained. It renders language both chas- tened and noble: chastened by its limits, and ennobled by its endless quest. Likewise, the apophatic thinker-whether a French philosopher or a theolo- gian steeped in the knowledge of cliristian mysticism—is to Franke a “knight of faith” (p. 32s) who restlessly probes the possibilities of believing through an ardent ascesis of questioning, whether such a kniglit is more Galahad or Don Quixote will probably be for tlie reader to decide, what they will not be able to dispute is the erudition and audacity of Franke’s own quest.”
—Brett Gray, Anglican Theological Review 99.1 (2017): 145-148
“. . . a quite dazzling defense of poetry as central to human knowledge, by way of phenomenological considerations of the act of knowing. . . . At a moment in which the religious tradition and the secularization of culture seem to have nothing to say to each other–a catastrophic loss for both sides–Franke’s development of the high theme of prophecy in all its meanings — and the role of the prophetic in secularization, and of the secular in prophecy! — in the most classic Western works is sorely needed–I am tempted to say, is itself prophetic.” — Bainard Cowan, Professor of English, Cowan Chair in Literature, University of Dallas
“The bottom line is this: “The Revelation of Imagination” is a brilliant study of formative works that should never lose our attention. Indeed, the manuscript is itself ‘revelatory.”’ — Peter Hawkins, Professor of Religion and Literature, Yale Divinity School
“. . . the reader of Franke’s book comes away with a sense of the differences and connections among these works, but also a sense of the “wholeness” of the tradition so eloquently discussed in Franke’s conclusion. . . . It is a learned work, and belongs on a shelf that includes Auerbach’s Mimesis.” — Paul Contino, Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities, Pepperdine University
Rebecca Dark, Review of Revelation of Imagination in Christianity and Literature:
Ever-increasing pressure on colleges and universities to demonstrate the marketabilityof their graduates in the business world is a source of anxiety for many of us in the humanities. We all know the importance of what we teach, even that the skills and knowledge we inculcate in our students are marketable, but we do not always find it easy to communicate the immediate value of the humanities to our culture. William Franke’s project in The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante is to ‘‘focus on what is enduring and perennial rather than accommodated to the agenda of the moment,’’ but in so doing he also provides a powerful defense of the contemporary relevance of the ‘‘revelations’’ great literature can provide (xi). Rereading five classic texts that he describes as aspiring ‘‘to become the conscience and the consciousness of a whole civilization,’’ Franke demonstrates their power to articulate new truth for the immediate present of succeeding cultures.
Franke is an eminent scholar whose perhaps-best known works, including his 2007 anthology On What Cannot Be Said and his 2014 A Philosophy of the Unsayable, explore apophatic discourse. The Revelation of Imagination is every bit the strong scholarly work, replete with footnotes and references, one would expect. The extreme clarity and accessibility of the text, however, open it to a much wider audience than the scholarly academic community. Anyone interested in learning about the great texts Franke treats in the book will find it a wonderful reading guide. Each chapter could be read alone as an aid to understanding a specific text, but taken as a whole they offer a finely woven argument regarding the revelatory nature of great literature. While Franke’s approach is post-secular in that it is open to and encourages finding transcendent meaning in literature, this work is literary rather than religious and would be useful even to those who do not adhere to a faith tradition.
Wayne Cristaudo, “The Wisdom of the Western Canon,” Review of The Revelation of Imagination:
“This is one of those rare and wonderful books that reflects a lifetime of learning and thinking. It is at once a powerful mediation upon five literary bulwarks of the Western tradition and a philosophical argument about the meaning of world-shaping literature. And, while the last fifty or so years have seen the institutional and disciplinary defeat of the idea of a Western canon and the kind of literary analysis of classic works that this book so glisteningly exemplifies, The Revelation of Imagination amply demonstrates why Homer, the writers of the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, and Dante have been invaluable and inexhaustible conduits for the revelations of the human imagination. There is not a page where William Franke’s ability to enter into the crafting and language of the work he is discussing does not
profoundly enrich one’s appreciation of the text. That he is able to take works and writers of whom so much has been written and yet make the reader feel how much more there is still to say and see, how inexhaustibly open these works are, is testimony to the mastery of his craft. His attention to stylistic detail, his ability to savour the intricate interweaving and balance of textual elements and to identify the semiotic ricochets and resonances of a text, to call upon the most brilliant and apposite insights of philosophers, theologians, and literary critics, to show the sheer power and grandeur of inventiveness and attentiveness to the human and divine conditions that elevate the works of these authors to a plane where they shaped their times and subsequently the human possibilities that followed in their wake, are all combined with a style that is at once devotional and enthusiastic, panoramic and nuanced, authoritative and humble.”
“In a series of dazzling essays taking Dante as their starting point, William Franke finds the trace of religious meaning throughout different forms of modern poetry, whose gaps and discontinuities he claims point to the ineffable beyond language. The book will prove an immense provocation and stimulus to all those who thought they had sorted out the relation of theology to modern poetry.” —Jeremy Tambling, University of Manchester
“In twenty-five years of teaching a ‘great books’ curriculum, I have rarely read a study so finely attuned to the spiritual resonances of classic texts. I will be consulting William Franke’s Secular Scriptures for as long as I continue teaching and writing about the religious dimension of literature, and its enduring relevance to our ‘secular age.’” —Paul J. Contino, Pepperdine University
“In Secular Scriptures, William Franke rejects the received wisdom that sacred and secular are essentially opposed to one another. He does this by asking us to think about where these alleged oppositions in fact converge—in a venerable Western literary tradition. Surveying a broad spectrum of works written ‘in the wake of Dante,’ he argues that ‘self reflexivity,’ subjective human experience and reflection, has become for modern poets the locus of revelation, a form of scripture. Building on his extensive previous explorations of ineffability, ‘on what cannot be said,’ he uncovers the richness—both literary and philosophical —of inventive language that speaks in order to reveal ‘the spiritual mysteries of the letter,’ to gain access to what ultimately lies beyond the reach of words.” —Peter Hawkins, Yale Divinity School
“I read Secular Scriptures almost without putting the work down. Readers in fields from fin-de-siècle decadence to ‘post-postmodernism’ in poetry, especially those with interest in religion and literature studies, will be delighted by the way Dante is recast here to preface twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments. Franke’s way of thinking backwards from recent postsecular theory is beguiling and transformative; the movement forward in the final chapter, via Dante’s emerging again at the end as at the beginning, is really rather beautiful.” — Romana Huk, University of Notre Dame
“William Franke has written, in a luminous prose, an enthralling book about a pivotal issue in literary studies: the esthetics of visionary literature. The questions Franke raises—philosophy of language, the nature of mystical insights, their modes of representation, and the revelations of poetic knowledge—find in Dante, in the Romantic poets of Europe, and in the radical philosophical speculations of the twentieth century a fascinating articulation through which the reader can experience the depths of the high culture of the West.” —Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
“William Franke is similarly concerned with the status of the materiality of the image. As part of his argument in Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, Franke argues that Milton’s religious commitments lead him to reclassify poetic imagery as “nonsacramental.” . . .his comments on Paradise Lost’s substitution of poetic evocativeness for poetic transcendence are key to his book’s thoughtful series of essays, which stretch all the way from Dante to W. B. Yeats.” —Katherine Eggert, SEL 57/1 (Winter 2017): 189-91
“Secular Scriptures is a quintessentially postsecular hymn to the sustained
revelatory power of apophatic literature.”
—Chad Schrock, Literature and Theology, Volume 32, Issue 1, 1 March 2018, Pages 124–126
“Well known for his distinguished work on mysticism and the apophatic, in this new monograph William Franke offers a remarkable development in the field of literature and theology. Building on the foundations laid by earlier scholars in both biblical studies and literature, Franke examines different genres in both testaments, from myth, epic, the prophetic, the apocalyptic, and the gospel, to offer a biblical theology that is inherent within the text rather than imposed externally upon it. It is a brilliant example of what Paul Ricoeur once called thinking biblically, and will be a profoundly important book for anyone within the humanities as well as theologians, liturgists, and biblical critics.”
—David Jasper, University of Glasgow
“William Franke’s book demonstrates the variegated way in which the Bible provides ‘a model for humanities texts.’ Not only does he rightly seek to relate the reading of the Bible to other texts in the humanities, but also underlines the fundamental importance which the Bible has had in its contribution to hermeneutics. Historical contextuality, and the way which texts are a means of self-reflection, have been part and parcel of engagement with the Bible down the centuries and are all too easily ignored in modern biblical scholarship.”
—Christopher Rowland, University of Oxford
“This is a brilliant new book by one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in the area of literature and theology. Offering a lucid and compelling account of the nature of revelation, Franke reads a range of biblical texts in ways that are simultaneously thought-provoking, illuminating, readable, and constructive. A Theology of Literature is a wonderful achievement, and certainly worth reading.”
—Mark Knight, Lancaster University
“William Franke views the Bible with a fresh eye. He has the scholar’s learning, the theologian’s quest for revelation, and the poet’s understanding of where language can take us. He writes with extraordinary clarity about complex issues and texts; he gives a new sense of all that the literature of the Bible has in store.”
—Peter S. Hawkins, Yale Divinity School
David Jasper in Literature and Theology, September 2017:
“This remarkable book is written within a venerable tradition of literary reading of the Bible and of reading the Bible as literature. Its immediate predecessors in the past few decades include works by James L. Kugel, Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, Meir Sternberg and others, both Jewish and Christian. And yet at the same time it has a power and a directness that are entirely new and singular.”
“Franke, a professor of comparative literature with deep theological knowledge, well known for his work on mysticism and the apophatic, reminds us that words and literary form lie at the very heart of religious revelation, and, beginning with Genesis, he leads us through the major literary forms of the Hebrew Bible up to the New Testament and the gospels.”
“William Franke’s book, however, comes as a learned, lively and intelligent reminder that when we begin again in the study of the Bible it must be with a literary sensitivity and a theological imagination that recognizes in ever-fresh ways the literary and poetic heart of faith as it arises from the life of words and language. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote memorably of the “living educts of the Imagination” in Scriptures, and here, for our own time, we are reintroduced to them in this lucid and articulate book that finds theology to be inherent in the biblical text and its textures rather than something outside and imposed upon it. This is a profoundly important book for anyone in the humanities and for general readers, as well as theologians, liturgists and biblical critics.”
Francesca Buglioni Knox, The Heythrop Journal LIX (2018), pp. 135-36:
“We are still looking, however, for a balanced, unprejudiced and impartial way forward that does not subordinate literature to theology or vice versa. Franke goes to the heart of the issue here. Eschewing militant secularism on the one hand and religious fundamentalism on the other, this volume marks out a space where the literary and the theological interact and challenge one another on equal footing. The Bible is an exemplary text for illustrating this ‘theology of literature’.”
Kevin Dunn, Journal of American Academy of Religion (2018), Reading Religion:
“Franke’s declared audience is, in fact, “more diversified … including confessional readerships beyond the walls of the academy” (ix). His manifesto, therefore, has the welcome goal of introducing to such an audience a more critical way of approaching the Bible that is still ultimately affirming of faith, allowing for a refreshed practice that connects the “confessional reader” both to the tradition and to his or her own evolving culture. . . . All said, this is quite an accomplishment.”
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Nia Noelle
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15 Things We Learned About R. Kelly From Every Episode of Lifetime’s ‘Surviving R. Kelly’
Written By: Nia Noelle
Source: R. Kelly The Buffet / R. Kelly The Buffet
The three-part series ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ continued two night two on Lifetime. And just like part 1, it was shocking.
Here are the top 15 things revealed in the second night of ‘Surviving R. Kelly’
Lisa Van Allen claims that she had several threesomes with R. Kelly and other young teenage girls including a 14-year-old who was Sparkle’s niece. She claims they were all filmed by R. Kelly.
Lisa Van Allen also was left alone with a bag R. Kelly often carried around with him with the tapes in them. She watched one of the tapes that included herself and another young girl having sex with R. Kelly and even being urinated on by him. She took the tape because she didn’t want him to have it anymore. She asked a person to hold the tape for her. This is the tape that was leaked in 2001.
Abdon Pallasch, a journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, received a fax with details about a relationship between R. Kelly and underage women. His colleague uncovered that many women had accused R. Kelly of sexual misconduct and sued him, all being settled out of court.
December 21, 2000, the first article in the Chicago Sun-Times ran about R. Kelly predatory behavior. More women called the newspaper to tell their story but they were reluctant to move forward legally.
Lisa Van Allen told R. Kelly that she took the sex tape from his bag and told him who had the tape out of fear that it would be leaked. R. Kelly paid $250,000 to get the tape back but copies had been made. R. Kelly accused Lisa Van Allen of trying to extort money by using the tape. She claims that he threatened to kill her because of it.
In 2002 a copy of the sex tape was mailed to the Chicago Sun-Times. Piecing together with evidence they gathered, reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times contacted Sparkle and asked her to come in and view the tapes. Sparkle confirmed that it was her 14-year-old niece in the video. The Chicago Sun-Times contacted the police.
The tape was leaked and sold on the streets in the bootleg market all over in barber shops and on porn sites.
Lisa Van Allen found out she was pregnant at the age of 20. R. Kelly arranged for her to have an abortion
R. Kelly’s wife Andrea Kelly was said to be a prisoner in their home rarely seen. If she wanted her hair done, people were brought to the house to do her hair etc
Music Producer Craig Williams and R. Kelly’s wife Andrea Kelly both claim that his ‘camp’ or staff helped orchestrate and cover up his sex acts.
R. Kelly shipped his wife off to Florida after the sex tape was leaked. Andrea Kelly was under so much stress that she had to deliver her son early. R. Kelly was contacted and told that his wife had given birth to their son Robert Jr. Just after giving birth she was in the hospital holding their son and saw that R. Kelly was arrested for child pornography on the news. The date was June 5, 2002.
R. Kelly is charged with 21 counts of child pornography. He posts bail and goes to a church on the south side of Chicago where he participated in a sing-along that included children.
January 23, 2003, R. Kelly was arrested in Miami for possessing photos of him allegedly having sex with underage girls. The case was eventually dropped due to problems with evidence.
Andrea Kelly decided after looking at the National Domestic Violence site that she needed to leave R. Kelly. She left in the middle of the night with $2,500 a bag and her three children.
During this time, R. Kelly was still touring, still releasing music and still at the top of the charts. The community and fans still embraced him.
Bonus Notations (Because there was too much in Part 2):
R. Kelly’s child-pornography trial is delayed for years. Working in favor of R. Kelly. The trial started six years after the charges were brought on.
R. Kelly claimed his innocence and says that it was his younger brother Carey Kelly in the video and not him.
Carey Kelly did an interview with Wendy Williams denying that it was him on the sex tape.
R. Kelly allegedly offered his brother Carey $100,000 and a record deal if he said it was him on the sex tape. Carey didn’t take the deal.
Sparkle was offered from R. Kelly a large sum of money to do an interview with R. Kelly in front of press showing that everything was ok. She declined.
Sparkle took the stand against R. Kelly but the rest of her family denied that it was their 14-year-olds relative identity in the video.
June 13, 2008, Robert Kelly was found not guilty
During his trial, R. Kelly met Jerhonda Pace a teenage fan and supporter. After being acquitted he sent for Jerhonda and invited her to his home. Jerhonda claims she told R. Kelly she was a virgin but he told her he was going to take her virginity. She claims the two had an extended sexual relationship that led to physical and mental abuse.
Jerhonda was told by R. Kelly to find another girl for him. She met Dominique Gardner on Myspace and introduced her to R. Kelly at the age of 17. When Dominique’s mother found out she was with R. Kelly she called the police and went with them to get Dominique. Legal action couldn’t be brought on to R. Kelly because Illinois legal age for consent is 17.
WANT MORE? CLICK THE NEXT FOR PART 3 OF ‘SURVIVING R. KELLY’
Which Celebs Declined to Interview for R. Kelly Docu-series?
Here’s Why R. Kelly’s Older Brother Bruce Is In Jail
R Kelly , surviving r. kelly
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Where does OHANIAN rank in the most common names in the U.S.?
OHANIAN is identified by the U.S. Bureau of the Census as a surname with more than 100 occurrences in the United States for the year-2000 U.S. Census. In "Demographic Aspects of Surnames from Census 2000", the Census Bureau tabulated the surnames of all people who had obtained Social Security Numbers by the year 2000.
OHANIAN ranks # 23411 in terms of the most common surnames in America for 2000.
OHANIAN had 1,013 occurrences in the 2000 Census, according the U.S. government records.
Out of a sample of 100,000 people in the United States, OHANIAN would occur an average of 0.38 times.
For the last name of OHANIAN the Census Bureau reports the following race / ethnic origin breakdown:
4.44 percent, or 45 total occurrences, were "Non-Hispanic of Two or More Races"
2.07 percent, or 21 total occurrences, were "Hispanic Origin"
Search the web for more on the name OHANIAN :
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What should have been
By Joel Corry
The various trade rumors before the NFL trading deadline produced minimal player movement, which is usually the case. Only one deal was made: The Philadelphia Eagles traded defensive lineman Isaac Sopoaga and a 2014 sixth round pick to the New England Patriots for a 2014 fifth round pick. Here are three trades that should have been made before the deadline.
Josh Gordon to the Detroit Lions for a 2014 second round pick and a conditional 2015 fourth round pick
The Lions got a glimpse of how much Calvin Johnson means to the offense when he missed Detroit’s Week 5 contest against the Green Bay Packers with a knee injury. The wide receivers only caught nine passes for 93 yards without Johnson commanding the opposing defense’s attention.
Gordon could have provided a big boost to an already explosive Detroit offense.
Gordon would have been a great complement to Johnson. He has 32 receptions for 582 yards and three touchdowns in six games since serving a two-game suspension for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy. The Lions got a first hand look at Gordon when he had seven catches for 126 yards against them in Week 6. A Gordon-Johnson combination would have instantly entered discussions of the NFL’s best wide receiver tandem. Although Gordon is a character risk who will serve a one-year suspension for his next drug policy violation, running back Willis McGahee thinks Gordon would benefit greatly from a veteran receiver as a mentor. Johnson and Nate Burleson could have served in that capacity.
Gordon is in the second year of a four-year deal that pays him $558,335 this year, $875,604 in 2014 and $1,118,406 in 2015. The 2012 second round pick could have easily fit under the salary cap since the Lions have $1.7 million of cap room.
With 11 picks in the 2014 draft after the trade, including two first round picks and two second round picks, the Cleveland Browns would have had plenty of ammunition to land a franchise quarterback, a wide receiver to offset the loss of Gordon and a couple of other impact players. They would only get the 2015 fourth round pick provided that Gordon wasn’t suspended again before the end of the 2014 season. (i.e.; was continuously on the roster, injured reserve, physically unable to perform list, etc. through the 2014 season).
Jairus Byrd to the Washington Redskins for a 2014 third round pick
A second day draft pick may have been more beneficial to the Buffalo Bills despite their preference of a young player for Byrd. Although draft choices are at a premium for the Redskins because the St. Louis Rams own their 2014 first round pick, Byrd would have addressed one of Washington’s biggest weaknesses. The play of the safeties has been a long standing issue for the Redskins.
Byrd has appeared in just three games for the Bills this season, notching zero interceptions.
Byrd’s relationship with the Bills became acrimonious because of his $6.916 million franchise tag and the team’s refusal to sign him to a multi-year contract in line with the top of the safety market. Dashon Goldson’s five-year, $41.25 million contract ($22 million guaranteed and $26 million over the first three years) with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is the most recent salary benchmark. There has been some speculation that Byrd may have played through the Plantar fasciitis in his feet that caused him to miss Buffalo’s first five games if he had been given a long term deal.
The salary cap would have been an obstacle to overcome in order to make the trade possible. It would have been necessary for the Redskins to restructure contracts to accommodate Byrd’s $3,661,141 salary for the remainder of the season since they are $1.7 million under the cap. The Redskins couldn’t have lowered his cap number through a long term deal. Byrd can’t sign a multi-year deal until the regular season ends (December 29) because franchise player rules prohibit such signings after July 15. Signing Byrd to the type of contract he has been seeking would not have been an issue for the Redskins in 2014. They should have over $15 million in cap room next year.
Fred Davis to the Green Bay Packers for a 2014 seventh round pick
Davis has dropped behind rookie Jordan Reed and Logan Paulsen on the Washington Redskins depth chart. He has been inactive for the last two games. There’s a good chance Davis will remain inactive for the foreseeable future since he doesn’t play special teams.
Davis was regarded as one of the NFL’s better pass catching tight ends when he tore his left Achilles tendon in the seventh game of the 2012 season. His 59 catches and 796 receiving yards in 12 games during a 2011 season cut short by a four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy prompted the Redskins to use their 2012 franchise tag on him. Davis signed a one-year deal worth $3 million (including a $1.5 million signing bonus) to return to the Redskins this year.
Even though it is uncharacteristic for Packers general manager Ted Thompson to give up draft choices for veteran players, Davis could have helped fill the void Green Bay has at tight end with Jermichael Finley out indefinitely due to a bruised spinal cord. Davis might have been willing to waive his $500,000 bonus for 12 games on the 46-man active roster in order to facilitate the change in scenery.
Follow me on Twitter: @corryjoel
Joel Corry is a former sports agent who helped found Premier Sports & Entertainment, a sports management firm that represents professional athletes and coaches. Prior to his tenure at Premier, Joel worked for Management Plus Enterprises, which represented Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ronnie Lott. You can email Joel at jccorry@gmail.com.
Vontaze Burfict three-game suspension upheld
Appeals officer Derrick Brooks upheld Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict's three-game suspension.
Burfict was suspended for his helmet-to-helmet hit on Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown in the playoffs that caused a concussion.
Burfict met Thursday with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to discuss his on-field behavior and steps he could take to avoid further disciplinary
Appeals officer Derrick Brooks upheld Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict’s three-game suspension.
Burfict met Thursday with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to discuss his on-field behavior and steps he could take to avoid further disciplinary action in the future. Burfict, his agents and Bengals coach Marvin Lewis were at the meeting Thursday with Goodell and NFL executi Troy Vincent.
Burfict was fined $50,000 for a hit on Baltimore Ravens tight end Maxx Williams.
Burfict was fined three times for incidents against the Steelers that totaled $70,000.
Burfict will lose $502,941 of his salary next season.
Follow me on Twitter: @AaronWilson_NFL
Aaron Wilson covers the Texans for The Houston Chronicle.
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Why Jonathan Martin retired
By Jeff Fedotin
Offensive tackle Jonathan Martin retired before the 2015 season, but Martin’s departure from football has nothing do with his infamous bullying scandal or his sometimes inconsistent play.
Instead it was a back injury suffered prior to training camp that forced him out of football.
“It just never got better,” said Martin’s agent, Kenny Zuckerman. “He
“It just never got better,” said Martin’s agent, Kenny Zuckerman. “He was just hoping it would just get better and better every day, and it just didn’t.”
Doctors said that Martin had to rest his back for four to eight weeks without engaging in physical activity — something that would’ve put him well behind for this NFL season — and then he was a candidate for spinal fusion surgery, a risky operation that could have sidelined him a year.
According to Zuckerman, the injury left Martin very discouraged, something that went contrary to some media depictions that labeled him as a player who lacked passion for football. He agonized over what to do about his playing career before deciding to retire just shy of his 26th birthday.
“He went through a tough time, but he loved playing,” Zuckerman said. “(The injury) consumed his mind 24 hours a day.”
After the Dolphins’ turmoil in 2013, few would have guessed that the NFL stay of Richie Incognito, the player who tormented Martin, would outlast Martin’s.
Martin, who was drafted in the second round of the 2012 NFL Draft, was just 23 years old at the time of the scandal and played one of the most important positions in football — offensive tackle. He entered the NFL as a major prospect, having protected quarterback Andrew Luck while at Stanford.
Incognito was a 30-year-old guard, who had been dismissed from both Nebraska and Oregon during college, and was being kicked to the curb by his third NFL team.
Surprisingly, Incognito is now slated as the starting left guard for the Bills while Martin has moved on with his career.
Zuckerman said there is “zero percent” chance that Martin plays again — regardless of whether the 25-year-old’s health unexpectedly improves.
Instead Martin, whose mother is a corporate lawyer for Toyota, likely will go to law school.
“If it was a guy who didn’t have that plan, I could see him sitting a year (and playing again),” Zuckerman said. “He’s a very bright guy … He’s ready to move on to the next part of life.”
After attending Harvard-Westlake (Calif.) High, a school known for its lofty academics, Martin, who majored in ancient Greek and Roman classics at Stanford, could have been the first ever fourth generation African-American at Harvard.
He was heavily recruited by the Ivy League school attended by his mother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
Instead Martin went to Stanford, where he became a second-team All-American in 2011, before starting 32 games during his three years in the NFL.
After leaving the Dolphins, the 6-5, 315-pound Martin signed with the 49ers and played for his college head coach, Jim Harbaugh. Martin started nine games at right tackle but often struggled while playing on an injury-plagued offensive line and was cut after the season.
In the ensuing offseason, he was claimed off of waivers by the Panthers, a team with a porous offensive line.
Martin, who was mostly playing behind Michael Oher of The Blind Side fame on the left side of the Panthers’ line during offseason practices, was reportedly scheduled to make $1.042 million this season.
Following his retirement from the Panthers, Martin’s camp maintains that he will not be negatively linked to the bullying scandal but instead serve as a positive example of resilience.
“He is a role model for kids that are going through things like he went through,” Zuckerman said.
Follow Jeff on Twitter @JFedotin
Chasing the Patriots: Bills and Jets share same strengths, weaknesses
The defending Super Bowl champion Patriots have won the AFC East six consecutive years, but they are poised to be knocked off the division’s top perch.
They have lost their top three cornerbacks from last season, and the NFL upheld a four-game suspension of QB Tom Brady.
Two of their challengers in the division —
Two of their challengers in the division — the Bills and Jets — are similarly constructed teams with the same strengths and problems.
Both the Bills and Jets have very good defensive units, something that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the main link between the franchises is Rex Ryan, the son of Buddy Ryan, who popularized the 46 defense.
After six years with the Jets, Rex Ryan enters his first year coaching the Bills. Ryan’s replacement in New York, Todd Bowles, actually employs a very similar gameplan involving a blitz-heavy 3-4 D.
Bowles, though, inherits the same problem that plagued Ryan in New York and still negatively affects him in Buffalo — poor QB play.
Although both teams have two of the most uncertain QB situations in the league, their defensive lines are two of the best.
The Jets’ D-line took a hit when defensive end Sheldon Richardson, who was just charged for resisting arrest after driving 143 mph, was suspended four games for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. But even without him, the Jets have Muhammad Wilkerson, a 6-4, 315-pounder with 16 sacks the last two years, and rookie Leonard Williams, who was regarded as the best defensive player in the draft before dropping to No. 6 overall because of rumors of a lingering shoulder injury that he claims were unfounded.
Buffalo’s version of Richardson is Marcell Dareus. The No. 3 overall pick in the 2011 NFL Draft has the versatility to play nose tackle, 4-3 defensive tackle or 3-4 defensive end. The talented Dareus is stout versus the run, and his 28.5 sacks in his four years in the league demonstrate his pass rush ability. His issues come off the field where he has numerous incidents, including ones involving drag racing and drugs.
On the Bills’ four-man line, Dareus lined up next to Kyle Williams, a high-motor player who has 16 sacks the past two years, last season.
Ryan will likely go with three down linemen this year, moving defensive ends Mario Williams — the No. 1 overall pick in the 2006 NFL Draft — and Jerry Hughes to 3-4 outside linebackers. Williams has 91 career sacks, and the duo combined for 24 sacks last season.
The Bills had the third best pass defense in the league last year not only because of their ability to get to the quarterback, but also because they have two former top 11 picks — Leodis McKelvin and Stephon Gilmore — starting at cornerback.
Ryan will love having those corners. He can trust them in single coverage, allowing him to blitz multiple defenders.
His penchant for doing that is why Ryan lobbied the Jets front office to re-sign Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie, the cover cornerbacks who shut down receivers while the Jets advanced to the AFC Championship Game in 2010.
Unfortunately for Ryan, the Jets re-signed them only after he left.
Those secondary additions — and the free-agent acquisition of CB Buster Skrine — should drastically improve a New York defense that ranked sixth in the NFL last season but only 14th against the pass.
And the Jets D will have to be outstanding to compensate for an anemic offense.
The offensive woes begin at quarterback where New York has error-prone Geno Smith, who has turned the ball over 41 times in 30 career games.
Rookie quarterback Bryce Petty, drafted in the fourth round, has potential, but he is somewhat of a project because he needs to adjust from the spread offense at Baylor to the Jets’ pro-style attack.
There’s a reason Jets QB Ryan Fitzpatrick is on his sixth team; he is whom you want as your No. 2 quarterback but not your starter.
One of Fitzpatrick’s former teams, the Bills, have similar QB issues. Matt Cassel, the odds-on favorite to win the job, is like Fitzpatrick. An excellent backup, he could not hold onto the starting job in Kansas City or Minnesota.
EJ Manuel, the first quarterback selected in the 2013 NFL Draft, is not dynamic enough. He has completed under 59 percent of his passes in both seasons and never averaged more than 6.44 yards per pass.
Tyrod Taylor also has a shot at the starting job.
Whoever quarterbacks the Bills will at least have LeSean McCoy and Fred Jackson at running back, potentially allowing Buffalo to play a ball-control attack, which puts less pressure on the passer.
McCoy has 2,926 rush yards over the last two seasons, and Jackson has surpassed 925 rushing yards three times.
The Bills have young talent at receiver. Sammy Watkins enters his second year while Robert Woods enters his third. They combined for 1,681 receiving yards last year.
They also signed WR Percy Harvin to a one-year contract. Harvin played for Ryan last year in New York after the versatile receiver previously wore out his welcome in Minnesota and Seattle.
The Jets took on another talented — but somewhat troubled — receiver in Brandon Marshall to complement Eric Decker.
But like the Bills, the Jets would be better off taking the game out of the hands of whichever dubious quarterback wins the QB job and relying on a deep RB group.
The Jets ranked third in the NFL in rushing last year and are even deeper this year. Though lacking an elite back, New York has Chris Ivory, Bilal Powell, Stevan Ridley and Zac Stacy. Each has at least one 697-yard season to his name.
Time will tell if strong running games and defenses will be enough to make up for poor QB play — and enough to finally unseat the Patriots.
How the Belichick-Parcells relationship mirrors Coach K and Knight’s
Mentor teaches pupil. Pupil bests mentor. Mentor and pupil grow apart. Mentor and pupil become close again.
It’s a narrative that describes two of the greatest coaching pairings — Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, along with Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski — in the modern era, and it’s just one of the ties that bind
It’s a narrative that describes two of the greatest coaching pairings — Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, along with Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski — in the modern era, and it’s just one of the ties that bind the four legends.
Belichick coached on the defensive side of the ball under Parcells from 1983-1990 with the New York Giants, 1996 with the New England Patriots and 1997-1999 with the New York Jets.
The two were so tied at the hip that Belichick was called “Little Bill,” and Parcells was called “Big Bill.” Little Bill, though, has now surpassed Parcells. As head coach he has more Super Bowl titles (four to two), more Super Bowl appearances (six to three), and more regular-season victories (211 to 172).
Coach K played under Knight from 1966-1969 at Army and coached under him at Indiana from 1974-1975. When Krzyzewski’s father died near the end of his senior year, Knight flew to Chicago to mourn with the family and he attended Krzyzewski’s wedding four days after his player graduated from college.
Like Belichick, Krzyzewski similarly exceeded his confidante and former boss. He now has more NCAA championships (five to three), Final Four appearances (12 to five), and total victories (1,018 to 902) than Knight.
The striking parallels, though, go beyond a student gaining more acclaim than his teacher.
The falling out and reconciliation
The plan all along was for Belichick to succeed Parcells as head coach with the Jets. However, Belichick, who saw a more stable ownership with the Patriots and a chance to spread his wings, resigned from that position to become the Patriots’ head coach.
“At that point in time, in that situation, I did what I felt I needed to do and I don’t have any regrets about that,” Belichick said in Parcells: A Football Life. “Certainly a lot of things could have been handled differently.”
Belichick’s move to New England not only added more fuel to the Patriots-Jets rivalry, but also created acrimony between the coaches. The two remained estranged for about six years.
But after Parcells watched Belichick win Super Bowl XXXIX and get doused with Gatorade while his father, Steve, was at his side, Parcells was moved. He sent a note describing his joy in seeing them enjoy that father-son moment.
More than a year after that, Belichick invited Parcells, the then-Cowboys coach, to play golf at Nantucket Golf Club, a gracious act that Scott Pioli, Parcells’ son-in-law and former Belichick right-hand man, is presumed to have played a role in.
Shortly thereafter, the coaches regularly called each other.
Belichick, whose girlfriend was living in Florida, even purchased a condominium unit two floors above Parcells’ Miami-area place in 2009.
“We just had a difference of opinion on some things,” Parcells said in his book. “I wasn’t happy that we were kind of at different ends of the spectrum for a while. I wouldn’t say we’re buddy buddies, but we get along.”
The ultimate gesture came when Belichick left Patriots training camp to attend Parcells’ 2013 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
When Coach K went to his first Final Four in 1986, a beaming Knight supported him by wearing a Duke button in Dallas.
For his sixth Final Four, Coach K’s defending champion faced Knight’s Indiana team in the semifinal. Duke won 81-78, and the coaching legends brushed past each other after the game, barely shaking hands.
It was never revealed what led to the frostiness in the relationship. John Feinstein, a Duke alum and author of the Knight tell-all book, A Season on the Brink, conjectured that Knight felt Krzyzewski had not publicly credited him enough for his success.
Like it did for Parcells and Belichick, the Hall of Fame helped mend fences for the basketball coaches.
Krzyzewski asked Knight to introduce him during his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001, and the two became close once again.
During a 2006 holiday tournament, Krzyzewski told me he always roots for Knight, who was then coaching Texas Tech, to win, equating it to cheering for a family member.
When Krzyzewski surpassed Knight in 2011 as the all-time winningest men’s basketball coach in Division I history, Knight was there announcing the game for ESPN. The two warmly embraced.
“I just told Coach I love him,” Krzyzewski said. “I wouldn’t be in this position without him. It’s a moment shared. I know he’s very proud and I’m very proud to have been somebody who’s worked under him and studied him and tried to be like him.”
All four have deep connections to the military.
Bill Belichick’s father, Steve, coached at Navy from 1956-1989. The Midshipmen coach helped indoctrinate his son, who learned how to scout at the age of 10, into the football world.
Steve coached against Parcells, the Army head coach from 1966 to 1969, in the famed Army-Navy rivalry clashes. Parcells became the head coach at another service academy, the Air Force, in 1978. It was his first head coaching job at any level.
Knight, who was nicknamed the “General” in part because he coached at Army from 1965 to 1971, recruited Krzyzewski. Coach K then served as Army head coach from 1975 to 1980 before becoming Duke head coach.
To further complete this coaching quadrangle, Parcells and Knight were the respective head coaches of football and basketball at Army at the same time.
They became great friends, playing heated basketball games against each other and regularly hanging out in Knight’s basement or Parcells’ living room.
Knight would counsel Parcells on prospective jobs, once telling him the Indiana head coaching job had opened, though Parcells would accept the Giants’ head coaching position.
Three years before, Knight recommended Duke hire an under-the-radar coach with a last name that was difficult to pronounce. He would go on to become the NCAA’s all-time winningest men’s basketball coach.
Why the Vikings are on the rise
After a 7-9 finish last year, the Minnesota Vikings are a trendy pick to make the playoffs in 2015 — and for good reason.
Although the young talent on the defense may represent the biggest reason for the Vikings’ ascension, much of the optimism centers on returning star, RB Adrian Peterson, and the new offensive
Although the young talent on the defense may represent the biggest reason for the Vikings’ ascension, much of the optimism centers on returning star, RB Adrian Peterson, and the new offensive face of the franchise, QB Teddy Bridgewater.
The excitement over Bridgewater is understandable, considering the Vikings went 31-48-1 from 2010-14 when the team’s major problem was a void at quarterback.
Now they have their best young passer since Daunte Culpepper. (Brett Favre starred in his first season in Minnesota in 2009, but at 40 years old, he was not a long-term answer at the position.)
Bridgewater enters his second season after going 6-6 in his 12 starts as a rookie. Most encouraging is how his play improved as the season wore on. During four of his last five games, he posted a QB rating of 90.2 or better. He threw eight touchdowns and five interceptions during that stretch while completing at least 68 percent of his passes in each game.
He put up those promising numbers despite being without one of the best running backs in NFL history. Peterson played in just one game in 2014 after being placed on an exempt list due to child abuse charges.
Look for Peterson, who rushed for 1,266 and 2,097 yards in the two previous seasons, to play with added motivation in 2015. The last time he had a chip on his shoulder — after coming back from an ACL injury — he finished with an MVP season.
Though he’s a physical marvel, Peterson has turned 30, the age when most running backs begin showing slippage. But the Vikings finally have a player who can spell Peterson in Jerick McKinnon, who averaged 4.8 yards per carry as a rookie last season.
They are not the only offensive playmakers who will help out the 22-year-old Bridgewater. He now has a deep threat after the Vikings traded a fifth-round pick for wide receiver Mike Wallace.
Even though the speedster didn’t live up to the expectations of his lofty contract with the Miami Dolphins, he still had 862 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns last year, and a change of scenery could provide a career boost.
His receiving mate, the versatile Cordarrelle Patterson, showed great promise as a rushing/receiving/special teams threat while scoring nine touchdowns as a rookie in 2013, though his play regressed last season.
To resuscitate Wallace’s career and advance Patterson’s, the Vikings have the right man in offensive coordinator Norv Turner, an excellent playcaller and QB guru.
Unlike most well-regarded offensive coordinators, Turner emphasizes the running game over the passing game, though he mixes in the deep ball, a result of his Air Coryell roots.
With Turner in charge of the offense, it allows second-year head coach Mike Zimmer to devote his time to his specialty — the defense, a 4-3 unit that features press coverage in the secondary.
The D — with players like Jared Allen, the Williams Wall, Antoine Winfield and co. — used to be the hallmark of Minnesota’s success, but as that group grew old, the Vikings fell apart.
The Vikings have just one defensive starter from their last NFC Championship Game appearance — Chad Greenway, the linebacker who has started 123 games.
Minnesota has remade their defense alongside Greenway with a slew of young defensive stars, which it acquired through the draft.
One reason the Vikings felt comfortable parting with Allen before the 2014 season was the emergence of their other pass rushers. Everson Griffen and veteran Brian Robison combined for 32 sacks the last two years, though a pectoral injury could limit the latter during training camp.
Aside from Greenway and Robison, it’s a young corps.
Before a knee injury ended his 2014 season, linebacker Anthony Barr was in contention for Rookie of the Year voting. A multi-talented player, he had 55 tackles, four sacks, two forced fumbles and a touchdown through 12 weeks last year.
Projected as a 2015 first-round pick, Eric Kendricks slipped to the Vikings in the second round (45th overall). The best middle linebacker of the draft has special instincts and intelligence while also possessing great lateral agility and a 38-inch vertical leap.
With the 11th overall pick, the Vikings selected cornerback Trae Waynes, a perfect fit for Zimmer’s man-press scheme. The 6-1, 183-pounder has the blend of size and speed to handle NFC North receivers.
His 4.23 speed at the NFL Combine was the fastest among all defensive backs, and he also had the fastest 20-yard split (2.40 seconds) among all participants.
What was once a source of weakness — the defensive backfield — may soon become a strength for the Vikings. They can pair Waynes with ballhawking safety Harrison Smith, who has three touchdowns and 10 interceptions in his three-year career, and cornerback Xavier Rhodes, a first-round pick in 2013.
Beyond the young talent aboard, the future looks bright in Minnesota. The Vikings’ new stadium, Minnesota Stadium, will open in 2016. And in 2018, it will host the Super Bowl.
The Chiefs have Georgia on their mind
Immediately after Chris Conley was selected by the Chiefs in third round of the 2015 NFL Draft, second-year Chiefs quarterback Aaron Murray texted the Georgia wide receiver.
“Get ready to come and grind with me again,” messaged the former Bulldogs passer.
Murray, Georgia’s all-time leader in passing yards and touchdown passes, threw to Conley for
Murray, Georgia’s all-time leader in passing yards and touchdown passes, threw to Conley for three years, including in 2013, when Conley led the team with 45 receptions and 651 receiving yards.
The duo is elated about their reunion Kansas City.
“It helps tremendously. It helps because Aaron knows how I work,” Conley said. “He’s able to ease that transition a little more.”
Perhaps the Chiefs will start planting some Sanford Stadium-like hedges outside Arrowhead Stadium. In the past five years, Kansas City has drafted five Georgia players.
That group includes Murray, Conley, safety Sanders Commings, linebacker Justin Houston and linebacker Ramik Wilson, who was selected in the fourth round (118th overall) of this 2015 NFL Draft.
Under general manager John Dorsey and head coach Andy Reid, the Chiefs have selected four former Georgia players since 2013 and at least one Bulldog every year.
In addition Wilson has become close to Houston, who was drafted by former Chiefs GM Scott Pioli. The elite pass rusher often comes back to Georgia at the end of NFL seasons and works out or rehabs there. Wilson and Murray both grew up in Tampa, Florida, and have known each other for years prior to reconnecting in Kansas City.
“It’s a great fit,” Wilson said. “It makes (it) feel like home. I can go to them for anything.”
While the Georgia players enjoy a comfortable setting in Kansas City with plenty of former teammates, the Chiefs get players who have proven their ability at the highest level of college football.
“Everyone always talks about the speed of the game and they say the speed of the SEC is the closest you get,” Conley said. “Hopefully that will translate.”
That SEC background is likely one reason Dorsey remains enamored with Georgia players. However, he drafted Conley and Wilson because of their specific skill set — not just their conference pedigree.
The Chiefs liked Conley so much that they traded their third-round pick (80th pick overall) and sixth-round pick (193rd overall) to the Vikings in exchange for Minnesota’s 76th overall pick.
The 6-2, 213-pound Conley has an impressive blend of size and athleticism. At the 2015 NFL Combine, he led all participants with a 45-inch vertical leap and tied for fourth with a 40 time of 4.35 seconds.
Conley used that speed to average 18.3 yards per catch while posting 657 receiving yards and scoring eight touchdowns during his senior year in 2014.
“He can go deep. He really does have some nice feet in terms of running after the catch and making guys miss. He’s got enough size to break the arm tackle,” Dorsey said. “He has got the athletic skills to just kind of blend right in.”
Conley has blended in quickly thus far, wowing observers and teammates during offseason practices.
“He can play some football,” said veteran wide receiver Jason Avant. “He has the potential to be really, really good.”
The Chiefs need Conley to be good and quickly — given the glaring hole on Kansas City’s roster. The Chiefs’ wide receivers did not score a touchdown last season.
Wilson also fits a need at middle linebacker where 32-year-old star Derrick Johnson is coming off a season-ending torn Achilles tendon.
The rookie’s production and range belie his 4.74 speed in the 40. A three-year starter at Georgia who can adeptly cover tight ends, the 6-2, 237-pound linebacker led the SEC in tackles in 2013 and added 110 more in 2014.
His fellow Bulldogs linebacker, Houston, remains unsigned after the franchise player led the NFL with 22 sacks last year. Meanwhile, Commings, who is trying to overcome two injury-plagued seasons, will try to help fill the void left by safety Eric Berry.
The challenge for Murray, the presumptive No. 3 quarterback and a possible eventual successor to starter Alex Smith, is to continue to master the complexities of the Chiefs’ West Coast Offense.
“Even Aaron is still learning things about this offense,” Conley said. “When Aaron was at Georgia, he knew everything there was. This offense is so big and grand, and every year wrinkles are added.”
As Conley tries to master his own playbook and adjust to life in the NFL, having fellow Bulldogs on the roster only can help the rookie receiver.
“There are so (many) new things going on and so many things flying,” Conley said. “Having familiar faces and guys who can kind of show you the ropes is so beneficial at this point. I’m loving it.”
Why Michael Sam can excel in the CFL
Though Michael Sam did not play a regular-season down in the NFL, he has the skill set to flourish up north.
“He can be an outstanding CFL rush end,” Jim Popp, Montreal Alouettes vice president, general manager and director of football operations, told NFP.
The Alouettes, who signed Sam on May 22, run an aggressive
The Alouettes, who signed Sam on May 22, run an aggressive scheme with a four-man front, which emphasizes pressuring the passer, and employ bump-and-run coverage in the secondary.
Moreover, the CFL has 12 players on each side of the ball, and the extra player is typically a receiver on offense and a defensive back on defense. So, the Alouettes use a 4-3-5 scheme or often a dime look with six defensive backs. Those extra secondary players focus on coverage responsibilities, which will allow Sam to concentrate on pressuring the quarterback.
“There will be times where he has to drop,” Popp said. “But 95 percent of the time he’ll be rushing the passer.”
That should enable Sam, 25, to avoid one of the weaknesses in his game — dropping back into coverage — that prevented him from hanging on with an NFL team.
Sam, however, has a knack for rushing the passer.
In the best conference in the country, he recorded 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for loss during his senior season at Missouri and was named the SEC’s Co-Defensive Player of the Year in 2013. During the 2014 NFL preseason, he tied for fourth in the league with three sacks.
But the 6-2, 260-pound Sam, who ran a 4.99 in the 40 at the NFL’s veterans combine in March, was knocked by NFL teams for being a tweener — too slow to be a 3-4 linebacker and too small to play defensive line.
The CFL is often a refuge for players deemed to have inadequate speed or size for the NFL. Doug Flutie, who NFL teams rejected because of his 5’10” height, became a six-time Most Outstanding Player in the CFL.
“We don’t get caught up in measurables,” Popp said.
Popp also is not concerned by the fact that Sam is gay.
“Absolutely not,” said Popp, who lauded Sam’s character and leadership. “We see everyone as equal.”
Sam was not only the first openly gay player to be drafted by the NFL, but Popp also said he is the first one in the CFL, and the CFL is embracing his barrier-breaking status.
“The league office is very happy,” Popp said.
Sam has been on the Alouettes’ negotiation list since college.
The CFL has a draft, but it is only for Canadian citizens. Free agents can be placed on a negotiation list of 35 players, a first-come, first-serve, private list only known to CFL teams and the league office.
Noteworthy players who have been on the Alouettes’ negotiation list include Russell Wilson (who was once deemed too short for the NFL and was recruited to N.C. State by future Alouettes coach Marc Trestman), Clay Matthews (a former USC walk-on once considered too slight), Colin Kaepernick (once considered a product of a gimmicky system at Nevada) and Tim Tebow.
CFL teams can take a player off at any time but cannot tamper with someone else’s list. Hypothetically, they could even put high school players on that list, though they cannot negotiate with them or college players until they have declared for the draft or already have spent four years in college.
The Rams drafted Sam in the seventh round (249th overall) in 2014 before releasing him prior to the season. With Chris Long and Robert Quinn holding down a stacked defensive end group, St. Louis may not have been the best fit.
“That was one of the strongest points of that team,” Popp said. “That was (working) against him.”
Receiving playing time with the Alouettes, a vaunted CFL franchise that has made eight Grey Cup appearances in the 21st century, is not guaranteed either. Defensive end John Bowman, the franchise’s all-time leading sacker, leads a deep group.
“The position we’re bringing him into (has) four very good guys,” Popp said.
Sam signed a reported one-year deal, and the Alouettes hold the option for the 2016 season, though Popp often allows his players to move on if they receive NFL interest.
So if Sam can rise up the Montreal depth chart and produce big this year — like former B.C. Lions pass rusher Cameron Wake — he could find himself back in the NFL within a year.
Sam begins his CFL journey at the Alouettes’ rookie camp, which starts Wednesday.
After his NFL campaign focused on how a gay football player would mesh with his team, the narrative now has become whether he can make an impact on the field.
“This young man just wants to be a football player,” Popp said. “He wants to play.”
Why Travis Kelce is poised for a huge season
When the Chiefs released veteran tight end Anthony Fasano over the offseason, it pained his younger position mate, Travis Kelce.
“When you see Fasano go, that’s a brother. That rips your heart out,” Kelce said. “It just lets you know that it is a business and everybody’s spot is vulnerable.”
It also meant that Kansas
It also meant that Kansas City had high expectations for Kelce to replace Fasano —who started 22 games for the Chiefs the last two years — and then some.
Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said the 25-year-old Kelce has the potential to be an elite player, and he’s at a crucial position in the K.C. offense.
Even with the free-agent signing of wide receiver Jeremy Maclin, the Chiefs lack strong receiving options. And in their ball-control, short-passing offense — K.C. ranked 24th in the league in yards per attempt — the team often employed 3-TE-sets last season.
The Chiefs still have basketball player-turned-tight end Demetrius Harris and did draft James O’Shaughnessy in the fifth round of the 2015 NFL Draft, but the onus will be on Kelce, who caught 67 passes for 862 yards and five touchdowns in 2014 during what basically was his rookie year.
A 2013 third-round pick, he played in just one game his rookie season because of a knee injury. He was placed on injured reserve in October of 2013 and underwent microfracture surgery, where holes are drilled in the knee to stimulate cartilage growth.
Kelce excitedly launched a comeback, returning to action last season when he burst on the scene with a 69-yard touchdown reception during the first preseason game, a 41-39 victory against the Bengals.
“I felt like I was in flames, just running around there with my head on fire,” Kelce told NFP. “It was a huge mile marker for me.”
Once the 6-6, 250-pounder passed that initial marker, he continued to flourish.
And now nearly two years removed from microfracture, he should see even better results this season. Patients who have undergone major knee surgeries typically report that it’s not until two years postoperatively that they begin feeling 100 percent.
“Without a doubt … the cartilage has got to regrow,” Kelce said. “I’m definitely feeling more and more comfortable.”
He’s also growing more accustomed to the offense that uses him in myriad roles, including in motion and chip blocking pass rushers.
“If you watch the film,” Kelce said, “you can see me everywhere on the field.”
Indeed he stands outs, exuberantly celebrating his touchdowns — and even first downs.
“He’s tremendously talented, loves to play the game,” Reid said. “He’s like a little kid out there.”
Kelce’s energy pumps up teammates during games and even mundane practices and meetings.
“When you’re having a bad day,” said Brandon Barden, a tight end on last year’s Chiefs practice squad, “just look at him, and he’ll kind of give you that little spark you need to get through.”
Kelce’s enthusiasm is best displayed during touchdown celebrations, including The Nae Nae, The Shmoney Dance, The Bow and Arrow and even one that honors WWE wrestler Ric Flair.
“I do have some fun when I do get in the end zone,” Kelce said. “That’s for sure.”
It’s a carryover from what he did growing up while “being a knucklehead in the backyard trying to get in the heads of the guys we were playing around with.”
“Everything that I come out here and show,” Kelce said, “is a product of who I am and where I’m from.”
He grew up in suburban Cleveland with his brother, Jason Kelce, who has started 46 games at center for the Eagles.
Reid drafted and coached Jason, who is two years older than Travis, when he was in Philadelphia. That bond likely factored into the Chiefs drafting Travis and knowing he could make an impact in the NFL.
“It might’ve helped out a little bit that they knew the kind of family that me and Jason came from,” Travis said. “We’re both hardworking guys and love what we do.”
Upon being selected by Kansas City, Travis picked his brother’s brain on Reid, and Jason emphasized the vigilance and attention to detail of Reid, a former offensive lineman at BYU and a tight ends coach for the Brett Favre-era Packers.
“He was going to hold you accountable. He wasn’t going to let anything slide,” Travis said his brother explained. “Every fundamental, even when you think he’s not watching, he’s watching every single second.”
Reid likely will be keeping a close eye on Kelce’s blocking, an area that he needs to improve to be on par with his stellar body control, route running and ability to gain yards after the catch.
As he continues to hone those skills, Kelce seems ready to use his breakout 2014 campaign as a springboard for 2015.
“Everybody is really excited about Travis,” Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith said, “We all saw last year what he’s capable of.”
Shane Ray and Randy Gregory: Same predicament, different outlook
CHICAGO—Shane Ray and Randy Gregory endured a similar fate.
The talented pass rushers plummeted in the 2015 NFL Draft because of marijuana issues.
“Shane is kind of like me. He made a bad choice.” Gregory told NFP. “I wish nothing but the best for him, hope he makes some smarter decisions in the future and I'm
“Shane is kind of like me. He made a bad choice.” Gregory told NFP. “I wish nothing but the best for him, hope he makes some smarter decisions in the future and I’m hoping he wishes the same upon me.”
But while the humbled Gregory said he deserved what happened to him, the overly confident Ray was defiant.
“I want to show those other teams that they made a huge mistake. … This does nothing but add fuel to the fire,” Ray said. “I will use this as motivation and I hope that I do see every one of those teams twice a year.”
Ray, who had 14.5 sacks and 22.5 tackles for loss last year, vowed to demonstrate his ability that had many pegging him as a Top 10 pick last month before his issues, including an April 27 citation for weed possession, caused him to slide to No. 23 overall.
“I will go over and beyond to show (the Broncos) that I am more than capable at dominating at whatever they ask me to do,” he said. “And when I say ‘dominating,’ I mean nothing less than that.”
While the Denver-bound Ray seemed vengeful, Gregory took a more apologetic tone, saying he needed to mature.
“I made a real dumb decision,” Gregory said, “that’s been the most embarrassing part of my life up to this point and I’m just ready to fix it.”
After testing positive for marijuana at the NFL Combine, Gregory fell out of the first round and was the last player remaining in the green room when the Cowboys selected him 60th overall.
Gregory’s Missed Appointments
Magnifying concerns over his character, the Nebraska product was truant from meetings with several NFL clubs.
“I know for a fact it hurt me with a few teams,” Gregory said. “I understood why I wasn’t picked high.”
One meeting Gregory did attend was with the Cowboys a couple of weeks ago. He spent 40 minutes with head coach Jason Garrett, defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli and owner Jerry Jones.
Gregory compared his heart-to-heart with Jones to a stern father-son conversation. Dallas has taken chances on several players with a litany of off-the-field problems, including wide receiver Dez Bryant and defensive end Greg Hardy.
Gregory, who said he smoked weed to help cope with anxiety, told reporters he would be open to having a mentor/sponsor, which the Cowboys have used on players in the past.
Unintentionally wearing Cowboys colors — a silver suit and blue tie — on Friday night, he may prove to be a great fit in Dallas. Having recorded just 28 sacks in 2014, the Cowboys ranked 26th in pass defense and are in desperate need of a pass rusher.
“I feel like I could be a piece right there to get us to that next level, get us another championship,” Gregory said. “That’s what makes it exciting.”
Denver, on the other hand, does not have a hole at pass rusher. With DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller, after whom Ray has modeled his game, the Broncos ranked in the top 10 in the NFL last year with 41 sacks.
Rumors, though, circulated that the Ravens were targeting Ray, and the Broncos traded their first-round pick, fifth-round pick, 2016 fifth-round pick, and offensive lineman Manny Ramirez to the Lions to move up five spots to select the explosive 6-3, 245-pound Missouri star.
Injury and Weight Issues
Trading up was somewhat of a surprising move by Denver, considering Ray not only had the marijuana incident but also a toe injury that prevented him from working out at the Combine and had some speculating he would miss much of his rookie NFL season.
Ray, though, said that his doctor told him he did not need surgery. The injury was only keeping him out because he did not have time to properly rehab it due to the hectic schedule of pro days, the Combine and flying to meet teams.
He promised to be healthy enough to play Week 1 against the Ravens.
“My toe’s fine,” Ray said. “I will be ready.”
Like Ray, Gregory had a physical concern that caused him to fall in the draft.
Though a gifted 6-5 pass rusher who had 17.5 sacks and 25.5 tackles for loss the last two years, he was the lightest defensive lineman at the Combine at 235 pounds. Gregory said he currently weighed 239 to 240 pounds and that he needs to get up to 255.
“One of the big things is obviously putting a little bit more mass on me,” he said. “I’m definitely going to get there.”
Ray is going to get to play in Colorado, a state that legalized pot, something that made him the butt of social media jokes.
“Just because I was cited for marijuana possession doesn’t mean I’m this huge smoker or some huge drug addict,” Ray said. “That’s not a worry for me.”
Instead Ray is more concerned with proving himself to the other teams who passed on him before the Broncos selected him at No. 23.
“They’re all circled, you best believe,” he said. “I’ve been blessed with my situation that the Broncos decided to trade up to get me and give me a second opportunity. And I’m going to show them that this was the best decision they could’ve made.”
Draft: 3 biggest bargains of round one
Although there were very few curveballs in a rather vanilla round one of the 2015 NFL draft, we certainly weren't void of a few value selections in the latter stages of the night.
Here are three in particular that stood out:
Bud Dupree to the Steelers at No. 22
Prior to Randy Gregory
Although there were very few curveballs in a rather vanilla round one of the 2015 NFL draft, we certainly weren’t void of a few value selections in the latter stages of the night.
Prior to Randy Gregory and Shane Ray’s off field indiscretions in the pre-draft, there may have been a limited number of scenarios where all five of the highly rated pass rushers were not all off the board by the time Pittsburgh was on the clock at No. 22. However, for the eternally defensive-minded Steelers, Kentucky conversion edge defender Bud Dupree fell fortuitously into their lap. Although the secondary absorbed multiple blows this offseason, with Jason Worilds’ shock retirement came the immediate requirement for a pass rushing reinforcement. Dupree (my 10th ranked player overall) was projected by some to go as high as seventh to Atlanta. A height, weight, speed specimen with significant upside, he will luckily not be thrust into a high leverage role prematurely as he — and his raw skill set — acclimatizes to the NFL game.
Shane Ray to the Broncos at No. 23
The 2014 SEC Defensive Player of the Year’s slide was not unforeseen after being cited for marijuana possession during the very week of the draft, but the Broncos were happy to capitalize. Ray (my 3rd ranked player overall) brings with him to Denver a pleasantly violent on-field demeanor and unmatched motor. Though I view him to be a better fit as a classic 4-3, hand in the dirt, defensive end, simply having him installed opposite Von Miller makes a good unit all the more dynamic. I’d expect him to contribute primarily as a spot rusher while he adjusts to the pro level and (hopefully) adds to his frame.
Malcom Brown to the Patriots at No. 32
Big bodies who can move and affect the passing game are a commodity. For New England, it was fortunate that Brown (my 14th ranked player overall) was able to get past a handful of defensive tackle-needy teams in the twenties — particularly the Detroit Lions at No. 28 who lost both Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley this offseason. Malcom Brown improved significantly in 2014 and accumulated 13.0 tackles for loss and 6.5 sacks. A slippery pass rusher packed into a beefy frame, he boasts an abundance of athleticism for the position as well. Yes, Vince Wilfork is gone, but Brown is not his replacement. The latter is a different profile of player and, unlike Big Vince, won’t have to come off the field in obvious passing situations.
The 49ers trade down two spots and still get their man
Despite the surprisingly sparse amount of trade movement, San Francisco was able to slide down just two spots and take the player they coveted all along. The 49ers went from No. 15 to No. 17, managing to acquire a fourth round pick (No. 117 overall) and a 2016 fifth round pick as well. Fair play to San Diego for getting its man, but quick and easy draft manipulation is always worthy of props.
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Guest Stars, The Scouting Department
NFL Draft Day Two: The 11 Best Available
When the music stops at the cessation of any NFL draft's first day, we're left with a handful of talented players still standing, unselected.
Though the 2015 NFL draft isn't as classically stockpiled with as much overall depth as we've been accustomed to in recent years, there is plenty to monitor heading into the top
When the music stops at the cessation of any NFL draft’s first day, we’re left with a handful of talented players still standing, unselected.
Though the 2015 NFL draft isn’t as classically stockpiled with as much overall depth as we’ve been accustomed to in recent years, there is plenty to monitor heading into the top of the second round.
Of the remaining dancers without a partner, here are the eleven most enticing available:
Jake Fisher, OT. Oregon (6’6″ 306 lbs.)
Former tight end with superior athleticism and quickness off the snap. A potential left tackle in a zone blocking scheme, he gets by on good technique and above-average footwork. There is a Joe Staley element to his profile.
Randy Gregory, OLB. Nebraska (6’5″ 235 lbs.)
Quality movement skills and lower body explosion packaged into a long frame. Though his get-off is sub par as slowly unravels out of his stance, Gregory does well to use his hands to beat blockers. Chase linebacker who plays with effort. If he gets past his substance concerns and reinforces his semi-wiry frame, he could be a major day two bargain.
Landon Collins, S. Alabama (6’0″ 228 lbs.)
Aggressive and tough, Collins is a downhill hammer that finds the football in run and pass defense. Will add a certain attitude to a defense and comes physically ready for the NFL. A lack of ball skills or natural coverage ability prevented him from the first round, but he’s an impact run defender from day one at the strong safety position.
Eddie Goldman, DT. Florida State (6’4″ 336 lbs.)
A lot to be said about big men who can carry their weight well. Goldman is a wrecking ball at the point of attack and can affect the oppositions rhythm with his natural power. He lacks the ability to consistently affect the passing game on third-down, likely limiting him to 3-4 teams.
T.J. Clemmings, OT. Pittsburgh (6’5″ 309 lbs.)
Experienced leader who displays impressive quickness and lateral movement skills. The former defensive end is still constantly learning the nuances of playing on offense, but has long term potential to be a left tackle if he goes to a patient team.
Jaelen Strong, WR. Arizona State (6’2″ 217 lbs.)
Big body target who can prove to be a reliable safety valve due to his ability to adjust and shield defenders away from passes. Lacks explosion and doesn’t consistently make catches off hi frame with natural hands, but there’s an undeniable talent level that should intrigue teams early day two.
La’El Collins, OG/RT. LSU (6’4″ 305 lbs.)
Powerful, thickly-built dual guard or right tackle. A finisher in the run game who eliminates when engaged. Leader with three-years of starting experience. Though he is not a suspect, Collins has a scheduled meeting with police over an April shooting of a pregnant woman. If not for the uncertainty of the situation, he’d have likely been a first round selection.
Dorial Green-Beckham, WR. Missouri (6’5″ 237 lbs.)
A laundry list of maturity and off-field concerns are difficult to overlook, but the physical makeup is tantalizing. Fluidity and smooth movement despite carrying a larger, taller frame. Strength and separation of areas of concern, but can extend and high-point over most defensive backs. Can he deal with physical NFL cornerbacks, though?
Jordan Phillips, NT. Oklahoma (6’5″ 329 lbs.)
Beefy 3-4 nose tackle only; decent movement skills. Anchors well and can push the pocket using his supreme length and strength. Won’t provide much of a pass rush, but should contribute from the outset for a team that needs help at the 0-tech. Two down player, but imposing dimensions.
Ronald Darby, CB. Florida State (5’11” 193 lbs.)
Track speed with smooth change or direction and obvious fluidity. Man-coverage capable boundary corner by gives up inside release quite often on film. Lacks top end ball skills, but could make for a very intriguing project to a team in day two. Rather significant upside.
Tevin Coleman, RB. Indiana (5’11” 206 lbs.)
Workhorse ‘back who produced heavily despite playing behind an unimpressive offensive line. Greatest strength is his refusal to go down, but can also be a weakness as he too often looks for the home run. Still, a smooth-cutting between the tackle rusher who can maintain speed off contact. Lacks open-field elusiveness of some others and relatively unproven as a pass catcher.
Jalen Collins, CB. LSU (6’1″ 203 lbs.) – New school boundary corner; size/speed/length.
T.J. Yeldon, RB. Alabama (6’1″ 226 lbs.) – Decisive bruiser with instincts; keeps feet moving.
Eric Kendricks, ILB. UCLA (6’0″ 232 lbs.) – Stat freak with an aggressive downhill demeanor.
Donovan Smith, OT. Penn State (6’6″ 338 lbs.) – Day one starter at guard/right tackle.
Eli Harold, DE/OLB, UVA (6’3″ 247 lbs.) – Gets regular pressure; fluidity to play in space.
Did the Jets get a steal in Leonard Williams?
CHICAGO—Before stepping to the podium, Leonard Williams audibly exhaled.
Such a reaction was understandable, considering he had slipped to the sixth overall pick, even though most had pegged the 6-5, 302-pounder as the best defensive player — and perhaps the best player overall — in the 2015 NFL Draft.
“It’s like a sigh of relief,”
“It’s like a sigh of relief,” Williams said. “I had high expectations for myself, and seeing myself fall was kind of disappointing.”
The Jets didn’t expect him to be available at No. 6 either.
Williams had visited the Jets and was told he’d be one of their main targets if he was there, something they didn’t figure to be the case.
Rumor has it that a shoulder injury caused the defensive lineman, who had 21 sacks and 36.5 tackles for loss during his three years at USC, to slide in the first round.
Williams had surgery following his sophomore season to repair a torn labrum and after workouts he still does extra stabilization exercises to keep his shoulder strong.
After missing spring workouts, however, he returned from injury to have seven sacks and 80 tackles during an impressive junior campaign where he started 13 games.
“I played the whole 2014 season with no problems,” Williams said. “I don’t know why that would have been a factor, so I don’t really believe in that rumor.”
Whether that shoulder rumor led to him falling to the Jets, it meant he landed on a team that had already possessed a strong defense. New York had the sixth-ranked defense last year and added cornerbacks, Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie, who both starred for the team previously, during the offseason.
“I’m glad to go into a defense that’s already well-seasoned up front,” Williams said. “They have a great D-line already.”
That line is led by stout defensive ends Sheldon Richardson and Muhammad Wilkerson. In addition to stopping the run, the latter has 16.5 sacks the last two years, a very high total for a 3-4 end.
Following the Jets’ selection of Williams, Wilkerson welcomed him to the club via Instagram.
“That means a lot to me,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to working with those guys.”
Wilkerson, though, could be on his way out. Thee fifth-year player is in the final year of his deal and has skipped voluntary workouts. New York even reportedly listened to trade offers for him prior to the draft.
Williams, who looks very lean in person, is athletic, having run a 4.94 40, and versatile, which allows him play either the three- or five-technique under new head coach Todd Bowles. But he said the Jets told him he would play as a 3-4 defensive end, perhaps making Wilkerson the odd man out.
Bowles, a Bill Parcells disciple, orchestrated the Cardinals’ 3-4 defense last year and likely will not employ four defensive linemen in his base defense.
Williams instantly bonded with his new coach, who he described as a players’ coach, during their visit. Bowles kidded him, saying he would critique his draft attire.
“We were joking around,” Williams said. “I felt comfortable around him.”
The 20-year-old, who has outside interests including ceramics, should also be a good fit in New York as he crosses coasts to plays on the biggest stage.
“I kind of do well being in big cities,” Williams said.
The Big Apple will take to Williams if he can help the Jets bridge the gap in the division, which includes their longtime nemesis and the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots led by Tom Brady.
“I know it’s a big rivalry,” he said. “I’m looking forward to tackling a great quarterback like that. I hope that’s the first sack of my career.”
The Jets could make the going tough for opposing offenses in the AFC East. They currently have three defensive lineman (Richardson, Wilkerson and Williams) who were first-round picks, and none is older than 25.
The issue is that by loading up on D-line, the Jets have neglected their offense, which currently looks like it will be quarterbacked by Geno Smith or Ryan Fitzpatrick and lacks many weapons beside Brandon Marshall and Eric Decker.
New general manager Mike Maccagnan must spend Friday and Saturday improving that part of his team.
He used his Thursday to phone Williams, a call that really surprised the All-Pac 12 player.
It was not only shock for the soon-to-be rookie, but it also provided motivation. He vowed to remember the five teams who passed on him.
“I’m looking forward to proving those people wrong,” Williams said, “and most of all proving the Jets right.”
Participation Is Voluntary
Voluntary offseason workout programs for teams that did not hire a new head coach can begin on the third Monday in April, which is April 20 this year. Teams with a new head coach were allowed to start two weeks earlier on April 6. Players who are franchised, such as Dez Bryant, Justin Houston and
Voluntary offseason workout programs for teams that did not hire a new head coach can begin on the third Monday in April, which is April 20 this year. Teams with a new head coach were allowed to start two weeks earlier on April 6. Players who are franchised, such as Dez Bryant, Justin Houston and Demaryius Thomas, and restricted free agents, like Tashaun Gipson, are prohibited from participating in off-season team activities without signing an NFL player contract.
There is another way for these types of players to participate through an obscure provision (Article 21, Section 9) of the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Players who received a tender but haven’t signed an NFL contract and unrestricted free agents whose contracts expired can engage in offseason workouts and minicamps with their previous team while retaining the free agency rights they already have. In order to participate, these players must sign an agreement that contains the standard language the NFL and NFLPA came up with in 2012, which has been incorporated into Article 21, Section 9 of the 2011 CBA as Appendix Q.
Appendix Q protects players in case they are injured while participating in team activities during the off-season. In the case of an injury, a player will receive as a one year salary the greater of his required tender, his applicable minimum salary or the amount negotiated by the player and the team. Participation by a player is voluntarily under this provision so he can withdraw at any time with impunity. In Gipson’s case, his 2015 salary would be $2.356 million with an injury, his restricted free agent tender, since it’s unlikely that the Cleveland Browns would agree to a greater amount in order to get him to participate.
A main benefit to signing a participation agreement instead of an NFL contract is that a player will preserve his option of holding out without subjecting himself to penalties. For example, if Gipson boycotted a mandatory three day minicamp because of a lack of progress on a long term deal after signing his restricted free agent tender, the Browns would have the right to fine him $12,155 for the first day he missed minicamp, $24,300 for a second missed day and $36,465 if he missed a third day ($72,920 total for missing minicamp). If Gipson continued his boycott into training camp, the Browns could fine him $30,000 for each day he missed. These fines can’t occur when players are operating under participation agreements and they can only partake in training camp if they have signed an NFL contract.
Participation agreements have been rarely utilized by players receiving a franchise tender. Tennessee Titans safety Michael Griffin signed one in 2012 so he could be a part of the off-season program. The Titans rewarded his approach by signing him a five-year, $35 million contract (with $15 million in guarantees) about a month before training camp started.
The player least likely to use this option as a gesture of good faith is Houston. The Chiefs shouldn’t expect to see Houston during the off-season unless he has signed a long term deal. The 2011 third round pick skipped off-season activities in 2014 and forfeited a $25,000 workout bonus in a contract dispute with the Chiefs. Houston reported to training camp despite his unhappiness with his salary because he lacked leverage to continue his holdout. He wouldn’t have gotten a year of service towards free agency without reporting to the Chiefs at least 30 days prior to their first regular season game. Missing the August 5 deadline in 2014 and playing out his rookie deal would have made Houston a restricted free agent this year.
Email me: jccorry@gmail.com
Joel Corry is a former sports agent who helped found Premier Sports & Entertainment, a sports management firm that represents professional athletes and coaches. Prior to his tenure at Premier, Joel worked for Management Plus Enterprises, which represented Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ronnie Lott.
A Chiefs draft lesson: Why GM Scott Pioli was better than you think
Scott Pioli, the former Chiefs general manager, was skewered for his moves while running the team, which went 23-41 during his four years.
Among his biggest gaffes:
Hiring one head coach, Todd Haley, he could not get along with and another, Romeo Crennel, who struggled to control the team.
Signing Matt Cassel, who is
Signing Matt Cassel, who is better suited as a backup than a starter, to a franchise quarterback worthy deal of six years, $60 million, including $28 million guaranteed.
Trading future Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez for a second-round pick that would be used on Javier Arenas, an average defensive back.
Drafting Tyson Jackson third overall — over players like Brian Orakpo, Brian Cushing and Clay Matthews — in the 2009 NFL Draft.
As time has gone on, however, Pioli’s 2009-12 tenure looks much better.
Three of his draft picks, in particular, have proven to be the backbone for a Chiefs defense that allowed the second fewest points in the league last year.
It starts with the 2011 NFL Draft, where his third-round selections accounted for 27 sacks last season.
With the 70th overall pick, Pioli selected outside linebacker Justin Houston, a move that was considered a gamble at the time. Houston starred at Georgia, but his character was questioned for, among other things, testing positive at the NFL Combine for marijuana.
Houston, though, lost weight and has become a hard worker, providing Kansas City its best edge rusher since Derrick Thomas.
Just 26, Houston already has made three Pro Bowls, including his exemplary 2014 season when he had 22 sacks — a half-sack behind Michael Strahan’s all-time single-season NFL record — and four forced fumbles.
Sixteen picks after Houston, Pioli selected Allen Bailey out of Miami (Fla.) The 3-4 defensive end came into his own last year, starting 14 games and recording five sacks.
“He’s continued to improve,” head coach Andy Reid said. “He was good before, but I think he’s really developed into a pretty fine football player.”
Bailey’s speed, range and quickness made him effective on third down from the get-go, but the 6-3, 288 pounder has added weight and honed his technique to make him a more stout, well-rounded 3-4 end.
As a result the Chiefs, who signed Bailey to a four-year, $25 million contract last season, expect the 26-year-old to anchor the edge of their defensive line for years to come.
“The more he’s played, the better he’s got,” said Chiefs defensive coordinator Bob Sutton. “The arrow’s really pointing up on him.”
Bailey’s acquisition also offsets missing on Jackson, who was drafted to play the same position as Bailey, two years earlier. (Jackson now plays for the Falcons, where Pioli is the assistant GM.)
Pioli’s best move may have been his final first-round pick as a Chiefs executive when he drafted nose tackle Dontari Poe with the 11th overall choice in the 2012 NFL Draft.
Poe may be the best nose in the NFL. He’s that good.
Poe crushed it at the 2012 Combine, running the 40 in 4.98 seconds despite being the fifth heaviest defensive lineman to weigh in at the Combine since 2000. He also bench pressed 44 reps of 225 pounds.
Despite those eye-popping numbers, Poe was considered a workout wonder, and the pick was deemed a question mark. His play on the field at Memphis came nowhere close to reflecting those physical gifts. He had just five sacks over three years, including one as a senior, while playing against weak competition in Conference USA.
Pundits thought that indicated a lack of motor and of real football talent.
Pioli, however, rolled the dice and ended up with a player that not only has a motor, but it’s revved for nearly every play.
Heading into Week 14 of the 2013 season, for example, Poe was in the lineup for 95 percent of Kansas City’s defensive plays, which amounted to 804 snaps and was 85 more than any other NFL defensive tackle.
“It’s a great luxury because very seldom do you have a man as big as he that doesn’t come out,” Sutton said. “He’s a very talented guy.”
Indeed Poe plays so many downs because of his versatility — not just because of his stamina. The mammoth space eater is stout against interior running plays but has chased down screen passes near the sideline.
On obvious passing downs, the 346-pounder can collapse the pocket. The three-time Pro Bowler has 10.5 sacks the last two seasons.
The acquisitions of Poe, Bailey and Houston show that while the Chiefs organization may be in better shape with Reid and John Dorsey running the show, some of Pioli’s moves helped mold the Chiefs defense into one of the league’s best.
Is 2015 the best running back draft in years?
After becoming devalued in the new pass-happy NFL era, the running back position has become a premium asset this offseason.
DeMarco Murray and LeSean McCoy both signed five-year deals for $40 million or more, and the 2015 draft is loaded at running back.
Most prognosticators believe that this NFL draft will have at least one
Most prognosticators believe that this NFL draft will have at least one running back selected in the first round for the first time in two years.
Todd Gurley, Melvin Gordon, Tevin Coleman, Jay Ajayi, Duke Johnson, Ameer Abdullah, T.J. Yeldon and Jeremy Langford head a deep group that could contribute from Day One. Before a knee injury sidelined Gurley, many thought the Georgia runner was the most talented back since Adrian Peterson.
Only time will tell if the experts are correct in predicting the quality of this year’s crop, but here’s a look at what the 2015-ers are up against from the last five RB drafts:
2010 — 13 RBs drafted
C.J. Spiller, drafted 9th overall by the Bills, rushed for 1,244 yards in 2012, but a broken collarbone shortened the explosive player’s 2014 campaign.
Ryan Mathews, drafted 12th overall by the Chargers, has started 53 games and averaged 4.4 yards per carry, but he can’t shake the injury bug.
Jahvid Best, drafted 30th overall by the Lions, played in just 22 games before concussions ended his career.
Dexter McCluster, drafted 36th overall by the Chiefs, was a running back/receiver and never exemplary at either, though he did make the Pro Bowl as special teamer in 2013.
Toby Gerhart, drafted 51st overall by the Vikings, served as Adrian Peterson’s backup in Minnesota and then struggled when given an opportunity for more with Jacksonville.
Ben Tate, drafted 58th overall by the Texans, broke his ankle as a rookie, allowing Arian Foster to take his spot. He ran for 942 yards the next year for Houston but has been on three different teams since.
Montario Hardesty, drafted 59th overall by the Browns, was plagued by injuries and last played in a regular season contest in 2012.
Drafted by the Packers (193rd overall, 6th round), James Starks rushed for 316 yards in the 2010 postseason during Green Bay’s Super Bowl run.
D: This class not only lacked depth, but the first seven backs selected are no longer with their original team.
Mark Ingram, drafted 28th overall by the Saints, had his best year in 2014, rushing for 964 yards and nine touchdowns after battling myriad injuries.
Ryan Williams, drafted 38th overall by the Cardinals, has been plagued by injuries, including rupturing a patella tendon before taking a regular season snap and a shoulder injury that ended his second season.
Shane Vereen, drafted 56th overall by the Patriots, emerged as an effective runner, receiver and blocker especially on third downs.
Mikel Leshoure, drafted 57th overall by the Lions, tore his Achilles tendon before playing a regular season down for Detroit and did not play for a team during the 2014 regular season.
Daniel Thomas, drafted 62nd overall by the Dolphins, has averaged under 3.9 yards per carry in each of his four seasons.
Drafted by the Cowboys (71st overall, 3rd round), DeMarco Murray led the NFL with 1,845 rushing yards in 2014.
Drafted by the Patriots (73rd overall, 3rd round), Stevan Ridley rushed for 1,263 yards in 2012 before fumbling issues put him in Bill Belichick’s doghouse.
Drafted by the Redskins (105th overall, 4th round), Roy Helu surpassed 100 rushing yards in three consecutive weeks as a rookie.
Drafted by the 49ers (115th overall, 4th round), Kendall Hunter averaged 4.6 yards per carry for his career before tearing his ACL in last year’s training camp.
Drafted by the Jets (126th overall, 4th round), Bilal Powell started 11 games while rushing for 697 yards in 2013.
Drafted by the Falcons (145th overall, 5th round), Jacquizz Rodgers, a shifty third-down back, has scored 10 career touchdowns.
C+: Murray can’t redeem a class whose early-round picks had their careers hampered by injuries and that lacks many full-time starters.
Trent Richardson, drafted 3rd overall by the Browns, has become one of the NFL’s biggest draft busts of late.
Doug Martin, drafted 31st overall by the Buccaneers, rushed for 1,454 yards as a rookie before suffering a shoulder injury and then falling out of favor with the Tampa Bay coaching staff.
David Wilson, drafted 32nd overall by the Giants, retired prior to the 2014 season because of neck injuries.
Isaiah Pead, drafted 50th overall by the Rams, carried the ball a total of just 17 times during his three years in St. Louis.
LaMichael James, drafted 61st overall by the 49ers, was relegated to the Dolphins’ practice squad before joining their active roster late in the 2014 season.
Drafted by the Broncos (67th overall, 3rd round), Ronnie Hillman started four games for Denver last year before the emergence of C.J. Anderson.
Drafted by the Ravens (84th overall, 3rd round), Bernard Pierce rushed for 1,334 yards in three years with Baltimore before a recent DUI arrest led to his release.
Drafted by the Redskins (173rd overall, 6th round), Alfred Morris has surpassed 1,000 rushing yards, including 1,613 during his rookie season, and 4.0 yards per carry each year.
Drafted by the Bengals (191st overall, 6th round), Dan Herron started all three playoff games for the Indianapolis Colts last season.
Drafted by the Rams (252nd overall, 7th round), Daryl Richardson rushed for 475 yards as a rookie.
D+: A 6th rounder — Morris — is the best of a lot that included major busts in the early rounds.
Giovani Bernard, drafted 37th overall by the Bengals, amassed 1,209 yards from scrimmage during his rookie year while making a slew of highlight plays.
Le’Veon Bell, drafted 48th overall by the Steelers, was initially slowed by knee and foot injuries as a rookie before emerging as one of the NFL’s best weapons in his second season.
Montee Ball, drafted 58th overall by the Broncos, never developed into more than a part-time player as he struggled with injuries and fumbling issues.
Eddie Lacy, drafted 61st overall by the Packers, has become the best back Aaron Rodgers ever played with.
Christine Michael, drafted 62nd overall by the Seahawks, has averaged 4.9 yards per carry during his career, though Marshawn Lynch’s backup only has 52 career rushes.
Drafted by the Chiefs (96th overall, 3rd round), Knile Davis has proven to be a nice complement to the smaller, speedier Jamaal Charles.
Drafted by the Jaguars (135th overall, 5th round), Denard Robinson, the former college quarterback, twice surpassed 100 rushing yards as he grew into his new position during his second season.
Drafted by the Rams (160th overall, 5th round), Zac Stacy started 12 games his rookie year before falling out of favor in his second season.
Drafted by the Raiders (181st overall, 6th round), Latavius Murray surpassed 75 rushing yards three times during the last five games of the 2014 season.
Drafted by the Cardinals (187th overall, 6th round), Andre Ellington has produced 2,078 yards from scrimmage during his two-year career.
Drafted by the Lions (199th overall, 7th round), Theo Riddick caught four touchdowns last year and likely will take on a bigger role after Detroit lost Reggie Bush.
A-: The second round featured a star back in Bell and two very good ones in Lacy and Bernard. The later rounds unearthed several part-time or full-time starters, which could’ve been even better had 4th rounders Johnathan Franklin and Marcus Lattimore not retired early.
Bishop Sankey, drafted 54th overall by the Titans, disappointed as rookie, averaging only 3.7 yards per carry and never registering more than 61 yards in a game. He had as many touchdowns as fumbles.
Jeremy Hill, drafted 55th overall by the Bengals, shined as the star of the class, averaging 5.1 yards per carry and stealing the starting job from Giovani Bernard.
Carlos Hyde, drafted 57th overall by the 49ers, averaged 4.0 yards per carry last year and is poised to assume the starting role in 2015 with Frank Gore off to Philadelphia.
Drafted by the Rams (75th overall, 3rd round), Tre Mason came on strong in the latter part of the season as St. Louis’ main back after not playing in the first four games.
Drafted by the Browns (94th overall, 3rd round), Terrance West started six games for Cleveland.
Drafted by the Vikings (96th overall, 3rd round), Jerick McKinnon averaged 4.8 yards per carry and could become Minnesota’s main back if it parts ways with Adrian Peterson.
B: This class could produce as many as six starters on 2015 rosters, but Hill is the only Pro Bowl-level talent.
Free Agency’s Losers
Players are usually eager to enter free agency because of the expectation of a big payday. It doesn’t always work out that way. A market may never develop for a variety of reasons (age, unrealistic contract demands, supply at playing position, etc.). Here’s a look at a few players that haven’t or didn’t fare so
Players are usually eager to enter free agency because of the expectation of a big payday. It doesn’t always work out that way. A market may never develop for a variety of reasons (age, unrealistic contract demands, supply at playing position, etc.). Here’s a look at a few players that haven’t or didn’t fare so well on the open market.
Michael Crabtree (WR): Crabtree took a backseat to 34 year old Anquan Boldin in the San Francisco 49ers’ passing game last season. The 2009 tenth overall pick finished 2014 with 68 receptions, 698 receiving yards and four touchdown catches. The 49ers went in a different direction at wide receiver by signing speedster Torrey Smith to a five-year, $40 million contract (with $22 million in guarantees). It only took Dwayne Bowe a week to find a new home with the Cleveland Browns once the Kansas City Chiefs released him. Bowe got a two-year, $12.5 million containing $9 million fully guaranteed despite three straight disappointing seasons in Kansas City. Crabtree is willing to be patient to find the right situation. He made $4 million in 2014 during the final year of his six year rookie contract. The odds are against him finding a one year deal for more than his 2014 salary.
Terrance Knighton (DT)-Washington Redskins: It was widely assumed Knighton’s affinity for head coach Jack Del Rio would lead him to the Oakland Raiders. Del Rio had Knighton for three years when he was coaching the Jacksonville Jaguars and spent the last two seasons as his defensive coordinator with the Denver Broncos. Continuing to play for Del Rio went out the window after Knighton eliminated the Raiders from consideration because of a “low ball” offer. Knighton was reportedly seeking a multi-year contract averaging $8 million per year. The Raiders signed defensive tackle Dan Williams to a four-year, $25 million deal with $15.2 million fully guaranteed instead. Knighton took a one year deal worth $4 million from the Redskins, which includes $450,000 in weight clauses.
Rolando McClain (ILB): McClain was one of the NFL’s best bargains in 2014 while making $700,000. He was retired and hadn’t played in the NFL since the Oakland Raiders released him in the middle of the 2012 season when the Dallas Cowboys acquired him in a trade with the Baltimore Ravens last off-season. McClain was the Cowboys’ best linebacker in 2014 and finished tied for second in the voting for the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year Award.
Other 2014 Cowboys linebackers quickly found deals on the open market. Bruce Carter signed a four-year, $17 million contract (worth up to $20.5 million with salary escalators and incentives) with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Justin Durant received a three-year, $10 million deal (worth a maximum of $13.8 million through incentives) from the Atlanta Falcons. McClain didn’t do himself any favors by running afoul of the league’s substance abuse policy. He is subject to a fine of four week’s salary for failing three drug tests. His next violation will result in a four game suspension.
The Cowboys are interested in bringing him back but have already signed Jasper Brinkley and Andrew Gachkar for middle linebacker depth. Brinkely received a one year deal worth $2.25 million with the Cowboys having an option for a second year at the same amount. Gachkar signed a two-year, $3.5 million contract (worth up to $5.5 million through incentives.).
Ahtyba Rubin-(DT)-Seattle Seahawks: Rubin’s one-year, $2.6 million deal (worth up to $3.1 million with incentives) is a big departure from his last contract. He entered free agency after completing a three-year, $26.5 million contract extension (with $18 million in guarantees) he signed with the Cleveland Browns in 2011. Rubin, who was slowed by a nagging ankle injury in 2014, will provide depth as a part of Seattle’s interior defensive line rotation.
Rahim Moore (S)-Houston Texans: Moore signed a three-year, $12 million deal ($4.5 million fully guaranteed) to fill a void at free safety that’s existed ever since Glover Quin left via free agency two years ago. It’s interesting that the Texans made a bigger commitment to an aging Ed Reed in 2013 than to the 25 year old Moore. Reed received a three-year, $15 million contract containing $5 million fully guaranteed when he was approaching 35 years of age. The future Hall of Famer made $5,050,966 from the Texans for appearing in seven games before being released nine games into the 2013 season. Moore is making $5 million in 2015.
Free Agency’s Big Winners
With the NFL turning its attention to the annual owners meetings, here’s a look at some of the big winners in free agency.
Ndamukong Suh (DT)-Miami Dolphins: Suh re-set the non-quarterback market with a six-year, $114.375 million contract containing $59.955 million fully guaranteed. The previous non-quarterback benchmark was the six-year, $100 million contract extension (averages
Ndamukong Suh (DT)-Miami Dolphins: Suh re-set the non-quarterback market with a six-year, $114.375 million contract containing $59.955 million fully guaranteed. The previous non-quarterback benchmark was the six-year, $100 million contract extension (averages $16,666,667 per year) J.J. Watt received from the Houston Texans last September. Suh’s $59.955 million also sets a new standard for guaranteed money with non-quarterbacks. It eclipses the $53.25 million of guaranteed money in the seven-year, $113.45 million contract extension Calvin Johnson received from the Detroit Lions in 2012.
Darrelle Revis (CB)-New York Jets: Revis getting a deal to place him at the top of the cornerback salary hierarchy was expected. His five-year contract worth $70,121,060 is clearly superior to other top cornerback deals in key contract metrics. $39 million is fully guaranteed at signing. That’s a little over $8.5 million more than the $30.481 million Patrick Peterson and Richard Sherman, the NFL’s second and third highest paid cornerbacks (by average yearly salary) have fully guaranteed at signing collectively.
Julius Thomas (TE)-Jacksonville Jaguars: The Jaguars didn’t make Thomas the NFL’s second highest paid tight end because of his blocking prowess. He is expected to remain arguably the NFL’s best red zone threat at the position after receiving a five-year, $46 million deal containing $24 million in guarantees. Thomas sets a new standard for guarantees in tight end deals with the $24 million. $21 million of the $24 million was fully guaranteed at signing.
Byron Maxwell-(CB)-Philadelphia Eagles: Maxwell hit the open market at the right time. This year’s group of free agent cornerbacks wasn’t nearly as impressive as last year’s group, which included Vontae Davis, Brent Grimes, Sam Shields, Aqib Talib and Alterraun Verner. He received a six-year, $63 million contract with $25 million fully guaranteed. $32 million is in the first three years.
Devin McCourty (S)-New England Patriots: McCourty became the NFL’s second highest paid safety despite rejecting bigger offers from other teams. His five-year, $47.5 million contract contains $28.5 million in guarantees, which is the most ever in guarantees for a veteran safety deal. McCourty also has the best three-year cash flow for safeties with $30 million in the first three years.
Rodney Hudson (C)-Oakland Raiders: Hudson reached his goal of becoming the NFL’s highest paid center with a five-year, $44.5 million contract. The Raiders were smart in using a pay as you go structure with Hudson’s deal. His cash and salary cap numbers are the same in each contract year because he is receiving salary guarantees instead of a signing bonus. Since Hudson’s $7.35 million 2016 base salary doesn’t become fully guaranteed until the third day of the 2016 league year (mid-March), the Raiders have a window to get out of the deal after the 2015 season without any cap consequences if he doesn’t pan out.
DeMarco Murray (RB)-Philadelphia Eagles: Murray didn’t capitalize on a dominant season in a contract year as much as he would have at other positions because of the devaluing of running backs. Nonetheless, his five-year, $40 million contract (with $21 million in guarantees and worth a maximum of $42 million through salary escalators) makes him the first running back to switch teams in free agency with a deal over $5 million per year since Michael Turner left the San Diego Chargers for the Atlanta Falcons in 2008.
Dwayne Harris (WR)-New York Giants: The Giants made Harris the NFL’s highest paid player whose primary role is returning kicks by giving him a five-year, $17.5 million contract (with $7.1 million fully guaranteed). Harris was second in the NFL in kickoff return average with 30.6 yards per return and third in punt return average (12.8 yards) during the 2013 season. It’s conceivable that Harris will be New York’s fifth wide receiver behind Preston Parker, who caught 36 passes in an expanded role because of Victor Cruz’s torn patellar tendon in his right knee. To put Harris’ deal in better perspective, Cole Beasley, who was ahead of Harris on the depth chart with the Dallas Cowboys last season as the team’s third wide receiver, recently re-upped on a four-year, $13.606 million contract with $5 million fully guaranteed.
Aaron Rodgers (QB)-Green Bay Packers: The Packers maintain offensive continuity with offensive tackle Bryan Bulaga and wide receiver Randall Cobb taking hometown discounts to remain in Green Bay. Bulaga signed a five-year, $33.75 million deal. Cobb’s four-year, $40 million contract containing a $13 million signing bonus, which is the deal’s only guaranteed money, is in line with the four-year, $39.05 million contract extension Jordy Nelson signed during the initial days of training camp last season.
Jeremy Parnell (OT)-Jacksonville Jaguars: Parnell signed a five-year, $32 million deal with $14.5 million fully guaranteed after serving as a backup during his five years with the Dallas Cowboys. He got his most extensive playtime in 2014 by starting five regular season games and both of the team’s playoff games because of ankle and foot injuries to starting right tackle Doug Free. Parnell received a much more lucrative contract than Free, who is two and half years older. Free re-signed with the Cowboys for $15 million over three years. The guaranteed money in Parnell’s deal is almost as much as Free’s entire contract.
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Taxes, US Government
Newark’s Water/Sewer Nonprofit Proves to Be Political Cesspool
February 20, 2014; Star-Ledger
The almost complete silence of nonprofit leadership organizations about government-created and government-controlled nonprofits is kind of embarrassing. The recent spate of government nonprofits involves state governments creating nonprofits (or “public-private partnerships”) to run state economic development activities that were once the province of public agencies. Ohio’s creation of JobsOhio may be the example most well known to NPQ readers due to our coverage of the sturm und drang behind Governor John Kasich’s plan. North Carolina’s attempt to copy the Ohio model is probably the latest, but examples like the creation of Enterprise Florida go back to the mid-1990s.
Getting less attention are nonprofits created by or controlled by municipal or county governments, some of which are quite old. In Newark, New Jersey, residents probably paid scant attention to a nonprofit called the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation until the past couple of years when the organization disbanded in the wake of leakage. Not water leaks, though reports did show that the water system loses 26 percent of its water through leakage and theft, but scandals, culminating in a thorough and devastating investigation by the Star-Ledger.
Last week’s report is the state comptroller’s investigation, which documented spending by the executive director and others that gave new definition to the word “profligate.” Newark has been in financial trouble for years, but the Watershed nonprofit, in charge of the city’s water and sewer systems, felt no compunctions about lavish self-indulgences, unauthorized expenditures, and other questionable outlays, including two severance packages awarded to the executive director, Linda Watkins-Brashear—one for $209,000 while she was still employed and being paid by the organization in 2006, and a second for $454,000 when she finally did leave in 2013. She also gave more than $1 million in contracts to her friends and her ex-husband, mismanaged a half million dollars in petty cash, and lost another half million in what the Star-Ledger called “dubious stock ventures.”
As summarized by the Star-Ledger, the State Comptroller’s report “accuses Watkins-Brashear and her cohorts of siphoning off millions of city dollars in illegal payments, sweetheart deals and risky stock ventures right under the nose of then-Mayor Cory Booker.” One has to wonder about Booker’s nose. When he became mayor in 2006, he consolidated water and sewer infrastructure control under the organization and provided all of its funding from tax revenues. Although Booker, now a senator, was the agency’s ex-officio chairman, he apparently never attended a board meeting. Booker, according to the report, relied on the city’s business administrator to attend on his behalf, but the business administrator resigned in 2010 and Booker never bothered to name a replacement. Booker’s close friend, “political advisor,” and former law partner, Elnardo Webster, served as the agency’s general counsel, billing more than $1 million between 2007 and 2011 for his services, though saying that he was unaware of any of the misdeeds that occurred during that time.
The Watershed nonprofit’s problems might have been under Booker’s nose, but they connected with his campaign and business interests. The Star-Ledger details some of the expenses charged by Booker’s former law firm partners, including “$22 to read an e-mail, $67.50 to read a Star-Ledger article,” but the money raked in by Webster and his firms hit seven-figure totals. Watkins-Brashear was a donor and volunteer for Booker’s mayoral campaigns, and many contractors showed up as donors to Empower Newark, the political action committee linked to the former mayor, now senator.
A read of the Comptroller’s report is a tutorial in long-running municipal government corruption in Newark. One might hope that Booker would be embarrassed by this soap opera that existed throughout the duration of his service as mayor of Newark, but it seems he actually strengthened the corporation, consolidated more power and control under it, and clearly chose not to be engaged in the oversight of an entity in charge of providing water for 500,000 customers.
The implications for nonprofits are not brought out in the report. If they were, nonprofits would be aghast at the actions taken under the penumbra of the agency’s nonprofit status.
As the report notes, under the cover of the organization’s nonprofit status, “The NWCDC Executive Director Abused Her Authority by Improperly Enriching Herself, Her Associates and NWCDC Employees with Public Funds,” including the illegal severance payments and multiple other examples. That looks like self-enrichment.
“The NWCDC Executive Director, Without Board Knowledge or Approval, Awarded No-Bid Contracts to Her Former Husband, Close Personal Associates and NWCDC Employees,” which was defended as allowable because the agency was a nonprofit and therefore not required to put contracts out to bid—even though the agency was wholly paid for by tax revenues. That sounds like self-dealing and conflict of interest.
The executive director made a loan of agency funds to the National Black United Fund, whose executive director was an NWCDC board member, because NBUF was short of operating funds, even though there was no business justification for NWCDC to be loaning NBUF anything; she also distributed $250,000 between 2008 and 2011 as gifts to other community organizations, the bulk of the funding to an organization chaired by an NWCDC employee. These are examples of board members who appear to have put their personal organizational interests ahead of their obligations as NWCDC trustees.
NWCDC’s board, independent auditor, accountant, and general counsel all seem to have failed to exercise the due diligence required of them to rein in the executive director’s alleged excesses, including omissions on the organization’s 990 by the independent auditor of the agency’s clearly dubious stock investments. These are failures to carry out delegated duties.
The City’s systematically and repeatedly fell short of its duties of overseeing the agency and protecting the funding from Newark taxpayers. This is no doubt shoddy due diligence by government.
Add it all up, and it is a damning critique of the problems of transparency, disclosure, and oversight of a government-created and -run nonprofit. It should be an opportunity for nonprofit leaders to tell governments to stop screwing around with 501(c)(3)s that get used as means of trading political favors, enriching political and business colleagues, and hiding important information from the public by using the shield of nonprofit tax-exempt status.—Rick Cohen
Financial Cautionary Tales for Nonprofits
Why Funding Overhead Is Not the Real Issue: The Case to Cover Full Costs
Nonprofit Capital: How to Think Differently about Its Use in Your Organization
NPQ Positions on the Multidimensional Landscape of Nonprofits and Taxes
Nonprofit Tax Policy—A Game of Three-Dimensional Chess
By Tim Delaney
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Nonprofit Newswire | Skoll—Profit Motive Good for Social Mission?
June 12, 2010; Source: Mercury News | Last week, the Nonprofit Quarterly referenced the five mega-philanthropists who pledged $45 million toward the Obama Administration’s Social Innovation Fund. One was Jeff Skoll of the Skoll Foundation, who became an overnight millionaire, then billionaire due to this good fortune of being hired as the first employee of the internet auction site that became eBay.
Only fifteen years after getting his MBA at the school, he is scheduled to be, according to the Merc, the first-ever commencement speaker for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. What might he say about charity and philanthropy to these new business grads? One suspects he’ll talk about endowing his eponymous foundation with $1 billion to support social entrepreneurs. Talking to the Merc, Skoll suggested that the bad economy is “almost a blessing in disguise,” because some Stanford business grads still looking for work might choose “getting aligned with a nonprofit” in the absence of getting “high-paying investment bank or consulting jobs.”
He believes that grads should look for the impact and change they ultimately want to make in the world, and work back from that objective to figure out where they want to take their careers. For Skoll, it was a desire to be a writer, influenced by the writings of Orwell, Huxley, and Rand “who painted a picture of what the future would look like.” Though he didn’t become a writer he created Participant Media, which has produced well known films such as “The Cove,” “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The Informant,” “The Soloist,” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
Participant Media is a for-profit, because according to Skoll, “it’s more difficult to set up a nonprofit in the entertainment world,” but a for-profit with a “truly” social mission, he says, achieves a nonprofit’s social goals. In the view of Skoll and the other philanthropists supporting the Social Innovation Fund, the presence of profit or the profit motivation does not undo the social mission of social entrepreneurs.—Rick Cohen
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Proposal to Make Public Universities Whole
Bruce S Trachtenberg
November 23, 2010; Source: Wall Street Journal | Oregon is suffering from what University of Oregon president Rich Lariviere calls one of the “worst-funded public systems of public higher education in America.” His solution? Writing in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Larivierre proposes—as part of a three-part plan—a unique endowment scheme that would relieve the university of the vagaries of state support for the school by sharing the responsibility equally between the public and private sectors.
He notes that 20 years ago, the Oregon legislature appropriated $63 million for the university. For the current fiscal year, funding is expected to drop to $60 million, or $34.9 million in 1990 dollars. The shortfall in state funding is too much of a burden to pass off to students and their families in higher tuition. As Lariviere notes, “College is being put beyond the reach of too many worthy students. The goal at our university is to sustain high academic quality, while providing these young Oregonians with an affordable education.”
Under his proposal, the state would lock public funding for the university at $63 million over 30 years. He says that would be sufficient to cover debt payments, at a 7 percent taxable bond rate, on $800 million in general obligation bonds. “Meanwhile, the university will pledge to match the $800 million in bond proceeds with private donations, and we will raise the private money before the public money is used for these bonds. The combined $1.6 billion public-private endowment will create a solid base for the university’s financial operation, replacing the erratic seesaw of annual state appropriations.”
Based on the university’s average annual 9.8 percent return on its endowment since 1994—even accounting for the recent stock market collapse—Lariviere believes that “the new public-private endowment will generate $64 million in operating revenue for the university in its first year. This is more than the current annual appropriation. Projecting returns of 9 percent and assuming distributions of 4 percent, the endowment’s annual payout will increase to $263.4 million in its 30th year. The endowment’s capitalized balance of $6.9 billion at that point will secure the university’s future.” Is Laiviere relying on too rosy a forecast or is he correct in saying his proposal answers the question of how to make higher education affordable without “sinking” Oregon and other states into a “financial hole?”—Bruce Trachtenberg
It Pays Well To Pay Tribute to 9/11 Victims
By Bruce S Trachtenberg
Local Charities Aim To Score From Super Bowl Fundraisers
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International NGOs and Civil Society
Why the Business World Is Worried about China’s New Law to Regulate NGOs
June 2, 2015; New York Times
A draft law in China aimed at NGOs has businesspeople worried, according to the Wall Street Journal. The “Foreign NGO Management Law” was described by one expert as capable of fundamentally changing the way NGOs operate.
Writing for the New York Times, Ira Belkin and Jerome Cohen assert, “If the NGO draft becomes law, the international cultural, educational, and technical exchanges that have become commonplace and so essential to China’s astonishing development may come to a grinding halt.” Most laws of this type have been more narrowly aimed at foreign-funded human rights and civil society organizations.
Why would businesspeople care when they have not spoken out when it came to similar laws in Russia, Israel, and even India? Because the proposed Chinese law has been written to include all foreign nonprofits or NGOs, even when acting in their home countries, and this could have an impact on trade associations and industry groups.
One of the most symbolic changes sparked by the law would be the requirement that all foreign-based nonprofit organizations be vetted by China’s security police before they are allowed to conduct activities in China. They would also be required to submit work plans and reports, would only be allowed to have one location in China, and would be subject to scrutiny by China even for their activities in other countries.
The new law is apparently associated with a two-year-old memo called “Document No. 9,” which urges vigilance against the “seven unmentionables”: Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism, Western media, “historical negation,” and questioning the meaning of certain Chinese slogans. The document reads in part, “Western anti-China forces and domestic ‘dissidents’ also incessantly carry out infiltration activities in our country’s ideological sphere, and challenge our mainstream ideology,” and that “Western embassies, media organs and nongovernmental organizations act within our borders under all kinds of names to spread Western values, and foster so-called anti-government forces.”
Article 59 of the law extends the government’s monitoring authority to activities conducted outside of China that might subvert state power, undermine ethnic harmony, spread rumors, or “other situations that endanger state security or damage the national interest or society’s public interest.” In other words, as described by Belkin and Cohen, “if a student group on an American campus protests against Chinese government treatment of Tibetans, the university could be barred from activities in China, and its representatives in China could be detained and prosecuted.”
The Wall Street Journal article states that a letter is being considered by a coalition of trade and business groups but, they write, “A joint letter of concern on an issue seemingly tangential to businesses would be unusual for foreign business groups, which have tended to stick closely to matters of trade and commercial regulation and to carefully pick their battles with the Chinese government.”—Ruth McCambridge
A 2018 Nonprofit Sampler of NPQ’s Most Popular and Influential Content
Free Your Mind, and Your Nonprofit Will Follow: Racial Equity in Psychedelic Research
Advancing from New Ground Taken: What Civil Society Must Bring Forward from the Midterms
Pakistan Expels NGOs in Crackdown on Dissent
By Moshe Hecht
Don’t Stop Believing, George Soros
By Anna Berry
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The Unspoken Truth on 9/11: “September 11 – The New Pearl Harbor” | Global Research
Posted by Norman Pilon in 9/11, False Flags, Media Disinformation, Sourced Opinion, Video
9/11, False Flag
Review of documentary by Massimo Mazzucco.
By David Ray Griffin
There have been several good films and videos about 9/11. But the new film by award-winning film-maker Massimo Mazzucco is in a class by itself.
For those of us who have been working on 9/11 for a long time, this is the film we have been waiting for.
Whereas there are excellent films treating the falsity of particular parts of the official account, such as the Twin Towers or WTC 7, Mazzucco has given us a comprehensive documentary treatment of 9/11, dealing with virtually all of the issues.
There have, of course, been films that treated the fictional official story as true. And there are films that use fictional stories to portray people’s struggles after starting to suspect the official story to be false.
But there is no fiction in Mazzucco’s film – except in the sense that it clearly and relentlessly exposes every part of the official account as fictional.
Because of his intent at completeness, Mazzucco has given us a 5-hour film. It is so fascinating and fast-paced that many will want to watch it in one sitting. But this is not necessary, as the film, which fills 3 DVDs, consists of 7 parts, each of which is divided into many short chapters.
These 7 parts treat Air Defence, The Hijackers, The Airplanes, The Pentagon, Flight 93, The Twin Towers, and Building 7. In each part, after presenting facts that contradict the official story, Mazzucco deals with the claims of the debunkers (meaning those who try to debunk the evidence provided by the 9/11 research community).
The Introduction, reflecting the film’s title, deals with 12 uncanny parallels between Pearl Harbor and September 11.
The film can educate people who know nothing about 9/11 (beyond the official story), those with a moderate amount of knowledge about the various problems with the official story, and even by experts. (I myself learned many things.)
Mazzucco points out that his film covers 12 years of public debate about 9/11. People who have been promoting 9/11 truth for many of these years will see that their labors have been well-rewarded: There is now a high-quality, carefully-documented film that dramatically shows the official story about 9/11 to be a fabrication through and through.
This is truly the film we have been waiting for.
via The Unspoken Truth on 9/11: “September 11 – The New Pearl Harbor” | Global Research.
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Film & TV Web Exclusives Muse
Are interactive audiences the future of storytelling?
Malu Rocha hears out the producer of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as he reveals the challenges of creating Netflix’s first adult interactive film
Sunday 16 Jun 2019 Malu Rocha
Image Credit: Netflix
You don’t often hear people saying, “which ending did you get?” after watching a film. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch changed that.
Bandersnatch is an interactive film set in 1984 about young videogame programmer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) who descends into madness as he attempts to adapt a build-your-own-adventure novel into a videogame. If you haven’t seen it yet and want to experience multiple pathways, sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat drama and mind-boggling confrontations about free will, be sure to set aside at least five hours of your day to do so. The journey may be long, but I assure you it’ll be a very rewarding (acid) trip.
In the cultural event ‘Interactive Audiences with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’, presented by the Guild of Media Arts in collaboration with York Mediale, producers Russell McLean and Sharon Reid discussed the future of interactive storytelling. Russel started his career producing music videos for artists such as Snow Patrol, Paul McCartney, and REM. He currently works as a producer for interactive films such as Netflix’s 2018 Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the first in its genre. Sharon Reid joins him in the conversation. She is the co-owner of two leading studios based in York (The Imaginarium Studios and Symbolism Studios) which focus on performance capture and immersive storytelling, respectively.
Interactive films are often nonlinear, which is already a complication in itself, so directors need to rely on clever storytelling techniques to get their message across. Sharon explains that the first step to making a nonlinear story is to look at linear stories, and this couldn’t be more true. Even if your story consists of multiple universes and complicated plotlines, you still need a hero, and that hero needs to be captivating. Even if you jump around your timeline and across plotlines, you still need a consistent character arc to engage the audience. Sharon points out that a great example of this can be seen in gaming universes, because even though your character doesn’t always follow the same path, they have a consistent persona throughout.
During the premiere of Cutting Room’s ‘What Is Love?’ (an interactive love story edited in real time) in last year’s Mediale, Sharon analysed feedback from viewers regarding this new model of storytelling. Because people had never been asked to interact with film in such a way before, it’s granted that there were mixed feelings among the audience. Some people loved it because the more choices they had, the more engaged they became. But on the other hand, some people wanted to watch a movie for the simple pleasure of being entertained. Some even claimed that they expect to see the director’s vision, something which is not at the forefront of interactive stories, but instead hidden between the lines.
When Black Mirror: Bandersnatch came out in December of 2018, it instantly sparked a conversation about interactive stories. With this film in particular, creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones wanted to toy with the idea of free will and its limitations. Created to fit seamlessly in the Black Mirror dystopian universe, Bandersnatch uses the freedom of choice in the videogame and in the film as a metaphor for questioning the range of choices we have, or don’t have, in real life. It makes you in control, or at least makes you think you’re in control. Take the acid trip sequence for example; you can choose whether or not Stefan accepts the drug, but him taking it is inevitable as Colin spikes his drink anyway. This is the first time where the ‘viewser’ (as Charlie called them) realises that they don’t have as much control as they thought they did.
With such an unconventional story, an unconventional production process was inevitable. Russell described the film’s preproduction as life imitating art. If you’ve seenBandersnatch you might vividly remember the numerous scenes where Stefan tries tirelessly to write the code for his videogame, all set in his small bedroom with heaps of scribbled paper decorating the walls from floor to ceiling. Russell said he could genuinely see himself in Stefan’s character during the coding process for the film, which would often go wrong, and he would have to restart. Netflix was on the same boat. Even though they had committed to the project, they didn’t have all the pieces together in the beginning as to how they would actually execute the final product. The actors were also on that boat. Russell, Charlie, Annabel and their team didn’t have a read-through of the script with the cast as it would have been virtually impossible.
In a couple of weeks, the 109-page draft of the script evolved into a 166-page shooting script as they moved into production, where they also adopted an unorthodox approach. Traditionally in filmmaking you run through all of your shots with the camera set up in Position A, even if those shots span across different scenes, which means that the script is more often than not shot out of order. In most cases this process is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. However, because the scenes in Bandersnatch can sometimes be extremely similar (think back to when Stefan first meets Colin; there are three variations of that quick encounter, all slightly different) the actors started getting confused about which point they were at in the story.
Therefore, the team decided to shoot all of Scene 1, then all of Scene 2, and so on. Even though they knew this would be more time consuming, it meant that the actors were able to deliver their best performances. So, in the first few hours of shooting, the production team scrapped the Call Sheet and realised that their planned schedule for the following 6 weeks belonged in the bin.
Russell explained that the postproduction process also had a few hiccups that they weren’t expecting, including 750 different vfx in over 200 shots. He also revealed that making the audio transitions between choices seamless was an extremely crucial point that turned out to be a lot harder than expected, as they wanted the film to flow smoothly and not feel like loose bits stitched up and mended together. All this hard work culminated to 250 segments of video comprising 5 hours and 15 minutes of footage in total.
When asked what the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of working in *Bandersnatch *were, Russell answered that he absolutely loved the acid trip sequence and particularly Colin’s speech about Pac Man, mostly because it was the first point of real consequence in the film. Even though the sequence was shot by two different DoP’s, Russell expressed his admiration for the lighting, the performances and the vfx shots in it. He further mentioned that the most challenging thing of working in a film like this is that you inevitably shoot something that turns out to be your favourite scene, but people might never get to watch them because of the choices they make, and you need to be ready to let that go.
Concerning the different types of responses and feedback from viewers, Russell was surprised to find out that couples, friends and even families were watching the film together. He initially thought that it would be a very individual and personal experience but was surprised to learn that people enjoyed watching it in groups and discuss what choices to make. He was also taken aback by the level of dedication from fans. The team thought that it would take at least 2 weeks for someone to decipher the Easter Egg planted in the credits of the film, but all it took was 7 hours!
Sharon expressed that yes, there are still a lot of mistakes to make and endings to explore, but films like these spark a conversation and mark a watershed moment in film history.
Malu Rocha
Film and TV Editor ( Since Oct 2018 )
https://malurocha.myportfolio.com/
Do we really need a Breaking Bad film?
Netflix sued by Satanic Temple
Short Film Sunday: Fauve
Latest in Film & TV
Is City of God still a worthwhile Brazilian classic?
15/Jul/19
Barry and the best way to do violence?
When Harry Met Sally: The perfect rom-com?
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University-wide/
Nebraska Bankers Association/
Support the Nebraska Bankers Association Scholarship Funds
During the 1970s, the Nebraska Bankers Association conducted a fund drive to establish the Nebraska Bankers fund within the University of Nebraska Foundation. That campaign raised approximately $1 million, forming the foundation's largest single-industry gift. "This fund is part of an ongoing effort by the Nebraska banking industry to retain and attract the best and brightest students to our state and to the University of Nebraska campuses," said Kelly Holthus, chairman of Cornerstone Bank in York, Nebraska.
The Nebraska Bankers Association and the Department of Agricultural Economics have partnered to prepare students for careers in agricultural banking. This program combines classroom instruction with real-world learning at a Nebraska bank. In order to reach more students, Nebraska bankers would like to increase the amount of each scholarship to make them even more attractive to Nebraska students. To do so, however, they need to grow their fund. And they need your help. Thank you for your interest in assisting the Nebraska Bankers Association in this important effort that not only helps the students, but everyone in our state.
Cameron Andreesen
cameron.andreesen@nufoundation.org
Cameron is a 2008 graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Business with a degree in marketing. Cameron brings outstanding experience, energy and passion for the university to the College of Business team.
Craig Buescher
Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources
craig.buescher@nufoundation.org
Craig grew up in south-central Nebraska on a diversified farm and livestock operation. Craig graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with an animal science degree and worked at the Senek Swine Testing Station, and the Meat Animal Research Center before operating his own diversified farming operation near Deweese for more than 30 years.
Amanda Byleen
amanda.byleen@nufoundation.org
Amanda joined the University of Nebraska Foundation in 2014. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Education and Human Sciences and has a degree in speech language pathology and audiology. Her involvement in numerous organizations and activities led to a deeply enriched experience at UNL. Amanda enjoys the opportunity to develop relationships and serve amazing friends and alumni of the university.
Justin Carlson
justin.carlson@nufoundation.org
Justin earned his bachelor’s degree from UNL’s College of Business. With 10 years of experience in the insurance industry and eight years as a financial advisor, Justin brings valuable experience to the development team. Justin has always been passionate about community service and giving back. He has served on a long list of boards and committees, including most recently Leadership Lincoln, the Community Services Fund of Nebraska and Lincoln’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. Justin believes in the power of education to transform our society and in the impact learning has on an individual. Justin is married and has three children, ages 9, 7 and 3.
Doug Carr
doug.carr@nufoundation.org
Doug is a graduate of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He joined the University of Nebraska Foundation in 2017 and has extensive experience in video production, advertising, sales and marketing, primarily in the field of agribusiness. Doug’s fundraising efforts are focused on the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Josh Egley
josh.egley@nufoundation.org
Josh has been with the foundation since 2008. He has a Bachelor of Science in secondary education from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Josh's experience at UNL was very positive, and working at the foundation allows him to help make that same experience available to other students. It also allows him to give back to his alma mater.
Joye Fehringer
joye.fehringer@nufoundation.org
Joye has been with the foundation since 2007. She has a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is passionate about her job because she enjoys bringing friends and alumni together to help advance the College of Arts and Sciences.
Joey Felici
Director of Development, College of Business, UNL
joey.felici@nufoundation.org
Joey is originally from Omaha and obtained his bachelor’s degree in business administration from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Joey was a four-year member of the Husker Football program. During his student-athlete experience, he received many awards including the Tom Osborne and Brook Berringer Citizenship Award, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Trophy for unselfish commitment, motivation and teamwork, and the Hero Leadership Award for demonstrated excellence in community service and leadership.
amy.ferguson@nufoundation.org
Amy has been a fundraiser at the foundation since 2012. She has a Bachelor of Journalism in Advertising from UNL. She is passionate about her job because she enjoys helping students achieve their dreams of attending college.
Greg Jensen
College of Journalism
greg.jensen@nufoundation.org
Greg has been with the foundation since 1989. He has a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He considers it a privilege to work with University of Nebraska alumni and friends to make a difference in advancing educational access and opportunities for students in Nebraska.
Scott Jochum
UNK College of Education and College of Business & Technology
scott.jochum@nufoundation.org
Scott joined the University of Nebraska Foundation team in 2018 after 17 years teaching and mentoring students at UNK. He holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology education and a master’s degree in education, both from the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Amy Kloefkorn
amy.kloefkorn@nufoundation.org
Amy joined the foundation in 2014. Her past experiences and skills building community relationships and partnerships with universities and other organizations across Nebraska serve her well here at the foundation.
Jeremy Lohrman
Jeremy.Lohrman@nufoundation.org
A Nebraska native, Jeremy earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a chemistry major from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2008. As a nontraditional student, he experienced firsthand the impact of receiving a higher education through the gift of scholarships, and he is passionate about helping others receive the same transformational opportunity. Prior to joining the foundation in 2016, Jeremy spent his career in information systems and technology.
Heather Lundine
Lied Center for Performing Arts, Sheldon Museum of Art, International Quilt Museum
heather.lundine@nufoundation.org
Heather’s fundraising efforts are focused on the Lied Center for Performing Arts, the Sheldon Museum of Art and the International Quilt Museum. Heather has a longtime relationship with the arts in Nebraska and has worked in the nonprofit sector for more than 10 years. Heather joined the foundation in 2016 and is passionate about her work because scholarships helped her reach her own educational goals.
Todd Mattox
todd.mattox@nufoundation.org
Todd joined the foundation in 2014. He has a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A native Nebraskan, he is passionate about the university and the impact it has on the lives of its students, alumni and people throughout the state.
Joanna Nordhues
joanna.nordhues@nufoundation.org
Joanna has been with the foundation since 2005. She has a bachelor's degree of journalism in advertising from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is routinely surrounded by extremely intelligent, kind and generous people who have achieved great success in their lives. She finds these interactions to be a wonderful way to spend her days.
Connie Pejsar
Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, State Museum
connie.pejsar@nufoundation.org
Connie has been with the foundation since 1983. She has enjoyed a variety of positions and currently is fundraising for the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts and the State Museum. The most rewarding part of Connie's job is establishing relationships with alumni and friends of the university and helping them make their dream of helping the university a reality.
Kathy Schubauer
College of Engineering and Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management
kathy.schubauer@nufoundation.org
Kathy holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University and joined the University of Nebraska Foundation team in 2015. Born and raised in Omaha, she has volunteered with TeamMates Mentoring for years and believes in the power of education in Nebraska; this passion drives her work in fundraising for the College of Engineering and the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management.
Ronna Sears-Fritz
ronna.sears-fritz@nufoundation.org
A Nebraska native, Ronna earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from UNL’s College of Education and Human Sciences and a master’s degree in public administration from UNO. Ronna joined the foundation in 2018 with several years of fundraising and programming experience and loves working to advance the college where she got her start.
Joe Selig
Senior Vice President of UNL Development
joe.selig@nufoundation.org
Joe Selig is senior vice president for UNL development at the University of Nebraska Foundation. Before joining the foundation in 2003, he provided 23 years of service to the UNL athletics department. He is an alumnus of the UNL College of Business where he received bachelor’s and MBA degrees.
Barbara Soderlin
barbara.soderlin@nufoundation.org
Barbara joined the University of Nebraska Foundation in 2018 following a career as a newspaper reporter and editor. She worked for several papers, including the Omaha World-Herald, where she covered agribusiness, food production and the grocery business, communicating the story of Nebraska’s ag economy to readers. Barbara holds degrees in English and journalism.
Courtney Spilker
courtney.spilker@nufoundation.org
Courtney graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources with degrees in agronomy and agricultural education. After working in agricultural sales, she joined the University of Nebraska Foundation team in 2019 where her fundraising efforts are focused on UNL’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Justin Swanson
justin.swanson@nufoundation.org
An Omaha native, Justin earned a juris doctor from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Law and a master’s degree from UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He believes that college should be accessible to everyone, particularly students who are first in their family to attend college, and is passionate about the power of education. Justin joined the foundation in 2016.
Christine Truhe
christine.truhe@nufoundation.org
Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communication and her Juris Doctorate from the NU College of Law. In addition to her time with the Law College, Christine has worked for UNL Housing, UNL Conference Services, and Husker Athletics.
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Working on the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum
Business & Industry, Transportation, Work & Labor
Judd, M.E.;Calton, Clarence P.;Steam Press Of Jewett, Thomas & Co.;State Of New York;Onondaga County (N.Y.). Legislature;
Canal Construction Workers
Canals--New York (State)
Cayuga-Seneca Canal (N.Y.)
Erie Canal (N.Y.)
Seneca Lake--New York (State)
The Erie Canal was part of the New York State Canal System, which connected the Great Lakes basin to New York City by opening up new trade routes. By providing cheaper and more efficient means to transport goods, the canal had a substantial and enduring impact on the economic development of New York State, as well as the United States as a whole. The canal’s construction began in 1817 and officially opened for travel in 1825. With stops along many parts of New York State, trade and travel grew and the state prospered. A large number of laborers, many of whom were immigrants, worked to construct the Erie Canal.
The “Working on the Erie Canal” collection provides insight into the lives of those who worked on the Erie Canal from the 1820s to the 1930s, from the early days of canal enlargement to the industrial age of the Barge Canal. Through photographs, receipts, contracts, and other ephemera, this collection provides insight into the operation of the Erie Canal as workers faced winter weather, advances in boat construction, competition from other modes of transportation, among other obstacles. From the surveyors and construction workers who built the canal to the lock operators and administrators who managed the canal's operations, this collection depicts the Erie Canal and its workers as agents of progress and transformation.
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Olaf Kroneman
Doctor, Writer, Boxing Fan
Medicine’s First Responders: The Unselfish Dedication of Nurses
In the interest of patient care the Massachusetts Nurses Association seeks legislation to put a limit on the number of patients assigned to an individual nurse. They request one nurse to care for four patients in the non-ICU setting and a one to one ratio in the ICU. A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal, Bad Bedside Manner in Massachusetts, Oct 17, 2018, takes exception to their request. This, the article states, would not be fiscally responsible as it would drive up wages and increase overtime for nurses.
However, there is a strong argument that nurse’s salaries should be increased anyway. This is supported by an article appearing in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. It notes that total healthcare salaries increased from 663 billion per year to 865 billion per year from 2005 to 2015. Twenty-seven percent of the increases were for non-clinical workers. Nurse’s salaries rose only 3%. Over ninety percent of nurses are women and women are paid less than men.
I see this as an example of institutionalized gender bias (organizational climate) which appears to be endemic in healthcare as noted by the results of a three-year study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Two recent op-eds in The New England Journal of Medicine comment on the recent study from the Academy.
Times Up for Medicine? Only Time Will Tell highlights the findings of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Inequities for women in salary, career advancement and leadership opportunities are noted to be endemic in academic medicine.
In the same NEJM issue a separate op-ed, Ending Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine, notes that only 15% of clinical chairs are women, 16% are deans of medical schools and only 1% of surgical chairs are women.
It is stated that about 50% of female medical students are subjected to sexual harassment. (A study from 1995 found the same statistics.) It is not just unwanted sexual advances that are of concern but also the organizational behaviors that “convey hostility, exclusion, or second -class status about one gender.”
Overt sexual harassment is vulgar but with recent awareness and measures it is being exposed and it is to be hoped, contained and punished.
It is the covert sexual harassment that has prevented women from achieving the same heights in academic medicine. Covert harassment is pernicious because of is subtlety and acceptance and effectiveness for its beneficiaries. The few numbers of women in leadership roles don’t lie.
What is distressing is there is no inclusion by the Academy, or in the op-ed pieces from the NEJM, concerning the harassment of nurses. This seems like an unconscious form of gender bias and an “organizational climate” that got us where we are today and were in 1995. It forecasts that nothing is going to change.
Nurses are our colleagues (more so than the physician leaders who make policy) and should be included when speaking of the academic sciences. Their exclusion, by people who should know better, is unfortunate.
They appear to be invisible and marginalized.
To write in support of the nurse’s request for limiting patient numbers, I reviewed the history of the Ebola outbreak of 2014. A man exposed to the virus entered the United States under false pretenses. He became ill and was admitted to the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Two nurses cared for the patient around the clock. The patient expired. Days later both nurses contracted the disease. Imagine the terror of the stricken nurses. They observed the patient die a horrible death, a fate that could, in hours, have been theirs.
Fortunately, they survived.
Dr. Thomas Friedan, the director of the CDC at that time, opined a breach of protocol led to the nurses becoming infected. At the time it struck me as an insensitive response. Later Dr. Frieden admitted the CDC was largely to blame as the nurses had followed the inadequate CDC protocol to the letter.
As I reviewed the articles from the 2014 epidemic, I came across an update on Dr. Friedan. I was stunned to see a picture of Dr. Friedan, in handcuffs, being led out of a Brooklyn police station. According to sources he was arrested for alleged forcible touching, alleged sexual abuse and alleged harassment of a woman. A plea deal was denied and his passport surrendered. He is due back in court this November.
I hope the allegations are false as I have always had faith and respect for the leaders of American medical institutions and being the director of the CDC is a pinnacle. (I was further distressed to learn that his successor had to resign from the CDC because she owned tobacco stocks.)
Perhaps I have been naive.
The articles state that culture change begins with leadership, yet the leaders of most major medical institutions are male. You are asking them to purge themselves. Until they retire, change will be slow.
But the use of Title IX to enforce compliance and tie government funding for hospitals and medical schools so that compliance would bring the glass ceiling crashing down. Money talks.
Nurses would be included in the Title IX enforcement.
Concerning nurse to patient ratios, rather than pass legislation, how about a government funded study that demonstrates the validity of the nurse’s request? If evidence -based research supports them it should not require legislation just implementation.
As a physician, I am witness to the unselfish dedication of nurses. Their heroism is similar to that of our first responders; the policemen and firemen.
It won’t be the doctors but rather the nurses who would be the first responders to Ebola or any other contagion that hits the hospitals or the country. They are as vulnerable, and brave, as the trained policemen and firemen. They should be viewed in the same light.
The CDC calls it “Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever.”
In Africa it is known as “The Nurse Killer.”
Olaf Kroneman, MD, is a nephrologist at The Southeast Michigan Kidney Center. He graduated from the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, interned at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, then attended the University of Virginia to complete a residency in internal medicine. He completed a fellowship in nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His work has appeared in literary magazines. He is also a 2018–2019 Doximity Author.
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Everybody Likes A Fat Man
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This Is What Fiscal Responsibility Looks Like
By Jonathan Cohn
Just now at the White House press briefing, a reporter (I couldn't tell who) pressed spokesman Robert Gibbs about how the administration could be confident of cost savings, given that the Congressional Budget Office itself admits projections deep into the future contain enormous uncertainty. I'm sure reform critics will be making the same argument in the next few days, and that it will reinforce doubts many Americans already harbor.
So let's be clear about why this is wrong.
No, these projections are not a precise science. Yes, the CBO itself notes that projections for the second decade of implementation--that is, 2020 through 2029--have an unusually high margin of error. But the CBO's final judgment takes that uncertainty into account.
Remember, when the CBO makes a projection for how much a program will cost over time, it isn't just spitting out a single number. It's giving a range of numbers. It's typically the midpoint that you hear about, but there's always a chance that the number will be higher or lower, by a certain interval. And, in order to play it safe, CBO decided it would judge health care reform based on the worst possible estimate within that interval.
So suppose, just to use some hypothetical numbers, the CBO ran the numbers and determined that the Democrats' bill would probably save $1 trillion over ten years, but that the range of possible estimates was between saving $2.25 trillion and losing $250 billion. I'd say that's pretty good odds: It's far more likely you'll save money and the possible savings are far bigger than the possible increase in the deficit.
CBO would have disagreed. If there's a statistically significant chance that the bill would cost $250 billion, they would have said they can't declare that the bill won't inflate the deficit. The only way to get CBO approval would have been to modify the bill, so that the CBO determined it was likely to save $1.25 trillion but determined even the worst-case, most pessimistic scenario wouldn't drive up the deficit.
I know quite a few economists who think that standard was simply too tough. The Democrats could have argued they didn't need to meet that requirement and they would have had a pretty legitimate case. It would created room to provide more generous subsidies or more financial assistance for people buying insurance--which I, for one, would have appreciated. Or it would have allowed Democrats to ease up on the benefits tax that is generally unpopular, particularly with unions.
But the Democrats didn't do that. Instead, they constructed a bill that, even in the worst-case scenario, CBO thinks would not raise the defict. It's not an ironclad guarantee, but it's as close as you can come.
And if that's not fiscal responsibility, I don't know what is.
Update: I read over the first draft of this posting, decided I had written something utterly incomprehensible, and revised it. Hopefully it's more clear now.
Health Care, White House, The Treatment, Robert Gibbs
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12.27.16Hilton Signs Agreement With Brg Group To Manage 610-room Dual-branded Hotel In Vietnam
Hilton (NYSE: HLT) today announced the signing of a management agreement with Victory Hotel Joint Stock Company, which is part of the BRG Group, for a 610-room dual-branded hotel.
12.21.16DoubleTree by Hilton opens in the Royal Borough of London Kingston upon Thames
DoubleTree by Hilton, one of Hilton (NYSE: HLT) 13 market-leading brands, today announced the opening of DoubleTree by Hilton Kingston upon Thames, located in the centre of the popular riverside town. The upscale hotel joins 72 DoubleTree by Hilton properties open across Europe and is the first Hilton-branded property in the Kingston market.
12.20.16DoubleTree by Hilton Welcomes Travelers to the Wonders of Niagara Falls
Tourists enjoying one of the world’s great natural wonders may now also indulge in contemporary and upscale lodging, with the addition of a stunning, $30 million upscale hotel in downtown Niagara Falls - DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Niagara Falls New York.
12.20.16Swindon Welcomes Renovated DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Picturesque South West England
DoubleTree by Hilton, one of Hilton’s (NYSE: HLT) 13 market-leading brands, today announced the opening of DoubleTree by Hilton Swindon. Following a recent investment and renovation program, the hotel joins the UK’s existing portfolio of 32 DoubleTree by Hilton properties.
12.17.16DoubleTree by Hilton Edinburgh Airport Opens in Scottish Capital
The UK’s fastest growing upscale brand today announced the opening of DoubleTree by Hilton Edinburgh Airport. A renovation programme overseen by Hilton has seen the hotel convert to a DoubleTree by Hilton property.
12.14.16DoubleTree by Hilton Debuts in Belarus within Galleria Minsk
DoubleTree by Hilton, one of Hilton’s (NYSE: HLT) 13 market-leading brands, today announced the opening of DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Minsk within the Galleria Minsk, a premier shopping and entertainment complex located in the heart of the city. This new upper upscale, contemporary hotel features 193 guest rooms and suítes and marks the brand’s debut in Belarus.
12.14.16Historic Cheltenham Park Hotel Joins DoubleTree by Hilton
Hilton (NYSE: HLT) The Cheltenham Park Hotel is set to become part of one of the UK’s top hotel brands, DoubleTree by Hilton under the management of M&T Hotel Management. Following an extensive £4.5m refurbishment the hotel will trade as DoubleTree by Hilton Cheltenham in March 2017. Situated in Charlton Kings, the property will become the first hotel in the Hilton portfolio of brands to open in Cheltenham.
12.12.16Hilton to transform rooms into a bohemian summer sleepover
This Summer from 17 December 2016 to 15 January 2017, visitors to Melbourne are set to enjoy a sleepover experience like no other with the introduction of Summer Sleepover-themed guest rooms across both Hilton Melbourne South Wharf and DoubleTree by Hilton Melbourne – Flinders Street.
12.08.16Hotel Karlan San Diego - a DoubleTree by Hilton Completes $12 Million Renovation
Hotel Karlan San Diego - a DoubleTree by Hilton announced today the completion of its total rebrand and renovation of the 174-room, resort style property located in the scenic foothills of the exclusive community of Carmel Highlands just 15 miles from the heart of San Diego.
12.02.16DoubleTree by Hilton Alice Springs Welcomes Groups with Renovated Conference and Events Space
DoubleTree by Hilton Alice Springs recently completed an extensive renovation of its conference and events facility, resulting in more than 850 square metres of flexible function space that can take guests from conference to cocktail in a day.
12.01.16President Abraham Lincoln Springfield – A DoubleTree by Hilton Celebrates being the first hotel in Springfield to welcome Digital Key Technology
President Abraham Lincoln Springfield – A DoubleTree by Hilton, part of DoubleTree by Hilton’s fast-growing global portfolio of upscale, full-service hotels, announces that they are the first hotel in the Springfield region to offer Digital Key technology for guest room check-in. After downloading the Hilton HHonors app on a smart device, guests will be able to choose a room, check-in and enter their guest room, all from their phone - allowing them to skip the front desk entirely.
12.01.16DoubleTree by Hilton Welcomes New Hotel in Mexico’s Capital
DoubleTree by Hilton, one of Hilton’s (NYSE: HLT) 13 industry-leading brands, announces the opening of its newest hotel in Mexico City – the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Mexico City Santa Fe. Strategically located adjacent to the Expo Santa Fe Mexico Convention Center in the city’s new corporate district, the hotel will undergo a multimillion dollar renovation to be unveiled during 2017. The 172-room DoubleTree by Hilton property is part of a dual brand development, which will include a 189-room Hilton Garden Inn expected to open late 2017.
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Back to Farmers
“There is a growing awareness of what people are eating today. People want to eat healthier. To be part of that is very special to us.”
River’s Edge Organics
There is a quiet comfort to oats that can’t really be put into words—they’re easily nourishing, add a fantastic texture to everything from smoothie bowls to chocolate chip cookies, and are a timeless base to the most reliable of breakfasts. While the wildly versatile grain seems quite at home in these supporting roles, on this visit to River’s Edge Organic Farm in Barrhead, Alberta, row after row of golden cereal stalks happily shone in the spotlight.
Our connection to the central Alberta farm stems from more than just wanting some added crunch in our One Degree Organics cereals and granolas or a little extra warmth in our hot cereal line-up. As part of our ongoing commitment to total food transparency, we came to look in on and learn from owner Eldon Kebernik and his son Brad, who are both passionate advocates for organic farming.
“When the opportunity arose, we jumped in with both feet and we haven’t looked back,” says Eldon. “We began our transition to organic in 1996 and were faced with some skepticism from neighbors, but there was excitement on our part, because I was looking forward to doing something that I believed in. I always had an organic philosophy.”
Eldon began farming in 1978, taking over from his parents, who founded the farm in 1947. Now, another generation of Kebernik farmers will continue with Brad. Both father and son share a passion for the big Alberta skies and dry air that results in plentiful oat yields, but the tradition is sentimental at its heart. “I knew as a youngster I’d be interested in farming,” says Eldon. “But at that time the opportunities for organic didn’t exist yet.” For Brad, it’s the only way he’s ever known. “Riding in tractors with my Dad creates a special bond that you really can’t replace. With the legacy we have here, the attachment to the land… I’d never be able to let that go.”
Brad agrees with his father’s organic farming philosophy and the health benefits of their product. Most people know oats are full of fiber (in fact, a specific kind called beta-glucan, which helps to lower bad cholesterol levels), but few know that the grain is also brimming with essential vitamins and minerals, including manganese, phosphorus, magnesium, thiamine, folate, iron, zinc, potassium, vitamin B6, and more. Oats also contain antioxidants that help lower blood pressure, can help reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, and even have anti-inflammatory and anti-itch properties when applied to the skin (hence oatmeal baths when you catch chicken pox).
What makes the Keberniks’ oats so special, however, is their total commitment to organic farming and food safety. “We’re looking at soil-building the natural way, not the quick and easy means of doing it,” explains Eldon. “We face many challenges; so much hingers on the weather. It is friend and foe.”
The vast farmland Eldon and Brad look over works on a crop rotation system with lots of effort going into soil-building and weed control. Much of the work depends on timing, with the maturity period for oats lasting just 100–110 days. While this particular region in Alberta is conducive to growing a higher quality oat (Eldon credits the long days and dry weather in addition to his perfected rotation system), much of the nutritional value has to do with steering clear of desiccants like glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp.
“I’m a firm believer in the natural production of a crop,” says Eldon. “I believe the use of glyphosate is harmful and has an adverse effect… it’s not cleaned off, it is not washed off, and we’re ingesting this. In organic farming, none of that is used; it’s a natural means of producing for a healthier product. Organic means more care from beginning to end.” That care includes using cover crops to be plowed in for the purpose of building nutrients in the soil as well as summer fallow to assist with weed control.
As the years continue to roll by, the Kebernik’s goal will be to continue growing organic. In Eldon’s eyes, the opportunities are endless. “There are so many doors opening for the organic industry because the demand is growing,” he says. “There is a growing awareness of what people are eating today. People want to eat healthier. To be part of that is very special to us.”
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Greg Fergus Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Mr. Speaker, I agree that these are valid and important concerns, but Bill C-331 would not make Canadian companies more accountable and would not help award damages to victims.
The Federal Court is a statutory court, which means that it has only the jurisdiction explicitly conferred upon it by statute. In lawsuits against individuals and corporations, the court can only hear claims for relief arising in the federal domain, such as patent infringement or collisions at sea, which fall under Canadian maritime law. Such cases are explicitly provided for in federal law.
That is why lawsuits such as Araya v. Nevsun Resources Ltd. and Choc v. Hudbay Minerals Inc. were heard in provincial superior courts, which have jurisdiction over matters involving Canadian companies' actions abroad and, more generally, those with a real and substantial connection to the province.
Some provinces have also recognized the forum of necessity doctrine, which allows courts to assume jurisdiction in situations where the victim cannot be forced to initiate proceedings in the jurisdiction where he or she was harmed. The doctrine was applied in Bouzari v. Bahremani, an action for damages in respect of acts of torture in Iran.
Accordingly, there is no gap in domestic jurisdiction that Bill C-331 needs to fill. The provincial Superior Courts have adequate jurisdiction to address this type of claim. When Superior Courts decline to exercise jurisdiction, it is in application of well-settled rules of private international law or based on considerations of international comity.
The common law evolves gradually, incrementally taking into account developments in other jurisdictions. Recent decisions applying the doctrine of forum of necessity show that the common law can and does evolve to address accountability concerns of the kind reflected in Bill C-331.
It is worth noting that Bill C-331 is modelled on the U.S. Alien Tort Statute, which is the only legislation of its kind in force today.
The Alien Tort Statute provides, in full, “'The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” Belgium experimented with similar legislation starting in 1993, but repealed it 10 years later, in 2003.
The Alien Tort Statute is something of an anomaly. It was enacted by the first United States Congress in 1789 and lay dormant until the 1980s. It is a controversial and much litigated legislation. Its scope has been narrowed by successive decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently last year when the court decided that foreign, that is, non-American, corporations could not be sued under that law.
Bill C-331 is likewise an invitation to costly and protracted litigation. As with the Alien Tort Statute, the scope of the bill is not clear and it would not assist victims in obtaining reparation.
In particular, Bill C-331 does not create any new remedies, that is, any new right of action, under federal law that the Federal Court could enforce. Rather, it merely allows the court to exercise jurisdiction where one of those violations of international law can be framed as a type of conduct that is already actionable under federal law.
Similarly, the bill does not change the private international law requirement of a real and substantial connection between the forum and the subject matter of litigation. As such, Bill C-331 would not allow foreign victims to sue foreign companies that did not carry on business in Canada in respect of their conduct abroad. The real and substantial connection test would lead a court to decline jurisdiction in such cases. This test was developed by the Supreme Court of Canada, notably in order to prevent jurisdictional overreach by the courts.
Finally, the bill would do nothing to enable claims against foreign states, which would continue to enjoy immunity pursuant to the State Immunity Act with respect to their sovereign activities outside Canada.
The victims this bill is meant to serve would not be any better off if the Federal Court had jurisdiction over their cases. On the contrary, they are more likely to find justice through the superior courts, where the law is clearer and more predictable.
Instead of providing the same remedies that can already be sought from the superior courts, this government created the ombudsperson for responsible enterprise, a world first. In April 2019, the Minister of International Trade Diversification appointed Sheri Meyerhoffer to the position.
For the victims of human rights abuses, the ombudsperson is a real and effective alternative to litigation. More specifically, the ombudsperson's mandate is to review alleged human rights abuses arising from a Canadian company’s operations abroad and to propose corrective actions, such as victim compensation. This mechanism complements the legal remedies available to victims.
In January of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the Araya v. Nevsun case. The respondents were Eritrean refugees who allege that they were forced to work in an Eritrean gold mine, 60% of which is indirectly owned by the B.C. company in question.
This case raises questions directly addressed by this bill. For example, would Eritrea be the appropriate place to initiate the proceedings? What would be the scope of the act of government, which would prevent the court from ruling on the legality of a foreign state's sovereign acts within its own territory? Furthermore, the bill addresses the application of the customary standards of international law.
The Supreme Court will rule in the coming months. It would be prudent to wait for the court's ruling in this case, since the ruling could affect the content of this bill.
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Local support outlasts technological advances
Jason Chaney
While most video stores have disappeared, Video Hut has survived competition from national chain competitors and the advent of online video streaming
The video store industry was alive and well when Kim Atkinson first began working at Prineville's Video Hut.
The year was 1998, and her mother had just purchased the store, one of a handful scattered throughout the community, and she and her sister operated the business.
"When I first started, it (the industry) was just transitioning over to DVDs," she recalls. "VHS was still costing us anywhere from $70 to $150 per tape (movie) and DVDs were pretty expensive then, too. And we were still getting more VHS copies (per movie), than DVD."
Transition, it seems, would become an ongoing norm for Atkinson, who eventually took ownership of the video store a year or so later — transition that would ultimately result in most video stores nationwide going the way of the dinosaur and leaving Video Hut an island in a modern world of on-demand video streaming and Redbox machines.
The next big change came a few years later as Blockbuster, a large-scale chain video store, found its way to Prineville. Blockbuster purchased Sun Home Video and opened in the fall of 2003 — within months of the chain's peak, when more than 9,000 locations existed nationwide.
Atkinson said they were never approached by Blockbuster, Hollywood Video or any of the other major national chains. She doubts any other independent, local stores were either.
"I don't think it was something where they would come and approach you, because they didn't care. It would be something where you would approach them," she said. "We never thought about going that direction. We were always about putting back into the community."
Blockbuster coming to town changed things for Atkinson. Now, she was competing with a store with much greater resources that gave them a competitive advantage.
"There is name recognition, but we all still got the same videos," she said. "The difference was that they were able to bring in massive amounts of a movie. They were able to offer a lot of different deals that we could not."
At first, Atkinson found herself comparing Video Hut to the local Blockbuster, and it bothered her that she was unable to offer what the chain store could. But a couple years into competing with them, she had an epiphany.
"One day, I was just driving down the street, and I thought, 'You know what, I can't be a Blockbuster. I cannot do the things that they can do. It doesn't matter,'" she said. "So you know, watch out because I'm just gonna be me, and you guys can try to keep up."
The awakening and resulting philosophy would help keep her afloat in the years that followed as technology — not big box competitors — would challenge her independent local store.
Netflix launched in 1999 but didn't make a whole lot of noise early on as it settled into its initial business model of mailing out movies for an indefinite period of time while charging a monthly fee. But by 2005, the business had enjoyed a surge in popularity, offering around 35,000 titles and shipping around 1 million DVDs to customers daily.
By eschewing the time limit for rentals, Netflix posed a direct threat to video store giants like Blockbuster that limited rentals to only a few days, and their stores began to suffer. But Atkinson found it wasn't always such a great alternative as far as her customers were concerned.
"They didn't like the fact that they had to mail them back, that they would be scratched up," she remembers, adding that waiting out the mail was another deterrent. "It was easy, but people don't like to wait for things."
Netflix introduced a new online streaming version of its service in 2007, which has enabled people to order movies online and receive them as quickly as their home internet can download them. Other outlets like Hulu and Amazon Video trotted out similar services as did satellite television providers like Dish and DirecTV.
These services made a bigger dent in the video store industry as did the advent of Redbox, an automated, vending machine-style video rental service that set up kiosks at McDonald's restaurants and convenience stores.
The emerging technologies continued to topple the national video store giants like Blockbuster, and Atkinson acknowledges that it put a dent in her business as well. But once again, she found people who still preferred the video store option.
Customers put off by the time it takes streaming videos to download or the quality of the downloaded product would still come through her doors. So did the people who appreciated the human interaction of an actual store and the opportunity to peruse the shelves and pick up and read a video display box.
"We are more than just a movie," she explained. "People come here because they want to talk to the video lady. They want to know if the movie is any good. They want to see what's up there and look at the box."
Moving ahead to present day, the video store landscape has drastically changed from when Atkinson entered the industry two decades ago. Video Hut is the only remaining store of its kind in Prineville. Blockbuster is long gone locally, its last remaining store in the whole country located in Bend.
On a typical Friday evening in 1998, Atkinson could expect around 250 videos to go out the door. Today, that number has been cut in half. Yet, like the small diners, pubs and other mom-and-pop businesses of the world, she is surviving, thanks to the regulars, a business culture she didn't set out to develop, but has materialized all the same.
"I know people," she said. "I have seen their kids grow. Now, they are coming in with their kids and renting movies."
Atkinson believes in supporting local businesses, insisting that if people support a community, it will support them in return. In her opinion, that desire to support a community is what will keep advances in technology from ultimately driving independent businesses like video stores, clothing stores and more out of business.
"The more that we let technology take all of this away, buildings are going to sit empty," she remarks.
Atkinson doesn't know how much longer she will own and operate Video Hut. No longer is it a piece of a bustling industry, where stores are commonplace. Her place of business has become a novelty of sorts for Prineville visitors and locals alike. Some people drop in, amazed that a place like Video Hut still exists. Others show up having never set foot in a video store before, unsure how the whole rental thing works.
But she has decided her future is in the hands of her customers and her community, and so far, both have been a great source of support and have helped her outlast the onslaught of national chains and an ever-changing technological world.
"Technology can't stop me," she said, "but the community can."
Video Hut
Address: 142 NW Third St.
Hours: Open 7 days a week 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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Posts Tagged ‘Minneapolis’
K-9 Konundrum
Posted in Crime, Transgression, True Crime, tagged Anglo-American academic, ’70s nostalgia concert, bewilderment-and-grieving process, crime in Minneapolis, Dog, dog-napping, dog-sitting, French bulldog, gay ninjas, introduction by Mikita Brottman, Ludovicus, Mikita Brottman, Minneapolis, multiple CCTV-feeds, Peter Sotos, post-transgressive arena, ransom demand, transgression, TransVisceral Books, True Crime, uncompromisingly incendiary submariner on February 7, 2014| 4 Comments »
Dog, Peter Sotos, with an introduction by Mikita Brottman (TransVisceral Books 2014)
August 9, 2012. Anglo-American academic Mikita Brottman departs her apartment in Minneapolis to attend a ’70s nostalgia concert at a local rock-arena. Behind her, she leaves transgressive author Peter Sotos to dog-sit her prized French bulldog Ludovicus. Four hours later, Brottman returns to her apartment to discover Ludovicus gone and Sotos lying unconscious on the floor.
When he revives, Sotos describes how, minutes after Brottman’s departure, the apartment was invaded by a masked gang.
He remembers trying to fight them off.
Then it all went black…
Dog is a detailed examination of that fateful August day and its continuing repercussions. It is a true-crime book like no other, written from the inside by a no-holds-barred author who has been at the heart of events right from the beginning. As Brottman writes in her introduction:
Peter was a rock thru-out the bewilderment-and-grieving process. It was truly a great comfort when he told me that, altho’ he knew Ludovicus for only a brief time, he felt that the two of them had achieved a genuine and permanent closeness. Furthermore, despite the brutal assault to which he was subjected and the stress-induced indigestion he suffered for two days after Ludovicus’s disappearance, Peter barely left my side for the rest of the month, helping me to process my initial shock and horror and trying to assist the police investigation in any way he could. He also came up with the most plausible theory as to the gang’s identity. No trace of any break-in could be discovered, nor, despite detailed examination of multiple CCTV-feeds, was it possible to identify any strangers entering or leaving the apartment-block during the relevant time-period. But, while the gang was in the apartment, they cleaned the kitchen and polished the stove.
Peter’s suggestion?
“They must have been gay ninjas, Miki,” he said.
I concur. It’s the only explanation that fits all the facts. (Introduction, pg. xii)
But why would gay ninjas kidnap Ludovicus? Where have they taken him? When will they issue a ransom demand? These questions continue to haunt all those involved in this unique tragedy. Dog interrogates each aspect of the case from every conceivable angle and will only serve to sharpen Sotos’s two-fisted reputation as an uncompromisingly incendiary submariner of the most phantasmal sierras of the post-transgressive arena.
Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:
• Toxic Twosome — review of Doll by Peter Sotos and James Havoc
Proviously post-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:
• Twice Has Thrice the Vice — review of Pisces by Peter Sotos
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Home » Materials Reliability & Obsolescence Test & Measurement
New form of electron-beam imaging can see elements that are ‘invisible’ to common methods
source: Eurek Alert news
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Scientists at the Department of Energy’sc Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new imaging technique, tested on samples of nanoscale gold and carbon, that greatly improves images of light elements using fewer electrons.
Electrons can extend our view of microscopic objects well beyond what’s possible with visible light–all the way to the atomic scale. A popular method in electron microscopy for looking at tough, resilient materials in atomic detail is called STEM, or scanning transmission electron microscopy, but the highly-focused beam of electrons used in STEM can also easily destroy delicate samples.
This is why using electrons to image biological or other organic compounds, such as chemical mixes that include lithium–a light metal that is a popular element in next-generation battery research–requires a very low electron dose.
The newly demonstrated technique, dubbed MIDI-STEM, for matched illumination and detector interferometry STEM, combines STEM with an optical device called a phase plate that modifies the alternating peak-to-trough, wave-like properties (called the phase) of the electron beam.
This phase plate modifies the electron beam in a way that allows subtle changes in a material to be measured, even revealing materials that would be invisible in traditional STEM imaging.
Another electron-based method, which researchers use to determine the detailed structure of delicate, frozen biological samples, is called cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM. While single-particle cryo-EM is a powerful tool–it was named as science journal Nature’s 2015 Method of the Year –it typically requires taking an average over many identical samples to be effective. Cryo-EM is generally not useful for studying samples with a mixture of heavy elements (for example, most types of metals) and light elements like oxygen and carbon.
“The MIDI-STEM method provides hope for seeing structures with a mixture of heavy and light elements, even when they are bunched closely together,” said Colin Ophus, a project scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry and lead author of a study, published Feb. 29 in Nature Communications, that details this method.
If you take a heavy-element nanoparticle and add molecules to give it a specific function, conventional techniques don’t provide an easy, clear way to see the areas where the nanoparticle and added molecules meet.
“How are they aligned? How are they oriented?” Ophus asked. “There are so many questions about these systems, and because there wasn’t a way to see them, we couldn’t directly answer them.”
While traditional STEM is effective for “hard” samples that can stand up to intense electron beams, and cryo-EM can image biological samples, “We can do both at once” with the MIDI-STEM technique, said Peter Ercius, a Berkeley Lab staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry and co-author of the study.
The phase plate in the MIDI-STEM technique allows a direct measure of the phase of electrons that are weakly scattered as they interact with light elements in the sample. These measurements are then used to construct so-called phase-contrast images of the elements. Without this phase information, the high-resolution images of these elements would not be possible.
In this study, the researchers combined phase plate technology with one of the world’s highest resolution STEMs, at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, and a high-speed electron detector.
They produced images of samples of crystalline gold nanoparticles, which measured several nanometers across, and the super-thin film of amorphous carbon that the particles sat on. They also performed computer simulations that validated what they saw in the experiment.
The phase plate technology was developed as part of a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant in collaboration with Ben McMorran at University of Oregon.
The MIDI-STEM technique could prove particularly useful for directly viewing nanoscale objects with a mixture of heavy and light materials, such as some battery and energy-harvesting materials, that are otherwise difficult to view together at atomic resolution.
It also might be useful in revealing new details about important two-dimensional proteins, called S-layer proteins, that could serve as foundations for engineered nanostructures but are challenging to study in atomic detail using other techniques.
In the future, a faster, more sensitive electron detector could allow researchers to study even more delicate samples at improved resolution by exposing them to fewer electrons per image.
“If you can lower the electron dose you can tilt beam-sensitive samples into many orientations and reconstruct the sample in 3-D, like a medical CT scan. There are also data issues that need to be addressed,” Ercius said, as faster detectors will generate huge amounts of data. Another goal is to make the technique more “plug-and-play,” so it is broadly accessible to other scientists.
Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Researchers from the University of Oregon, Gatan Inc. and Ulm University in Germany also participated in the study.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit http://www. lbl. gov/ .
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science. energy. gov.
Free book covers copper for inductors and IC packaging
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Memorial Daniel P. Filson ’49
Dan died July 12, 2018, in Palm Beach, Fla., just four months after celebrating his 90th birthday.
He came to Princeton from James Madison High School in Brooklyn, roomed with Dave Sweney, and majored in economics. He was a member of Elm Club, St. Paul’s Society, the Pre-Law Society, and the German Club. After a tour of duty in Korea, Dan went to work for the W.T. Grant Co. in several stores in New York and New Jersey. At the time of our 10th reunion, he reported that he was living in Livingston, N.J., with his wife and they had two children.
By 1974 Dan had been transferred to W.T. Grant’s Chicago office, where he was the regional merchandise manager. Although he was living in Barrington, Ill., at that time, by the mid-1990s he had moved back to New Jersey and was the president and owner of Shelby & Danby, distributors. Other than knowing he had a second residence in West Palm Beach, we have very little information about his life during those years.
Dan is survived by his wife, Betty, and four children Susan, Stephen, Tracy, and Patricia. We offer our sympathy and condolences to Betty and the entire family.
Undergraduate Class of 1949
Mudd Archive Memorials
Visit the Mudd Manuscript Library database for information about PAW memorials published from 1900 to 2011.
View Mudd Archive Memorials
Recent Alumni Deaths
PAW periodically updates a list of alumni whose deaths recently have been reported to the University.
A Glimpse of China, by the Dashboard Light
Reading Room: Frank Langfitt ’86
Honorary Degrees for Six at Commencement
Scribe Latinus: Capturing a Life in a Few (Latin) Words
Nine Newly Minted Officers ... and Five Very Proud Children
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Earth Facts, Geography
5 Geography Facts that Will Blow Your Mind
November 29, 2018 Our Planet Leave a comment
From stunning landscapes to awe-inspiring vistas, our earth is a unique beauty in the immensity of space. To explore its beauty and diversity is an exhilarating honor and humbling adventure. To us, the greatest wonders flow from Earth’s beauty, power, and magnificent intricacies. Explore with us some of its unforgettable features with this list of five geography facts that will blow your mind.
1. Mount Everest is Not the Tallest Mountain in the World
Sorry, Mount Everest! Contrary to what most people think, Mt. Everest is not the tallest mountain in the world. While Everest is the highest mountain above sea level at 29,029 feet (8,848 meters), if measured from below sea level, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is actually the tallest. The distance from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean floor to the peak of Mauna Kea is around 33,610 feet (10,000 meters). In short, if you placed Mount Everest and Mauna Kea next to each other on flat ground, Mauna Kea would be the taller of the two by almost 1,640 feet (500 meters).
While we’re at it, Mt. Everest isn’t even the closest part of the Earth to the moon. It is dwarfed by a mountain that you probably haven’t heard of: An Ecuadorian volcano called Chimborazo. While Chimborazo in Ecuador has an altitude of 20,703 feet (6,310 meters), which is less than Everest, Chimborazo sits on top of a bulge in the Earth, making it the closest point of Earth to the moon.
Mount Everest’s north face from the Tibetan plateau. Photo: Wikipedia
2. Most of the U.S., India, Europe, and China could Fit in Africa
Think Africa is big? Think bigger. Much bigger. While most flat maps show that Greenland is about as big as Africa, the scale is not even close. Africa is a whopping 14 times larger than Greenland.
But it’s not your fault if you underestimated the size of Africa. Flat mats significantly distort the size of countries and continents toward the poles. This means that they tend to underestimate the size of countries close to the equator. In reality, Africa is bigger than China, India, the contiguous U.S. and most of Europe–combined. With an area of 11.67 million square millions (30.22 million square kilometers), Africa’s is the world’s second-largest continent after Asia.
Africa (orthographic projection). At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, Africa is the world’s second largest and with 1.2 billion people as of 2016, second most-populous continent (behind Asia in both categories). It covers 6% of Earth’s total surface area and 20% of its land area. Its population accounts for about 16% of the world’s human population.
3. The Continent of Asia has More Surface Area Than the Moon
When you look up at the sky, it’s hard to get a sense of how big the moon really is. At first glance, it appears fairly large, but that is because it is the closest celestial body to the Earth. In reality, the moon is just a bit more than ¼ (27 percent) the size of Earth. To put this in perspective, the moon’s surface area is about 14.6 million square miles (38 million square kilometers) which is less than the total surface area of the largest continent on Earth, Asia, which is 17. 2 million square miles or 44.5 million square km).
Yes, Asia is huge. Knowns as the “rooftop of the world,” Asia holds about 30% or ⅓ of the world’s land, and for every 10 people alive today, 6 of them live in Asia. In just China alone, you could squeeze Greenland in four times over.
An “EPIC” view of the Moon transiting the Earth created with actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the Sun.
4. Minnesota Has More Shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii–Combined
With a state nickname like “Land of 10,00 Lakes,” Minnesota is bound to have quite the coastline. Still, even with a plethora or lakes and rivers, how can a state with zero oceanfront property beat out these coastal states famous for their coastlines?
Well, as we mentioned above, Minnesota has LOTS of lakes, streams, and rivers and about 183,325 (295,033 km) miles of shoreline. Plus, there is over 200 miles (322 km) of shoreline of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, where the great river originates. Even with their beautiful coastal shorelines AND rivers, California, Hawaii, and Florida don’t measure up. They only have 168,918 miles (271,847 km) of shoreline–combined. So, yes, if you consider rivers and streams, Minnesota does have more shoreline than those states.
Saint Paul, Minnesota. Image: Getty Images
5. If You Drive South in Some Parts of Detroit, Michigan, You’ll End Up in Canada
The United States/Canada border is the longest international border in the world that is shared by two countries, at over 5,500 miles (8851 km) long. With such a long border, you’re bound to find a few quirks along the way. For example, while almost all of Canada is located north of the United States, not all of it is. If you drive south from Detroit, Michigan, you’ll actually enter Canada. How is this possible? Rivers often acts as international borders, and the Detroit River is such an example. The Detroit River is a narrow ribbon of water that joins Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, but, like most rivers, it curves slightly. This small curvature places Windsor, Canada south of Detroit. So, now you can say that both Mexico and Canada are directly south of the U.S. border.
Detroit Skyline from Windsor, Canada. Image: Wikimedia
The earth is a wild, weird, and beautiful place filled with wonder and adventure. From crazy borders to continents larger than the moon, the above facts are just a few of the many that will “blow your mind.” But don’t take our word for it. Grab a map, put on your hiking shoes, and go out there and explore.
Image: PXHere
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Non-Verbal Reasoning 13 Plus Tutors
7 Plus, 8 Plus, 11 Plus, 13 Plus, English, French and Maths
Adam completed his Certificate In Education at Cambridge University and hist postgraduate Diploma at the London School of Economics. He has nearly two decades of experience preparing children for entrance to leading London day and boarding schools at the 7+, 8+, 11+ and 13+.
7 Plus, 8 Plus, 11 Plus, 13 Plus, Other School Entrance, Drama, English, French, Media Studies, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, Spanish and Theory of Knowledge
Amy currently teaches in a very successful English Department, supporting the development of staff across the school and teaching a range of abilities from Year 7 to 13. In her role as an English teacher, Amy is used to opening her classroom to colleagues and parents to showcase her successful, innovative practice.
Sobia
7 Plus, 8 Plus, 11 Plus, 13 Plus, Other School Entrance, Biology, Chemistry, English, Maths, Physics, Psychology and Science
Sobia is a highly experienced tutor in English and the Sciences at all levels. She is also an experienced private school entrance tutor.
Raj studied for degrees in Mathematics at Keele University (BA Hons) and Oxford University (MSc) and has over 35 years teaching experience in Private Schools, Grammar Schools and Colleges.
He is also an Associate Lecturer for The Open University.
Scott has been teaching and tutoring mathematics for over 30 years. He currently teaches part-time as a secondary maths teacher in a local comprehensive school.
11 Plus, 13 Plus and Maths
Samir has an Honours degree in Mathematics and Statistics from a Russel group university. He has several years classroom teaching experience and has worked in a Mathematics department rated outstanding by Ofsted.
"Sobia has provided four months of online tutoring to our daughter who is currently year 9, for the preparation of the entrance test and improvement in mathematics knowledge and skills. Sobia has been a flexible and supportive teacher whose teaching approach is pertinent to this year. Our daughter’s knowledge of entrance test and skills of Math subject has improved. We would be happy to recommend Sobia for similar assignment."
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Tuesday, 23rd April 2019
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Tag Archives: Bill Hader
Review: Her (2013)
Her without a doubt should be considered as a frontrunner for Best Original Screenplay for the Oscars. Its premise of falling inlove with a machine (an operating system) was a reminiscent and was very much like the obsession of Al Pacino’s character to Simone. This film however took a direction very different from the latter. The year was 2025 and Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), someone who writes under a company named beautifulhandwrittenletters. Theodore was in the brink of divorce with his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) and was desperately in need of company until he met the OS which he named Samantha. Together, they talked about love and life with Theodore seeking love advise from Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) which eventually led to them falling in love with each other.
Now this seemed to be a bit out of order, yes? But you gotta remember that it’s the year 2025 and falling in love is yes – that simple. Funny thing is, since Sam’s a microchip the two cannot have sex – an indication that the relationship to work in the long run is impossible and there can’t be no physical human connection that could transpire.
I thought Joaquin Phoenix portrayal was very commendable for there was a feel of longing and sadness in his approach which so become him
The premise may not seemed original at all but it’s charming and has character. Director Spike Jonze delivered a passive yet arresting sequences of events that is both endearing and unique.
Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pratt, Matt Letscher, Sam Jaeger, Luka Jones, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Spike Jonze, Portia Doubleday, Soko, Brian Cox
*Her received five Academy Award nominations, including the Best Picture category.
Tagged Amy Adams, Bill Hader, Brian Cox, Chris Pratt, Film Review, Her, Joaquin Phoenix, Kristen Wiig, Luka Jones, Matt Letscher, Olivia Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Rooney Mara, Sam Jaeger, Scarlett Johansson, Simone, Soko, Spike Jonze
Review: Men In Black 3 in 3D
“Men in Black 3” comes 15 years after its original installment and 10 years after its sequel where nobody ever expected to get a follow up after. I, for one did not. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant reminder that Will Smith is still very much alive to do movies.
This third film based on Lowell Cunningham’s comic series had Agent J (Will Smith) travels back to 1969 where he met the younger Agent K (played this time by Josh Brolin.) His mission is to stop the alien criminal Boris from assassinating the young Agent K that would change the course of history.
I am not a fan of the franchise but I remember enjoying the first two films somehow. I just loved the dynamics between Smith and Jones in the previous installments. This time though, Smith does not have a lot of sequences with Jones, which is a shame because they really have a great chemistry. Brolin isn’t a bad replacement though; he’s pretty quick and spot-on as the younger Agent K.
Another problem I have was the establishment of Agent O’s (Emma Thompson) character (also played by Alice Eve.) The scenes were not enough to establish K’s softer side for “them.”
Jemaine Clement who played Boris the animal was a-okay. He was “fierce” enough I guess but does little to be a threatening villain.
This film also goes a little backward in terms of special effects that it almost seemed unreal. I don’t know maybe it’s just me or it’s the effect of 3-D but it felt distant somehow. The film isn’t bad at all but it’s missing the spark of the previous installments that may have made the film a bit lackluster in providing a spectacular comeback sequel.
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Starring: WillSmith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mike Colter, Nicole Scherzinger, Alice Eve, Will Arnett, David Rasche, Keone Young, Bill Hader, Lady Gaga, Lenny Venito
This Review was posted first in PinoyExchange at the PEx Official Movie Reviews.
Tagged Alice Eve, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bill Hader, David Rasche, Emma Thompson, Film Review, Jemaine Clement, Josh Brolin, Keone Young, Lady Gaga, Lenny Venito, Men In Black, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mike Colter, Nicole Scherzinger, Tommy Lee Jones, Will Arnett, WillSmith
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Tag Archives: dietrich bonhoeffer
July 12, 2019 · 21:45
To Boldly Go…. Binge Watching Star Trek the Next Generation from the Beginning and Wondering About Possibilities not of This Earth
I have always been what some would call a Trekkie. Ever since I was a young child watching Star Trek the Original Series I have been fascinated with space, other universes, galaxies, and other life that must exist beyond earth. As a Christian and theologian I have to admit that the possibilities of a non earthnocentric order fascinate me. Christians, especially pastors, and theologians love to talk about the attributes of God: his omniscience, his power, his omnipresence, ad infinitum, but instead of contemplating the unknown potentials of a universe that we know little about, our puny minds remained focused only on earth and ways in which to destroy it in order to ensure the Apocalypse arrives, I cannot do that.
While obviously as a Christian I have to live fully in this world, and in doing so bear witness of Jesus the Christ, fight for equality and human rights, and do my best to bear witness of the truth, that human beings can be among the most noble as well as debased beings that have ever existed. There are certainly examples in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures to support both extremes, and theologians who those who support the total depravity of humanity, or an exalted view of humankind.
But, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer so succinctly noted:
“Man no longer lives in the beginning–he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end. He sees that his life is determined by these two facets, of which he knows only that he does not know them”
The fact is, that we human beings are stuck in that uncomfortable middle, and to admit that is a step on the road to freedom. That is what I find so fascinating about Star Trek the Next Generation, it confronts human nature with the added dimension of the possibility, if we don’t destroy ourselves first, that we will meet others from other solar systems and galaxies.
In the finale of Star Trek the Next Generation, the being known as Q discusses that question with Captain Picard:
Capt. Picard: I sincerely hope that this is the last time that I find myself here.
Q: You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.
Capt. Picard: When I realized the paradox.
Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That*is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
I really do believe that being open to options that we never considered is both a part of the Christian life, as well as humanity in general.
I certainly don’t have the answers, but I am am open to answers that lie beyond my realm of sight and thought. There are times that I think that I was born 300 years too late for the Enlightenment and probably at least 300 years too soon for the world of Star Trek, I am caught in that uncomfortable middle that Bonhoeffer spoke of, but in the middle of the middle.
But for now I have 171 more episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation to go, then on to Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek Voyager.
So until tomorrow,
Filed under christian life, enteratinment, faith, life, philosophy, Religion, star trek, televsion
Tagged as captain jean luc picard, christian faith, christian life, creation, dietrich bonhoeffer, Extra terrestrial life, faith, Human depravity, Human perfection, star trek the next generation, The Enlightenment, Theology
June 12, 2019 · 19:33
Silence in the Face Of Evil is Evil Itself
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the words “silence in the face of evil is evil itself.”
Today I blocked and deleted a former friend from a church I went to decades ago because of his attitude towards me and what I post on Facebook. I get tired of the hypocrisy of people who pretend to be patriotic when in fact they openly support a President who openly denies his oath when he said today that he would accept “dirt” on his political opponents from foreign sources.
This is a very difficult article to write because truthfully I believe that civility and mutual respect should be an ideal that we as Americans should not retreat from, as John F. Kennedy noted:
“So let us begin a new remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
I have written about that subject a number of times, the last being on November 22nd 2016 shortly after President Trump’s election and on the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. However, since that time I have seen the President lead a descent into depravity that I fully comprehended then, although I hoped for a different outcome. Trust me, as an American with a profound respect for the office of the President that is what I wanted, but it didn’t happen.
The fact is that the President has in his words, deeds, and tweets destroyed any hope of our political divide being healed, or of Americans of different viewpoints being able to reconcile their differences anytime in the foreseeable future. He stokes the hatred and division almost on an hourly basis, and of course his opponents having become wise to him are rolling up their sleeves and fighting back.
Too me that is an unfortunate situation that might become a tragedy for the United States and the world, as Abraham Lincoln noted “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” To GOP Congressman Steve King of Iowa the sight and sound of Trump’s opponents is like “Harpers Ferry” and what comes next will be “Fort Sumter.” Since King proudly displays the Confederate Battle Flag in his office I know exactly what side of this fight that he is on.
The fact is that he and many like him want bloodshed, they want Civil War, they want to remake the Union in a way that Jefferson Davis and his band of traitors failed to do. As a historian of the period with a book awaiting publication the fact is that in the end it comes down to the fact that King, many of the President’s supporters and quite probably the President himself are all White Supremacists. They want a full and complete return to White Man’s Rule and the subservience of all non-white races and non-Christian religions to it. They are the Know Nothings of the North and Slave Power Secessionists of the South rolled into one package of ignorance, incivility, and hatred.
I write often about comparisons of the attitudes and actions administration and its supporters to Nazi Germany, but truth be told there is a lot of dirty laundry in our own history that sheds light on Trump and his supporters.
The fact is that for nearly three decades the vast majority of Northerners were too polite to criticize the egregious actions of the Know Nothings in their midst or the Southern Slave Power Block that dominated the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court for the three decades prior to the War of the Rebellion, also known as the American Civil War, or the War Between the States. Honestly, I think that the term ascribed to it by many Union Veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic after the war, the “War of the Rebellion” is the best.
Those opposed to the Know Nothings and Slave Power Block were condemned as being rude, impolite, and worse. Some were physical assaulted. In 1856 Senator Charles Sumner was attacked by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the Senate for his speech against the Kansas Nebraska Act. Sumner was beaten until he was unconscious and Brooks’ heavy cane which he used to conduct the attack broke. Brooks continued to beat Sumner aided by Representative Lawrence Keitt also of South Carolina who brandishing a pistol threatened Senators coming to his aid. Sumner has proclaimed no threats of violence but only spoken the truth about the Act and those that supported it. So much for civility and now.
The scurrilous and overtly violent threats against minorities and civil rights advocates by conservatives, especially White Christian conservatives have continued unabated since from the ante-Bellum South and the Know Nothing North, through the War of the Rebellion, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, to the modern day. Whole political campaigns including that of George H.W. Bush run by Lee Atwater turned on the demonization of African Americans. The same is true regarding the Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and again even more so from the time that Candidate Donald Trump descended to the lobby of Trump Tower in 2015 until now. The President proclaims that White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis are “very fine people.”
The President and many of his followers including administration officials like Stephen Miller set the tone while Presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies and denies the President’s words and vilifies anyone that dares to question her. So when she is asked to leave a restaurant, or when Miller or DHS Secretary Nielsen are shamed when trying to enter Mexican restaurants it makes makes my heart bleed. People who have no compassion, no sense of empathy and behave as sociopaths and then act the victim when the tables are turned only deserve scorn.
Their anti-immigrant and often blatantly racist tropes of the President, his administration, and his supporters on the Fox Propaganda Network, the Right Wing media, the Putrid Princes of the Captive Conservative Church, and his assorted sordid supporters should be condemned and opposed around the clock. If they are not then any of us who remain silent knowing the evil of these policies is as guilty as anyone that turned their backs on the Jews in Nazi Germany. The higher the office the greater the guilt and culpability.
That being said if had the chance to see any one of them in a public setting I would not resort to public shaming. I do not own a restaurant or business so I could not ask them to leave. However, that being said if any of them the President himself presented themselves to me at my chapel or any civilian church that I might be celebrating the Eucharist I would deny them communion which from a Christian point of view is “a fate worse than a fate worse than death.”
Bonhoeffer wrote:
“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”
As for me I must tell the truth and protest against the violence and the arbitrary pride of power exhibited by the Trump administration and its supporters. I could not live with myself if I didn’t do so. Some might think this political and in some sense it is, but it is entirely based on my understanding of the Christian faith and the very premise of the founders of this country, that phrase in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
If need be I would die for that faith and that proposition and I will not be silent in the face of evil. I will live and die as a Christian who believes those sacred words of secular scripture found in the Declaration.
Filed under christian life, ethics, faith, History, News and current events, Political Commentary
Tagged as abraham lincoln, american civil war, civil rights, congressman Steve King, declaration of independence, dietrich bonhoeffer, donald trump supporters, fox news, George H.W. Buch, History, jim crow, john f kennedy, kansas-nebraska act, know nothings, Lee Atwater, nazi germany, neo-nazis, newt gingrich, Political Commentary, president donald trump, preston brooks, reconstruction, religious liberty, Sarah Sanders, slave power, William sumner, Willie Horton ad
January 20, 2019 · 00:00
So Far Yet to Go, Overt Racism on Display Yet Again: Catholic Youth Accost Native American at the Lincoln Memorial
Tomorrow is the official observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the past I have been content to post variations on the theme of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech. In some of those I have also mentioned Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I will address his I have a dream speech in a future post, probably near the anniversary of his assassination.
Today I decided to read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail again and contemplate Dr. King’s words in the light of the overt racism that has become fashionable in Donald Trump’s America. Today I saw videos of a gang of white male Catholic High School students from Covington Kentucky accosting Native America Vietnam Veteran Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial. The students were in Washington DC for the annual March for life, but clad in Trump’s Make America Great Again hats and shirts they had surrounded and were shouting at the man and a few other Native Americans gathered there. One young man stood directly in front of Mr. Phillips giving him a mocking and menacing look. It was like watching Hitler Youth mock Jews in the 1930s, and they call themselves Christians, and I knew that I would not take much to turn these young men into killers. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The actions of such people are so far out of the prophetic tradition of the Christian church and its ancestors the great Jewish prophets of the Old Testament that it makes my mind spin. I could see them in time standing over death pits with guns in their hands.
I wonder what they are learning from their parents and the school that they attend. While I was already planning on writing about Dr. King I realized just how far we have to go to see his dream come true.
The fact is that as much as anyone would like to deny it, the American President not only is a paranoid and narcissistic sociopath, but also a racist as well. He is all too much like the men and their supposedly Christian supporters who did all that they could to stop the civil rights movement and to fight against every evil cause that Dr. King stood to oppose. The sad thing is that as banal and abhorrent as the racism of President Trump is, that of his defenders is far worse, for they, at least his Christian supporters should know better.
The fact is that instead of speaking a few well meaning yet conscience salving platitudes about Dr. King we really have to remember who he really was and what his message spoke to, and no it was not his acknowledgement of American Exceptionalism. That being said he embodied all that was good about the ideal of the United States of America and the message of Jesus and the prophets; and he was killed for it. Dr. King understood the implications of following Jesus, the depths of Christian theology and the its prophetic past. When I hear and read Dr. King’s words I am reminded of the Sermon on the Mount as well as the messages of Jeremiah and the other great Old Testament prophets.
A year after I returned from Iraq I struggled with what I was becoming. Before Iraq I had always considered myself to be a conservative, but though I was already on the path to becoming a liberal and progressive I could not identify myself as such, so I called myself a “passionate moderate” and the site “Musings of a Passionate Moderate.” A few years ago I owned the fact that I am a liberal and progressive, but also a realist. I came to realize that while moderation is an important part of civic life, it is not redemptive if it stands in silent opposition to justice in the name of order. As my journey continued I began to understand the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote:
Dr. King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Dr. King’s words in that letter are timeless and their implications should be contemplated by anyone who truly believes in that proposition in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” That is something that Dr. King certainly believed, but like those who sat on the fence in his day so many today choose to believe, but not to act upon. That is why that I continue to make my stand in the name of Jesus the Christ, the Gospel, and yes, the proposition of the Declaration that all men are created equal. If the President and his Christian supporters don’t get that then there is no hope for them as long as they continue down that path, but as I wrote yesterday, I still believe that people can have epiphanies.
I encourage all of my readers to read Dr. King’s letter. You can read it here:
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Filed under christian life, civil rights, ethics, History, Loose thoughts and musings, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary
Tagged as #MAGA, Covington Catholic High School, dietrich bonhoeffer, donald trump supporters, dr martin luther king jr, letter from a Birmingham Jail, make america great again, president donald trump, racism, timothy snyder
December 30, 2018 · 08:05
“The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be” Thoughts on the Eve Of New Year’s Eve
T. S. Elliott wrote:
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.”
It is the eve of New Year’s Eve and I have been reflecting on the year past and thinking about the future, and trying to put the past year into words. The good thing is that I write a decent amount about my experiences as they occur on this site, so in addition to it being a wealth of historical, biographical, religious, and political thinking, it also serves as kind of a public diary.
I have to admit, 2018 was an difficult year for me personally as well as for Judy, even little Pierre had a brush with death. The difficulties have been many but we have survived and are preparing for a new chapter in our lives as I finally after over 37 years in the military am preparing to retire.
The year began fairly well but in April we had a water leak from our air conditioning drain pan while we were out of town. It was the first heat wave of the year and our AC unit is really good, it sucked out the humidity from the air like a beast. Unfortunately, the drain pipes had been clogged with blown in insulation which had solidified during the winter when the AC was not in use. The result was a flood on our second floor which damaged walls, floors, ceilings, and furnishings. It was a bitch to get fixed, in fact we still have some work to do, mostly painting, but a few other things, but those were delayed by other events.
I am grateful that we had insurance and some other resources otherwise it would have been much worse, even so it did cost us money and time, and I had to spend a couple weeks of leave that I could have used for other things. But it was stressful, and physically exhausting. The work, including having a professional water damage company drying out the place, getting a contractor, having contractors doing repairs and renovations, getting materials, and doing much work ourselves took us into September when we took a break for our pilgrimage to Germany.
That would be enough, but in the midst of it I had a threat to my career and freedom when military retiree member of my Protestant Chapel Congregation complained to my command about a sermon and attempted to have me tried by Court Martial. His complaint was political, my sermon which was solidly based on scripture and history conflicted with his Fox News and Donald Trump version of Christianity.
That took place at the end of June and I first part of July preparing for and being investigated by the command. The investigation exonerated me, but I did have to hire a lawyer who represents many high profile military and government personnel in religious liberty cases. That cost a decent amount of money but it was far better than trusting my freedom and career to a brand new Navy defense attorney. Even some emotional and spiritual toll that it took convinced me to retire. I came to realize that there is no place for who tries to stand for truth in front of politicized right wing chapel congregations.
That coupled with an insufferable amount of other chapel bullshit and bullying by military retirees in my chapel congregations at me and my staff made up my mind. My junior Chaplains have asked if I would be willing to preach again in the chapel, but I had to be honest, I don’t feel safe with and don’t trust and good number of people in the Protestant congregation.
The fact that I am neither Protestant or Roman Catholic has kind of made me a man without a country in the Navy Chaplain Corps. Members of Religious minorities who don’t tow the line to the powerful are not tolerated. After 26 years of championing religious liberties for people of all faiths regardless of their beliefs or social-political stances as an Army and now Navy Chaplain, I found out that some people don’t give a damn and would use their religious rights to attempt to destroy me.
I say, fuck that, I don’t need it. So I am retiring before I am required to do and before the end of this tour of duty. That being said, I appreciate my staff who stood by me, and I am proud to have been able to serve this country in peace and war in so many different ways, in so many places, and with so many great people; the people who did this can’t take that away from me. But I cannot be silent and I will still speak the truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Then there were the medical challenges. During August after work, and more work at home I was called by a former shipmate going through a very difficult time. I was on the phone with him until about 2:30 AM. When I went upstairs I realized that I had Judy’s car keys in my pocket, so I trudged back down the stairs but took my eyes off the stairs and didn’t keep my hand on the railing. I slipped and fell, spraining my left ankle, the ACLs of both knees, and my right hip. After a long period of getting examined, x-rays, physical therapy, and MRIs I will be getting arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus in my left knee and PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma) treatment on my right knee. In the next month or so. I can only echo the words of Mickey Mantle who said “I always loved the game, but when my legs weren’t hurting it was a lot easier to love.” I haven’t been able to run and even walking is not without pain, and considering that even earlier this year I was running thee to five miles or walking and running six to ten miles a day, this really sucks.
Then Judy had her right knee, which she thought was her good knee go out. She thought, and the ER docs thought it was a sprain, but it turned out that the knee, like her left knee needed replacement. She went through that on November 9th and has been recovering and rehabbing ever since. She will have to have the left knee replaced next year.
The scariest thing was when our little Papillon, Pierre ingested something toxic, probably from a mushroom, that caused him to have severe bleeding ulcers in his stomach which turned into a life threatening situation. He had to have emergency surgery, but came through it well. He had completely recovered but it was scary because he is my little shadow, daddy’s boy, and still so young.
But there were good things. We celebrated our 35th marriage anniversary, we have good friends, we made it through, or are making it through the difficult times. We also made a trip to Germany where we saw German friends, visited Munich, Berlin, Karlsruhe, Wittenberg, and other locations, and I was able to visit a good number of historical locations dealing with the Holocaust and the resistance to the Hitler regime.
Despite everything that we went through I am grateful for family, friends, and my staff at work who helped us get through everything. We are alive, we are making it through our medical and physical issues, the house is getting fixed and I am getting ready to retire from the Navy and transition to hopefully teaching history, writing, and working with veterans.
In the movie Star Trek: Generations, Captain Jean Luc Picard tells Commander William Riker:
“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe than time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important how we lived. After all, Number One, we’re only mortal.”
So as I close out the old year I wish you my readers all the best. May the coming year be good for all of us.
Until tomorrow,
Filed under christian life, faith, life, Loose thoughts and musings
Tagged as chaplain corps, dietrich bonhoeffer, mickey mantle, Military, ministry, new year, religious liberty, t s Elliott
November 17, 2018 · 23:16
Calling Out the Spiritual Arsonists of Trump’s Imperial Clergy Cult
Pastor Ed Young Calling Democrats a Godless Religion
Pardon the interruption last night, I was working on an article but about halfway through got a bit of writer’s block. I started well but ended up not knowing where I wanted to go with it, so instead I sat back and proceeded to read. That is not a bad thing. But tonight I do have something that I want to get off my chest.
Over the past couple of days I have experienced something rather disconcerting. A couple of people that I know from long ago but haven’t seen in years come out of left field and take me to task for pointing out the evils of racism, and anti-semitism that have become all too common since Donald Trump came down out of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President of the United States, and the Messiah of the Christian Right.
I won’t go into detail but the comments hit me wrong because both took aim at me for being a Chaplain and Priest who opposes racism and anti-semitism. One was definitely ideologically driven and quite nasty, while the other was more based on the person’s theology. One seemed to be denying that the environment created by Trump was feeding both, while the other admitted that people, especially elected officials who espouse racism are stupid.
Shortly following that exchange I saw an article in the Fort Worth Star Telegram that discussed comments made by former Southern Baptist Convention President, Pastor Ed Young of Houston’s massive Fifth Baptist Church, that: God would curse the United States because of the “Godless Democrats” who were elected in the mid-term elections. In fact, Young called the Democrats “a Godless religion and not a political party.”
Honestly, I don’t believe that either the Republicans or Democrats have a lock on Godliness or truth. This isn’t an argument for a moral equivalence between the parties, but neither can honestly claim to represent God.
Likewise, I don’t believe that the United States is, ever has been, or was established as a Christian nation. Such a proposition would have been abhorrent to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, or even Abraham Lincoln. In fact one cannot find In fact like the great Virginia Baptist and champion of the religious liberties of the First Amendment, John Leland, I believe:
“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. … Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”
But Ed Young, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Robert Jeffress, and a host of other politically calculating and corrupt Christian preachers not only promote the lie that the United States is somehow a Christian nation; they effectively believe non-Christians of any stripe are less than equal and should be subject to their often heretical notions of Christian doctrine and morality.
Gary North, a man who is not well recognized by most people has been one of the most influential members of the Christian Right’s political theorists. North, who has been a close adviser to Ron and Rand Paul, as well as many other GOP leaders wrote:
“The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel.”
That might have been the case of the State Churches of Europe from which our founders fled, and it is the curse that the Emperor Constantine bequeathed the Church. This was noted by the great Southern Baptist pastor, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President, George Truett:
“Constantine, the Emperor, saw something in the religion of Christ’s people which awakened his interest, and now we see him uniting religion to the state and marching up the marble steps of the Emperor’s palace, with the church robed in purple. Thus and there was begun the most baneful misalliance that ever fettered and cursed a suffering world…. When … Constantine crowned the union of church and state, the church was stamped with the spirit of the Caesars…. The long blighting record of the medieval ages is simply the working out of that idea.”
The denominational descendants of Leland and Truett have much more in common with Constantine’s clerics, and the medieval concept of the Divine Right of Kings, than they do the tradition of religious liberty advanced by our Enlightenment informed founders. They are creatures of the Dark Ages and intent on establishing their own theocracy, while anointing a man who mocks the Christian faith and shows no evidence of being a Christian as their leader.
Nothing Trump does shakes their faith in him, in fact he seems to embolden their longings and actions to establish a theocracy. The defeat of many of their allies in Congress has frightened them, thus the histrionics of Young and others. It plays into their culture of perpetual victimhood and apocalyptic vision of this world. That is why they campaign so hard for him and are shocked when he is rebuked by the electorate.
But these religious leaders are seldom held to account by conservative Christians, instead they vent their ire on those sounding the alarm rather than the arsonists who are trying to burn down the American experiment in liberty.
Leland wrote:
“Is conformity of sentiments in matters of religion essential to the happiness of civil government? Not at all. Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics. Let every man speak freely without fear–maintain the principles that he believes–worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing, i.e., see that he meets with no personal abuse or loss of property for his religious opinions. Instead of discouraging him with proscriptions, fines, confiscation or death, let him be encouraged, as a free man, to bring forth his arguments and maintain his points with all boldness; then if his doctrine is false it will be confuted, and if it is true (though ever so novel) let others credit it. When every man has this liberty what can he wish for more? A liberal man asks for nothing more of government.”
That is what I believe, but now we have entered a perilous time when Trump’s Christian supporters are voicing their support for policies that allow them to discriminate against others solely because of their religious beliefs, and less freedom for those who do not. Unfortunately, Trump and his administration are implementing policies on a daily basis that do discriminate based on religion. He knows that by tossing these crumbs to conservative Christians that they will excuse every one of his unethical, and authoritarian policies. Candidate Trump was right about them:
“You know what else they say about my people? The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible.”
The President has encouraged violence against opponents, called journalists and others enemies of the people, and stoked the fires of racism and anti-semitism by refusing to categorically condemn Nazis and White Supremacists. Instead he does all that he can to embolden them. In the wake of the mid-terms more and more of these heavily armed and militant groups are threatening violence against those who oppose the President.
Thus I have to make a stand, and it has already cost me. A parishioner at my chapel tried to have me tried by Court Martial last summer for opposing Trump policies based on scripture and the Christian tradition. I will not back down.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”
Likewise, I won’t stop sounding the alarm when I see Trump’s Christian cult arsonists trying to burn the foundation of the country to the ground.
Filed under christian life, civil rights, ethics, faith, News and current events, Political Commentary
Tagged as christian dominionism, conservative christians, democratic party, dietrich bonhoeffer, donald trump supporters, Ed Young, emperor constantine, evangelicals, first amendment, gary north, george truett, john leland, Political Commentary, president donald trump, religious liberty, republican party
October 7, 2018 · 19:33
“The Most Appalling Site Imaginable” George Patton’s Experience at the Ohrdorf Subcamp of Buchenwald
In our day there are fewer and fewer people who lived through or personal saw or documented the evils of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Likewise, there are a host of Holocaust deniers who produce a plethora of pseudo-scholarly articles claiming to be legitimate historians. Even more frighteningly the rise of apologists for the Nazi regime including those who are active members of allegedly conservative parties in the United States and the European Union is beginning to influence politics. The abject racism, rejection of anyone considered racially inferior, and quite often their unhidden anti-Semitism show that what lies in the dark heart of Naziism is not dead and in fact is rising.
In the United States its rise is being fueled and legitimized by the Presidency of Donald Trump who has referred to American Nazis and White Supremacists as “very good people” after one of their protests where an anti-Nazi demonstrator was murdered and others brutally attacked. In the same time frame a good number of Republican candidates have exposed themselves as White Supremacists and actual Nazis while running for office. A host of new-Nazi and White supremacist organizations openly meet and flood the internet with their race hatred.
The fact is that anyone who denies the Holocaust, attempts to minimize it, or advocates the same policies of race hatred and violence against political, religious, or other opponents is no better than the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Likewise, those who stand by and say nothing are worse. As Yehuda Bauer wrote:
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
The good thing is that there were people who took the time to record what they saw in the Nazi Concentration Camps and exposed those deeds to the world in such a way that only perverted and evil people could brazenly deny those facts.
One of the most detailed descriptions of a liberated Concentration Camp was written by General George Patton in his memoirs entitled War as I Knew It.
… we drove to Ohrdruf and visited the first horror camp any of us had ever seen. It was the most appalling sight imaginable.
A man who said he was one of the former inmates acted as impresario and showed us first the gallows, where men were hanged for attempting to escape. The drop board was about two feet from the ground, and the cord used was piano wire which had an adjustment so that when the man dropped, his toes would just reach the ground and it would take about fifteen minutes for him to choke to death, since the fall was not sufficient to break his neck. The next two men to die had to kick the board out from under him. It was stated by some of the Germans present that the generals who were executed after the Hitler bomb incident were hanged in this manner.
Our guide then took us to the whipping table, which was about the height of the average man’s crotch. The feet were placed in stocks on the ground and the man was pulled over the table, which was slightly hollowed, and held by two guards, while he was beaten across the back and loins. The stick which they said had been used, and which had some blood on it, was bigger than the handle of a pick.
Our guide claimed that he himself had received twenty-five blows with this tool. It later developed that he was not a prisoner at all, but one of the executioners. General Eisenhower must have suspected it, because he asked the man very pointedly how he could be so fat. He was found dead next morning, killed by some of the inmates.
Just beyond the whipping table there was a pile of forty bodies, more or less naked. All of these had been shot in the back of the head at short range, and the blood was still cooling on the ground.
In a shed near-by was a pile of forty completely naked bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime – not, apparently, for the purpose of destroying them, but to reduce the smell. As a reducer of smell, lime is a very inefficient medium.
The total capacity of the shed looked to me to be about two hundred bodies. It was stated that bodies were left until the shed was full and then they were taken out and buried. The inmates said some three thousand people had been buried from this shed since January 1, 1945.
When our troops began to draw near, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crimes. They therefore used the inmates to exhume the recently buried bodies and to build a sort of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation. The bodies were piled on this and they attempted to burn them. The attempt was a bad failure. Actually, one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue. In the pit itself were arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water which partially filled it.
General Walker and General Middleton had wisely decided to have as many soldiers as possible visit the scene. This gave me the idea of having the inhabitants themselves visit the camp. I suggested this to Walker, and found that he had already had the mayor and his wife take a look at it. On going home those two committed suicide. We later used the same system in having the inhabitants of Weimar go through the even larger slave camp (Buchenwald) north of that town. (Excerpted for G. Patton War as I Knew It)
Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote after seeing the camp:
The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
Eisenhower was so moved that he ordered that the best reporters and newsmen come and record what he had seen. He did not want the horrors to be denied by history. He wrote:
I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.
The fact is that as much as we want to pretend that what happened a Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Soribor, Belzec, and Treblinka are images from history that cannot happen again, however, they are an ever present reality and they cannot be ignored. Sadly, I cannot help but to imagine that this can and will happen again in my lifetime.
I go to a quote from one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation called The Drumhead uttered by Jean Luc Picard:
We think we’ve come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches it’s all ancient history. Then – before you can blink an eye – suddenly it threatens to start all over again.
That is our reality. There are people, even neighbors and those that we think are friends who would be perpetrators or bystanders when those that transgress the way of Trump are take us from our homes and families because of our beliefs. I would love to be wrong about this, but I am a historian and a theologian and I know the human condition far too well to sit back and remain silent, no matter what the cost.
I had a Facebook exchange with a friend who is a retired Navy Chaplain. He is very much a Trump supporter and apologist. He is very happy about Justice Kavanaugh being in the Supreme Court. The stories of the victims and their claims did not matter to him. Despite that I do not believe that he is a bad man or an evil person. I simply believe that like Martin Niemöller that he has made a bad choice in the man and party that he currently supports and that he will eventually regret it. I could be wrong, he might not turn out to be a Niemöller, but a Reichsbishof Müller. Sincerely hope that he does not become the latter.
I keep quoting historian Timothy Snyder, but he was all too correct when he wrote these words less than two years ago:
If you don’t believe me read the words of the President, his closest supporters, the prominent political preachers of the Christian Right, and any number of Trump leaning columnists, pundits, and politicians. There are some who are so far gone that they will accuse any opponent of being disloyal, not the the Constitution or the law but to President Trump. One of those people tried to get my commanding officer to have me tried by Court Martial for a sermon in which he lied about what I said. I had to spend my money to hire a lawyer to defend me from the false charges and have them dismissed during the preliminary investigation.
Trust me, I know what resistance will mean if this President and his cult like followers are not stopped. Our fate will be worse than that of Nazi Germany because we should have known better. We should have learned from Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. We should have learned fro Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, we should have learned from the Nuremberg trials, but we have not.
For the next four months, and maybe more should the Democrats fail to gain a majority in the House or Senate, President Trump will have all the branches of the Federal government in his power. With the laws already enacted in the Patriot Act and numerous executive orders there is little to stop a President who has no respect for the law or the Constitution from declaring full emergency powers should any war, terrorist act, or natural disaster be declared.
So with all of that happy commentary I will leave you until tomorrow when, God willing, I will be back in the United States.
Until then have a good night, and please, never forget.
Filed under civil rights, ethics, faith, History, holocaust, leadership, News and current events, Political Commentary
Tagged as adolf hitler, dietrich bonhoeffer, dwight eisenhower, George Patton, Holocaust, martin niemoller, president donald trump, resistance, timothy snyder
The Price of Resistance: Remembering the Men of Operation Valkyrie
Three days ago in Berlin I visits the memorial to the men of the German resistance movement who attempted to remove Hitler from power a number of times, and then resorted to attempted assassination. Their final attempt occurred on July 20th 1944. The building from which they attempted to seize power was the headquarters of the German Army, the Oberkommando des Heeres, located on Bendlerstraße.
I am not going to retell the story of those men. I have written about the event and some of the men a number of times. Among them at the headquarters were Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who had planted the bomb, General Ludwig Beck, General Friedrich Olbricht, Lieutenant Colonel Merz von Quirnheim, and Stauffenberg’s aide, Lieutenant Werner Von Haeften. All were captured by Wehrmacht Guard forces commanded by Major Remer when it was clear that Hitler was still alive.
Beck was given the opportunity to kill himself but failed and was shot where he lay while Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Quirnheim, and Haeften were tried by a drumhead Court convened by General Friedrich Fromm and executed in the square in the middle of the complex. Fromm had known about the plot but had refused to commit himself to it. When it was clear that Hitler was alive he overcompensated and had them executed to cover up his involvement. This did not save him, he was arrested soon after, tried by the Volksgericht headed by Roland Freisler, and executed in 1945.
I stood in that square where they were executed and I was moved. They paid paid the ultimate price for their act of resistance and I wonder if Americans who claim to be resisters would be willing to pay that price if that was the only remaining option.
Other plotters not in Berlin or at the Bendlerstrasse complex were either arrested and later executed, or committed suicide. One of those men, General Henning von Tresckow said the following shortly before his death:
The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in few hours’ time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if just ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope that for our sake God will not destroy Germany. None of us can bewail his own death; those who consented to join our circle put on the robe of Nessus. A human being’s moral integrity begins when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.
In the United States we still have the option of elections and for the moment most of our institutions are still holding out against a lawless administration. How long that will remain I do not know. Every day that I wake up without discovering that the United States has not experienced its Reichstag Fire moment I am relieved and say a prayer of thanks; but I worry, especially after a chapel member and strong supporter of President Trump tried to get me tried by Court Martial for a sermon in my chapel. I had to hire a lawyer to fight the charges during the preliminary investigation.
Thankfully, I was exonerated and did not have to face a trial because what the man had said was a bold faced lie. Despite that, the comments of some people who said I did not do what I was accused of doing were still quite harrowing in how they portrayed me and my beliefs. It was as if I was a caricature of a raving leftist. The fact is that I do not blindly follow any political party line. I have been a military officer and chaplain for almost all of my adult life, I have served under six Presidents and there are none who I agreed with on every issue, but my oath is to the Constitution, not any President or party despite my current party affiliation.
On some issues I am very liberal or progressive, and others quite conservative, but in each case I try my best to base those positions with my Christian faith, as well as my belief in the great proposition of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal…” and my belief that Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said in the Gettysburg Address “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
However, history shows that when authoritarian leaders seize power that most people, even opponents find a way to make peace with the regime. This is a fair question to ask of anyone.
A hashtag, tweet, or Facebook like or dislike does not define integrity or strength of character, it is what they do in the crisis when the personal costs are factored in. I have already experienced that to a degree, and I know what I will do because I have already had to do it. Yet most people have not hit that point, and honestly I pray that they never do.
Many of the men who acted on July 20th 1944 did so knowing that if they failed in their attempt that they would die and that their families too would be condemned. Of course they no longer had the opportunity that Americans today have to vote or to speak out publicly. They and their country had sacrificed that when sat silently when Hitler dismantled the Republic and the opposition parties, with the exception of the Social Democrats, voted themselves out of existence and allowed Hitler to rule as a dictator. Likewise, many Social Democrats and Communists converted to the NDSAP or minded their own business and looked the other way after the Nazis seized power. The same was true of most German Conservatives.
The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a part of the plot, but who had been arrested earlier through his association with leaders of the resistance in the German military intelligence service, wrote:
The men of the German resistance tried and failed more than once to stop Hitler. They were not perfect men, but in the end they made a stand that they knew would cost them, their family members, and their friends dearly.
I wonder if we would have the courage to do it should the institutions of the Republic fail and Trump or any other would be authoritarian leader of any party gain absolute power. By and large the leaders of the GOP, even those who fought his nomination and warned about the danger he posed, have already surrendered to Trump. The most notable is Senator Lindsey Graham.
Stauffenberg was right about men like Graham and the GOP leadership when he made this observation about most German military leaders and government officials:
“You cannot expect people who have broken their spine once or twice to stand up straight when a new decision has to be made.”
Likewise I wonder about the many people that claim to be resisters when the cost is still relatively low. Will they stand when their social or economic status, career, family, or lives are in danger? As I said earlier it is a fair question. People are people no matter what and history too often shows that even resisters often find ways to adjust to authoritarian governments.
Tresckow said:
It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?
There are many lessons to be learned in this. Will we learn them?
Filed under christian life, ethics, faith, History, Loose thoughts and musings, nazi germany, Political Commentary, world war two in europe
Tagged as adolf hitler, Bendlerstraße, Claus Von Stauffenberg, dietrich bonhoeffer, Friedrich Olbrict, henning von tresckow, ludwig beck, mertz von quirnheim, nazi germany, operation valkyrie, resistance
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Tag Archives: f4u corsair
January 6, 2019 · 01:49
Wings of Gold: U.S. Navy Carrier Aircraft 1941-1945
F4F-4 Wildcat of VF-41 in 1942
In 1941 with war raging in Europe and with the Japanese continuing their war in China and occupying French Indo-China the United States rushed to build up its Naval Air Arm and the Arm Air Corps. New models of aircraft of all types were being rushed into production to replace aircraft already known to be obsolescent. The Navy brought aircraft already accepted into full production even as it planned more advanced models. The events in Europe and Asia demonstrated that new fighter designs were needed quickly.
As 1940 dawned the standard fighter aircraft found on U.S. Navy carriers were the F2-A Brewster Buffalo, the Grumman F-3F biplane. In February 1940 the Navy accepted its first F4F-3 Wildcat which in an earlier for had been rejected in favor of the Brewster Buffalo. The new Grumman fighter was powered by a 1200 hp Pratt & Whitney R-1830-76 double row radial engine, mounted 4 .50 cal. Machine guns and was heavily armored. It had a maximum speed of 331 mph range of 845 miles and ceiling of 39500 feet. This would serve it and its pilots well as they aircraft was incredibly tough, often amazing experienced Japanese pilots in their A6M2 Zeros in their ability to suffer heavy damage and remain in the air. The plucky Wildcat would become the main line of defense in the Pacific against the advancing Japanese Imperial Navy in the months following Pearl Harbor.
The early F4F-3s were superseded by the F4F-4 model which incorporated folding wings, additional armor and an extra two machine guns. This decreased its maximum speed to 320 mph, rate of climb and ceiling but nonetheless the aircraft gave a good account of itself in Navy and Marine Corps service. F4F-3’s and F4F-4s served in the British Royal Navy where it was called the Martlet until the end of the war. When Grumman closed out F4F production in 1943 to concentrate on its replacement the F6F Hellcat production was continued by General Motors and Eastern Aircraft as the FM1 and FM2 Wildcat. The FM1 was identical to the F4F-4 but armament was reduced to 4 machine guns and bomb racks for two 250 lb bombs or depth charges were added. The FM2 was based on an updated version of the F4F and had a more powerful engine as well as a higher tail assembly to account for the increased torque of the engine. These aircraft served aboard the tiny Escort Carriers and performed valiantly, especially in the Battle off Samar during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A total of 7860 Wildcats of all varieties were built. They accounted for 1327 enemy aircraft shot down with the loss of only 191 Wildcats.
Aces Capt Joe Foss USMC and CAPT David McConnell USN both Medal of Honor Winners and CDR Jimmy Thatch (below)
The top aces who flew the Wildcat were all Marines, CAPT Joe Foss (26 victories) MAJ John Lucian Smith (19 victories) and MAJ Marion Carl (16 victories in the F4F and 2 in the F4U Corsair). Foss and Smith both won the Medal of Honor. Foss would go on to become Governor of South Dakota and the first Commissioner of the American Football League in 1959. Smith retired as a Colonel in 1960 and Carl as a Major General. Other distinguished F4F aces included LT Butch O’Hare, the first U.S. Navy ace and Medal of Honor winner and LCDR Jimmy Thatch who developed the highly successful “Thatch Weave” which enabled the U.S.pilots whose machines were slower and less maneuverable than the speedy and nimble Zeros to achieve good success against their Japanese foe. Thatch retired as an Admiral in 1967. O’Hare rose to become commander of the Enterprise Air Group and was killed in action in November 1943. Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is named for this brave aviator.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat took over front line fighter duties on the Fleet Carriers from the Wildcat in early 1943 and established itself as the dominant fighter in the Pacific Theater of Operations. Although it had a resemblance to the F4F the F6F was a totally new design built on combat experience against the Japanese. The aircraft was built around the powerful Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine which produced 2000 hp. The Hellcat mounted six .50 caliber machine guns and had a rate of climb of 3500 feet per minute and a 37300 ft operational ceiling.
Faster than the Zero and other Japanese fighters and piloted by more experienced pilots the Hellcats took a brutal toll of Japanese aircraft. They accounted for more Japanese aircraft kills than any other with 5163 confirmed kills with a loss of 270 aircraft an overall 19:1 kill ratio. They were piloted by 305 Navy and Marine Corps aces including Meal of Honor winner Captain David McConnell the Navy’s Ace of Aces, and highest surviving United States ace of the war that scored all 34 of his victories in the Hellcat. The greatest achievement of the Hellcats were when they swept the rebuilt Japanese Naval Air Arm from the skies in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. By November 1945 12275 Hellcats had been built with 1263 going to the British Royal Navy. After the war the Hellcat was replaced by the F8F Bearcat as the primary fighter and served in a night fighter and trainer role until the 1950s. The French Navy used the Hellcat in to provide heroic close air support to beleaguered French Soldiers in Indochina.
USMC F4U-4 Corsair providing close air support
Flying alongside the F6F was the Vaught F4U Corsair. The Corsair first flew in 1940 and the Navy was slow to adopt it due to difficulties in carrier operations and negative reviews of Navy pilots. However Marine Corps aviators flying the Corsair had great success and legendary aviators like MAJ Gregory “Pappy” Boyington and VMF-214 the Black Sheep. The Navy would adopt the aircraft later in the war as the Corsair’s carrier operation deficiencies were remedied, but its real success was a land based aircraft operated by the Marines. Likewise the first squadrons to operate the aircraft successfully from carriers were the Marine Corps VMF-124 and VMF-213.
Early F4U-1
The Corsair mounted the same Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine as the F6F but had a highly streamlined gull wing design as well as a turbo-charger which allowed it a top speed of 425 mph. Later models such as the F4U-4 had a top speed of 445 mph. The F4F was armed with six .50 cal machine guns as well as rockets and a bomb load of 2000 pounds and the F4U-4 could carry 4000 pounds of ordnance.
Less than 10000 of the over 64000 combat sorties flown by F4Us were flown from carriers, the vast bulk of the sorties coming from land based Marine Corps squadrons. The Corsair was often used as a fighter bomber where its capabilities to drop sizable amounts of ordinance including rockets, bombs and the nearly developed Napalm in a close air support role cemented the importance of Marine Air for future generations. They were beloved by the Marine Corps and U.S. Army infantrymen in their brutal battles with the Japanese on many hellish island battlefields. Corsairs accounted for 2140 confirmed kills during the war against a combat loss of 189 aircraft. The aircraft remained in production until 1952 with 12571 aircraft of all variants being built. Many Japanese pilots considered the Corsair to be the best fighter of the war.
During the war many Corsairs served in the British Royal Navy and Royal New Zealand Air Force with good success, and after the war the French Navy had success with them in a close air support role in Indochina and Algeria. Following the war the Corsair remained in service for many years in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as well as the French Navy and other smaller navies and air forces until the 1960s.
The Douglas SBD Dive Bomber was arguably the most effective Naval dive bomber of World War II, and possibly the best single engine dive bomber of all time. Other aircraft may have been faster or carried a larger bomb load, but the SBD, which served at a time when the U.S. Navy did not have air superiority and battled seasoned Japanese pilots and aircrews, achieved remarkable results,
The SBD was developed from the Northrop BT-2, after Douglas took over Northrop. The first model of the Dauntless, the SBD-1 began operations with the U.S. Marine Corps In 1940, the SBD-2 with the U.S. Navy in 1941. The SBD-3 which included more armor for the crew, and self sealing fuel tanks began entering service in late 1941.
The SBD combined a heavy bomb load, excellent bombing optics, great defensive armament, rugged construction, excellent handling characteristics and maneuverability, and superb dive bombing capabilities. It became the workhorse of the U.S. Navy between 1941 and 1944, flying about 25% of all missions flown from Navy carriers during that time. SBDs sank or damaged six Japanese Aircraft carriers, one Japanese and one French battleship, 14 cruisers, 6 destroyers, and many other ships including transports and submarines. It was the Dauntless which turn the tide of the Pacific war when at Midway they sank the Japanese aircraft carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu and the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The SBD also accounted for more enemy aircraft in aerial combat than were lost to enemy aircraft, an amazing accomplishment by any bomber of any type.
In late 1944 after the Battle Of the Philippine Sea the Dauntless was phased out of U.S. Navy squadrons by the SB2C Helldiver. Though the Helldiver was bigger, faster, and carried a higher bomb load, many pilots preferred the Dauntless due to its superior handling characteristics, especially at low speeds, essential to landing on a carrier. It is hard to believe that the United States would have prevailed in 1942 without the Dauntless.
It was used in combat by other allies, a variant, the A-24 Banshee was built for the U.S. Army Air Force. The French operates it from the carrier Arromanches in Indochina until 1949.
SBD Dauntless Dive Bomber above and at Midway below
TBF Avenger above and below
The TBF Avenger torpedo bomber was developed as a replacement for the TBD Devastator by in 1940 by Leroy Grumman of Grumman aircraft. Production began in 1941 and the first combat by the aircraft was at the Battle of Midway. During that battle, 6 aircraft from VT-6, based at Midway while the rest of the squadron flying TBD Devastators from the USS Hornet attacked the Japanese carrier strike force. All of the TBD were shot down, as well as 5 of the 6 TBFs.
Despite the inauspicious start the TBFs became one of the deadliest aircraft of the Second World War. They helped sink the largest Battleships ever constructed, the Japanese Musashi and Yamato, as well as many other warships and auxiliaries. They conducted bombing missions of land targets, and operated from Escort Carriers in Anti-Submarine Warfare operations and supporting invasions and shore operations. The Avenger was particularly effective in the ASW role and was credited with sinking about 30 German U-Boats and Japanese submarines during the war.
The TBF was the largest single engine aircraft of the war, only the P-47 Thunderbolt was anywhere close to its size. Despite this the TBF was able to operate from the smallest aircraft carriers. Powered by a 1900 HP Wright R-2600-20 Twin Cyclone 14 Cylinder radial engine it could cruise at over 30,000 feet at a top speed of 275 MPH while carrying 2,000 pounds of bombs or a Mark 13 Aerial Torpedo. They also carried racks for 5″ High Velocity Aircraft Rockets and depth charges.
After the war it served in a variety of roles in the U.S. Navy, Royal Navy, Canadian Navy, French Navy, and other militaries until the 1960s. In peacetime it was used for many years as a fire fighting aircraft in the United States and Canada.
LTjg. George H. W. Bush in the cockpit of his Avenger
The most famous man to pilot a TBF/TBM was LTjg George H. W. Bush, later the President of the United States whose aircraft was shot down over Chuchi Jima In 1944.
SB2C Helldiver above and in French Service below
The replacement for the Dauntless was the SB2C Curtiss Helldiver. The Helldiver was bigger and faster than the Dauntless but for its size it was underpowered, and had a shorter range that the beloved Dauntless. The Helldiver had very poor performance in flight, had unreliable electrical and hydraulic systems and frequently was poorly manufactured. The defects made it less than popular among the aircrews which had previously flown the Dauntless who came to call it the Beast. The problems would lead to a Congressional investigation headed by Senator Harry Truman. During the hearings Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air, Artemis Gates said: “When we needed the SB2C Helldiver neither we nor it was ready.”
The British Royal Navy and Australian Air Force evaluated the Helldiver and rejected it for service, cancelling their orders for it.
Despite the many flaws of the aircraft the superbly trained pilots and air crews made the most of it, sinking hundreds of Japanese ships and watercraft. From late 1944 until the end of the war it established a good combat record, though it never had to fight against the well trained Japanese pilots that the Dauntless aircrews had to face.
However, the Navy, and most air forces were moving away from the dive bomber as an attack aircraft. The U. S. Navy found that its F6F Hellcats, and F4U Corsairs could carry as heavy as payload in rockets and bombs as the Helldiver though the ordnance decreased their range. But even so the fighters were far better able to defend themselves against enemy fighter aircraft.
The aircraft served in the U. S. Navy and Naval Reserve until 1950. It also served in Greece where it was used in counter-insurgency (COIN) missions during the Greek Civil War, and by the French Navy during the Indochina campaign, including providing closer air support to French troops at Dien Bien Phu. The Italian Air Force was the last to operate the Helldiver, retiring it in 1959.
With the advent of rockets the dive bomber was replaced by single seat fighters and attack aircraft. The Helldiver was the last purpose built dive bomber. In the U.S. the Hellcat, Corsair, the postwar F8F Bearcat, the P-51 Mustang, and the P-47 Thunderbolt took over ground attack missions. The A4D Skyraider was designed as a ground attack aircraft, and eventually jet powered fighter-bombers would enter service.
These amazing aircraft and the men that flew them established a tradition of excellence that the Naval Aviators of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps continue today.
Padre Steve
Filed under aircraft, History, Loose thoughts and musings, Military, US Navy, World War II at Sea, world war two in the pacific
Tagged as battle of coral sea, battle of midway, battle of the philippine sea, Curtiss Aircraft, David McConnell, dien bien phu, f4f wildcat, f4u corsair, f6f hellcat, Greek Civil War, Grumman aircraft, harry truman, Joe Foss, John Thatch, Leroy Grumman, Mk 13 Aerial Torpedo, Musashi, naval aviation, naval battle of guadalcanal, sb2c helldiver, SBD Dauntless, TBD Devastator, tbf avenger, US Navy, world war ii, Yamato
Marine Aviators at Guadalcanal: The Sacrifice of VMF-221 and VMSB-241
A Brewster Buffalo of VMF-221
Today on June 5th I am posting several articles on the Battle of Midway which was fought between June 4th and June 6th 1942. It was the turning point of the World War Two in the Pacific.
One of the more overlooked aspects of the Battle of Midway are the sacrifices of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-221 on the morning of June 4th 1942 and Marine Bombing Squadron VMSB-241 that morning and on June 5th.
The Marine aviators of VMF-221 flew a mixture of 21 obsolescent Brewster F2A-3 Buffalos and 7 newer Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats. On the morning of June 4th they engaged a vastly superior force of Japanese Navy aircraft as the Japanese squadrons vectored toward Midway and its air station to begin softening it up for the planned invasion.
Led by Major Floyd Parks the squadron had arrived at Midway on Christmas day 1941 being delivered by the USS Saratoga after the aborted attempt to relieve Wake Island. The squadron along with Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 241 (VMSB 241) formed Marine Air Group 22. The squadron that Parks brought with him was comprised of just 14 aircraft, all F2A-3’s. The squadron was augmented by 7 more F2A-3s and 7 of the more advanced F4F-3 Wildcats before the battle. The fighter pilots of VMF-221 scored their first victory of the war shooting down a Japanese Kawanishi H8K2 “Emily” flying boat.
F2F-3 Brewster Buffalo
When the Japanese First Carrier Striking Group was spotted in the wee hours of June 4th the Marines and other Navy and Army Air Force aircrews aboard Midway scrambled to meet them. The 18 SBD-2 Dauntless’ and 12 Vought SB2-U3 Vindicator dive bombers of VMSB-241 along with the 6 new TBF Avengers belonging to Torpedo Squadron Eight, 4 Army Air Corps B-26 Marauders and 15 B-17 Flying Fortresses flew out to attack the Japanese carriers. Meanwhile the fighters of VMF-221 rose to intercept the 108 Japanese aircraft heading toward Midway. The 72 strike aircraft, 36 Aichi 99 Val Dive Bombers and 36 Nakajima B5N Torpedo/ High Level Bombers were protected by 36 AM6-2 Zeros. The Japanese Zeros thoroughly outclassed their Marine opponents in speed, maneuverability and in the combat experience of their pilots.
The Marines audaciously attacked the far superior Japanese force, throwing themselves against the Japanese phalanx with unmatched courage. Despite their courage the Marine fighters were decimated by the Japanese Zeros. The Marines shot down 4 Val dive bombers and at least three Zeros but lost 13 Buffalos and 3 Wildcats during the battle. Of the surviving aircraft only three Buffalos and three Wildcats were in commission at the end of the day. Among the casualties killed was Major Parks. Of the surviving pilots of VMF-221, two became “Aces” during the war. Lieutenant Charles M. Kunz would later fly in VMF-224, adding six victories to end the war with 8 victories. Capt. Marion E. Carl would later fly in VMF-223 and was credited with 18.5 Japanese aircraft shot down. Other pilots like Second Lieutenant Clayton M. Canfield shot down two additional aircraft while flying with VMF-223, while Second Lieutenant Walter W. Swansberger won the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal.
The last remaining Marine fighter pilot of VMF-221 from the battle of Midway, Williams Brooks died in January 2010 and was buried with full military honors in Bellview , Nebraska. Brooks in his after action report described his part in the battle:
VMF-221 was composed of the following aircraft and pilots.
FIRST DIVISION (F2A-3)
Plane # Bu.No. Pilot Status
MF-1 01518 Maj. Floyd B. Parks USMC MIA
MF-2 01548 2nd Lt. Eugene P. Madole USMCR MIA
MF-3 01525 Capt. John R. Alvord USMC MIA
MF-4 01537 2nd Lt. John M. Butler USMCR MIA
MF-5 01569 2nd Lt. David W. Pinkerton Jr. USMCR MIA
MF-6 01552 2nd Lt. Charles S. Hughes USMCR, Did not engage, turned back due to Engine problems
SECOND DIVISION (F2A-3)
MF-7 01552 Capt. Daniel J. Hennessey USMC MIA
MF-8 01541 2nd Lt. Ellwood Q. Lindsay USMCR MIA
MF-9 01524 Capt. Herbert T. Merrill USMC Bailed out WIA
MF-10 01528 Capt. Herbert T. Merrill USMC MIA
MF-11 01568 Capt. Phillip R. White USMC Survived
MF-12 01542 2nd Lt. John D. Lucas USMCR MIA
THIRD DIVISION (F2A-3)
Plane# Bu.No. Pilot Status
MF-13 01562 Capt. Kirk Armistead USMC Survived
MF-14 01563 2nd Lt. William B. Sandoval USMCR MIA
MF-15 01553 Capt. William C. Humberd USMC Survived
MF-16 01523 2nd Lt. Williams V. Brooks USMCR WIA
MF-17 01521 2nd Lt. Charles M .Kunz USMCR WIA
MF-18 01559 2nd Lt. Martin E. Mahannah USMC KIA (his body washed up later)
23 (F4F-3) 3989 2nd Lt. Walter W. Swansberger USMCR Survived
FOURTH DIVISION (F2A-3)
MF-19 01520 Capt. Robert E. Curtin USMC MIA
MF-20 01550 2nd Lt. Darrell D. Irwin USMCR Survived
FIFTH DIVISION (F4F-3)
22 4008 Capt. John F. Carey USMC WIA
24 4000 Capt. Marion E. Carl USMC Survived
25 3997 2Lt. Clayton M. Canfield USMCR Survived
26 4006 Capt. Francis P. McCarthy USMC MIA
27 2532 2nd Lt. Roy A. Corry USMC Survived
28 1864 2nd Lt.Hyde Phillips USMCR Did not engage, mechanical problems
SB2-U2 Vindicator of VMSB 241 at Midway
Their bomber counterparts of VMSB 241 attacked the Japanese task force on the morning of June 4th and scored no hits while losing 8 aircraft. The survivors were again in action later in the day as well as the following day where they helped sink the Japanese Heavy Cruiser Mikuma with with Captain Richard Fleming diving his mortally wounded Vindicator into the cruiser’s number four 8” gun turret.
The Mikuma Sinking after being bombed by Marine and Navy Dive Bombers – the wreck of Major Henderson’s Vindicator is atop the number four turret
While the Marines’ actions are not as well known or as successful as those of their Navy counterparts they were brave. The inexperienced Marine fighter pilots had to engage some of the most experienced pilots flying superior machines. The bomber crews had little to no experience before being thrown into combat. As we remember the sacrifices made by the men of Midway let us not forget the gallant men of VMF-221 and VSMB-241.
Filed under History, leadership, US Army Air Corps, US Marine Corps, World War II at Sea, world war two in the pacific
Tagged as 2nd lt charles kunz usmc, 2nd lt clayton canfield usmcr, 2nd lt walter swansberger, 2nd lt williams brooks usmcr, 2nd Lt. Charles S. Hughes USMCR, 2nd Lt. Darrell D. Irwin USMCR, 2nd Lt. David W. Pinkerton Jr. USMCR, 2nd Lt. Ellwood Q. Lindsay USMCR, 2nd Lt. Eugene P. Madole USMCR, 2nd Lt. John D. Lucas USMCR, 2nd Lt. John M. Butler USMCR, 2nd Lt. Martin E. Mahannah USMC, 2nd Lt. Roy A. Corry USMC, 2nd Lt. William B. Sandoval USMCR, 2nd Lt.Hyde Phillips USMCR, aichi 99 val, b-17 flying fortress, b-26 marauder, battle of midway, brewster f2a buffalo, capt marion carl usmc, Capt. Daniel J. Hennessey USMC, Capt. Francis P. McCarthy USMC, Capt. Herbert T. Merrill USMC, Capt. John F. Carey USMC, Capt. John R. Alvord USMC, Capt. Kirk Armistead USMC, Capt. Phillip R. White USMC, Capt. Robert E. Curtin USMC, Capt. William C. Humberd USMC, f4f wildcat, f4u corsair, ijn mikuma, Kawanishi H8K2 “Emily”, major floyd parks, marine air group 22, Mitsubishi am6-2 zero, nakajima bn2 kate, sb2-u3 vindicator, SBD Dauntless, torpedo 8, vmf-221, vsmb 241
Unlikely and Incredible: Victory at Midway
Friends of Padre Steve’s World
As I mentioned that I would be writing about a number of watershed events this week. Today is the 74th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Midway. As a Navy officer and having grown up in a Navy family, this battle is still something that I find fascinating. It was a battle that could have easily been lost, and with it the war in the Pacific significantly lengthened, and which had the Japanese won, forced a change in strategy that might have allowed Hitler to strengthen his grip on Europe and maybe even defeat the Soviet Union.
It was a watershed event because it was the first real defeat that the Japanese Imperial Navy sustained in the war, and it ensured that the Japanese would not be able to win the war, except by exhausting the United States.
So it still remains important even today. If you are interested in books about Midway I recommend Walter Lord’s classic “Incredible Victory” and Gordon Prange’s “Miracle at Midway.
United States Navy codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes in 1941, and in May the Navy code breakers at Pearl Harbor discovered Yamamoto’s plan to have the Imperial Navy attack Midway Island and the Aleutian Islands. Knowing the Japanese were coming, and that the occupation of Midway by Japanese forces would give them an operational base less than 1000 miles from Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet committed the bulk of his naval power, the carriers USS Enterprise CV-6, USS Yorktown CV-5 and USS Hornet CV-8 and their 8 escorting cruisers and 15 destroyers to defend Midway. This force of 26 ships with 233 aircraft embarked to defend Midway while a force of smaller force 5 cruisers and 4 destroyers was dispatched to cover the Aleutians. The forces on the ground at Midway had a mixed Marine, Navy and Army air group of 115 aircraft which included many obsolete aircraft, 32 PBY Catalina Flying Boats and 83 fighters, dive bombers, torpedo planes and Army Air Force bombers piloted by a host of inexperienced but resolute airmen with which to defend itself. It also had a ground force of U.S. Marines, should the Japanese actually land on the island.
he TBD which first flew in 1935 entered service in 1937 and was possibly the most modern naval aircraft in the world when it entered service. It was a revolutionary aircraft. It was the first monoplane widely used on carriers and was first all-metal naval aircraft. It was the first naval aircraft with a totally enclosed cockpit, the first with hydraulic powered folding wings. The TBD had crew of three and had a maximum speed of 206 miles an hour and carried a torpedo or up to 1500 pounds of bombs (3 x 500) or a 1000 pound bomb. 129 were built and served in all pre-war torpedo bombing squadrons based aboard the Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet with a limited number embarked aboard Wasp.
VB-3 under LCDR Max Leslie from the Yorktown stuck the Soryu with 17 aircraft, however only 13 of the aircraft had bombs due to an electronic arming device malfunction on 4 of the aircraft, including that of Commander Leslie. Despite this Leslie led the squadron as it dove on the Soryu at 1025 hitting that ship with 3 and maybe as many as 5 bombs. Soryu like her companions burst into flames as the ready aircraft and ordnance exploded about her deck. She was ordered abandoned at 1055 and would sink at 1915 taking 718 of her crew with her. A few hours later Hiryu, which had succeeded in launching strikes that seriously damaged Yorktown met the fate of her sisters. Yorktown would be sunk by a Japanese submarine, along with the destroyer Hamman a few days later as her crew attempted to get her to Pearl Harbor. In five pivotal minutes the course of the war in the Pacific was changed.
Tagged as 2nd lt charles kunz usmc, 2nd lt clayton canfield usmcr, 2nd lt walter swansberger, 2nd lt williams brooks usmcr, 2nd Lt. Charles S. Hughes USMCR, 2nd Lt. Darrell D. Irwin USMCR, 2nd Lt. David W. Pinkerton Jr. USMCR, 2nd Lt. Ellwood Q. Lindsay USMCR, 2nd Lt. Eugene P. Madole USMCR, 2nd Lt. John D. Lucas USMCR, 2nd Lt. John M. Butler USMCR, 2nd Lt. Martin E. Mahannah USMC, 2nd Lt. Roy A. Corry USMC, 2nd Lt. William B. Sandoval USMCR, 2nd Lt.Hyde Phillips USMCR, admiral chester nimitz, admiral chuichi nagumo, admiral frank fletcher, admiral matome ugaki, admiral moshiro hosogaya, admiral nobutake kondo, admiral raymond spruance, admiral shiro takasu, admiral takeo kurita, admiral yamamoto, aichi 99 val, alfred lord tennyson, all glory is fleeting, attu, b-17 flying fortress, b-26 marauder, battle of coral sea, battle of java sea, battle of midway, battle of sunda strait, battle of surigao strait, battle of the coral sea, brewster f2a buffalo, capt marion carl usmc, Capt. Daniel J. Hennessey USMC, Capt. Francis P. McCarthy USMC, Capt. Herbert T. Merrill USMC, Capt. John F. Carey USMC, Capt. John R. Alvord USMC, Capt. Kirk Armistead USMC, Capt. Phillip R. White USMC, Capt. Robert E. Curtin USMC, Capt. William C. Humberd USMC, captain edwin layton, captain marshall tyler usmc, captain richard fleming, carl von clausewitz, cdr minoru genda, cdr mistuo fuchida, charge of the light brigade, code breakers, colonel jimmy doolittle, commander joseph rochefort, commander mitsuo fuchida, doolittle raid, douglas tbd devastator, ensign bart earnest, ensign george gay, f4f wildcat, f4u corsair, first air fleet, first carrier striking group, gordon prange, hms hermes, hms prince of wales, hms repulse, ijn abukuma, ijn akagi, ijn amagiri, ijn ariake, ijn asagiri, ijn atago, ijn chikuma, ijn chitose, ijn chiyoda, ijn chokai, ijn fubuki, ijn fuso, ijn haguro, ijn haruna, ijn hatsuyki, ijn hiei, ijn hiryu, ijn hosho, ijn hyuga, ijn ise, ijn jintsu, ijn junyo, ijn junyu, ijn kaga, ijn kagero, ijn kawakaze, ijn kirishima, ijn kiso, ijn kitakami, ijn kongo, ijn kuma, ijn kumano, ijn maya, ijn mikuma, ijn mogami, ijn murakumo, ijn mutsu, ijn myoko, ijn nachi, ijn nagara, ijn nagato, ijn nisshin, ijn nowaki, ijn oi, ijn ryujo, ijn sendai, ijn shigureijn shiratsuyu, ijn shirakumo, ijn shirayuki, ijn shoho, ijn shokaku, ijn soryu, ijn suzukaze, ijn suzuya, ijn takao, ijn tama, ijn tone, ijn umikaze, ijn yamakze, ijn yamasharo, ijn yamato, ijn yugiri, ijn yukaze, ijn yura, ijn zuiho, ijn zuikaku, ijnyugure, IJS Kaga, incredible victory, into the valley of death, japanese combined fleet, jn-25 code, Kawanishi H8K2 “Emily”, kiska, lcdr eugene lindsey, lcdr john w murphy, lcdr john waldron, lcdr lem massey, lcdr max leslie, lcdr wade mcclusky, lt dick best, lt langdon fieberling, magotaro koga, major floyd parks, marine air group 22, mark 13 aerial torpedo, midway atoll, miracle at midway, Mitsubishi am6-2 zero, mogami class cruiser, nakajima bn2 kate, patton motion picture, pby catalina, pearl harbor, pearl harbor attack, rear admiral hiroaki abe, rear admiral raizo tanaka, rear admiral tamon yamaguchi, sb2-u3 vindicator, SBD Dauntless, sbu2 vindicator, TBD Devastator, tbf avenger, torpedo 3, torpedo 6, torpedo 8, uss enterprise cv-6, uss hornet cv-8, uss houston, uss lexington, uss ranger cv-4, uss saratoga, uss tambor, uss wasp, uss yorktown cv-5, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, vmf-221, vmsb-241, vsmb 241, walter lord
Improbable and Unlikely: Victory at Midway
As I mentioned earlier in the week I am publishing a number of articles on Greatest Generation as we remember the anniversaries of the Battle of Midway in 1942 and the D-Day landings in 1944.
This article is a compilation of a number of articles that I have done in the past with a bit of edition. It deals with the battle of Midway. I hope to do some really serious writing on the topic someday, but most of my writing and research time has been devoted to the Battle of Gettysburg and the American Civil War. Too bad I am not like LCDR Data in Star Trek the Next Generation. Image the productivity, but I digress…
I grew up in a Navy family when it was not popular for people to “support the troops” back during the Vietnam War and in the post-Vietnam era. That being said I developed a love for all things Navy and buried myself in the library, reading and checking out books. My friends probably remember he hauling armloads of books too and from class and too and from school on the buses that we rode. One of those books was Walter Lord’s classic Incredible Victory about the Battle of Midway. Through it and other books I felt as if I had come to know the men who fought that battle, the men of both sides, gaining an appreciation for their bravery and humanity. As I have mentioned time and time again on this site, people matter the most in history, especially in war. In the intervening years I have spent over 34 years in the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy serving at sea and ashore in combat operations. As such I have a connection to these men, I can imagine what they were going through.
As we get further away from these events we have fewer people who even know about them, and that is really sad because they are so important, and the sacrifices of the men who fought those battles helped secure an opportunity freedom for so many. I know that after the war that the United States has not always lived up to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, nor how our founders believed that we should pursue relations with other countries. In fact, they would not recognize what we have become. Even so, it is important for us to reexamine these events, to remember the men and women who served, and to remember their sacrifice, even as we acknowledge the tragedy of war and all that it brings.
I hope that you enjoy this and trust that you will have a good day.
The Doolittle Raid
The Japanese Fleet and was built around the elite First Carrier Striking Group, the Kido Butai composed of the Pearl Harbor attackers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu. Led by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo its highly trained and combat experienced air groups composed of 273 aircraft. This force was escorted by 2 Battleships, 3 Cruisers 12 Destroyers. Yamamoto commanded a force of 2 light carriers, 5 Battleships, 11 cruisers and 27 destroyers. Meanwhile a force of 4 battleships, 12 destroyers assigned screen to the Aleutian invasion force which was accompanied by 2 carriers 6 cruisers and 10 destroyers. The other carriers embarked a further 114 aircraft. The Japanese plan was ambitious but it was so ambitious that the Japanese Task forces were scattered over thousands of square miles of the Northern Pacific Ocean from which they could not rapidly come to the support of each other.
USMC Vought SB2-U3 Vindicators
VMF-221 Attacks
LCDR John Waldron (above) LCDR Lem Massey (below)
The men of Torpedo 8 only one survived
CDR Wade McClusky
LCDR Max Leslie ditches his aircraft near a cruiser
IJN Mikuma
Mikuma shattered, note wreckage of Captain Fleming’s Vindicator on turret
Survivors abandoning Mikuma
Filed under aircraft, History, Military, Navy Ships, US Navy, World War II at Sea, world war two in the pacific
September 19, 2011 · 23:57
Wings of Gold: U.S. Navy Carrier Fighter Aircraft 1941-1945
In 1941 with war raging inEuropeand the Japanese continuing their war in China and occupied French Indo-China theUnited States rushed to build up its Naval Air Arm and the Arm Air Corps. New models of aircraft of all types were being rushed into production to replace aircraft already known to be obsolescent. The Navy brought aircraft already accepted into full production even as it planned more advanced models. The events in Europe and Asia demonstrated that new fighter designs were needed quickly.
During the war many served in the British Royal Navy and Royal New Zealand Air Force with good success and after the war the French Navy had success with them in a close air support role in Indochina and Algeria. Following the war the Corsair remained in service for many years in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as well as the French Navy and other smaller navies and air forces until the 1960s.
Filed under aircraft, US Navy, world war two in the pacific
Tagged as A6M Zero, aeronavale, battle of leyte gulf, black sheep squadron, brewster f2a buffalo, capt joe foss, captain david mcconnell, close air support, f4f wildcat, f4u corsair, f6f hellcat, f8f bearcat, fm1 wildcat, fm2 wildcat, french algeria, french indochina, great marianas turkey shoot, grumman f3f, imperial japanese navy, korean war, lcdr jimmy thatch, lt butch o'hare, maj gregory pappy boyington, maj john lucian smith, maj marion carl, marlet, medal of honor winners, naval aviation, pearl harbor, pratt & whitney r-2800, Royal Navy, thatch weave, u s navy, US Marine Corps, US Navy, usmc, vmf 124, vmf 213, vmf 214, world war ii
Hawks at Angels 12: The Sacrifice of VMF 221 and VSMB 241 at Midway
The Marines audaciously attacked the far superior Japanese force, throwing themselves against the Japanese phalanx with unmatched courage. Despite their courage the Marine fighters were decimated by the Japanese Zeros. The Marines shot down 4 Val dive bombers and at least three Zeros but lost 13 Buffalos and 3 Wildcats during the battle. Of the surviving aircraft only three Buffalos and three Wildcats were in commission at the end of the day. Among the casualties killed was Major Parks. Of the surviving pilots of VMF-221, two became “Aces” during the war. Lieutenant Charles M. Kunz would later fly in VMF-224, adding six victories to end the war with 8 victories. Capt. Marion E. Carl would later fly in VMF-223 raising his score to 18.5 Japanese aircraft shot down. Other pilots like 2nd Lieutenant Clayton M. Canfield shot down two additional aircraft while flying with VMF-223. 2nd Lieutenant Walter W. Swansberger won the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal.
The last remaining Marine fighter pilot of VMF-221 from the battle of Midway, Williams Brooks died in January 2010 and was buried with full military honors, in Bellview , Nebraska. Brooks in his after action report described his part in the battle:
Their bomber counterparts of VMSB 241 attacked the Japanese task force on the morning of June 4th and scored no hits while losing 8 aircraft. The survivors were again in action later in the day as well as the following day where they helped sink the Japanese Heavy Cruiser Mikuma with their squadron leader Major Henderson diving his mortally wounded aircraft into the cruiser’s number 4 8” gun turret.While the Marines’ actions are not as well known or as successful as those of their Navy counterparts they were brave. Fighter pilots had to engage some of the most experienced pilots flying superior machines while the bomber crews had little to no experience before being thrown into combat. As we remember the sacrifices made by the men of Midway let us not forget the gallant men of VMF-221 and VSMB-241.
Filed under History, Military, Navy Ships, world war two in the pacific
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Kinvara by Christine Marion Fraser
Kinvara by Christine Marion Fraser was first published in 1998 and it’s the first by the author that I’ve read. I don’t know if it’s just the setting of a coastal community or what, but this really felt like Fraser was heavily influenced by Neil M Gunn’s books although her writing isn’t as sparkling as his. I have a feeling that Fraser could be described as being a sort of Scottish Catherine Cookson as her books seem to have been wildly popular family sagas. I admit that I’m a bit snooty about some writers and Cookson is one of them, but I did end up getting dragged into this tale and enjoyed it although I now realise there are three more books in this series, I’m not sure if I’ll continue with it though – so many books to read!
The setting is the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and Kinvara is a small village, some of the men are lighthouse keepers, it begins at Christmas 1922 and Robbie Sutherland is leaving the lighthouse to travel home to Kinvara after completing his stint.
He’s married to Hannah a difficult woman of the ‘own worst enemy’ variety who has been withdrawn and sullen since the birth of their son who has cerebral palsy. Robbie married her on the rebound after he had broken up with Morna who had gone back to her native Shetland. Hannah sees no point in caring for her son and makes no attempts to form a relationship with him. Robbie is at his wits’ end and as Morna has returned – with what turns out to be Robbie’s daughter, his life is a mess.
The book ends in the summer of 1926 and obviously there’s a lot more to it than I’ve written, if you fancy being in the company of some funny and interesting characters and you like a Scottish setting then you might like this one.
I’m a bit puzzled as to why the author called the book Kinvara as it is apparently a real place in Ireland, and she gave some of the characters Irish names too which is fairly unlikely in the far north of Scotland.
This entry was posted in Books and tagged 1920s setting, Christine Marion Fraser, family saga, Kinvara, Scottish author, Scottish setting by Katrina. Bookmark the permalink.
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